Collection 2 (Patreon)

Collection

Chapter 2

-VB-

Edward Arlaoskas

Kendall System

3000 October

After a full day of working on the dropship, I finally picked up the radio. The dropship only had laser and radio for long range communication, and I didn’t know where to beam the laser for communication and thus it was why I picked up the radio. 

“Umm… so this is the new captain and owner of the pirate dropship, Edward Arlaoskas. I was a new hire for the dropship, The Fat Arnold, but we were attacked by pirates. I ended up engaging the pirates and saw my chance to cut the connection keeping the pirate dropship attached to the Arnold. I fought and managed to … kill all of the pirates. By the laws of the Free Worlds League, this makes this dropship mine. The pirate jumpship is still in system since it’s only been a day since they jumped in. Oh, and Captain Anand, consider this my resignation letter. I’m the captain now, over.

I chuckled as I turned off the radio. I fiddled with the radio a little so that all broadcast it accepted would then be rebroadcasted through internal comms. Then I picked up some of the tools the pirates kept around to go around and start fixing the ship. Once the ship was fixed to my standard? I was going to modify it, even if it meant having to go back to Kendall to do it. 

And level up that Mechanic to IV. 

---

Kendall IV actually responded back! 

“This is General Erika Wortals of the Kendall County Militia. We have confirmed that you are indeed who you say you are, and acknowledge your heroics and accomplishments. We are currently sending you a rescue team to get you. Just hang tight, son.”

Well damn, that’s good news. They weren’t trying to actively screw me over. 

“This is Edward Arlaoskas of … um … Solo Killing speaking. Thanks for the assist, general. It’s good to hear from you, but do warn your boys and girls that the place is a mess. They had a lot of explosives, and I used them a lot. My nose may be desensitized, but the dropship may smell like burnt pork, over.”

I rolled up my sleeve and went back to fixing. 

So far, leveling up Mechanic has been useful. It was past supernatural level now and I was doing stuff that I couldn’t possibly be doing with normal mechanic skills. 

So yoink that Mechanic V.

---

I actually fixed everything in three days! 

Though if I was more honest with myself, then I hadn’t fixed the dropship so much as I had cut out all of the useless scrap metal doors that had warped beyond repair due to the explosions and patched the doors and walls that were worth fixing. 

… But I didn’t actually know how to pilot this thing. 

With a shrug, I got Battletech Spaceship Piloting.

It didn’t help much but I now knew a very general gist, both knowledge and instinct, of how to pilot this dropship.

I got on the helmsman’s seat and … 

“Oops, that’s reverse thruster,” I hissed as I quickly reversed it and then inaptly steered the ship until it was pointing toward Kendall IV. Then I hit the thrusters. In reverse, again. “Fucking -.”

-VB-

Senior Lieutenant Sergei Lell

Kendall System, Duchy of Graham-Marik

3000 October

Senior Lieutenant Sergei Lell looked around the loading bay of the once pirate dropship as he and three other members of the Kendall Militia drifted along with the new captain of the dropship.

Had this been anywhere but the Free Worlds League, then the ruling count would have confiscated the dropship from the young man, but lords and representatives of the Free Worlds League were above that. Or at least the Countess of Kendall was. 

So he was here just to check out that pirates were indeed killed, confirm it through checking any videofeed, and then give him the certificate of ownership after recording the ship’s registration numbers, if it had any.

As an Achilles, there probably was; it was an assault dropship that was the closest thing the Inner Sphere and the Periphery had to a warship. So either someone stole it or lost it to pirates, which was the same difference in Sergei’s eyes, really. If you lost an Achilles to pirates, then you deserved to lose it.

Once the ship was registered with the Civilian Naval Board and then the information sent to the ComStar, then it would become the new fact, regardless of who owned the ship before the pirate killer.

“And these are the pirates, huh?” he muttered as he looked down at the box that supposedly contained all of the … “Why only the heads?” he asked the new captain.

The young Kendall native - this was confirmed by the countess’s demographic bureau - rolled his shoulders before grimacing. “Bodies have fluids everywhere, so I couldn’t keep it around here in zero G. But I needed some form of ID for all of the pirates, so I only kept the heads and spaced the rest.” Sergei didn’t fault the man for that. Bodies were indeed messy in zero G as was everything else, which was why he was with the army branch of the militia. 

He glanced at the man in question for this “rescue” mission. Not only did he fix the dropship with limited materials and tools, he learned to pilot the dropship. If that wasn’t a sign of a genius, then nothing else would be. Sure, the young boy certainly wasn’t one for subtle and delicate arts - the unintentional manslaughter of his classmates and the massacre of these pirates showed a clear leaning toward a more viilent pursuit - but his genius couldn’t be denied. 

Even now, he felt tense while floating around him and felt a constant urge to steer clear of him. He only felt such when he talked to men and women with years of experience in the political scene or battlefield - the kinds of people who can kill him with the blink of an eye. 

He wasn’t sure what he would have done in his place, either. The crew that hired him ran the moment they could, leaving him for dead, and he was stuck on a dropship with pirates that wanted him dead. Edward here kept his cool and … killed them all. It was a feat more in line with SAFE agent or a battle hardened mercenary, not a student with the figure of a bodybuilder. 

“So what are you going to do now?” he asked Edward. “Achilles can’t exactly be a civilian tradeship. It has, what, 100 tons of cargo space?” he asked while looking over the loading bay. 

“You are right,” Edward hummed. … Could he possibly get the boy to sell the ship to the countess or even to the militia? They would pay him handsomely for it! “So I will need to modify it to my liking!” 

Sergei’s shoulders sagged minutely. Well, if the young man thought he could do it, then he would have to let him. But if he couldn’t do it and needed money - because he was bound to spend a lot of money trying to modify the Achilles - then he or someone else from the militia would be there to buy it.. “I see. Well, then. Let’s get this inspection over with, shall we?”

-VB-

Edward Arlaoskas

Kendall IV

3000 December

So yes, I ended back on Kendall IV, and my parents were both furiously proud and proudly furious. Relieved as well that I survived a pirate attack and managed to turn the table on the bastards - mom was especially proud of that - but the matter of the fact was that their son went out and nearly got killed in the depths of space where there was zero chance of recovering the dead. 

Yeah, they got scared.

And as the weeks went on by and they saw how quickly I began to strip, weld, change, and finish the dropship that I parked in the backyard, their apprehension only grew. 

Now, the Achilles assault dropship was more or less a patrol craft in any other setting. Incapable of FTL on its own, carried enough firepower to shame some corvettes, fast and maneuverable enough to contest smaller crafts that might try to escape it, and could field aerospace fighters with its two ASF bays. 

The pirates didn’t have fighters and had used those bays as makeshift battlemech bays, which was where I found one Locust and one Urbanmech, the most expensive weapons the pirates had on their assault dropship. I gave the former to my family, which was sure to become some sort of heirloom, and sold the Urbanmech for extra parts and components I needed but couldn’t get from tearing apart the ship’s nonessential areas. 

But, well, the Inspired Inventor helped. 

Starsector Spaceship Engineering VI.

Mechanic VII. 

Material Engineering VI. 

It was weird. I have been getting one level up or skill creation per day up to the pirate attack and events surrounding it, but after I landed, the acquisition of levels began to slow. For example, when I put in a level in Mechanic from level 5 to level 6, the time required for me to instinctively know that I had another level to invest increased from one day to one week. It happened with Material Engineering and Starsector Spaceship Engineering as well. 

It hadn’t happened so far to the new skills and other skills that hadn’t breached to level 6.

Special Forces V.

Battletech Spaceship Piloting IV.

Close Quarter Combat III. 

Starship Rigging IV. 

Stargate Hyperdive Fundamentals II.

New Eden (EVE) Warp Fundamentals II. 

It wasn’t an issue so far, though, because, well, a level 5 skill or knowledge was supernatural, if not near it, and I learned that when Senior Lieutenant Lell, the guy who came to pick me up, invited me to give a lecture on dropship zero G combat.

Yeah, I was surprised when he did that.

And the result was …

Left, right, duck, stab, flip, roll-.

Dodge, duck, grab, swing, pull, strike-.

“AND STOP!”

My elbow halted right before it could have struck my latest target’s chin, and the guy was looking at me with terror written all over his face - from wide eyes, horrified grimace, heavy sweating, and medial half of the eyebrows raised and lateral eyebrows lowered in that signature helpless look.

I just nodded as I pulled back and helped him up and looked around.

There were two dozen soldiers moaning and groaning, if they weren’t knocked out completely. 

Lieutenant Lell spoke up then, walking onto the sparring mat. “... Ed, my man, you were supposed to show them where they were lacking, not that they needed to do their training all over again!” he laughed but it felt hollow. Like a laugh I would make when there was a very precarious situation at hand and someone needed to diffuse it quickly. 

Like … like … ah, like a bomb.

I shrugged and slapped the shivering man next to me. “They’re solid. Much better than the pirates,” I told him. 

He looked surprised. “Really now?” 

“Yup,” I nodded. “Pirates were too busy screaming and trying to run away, even the ones in my hands,” I replied. “These guys didn’t run. They stuck around and fought. They have the discipline necessary for higher things.”

The lieutenant relaxed and grinned more genuinely. “Well, shit, that’s great to hear! Ain’t that right?! All of you won’t be sent back to the boot camp!” 

There were only groans and moans from those on the mat and silence from the wide eyed audience on the sideline.

“Alright, next group,” I ordered, and the entire room froze.

The lieutenant gulped and gestured another dozen to go in and drag their comrades out before replacing them as my vict- sparring partners. 

“Alright, let’s start with a very east tip this time. Beginners show where they will attack with their eyes. Adepts don’t show it at all. Experts will lie to you with their bodies,” I started before bouncing, making them all tense up and get ready. “So what you need to do is fool them, too. If you can do that, then you’ve touched the realm of martial experts. So try to fool me. I’ll go slower this time.”

They did not last five minutes. 

Personally, all of that sparring really showed me how little I knew about the extent of my own skills and fields of knowledge. Special Forces V had been enough to put down a hundred trained and disciplined soldiers, who I suspect were not regular militiamen. They had to be at least the countess’s personal guards or something like that to have that much discipline to not just run because when I got my hands on the video of my fight? 

Well, shit, I was scared of myself for a second. 

Yeah, when I can reasonably slaughter fifty people and say I came out the other side with only a few bruises, I understood completely that this was not natural.

But it also showed me that there was diminishing returns to the Inspired Inventor. It was why I began to bran out into other skills and fields of knowledge. Why only have one FTL knowledge when I can have two? Why only have Mechanic skill when I can also have Starship Rigging? 

That one, I found, was actually more useful in this universe than mechanic was. Mechanic was just understanding and being able to use tools related to fixing, well, mechanical objects. Starship Rigging, on the other hand, specifically gave me instinct and knowledge on how to fix broken parts aboard a spaceship without having to find new parts. Sure, there were limits to this (which was why I sold the Urbanmech), but those limits, once I began to push it to supernatural feats, were quite few and far inbetween. 

That wasn’t to say that Starship Rigging didn’t have its downsides. Like how it kept pushing me toward making a mess out of the engineering for the sake of efficiency and optimization.

Like, yes, efficiency and optimization were great, but it wasn’t as great when the path to getting there involved literally one hundred different wires having about the engineering chamber like an unholy spider web. That kind of hazard was not worth the extra 2% power efficiency or the 0.22% increased power to Large Laser. 

And speaking of Large Laser, I stripped out all of the weapons and changed all of the weapon hardpoints and turrets. I took inspiration from a Starsector mod ship called Welsh-class frigate and mounted an artillery meant to fire self-guided explosive munition. It would only fire if I had a target locked on with my ship’s onboard computer, and the shell and the computer would rapidly exchange data to correct the shell’s trajectory. It sounded like a missile but the explosive munitions didn’t have a capacity for self-propulsion, only minor course adjustments. In this universe where no ships could rapidly change their trajectory easily, it would be a killer that they couldn’t shoot down because it would, from my victim’s perspective, come out of nowhere at blindingly fast and strike before they could even register that it was within a hundred clicks of their position. Taking this same guidance technology into account, I reconverted the battletech bays into fighter bays but instead of housing aerospace fighters, they would hold simple drones equipped with lasers. To accommodate the automated drone repair station, I had to give up on a huge chunk of the ship’s dedicated space for weapon-related hardwares. Because of this, my dropship would only have 20 Medium Lasers instead of 38 plus weapons. But that’s okay because I would have two very small drones, small as a small truck, that would zip around like a speed demon while shooting lasers that could not miss with their built-in targeting computers. 

By this point, the dropship was only an “Achilles” because that’s what it was registered as. 

And two months was all I had needed to give the Achilles this makeover with minimal help from some of my hometown’s local laborers, my family, and some loaned machines.

Mechanic VI was a monster like that. 

“Still can’t believe you went and got a dropship and then turned it into this.”

I looked down and saw my youngest brother, Armas.

“Well, your brother’s been on the grindset lately. You too can become a chad like me.”

The brown haired and gold eyed eighteen year old snorted. 

He was smaller than me by a wide margin. He was the literal runt of our family, and resented that fact. And hated it when I told him about the grind mindset. I mean, sure, I was benefitting ridiculously from the Inspired Inventor that I had no idea how I got, but I had been a big, muscular guy who grinded hours away every two days at the gym. 

“So what are you here for? Coming to see if I have something for you to help out with?” I asked him as I climbed down.

“Ah, no,” he began slowly. He had something he wanted from me. “I … I want to go with you.”

“... excuse me?”

“I want to go out there! With you!” 

I looked at my little brother and hummed. While it might be a little dangerous for him, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have my own little family-minion like all dropship and jumpship houses do. Besides, even if I did automate a lot of the functions of the dropship, I still needed crew to run the other non-automated functions. 

“Alright. If you get mom and dad’s permission.”

He looked at me with a grimace. 

Yeah, both of us knew that -.

---

“- what do you mean you’re okay?” I hissed to mom after dinner.

The two of us were in the kitchen washing the dishes.

“Edward, you’ll keep your brother safe, right?”

“Of course!”

“Your ship is one of the safest places to be in the Inner Sphere, right?”

“I told you that, yes.”

“Kendall is not as well defended as I like it, too.”

“You complain about that often.”

“You aren’t going to abuse him, right?”

“Mom-.”

“Then he is better off with you then with us. Your oldest sister and her husband is most likely to get the farm. Your older brother is most likely to become pastor for the church after your father. What is there for Armas to do here? Take him with you,” she fnished. “He’ll have skills and prospects that he will otherwise never get here.”

“... We might not come back, ever,” I told her. 

“I know but that is how the world is. To gain something, you must give up something you already have.” She turned to me with steel in her eyes. “I gave up my family to live. You and your brother are too big for this small world and so you must give up on family to find your own prosperity.”

My shoulders sagged. “We can’t be good people out there.”

Her mother smirked. “If you can’t be good, then at the very least be rich so that what little charity you toss at us poor folk enables many more. So good. If you must not be good, then be great and become the steps and ladder that will allow other good men to rise up.”

“... Charging me with a big mission, huh?”

She snorted. “Your only mission is to keep your brother and yourself safe, well fed, and pray to God on what he wants from you. Everything else is secondary.”