It took quite some time and patience for Abyssal and company to reach the quarter-way point between Freedom United and Dawning Star— a few days of gruesome travelling. A chain is only as strong as its weakest point and Abyssal have proven herself to be the weak point of the entire endeavour. Her slow to charge and limited range of her warp drive just was too slow for Astral’s taste. It wasn’t too long after the beginning of the journey before Astral had enough of the slow travel speed and decided to land in another one of her numerous hideouts.
Unlike the previous hideouts near planet Baal, this hideout was just a random piece of a ship floating around in the middle of nowhere. Looking at the ship reminded Abyssal of how she first started her life in this chaotic galaxy. Also, unlike the previous hideout, this hideout was much more bare— empty and devoid of anything important. The only thing of value in the place were fuel, food and munitions. The whole hideout was just a small dock connected to a large cafeteria. The place was deemed useless enough that Astral had no problem letting Abyssal loose in the place.
At a certain moment, Astral was sitting across from Abyssal and her crew in a round table. She sat with one leg on top of the other while looking at a holographic image that was laid on the table via a mobile tablet console. It was the current blueprint for Abyssal’s current warp drive, taken from when she stole the Maxwell now turned Shark-class. She scrutinized the blueprint with a scary glare before letting out a sigh.
“This is an old commercial drive, I think. Designed to carry as many things as possible. It was never meant to travel long distances. It’s most probably meant for short-range hauls. That would explain why the cooldown on each successive warp and the calculation times are bad. At this rate it’s going to take us awhile before we even reach Dawning Star,” she said as she massaged her temples.
Kuon, who was listening to the whole thing, scowled towards Astral. “What does it matter? It’s good enough and is currently getting the job done, no?”
“Well, yeah, I guess…”
“Then what is the problem? We aren’t in an urgent situation. Time is not a factor. In the worst-case scenario, it would just take us another week or two to arrive at our destination. I am curious as to why you are making a big deal out of this.”
“Astral probably not used to just waiting around in space?” Meica tried to give a reasoning
“Is it that bad? I didn’t know you were the kind of person to go restless if you have nothing to do,” Abyssal replied. She knew deep in her cold metallic core that this wasn’t the reason why Astral was so grumpy but went along with Meica’s reasoning. A joke of sorts.
“What do you take me for? I’ve been in this business for a long time. A few weeks is nothing,” Astral retorted, giving a punchline to the small jest that Abyssal and Meica made.
“Dammit, what a blunder. I didn’t expect you to not have a standard commercial drive. You always seemed to do just fine with the warping out that I didn’t think too much about it,” she said after a moment’s pause.
“Well, like my cute maid here said, what seems to be the big problem?” Abyssal asked with a slight frown.
Astral’s reaction was to look to her sides. “Well, not really a problem. It’s just that I already made plans with a certain someone to meet up at the borders.”
“Meet? With who?”
“Who else? It’s that lovely stalker girl who seemed to have a crush on you guys.”
Immediately upon hearing that analogy, Abyssal and the others figured out who was the person that Astral was meeting up with.
Jinko.
“What?” Abyssal asked with a flabbergasted tone.
“I had to check if they could detect your movements despite my best attempts at masking your signature. So I left a small message at Baal. Shortly after we left, my message was intercepted. They’ve arrived at my secret location in just a few days, so they have a good tracker or a person capable of detecting even the tiniest of energy signature. I don’t think I need to explain any further, right? At our pace, the Dawning Star ships would beat us to our destination.”
“Then, why not let them? I don’t see the problem with letting them reach the borders first,” Kuon asked as she looked towards a map of the galaxy within her mind.
“Beating them to the goal isn’t the problem. The problem is that, on the way there, there is a big chance that they would detect us. We would lose the element of surprise in that case. I mean the whole reason why we took this detour towards Dawning Star was to avoid them. Kinda pointless if we can’t stay hidden from them. If they see us as hostile, they would no doubt engage us on the spot. Well, I don’t really have a problem with that as I can defend myself, but you guys are…. Well, no offence, but you guys aren’t exactly military grade.”
“Eehhh,” Abyssal let out a moan.
“My bad. I thought that we could at least have a head start towards the borders. I didn’t think that this would be a problem,” Astral said as she lowered her head.
‘Woah…’ Abyssal thought to herself, taken aback slightly by Astral’s rare display of humility.
“What are we to do now?” Abyssal asked. “You basically just lead them to us.”
“Beats me,” Astral said as she shrugged her shoulders. “I could think of a few things, but I want to hear your plans first.”
“My plan first? I don’t think I could think of anything better than you already did though?”
“Just go with it. Share ideas, brainstorming and stuff. Who knows, you might have some sort of insight that I missed.”
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“I see. Well if it’s any good to you… we could always just meet up with them here instead of there.”
“Huh?” Astral raised her eyebrows at Abyssal’s words.
“I mean we have at least a few days before they find us, right? You said that they arrived at Baal in just a few days. Meaning that they would take the same amount of time to find us here if not more.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Then let’s just meet up with them here. If we are gonna risk getting caught anyways, might as well take the initiative. Plus, we can take these few days we have and upgrade ourselves before meeting them. Prepare ourselves and whatnot. Best case scenario, they don’t come after us and we can just take our sweet time reaching the borders.”
Astral put her hands underneath her chin and started thinking about Abyssal’s proposal. “Hmm. I guess you have a point. But what happens if the negotiation fails?”
“Well, what was your original plan, then? Following your plan, we would arrive at the borders and negotiate with them. What would happen if we were to fail there?”
“I got friends over there and a large hideout that we can use to make negotiations smoother. Plus, the point of doing it there was to give them a sense of urgency, having the target be so near to the objective and all. The effect would be totally different if we were to do it here, ya know.”
Astral turned to look at Abyssal’s ship. “Besides, what could you even upgrade in such a short amount of time, anyway? We aren’t near a dock, we don’t have the resources and I don’t think you are a super unknown core that could build a ship within a day.”
“Tsk tsk, whoever said about building a whole ship?” Abyssal said as she puffed her chest outwards. She then slammed onto the table— the tablet changed the holographic display of a blueprint into another one.
“Behold! Thanks to my cute maid and my cute nekomi, we have developed an all-new warp drive design!” Abyssal said as she pointed towards the blueprint. Towards her side was Kuon giving herself a prideful nod and smile. Meica, on the other hand, clapped in excitement.
Astral had an uninterested face and looked towards their so-called newly-developed blueprint. It was then that her eyes opened wide. “Wait… this is.”
“Ho ho ho! That is correct! This is a repurposed warp drive from one of the fighters that I’ve taken from E’s ship. We reversed engineered them using the power of Living Cores and adapted the design to fit a larger ship. It’s only a feat that can be done by combining the power of a talented engineer and a living core.”
“...”
“Why it brings me no joy to have to work together with this obstreperous feline, I must admit, the stuff that we can make when our minds are put together is rather fascinating,” Kuon nodded with pride yet again.
“If stupid maid drone not so grumpy, could have made even better stuff,” Meica added.
“I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that,” Kuon responded.
“Now, now, you two. Be nice to each other.” Abyssal said to both of them.
Astral just looked at them with a blank expression, unable to give a response.
“Anyways! We have plenty of these designs that we could use to upgrade ourselves further. There is no need to upgrade the whole. We could always upgrade certain parts of the ship like the weapons system and the warp drive. At the very least, we could escape if things went bad during the negotiations. What do you think?” Abyssal asked.
“You still haven’t answered my question. Where are you going to get the resources from? In case you didn’t know, we are within the ‘empty’ part of space,” Astral said, emphasizing the word: empty.
“We have enough resources aboard to do the upgrade. Also, we could always salvage some resources from the current hideout. The way I see it, this used to be a part of a ship some time ago. We could use the steel to repurpose some of the systems,” Abyssal said as she looked around the cafeteria.
“Woah, woah, woah. Nobody said about permitting you guys to salvage my damn hideout.”
“Boooo. You are probably going to destroy it once we leave anyway. Might as well let us use it to its fullest potential!” Abyssal said as she raised her arms in the air.
“That’s right, nyaa!”
“Indeed.”
Astral couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She then massaged her temples as she always does. “What is this? A circus crew?” She muttered to herself.
The room went silent for a moment as Astral gave the suggestion a thought. She then let out a loud sigh. “Alright, fine. Do whatever you need to do. It better be worth it,” she said as she got up and left the place.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“Making my own preparations. Laying down some mines, putting a few communication disruptors, scouting the sector layout and stuff like that. I’ll see you guys in six hours,” she waved her hand backwards as she steadily walked towards her ship.