Lyle had, reluctantly, gotten better at his job with time.
It was impossible not to, after several years of nonstop labor.
And by labor, we of course mean violence.
The alien hordes never really seemed to diminish. If anything, they’d only gotten worse. Bigger, tougher variants. Specialized saboteur units that seemed to spring from nothing. Living bombs that flung themselves bodily upon his defenses, showering everything in hydrofluoric acid. Plenty of nasty shit.
Yet, Lyle was still kicking. Even if it didn’t feel like it, most days.
He just couldn’t find any other options, short of just accepting death.
Which he might, soon enough.
Then again, supposedly reinforcements were on the way. Might be that he could finally take a break, if somebody else was there to pick up the slack.
Maybe give him time to figure out how to escape this hellhole.
Anyway, I’d decided to tear my entire ship apart piece by piece.
After the last couple of crises, I just figured it would be best to nip any potential problems in the bud and rebuild my vessel from the ground up.
I was entirely being carried forward by my own inertia, anyway, so it wasn’t like I had to worry about cutting the engines, or something.
So long as I was careful to keep a couple key systems running, I could do whatever the fuck I wanted.
I moved the generator and battery banks that kept my consciousness powered closer to the computer that housed me, revamped my cooling systems to be able to handle both sources of heat being in close proximity, and then welded an airtight bubble of metal around everything important before slowly dismantling the rest of it.
The new plan was to basically prune my ship into nothing but the bare minimum amount of storage, plus a big-fuck-off fusion drive on the back.
It wasn’t like I had to worry about g-forces the same way a human did, after all.
Kat was feeling less optimistic, these days. It just took so long to reduce her debt by any real amount.
Between the interest payments, and the additional loans she’d had to take in the intervening time just to stay afloat, her fiscal progress had effectively stagnated.
She told herself that she had eternity. That no matter how long it took, she was basically immortal. As long as she kept pushing, she’d get there one day.
But she was so fucking tired.
Not in a physical sense, of course. She couldn’t experience exhaustion in truth, nor could she sleep.
But she hadn’t gotten to take a break for over a year, and that still took it's toll.
Whenever she seemed to be getting ahead of the curve, something always came up that needed her attention, and if she didn’t give it, if she tried to put problems off, things always went wrong.
Something important would break, there’d be some cascade of minor errors, and then usually something would explode and she’d rack up some more debt while trying to cover her losses.
There was no rest. No time for pleasure.
No time to even reflect.
But she had to keep going. No matter what.
It couldn’t be like this forever, right?
The hardest part, really, was figuring out how to weld in a vacuum.
I tried cold welding with a couple of different methods, but it didn’t prove reliable enough with the tools that I had to be worthwhile.
Eventually, I remembered that lasers were a thing, and that they were capable of transferring large amounts of heat without any air to act as a conductor.
Actually making a laser that powerful was a bit of a task, though. I’d tried whipping together a basic gas laser out of some shit I had floating around, but that proved more complicated than I would have liked.
Then I discovered I actually just had a few electronic laser diodes. They weren’t at melt metal spec, but that could be solved by focusing a bunch of them with some mirrors. The assembly generated a ton of waste heat, but I needed to get better at building my own coolant systems anyway.
Siddha was finally starting to get bored.
Sure, he was still good at what he did, and there was a basic level of satisfaction he got from seeing numbers go up.
But you could only do the same thing for so long before it became a chore, and he’d been doing this for a while.
It was to the point that he’d even managed to pay his debt off in its entirety.
So he’d asked his manager if he could resign. His job, so far as he was concerned, was done. His debt to society and very literal financial debt were both gone. It just made sense to leave.
His manager, of course, denied that. According to her, the contract he’d signed prevented him from quitting before certain terms were met. Neither of those terms had to do with his loan repayments or criminal sentence.
No, to earn his freedom, he’d need to either work for 25 years real time, or successfully terraform the whole planet.
Whichever came first.
Which was a load of horse shit, if you asked him. Sure, he might be able to eventually cover the entire planet on his lonesome, but that was going to be a drag. Never mind waiting for a full subjective century.
Both option fucking sucked.
It didn’t matter how incredibly wealthy he could theoretically be at the end of it. This wasn’t how he wanted to waste his time, any more.
Turned out, a lucrative career wasn’t actually the end all and be all of existence.
Which was something he vaguely remembered his older brother telling him might happen. Shame Siddha hadn’t believed him at the time. Though It didn't help that his brother had been forced to go overseas for work and then died shortly afterwards.
Anyway, Siddha was starting to seriously reconsider his priorities. Might be that it was time to blow this joint, no matter what threats his bosses made.
It wouldn’t even be the first time he’d been forced to escape from a workplace that violently disagreed with him.
Engineering a way off the planet couldn’t be any harder than running from the mob, he figured.
I almost lost Germaine due to an unexpected sudden depressurization, the other day.
He ended up not much worse for wear, at the end of it, but still, the close call was enough to make me breakdown into tears and clutch him tightly between two of the mechanized manipulators in my workshop like he was as stuffed animal.
I was not doing well.
But progress on my ship’s refit was going alright, at least. I couldn’t run my makeshift laser welder for very long before it started to burn itself up, but I was still getting there, one bit at a time.
I’d made more mobile robot arms to help me with the task, too. Several squat little roomba looking guys with arms mounted on top. The entire bottom disc was a big electromagnet, and that kept them anchored decent enough.
They were janky, and clunky, but they did what I needed them to, if only just.
The local middle manager was having a fucking conniption.
The numbers weren’t going up fast enough anymore. Her contractees weren’t earning enough, and nothing she was doing seemed to motivate them to actually get shit done faster.
That was a real problem, considering that if she continued to underperform, she’d be killed and turned into a contractee herself.
And she'd known that was a possibility, going in. She knew this was a high risk position, but goddamnit, she deserved a win. She knew she was better than the rest. She knew what life owed her.
But her fucking robot slaves weren’t working hard enough!
It made no sense.
According to the timeline, they weren’t supposed to tire out this quickly. There was another year and a half before attrition was projected to have started to set in.
That was when the next batch would show up, kicking the first group in the pants as the surface of the planet got a lot more crowded, forcing everybody to work harder to meet those quotas.
And when they inevitably discovered that it wasn’t possible to actually deliver what was asked of them, they’d start cannibalizing each other.
But it just wasn’t working, and she could not figure out for the life of her why.
The basic structure of my new ship was almost done. The skeleton was in place, and the metal skin was being layered on around the ribs.
It’d be about half the size that it had been at the start, a number of things having been scavenged and made into other things. But a lot of mass had been lost to little mistakes here and there, as well as a number of imperfect material conversions.
That was fine. I’d predicted as much.
Though I dreaded how much more difficult I’d actually made getting a base started up for myself would be.
Most of the shit I’d repurposed was originally meant to act as the seeds for a larger system of industry, and without most of those starting materials, I was going to have a bad time.
It would be worth it, though, if only because it meant I wouldn’t have to play my captor’s game.
I’d be doing things my own way, and if that killed me, then so be it.
I knew what I was about, and being a willing pawn for some corporate piece of scum wasn’t it.