My new ship was mostly done!
There were still some fine details to iron out, sure, but I’d figure those out with time.
For now, I had a pretty capable little rocket with just enough space to fit me, Germaine, and some miscellaneous manufacturing equipment.
Plus a fuckton of ablative shielding and a few parachutes for re-entry.
I was gonna land fast and hard, sure, but not so fast that I exploded.
As for the reason for my need for speed?
Well, to slip past all of my target destination’s many defenses, of course.
I know that if I was the motherfucker in charge of acting as warden to a bunch of probably incredibly pissed AI’s, I’d have some guns, at least.
Guns that I was sure would be pointed at me the moment my ship entered sensor range and failed to respond properly to a radio call.
There was no chance I was going to be able to pretend like nothing was wrong aboard my vessel, with how many things I’d thrown out.
Some virtual handshake or passphrase would be sent, and my modified ship would likely fail the security check on the spot.
So why bother, when I could just blitz past everything so fast that nobody could stop me?
Sure, that’d put a target on my back. Speed didn’t equal invisibility.
But subtlety had never been my strong suit anyway.
Once I hit planet fall I was still going to dig so far underground that nothing short of a planet destroying nuke could reach me, though.
On the list of things to do, all that was left was to find some water to make the needed propellant for my fusion drive, and then make myself a new body.
Both of which would be somewhat of a challenge, given my lack of materials.
But I’d be tackling the first one before anything else.
The more fuel I had, the better. More fuel meant more options for movement. More movement meant more options.
More ability for me to plan my attack, pick my landings, and speed through my problems.
As of now, I had just enough water on board for about 20 seconds at max thrust. Water being my limiting factor, because the fusion reactor itself was stupidly efficient.
Water provided reaction mass in the form of hydrogen, which instead of being burned alongside methane or oxygen for thrust like it would be in a liquid fuel engine, would instead just be superheated via proximity to a nearby fusion reaction, at which point the expanding hydrogen gas would shoot out the ass of the rocket and produce thrust.
As of right now, my supply of hydrogen was woefully low.
It was enough to course correct from the trajectory that blowing myself up accidentally put me on, but not much more.
Because that was another problem.
Even if my makeshift rocket engine hadn’t managed to exile that cursed rock in the intended manner, it had still provided a fair amount of thrust, in a manner of speaking. Thrust that had altered my trajectory just enough that, given the year or so of drift time remaining, would push me off course to actually hit my destination.
Thus why I needed to get more fuel as soon as possible.
The sooner I could course correct, the less propellant I’d have to waste on doing it.
So I needed to find some ice, and for that, I needed to give myself better eyes and ears to search through the void of space with.
I’d already torn apart the comms station, along with everything else, so now it was just a matter of using the parts to help build myself some telescopes. Infrared telescopes, mainly, though I’d supplement that with a couple other forms of spectroscopy.
Hey, did you know that making long distance precision telescopes is actually hard?
I didn’t!
I wasn’t supposed to know how to make anything other than basic optical sights needed for low quality weapons systems.
My captors didn’t want to give me the tools to get up to anything other than meaningless acts of violence, after all. And even that, I wasn’t supposed to do from any particular distance.
God, the education I’d been handed was lacking.
I had short range lidar arrays. I had some alright accelerometers. I had radar for atmospheric use. I could make more of any of those at any time.
But I didn’t have anything dedicated to navigating space.
The only reason I knew I’d been knocked off course was because I’d saved the accelerometer data generated during the explosion, and then done some napkin math to extrapolate from there.
I had no fucking idea where I actually was in space, aside from what I could see with the basic cameras I’d stuck on the outside of my remade ship.
Which wasn’t nothing, but it definitely wasn't enough, either.
Thus, telescopes.
Telescopes that were actually quite difficult to manufacture, even using mirrors and lenses from the comms array I’d salvaged.
But I got something working eventually, of course.
And by something, I mean a painstakingly crafted yet ultimately hella janky optical telescope.
It could see in infinitely more wavelengths than a paltry human eye, and with some clever programming that meant it could function as a decent enough tool for long distance spectroscopy.
All it had cost was a month of nonstop hair pulling, as well as the lives of several other tools I was supposed to use for analyzing soil and rocks.
I don’t wanna get into the details.
Regardless, I could see now!
The telescope itself couldn’t really aim at anything. It was entirely fixed in place, the only moving parts inside of it being dedicated to changing focal distances.
Still, that was good enough for my purposes.
I’d already built a whole contraption of opposing pairs of flywheels lodged in my ship’s center of mass to handle rotation and stabilization, so I could just spin the entire ship if I wanted to aim the telescope.
Not a viable option under thrust, sure, but there wasn’t much point to using a precision telescope while it was being rattled around by the vibrations from my engine, anyway.
Much imaging and some absolutely dreadful math later, I’d created a rough map of my surroundings, centered around what I was pretty sure was my target planet.
I’d also found some promising asteroids that were close enough to my current trajectory that I could get to them if I was really careful with my aim and fuel usage.
Plus or minus another solid fuel rocket or two.
Ones I still had the explosives to make, for the record. I’d just been putting it off after how badly that’d gone the first time
I’d of course since figured out what went wrong during that botched attempt, though.
Namely, fucking everything.
I’d been so impaired at the time, that I’d just mixed sand and fire retardant into the pulverized payload, stuffed it into a tube, and then drilled a hole in the center of the cylinder with a flared base to act as the nozzle.
I think I’d been trying to create something similar to a solid fuel model rocket engine, like the ones I remembered playing with as a kid, but news flash bucko, high explosives don’t act like fucking sugar rockets.
Yet I’d acted as if they would, because I’d been absolutely out of my mind with whatever invasive psychic force that had been messing with my circuitry.
It was absolutely moronic, in retrospect.
I knew I could do better now.
I just…
Hadn’t.
Because I was scared.
While I’ve been obviously playing it off as minor, the truth of the matter is that I was probably pretty deeply traumatized.
I hadn’t really processed the full extent of just how goddamn scary that whole episode had been yet, but even then I was already terrified to do anything that even remotely reminded me of the whole affair.
Things like making solid fuel rocket engines, apparently.
Which was dumb and irrational, but having been made a machine hadn’t actually made me immune to such things, as it turned out.
How did the joke go? Somebody got the ability to think at high speeds, and when asked if it had made them smarter, they instead replied that all they had was the ability to be stupid faster.
Same problem, except even worse in my case, what with how my hyperfixative tendencies had been amped up to eleven by giving me a near endless well of executive function.
There was no point where I was forced to pull back from a problem, because I didn’t ever get tired, didn’t need to eat or drink or use the restroom, and actively couldn’t sleep.
In order to take time to think about something, I had to force myself do so, and I could hardly remember to do that when I was fucking human!
Goddamnit.
Alright.
I just needed to make some expendable solid fuel rockets.
I could do that. I just needed to be cautious. Make scale test models before the real thing. Take breaks to reexamine whatever problems I inevitably ran into. That sort of thing.
And then, once I got a working prototype, I’d reward myself by finding out what having every single one of my virtual holes filled with tentacles felt like.
I could do this.