“What just happened?” Lani asked in a confused voice.
“I think that Kritch guy just killed Skitterbach. That came out of nowhere,” Watkins said. Kritch turned his pistol toward the assembled verminkin, and Watkins wondered if he even knew that it was empty and would take almost a minute to recharge the one shot the battery inside held.
“Wait, Skitterbach isn’t dead, he’s still moving,” Lani said. She was right, Watkins could see Skitterbach reach toward his waist where his own pistol was stashed. His legs didn’t seem able to move, but his arms were just fine. It was probably a severed spine, but according to his database, the damage was easy enough for a med pod to fix if he could get Skitterbach into one quickly enough.
“Kill Kritch,” Watkins ordered his MOBS through the drone’s speaker so the verminkin could hear. Without hesitation, all six of his MOBS fired their plasma rifles, the rounds tearing apart Kritch. The other verminkin resumed cowering in the center of the compartment.
“You will not be harmed, and we will provide aid to Skitterbach,” Watkins told them. His words seemed to have no effect on the huddled mass of verminkin. He left a drone in the compartment to watch over them and had the six of his MOBS that were assigned to assault the compartment wait just outside the hatch to made sure the verminkin didn’t cause any trouble.
He ordered a pair of drones to carefully remove Skitterbach and take him to the Canon. There, they would place him in the med bay while they waited for the first medical pod to be completed. The survivors of the assault on the bridge were sweeping the rest of the ship to clear out any remaining threats.
The connection with one of his MOBS entering the engine room was severed, catching Watkins’ attention. Some halflings had been hiding there and had jumped out from the machinery and were brawling with the remaining MOBS he had clearing that compartment. He ordered three of the MOBS defending the verminkin hatch, and a MOBS that had just been produced by the fabricator, to aid the troops in the engine room.
“Watkins, look, the halflings had a medical bay of sorts. Do you think their medical pod might be functional?” Lani asked. His troops scouring the ship for threats had turned up a medical bay closer to the bow of the halfling ship. He immediately sent a drone to investigate. It took it less than a minute to determine that the pod was functional, but only operating at a 28% efficiency. It was rather filthy, but it still held a minimal number of medical supplies stored inside.
Redirecting the drones that were hauling Skitterbach to the Canon, he brought the severely injured verminkin to the halfling med pod and had his drone activate the system. It was a simple enough control module, and the drone had no trouble interfacing with the pod and directing the machine to heal his new ally. Oddly enough, the machine at first refused to treat a verminkin, insisting that its resources were not to be used on foodstuffs. A quick override had the machine humming along nicely
While Skitterbach’s wounds were grievous, at least the plasma weapons left a clean and cauterized injury. Watkins used his link to the drone to interface with the med pod. It was spending a lot of energy in analyzing the verminkin body structures, data he would share with his own pods. From the early data it showed that these verminkin were much more durable than a human or even the baseline data he had for the kobolds and halflings.
Despite Skitterbach being the first verminkin in the pod, the machine seemed to be able to understand that the hole blasted in Skitterbach’s back wasn’t supposed to be there and got to work on fixing it. He was stable for now, and even with its limited efficiency, the med pod showed all indications that it would be able to fully heal Skitterbach. Watkins had other issues to deal with before he could figure out what to do with the other verminkin.
Back in the halfling engineering room, his reinforcements arrived and finished off the sole surviving halfling. It was already injured from the battle with his first team of MOBS, which made it an easy kill. Once the final halfling fell, a new series of notifications appeared in front of Watkins.
You have engaged in combat and destroyed a hostile vessel.
25 core points have been awarded.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
You have successfully boarded and captured a hostile vessel. This vessel possessed a crew significantly larger than your own.
40 core points have been awarded.
You have negotiated for the potential addition of sapient crew for your vessel.
30 core points have been awarded.
Current Core Points 200/250.
He was already closing in on level two for his core. It was happening faster than he had expected but given the level of combat he’d engaged in recently; it made sense that his core was rapidly developing and adapting. Combat was now over, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
“Lani, what are your thoughts on the halfling ship? Should we keep it or scrap it?” Watkins asked. He could feel her considering the options.
“It’s not exactly a formidable vessel, given its pedestrian origins as a cargo hauler of some type. That being said, there’s likely several systems, including their jump drive, that we can glean information from. The jump drive wasn’t compatible with his ship, but it would provide a research basis that he could use to design his own that would be powered by his core. There’s no immediate need for scrapping the halfling vessel, so maybe we should hold onto it and decide what to do with it later,” Lani offered.
“I agree, we’ll tow it back to the kobold station, clear the station out. Once the station is under our control, we can lash the halfling ship, and possibly the kobold vessel, to the station. At least while we’re traveling, I can have the drones sweep the ship for debris and supplies. I don’t think the halflings ran a very tidy ship, and there should be plenty of scrap lying around for us to put to a better use,” Watkins decided.
There was more than enough clutter aboard the halfling ship, not to mention casualties, to restock his salvage and biomass reserves. A quick check on his research module progress showed that his patience with the slow reprocessor research was about to pay off.
Research module activity.
- Reprocessor, Level 1, 97%.
- Research module, Level 1, 18%.
The reprocessor would probably finish before he made it back to the station, and once it was done, he’d have to decide on whether he should upgrade the gear for his MOBS, which was very much lacking based on the last battles, or to begin more ship improvements. Once his research module hit level one, that would allow him to begin researching up to level two for his systems.
Ordering a drone to begin construction of a third research module confirmed what he already suspected, he was still capped at two of them. While perusing his research options, Watkins found that a new one was now available.
You have unlocked the following research options.
- Point defense railgun, initial research.
In the back of his mind he also realized that he could now construct a boarding tube like the halflings had used. This wasn’t something that was upgradable, just a universal design that he could construct if he wished. Maybe as his drones continued to examine the halfling ship, he’d unlock some other new discoveries.
The progress that his drones were making was rapid. They’d inspected the internal structure of the halfling ship and even identified some critical repairs that should be made if he eventually decided to keep the ship. The oddest thing he found was that the entire front third of the ship was empty, and the compartments there had been hastily reinforced with scrap metal.
That was the reason his earlier gunfire hadn’t done serious damage to this particular ship. There was simply nothing critical on the bow that he could damage. Huge rents in the ship’s hull had been made, but his attacks hadn’t yet penetrated far enough into the ship to have caused them too many problems.
The whole bow of the vessel would need to be reconstructed, but that was a problem he could put on hold until he decided the halfling ship’s ultimate fate. Back aboard his own ship, the drones had completed the first pod in his medical bay. The most heavily injured verminkin was even now being hauled over by his drones.
At first, the verminkin resisted, but it couldn’t struggle much due to the huge bites the halflings had taken out of it. The verminkin also eventually yielded to the ingrained years of obedience that had been forced upon these hapless creatures. One thing in their favor was that the verminkin had been designed for survival in harsh environments, and where a human would have bled out already, those verminkin that had suffered serious bites were only heavily damaged and not on death’s doorstep.
The other verminkin ignored the taking of one of their own, such things were likely a common occurrence when the halflings were ready to eat. Maybe, once Skitterbach was back in action, they would finally begin to grow out of this passive mindset, though Watkins hoped he didn’t have to deal with more assassination attempts from another Kritch.
While the verminkin waited for Skitterbach to heal and the other med pods to be constructed, Watkins had his drones bring over some food and water from the galley. There was a mad scramble for the food, and Watkins had to bring in the MOBS to sort them out. Once the verminkin realized that everyone was going to get something to eat, they began to calm down a bit, though most looked warily at their neighbors as they tried to cram down their meal before anyone could get any ideas about stealing from them.
His ship was being quickly repaired, and once the tow lines were secured to the halfling ship, there was no reason to remain here. It was time to head back to the station and deal with the remaining kobolds that were still aboard it, as well as their slowly drifting ship.