"I've been thinking, Jake. I've got something that we should add. It's not very expensive, as far as the critical resources go. You know how you were asking for a tractor beam? That's not actually a thing in the Union, but there's something close. Let me show you."
He brought up a schematic and shared it with me. It wasn't obvious what it did, except add another blister on the hull of Redemption. It was a complex mass of Union components, and even with the schematic I couldn't make any sense of it. The blueprint he was showing me had nothing explaining what it did. I made a mental note to add comments to my blueprints in the future.
"What does this do? And where did you get this design?" I asked.
"Metra helped, but this is my design. Honestly, it was mostly Metra. It was my idea. Without her, I would've still been staring at a mostly blank page, so to speak."
"Great. Again, what does it do?" I asked.
"Oh, shit. Yeah, it's a tractor beam—kind of. It uses something similar to the tech that the gravity plates use to project a sphere of null gravity. It's kind of energy hungry, but it's not too bad. With this, we could have projected a sphere around the Potato and moved it around in relation to us quite easily. I'm not explaining it well. I only have a vague idea of the theory, but it'll do it. We can push, pull, and keep an object's position in relation to ours while we move. Tractor beam!"
"Really? So what's the range?" I asked.
"Oh, that is low. A kilometer at most."
That didn't seem low, to my human brain, but then I remembered space. Really big. One kilometer was basically nothing in space. Still, if our alternative was landing on the rock and clamping ourselves to it or this? Total no brainer, this was the winner.
"That's great. Let's add that to the list."
For the next several hours, Marty and I looked through all of our options and went back and forth on them. We brought up the Redemption's blueprint on a screen in front of us, adding and removing components as we tried to min-max our upgrade path.
The ship was already quite maneuverable and fast, so neither of us felt much of a need to upgrade there. We both agreed she needed better offense and defense. We were going to start a fight with a planet full of Ferals, after all.
The forward particle beam turret got removed and a much larger belly-mounted plasma turret was put in place. The same kind of turret that had given me so much trouble in the rift was now mounted on the bottom of the Redemption. It was a slightly smaller version without the enormous shell. Most of that shell had been hiding the power generation and capacitors.
We then put our particle beam turret back, mounting it under the stubby left wing. Another went under the right wing. I still itched to upgrade that design but I knew that would take longer than we currently had. Pluto wasn't going to clear itself and the clock was ticking.
Next were defensive upgrades. We could have finally added the point defense but it didn't seem likely we'd need it clearing out Ferals. They weren't likely to fire missiles at us, after all. We quickly settled on adding a defensive shield. The unit we installed was one taken from the collection of spares and adapted to use in the Redemption. It would stop energy weapon fire and even kinetic weapons up to a certain point.
Finally, all of our new additions had added a ton of power demand. A quick glance at the Redemption's status told us that.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Redemption
Hull Integrity: Nominal
2xLight particle beam turret/p>
1xPlasma turret
Defense Systems
Basic combat shielding
Other Systems
Mitrasa Deluxe Scoutship Stealth Package
Scout sensor package
Gate
Energy
Internal Generation: 200 PU/s
Internal Storage: 10000/10000 PU
Energy Consumption:
Weaponry: 0/1200 PU/s
Shields: 0/80 PU/s
Propulsion: 0/50 PU/s
Other: 0/25 PU/s
╠═╦╬╧╪
The energy budget wasn't looking great. With that kind of power demand there was no way our little scout would be doing much fighting.
We squeezed three more Zeropoint power generators into the cargo bay—mounted on the ceiling—and things started to look a lot better. Our power generation went up to where we could actually run all of our systems at the same time, and the generators' integrated energy storage greatly increased the amount of time we could do that with the weapons firing.
The plasma cannon was a real hog. Even with the extra generators and storage, Marty would have to be careful not to run the Redemption's energy storage dry.
Once everything was where we wanted it, we started the process. The Manufactors back on Pax started up, building the bits we couldn't steal from the Connahr base's spares.
For the next eight hours roughly half of Brick's spider army transported parts on a black river of legs through the gate from Pax or out of the spares locker and into our hanger to be installed. Installation was a lot easier than you might think. Usually it was just a matter of making sure the part was in the right place and then using a melder to attach it. The control and power runs happened almost automatically in the same way Excalibur could be powered and controlled while held in my armored hand.
Metra complained about us stealing some of her bots, but after she came through the gate and saw the plans her complaints stopped.
"Okay, you're right. Your little stunt was worth it. It's starting to look like a serious warship now," she allowed.
"Yes, she is. Aren't you, my little beauty?" Marty said and gave the blunt snout of Redemption a gentle pat.
Metra just rolled her eyes at him.
"As soon as we're done here we're going to go and try to clean out Pluto. Or at least scout it properly," I said.
"There's one thing you have both forgotten," Metra said. "If you're going to go clean out a Feral
