"Why are you rechecking my work?" Arabaki's voice distracted me from the handheld scanner spewing the diagnostic scanning results in the small engine room of the merchant class ship.
I didn't trust Arabaki not to screw around by adding unnecessary modifications, especially not now, after how Arabaki changed the coding in the spy bug without my knowledge.
The droid swarm exerted more independence now. Not necessarily a good thing, but not necessarily bad.
"Last time, the dark matter shield casing almost blew." I gave Arabaki an excuse.
My knuckles rapped on the blackened metal casing surrounding the containment unit as soon as I spotted a wandering maintenance droid scurrying across the floor of the room.
So that was the little droid snitch.
I stepped out of the tiny engine room, only to see the droid swarm in a large face formation, waiting for me at the back entrance to the merchant ship.
This time the greyish face formation held together more than the former loosely packed formation of buzzing droids.
My optical implant in the eye magnified the talking face only to show a highly unusual but tighter interlocking pattern of the droids.
A scowl appeared on Arabaki's talking face. Or was that my imagination playing tricks on my mind?
"While I'm in Eden, pull out any old archived memory records on this war cruiser."
"You realise that the war cruiser is older than me? The memory archives could be corrupted by now. It's already a miracle that we haven't crashed yet," Arabaki's lips moved according to the speech without metallic droid spittle on my face - something the droid swarm couldn't perform previously.
"Just try," I insisted while making my way to the cargo bay, careful not to step on any wandering maintenance droid of Arabaki in the merchant class ship. Some units were still working on the internal panelling.
"By the way, nice work on your shape formation," I congratulated Arabaki, wary of the way the droid swarm started exerting more independence.
The talking face melted to the ground like a puddle as a naked slender silvery humanoid form rose from puddle, forming feet first to the head with a formed face, resembling mine.
While the complexion of the face and hair were grey, Arabaki's form copied my features, including the red irises which glowed.
I raised my eyebrow and Arabaki followed like a mirror.
"Why my face?" I asked.
"Who else?" Arabaki imitated my voice. "Since I am stuck on this ship all the time with you and no one else."
Great, I have a twin made of droids now. Still, a replica of me could be useful.
Thankfully, Arabaki hasn't learned to form a perfect anatomy of a body yet. Where the reproductive anatomy should be, was just a smoothed over area.
"Surely you can form a layer of droids to mimic clothing?"
"Trying that when you are in Eden," Arabaki replied.
Maybe the droids will try a lot more than mimic clothing. I can only hope that there's a war cruiser to come back to.
"By the way, are you going to use the bay door or the slingshot to launch the merchant ship?" Arabaki asked while I thought of a to-do list to occupy the droids instead of leaving them alone and bored.
Boredom may lead them to more mischief of modifying tech beyond my wildest imagination later. That they could hack through my security protocols on the spy bug already worried me.
"Slingshot, since you parked the merchant ship on the elevator platform. Do try to clean up when I am away," I noted the untidy piles of items earlier in the cargo bay.
If I used the cargo bay to launch the merchant ship, space will vacuum the heap of items lying around when the bay door open.
With the slingshot, the elevator platform will lift the merchant ship into a slingshot deck above the cargo bay and seal off the deck from the cargo bay.
We nicknamed the war cruiser's fighter decks as slingshot decks because of the way the deck mechanism catapulted the smaller Kamuy fighters into space.
In the good old days of the long past, the Kamuy fleet favoured the war cruisers as the primary carriers of the smaller fighters into hot sites, where the most intense fighting took place.
Each war cruiser, including mine, could hold up to four fighters if needed - two in the cargo bay and two in the slingshot decks.
War cruisers proved to be the hardest to target on radar because of their slim triangular sword-like shape and dark matter shields.
The bigger the ship, the easier to be shot at, and shot down the most in battles.
My old Kamuy fighter, which functioned as an evacuation pod, took one of the two slingshot decks up.
I have not used the other for eons, but I checked it earlier - the clamps and airlock remained intact. Last maintenance report by the droids showed no deterioration on the exterior of my war cruiser.
The vacuum of space preserved the warship better than storing it on a planet where the external environmental elements may eat away at its parts.
I glanced at the tatty old merchant ship parked placidly on the elevator platform.
"Don't go joyriding in that junk," warned Arabaki. "It ain't like your fighter."
"Hah. You don't understand the freedom of flying in a smaller craft," I replied.
"Oh, but I fully understand the mechanics of how ships break up in space from stressed metal against the gravitational physics of spatial forces."
Damn party pooping droids.
***
*THUNK*
The clamps on the elevator platform locked onto the merchant ship as I watched the messy cargo bay from its front viewer. I could feel the upwards movement of the elevator platform slowly lifting the ship into the dark single compartment slingshot deck.
Memories of my first pilot training came flooding back each time I entered the slingshot deck. The first experience of being catapulted into actual space after the exhaustive training simulations in Amatsubune.
"Remember, no joy riding," Arabaki reminded me through the transmitter, although hearing the droids imitate my voice made my skin crawl. "The ship still has to pass through the nebula cloud."
"Can you switch your voice back to the usual?" I mumbled back into the transmitter.
"No."
I rolled my eyes at the droids answer. Gone were the good old days when Arabaki will ask why first and then refuse after. The damn artificial intelligence coding in the droids gifted them with a learnt stubbornness.
Before me, the dim light in the slingshot deck gradually disappeared as the elevator platform locked into place. I am in pitch black darkness with only lighting from the front command panels of the merchant ship, flight stick, and the front viewer displaying the illuminated green reports of each sequence.
As long as I don't see a red or yellow line of reports running across the front viewer, everything is going as planned.
Once the slingshot deck was fully closed and its airlock sealed, the deck will start complete depressurization to match the vacuum of space, a safety mechanism to prevent sudden decompression in deck which the clamps can't cope with.
If the doors suddenly swung open, the clamps will break from the suctioning force of the space vacuum, releasing the ship at a high speed through the partially opened doors, destroying it.
The second layer of the safety are the metal clamps holding the ship in place and the third is the strong electromagnetic clamps of the catapult.
Kamuy tech used the best of natural physics to reduce the power load on the systems of our ships. Our catapult system didn't require power to hurl a ship out but the vacuum of space to suck us out at full force when the sectioned shields over the slingshot deck dropped.
I felt the catapult lifting my ship at a raised angle.
"All good to go over your side?" Arabaki asked over the transmitter.
"Depressurization completed," I replied as I felt the vibration by catapult mechanism locking my small ship into position and the clamp release.
The old merchant class ship mistook the electromagnetic clamps as a tractor beam, a problem of using different spacefaring tech of other species.
I pulled the thruster throttle to its indicator for warming up the engines but not fire them up. The radar sensors appeared as I worked through the manual controls of the ship to prepare it for flight.
My hands worked quickly to set up the ship for the launch. I still needed the shields at minimum to deflect any space dust in the ship's way.
Without shields, even the smallest space dust will act as a deadly missile to pierce the hull while catapulting the ship at high speed. Hull breaches in such a small ship is instant death.
The pitch black darkness vanished when the slingshot deck doors of the war cruiser opened into space where I could see the pastel colored nebula clouds surrounding the planetary system. I reached out to the front panel to turn the dial on the sound emulator to turn it on, flooding it with techno beat music.
"Doors open… ah crap, not the damn music," Arabaki grumbled over the transmitter.
"Don't get distracted," I replied.
"Launching in 3, 2, 1."
A rush of force pulled my merchant class ship out into space at a blinding speed. With one hand to pull the thruster and main engine throttles for full power, I used the other to control the flight stick to break out of the planet's gravitational pull.
With the throttles locked into place to keep the ship moving, I moved to press on the panel for full deflector shielding until we reached the nebula clouds.
I continued going for a while and then steered the ship around in a back flip to watch my war cruiser, now a blackish slim triangular object above the planet's pole.
If not for the radar lock on, the war cruiser blended into the background.
"I thought I said no joy riding!" Arabaki called out over the transmitter, imitating the panic in my voice.
"See you later!" I replied and turned my small ship around for the starlight burst speed towards the nebula.