Ulin was sitting in one of the rows of seats with a frown on her face. This room was dark, it smelled like feet and it was far too cold. It reminded her of her little brother's basement room where he would spend hours gaming. It was a mix of nostalgia and disgust that she was feeling. Nostalgia because the time she spent with her mentally challenged brother was spent in that room playing video games with him. Disgusted because she knew this smell was nothing like smelling just her brother's body odor, it was far worse because it was a bunch of different people's combined unhygienic practices.
Her little brother could barely communicate normally and struggled with the real world. But while he was playing games, whether it was video games or virtual reality games he was a savant. So she always had to practice to keep up with him and create a challenge for him to overcome. Which resulted in both a sibling bond and rivalry as well as Ulin developing some top notch skills in gaming.
The weapons system of this ship was not complete but was instead a temporary computer room where they were basically controlling the weapons that were located along the hull of the ship. The ship's nonessential internal systems like weapons were still in the process of being completed, which is the reason why it is also transporting people instead of being part of a military campaign. But the temporary setup was like a video game, so while Ulin waited she got familiar with the controls.
To her right is an older man that was wearing engineer's overalls and even in the dark she could see his sunken eyes as he hunched over his station.
"Are we just waiting for orders from the bridge?" Ulin asked as she looked around.
"Yeah, there is no overseer or anything like that. But the bridge can keep all of the weapons controls locked to prevent us from firing. So they will keep it locked until the shields go down. The ship's shields also block our shots while going out so they want to prevent us from ricocheting shots back at ourselves." The man explained.
"That's a shame. I thought the shields would work like in video games where it blocks only one way. But it makes sense if we have to wait for their orders to shoot then. They have to get in a tactical position where we would minimize our own damage while maximizing the damage we deal out." Ulin nodded in understanding and looked around bored. "Nothing happens down here does it?"
"Nope." The man answered, "it is a bunch of nerds in the ship's equivalent of a basement. There is nothing glorious or important about it."
They sat for several more minutes in silence. There were a few whispered words around the room and people coughing. But then all of their screens lit up as a red box popped up.
[Maneuver beginning shortly.]
[All stations prepare to fire.]
"Finally!" Ulin exclaimed. She was bored out of her mind just waiting.
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Taylor was wandering around the ship's right wing cannon section. The internal portion of the cannon was contained within the ship. That was the portion she was around.
The ship is shaped like a bean with a rounded nose at the front and with its back end cut off where the rear thrusters are located. But on the sides of the bean were rounded protrusions with large barrels sticking out of them. These protrusions were the wings where the cannon barrels were secluded.
The cannons themselves had reactors that powered the cannons. For the ship's reactor core there was a team of engineers that were always on duty watching it. Usually when the ship was not in combat the extra power generated by the reactor was going to nonessential systems throughout the ship. But now that the ship was in combat the power was building up in order to fire the high output laser cannons.
Personally, Taylor thinks the cannon itself might be a bit overkill. With these designs and the amount of energy output the cannons will melt through a warship in a few seconds. It was completely safe to fire but if she was right they could have made it much smaller for efficiency or had multiple barrels to fire continuous barrages of laser fire instead.
She was making notes and her opinions as she glanced at the reactor valve she had quickly repaired a few minutes ago. The Fusion Reactor was an ancient form of power that was commonly used because they had figured out how to deal with the radiation side effects and damage it generated, so it could be contained.
But now she was thinking that those Victorium should have an alternate form of energy they used. She never got a look inside one of those ships but with the way they fired off energy they had to use another form of energy. Taylor knew for a fact that other countries powered their mecha and spacecraft with variations on the fusion reactor that were far more efficient but just as unstable.
"Hey what the hell is that?!?" Someone screamed from across the room. Pulling Taylor out of her thoughts. Her eyes lit up in excitement at what she saw.
Across the room pulling itself out of a wall vent was some mechanical beauty. Even from this distance she could see the gears moving as it slid out of the vent. It had a pair of hands that had sharp claws at the end of the thing's fingers.
Taylor grabbed a wrench and screwdriver before she started walking over. Intent on studying this thing, that was very clearly an intruder, to the best of her ability. The thing quickly ran on all fours across the floor, its clawed appendages scraping against the metal floor. It went right towards a group of engineers that were standing around broken pieces of the cannon and reactor.
They were likely thinking of the disposal issues they were going to have. There was no one coming into the cannon wing to collect the broken parts for the moment. They could manufacture new parts just fine with the industrial metal printer. They just could not break down the discarded metals.
The engineers began screaming in terror as they tripped over themselves to get away. Only one of them grabbing a nearby tool and arming themself. But before it reached them Taylor yelled across the room.
"Hey you! The biomechanical organism, come here!" Taylor yelled as she kicked a nearby bolt, which was just sitting on the floor likely discarded or forgotten, at the creature smacking it in the side of the head.
"Specialist Hielo, what do you think you are doing?!?" She could hear the person in charge of this engineering section ask.
The creature stopped mid stride and its head began clicking as it looked toward her. Then it leaped up and ran right toward her. When it was close it reached for her neck, intent on decapitating Taylor.
Taylor sidestepped it quickly once it was close. But as its arm passed her by she raised her wrench and screwdriver for only a moment. Then once the creature slid to a stop it realized something was wrong.
For one that person it was about to decapitate had side stepped them. Then it looked to its right arm, or rather the lack of a right arm. "KREE?" It was dazed as it looked around and saw the target it just went after. But she was holding the missing arm looking over it.
"Wow, this thing is," Taylor stopped to find the right words, "a heaping pile of garbage. This is no fun." Taylor looked at the creature, and for the first time in a long time the creature felt its dormant sense of fear reawaken.
In its reawakened fear it leaped forward again but Taylor threw something and it tripped over itself. As it face-planted it tried to push itself up but could not. Then it was forcibly flipped over and saw Taylor crouching over it.
"I mean," Taylor looked over the disassembled limbs. "You are just a very crude version of cybernetics. Someone obsessed with gears must have created you. Or more likely enslaved you." Taylor reached toward the creature's head and began dismantling it. "Would you look at that? The bulk of anything interesting is in your head. Let's disable this and that, then this and we are done."
Taylor frowned in disappointment as the other engineers walked up.
"A crude version of a cyborg. It has an explosive in its head that I disabled. It also had a very advanced piece of transceiver technology in its head. The thing's entire body operated based off of brainwaves but its mind was being controlled from something else." Taylor answered as she stood up. "They are still alive, just disabled. Send for medical and security. They will need to take custody for us to study the live specimen."
Her temporary boss frowned, "you know there is something wrong with you right?" He waved at the completely disassembled attacker. "You completely pulled that thing apart like it was a familiar toy while the rest of us ran away from it in terror."
Taylor blinked and shrugged, "it looked like it might be interesting and since it was clearly an enemy combatant I could do anything I wanted to do to the creature during combat." She answered, reciting an idea that both her and Jace shared.