Rikku

[Tenacity]

<Early Morning, Beamont Base, Texas system>

Rikku yawned as she climbed into the CSV's cockpit, strapping herself into the seat as she did every morning. Hit a button here, flip a switch there, the reactor started to humm as it came to life. The ship wasnt pretty, but it got the job done, and it had gotten her out of a jam in the past. She shuddered at the thought of encountering more xenos today... she hated killing them, why couldnt they work with the junkers instead of attacking all the time? She shrugged off the thought, xenos were always confusing.

The CSV cockpit closed and clanked shut with a magnetic seal. Rikku picked up the communication headset hanging on the dash and fit it over her ear; a dozen quiet voices were chattering in the background static. She entered a code on the CSV's primary control panel and the docking arms inside the bay picked up her ship, swinging it over to the airlock door.

"Beaumont control, this is CSV-Gamma-four, requesting clearance for launch" she said in a smooth tone, trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes before she took off.

"Gamma-four, you have clearance, initiating launch procedure. Good luck out there." A voice responded in the earphone.

The door in front of her opened slowly, and the docking arm moved her CSV forward into the airlock. The ship was set down with a slight thud, and the airlock door closed behind her after the arm had retreated. A rush of air exploded outward into space as the bay opened, exposing her ship to the void. She took ahold of the control stick and slowly moved away from the base.

<Three Hours Later, South Dallas Debris field, Texas system>

Salvage work was always slow going, Rikku thought to herself. She took aim at another chunk of floating scrap and pulled the firing trigger, reducing it to a ball of molten hot metal before locking onto it with the ship's tractor beam to suck it into the cargo bay. The molten scraps cooled within seconds in the void of space, and the blasting process removed impurities from the durasteel. It took a lot of smelting work out of the process of metal recycling.

She moved the CSV forward, using a second control stick to extend it's robotic arm. She grabbed ahold of a larger peice of scrap, one that looked different from the rest of the field. The arm rotated upwards, holding the object in front of the cockpit...

"Cool!" She said outloud, "Havent turned up one of you babies in months!" She let go of the object with the robotic arm and used the tractor beam to get it in the cargo hold. The item was an accelerator core, a key component in fighter-grade afterburners - it'd fetch a hefty price on the black market once it was fixed up.

Rikku sighed momentarily... it was always the same, she blasted metal scraps and found the occasional gun or engine part, why couldnt she ever find anything big? Other junkers managed to find shipwrecks or cargo pods all the time, they'd strike it rich and become millionaires from a single salvage job, while she was stuck with a measly thousand credits to her name, barely enough to live off of. Hell, even that wouldnt be enough soon, synth paste was skyrocketing in price due to all the LWB and FA attacks lately, and half of what did make it into liberty had to get past the xenos as well. Blast those xenos, good for nothin terrorists!

She gazed out of the cockpit into space, admiring the beauty of the system... distant stars, colorful wisps created by nebulae, the space-dust contrails left by ships that passed. She paused for a moment, staring at the dark matter cloud at the center of the debris field. Nobody ever went in there... at least not willingly. There was radiation... lots of it... and nav systems always went haywire even on the edge of the cloud. Dark matter was dangerous, but danger was exciting...

Rikku reset the robotic arm to it's normal position and started moving towards the cloud. Her CSV's cruise engines groaned as they activated, finally lurching the ship forward at high velocity towards the cloud. If there was anything to be found, it'd be in there... all the good stuff that nobody had gotten to yet...

As her ship approached the edge of the cloud, the onboard computer's voice spoke up... "Warning! Sensor efficiency reduced! Radiation damage detected!" Rikku ignored the warnings. Her ship could handle the radiation, and as long as she didnt stay inside the cloud for too long so could she. Of course... she might end up hurling meals for the next week, but if she could find something valuable in the cloud it'd be worth the discomfort.

Dark matter quickly enveloped her ship, she had to concentrate just to avoid running into the debris. The cloud blacked out everything, she could barely see five meters in front of her and she was barreling along at breakneck speed. Suddenly another alarm went off; "Proximity alert!". A large shape loomed in front of her ship, appearing almost instantly out of the cloud. Rikku pulled up hard on the flight stick to avoid it, but the tail wing of her CSV caught the object, sending the ship tumbling through the cloud and finally coming to a stop as it crashed into a chunk of debris.

Luckily ship integrity hadnt been compromised, the CSV would have to limp back home though. She regained control of the ship and slowly moved it back towards the direction of the object she had clipped. As she neared it, the sillhouette cleared. It was a ship... but not like anything she had seen before.

It wasnt big, but it wasnt small either - Several times larger than her CSV at least. The front was hammerhead-shaped, like a cylinder laid down sideways that tapered on the ends. The midsection of the ship widened out a bit, it probably contained a single room. At the rear was a large engine section, with two exhaust ports. The thing was loaded with guns... she counted six total, but it was hard to focus inside the cloud.

As the shock of the crash wore off, Rikku was overwhelmed by excitement; "YES! This is it! I'm gonna be rich! No more scrap blastin for me!" She did a little dance in the cockpit. "Ok, let's crack this baby open and see what we've got!" She manuevered the CSV around to the other side of the ship, spotting an airlock at the midsection. CSV's werent meant for direct docking with other ships... she'd have to seal her ship's cargo bay around the docking port and crawl down through it.

<Inside the ship, ten minutes later>

As the airlock cracked open she was hit with the scent of stale air and mechanical grease. She flipped on her flashlight and crawled inside.

There wasnt much room at all, barely enough to stand up - luckily for her she was short. The airlock connected to a single room that took up the midsection of the ship. From the looks of it, this was a cargo bay of sorts... not at all large enough to hold any shipments though. There were a couple crates on the floor in the corner of the room - she opened one up to find gears, circuit connectors, Tubes of mechanical grease, optical chips, and other various items typically used in ship repairs.

The front and back of the room were open to tunnels leading to the other parts of the ship. There were no doorways, and the tunnels were so cramped she had to crouch down to walk through them. She went to the back of the ship first - the most valuable parts of a ship were it's engines and it's reactor. Surprisingly, she didnt feel the sting of radiation here... the ship must have been shielded against it.

Crawling into the rear section of the ship, she was welcomed by a much larger room to work in. Here she could stand up fully without hitting her head on the ceiling, and walk around a bit. The bulk of the room was occupied by the ship's two huge engines, she looked over them with the flashlight.

"No way! HG-22 Rotary Ion Accelerator engines! Totally oldschool..." She walked up to the control panel between the two cylindrical engines, examining it. HG-22 engines had been used by a lot of exploration ships and even some military ships in the past... they were extremely reliable, with very few moving parts and very low maintenance requirement. Under ideal operating conditions, those engines could last centuries with no maintenance, and they were pretty efficient too.

Rikku blew the dust off the control panel and found the switch for the main reactor. It sat inbetween the two engines, and was dwarfed in size by them - most reactors were, all they really did was use a chemical reaction to create enough power to start up the ship systems and warm up the engines; after that the ship drew it's power directly from the engines. She flipped a switch on the panel upward and hit the button above it.

With a loud, magnetic thump the reactor lit up - deuterium and antimatter in the reactor chamber colliding with one another to produce an immense amount of energy. Within seconds the two engines started to glow red as the ion generators warmed up, and seconds later the internal lighting and power systems of the ship started switching on. Rikku smiled, "This baby's still in ship-shape!"

[VISAD Online... Unknown biomass detected internally... Query: Who is here?]

Rikku jumped when she heard the voice echo through the ship's speakers. "um... hi?"

[Repeat Query: Who are you?]

She nervously looked around the ship, trying to find something to speak towards, but there was no face to put to the voice. She had no idea this was an AI ship... hell, they were banned in half of sirius after some of them went haywire a few years back. She spoke up again, talking to nothing, "I'm Rikku..."

[Query: Biomass Rikku, what is your function?]

She cleared her throat, "I'm a junker... erm... I fix things, I turned you back on... who are you?"

[Statement: Designation VISAD X-1, Virtual Intelligence Seek-And-Destroy prototype, property of Black Lance]

"Black lance? I've never heard of them..."

[Clarification: Black lance is an operational wing of the bounty hunter's guild]

Rikku thought for a moment, trying to sort through all she had ever heard about the guild's activities and groups... She looked back up at the speaker on the wall, "Um, not sure if I should say this but... Black Lance was cut out of the guild for corruption a few years ago... I saw it on the news board at beaumont."

[Statement: If Black Lance does not exist, VISAD has no orders. Initiating self-destruct sequence]

"Woah woah, wait! You cant blow yourself up, I'm inside you! 'N I aint ready to die yet!" she shouted frantically

[Self destruct cancelled, VISAD cannot harm innocents. Query: Will Rikku give VISAD orders?]

"um... sure, I guess... do a system analysis while I clean this place up."

[Confirmation: Performing systems scan, ETA to completion... One Hour]

Rikku sighed in relief and looked around the room again. Boy this place is a mess, she thought.

(Rikku inside the VISAD prototype ship)


<Approximately one hour later>

Rikku jumped as the ship's "voice" startled her, it had been silent for almost an hour now.

[Report: Systems analysus complete, VISAD is in full working order. Query: What is Rikku's next Order?]

Rikku sighed, "First off, I'm not calling you 'visad', that sounds stupid! You need a real name... how about bob? Yea, I'm gonna call you bob, ok bob?"

[Confirmation: Confirmed, Bob awaits orders]

She smiled. Rikku had never been the sociable type, though she was always happy and always optimistic... she just didnt understand people. They always acted so rashly! She tended to stick with her machines and equipment. They might not talk much, but accelerator cores definitely listened better than most people she knew.

"Hm... maybe I wont scrap this ship after all!" she said, "It'll be fun having a robot friend, right bob?"

[Clarification: Bob is not a robot, Bob is a virtual intelligence seek and destroy prototype]

"Not anymore bob! you're my ship now, ok? We're gonna have fun, I can think of tons of places we can go explore!" She said with a giddy tone.

[Query: Where does Rikku want Bob to go?]

"hm... we should get back to beaumont, Gotta get you cleaned up proper-like, all this dust is gonna start buggin me soon!"

[Statement: Beaumont is not a recognized destination in Bob's databank]

"Hm... wonder how good your scanners are... Can you detect anything outside of this dark matter cloud we're in?"

[Confirmation: yes, beyond this cloud lies an extensive debris field. Sensors verify that we are in the texas system of Liberty space]

"Ok, get us outta the cloud and I can show you where to go from there." Rikku said as she sat up and hit a button on the airlock control panel, disconnecting her cSV from the new ship. She wouldnt need it anymore... why fly a cramped little scrapper when you had a warship at your command? She crawled through the forward tunnel to the front section of the ship, looking around for the first time at the 'command center'.

It wasnt much more than an elongated room. There was a wide viewport at the front, the only place she could see out of the ship. A large computer dominated the center of the room... likely the AI's main databanks. There were some control panels that provided minimal manual control over the ship and a single chair in front of them - probably for docking procedures if the AI wasnt functioning properly. The left side of the room contained the life support generator, while the right side was occupied by a blocky object she couldnt identify.

The ship smoothly glided out of the cloud, it's engines were surprisingly quiet. Rikku pointed to the left of a planet that loomed in the distance, "take us that way!"

[Calculating Trajectory... Unidentified space station resides approximately 75 kilometers away]

"That's beaumont, let's get there so we can get you fixed up bob!"

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