"This sucks", I thought as my ship detached from the train, falling away from it and the gate. The Invincible was a planet-hopper, more or less a sports vehicle that rich parents bought for their kids to tool around the local star system in, not a serious vessel for exploring the wilderness at the edge of civilization. Yet here I was. As expected, the only ship out of the dozens that had attached to the train was mine. No one else would come to a place like this. Beautiful, scenic Imperial Interstellar Claim 414802. A frankly rather dull system with a small yellow star. The nearest planet to the star was a tiny, rocky world that orbited so close it was practically skipping across the surface of the star. After that came a super-Neptune with a host of moons. The second of which had life — a developing, early-land colonizing ecosystem with a largely nitrogen atmosphere and abundant (perhaps a bit too abundant) oxygen.
The second moon of the second planet had no name, of course, it was simply known by it's claim number, IIC-413802b2. I, as its ruler and only resident would get to name it. Which might be exciting if it matter to literally anyone else in the universe and, let's be honest, it doesn't.
Yes, I got to rule a planet. This was nowhere near as exciting a prospect as you might think, though. Was I a noble? I sure was. I'm the fourth oldest son of Baron Viridian, or I guess I'm actually now Baron myself, but, again, it literally doesn't matter. Being a noble wasn't a big deal, anyway. The Empire is old and there are hundreds of thousands of worlds in it and thousands upon thousands of nobles. It basically meant I had rich parents, tutors, and, as the fourth-oldest son of a minor house with control over a few worlds, most of which only had a few people, it meant nobody expected much of me.
That, I admit, might've been my problem. I considered myself a scholar of classic media and hoped to one day maybe get a job doing something with that? Did the galaxy really need another academic studying early 21st century visual kinetic media? It really didn't and I'm not a great writer, anyway. But it would've at least been a job and kept my parents out of my hair.
And yet, not two weeks ago, my parents had called me and told me it was time to have a family meeting.
"We're old," my father explained as teams of large men and women loaded our furnishings onto the deep space hauler that my parents that converted into a recreational vehicle. Well, what was left of them, after most had been sold off to fund their vacations.
"Really old," my mother continued. "I turn 109 in a month!"
"But you look as lovely as the day we met!" my father interjected. I really wished they wouldn't flirt at a time like this. "So we're retiring and ceding the Barony to you."
"Me?!" I shouted, "What about Jarel?" Jarel Viridian was my older brother and logically the first in line of succession.
"Jarel joined the Stellar Knights, remember? They need to renounce their inheritance."
"Wait, really? Uh, then Faith?" And here I'd thought the Stellar Knights were just a bunch of cosplaying dorks, but it turns out they're a bunch of cosplaying dorks in a weird cult.
"We haven't been able to find her since she left on a voyage of self-discovery." So much for my older sister.
"...Miron? Now, I'm sure they're not in a cult or off on a voyage of discovery," I still had one more shot at freedom and Miron and I had always been relatively close.
"Miron joined a convent."
"What?! When?!"
"Yesterday, when we told them about our plans."
They hadn't even said goodbye! I guess we weren't as close as I thought.
"Ok... well, maybe this won't be as bad as I thought. I... we still have the castle, we still have our holdings. I can make this work."
"About those..." my mother said in an apologetic tone. "I'm afraid we've sold most of them. Oh, but not all! There wouldn't be much of a point to being nobility with no holdings to rule. We have a lovely little planet."
"Oh? What's it called?" I demanded.
"Oh, it's... er..." she stopped and looked away, whispering something to her computer.
"Tell me without looking it up!"
"Oh, you know I could never remember all these things! It's ICC-414802b2. It's a lovely planet! Er, I assume."
"You've never seen it?"
"It's a bit distant, you see. But I'm sure you'll love it!"
"You're shipping me off to some planet you've never seen that doesn't even have a name!"
"Now, now, we're not shipping you off. You have a choice in all this! You're an adult, after all. What have you done with the allowance we've been giving you? Surely you must have quite a savings by now."
I did, if you counted the accumulating value of my classic Earth media collection. Otherwise I was nearly broke.
"Can your friends take you in?"
Oh. My friends. Yeah, I definitely had those. Ha. Ha.... Well, okay.
"Well, then! It sounds like at least you'll have a home, and you have your planet hopper and we'll provide you with some of our old camping gear, even! Listen, dear, the truth is, we've been in a bit of a precarious financial situation for a while now and the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak. So, off you go! It'll be an adventure!"
Well, crap.
I brought the Invincible down into low orbit and looked for a suitable place to land. I had limited fuel; enough to get me back to the gate, at least, but not so much that I could waste it flying around in circles all day. In the worst case scenario, I could call for help and get a refueling, but that would definitely use up the last of my meager savings, so that was out except in an emergency. I settled on a location near the equator in a sort of meadow halfway up a mountain. The forest or jungle or whatever you might call it. What's the difference between a jungle and a rain forest anyway? Anyway, it didn't seem that this particular location, with a bit of a rain shadow effect, got too much rain, but it got enough that the forest around it was lush. Basically, I had options and that was important.
I set my ship down in the clearing. There were massive trees around me — I don't know if they were technically trees, they looked more like ferns or something, and rather than grass, it looked more like purple lichen or something. This planet had no intelligent life, as far as anyone knew. It was something like the Carboniferous period on Earth.
My stash of media included a lot of sci-fi like Star Trek or whatever and the thing about sci-fi is that it made it seem like there were tons of alien civilizations all over the place, but the truth was, there really aren't that many. By the time humanity had spread throughout the galaxy, we'd discovered only a handful of planets with sentient aliens that we could identify and of those, none had the level of technology that we did.
There was this idea called the Fermi Paradox, named after some old scientist, where ancient humans asked, "Well, planets and life should be pretty common, so why, after billions of years, haven't we seen aliens or been conquered?" The galaxy is a big place, but time is long. Humans started properly exploring the stars a little over 20,000 years ago, not long after we learned how to create exotic matter. With it, we could launch probes that dragged wormholes behind them, linking solar systems with gates. Once in a new system, they'd replicate, creating new probes and repeating the process. We hadn't taken over the galaxy — even the fastest, most advanced probes could only reach half the speed of light — but we'd expanded a lot in just a few thousand years. At this point, it'd be hard to imagine that humanity could actually be destroyed, much less that all of the probes could be stopped. So it's not unreasonable that in a few hundred thousand more, we might be the dominate life form in the whole galaxy. It's always possible there are other civilizations on the other side, but even if there are, they can't be that much more advanced, right? Otherwise they would've already been here.
Wow, I got off track. I like sci-fi, is all. I'd always dreamed of discovering alien civilizations and meeting hot blue space babes or whatever (they could be hot dudes, that's fine, too) but I thought reality was boring. Politics, money, all that boring stuff. We were nobility, yeah, but so were a lot of other people. Listen, there are billions of stars in the galaxy and billions of planets. The Orion Empire alone has over 100 million systems. There are tens of thousands of noble houses! Plus I was fourth in line. I would never have to do anything important, so I never bothered. I guess that's on me.
Anyway, I have a molecular constructor/molecular collector, which I'll just call the MC2, so I should be able to build myself a nice little house. If I can figure out how to work the thing. Well, nothing for it. The actual machine is fairly big and bulky, but there's a long cord that connects it to the sort of gun-looking thing that you use to actually interact with things.
I started up the collector and aimed it at a nearby rock and set it into collection mode. After a moment, it deconstructed the rock and stored it in compacted form in the machine. Nice. I too a look at the readout. Silicon, oxygen.. Plagioclase? What the heck is that? Oh, it's a crystal with sodium and aluminum. Ok, so that was a basalt. Hm. Actually, this might be an issue. The MC2 had a few formulas for different material, but some of the stronger ones required metals and in much greater quantities than I had here. I decided to try some fiddling with the settings. I set it to exclude everything but aluminum and tried it with another small rock. It worked, but it did take a fairly big chunk of power to do it. My solar cells on the Invincible would refill it, but I only got a tiny amount of aluminum for my efforts. I think... if I'm going to go with this, I'll need to find some rocks with a lot more minerals. Looking over the manual, I guess the collector has to break down the bonds of whatever it collects, so the less work it has to do, the less power it needs.
I detached a smaller collector tank from the larger unit and strapped it on like a backpack. I should be able to walk around with this. Oh, but still... I went to he main cabin of the Invincible and dug out a box. I hadn't used this guy in years but he should still be good. The interior of the box was padded with foam, and inside was a small robot, the size of a housecat and the shape of, well, it kind of looked like a turtle. Well, without a head or tails. It had four 'flippers' that served as stabilization and propulsion surfaces. I had named him 'Leonardo', after the mythical hero, but I usually just called him Leo. With his box open, Leo sprang to life and lifted off the ground.
I had had a number of adventures with Leo as a kid, when he had been my pet and companion. He was just a toy, the bare minimum for a pet of this kind, really, with a tiny processor that could barely house a functional AI. But I had made some upgrades and modifications to him and, seeing as he was really only a collector's item anyway, had decided to bring him along.
Leo scanned his surroundings curiously.
"Leo, I need you to come with me and scan the area."
He gave me a quizzical beep.
"LIDAR is fine. It's better than nothing."
Another beep. He was... sad? It's hard to tell.
"I know it's been a while. But I need you now. Can you help?"
Leo chirped enthusiastically and did a spin in the air.
With a LIDAR feed from Leo above, I set off in search of some better materials.
The terrain was... not pleasant, to say the least. I wasn't used to hiking, for one thing. For another, this wasn't the soft, loamy soil of the planets we'd been to on vacation. This place probably didn't have a complex enough system of decomposers to make nice, soft, rich dirt. Or maybe it did and they didn't work in the same way as other places. I was just trying to remember stuff from my textbooks.
Still, with Leo's help I was able to find an area that had seen a rockslide in the recent (maybe?) past. I figured it'd give me lots of rocks to choose from. I decided not to do too much rock climbing because, well, if I broke a leg or something I would probably just die out here. Instead I circled around until I found a rock that had reddish streaks and zapped it up. Sure enough, a lot of iron there. Another had green streaks. Copper, this time. Pretty lucky, honestly. Or, actually, maybe not. Ancient humans had to work with the metals they could find on the surface, so maybe it was to be expected. Not to mention that I had Leo's help and I could scan anything I collected. I continued to gather rocks up until my collector had run out of space. I could've saved more space by collecting only the metals I wanted, but then I would run out of power breaking them down.
Once I had hiked back to the ship, I got to work building my new home. I had limited experience with using the building tools, and honestly, the interface that was being displayed on my AR implant was somehow too crude to understand and too complex for me to use. I probably should've paid more attention in class. Actually, that's something I keep thinking these days.
Still, I managed to figure out that I could draw a rectangle, then extrude it. There. A wall. Now for the materials. I had a library of common building materials and alloys, but I was lacking in some of these components. Manganese? Chromium? Aluminum? I had trace amounts in my collector, but I wasn't sure I had enough for anything. I had a bunch of iron, though. Iron it is. Nice and sturdy. I 'took' my wall and copy and pasted it four times. Ok, four walls. Wait, I should do the floor first. Undo, undo. I placed a floor down, then resized the walls to be a little smaller. Four of them. Then a roof, same size as the floor. It doesn't need to be complex. The walls were pretty thin, but it was iron, so just making a shelter a bit bigger than me took up most of what I had collected.
I saved my design and placed it in a flat spot, then switched the thing to constructor mode and built it.
And... what came out... was just a crate.
A goddamn metal crate.
Yeah. Maybe I should look at some tutorials online.