Chapter 8: Age of Discovery
Personal Journal June 7th, 3001. After I got the reactor up and running on the supply depot I ran a rough check on the Potemkin and Invader that were also docked here. The Potemkin classed Warship Age of Discovery is really messed up. From what I can piece together from various logs it was directly hit by a nuke in the Ameris civil war and was limped back to here in the hopes of making repairs at some point. When they arrived here, there was another Warship that had been freshly repaired and they just transferred over all of the personnel while leaving this Warship behind. It was right before the invasion of Terra and they needed all hands on deck so they just adjusted chain of command and left. As for the dropships attached to the Age of Discovery, they were mostly emptied out. Eleven of the twelve unions were left behind because they didn't have the space for them on the other ship. They did transfer almost all of the cargo though and only left behind things like stores of armor. There is one union that still has cargo and material, and it's just filled with things like extra uniforms, a little bit of Ferro Fibrous, and a full company of bugmechs that were left behind.
"Ahh." I sighed as I set the cup of coffee that I was drinking down along with the pen I had been using. It turns out that recording your thoughts and what you had done for the day helps prevent you from going insane after long periods of time alone. I had just spent the week combing over the Age of Discovery and was taking a day to have a break before getting to the Invader. Luckily, the hydroponics bays were intact on this station even if they were a little overgrown so I had access to fresh food for the first time in a while. Also, this Depot had coffee that didn't taste like it came out of a Maxwell coffee can and so I was drinking good coffee and writing down everything that I had done over the past year and a half. And on top of that, all of the water reclamation worked really well so I had had an incredibly long and hot shower for the first time in almost a year.
One of the things about this universe that you always read about and appreciated on paper was just how Ragnarok proofed everything was. And the SLDF and the civil engineers really outdid themselves in every way in that regard. But it also made it harder to maintain if you had no clue how things worked at first. This had led to months and months of study as I had worked my way through the Inner Sphere. I had an innate desire to know how things worked and my favorite thing to do back on Earth in the twenty-first century had been self study on things I felt interesting. So I had put everything that I had learned in self study and research into developing more skills at remembering the things that I read.
I had never had an photographic memory, and I certainly had never possessed an Eidetic memory. But my memory had always been good at retaining information that was written down. While I couldn't remember everything perfectly, I could remember most if not all of what I read. My information retention was good. This is what had enabled me to get the systems back up and running on the Manassas. And the notes that I had taken on that process had helped me to get this depots generators up and running. I had also gone through the manifest that was listed in the Depot and had found several Voidseeker AI cores that were in the cargo area shutdown. There was a listed Caspar in the bay as well, but when I had gone to check the bay, I found that it had been disassembled and the parts placed into storage until they could be repurposed.
The depot had enough repair equipment and refined raw materials that it could repair part but not all of the Age of Discovery. If I went through the Manassas stores and moved all of the refined material into the Depot I might be able to fully repair the Age of Discovery there was also some material in the Potemkin but it would be minuscule compared to the amount I would need to repair the entire thing. But I would have no guarantees. There were a couple of other depots listed in the Manassas navigation computer and if I could possibly find more on the Age of Discover I could potentially find more useful Lostech and potentially enough refined material to repair the Potemkin. But, it would take me several days to work through the computer systems and I was going to go through the Invader and it's dropships first.
Making my way to the quarters I had claimed for my own, I grabbed the Blackwatch officers ID tag and the copy of the codes he had on him before making my way to enter the Invader to do a check on what would hopefully be my ticket to civilization.
Authors note: So, seeing as people were wondering why I chose the Manassas instead of another Warship and what had happened in order for me to end up with it in the state it was in when I appeared. Now, I assume everyone here knows the story of what had happened to the Manassas in the original story of how it vanished. Well, in this fic instead of getting frozen in time until 3058, there was a malfunction when they jumped the second time and all of the crew ended up dying while they were suspended in Hyperspace until I appeared. The accident that led to me coming to Battletech also ended up killing the crew. I'm kinda taking a bit of liberty with Hyperspace in order to make this work. Also, I used the Manassas because I was reading up on Warships and the plot bunny hit me when I read the Manassas entry. I know that a lot of people are more educated in Battletech than me. And I'm open to some criticism as well as advice. I won't use everything that I'm given because I've already got a plan in mind. I've incorporated and will be using more things that people have posted in multiple chapters already. The Tortuga Prime thing I'm literally going to hand-wave and go Word of God on it and say that the SLDF discovered the location as the Amaris Civil war was going on and that they just had more pressing problems than dealing with pirates.
Also, Sunday is my day off from writing. I'm a little ahead of my word count anyway