Darkness. Cold. Silence.

Our ship coasted along the dark side of the planet, and on the far horizon, a thin ring of sunlight glowed, brighter, and soon the sun flared alight and bathed us with golden heat.

Within moments, the air in the ship went from awfully cold to burning hot, and our shitty Liquid-Mana-Dispenser system struggled to pump enough ice-wind air through the ship to keep it survivable. Back on Earth, back when we were sailing the high seas like normal people, we never needed to worry about such things. The temperature was relatively stable. But here? In fuckin’ space? Nope.

The HVAC system was by far the best, but at least the crew didn't freeze, then boil, then freeze ad nauseam.

I sat on my Super Ultimate Sadomasochist-Drive Folding Chair, and I rested my head on my hands in boredom. The technicians were silent and at work. The Card King nursed a cup of coffee as he watched literally the third sunrise this evening.

Outside on the decks, the hero party walked around in zero-gravity and no atmosphere, protected by the mage's air and gravity magic. The knight, being the golden retriever goofball that he was, stuck his hand out of the magic air barrier, felt the immediate burn of solar radiation, and yanked it back in, gripping it in pain. The healer scolded him as she healed it.

I brought up the screen to Jessie's workshop, and already I could see people in lab coats and goggles hurrying this way and that, piecing together some great machine to solve all of our problems.

I sighed.

"Cassandra," I said. "What our status?"

"The crew has deposited 5,310kg of trash thus far. This can be immediately recycled for Matter or Energy resource, but currently, Jessie has requested the first resource payout to her workshop."

I groaned. "Just tell me when they're done."

This sucked. We were essentially stuck in space with no resources, which meant no fuel, limited food, and just enough air element to breathe. We were trapped. Low on options. Out of patience.

"Admiral," said one of the techs. "We've detected a spaceship signal. Several."

"Are they hostile?"

"They seem to be... not moving."

I rubbed my armored temples in thought. It would be a gamble to spend resources on fuel just to get to an unknown ship that may or may not be an enemy. Given that we had already recycled most of our ammunition for food and air, we were in no shape to fight.

But still.

If I could recycle just a bit of a proper space-faring vessel, I could gain some extremely rare recipes.

"We need a better analysis," I said. "Get all of our signals techs working on it."

"Yes, sir," she said.

I brought up Jessie on screen. She and Doc Jackelope stood at the Gate device while her crew welded on it in various places.

"Jessie, how close are you to being done?" I asked.

She turned. "Motherfucker, I'm busy."

"We've found unknown ships nearby."

She blinked. "Are they... hostile?"

"I dunno."

She whispered something to Doc Jackelope, he nodded, and she looked back at me through the screen. "I want ship recipes, Redrim. We need special hardware if we're gonna fuck around in space, so if you can eat a ship, you need to do it."

"Admiral," said one of the techs. She stepped up to me with a crisp salute and offered a sheet of paper. "We've completed a full deep scan."

I took it. The paper was a computer-printout of the scan's results.

Thermal: None

Visual: Dark

Distance: 62km

Relative Velocity: 113m/s

Cosmic Essence: Trace

Radiation: Normal

Mana Traces: None

Sexual Deviant Energy: None

"Who the fuck scanned for sexual deviant energy?"

I looked up.

The Gimp King stared back. "Sexual energy is perhaps the greatest heuristic for another person's presence." His bulge throbbed informatively. "Even the most invisible of rogues cannot mask his sexual energy."

He spoke the truth, surely. "Begin refueling," I ordered. "Plot a rendezvous with those ships."

The technicians saluted and went to work.

+6870kg Assorted Garbage

Krrrrr--

+6,801,300 Energy

+34,006,500 XP

The ship eased into a turn as the Liquid Mana Dispersal system shot jets of air to reposition us. Once we found our bearing, the rocket engines rumbled to life, and I felt the ship lurch forward. The momentum was gentle but constant.

"ETA: 6 minutes," said one of the techs.

"Fire the railgun," I said.

"What?" said the Card King. "Why? We don't know if those ships are hostile, Redrim. For all we know--"

"Use a smoke round."

The technicians were hesitant but put in the order regardless. Even without Vil or anyone actively manning the turrets, the technicians on the bridge had enough control here to see it done.

The railgun aimed in eery silence, the rail glowed for an instant, and the projectile zipped off ahead of us.

"Impact," said a tech.

"Any movement?"

There was a pause. Then another.

"No movement," she said.

I breathed a sigh of relief and sank back into my folding chair.

And the ship coasted through the darkness of space, the sun glaring on one side, heating the hull to some stupid degree of hot, while the dark side was more than freezing. The space around felt motionless, as though we weren't even moving at all, and even the planet behind us--with its constant spin--seemed to not even grow smaller as we burned away from it.

"Beginning retrograde burn," said a tech.

The ship eased to a gentle stop, or I guess a relative stop, right within sight of the ships--and they were ships alright. Dozens of ships of strange metallic designs, torn and shredded and crumpled, all stuck together as if gravity just pulled them here after however long it took, and looking around was a sea of debris. Bits of metal and plastic and electronic bits just floating around, and looking at these ships, I could see the sheer size of those bullet wounds that punctured them, big enough to walk through.

It was a ship graveyard. Obviously. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe it was the result of a dramatic final battle between the ancients, and they all died, and gravity just sort of tugged them into one spot, and then we found them.

Neat.

"Begin recycling," I ordered.

And the lasers blinked on and began to drill into those old husks.

I knew the XP would be massive, and I felt the quench to my thirst as my resource hold filled with recycled ship metal.

"Imsi," said Cassandra. "Now that we are no longer bound to a single vessel, it would be wise to create ships with recycling and production capability."

It was a perfect idea. We already had mining lasers and ammunition constructors on the jets and gunboats and tanks, but nobody said they couldn't just expand their own sizes and build copies of themselves, right?

Up until now, I had been going tall, as they say. But now it was time to go wide.

"Let’s get to work, then," I said. “Start a new recipe.”

Recipe: Spaceminer

5 Hardpoints:

1 Liquid Mana Fuel Rocket Engine

3 Recycling Lasers

1 Vend System

"How's that?" I asked.

"If you want your crew to survive in the vacuum of space," Cassandra said, "you'll need to include an LMD system to vend temperature-controlled air and protection magic against the radiation of space. It can also eject bursts of air for maneuvering, which can be used to replace the Liquid-Mana-Fuel (LMF) Engine. Currently, these ships are temporary and used only for local mining operations, thus do not need long-distance capabilities."

Recipe: Spaceminer_copy

5 Hardpoints:

1 Vend System

1 LMD System

3 Recycling Lasers

"Yes?" I asked.

"Yes," she said back.

Work Order:

Spaceminer_copy: 10

These things were pretty much the bare-necessity of any space-faring vessel. Cassandra handled the general shape of the thing--like two canoes glued top-to-top with laser guns on the front and sides--and the hull was thin as all hell. Just strong enough to keep the air locked in.

Soon, we launched the first ship with the brave crew manning it--those fucking singing pirates again--and they eased over to a nearby dead ship and began to laser in.

Even with the thickness of the dead ship's armor, I could visibly see the rice-grain of a ship ballooning in size like a mosquito, the hull thickening and reforming and the entire ship growing larger until--

It birthed another Spaceminer.

One of the pirate crew drove the ship back into the hangar so that it could be loaded with yet more crew to man it, and when it was ready, it, too, joined beside the mother miner boat to dig into this carcass of a space battleship.

It was incredible to see it unfold.

Those 10 Spaceminers soon became 20. Those 20 became 40. And 40 became 80, became 160, and finally stopped at 200 total Spaceminer boats when I gave the order to cease production and instead grow its hull size.

"Imsi," said Cassandra. "We'll need new recipes for their next stage of evolution."

"Great. I guess I could come up with some ideas."

"While I understand you are smarter than you look, and while I don't entirely doubt your engineering prowess, I suggest leaving me to granular recipe generation. Instead, explain to me what role the recipe should fill, and I will do my best to fulfill it."

Cassandra was just so sweet. She knew I was a smart cookie, and even so, she thought to save me the trouble of thinking. "Okay, how about something like this..."

Defense Corvette: Small ship to dispense flak artillery and shield magic. Minimum crew: 30

Attack Corvette: Small support ship. Should carry marines for boarding ops. Minimum crew: 30

Destroyer: Moderate-light ship to general combat capabilities. Minimum crew: 100

Cruiser: Like a destroyer but bigger. Minimum crew: 300

Battleship: Even bigger! Carries the largest guns and has the most armor. Minimum crew: 1000

Mining Carrier: Only light defense armament, stacked with mining lasers. As large as a cruiser or battleship. Generates new small attack craft. Minimum crew: 30

Small Attack Craft:

Fighters: Like jets, but in space. Used to overwhelm enemy defenses. Crew: 1

Snipers: Agile boats with long-range weapons. Crew: 1-3

Support: Generalist boats for repair and specialist ops. Crew: 1-3

"Confirmed," she said. "Relaying new recipe progression track. Current ships updated. Target ship level assignment complete. With our current crew capabilities, we are limited in our fleet options."

I had completely forgotten about the crew. I brought up the roster.

Crew: 6,301

"How the fuck did we get so many people?"

"Volunteers after the liberation of Lambston," she said.

This was good. It looked like I had enough for a healthy fleet, and even with a skeleton crew on each ship, they'd be an effective fighting force.

Projected Crew Assignments:

1x Redrim Capital Space Battleship: 500

3x Mining Carrier: 90

2x Battleships: 2000

5x Cruisers: 1500

10x Destroyers: 1000

30x Corvettes: 900

100x Small Craft: 150

As big as a fleet it appeared to be, it surprisingly didn't take long to build. Those 200 ships split off into temporary mining carriers with two dozen mining lasers each, which ripped apart those dead ships with ease. Nearby ships docked and transferred resources to pour into their own hull development, and soon the darkness of space was lit with a fuckload of lasers shining this way and that.

What was before just a dead and silent graveyard of ships was now a bustling industrial zone.

Of course, this was only possible since we didn't reinforce the hulls of the fleet. In fact, the hulls were damn near paper-thin in comparison to my capital ship, but if we leveraged the LMD to maintain shields, they shouldn't have too much of an issue. Why waste all that mass on hull armor when we could use it as fuel to project manashields?

"Imsi," said Cassandra. "After an analysis, I do not believe we will obtain enough matter to create two battleships."

I looked out at the dwindling ship graveyard. We had already almost eaten it all, and now corvettes and mining ships were practically fighting for mining space. "I'll take what I can get," I said.

I brought up my recycling notifications.

Resource Gain Rate: 455,625 Matter per second

XP Gain Rate: 2,278,125 per second

Duration: 134 minutes

+3,663,225,000 Matter

+18,316,125,000 XP

+1 Level [Level 71]

+1 Class Point

Fucking finally. At this rate, it looked like I'd never reach max level, but I wasn't worried about that anymore. We were past progression now. This was the endgame.

Recipes unlocked:

Ancient-weave Armor Plating: Moderate strength armored plating designed for spacecraft. Provides protection against radiation, temperature fluctuations, and is malleable enough to avoid shattering when struck by small space debris.

Ion Engines: Hyper-efficient engines that require less fuel but at the cost of engine power.

Spacesuit: Enables survival in space.

Burst Laser Rifle: Rapid-fire laser rifle.

Weld-cutter Scyth: Welding tool used to work on ship hulls.

Assorted Machinery: Small sub-machinery used in larger recipes. Includes mana compressors, refraction nullifiers, manatech pistons, and more.

Partial Ship AI-Core: Contains a vast resource of partially-corrupted data.

I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't get some crazy high-tech mega cannon, but these quality-of-life recipes would do us wonders, I figured.

"Imsi," said Cassandra. "Shall I go ahead and implement an infrastructure update?"

"Go ahead."

Work Order:

Ship Repair

Infrastructure Update

Equipment Update

Armor Update

Ancient Ai-Core Repair

"Redrim," Jessie said. Her smug face stared at me from the screen. "It's done. I'm dropping in a recipe now that I need made ASAP."

+1 Cosmic Shard Launcher

+1 Unstable Gate Core

+1 Gate Console

New recipes unlocked.

I looked over the recipe, didn't understand it, and I shrugged as I added them to the work order. The updates were already churning out across the ship, and even the hull began to perspire molten metal to reform into our new layer of armor.

Jessie said, "I'm sending one of ours. He'll be your new Gate technician."

The bridge door hissed open, and a young engineer hit me with a crisp salute.

"What can I do with this?" I asked.

"We're chasing Marianna," she answered. "Across worlds."

"What? How?"

Jessie sighed. "Just... listen to the damn technician once he gets started." Her screen flicked off, and I looked over at the new guy. The new Gate Console had been made over in the corner, and he shuffled into his seat.

The screen blinked on, he shifted his glasses, and he ran over data points and graphs and all sorts of shit I didn't care about. "Admiral, we have 1,319 Cosmic Shard remaining to use as fuel, and to travel to Marianna's last known location, we'll need to spend 50 to 300 Shards."

"Why such a variance?" I asked.

"The Gate Core is unstable, and it may cost more or less than what we expect."

Great. Just another weird-ass system with a weird-ass resource I had to keep up with. I looked across space around us, and I saw that the ship graveyard had been completely devoured.

My fleet was ready. Guns sparkling, hulls shimmering, the crews boiling over in excitement. Seeing the extent of our numbers filled me with power. This was mine. My fleet. I was just as much the leader as I was the father to these ships.

"Well, Redrim?" said the Card King. "Shall we head out to places far from here?"

I smirked. "All ships: Battle stations! Prepare for an ambush at any moment."

The ceiling lights above pulsed red and a howling alarm wailed across the ship as the outer shell began to clack shut. Technicians hushed commands through their earpieces, communications officers relayed orders back and forth, and finally, over to the Card King. And when he was ready, he turned and offered a salute. "Supreme Admiral. All ships present and accounted for."

I saluted back, and I stood up from my shitty folding chair, fluffed out my awesome cloak, so it billowed behind me, and I thrust my arm forward. "Activate the gate!"

There was a pause. Then a cough.

The gate technician sheepishly turned to me and said, "Sorry, Admiral, but the nomenclature we use now is Super Galactic. To ensure a strong effect, the engineering team requests that you call it the Super Galactic Dimensional Gate."

I dropped myself back into my chair. "Just fuckin' do the thing."

"Yes, sir."

The ship hummed, and I felt a vibration beneath my feet. A dull thump rang throughout the ship--the new frontal shard cannon fired a shotgun blast of glittering gems. Soon after, a bright red laser at the bow traced a line among those crystals, drawing a rough circle in front of us. It glowed for a moment, then another, then brighter before the entire inner circle shimmered over like a pond of water.

"Dimensional Gate activated successfully," said the tech. "T minus 60 until gate closure."

I stood proud and crossed my arms. "Push us through," I commanded.

The ship rumbled as the engines worked to move our incredible mass, and the front of the ship crossed the threshold--like dipping into water--and the boundary raced across the decks and blinked past us.

We were through, and now my fleet hurried in behind us.

Gasps. Some of the crew gasped at what we had found.

The flaring red glow of the planet poured into the bridge, an ominous contrast to the peaceful blue we had just abandoned. There, far below us, the planet was cracked and burning, like a ball of crust and lava.

"Radar is clear."

"Cosmic Traces detected."

"Faint degeneracy scent located."

"No sign of enemy activity."

I gazed out the glass and at the dying planet. The burn of its surface stared back at me. "Scan the planet for lifeforms," I ordered.

"Scanning--done. There... are no lifeforms on the planet."

"Was it always like this?"

Jessie blinked in on the screen. "No," she said. "I've run an analysis with the dimensional world charts we found on those old ships. This was a place with countless living on it."

"Terrible," said the Card King.

The Gimp King rumbled above me from his sex swing. "Truly the work of Marianna, the Harlot Queen."

"Genocide," I echoed. "Not just on a scale of nations, but across worlds." I narrowed my eyes. "What is she truly after?" I looked over at Jessie through the screen. "Tell me about these supposed worlds we're traveling through."

"Each world has its own quirk or physical law that sets it apart from the rest, and as far as I know, the possibilities are endless."

"Which world was this one?" I asked.

"She looked through her computer console and squinted her eyes as she read. "Oh, no," she said sadly. "Those poor furries."

"Furries?"

"This was Furry World," she said. "I had passed through here once, reborn as some kind of wolf-slut hybrid. That was the gimmick, after all. Humans with animal features."

"I thought we already had that," I said. "I've seen people with tails before."

"No, no," she said. "This is more sexualized."

I stared at the burning carcass of the furry planet. "Oh."

"Admiral!" said the gate tech. "We've locked onto Marianna's Cosmic scent, but it's faint. We should leave soon before it completely vanishes."

I looked again at the space around me. There was nothing but a dying planet and emptiness. Not even a graveyard to recycle.

"Alright," I said. "Put us through again."

The ship fired its blinking crystals, the laser traced a portal out of them, and the gate spawned in--somehow more static-y than before. The boundary lines of the portal seemed to vibrate violently, struggling to maintain a circle shape.

The ship pushed forward, the threshold clipped through the ship as we crossed over, and--

We rocked with an explosion.

An alarm wailed.

"Damage report! Is it an ambush?"

"No, sir," said a tech. "The damage is limited to... the Gate Core."

The gate tech followed, "Dimensional functionality has ceased. It appears that--Impossible--we've been thrown off course."

"Goddamnit," I groaned.

The ship crossed through, and the rest of the fleet flashed in beside us.

And here we found a metropolis. Space structures like motionless spinning tops dotting around us. Neon billboards--countless of them--blinked on and off to advertise some fancy product, some containing faces that appeared human, and all throughout, little wagon-sized spaceships zipped this way and that between the space buildings, some parking or docking into little spots, others flying off to the planet below.

And there, that other-version-Earth was a dim, dark thing. It still kept a faint blue glow from its oceans, but the green of the continents had turned to pale gray, a sickly grey. A type of planet-wide illness that would make me doubt anyone could live there, but seeing the sheer amount of life buzzing around here in space, I could see the population.

They just moved to space, apparently.

"Admiral," said the radar tech. "Dozens of small vessels are approaching fast."

I brought one up on screen. It was, sure enough, a little wagon-sized thing painted black and white, and on its top was a blue and red light flashing. There were indeed dozens of these vessels.

"Redrim," said the Gimp King. "Those appear to be police vessels."

"Admiral," said the comms officer. "Those boats are hailing us. They're sending us a message over open comms."

"Play it," I ordered.

A voice crackled into the room. A voice that sounded like a cool guy who loved his job and was just excited to be a part of whatever-the-fuck was happening. It was a voice that said, "Surrender now, space criminals. Yer goin' to jail! Space jail!"

"For fuck's sake."