Collection 1 (Patreon)

Tags: inspired inventor, battletech (setting), multiverse, harem, semi-self-indulgent
Comment what you think about this story.

-VB-

Collection

Chapter 1

-VB-

Edward Arlaoskas

Kendall IV, Duchy of Graham-Marik, Free Worlds League

3000 October

Starsector Spaceship Engineering I.

I was a heretic by the standards of … a lot of people. As a non-devout Baptist from a heavily devout Baptist family and community of Swiss descent on a planet filled with Eastern Orthodoxists of Georgian descent in a duchy filled to the brim with non-Caucasus majority ethnicities (mostly Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Estonian, and Romanian), I was pretty heretical by the standards of most of the locals, even if religious heresy was not something most Free Worlds League citizens spent more than a few hours in their entire life thinking about. Mostly as a meme. 

Hell, even my father - the local pastor - didn’t care too much about it, but that’s mostly because he knew that I wasn’t going to become ultra devout to God any time soon unless something drastically changed in my life. 

What I was more known for was heresies of more cultural leanings.

For example, I declared in my college class in a very bold and confrontational manner that Free Worlds League could not win the Succession Wars not because we were incapable of it but because our very profit-driven mindset prevented us from looking further than the next quarterly report. Sufficed to say, there were many angry classmates who lambasted me. I shouted at them of the condition that the average citizen lived here on Kendall, which shut up a few, but the fervent Marik supporters didn’t give a shit about logic or the wellbeing of others.

And well, things escalated, and I was officially expelled from the college but wasn’t charged with the murder of half a dozen classmates who attacked me first. It was kind of hard to lose against six reedy idiots when I was 190 centimeters of well-defined muscles.

Had I known that I would be getting this kind of superpower some twenty years into my third life, I might have relaxed and played around in this life. But maybe that was the reason? I’ve studied and looked for ways to become something more than just another citizen of the Free Worlds League.

That’s why I was in college: to become a politician.

But instead of being a politician, I got kicked out of my college after my admittedly overreactive killing spree, blacklisted from most political organizations, and, for the murders I’ve committed in throes of passion, made an outcast in my own town.

And in its place, I got Inspired Inventor. 

It felt like the devil was tempting me. 

Here was a superpower to supercede most other superpowers. Here was a power that would make me the most powerful person in this universe. Because I knew this universe well; what other universe out there, fictional or not, focused so heavily on walking robots as the primary means of warfare?

Only Battletech.

And in this setting where spaceships were relegated to being extinct, hidden, or used by foreign barbarians from beyond the center of human civilization, the first field of knowledge I gave myself was how to make spaceships from a semi-obscure indie spaceship rpg called Starsector. 

Which … had pretty similar circumstances to this universe. 

Persean Sector (Starsector) got cut off from rest of humanity and regressed technologically; Inner Sphere (Battletech) lost Star League era technology through hundreds of years of wars. Persean Sector had five major factions: Luddic Church, Persean League, Tri-Tachyon Corporation, the Hegemony, and the Independents; Inner Sphere had five major factions: Lyran Commonwealth, Draconis Combine, Federated Suns, Capellan Confederation, and the Free Worlds League. Life in the Persean Sector was shit overall; life in the Inner Sphere was … as not as bad as one in the Persean Sector. Sure, life was shit along the border worlds where everyone was fighting everyone they bordered and pirates came and fucked over relatively unguarded worlds, but the vast majority of people remained away from the frontlines and war in general for long periods of time in this universe. 

Huh. I guessed that was one major difference. 

The more important difference was spaceship vs. battlemech; Inner Sphere focused heavily on ground combat while Persean Sector was all about that space naval battles. 

And you know what? I had a chance here to bring fiction to life. To have spaceships and sail the stars.

But there was a problem.

I didn’t have money to build a spaceship. 

… Time to start making money, then.

-VB-

“You’re really leaving?” mom asked me at the dinner table.

“Yeah,” I hummed. “If I can’t find a way to get big here on Kendall, then I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“But must you-?” mom began to ask but dad poked her gently to get her to stop. Mom glared at him, but dad ignored her in favor of taking this chance to speak.

“I would like to believe that you truly do mean that, Edward,” he began and took a bite of the purple broccoli. HE chewed for a bit and swallowed. “But I wonder if there isn’t something else to it, too.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Maybe you are running awya from guilt.” I paused. “I know that you didn’t mean to kill them. The investigators and coroner basically spelled it out for the jury. It wasn’t your fault that the ground in front of you just happened to be weak enough that seven grown men falling on top of it led to a fall that killed them.”

I sighed. “No, I don’t feel guilty about that,” I countered. “At least not guilty toward them. Maybe toward their families for raising impulsive and violent children-.”

“Ed!” mom shrieked at my cold callousness. 

“- but they were grown men and women who chose to attack me because I chose to speak my mind about the current state of the League.”

“Deliberately provoking them isn’t your fault?” he asked pointedly. 

“Then they should have used words to rile me up. We were in a classroom, not a fighting pit.”

“True.”

The entire family ate as we all thought about the past and my decision in the now. 

“How do you intend to make ends meet out there? You don’t exactly have any skills that would be useful for making money.”

I cleared my throat.

“... Do you?”

“I may or may not know a thing or two about how to be a mechanic.”

This time Dad raised his eyebrow. “I’ll believe that when you fix my -.”

---

“- really fixed the car,” Samuel muttered as he sat in the driver’s seat of his - or rather his father’s - small disel truck. It even purred like he remembered from his childhood… but that shouldn’t be possible because it was missing a third of the original components that broke down over the years. He looked out of the open window at his son, who was rolling his shoulders around with grease smudges all over him.

He didn’t know that Ed could work with machines, never mind cars. He was never the kid who was into cars in the first place. 

In fact, he found more porn pages than textbook pages in his room.

… And speaking of which, he knew that if Ed could do this, then he truly could make ends meet once he left home.

But there was something he wanted to check before he did. 

He turned off the engine and walked over to where his son was with the rest of the family. This time, his other children had also come over, and they were marveling at the idea that Edward, the most indoor introvert they knew in town (until he went to college, apparently), could do outdoor stuff. Like fixing cars and welding metals. 

“Edward.” His son looked up with a smile on his face. Sam wondered how long that would remain the case. The rest of the Inner Sphere was not as calm or quiet as the decently guarded backwaters of the Free Worlds League. “... Do you really want to leave?”

“I do,” he replied with a firm and determined set of eyes. “Kendall will forever be home, but it is … an agricultural backwater. There is a limit to what I can become, and after making so many enemies here, I’m going to find my future elsewhere.” 

“And you know that the world beyond the gravity of Kendall will not be a kind place? That your morals will be put to the test if not warped beyond recognition?”

He worried that Edward will look back a decade from now and find a monster in the mirror, because the Succession Wars changed you, just like how it changed his dad. 

“I know.”

He nodded. “Okay. Just … stay alive out there, son. And come visit us if you make it big, okay?”

“I will.”

-VB-

As great as Starsector spaceship engineering was, it failed to provide the more intricate needs a true spaceship mechanic needed to fill, and thus I spent the last three of four days of my first ever dropship travel just spam leveling Mechanics. 

With the new level on Mechanic, I now had the following upgrades and acquisitions to my knowledge.

Starsector Spaceship Engineering II.

Mechanics III

Special Forces II. 

Material Engineering III.

The last knowledge field had been kind of a prerequisite once I actually tried to design Starsector ships, which apparently included modded ships. The cheapest and easiest of them to design for military use, the Fox-class Corvette, needed at least two different materials that didn’t exist here in the Inner Sphere. It took three levels of Material Engineering before I got a gist of how to make suboptimal alternatives of the required materials, which was actually needed to contain and use antimatter fuel.

Because antimatter fuel was what Starsector ships used for their FTL drive energy. 

(And I got Special Forces because, um, reasons. Couldn’t be caught prepared, you know?)

I yawned as I got out of my bed in zero-G, undoing the straps that had kept my legs and body tied to my cot, and then pushed off on an angle to leave the barrack I was in.

A week ago, I found myself in an interview with a dropship captain and doing a working demonstration what I could do. Having two levels on Starsector Spaceship Engineering was enough for me to get a job as a general dropship mechanic on a civilian trade dropship, The Fat Arnold.

Why was it named “Fat Arnold”? I have no idea and didn’t think to ask. What I did know about The Fat Arnold was that she was typical of the current Third Succession War era of the Inner Sphere: old, running on fumes and spare parts, and run by people who had as much rituals as they did actual knowledge of how to operate and fix dropships. There were more patches than actual professional drydock fixes.

And what did the owner of this ragtag dropship hauled?

Grain.

Yup.

Grain.

Apparently, my homeworld was a big name agriculture world that exported a lot of hardy cereal grain, the kind that was wonderful for a realm under constant assault. Where other grains might rot and need to be thrown out, Kendall grains could be stored for years longer than others, including rice.

The past four days have been just the travel from Kendall to the north pole of the Kendall star where a jumpship was waiting for The Fat Arnold and three other dropships. Travel to the jumpship was supposed to take four days, so we should be arriving soon, especially since the captain started deceleration yesterday. 

“What’s up, newbie.”

I looked up just as I floated out of my barrack and saw Miss Aliander, someone who’s been with this crew for years.

“Just woke up,” I replied with a yawn. “What’s my job today?”

“The air ventilation’s gone wonky again. Sucks to be you.”

I grimaced.

Air ventilation system was one of the grossier problems to work with because all of the gunk in the air eventually ends up there. Considering that the air here was zero-gravity, this meant everything ends up in the air ventilation system, which meant there were things in there that included but was not limited to water, toxic waste, solidified but fragile ash and smoke crystal-like shards, 100 day old semen, sweat, and more. You never knew what you were going to find until you dug through it.

And the problem with being in space of a setting where component scarcity was a thing was that you couldn’t space the filters and buy new filters at the destination. Dropship factories were far and few inbetween, and there were lines lasting for literal generations for even smaller components like air filters. This was, of course, if you weren’t planetary dukes, regional governors, and leaders of nations and factions. 

Fucking air filters.

I grumbled as I made my way toward engineering.

Then the hallways flared red and the crappy speakers roared to life.

“New jump! Pirate inbound! I repeat, pirate boarders are inbound! All crew members arm yourselves!” 

Miss Aliander and I looked at each other before shooting off toward the armory. 

And I made sure to put today’s charge into Close Quarter Melee, bringing it up to level 3. 

-VB-

Anand Tumanturu grimaced as he hefted his Hawk Eagle Pistol, a remnant of his service with the Marik Militia. He was the eleventh head of the Tumanturu Family and the eleventh captain of The Fat Arnold, a Danais-class cargo dropship.

There was no way he was going to give it up to the fucking pirates without a fight, and his family and crew were with him on this. 

The most important places that they needed to hold were the bridge and the third deck of the ship, which was the deck that led to critical areas of the ship like Engineering. If they lost the third deck, then they would lose the ship even if they managed to hold the bridge. 

And so, he was here on the third deck with the entirety of the permanent crew of The Fat Arnold. He didn’t know how or why the pirates managed to jump in with a fucking Achilles! How did pirates even have an Achilles?! 

… No matter. 

This was his family’s ship. Some fucking pirates weren’t going to take it from him! 

The radio crackled. 

“Fucking idiots, keep pushing! Why can’t you-?!”

That was … on a public channel. Did these pirates not have a concept of secure communications or something? 

“We can’t, boss! There’s a fucker in the loading bay!”

“Shoot a fucking rocket then!”

Anand’s eyes widened. 

Then the ship shook.

“Go check it out!”

“... OH SH-!”

Crackles of radio. Gunfire. Screams.

Anand looked up and saw everyone looking at him and the radio in his hand.

“What the fuck is happening down there…?” he muttered. 

While all of the permanent crew and his family was here in the third deck, all of the temp crew had been sent to the loading bay, which was where the pirates had opened it to space. There were less than ten people there to hold them back.

So why were pirates screaming into the radio?

“T-This is Aliander.”

Right, Aliander volunteered to fight along the temps. 

“Ali, what the fuck is happening down there?!” he demanded. He sounded scared but he didn’t care right now.

“Um, the mechanic did this. He, uh, just killed them all.”

“Who? The mechanic?”

“Edward.”

“That shitty mechanc I only hired because the last one left?” he asked.

“Boss, he just slaughtered two dozen pirates in zero-G. If he’s only a mechanic, then I will eat my liver. And he- he just jumped into the pirate dropship.” Then there was a shout and a scream. Then Anand felt his ship lurch. “The fucker just cut the cords connecting us!”

He looked around before he made the arguably evil decision. 

“Nirved, get the fuck back into the bridge and get us out of here and to the jumpship!” 

“Boss!” he heard Aliander shout. 

“He cut the cord, Ali,” he snapped into the radio. “The boy … the man knew what he was doing. Or do you think that pirates only have twenty something fighters? He’s giving us a way out. Move it and ge some people to seal the hole in the loading bay!”

-VB-

I watched The Fat Arnold fly away with full thruster flare, and felt a little betrayed.

I mean… I also expected it. 

I quickly learned that level 3 Special Forces was at a supernatural level of skill. How else would I have predicted a rocket attack and moved ahead to dodge and jump into their dropship? 

I also knew instinctively that the small civilian dropship wouldn’t last long if they didn’t get far enough before the pirate dropship captain and his crew got their act together and begin to just shoot it up. So I cut the cords that the pirates used to attach their ship to The Fat Arnold.

But it was about self-sacrifice. 

No, there was a healthy dose of greed. If they ran away, then they could not come back in a reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time was measured in days. Days was more than enough for me to gain supernatural levels of skill in repairing and modifying spaceships, which I already had.

And as an already supernatural fighter and killer (I didn’t know why I wasn’t feeling anything right now) who got a gist of what this fight might be like, I knew that I had a decent chance at taking out the rest of the pirate crew. 

Yeah.

This wasn’t about me saving people.

No, this was about me taking the entire dropship (and maybe even the pirate jumpship) all for myself. 

I licked my lips underneath the helmet and used the “sleeve” of the jumpsuit to wipe the blood off of my hermatically sealed helmet’s visor. Then with a hiss of air-propelled jetpack built into the spacesuit, I wandered deeper into the dropship. 

Oh yeah… This was a payday I never expected but one I would gladly -.

---

“URGH UGH OOO-!”

Had it been feminine and less sick in sound, then it might have been enjoyable to the average man or woman.

Instead, the sound came from me, carried a sickly deep baritone, and was followed quickly by the sound of barf wetly splattering all over the insides of a plastic bag that I, even in my sickness, quickly tied up so as to not allow its content to spill out. 

It was the fourth of such bags.

Why were there four such bags? 

Because I was a non-combatant who had the skills and instincts of a combatant thanks to Inspired Inventor but neither the mindset nor the mentality of a skilled killer.

Yeah, I held my first kill heavings back because I was half blinded by greed and the other half had been kept in check by the killer instincts of Special Forces III. Normally, such a thing would not be possible because biology but Special Forces III was at a supernatural level already and overpowered the biological need to throw up after a kill.

I didn’t know that I was one of those people who would throw up but I did, because, let’s be honest, I … killed a lot of people.

There were forty something people aboard here. 

I killed all of them.

If there were people who didn’t deserve mercy, then it was pirates.

Why did I think this?

Kendall was equidistant to both the Circinus Federation and Marian Hegemony, the two largest pirate-nations. We may not have gotten raided because we were a agriculture world with nothing worthwhile for them to steal (what pirate steals grain? Probably a pirate clown), there were plenty of refugees and news that reached us about the shit they pulled. On a personal level, my mom came from Sierra, the world closest to the Circinus Federation, and she fled to Kendall because her entire family got killed or kidnapped. 

Yeah, this was kind of personal for me. 

… Anyways, with the last of my vomit contained, I looked around and took an inventory of what I had. 

Unlike The Fat Arnold, the pirates didn’t make a hole in their own Achilles-class dropship and merely opened one of its bays to flood out of it to the explosive-blown hole. In that, I was blessed to not need to fix it. What did need fixing were the multiple doors that would have served as serviceable airlocks. These doors were blown in by yours truly with explosive once held by pirates I killed. 

It was almost like a game. I killed pirates, found explosives, and blew a hole somewhere in the ship to get to the next room with pirates. Rinse and repeat until all pirates were dead. I never would have made it past the first group of pirates, either, if I hadn’t been given a suitably padded spacesuit and automatic rifle. 

The ship also had a shit ton of weapons that the pirates were using, and more importantly, there were 

I kicked off the dead pirate in the captain’s chair and sat down on it. 

‘If they had blown up their own loading bay, then I would be stuck inside my spacesuit with all of the mess that comes with vomiting,’ I thought with a shudder. 

Then I looked around and sighed.

There was so much to clean now. At least it was my dropship to clean.

And modify.

(Yeah, I got overenthusiastic about getting that pirate jumpship. There was no way that was going to happen.)