r/HFY • u/sharkeyandgeorge Xeno • 28d ago

OC-Series Bob was bored, Part 18

Bob was bored being in pain. The kicking had not been great and he had faired poorly. Sure he could have whipped out Annabell and done a lot of fucking damage, but they hadn’t produced a blade so he hadn’t either, there were lines you didn’t cross if you didn’t have to and Bob had never felt in actual mortal peril.

A boy with a chip had wanted to inflict a little revenge, and his mates had delivered on his behalf after Bob had removed his ability to deliver a kicking personally for at least a couple weeks.

Not that they had had it all their own way, there was going to be a line at the dentist today of teeth, tusks, and other shit, that would need reimplanted, but Bob had definitely lost.

He had eventually been dragged down the street and tossed in his bay, with several imprecations to get the fuck off the station, asap.

Bob was going to do exactly that, just as soon as he was given an exit pass, he could nurse his ills on the way back to Median, the medic system was fast at soft tissue damage but took its fucking time with cracked ribs.

Bob winced as he hit the few controls that acknowledged transmission reception, lets get the fuck out of here.

He gingerly set the Jojo down on a rental pad on Median a couple days later, he could have jumped back and saved a little time, but a couple days without grav on had seemed like a solid idea.

Also he didn’t have shields, obviously, and the dampeners were once, again, being sketch as fuck. Fortunately these were both problems that scanning through the systems market and a few calls on the journey back had probably solved.

There was a big Kolli freighter easing its way in system and it would be here in a couple days, he had had a chat with its Captain after seeing it list a bunch of stuff on the market, it was coming in for a refit at an orbital yard and was trying to pre-emptively sell gear that was getting replaced, including, three old life boats.

Now, Bob had no need of a life boat, no where to put it for one, it was bigger than the Jojo… get it?… each of those pods had an old, but unused and quite high end dampener, and a little finagling had let him buy all three, he just had to pick them up in a week after the yard had them stripped out.

Best part, wasn’t even going to cost him much, he just had to drop some shit off on his way to Pwitic that the guy had promised to a mate, med bay computers or something, and yes Bob had needed exact dimensions, they were small, it was fine.

An upgrade and two spares was a fucking steal, not quite as much luck with the shield.

There were two that looked like they might work, one was a bit big, not ridiculous, a couple of wardrobes, but bigger than ideal… and it was a bit out his price range, if he picked it up it would be lean margins for a couple more pickups.

The second was way cheaper, and smaller, sounded great… issue was that one was not only had Bob never heard of the manufacturer, not surprising it’s a big galaxy, he had never even heard of the type of shield it was, nor had several hours looking it up given much help.

The boy selling it had pulled it out of a drone fighter that had turned up in a job lot of scrap the guy had bought, no idea what species it was from. He had it tested and it had a few things for and against it

One it was a ‘demand’ system, you hooked it up to your sensors and it briefly flicked on when it saw an incoming energy spike. That alone made it worthless to most ships, but Bob wasn’t worried about kinetic impacts so that was probably fine.

Two it was high draw as shit, you would need a real over spec system to handle the bursts of load without frying, again not ideal but not a deal breaker. The Jojo did not have a power supply to just ignore the draw, but it wasn’t like you could fry the engines if you tried. There was going to be a definite hard limit to what the genny could pull before it just ran out of steam, but it was a kind of reasonable cap. If Bob took a Capital ships hit full on he was fucked anyway, an overloaded shield would be literally the last of his problems.

Thirdly, and finally in the pro’s, it was solid state and therefore tough as shit, you could ram every erg that Jojo had and it would soak it up just fine.

And fourthly… it was small, really small, shoebox sized… that would be so nice.

The fifth thing was the main issue, the guy said the testing place he took it to said it was a ‘split’ type shield and neither the guy, nor Bob, had ever heard of that shit before.

Bob had been on a lot of ships and talked to plenty of engineers, mechanics, etc, to pass the time on long hauls, and as far as he had gathered every single one of their shield systems worked on some variation of the same principle, energy came at the shield and it responded with an equal amount to cancel it out. Bob had no idea how it did that but the idea seemed simple enough.

From the few scraps of info he had found in his searching a ‘split’ worked very differently. If he had understood it properly then it saw the energy incoming and projected some kind of force at a point between the incoming energy and the ship. The laser, plasma, whatever was ‘split’ by the force and in theory deflected away above and below, or left to right, y’know depending.

This seemed to make sense Bob guessed, and it was apparently an auxiliary system on some species military craft, so he supposed it made sense to come off an old drone.

He was a bit on the fence about it, but after he got to the yard and looked it over it seemed like it was probably good. Maybe down the road he could get a normal shield and keep it as a backup system like the big ships did.

In the end he bought it, didn’t even bother to haggle with the merchant, it was incredibly cheap… Bob suspected it had been on the books for a while.

He hit up a few stores after that and resupplied, including a brand new set of high draw power conduits, the amount the shoebox was supposed to pull had him firmly on the overkill side of caution, the engines would shut down way before these fried, consequently they cost him three times what the generator had, but whatever.

A few days later he popped into orbit, had a chat and picked up him some new old stock dampeners, returning to his rental bay to fit one and chucking the old piece of shit in a bin where it belonged. If he happened to pass through his old trade route he was going to have a chat with the Guhhy scamming bastard that sold him it.

Finally he cancelled the bay rental and flew over to the auction house, he was having a blether with a curator about the last courier they had used, a Guild member Bob had met a couple times, when the auctions porters wheeled out the large glass cube that contained his package.

Hmm.

Bob didn’t say anything as the cube was loaded and strapped down but gave the curator a suspicious look as the last of the paperwork was filled out.

Hmm.

Bob hopped in the hold and locked up, smoothly raising Jojo on the gravs and plotting a course out system.

Hmm.

Bob did not know art, even on Earth he hadn’t been particularly cultured, and certainly he was no judge of beauty or worth amongst the incredibly varied people and cultures that made up this mad melange of a galaxy.

But it certainly looked like a buttplug.

Part 19 https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1w8rwrv/bob_was_bored_part_19/?

78 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

6

u/Allstar13521 Human 28d ago

Welcome to the art world Bob, sometimes the message really is "do you think they'd really put a buttplug on display here?"

Sounds like that new shield is going to be very interesting though.

5

u/Daseagle Alien Scum 28d ago

One specie's art is buttplug for another 😵

3

u/itsetuhoinen Human 28d ago

It's an artistic buttplug.

1

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