Two days later, Nick was getting brain fried from his lessons in ship handling. He took a break from his active lessons, got himself a drink, then reviewed what he had learned about the Kalash-Quovo. There was a lot to go over.

The alien cruiser ran on technology that Nick didn't understand and that didn't really fit in with the science fiction he had watched and read. A lot of the ship was a bunch of black boxes, and never mind the internal workings, he was having plenty of trouble just knowing what the black boxes were supposed to do.

Nick had expected there to be a few big main parts to the ship, like: regular engines, faster-than-light engines, reactor, main computer, life support, fuel tanks, and so on. The reality was a lot more confusing. Instead of one main power system, for example, there were hundreds of baby reactors scattered all over the ship. They were networked together in some weird way, and it seemed that the pattern changed constantly.

Things connected to each other and disconnected in sequences that looked completely random to him, but he had to learn to interpret it and help it along at times. It was as if the ship were constantly rebuilding itself according to the needs of the moment. Problems happened when the subsystems on board started trying to do contradictory things, like competing for power supply. As a member of the crew, his job was to disentangle those snarls.

With Petra running things, the situation was kind of odd. It would be easy for Petra to control and coordinate everything aboard at once, except that she physically couldn't. The ship systems would not allow a single central authority to run everything, or even an entire subsystem. Petra knew exactly what she wanted done, though.

The end result was like playing a game of "Simon says" but with lights and beeps. He had to repeat patterns that Petra would flash over the controls. "Do this, then this, then this, then that..." and so forth. It was mindless enough that Nick could do it easily. That made him wonder why a person was needed at all. They told him that it wouldn't work to have a bot do it, but he wasn't able to understand why.

He felt like a caveman seeing a car, and getting lost as the owner tried to explain what the alternator did. It probably was a pretty good analogy, in fact. For all of that, he was in much better shape than the fuakalas.

It wasn't that they didn't know how to press a button—of course they did, they had technology at least as good as Earth about a century back. It was more that they didn't recognize when something was a button. There were tasks that were instinctive for Nick after growing up playing with computers, but which were completely outside the experiences and mental frameworks of the fuakalas.

Usually, they could do something, but they either didn't recognize it as even being a possibility, or couldn't fathom why anyone would ever want to do it. Unsurprisingly, the younger fuakalas had much less trouble than their elders learning things that were literally alien concepts. More than once, Nick found himself getting taught by a fuakala who understood some of the weirder bits better than he did.

At any rate, he didn't let himself complain about the workload, not with his advantage.

A diagram of the ship wasn't particularly helpful. A flow chart was much more useful, to figure out what they were trying to do. For understanding what the ship could do, though, Nick and Petra fell back on stat sheets for one attempt.

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Goldaskian Light Cruiser Kalash-Quovo

Speed: 5 (7.5 light years/hour)

Maneuverability: 4

Ship-to-Ship Weaponry: 6 (20 guns)

Ship-to-Surface Weaponry: 4 (299 bombs)

Armor: 6

Crew Capacity: 5 (312 humanoids)

Hit Points: 820

Stamina: 611/960

Mana: 110/110

Nick ran out of steam partway through figuring out the English words to replace all the gaming terms. Unfortunately the numbers were pretty meaningless without a scale. He kept asking Petra about it but couldn't seem to hit on the right phrasing of his question. Plus, he was missing information Petra needed—he had no clue how much energy was in a megaton, for example.

The stats weren't on a one-to-ten scale, he found out that much. There didn't seem to be a maximum for the scale, and when he tried to ask the maximum in the galaxy, Petra just said, "unknown." When he asked the maximum Petra had ever seen, she gave the stats for the Kalash-Quovo. When he asked for the maximum stats of weapons in Petra's library of blueprints, she said, "twenty-two."

He asked how long it would take her to build one of those weapons, and the answer came back in decades—and that was assuming that Petra had plenty of resources and all of Petra's printing time went to constructing the weapon. Nick shook his head. What's the point of a weapon that takes a large part of a century to make?

Finally, Nick asked one of the ship engineers about the scale, which he probably should have done first.

The Goldaskian scratched his head and asked a few questions, then gave him a guess at a partial explanation. "Most ships do not fight. They probably have Weaponry 0 and Armor 1. Some fraction of ships do have weapons, and that would be Weaponry 1.

"Then, some fraction of those ships have better weapons and are Weaponry 2. A fraction of those are Weaponry 3, and so on. We are a warship, and have Weaponry 4, you say. Our larger ships might have Weaponry 5 or 6, I guess."

"I thought there weren't a lot of wars between planets because they are so far apart, the doctor said."

"There are some wars. The Goldaskian Empire has eight worlds. How did we get them, do you think?"

"Mmm." Nick nodded. "Thanks. I wonder what is the point of weapons that take many years for Petra to build."

The engineer leaned forward. "What do those do? Do they destroy stars?" Then he lifted his head. "Wait. I am thinking." Nick waited, while the Goldaskian's eyes moved around just like a human's would if he were thinking hard. Nick's mind wandered a bit.

Humans and Goldaskians have a lot in common. More than humans and fuakalas do. I wonder if the reason they look like demons is because they visited Earth in the past and scared the bejeezus out of humans who saw them? And then people described Goldaskians when they wanted to make up a big scary monster?

I wonder if one of their planets is named "Hell"?

"I have a guess," the engineer announced. Nick refocused on the man and nodded for him to go on. "You probably asked Petra how long it would take her to make things herself."

"Yeah?" Nick didn't see the point.

"You don't use a ship weapon to kill a gozak."

"What's a gozak?"

The engineer held two fingers close together. "Small, bad, weak animal that flies."

"A mosquito. A bug," Nick interpreted.

"Actually, Nick—" Petra began.

"Later, Petra. I got the gist."

"Yes, Nick."

Nick frowned at the engineer. "So, why have Petra know how to make all these things if someone else is going to build stuff?"

The engineer tugged on one of its horns. Nick had seen that before, and suspected that meant that a Goldaskian was running out of patience.

"You do not use a Petra to make millions of iron beams! You use Petra to make the small, important pieces!"

"Oh!"

"Yes! You are not alone on one planet now, Nick! Races who have Petras have many other ways to make most things."

"Okay, I get it. Thank you."

"You're welcome. I need to go to work now."

"Of course. Thank you for your time."

The engineer signed off and Nick drummed his fingers on the table for a minute. Guess I was a dumbass again. Nick looked again at the stats for the ship, and tried to think.

So...if we could buy the simple parts and have Petra make the tricky bits...could we upgrade the ship?

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