Read The Pattern Ship (The Pattern Universe) for Free Online Page B

deal with it. Hopefully when this pounding headache had gone.
    He viewed all the equipment he had purloined, setting to work building his computer network. Within the space of a couple of hours he had a set-up that would satisfy a professional hacker. Not that he was intending to do much, just get himself out of the murky back-streets and back into mainstream society.
    Zeke began to formulate a plan of attack with the authorities. He fully intended to be in a job within a month. For that he needed an ID and an address. Tomorrow he would begin working on it in earnest.
    Meanwhile, exhausted from his gruelling ordeal as well as the stress and unusual exercise, he pulled out his sleeping bag that he religiously rolled up every morning. Moving the reclaimed sofas around until he had his favoured combination he turned off the small LED lamp and slept.
    A short while after he fell into a deep sleep, the light curtain that had attacked him earlier reappeared at the foot of his bed.
    This time, however, it was a dull green and very faint, as if set to a lower power threshold.
    It proceeded up his body unnoticed by Zeke. As it reached his head the power dropped further until it was just a faint glimmer. As it scanned its way across his skull for the second time that night Zeke didn’t stir. The curtain of light cut out when it reached the top of his skull finally leaving Zeke in peace.

    - 7 -
    The A.I. pulled up a review of its progress. It had mined and collected all components in the quantities required to complete fabrication. It had transmuted all raw materials into the necessary exotic alloys, formed all the necessary parts and sections; nano-bots had welded everything together at molecular level, meaning that effectively the ships’ construction was now complete. It now only needed to D-Jump into space to charge the power cells.
    It also needed the A.I. construct to manage the ship’s systems by obtaining materials from the human source for which it had not yet received approval from its Maker. So falling back on its permitted actions, it slaved the ship’s systems to its own and from there carried out all the necessary pre-flight checks before D-Jumping the ship and itself to the previous location in space located at the apex of the northern hemisphere.
    Here, out of the way of all the satellites and surface radar, it carried out its final integrity checks.
    The Pod A.I. set about checking seals, space locks, instrumentation, life support systems, applicators, and weapons systems, in amongst other peripheral tasks. The fuel intakes were activated to extract and compress exotic matter from normal space for the jump actuator. Solar cells generated the necessary power for the engines to be put on-line allowing further systems testing to take place.
    The A.I. worked continuously adding all the ancillary equipment using its wide array of nanobots while Zirkos kept in the background finalising details of a personal project using the D-field the Pod had worked out.
    Within several planet days the T-Ship was completed and ready for phase two.
    The Pod A.I. pulled up its working list of more exotic additions that needed to be completed and once sufficient power was available it hyper-jumped the new design T-Ship into the asteroid belt to the point it had arrived in the system many millennia ago, and selected a suitable rock.
    The A.I. set about converting rare raw materials on the asteroids surface. It manufactured everything by molecular integration to specifications outlined in the stored patterns. When finished the ship glistened externally with a new composite veneer and internally the infrastructure built itself with the new nanobots it had manufactured from the raw materials found there.
    This new hull was now the latest in the line of T-Ships and more than twice as advanced as the previous build. In some ways it was a completely new design, but the Maker insisted on retaining the old shape as it would provide for lower