Escape

Fleeing the gate system proved to be a wise idea as well as absorbing all of the information out of that alien ship I was a smart move it improved my overall tech base by 40% and gave me a new defensive technology. Yeah I was now the proud owner of a hard light shield system the version I could build was a panel with reflectors on each end that captured and reinforced the light beam from the other side. I started to tinker around a bit with the technology and I was pretty engrossed with my tinkering until a signal reached my ship and so I checked it out and oh boy was I glad I'd installed hard-light shields because behind me were a stream of missiles and the signal that my ship had received was their activation sequence.

I spun up the shields which would take seconds that I might not have and then I activated the minimalist point defenses that I'd installed "just in case" oh today they were definitely needed as they lanced out striking repeatedly at the incoming missiles. Armor boiled off into space just before the first missile died just 200km from my ship and then the next and the next and so on closer and closer they came until the most recent exploded just a kilometer off the rear of the ship. I exited through into the bow escape compartment which amounted to a armored closet with hatches at both ends and I sealed the hatch behind me just before a tremor ran through my ship followed soon after by another and another when I thought that there couldn't be any more coming the entire ship heaved like a bucking bronco.

After ten minutes of total silence and no new impacts I exited my escape compartment and explored my ship though there really wasn't a lot left the rear half had taken at least one missile directly and had been blasted through by a powerful anti ship missile the front end of the ship was in rough shape but might be fixable if I could get enough materials though the front or the ship didn't have much of anything important in it so I decided to abandon ship obviously they knew it was here and I had no intention in getting shut down and recycled so I pointed all of my plasma drives behind me and accelerated on a 30 degree divergent course from where my ship was headed and towards a distant star and went into hibernation mode.

I awoke from hibernation mode and found myself going to pass behind my target system so I adjusted course and checked the elapsed time and found I had hibernated for 300 years. After realizing I'd been asleep for 300 years I did some calculations and realized that I had missed my target star 148 years ago and somehow managed to arrive at another star close enough for my systems to wake up now that was lucky enough though I also found a rather large dent in my armored shell which must have been the impact that knocked me off course. I repaired what damage I could and found that my plasma drives were nearly at the end of their lives at 10% and one at 9% and several of my parts were down to their back up systems due to radiation damage and that obvious impact though once the armor plate was fixed I figured that I'd fix the remaining issues once in system they were important but would leave me with my internals exposed while approaching a planetary system.

As I approached the star system I was thinking about a comprehensive system upgrade and came to the decision to simply build a new me it would take significantly less time and then I could use my current shell as a worker. I programmed a simple operating system for my soon to be coopted minion and placed it in a secure file for the time being. I arrived in a asteroid belt thick with large metal rich asteroids which I quickly put into use I constructed 15 new me's and boarded my new body I had shifted from the tentacle covered ball to a egg shaped body and kept the tentacle based plasma drives but added a significantly larger plasma drive to what I'd refer to as my bottom and now I could travel at three times my original speed. After building my small army I gave them their instructions and began working on yet another starship this time it was simply a Death Star orb minus the trench and super weapon. I experimented with my various bits of technology and came up with a unique drive system utilizing hard light and a plasma drive and some other bits and pieces that were normally not used in the way I was using them and it was my best version yet. My new drive system I called the gazelle 1 or the HLPD for short boasted a 80% increase in efficiency over my previous plasma drive versions making it the best yet though it had a large minimum size so installing it into myself was out of the question however for my starship it would mean that I would have the fastest ship at least compared to humans 300 years ago.

Construction of my planetoid ship took a couple years simply because I had to fetch a lot of resources and redesign the power sources that I was using due to the fact that my original reactor was great but obviously lacking in terms of longevity as my first upgrade body was simply starting to fail the reactor inside was simply dying so I sent number one from a trip because once the reactor failed it would explode violently. We finished the planetoid ship and then seeing as we had a metric ass load of stone granite and other less useful materials I ordered the ship coated in rock and left out the point defenses and drive systems so that they would remain functional and then I installed the other shield system that I had found it was a variation on hard light based panel shields but it functioned only on spheres and didn't require end caps that reflected the light but a system that ended up being a gravity generator which brought up all kinds of new ideas.