Schrottplatz, near Jupiter
The Hunterminator:
As yet another satisfied customer paid me, I kept hearing the amused chuckles coming from all over the Spaceport. I glowered at the various onlookers and marched back to the Schrottplatz. As I did though, I couldn't help glancing at my ship, and I had to admit that I understood their amusement, it was a sorry excuse for a ship, no matter how much Handwavium you coated it with.
The worst is that I never really had a choice about it. One day, a group of my drones had gotten tired of me telling them that we didn't have any room to install every single device they wanted to build. So they flew away with my car one evening while I was not looking, and when I saw it next, the front half proudly jutted out the front of a formerly shipwrecked freighter.
At least, I had room for a real bed now. I was also one of the few Fen that could be hired for large deliveries and the most competitive when it came to serious space construction jobs. It was also great for attracting passenger jobs, provided they could live with the fact that they would be travelling onboard a rusty freighter/car hybrid named scrap yard in German.
I had barely walked through the hatch that one of AllCaps' descendents spoke to me from the other end of the hold, easily audible over the noise of 5 drones welding what looked like a crane on the inside of the hull, "Boss, we just received an invitation to a convention, though well have to leave right now to make it in time."
I mentally calculated the supplies we would need for the travel and a quick check revealed that yes, we had everything we needed to leave immediately. I nodded and replied, "Ok, tell everyone to be ready for takeoff as soon as possible."
As I walked to the cockpit, I heard the AllCapist yelling the wake up call to the drone in charge of engineering, "Yo Gramps, wake up the engine. Boss says were leaving now."
The call echoed across most of the ship, and the various other AllCapist drones quickly became audible all over the ship, waking everyone up with their rather loud wake up calls. I looked around the cockpit, checking that everything was in order, and then steered towards my next destination.
"Yo boss! We're almost there."
I looked up and almost laughed in relief. No matter how much one likes to laugh, reading bad jokes and horrible puns to an engine gets boring fast. This is especially true if you're coming from the edge of a system and all the way to Phobos, which, because the Schrottplatz is pretty much always dreadfully slow, takes a lot of time.
I gave the great big book of jokes and puns to Gramps and he continued reading from it, bursts of increased speed indicating when the engine was 'laughing'. I turned around and ran out and towards the cockpit praying that none of the drones had taken the initiative of hailing Phobos station yet. My prayers were for naught when I arrived and saw one of Penny's colleagues trying to sell someone "prime farming land on Pluto" over the communicator.
With a low growl, I pushed the drone back and whispered, "Stop that. I don't need to get another fine for clogging up the comm. channels."
I turned back to the over glorified handwaved radio we called a communicator, "Sorry about that." and cut the communication.
I then called Phobos station to notify them of our arrival and sat back for the wait.
Finally, after a few hours, we flew to our designated dock. We had barely landed that several drones ran out of the ship and started setting up kiosks. Of note were the Capitalistic Drones and their "Alcohol, snacks, and anything your heart might desire" stand with a pile of odds and ends behind it. There was also our 'official' stand, that is, the one that advertised our services.
A large part was dedicated to our expertise at construction of replicas, with pictures of our two most notable projects, the federation starbase replica in orbit of Pluto, and our 1/100 replica of an Imperial Star Destroyer. The stand was manned by a varied assortment of drones, including the 'trekkie' group and the stormtrooper drones.
Once I had conducted a quick review of that stand, I took a look around, and noticed a genuine pitchfork and torches mob. I was starting to wonder where the mob had found such antique equipment when I noticed a duo of my drones selling them to onlookers. I was in the process of stomping over to stop them when the crowd suddenly ran away from a psychotic nut job with a gun instead of a hand.
