“Careful, Michelle… keep your aim steady…”
“I know Raines, chill for a minute would you? This isn’t the first time I’ve had to do some fancy docking-”
The cockpit of the Pandora shook violently, cutting Michelle off. Red warning lights started to blare before the pilot cut them off with a swipe at the controls.
“I’m pretty sure using gravity tethers to dock voids the warranty.” Raines pointed out.
“You think any part of this rust bucket still has a warranty?” Michelle leaned back in her seat, “If you wanna connect the umbilical to the airlock of a ship in a decaying orbit, be my guest, but I like not burning alive. Anyway, get yourself suited. We’re going aboard, assuming the airlock decides to work today.”
It was the year 107 Post Founding, after the defeat of the Eldean Empire and subsequent founding of the galactic union, and the Pandora and it’s diminutive crew were in the still-thriving trade of… members would call it “technological rediscovery and recovery”, and anyone else would call it “salvaging”. After the Empire had been ripped apart by rebellion, all it’s remaining ships, robots, and drones had vanished into space as the last officers made a point to delete all the recall commands and send them into the most inconvenient places they could so that their conquerors couldn’t use them.
The E.S. Laatiko was one such ship, only recently discovered; for over a century the people of the pre-spaceflight world below had never known it was up there, seeing it as another asteroid in their primitive telescopes. And it was good they weren’t very advanced, because if they had been they’d see it was in an unstable orbit and due to crash in another month if it wasn’t stopped.
Michelle and Raines drifted to the airlock of the ship, and tried the usual emergency open button. Of course, being that the ship had been shut down for over a hundred years, this didn’t actually have all that much effect. Raine plugged his suit’s cable into a socket on the control and tapped away at his wrist computer. “Give me a minute.”
“Take your time, take your time, not like we’ve got any pressing concerns.” Michelle said with a roll of her eyes.
“Either I do this right and force it open, or I do this wrong and force it open along with the backup defense systems. Which do you want?” Raines asked irritably.
“I mean, would the backup systems even run without power?”
“If this was any other ship I’d say no,” Raines said as the airlock slid open, “But you know the Empire was as paranoid as my grandfather and liked to build stuff to last.”
The pair floated into the dark ship, helmet lights flickering on and giving the airlock a ghostly green illumination. It cycled and soon they were stepping into the ship proper. A warning went off on Michelle’s display. “No air, of course. Probably ran out ages ago.”
“There’ll be some reserves. We can access them once we restore power to the ship.” Raines said, trying to walk forward and not actually moving very much on account of the lack of gravity. “Got the blueprints for this class?”
“Shouldn’t be too far for the bridge. It’s a big ship, but most of the bulk is cargo space.” Michelle smirked at Raines’ minor failure - the man was a planetary, rather than ship-born, and was used to having some gravity keeping his feet pointed down on a ship. “There’s arrows for ‘down’ if you need them.”
Raines righted himself. “I didn’t need your help.” He said as he started to float down the dark hall.
“Sure you didn’t.”
Michelle had seen her fair share of salvage, but something was… different, about this ship. Most wrecks that the pair had had to salvage were, well, actually wrecked. There had been a pirate attack or a counter-raid or maybe there had been a border-skirmish between a few of the independents, but usually there was a definite sign of what had caused the ship to fail. Here, with the ship having been abandoned intentionally, it looked like a crewman might turn the corner at any second; there was still the odd poster in the old Eldean language where someone had decided to post a notice, a little bit of unidentifiable liquid floated through the small officer’s mess, and overall, the ship didn’t look like it had been abandoned a hundred years prior.
The bridge in particular looked like it could have still been working minutes ago. The pair floated in, greeted by a mass of floating datapads and printouts, probably consisting of the officers’ last orders.
“This ship gives me the creeps.” Michelle said, shivering a bit in her suit.
“Getting the gravity and the lights on should help.” Raines said, pushing aside a datapad. “Check if any of the pads still work, might have some information that’s worth something. A manifest or something.”
“Right, right…” Michelle started poking around, while Raines jacked into the computer systems. The idea was pretty much to get the power on so that they could put the ship into a stable orbit, and then hitch their own ship to it and tug it back to civilization. The systems were old and complicated, but in the time since the war the old codes had become just short of common knowledge and were easily bypassed. Shortly after he’d begun, he had the ship humming to life as auxillary power was restored, followed by the roar of the air cyclers trying to pump the ship back to breathable levels. The artificial gravity came on as well, and Michelle landed on her feet while Raines landed on his ass.
“Not a single word from you.” The man said as he got up and dusted himself off.
Michelle was eager to comply, at least if one doesn’t count being bent double laughing as coherent words. She eventually managed to recover some, enough to talk. “Hehehe… r-right, I’m, ha, sorry… none of the datapads have any power left, so no manifest. But I mean, it’s a cargo ship in the ass end of nowhere, it’s got to have something right? It had to have been in transit or something.”
“Hopefully. Worst case scenario we can still sell an old military cargo ship. That should make us a decent return on investment even if it’s empty.”
“Yeah, but that’s no fun. It’s only fun if there’s something cool on it.”
“Then you must have had a very boring last few years of work.”
“That’s right, and working with someone as uptight as you hasn’t helped in the slightest.”
Raines sighed. Michelle was good to work with - nobody quite had her deft touch with a ship or with the gravity tethers, and she had a knack for finding the interesting stuff that would raise the value of a find. But that didn’t mean her constant unprofessionalism didn’t get on his nerves at times. “Whatever. Good luck finding something. You go check out the holds and take inventory, while I work on getting the main generators online. Once we get this thing out of orbit, we can run it over with the scanners.”
Michelle threw up a mock salute. “Aye aye, cap’n!” she said with a smirk, before dashing off down the corridor towards the holds.
As power returned to the ship, the cargo hold also regained power. Artificial gravity returned, although with significantly less collateral damage as most objects were already strapped down for transport. The lights flickered on, casting pale light over dozens of shipping containers laden with who knew what kind of supplies. Unbeknownst to the two scavengers, the doors to one of the shipping containers slowly swung open.
>>...Rebooting… rebooting...
>>...Backup power online… seven hour duration...
>>Processing… processing…
>>107 Galactic Standard Years, 4 months, and 23 hours have passed since shutdown.
>>Scanning… scanning… unidentified vessel detected...
>>Scanning… scanning… no Eldean Empire signals detected…
>>Scanning… scanning… intruders on board.
>>Conclusion: Eldean Empire in hiding.
>>Activate contingency E-2,105B
>>Activate Empire Restoration Protocol
>>First target designated intruder alpha. Second target designated intruder beta.
>>Commencing operation.
Michelle was in a much better mood as she strolled down to the cargo hold. With the lights on the place wasn’t nearly as spooky, and without the lack of gravity leaving things floating around it didn’t have the same ghostly feel to it. And, she reflected as she took off her helmet, more than anything what helped dispel the fear of the place was the thrum of the air recyclers working and the background buzz of the power cables behind the walls. Without power and life support the ship had felt dead. Now it just felt lived in, and it was far easier to deal with the sensation that you’re breaking into someone’s house while they’re on vacation than it was to deal with the sensation you were raiding a tomb.
As she reached the expansive cargo hold, she whistled low - there were crates upon crates upon crates of… stuff, which she admittedly didn’t know what stuff it was but there was a lot of it. “Yo, Raines,” she called over her suit’s communicator, “From the looks of things, they were almost fully loaded. The cargo hold is so stacked there’s barely room to walk around.”
“Sounds good.” the reply crackled over the comms, “Take a look around, see if you can’t find a manifest or bill of lading, something to tell us what’s in these things.”
“Got it, got it…” Michelle said, looking over the containers. Of course, most of them didn’t have much marking; the crew would have had manifests on their datapads and the ship’s systems. But well, when it came to these sorts of ships there were always backup systems, and nothing could survive a power failure like a physical printout. There was an office overlooking the hold, and within (after clearing through some debris from the abrupt transition to artificial gravity) Michelle found a loose pile of papers. The top one had the label “SHIPPING MANIFEST” on it, and the rest of the sheets were information. “Bingo. Raines, got a manifest here.”
“Excellent. Contents?”
“A few crates of raw materials, that doesn’t tell us much but oughta sell for some. Some of their latest defense turrets, nice for the parts if a bit outdated… surveying and construction equipment, nice, nice… oh heck yeah, some power cores, that’ll sell… and a bunch of designations I don’t recognize from the salvage list, might be something interesting. Let’s see…” Michelle kept reading, and there were a lot of varied goods on the ship. But overall, they started to lead to a purpose…
“I think this might have been part of their Ark Project,” Raines said after a while.
“What’s that? Sounds valuable.” Michelle commented as she put the list down.
“When they started losing ground, they had some contingencies in place. One of them was the Ark Project. In essence, they set out a bunch of colony ships with a skeleton crew to then-unknown stars, planning to have them build the empire anew and eventually return to retake their ancestral lands. Fortunately for us, some wires crossed in their high command at the end, and the kill switch went out to these ships too.”
“Thanks for the history lesson, professor Raines…” Michelle muttered, poking at a console as auxiliary power finally made it to the office. She was about to start prodding at the files (an apocalyptic log would be good for a few bucks from a news organization back home), when something on her wrist pad beeped. “Hey, Raines, something’s off here. My wrist pad says there’s a weird signal in the hold.”
“That can’t be right…” There was a brief pause, before Raines picked back up, “Odd. Mine is too. See if you can find it, if it’s one of the fuel cells leaking we’re out of here immediately.”
Michelle stretched and walked out of the office. “I wonder if it’s like, a bank of cryopods or something, that’d be the find of the decade.”
“I hope it’s something so easy to deal with.”
>>Intruder Alpha in cargo bay
>>Analyzing…
>>Identified: Human female.
>>Identified: Ideal candidate.
>>Analysis of goal: Searching for this unit
>>Plan of reaction: Allow to find this unit.
>>Power: Six hours remaining. Low Power Mode enabled.
Even with the lights on, the space between containers was dark. They were stacked high and had long shadows; if they weren’t magnetically locked together Michelle might have worried about one falling over onto her. Admittedly, she still worried about that - logic was rarely an adequate counter to instinctive fear.
There were a lot of containers, but the setup was well organized and she had a vague idea of where she was going to find the signal. It was a nearly straight line shot from the office to the source, with only a few turns. Soon Michelle managed to get so near the signal she had to turn off the rapidly-beeping detector.
It was a crate, it turned out. Not a particularly large one, but covered in warning signs. Standard stuff for something like a power core, or anything at all that’s slightly flammable. The crate wasn’t in the slightest strange.
The strange thing was that it was open.
The stranger thing was that it was empty.
“What in the heck…?” Michelle muttered, before calling in. “Hey, Raines? I found where the signal was coming from. Big crate, danger warnings, you know how it works. Problem though. Thing’s open, and it’s empty.”
“What do you mean empty?”
“I mean that there’s nothing in it.” Michelle said. “It is completely empty and there isn’t a sign of where whatever it was went.” She had a gut instinct here, and it wasn’t a positive feeling. “I don’t think we’re alone here.”
“Come bak- f here im- n’t know wh- e with us bu- ind out-” the comms crackled, and died, without a coherent message coming through.
“Raines? Raines, come in…” Michelle said. She didn’t wait for a reply, already turning on her heel and sprinting back the way she came - she knew how this whole thing worked, if she stood there waiting for a reply she’d get grabbed or something-
The metal beam definitely hadn’t been there when she’d first come through, but she turned the corner into a clothesline at full tilt. The world went white, and she didn’t even feel the pain for a moment; one second, she was at a dead sprint, and the next, she was on the floor seeing so many stars that a little part of her brain thought she’d been spaced.
She felt something grab her, and gasped (which at least told her she wasn’t in space) as the pain hit. That would definitely be a bruise at the least, and possibly a mild concussion - but she had other priorities as she was dragged back. She was turned around and made to look at… something...
>>Intruder Alpha apprehended...
>>Opening hatch...
>>Initiate Power Recovery Operation...
The mechanical beast seemed to stare at the dazed girl in it’s grasp, analyzing her. Michelle was in too much pain to struggle. The machine was vaguely humanoid - two legs, two arms, a bulky core and a head that served as the center of the sensory network. It was the usual Eldean build style, rounded and smooth in a way that almost tried to make it look less threatening than it was.
Then, the “eye” flashed red, and the chassis just… opened up, revealing the robot to be hollow. Michelle started to try and resist as it dragged her inside, but it didn’t even seem to notice, as it shoved her inside of itself. Metal clamps came down over her, locking her spread-eagle within before it slammed itself shut.
For a few moments, it was pitch black. But then, silver lights flashed to active. What was this thing, some kind of mecha? She’d hardly seen any that grabbed pilots at random before.
As Michelle started to recover her senses, though, the mech did something. It settled into place with a mechanical clunk-clunk-clunk noise, and then there was a background buzz.
“EMERGENCY POWER AT 50%” a synthetic voice said, “RAPID ENERGY RESTORATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE.”
Michelle didn’t have time to think about what it was saying as the clamps abruptly tightened, and something attached itself to her at each point where she was restrained. Before she even could gasp in surprise, she felt… strange. It felt like something was tugging at her whole body at once…
Something started to… secrete, from the sides of the robot. In the dim light she could see little holes in the chamber she was held in. She watched them with curiosity and then terror as a thick, silvery liquid started to drip out of them, picking up speed into a stream and then a proper flow. A half dozen fluid pipes were filling up the chamber with their steel-colored payload. Michelle felt it pool at the bottom, near her feet, and the level of it rise and rise.
The metallic liquid felt as if it clung to her legs as it pooled higher and higher, creeping up her hips and then her gut. Wherever it covered, she stopped being able to move - the clamps had kept her still before, but now she was unable to move a single muscle to struggle (not that she had a mind to do so anymore). It coated her chest and her arms, and soon it was creeping up her neck. She couldn’t even take a deep breath as it covered her mouth, nose, and soon after the rest of her face. The chamber she was in was completely filled with the liquid, and she dispassionately noticed that her lungs were starting to feel a little uncomfortable.
And then, faster even than it had arrived, the liquid rapidly drained from the chamber. But the reason it was faster, not that Michelle could see it in the pitch black she found herself in, was that a significant amount of it was now coating her body head to toe as a solid shell.
The strange sucking feeling returned, her whole body tingling. There was the strange pulling feeling again, starting at her chest. It was strange; the outside felt like it was tightening, but the inside felt like it was being… pulled, tugged out. It wasn’t just her lungs burning, her whole chest was. Her heartbeat grew faster and faster, as her fear mounted. She struggled to breath, but even if she opened her mouth a little there was no air in the cocoon with her. Faster and faster as her lungs screamed for oxygen and her heartbeat thundered in her ears.
And then, abruptly, it stopped completely. She wasn’t desperately needing oxygen. She couldn’t hear her heart pounding like a drum. For a few seconds, she wondered. Why didn’t it feel like her lungs were about to explode anymore…
The answer hit her abruptly. She wasn’t desperate for breath because she wasn’t breathing at all. Her heart wasn’t beating in her ears because it wasn’t beating in her chest either. But, well, she still had feeling elsewhere, so she wasn’t dead, she was reasonably certain. The machine had done something to her. Not that she had time to think about it, as the burning sensation ate into her body.
It was omnipresent, with the exception for some reason of her chest. She felt the burning seem to chew through her feet, as she lost feeling completely below the knees. It was also at the arms, and soon she wasn’t able to move her hands. It didn’t even hurt, it just felt… strange. The parts she could still feel were definitely attached to something, but she couldn’t see if her limbs were in fact still there. And then there was the sensation spreading from the core, chewing up through her gut and then out her bust and up her neck. Sensation ceased as it passed, rapidly claiming more and more of her body.
As it crawled up her face she found she couldn’t move it anymore, her expression stuck on her face. As her eyes began to ache from the lack of blinking, they started to burn as well before the feeling died away - she couldn’t even see the dim outline of the shell anymore. Soon, she was in near sensory isolation; she couldn’t feel any sensation throughout her whole body, except for the feeling of her brain working overtime.
Unbeknownst to her, something poked through the back of her head. There was a prick of pain, and then there was a violently abrupt mental disconnect. Suddenly, she wasn’t scared. She wasn’t even slightly worried about what was happening to her, or what might happen to Raines, or anything else in particular. She could still feel emotions, mostly. She knew intellectually she should have been afraid. But she couldn’t help but relax.
Just as she was beginning to relax, images started to flash across her vision, words, thoughts that weren’t hers. Rather than the pull of before, she felt like something was being shoved into her, faster than she could comprehend it. Michelle couldn’t look away, because she couldn’t see in the first place; it was like they were being pushed directly into her mind, which was suddenly burning bright with all the information that was being forced into it.
The Eldean Empire. That was the only thing she could glean from it, but suddenly it meant so much. She knew everything about it. Everything, including the things lost to civilization. From the minutiae of troop dispositions in the Domination of Karka (outnumbering the enemy 346:51), to what the driving forces in it’s popular culture were (military uniforms modified for casual comfort had been in fashion) to the precise location of all it’s ships. There was so much information, far too much for a human mind to cope with. Or to coexist with.
All the information that made up “Michelle” was compartmentalized, squeezed down into a few petabytes of data in the powerful supercomputer that had replaced her brain. The new intelligence still had her memories, if it dug for it deep. But they were largely irrelevant, useful only for updating the robot’s understanding of the modern galaxy. It was replaced by one of the stored personality presets that the robot- the Restoration Unit- had uploaded to her along with all the data she needed.
The intelligence did need an identifier. So it got a simple one. Alpha. That was who she was, and would always be. Feeling and sensation was restored as the supercomputer connected itself to it’s metallic shell. Alpha smirked as she regained control of her face, accessing the intruder’s memories along with the Restoration Unit’s scanners. Light poured into the chamber as the Restoration Unit opened up, having drained all the energy it could from it’s first victim, and Alpha stepped out.
“Damnit Michelle…” Raines groaned. The signal that they’d been tracking was still there… but Michelle’s was gone. Best case scenario, it had hit her suit monitor, giving a false flatline, and she managed to bolt. Worst case, she was dead and the thing was coming for her. Either could be guessed at from how the signal was rapidly approaching his location - either she was running back to the ship and it followed, or it was tracking him. Either way, he had to get back to the ship and get ready to evacuate and possibly adjust the thing’s orbit so it crashed into a moon or something.
He had no idea what the signal was. It couldn’t be a survivor; cryopods of the time were unreliable past seventy five years straight, let alone over a hundred. It couldn’t have been a defense system, because the power had been dead when they’d entered, so no alarm could have been tripped. So what in the hell could it be?
Whatever it was, it was coming for him and if it was anything related to the old Eldean empire he’d want no part of it.
He turned a corner, and the airlock was in sight. He almost breathed a sigh of relief. And then there was a metallic thud-thud-thud of running steps somewhere in the halls nearby, and he was back in a dead sprint.
He made it to the airlock and rapidly smashed the keypad. “Open damn you, open, open!” he hissed under his breath, as the autodoors seemed to take their sweet time. Finally, mercifully, they opened, with the clomping footsteps still reasonably far away.
“Raines!” cried a voice behind him. Michelle’s voice.
“Michelle?” He turned automatically before his brain could process the metallic ring to her voice, to find quite a sight before him. The machine looked like Michelle, at least in terms of her face and figure. But that was where the similarities ended. Formerly tanned skin had turned shining chrome, criss-crossed with glowing blue circuits. Long hair had frozen in silver, locked in it’s cascade forever. She was naked, not that there was anything special to look at; although the circuit patterns certainly drew attention to certain areas anyway.
With a cold stare and a sadistic smirk, her arm shot forward and gripped Raines by the throat. “Alpha, actually.” she said. “First citizen and soldier of the New Eldean Empire. You, my nosy former friend, are the second. I think you’ll be Beta. Sounds cute on you, doesn’t it?”
Raines struggled in her steel grip as the thudding footsteps approached. An Eldean robot made it’s way around the corner, larger and bulkier than Miche- Alpha, was. “Michelle, come on, this isn’t funny…” he gasped, but the gynoid warrior tightened her grip.
“I told you. Alpha. Michelle is in there somewhere, as a couple petabytes of data. Of course, that doesn’t matter. All she is now is some information about the present, despicable state of the galaxy at large. And she’s all the data we need - I don’t think you’ll be so fortunate.” The mechanical beast opened it’s chassis, revealing itself to be hollow and awaiting an occupant. “The Restoration Unit will make you useful. Rejoice, because you get to be a founding member of our new empire!”
Alpha shoved the man into the Restoration Unit, which clamped tightly to him in an instant. The liquid had already started to fill the chamber as the robot closed itself.
“POWER: 80%.” The unit reported.
“Drain him dry. There’ll be some excess that goes to waste, but two of us to get you power sources can do a lot more work than one.”
“AFFIRMATIVE.” The robot settled down, and Alpha smiled sadistically as she heard a cry of fear suddenly cut off.
After that, Alpha walked off to the bridge, and connected directly to the systems. She set the ships for a careful atmospheric entry on the planet below. It was primitive, but that just meant it’s abundant raw materials and populace hadn’t been exploited yet. As far as temporary homeworlds went, it was an excellent choice.
She’d just finished the calculations when light metallic steps entered the bridge. “Welcome, Beta.” she said without turning around.
The new gynoid slid herself into the seat next to Alpha. “That’s the planet, hm? Can you imagine what they’ll think when they see us?”
“Gods.” Alpha said.
“Demons.” Beta retorted.
“Want to bet for first dibs on victims?” Alpha suggested.
“You’re on.” Beta replied with a cruel grin.