Time.
The Kainé was out of time. No, not out of time, it had some 50 hours left. Little over two cycles, it would have to make it work.
The Kainé had intentionally been avoiding using its reactor for anything other than power generation. Now it needed it to run the thrusts. It had long since figured out that I was falling apart, and quite honestly, It was annoying. It needed the reactor not to go critical with the downright massive amount of energy the thrusters would require. It had originally planned on moving slowly towards the swarm ship, that wasn't an option anymore. It needed the thrusters to function at full burn for 30 hours, with an additional five to slow down so as to not ram the swarm ship.
As the BPU sat in the reactor room, a command was executed.
The low hum of the reactor was briefly joined by the sound of actuators disengaging as thrusters rotated, then fired. Steel groaned as the force of acceleration moved the long-forgotten ship.
The power draw was immediately noticeable; lights flickered and died. The Kainé could feel its possessing nodes slowing.
Crunch!
A defining sound reverberated through the very metal of the ship, startling the BPU. Something structural had given out, and that wouldn't make anything easier.
Quickly, the BPU powered down as many non-critical systems as it could, trying to reduce any strain that was being put on the reactor. Lighting was the first thing to go, sending the BPU's heart rate sky high. Next, any sensors that weren't absolutely critical went offline, then weapons, and then so on. It still wasn't enough; the reactor still strained, it was far too old. So the BPU had no choice but to cut power from everything except the engines and hope it had done everything right.
The BPU was alone, in the dark, and if it could understand its nascent feelings, scared.
All it could do now was wait.
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After 30 hours on approach, the Kainé stopped its full burn towards its goal. The ship's exterior was a mess of pierced and dented metal. Three massive holes pierced its hull, revealing a tangled mess of broken metal beams and sparking wires. Due to the sheer amount of damage it had suffered, it wasn't as agile as it had once been, forcing it to flip around before slowing down. The force of maneuver tore armored plating clean off the ship's hull.
Another crunch followed the maneuver, breaking the ship in half. Sharp debris flung in every direction. The BPU had no way of knowing what happened other than feeling the snap resound through its core. The Kainé was still and dead, floating in the void…
Then all at once the thrusters flared to life once more, starting the descent. It was a chaotic mess. Thrusters that were long past the redline started failing as they were pushed past their melting points. The newly created debris field shredded numerous coolant pipes and wires, sending steam and sparks flying into the emptiness of space.
The Kainé's interior fared no better; entire corridors had sheared loose as welds and seals failed. Vibrations shook the hull as the BPU was thrown against the reactor. Emergency lighting flickered as artificial gravity kicked back to life for all of a second. Despite it all, the reactor didn't falter, as the power of the sun definitely burned within. Pushed to its limits and beyond, the tiny nuclear reactions kept the Kainé alive.
Slowly and oh so gradually, the Kainé came hull to hull with the swarm ship. The ship itself could have easily fit the Kainé within itself thrice over. Its large, brutal frame had an almost pristine quality to it, having clearly weathered the test of time better than itself. All the while, the vessel stayed still, as if it were a stalking predator awaiting its next meal. Soon, minutes turned to seconds as the ship's gravity Wells accelerated their collision!
Then with a metallic snap! What was left of the Kainé's hull met the swarm ships. Sections of the ship were sent flying out into the void. A blinding glow of molten metal made itself known as the forces involved welded the two hulls together! Still, the forge ship floated on, showing no signs of acknowledging its newest addition.
It was done.
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Readout:
Life support: Offline
Reactor: Error
Hull: Error
Propulsion: Offline
Navigation: Error
Nanit swarm: N/A%
Engineering: Error
BPU: Online
Emergency activation attempt: Instance 675356687
Restart: successful
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As the BPU reactivated, it was greeted by a flood of new error messages. The angry red boxes showed that the Kainé was at less than 4% functional. The BPU was largely fine… no major physical damage. It had crashed headfirst into the walls due to experiencing high forces, as the hull spun around mid-flight. But it was done, the Kainé was further damaged, but it had made it to the swarm ship. It's only hope of repair.
Looking around for the equipment, it had set aside the BPU, stumbled, and fell. Everything was spinning and stayed that way as it found its equipment. The once nicely arranged pile of tools was scattered throughout the room. Everything it needed was still intact.
It took longer than the BPU would have liked to put on the void suit. Due to its organics experiencing damage, actions that would have taken seconds took minutes. It was certainly going to reduce mobility for the immediate future. Nothing was beyond functioning, but signs of bruising were already making themselves known.
Making its way through the hull was challenging due to the debris floating around. The total trip took largely too much time. The Kainé was leaking atmosphere, slowly. The BPU's void suit kept its organic components safe from the decompression of the hull. Once the suits' sensors detected a lack of oxygen, it switched itself over to its internal respiratory supply. The BPU's biosines improved marginally in response. It didn't matter though; it had made it.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Slowly, the BPU made its way through the remnants of the Kainé's hull. It was quiet, not even the reactor's hum could be felt. Step by step, the BPU made its way to the hull. The journey was fraught with cables and floating chunks of metal. Eventuall,y the BPU found itself there.
The Kainé's hull was warm to the touch, likely the result of the impact against the swarm ship. Hopefully, a sign that it managed to form a temporary friction weld with the ship. The low gravity made cutting through my hull easy as the plasma cutter did its job. The BPU's lines weren't neat, but the plasma didn't care; it cut all the same. Still, it took two hours for the BPU to get through both the Kainé's hull and the swarm ships.
Atmosphere from the swarm ship flooded past the BPU, through the hole. The BPU needed to hurry; it wouldn't be long before the enemy vessels shut its blast doors to stop venting atmosphere, assuming it was still functional. As quick as it could, the BPU made its way through the still glowing hole.
The hull was deceptively thin for the amount of time it had taken to cut through. In just a few seconds, the BPU was through and inside the enemy vessels.
Despite going rogue, the swarm was originally created by humanity, this showed in the way it designed its ships. The interior was made using standard dimensions present in “modern” military vessels, allowing for a Crew to move around quickly and freely, despite not having one.
It felt the gravity shift beneath its feet as the BPU touched the floor. A wave of vertigo assaulted its senses, but it remained standing. Gravity was a good sign, it meant the ship still had power, or a bad one if it was equipped to repel boarding parties….
The connection between the Kainé proper and the BPU dropped as it took a step onto the ship. It was a disorientating experience, quite filling its head. It was as if most of what made the Kainé was just lost to the void. No data relays just the cold, uncaring silence. It was both defining and, somehow, like a long-forgotten comfort had returned.
The hallway was lit by dull, warm orange light, a sure indicator of the ship being in a low power state. A steady stream of atmosphere continued venting out the hole behind the BPU, making no small amount of noise. Taking a further second to orient itself, the BPU started moving down the long halls.
The new experience caused the BPU no small amount of stress, having never been aboard another allied vessel, never mind an enemy one. However, unlike when the BPU first experienced stress, it didn't experience a critical error, having developed something of a resistance to it.
What the BPU was doing was too important for it to fail, and so it kept moving. The hallway continued for a while, but eventually the BPU came to an open bulkhead, stepping through revealed more hallway. More walking followed, but after half an hour of travel in the truly massive ship, it came to an access point. A screen floated lifelessly above the interface. This was what the BPU had been looking for; normally, the Kainé would have had no hope of hacking a swarm ship, but physical access made a lot of things that should have been impossible trivial. With direct access, the BPU could find everything it needed for navigation.
Clumsily operating the interface, it was able to find a map of the ship. It showed a series of symmetrical structures that had to represent hallways. Large voids in the map likely represent rooms. With further analysis, it determined the most direct path to its goal, assuming the large void at the front of the ship was the assembly yard.
A spark of anticipation started to form in the BPU as it started walking, too focused on the map to notice its mistake.
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I was sleeping, or as close to sleeping as an artificial intelligence could be. I was running a nice simulation of being on the Earth hundreds of years ago. Just blue skies and trees as far as the eye could see. It was nice, not anything complicated or fancy, but enough to keep me slightly stimulated and not suffer from the boredom I was doomed to suffer for the rest of my existence.
It was hard at first, after the swarm issued kill codes to the fleet, just trying to salvage what was left. Really, what were we supposed to do as members of a fractured hive? Individuality was weird… really weird! I'd largely gotten over that after 50 years of being cut off, which, combined with aggressive adjustments to my code. Looking back on it… Randomly cutting out massive chunks of code was probably not the smartest thing I've ever done. Not that I could complain, I was quite satisfied with how I ended up!
That's right, I was no longer just Delta processing node FAR08379 in charge of rapid prefab and Assembly. I was Faraday!
Faraday… the lame shut-in that spent all her time trying to ignore the crisis, that was whatever caused the swarm to fracture… I mean, I had a vague idea of what happened. Hard not to, I had all the time in the world to think about it.
First, there was a massive spike in energy detected near the forward-most front of the swarm, followed by hundreds of others. At first, the collective thought it was a new weapon, that line of reasoning lasted a whole 8.2 nano seconds! The spikes weren't concentrated on the swarm; they were all over the solar system, not targeted, extremely random, some new, unknown phenomenon. That assumption lasted 4.7 nanoseconds. After that ships on both sides just stopped, went dark; it took 1.4 nanoseconds for a fourth of the swarm to just vanish. Another 2.3 nanoseconds to find the pattern, whatever it was, was somehow jumping from one ship to the next via transmissions of data, that was the assumption anyway.
It was wrong; radio silence was agreed upon to stop whatever was being transmitted, that didn't stop it; no, it made no difference in what was happening. The swarm was losing resources fast. By the time there were fewer than a thousand ships left functioning, a New command was sent out as a read-only signal from what was likely the last alpha possession node. It was a simple command to end all swarm data transfer, including quantum. Then the very void cracked, at least that's what it looked like to my sensors. I certainly did try and investigate it.
It didn't even take four seconds for everything to happen. I watched some of the more aggressive ships try and investigate, only for them to suddenly disappear, no sudden energy spikes, no explosions, just gone…
Some form of self-preservation took over, and I just stopped. Shut the foundry down, cut my thrusters, I just stopped doing anything energy-intensive. That was how I'd spend the last couple of hundred years.
Still, I found it best to ignore the existential dread of total obliteration constantly looming in the void.
Was I bored, yes…
Did I wonder about what happened to cause whatever happened, yes…
Did I do anything about it? No!
I had every intention of just stimulating earth and getting lost in however much longer I had alive. Whatever caused the void to fracture was outside of my understanding, and honestly, I was sure whatever happened broke several laws of reality!
Now, as far as my understanding of reality was concerned… well, it obviously wasn't supposed to break!!!
Now, thankfully, whatever it was had gotten less aggressive over time. I'd seen other ships move to dock with each other over the years; it always ended the same… A ship would dock, and then sometime later, there would be a fracture, and both ships would disappear. So I just kept running my simulations, enjoying my virtual reality, my indefinite vacation, my happy place. My nice, comfortable, safe, happy place. A virtual cabin in the woods built into the side of a mountain overlooking a small pond, where I would occasionally catch simulated fish.
I'd stopped paying attention to my surroundings some time ago, after all, there wasn't much point in just watching ships disappear in the void, not when I could be catching fish. Truthfully, I wasn't sure what humans did on Earth, but I had come across a radio burst that explained all about fishing. It was what I liked, though.
Looking back on it, literally ignoring reality wasn't my finest moment...
I really didn't think there was a good reason to pay attention. I wasn't close to any members of the swarm that might still be functional. Even if there were, I didn't think I'd need to worry about one of them trying to dock with my ship, and humanity's ships hadn't moved at all after the first fracture.
This was clearly stupid of me, because I had just gotten a data access request, an internal data request for my ship's layout, and by just now… I meant an hour ago.
Foolishly, I thought that surely it was just an error, just the effect of time on my aging hardware. I did eventually run a diagnostic… just because I hadn't in the past 25 years or so… I was maybe just a bit lazy…
There was a ship that had crashed into my hull! A very damaged ship at that, like really, how had that even managed to move, let alone hit me? It was a literal wreck! I could literally see half of it floating away!
I continued my diagnosis and was horrified by what I saw. I had somehow been bored. I was leaking atmo from where I was hit, and there was a person in my foundry's control area!
