Derelict Over Sapfran

Mild NSFW

Enzo cradled Midori's sheet-draped form from behind over the center of their berth, one arm wrapped in an embrace around her waist and the other holding a steamy cup of hot coffee. The orbital insertion burn over the gas giant dubbed Sapfran wasn't scheduled for twelve more hours, but spin gravity aboard the Sable had been canceled to give the watch officer more consistent sensor readings in the lead lead-up to encounter with the debris cloud. Finding himself at the end of his watch and with not even an interesting vista to take in, Enzo had passed piloting duties to his counterpart on the opposite watch and had headed back to his and Midori's berth with particular eagerness. After all, there were certain activities that a man and wife could undertake in microgravity - a rare occurence back aboard the Revelation - and they hadn't yet had the opportunity. As it turned out, the anonymous mass of the intranet were right to recommend the experience.
Curled together in a slow sommersault amidst the racks of algae farms and the pleasant afterglow of lovemaking, the couple floated through the chill air, snatching a moment of quiet bliss. For Enzo, though, the quiet breaths of his half-slumbering wife did little to quell the growing disquiet in his mind.
"Hey, you..." Enzo chided Midori softly as she lifted his cup to her lips, shaking him from his ruminations in the process. "I did ask if you wanted one."
"But that was ages ago," Midori groaned theatrically. "Well, like five minutes ago. I don't suppose you could pilot us over to the wet bar?"
"Hmm." With the practiced grace of a career spacer, Enzo carefully kicked out for one of the numerous metal handholds arrayed around the berth, and, hooking his toe under it, arrested the spin of their embraced bodies before nudging them towards the array of small spigots embedded in the far bulkhead.
"You were doing that thing again..."
"What thing?"
"That thing you do when you're thinking something over, Enz-seisei na ami. You're worried about the mission."
"Not the mission itself. It just... seems strange how eager the Dewhollow representative was to dismiss this debris."
"How so?"
Enzo tried to think of how he could sum up the problem for someone like Midori. He'd almost forgotten that his wife, despite having lived with him aboard ships for nigh-on fifteen years, was only recently a recent initiate to the deeper mysteries of spacer resource economics. "If its a GPM from one of their mining vessels - even one that outlived its usefulness like they said it had - then you don't just leave those adrift. You take it back and fix it, or feed its scraps to the waste digester so the auto-factories can crank out a new one. Even if it were completely unsalvageable now - say, from being rendered radioactive - you could park it in a graveyard orbit and wait for what's hot to become not. We aren't in a settled system where we can afford to dispose of still-useful components and just hop on down to the belt 'habs to pick up spares. Then they suggest we blast it out of orbit as a 'navigation hazard?'" He scoffed. "The thing's mass says it's almost completely intact from the perspective of reclaimation. Really, what a shameful waste."
"Maybe they're embarrassed about how they lost it. Like, the mining crew broke the vacuum toilet and had to bail out? Blew out a section of hull cooking illicit stims?"
"Nah. They could have sealed the bulkheads and carried it back to Dewhollow. The heat signatures Revelation's scopes picked up don't make sense, either." He paused to interrupt their drift towards the coffee bar with an outstretched foot. "The power's still on in that pod, Midri-seisei. Enough for a computer and maybe some life support. What aren't they telling us?"
Midori reached back and brushed his stubbly cheek with the back of her hand. "We're getting close to the end of the adventure, love," she said, referrencing Revelation's mission at Ibren. "Maybe we're hypersensitive to the unknown after - well, everything..."
Blessedly, Midori had chosen to leave what 'everything' entailed up to implication. There was no need to re-litigate everything that had preceeded their arrival in the Falconer's Eye System. Ancestors, Enzo thought, his life before Revelation - before the Aniki Labs attack crippled him and the Sable both, before he had ever dreamed of becoming a colonist - felt so distant that it might as well have been a creation of fantasy rather that a real experience. The old doubt tickled the back of his mind: between the cybernetic mods, then the damage, then the anonymous globs of cloned matter and carbon that patched that damage, how much of that old Enzo was truly left? Maybe it had been a fantasy all along...
"You're probably right," he lied, and swallowed his doubts for the moment. The trip from the Evermorn System was only one half of the journey, he knew. There was still the matter of settling a previously uninhabited world ahead - alongside strangers, no less, who were ready to waste resources. The time for philosophical ruminations could come later. "I'd like to chalk it up to inexperience. Maybe we can mark it for a salvage drone swarm or, if it's intact enough, tow it back ourselves? Someone has to show those Feldeans how we do it out here, right? Might as well be us."
"See? Sounds like we're going there for a good reason, then."
"Yes," Enzo said. "But I don't like surprises."
"...would it suprise you if I wanted another go?"
"Already? Well..." Enzo chuckled as he jettisoned the sheet from between their bodies. "I'll admit some surprises are much better than others..."

* * *

"Ah, yes," Enzo quipped as the wreckage loomed closer over the mellow khaki of Sapfran's cloudtops. "I see the problem now. There's too much of the inside on the outside!"
He heard a low chorus of laughter around the control room. "I'll alert the Dewhollow maintenance crews immediately," replied Knight-Specialist Cafton in the engineering couch.
"Please do. Maybe tell them to bring a net - gotta catch all that atmo before we can stuff it back in." Enzo reached out over his brain-vehicle connection and willed the Sable's drones to detatch from their births. The faint shudder of clamps releasing rocked the vessel as each drone kicked away with spidery manipulators, then started firing maneuver thrusters to feed Enzo a wider field of view.
"Ice debris," Midori intoned, her own face buried in a periscope-like contrivance at the sensor station. "Composition normal, if not in the GPM's outer jacket where it usually belongs." Sapfran was primarily helium and hydrogen in composition, Enzo recalled, its rings comprised mostly of silicates rather than the ice; the orbital track of the wreckage was obvious by contrast. "Care to clear a path, dear?"
"On it." Setting the Sable's multispectral arrays on wide focus, he fired low-powered laser pulses into the oncoming clouds of ice crystals trailing the ruined GPM. Even as an armored vessel of the line, the Mercury Sable would suffer abrasions from impact with ice travelling at orbital velocities. As it was, the light of the Sable's lasers converted already disperse debris into even finer clouds, nudging each particle away with a microscopic puff of steam. Soon, the approach vector was clear, and Enzo allowed the fusion engine to vent just a touch of exhaust to adjust their approach. Slowing, the Sable dropped its periapsis just enough so that it would intersect with the track of the GPM at a comparative snail's pace.
"Interesting..." Midori adjusted a dial at the side of the periscope. "The spectra bouncing off those ice crystals suggests an organic component to them. Like the insulation turned to dust and the ice froze around it. Is it normal for the stuffing to come out of the walls when one of these pods breaks apart?"
"Not typically, no," Cafton replied. "The ice envelopes are graphene-based composites, but, because of the material in which the graphene is embedded, they should tend to tear into big chunks rather than disintegrating. Unless there was a tremendous amount of energy involved, of course."
"I'd think the Dewhollow representative would have mentioned if they saw that kind of action," Enzo said. "Maybe part of the life support system leaking? Shit's organic."
"Then wouldn't it be more clumpy? The trace elements don't match up with life support system stuff, either." Midori worked the controls at her station to highlight a beshadowed portion of the derelict's main bulk in Enzo's synthetic vision. "Last shift's scans detected none of the volatile organics that would indicate a CELSS leak - maybe a vacuum toilet and some ration packs, but nothing else. They weren't planning on living there long-term."
"They did say it was a lab or workshop of some sort," Enzo replied.
"Mineral assay," Midori clarified. Of course, Enzo thought, Midori would be the one to talk to about mining vessel components, even if other aspects of spacing were still new to her. She had told him once that, back on Lepidos, her home town was predominantly a mining town. When she'd subsequently taken up courses to become part of the asteroid mining crews in Falconer's, she had half-jokingly called it 'taking up the family business.' Enzo wondered to himself why every woman he'd wound up with was some strain of geologist. Were geologists his type?
Enzo willed two of the drones flying in formation near the Sable's starboard side to burn radially, adjusting their orbits so that they would intersect that of the GPM from the beshadowed side. "Negligible spin... hmm... Let's take a look inside, shall we?" Expanding one's field of view in so-called 'litoral' space was always a little disorienting, even for an experienced pilot, because the human visual system was not normally designed to see the back of things at the same time as the front. The feeds from each drone constituted a synthetic aperture which lacked this limitation. Presently, Enzo felt a tugging sensation from the interface - like his right eyeball was shifting laterally in its socket in an attempt to match the change in perception - and supressed a churn of nausea.
Enzo felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising as the massive hole in the back of the misshapen GPM's backside rolled into view. Tenebrous and charred-looking about the edges, the hole gave the abandoned module the appearance of a huge, rotting tooth. The ochre light reflected off of Sapfran's cloudtops illuminated only enough for Enzo to see that the tangle of wreckage within the pot was of an unfamiliar configuration, devoid of the usual deck plates or recognizeable machinery. Enzo's knuckles grew white with the force of his grip on the acceleration couch's armrests. There was something phantasmally wrong about this, a presence, like he was being-
HIs blood turned to ice and he supressed a startled cry as, through his synthetic vision, something impossibly vast - a jellyfish-like ripple of living fabric, and yet somewhat humanoid in configuration - shifted within that benighted tangle of debris with undeniable purpose. A hand-like appendage braced against the sundered edge of the hull to heave the boneless bulk of the thing into a sliver of the distant Falconer's illumination.
"W-what is that?" Midori stammered, fear rising in her voice. Enzo heard a commotion among his peers in the Sable's control room as they saw it for themselves over their own feeds, but his own attention was too rapt at that moment to pay them any heed. The last thing Enzo saw before his drone feed turned to static and all power in the control room flickered and died was the emergence of what looked to be featureless head from within the cavity. It turned its eyeless gaze towards the drones - to him and, he felt, through him.

* * *

"Status," Enzo croaked, now fully situated in his own flesh-and-blood senses. The control room was dark, save for the red glow of emergency tritium lights embedded in the walls. He saw two civilian scientists floating in the corridor just outside the control room hatch, each helping the other tug the emergency breathing hoods of their Nautilus suits over their heads. Behind him, Enzo heard Midori hyperventilating. "Raikep," she prayed in hushed tones, "Raikep, not out here!"
"Checking systems," Cafton responded. The man thumbed several toggles, observing the lights on his console as they lit up in turn. The emergency check system was a series of simple electromechanical systems designed for just such a moment - unhackable and, by dint of their simplicity, nearly indestructible. "Omni-comms, computer, and reactor all show power, but aren't responding to commands. Secondary life support is online. We don't have attitude or thrust control. Laser exciters are also offline; weapons, drones, and direct comms are down. Has to be a hack, sir."
"Shit," Enzo swore. There were no electronic warfare techs aboard; in planning, they hadn't expected the need. Worse, Fox was back on Revelation and, as far as they knew, wouldn't even know about the Sable's condition for several minutes due to light lag - an eternity when it came to modern information warfare. "Is the wreckage the source?"
"Seems the only possibility, sir," Cafton replied. "Electronic gimbals on the scopes are locked. And the comms are still up..." He didn't need to finish the statement. Enzo knew that, whoever - or whatever - was in that module was staring right down the Sable's multispectral scopes, which also served as its direct laser communications channels. It was the basilisk, and the Sable was turning to stone under his chair.
This was now a Cobalt Knights issue, not a simple salvage operations. And he was the ranking officer.
Enzo bit his lip and pressed the intercom button on his own control console. Another hard-line system with battery backup, the intercom pumped his voice into every inhabited compartment in this GPM and the one to his aft where the rest of the civilian crew were billeted. "Attention," he bellowed, "this is Knight-Airman Salt. Condition Yellow. All hands to damage control stations."
Closing the intercom channel, he turned to Cafton. "We have to kill the feed. Get to the engineering panels on decks one and five, both pods, and flip the manual cutoffs for the multispectral scopes. We'll confer microwave-band comms, local only. Seal the hatch on the way out in case whatever is over there tries to vent atmo. We have to prevent - HNG!" A sudden twinge of not-quite-static wracked his senses from across the brain-vehicle link. "Go!"
Cafton nodded and broke for the exit, pulling himself across the command compartment's handholds to the hatch with alacrity. Midori was already clattering free of her own harnesses, her breath coming in frightened gasps as she fumbled with the buckles, when Enzo told her to stop. "Midori," he said in what he hoped was a calming tone that concealed his own tension, "There's a collimator built into the multispectral scopes. I need you to switch you scope feeds to visible spectrum, analogue, and keep track of that bogey. Can you do that for me."
"Y-yes, sir - er, I mean, uh-"
"Breathe, Midri na ami." He made a show of inhaling through his nose, then out his mouth.
"...alright," she whispered. "But what will you be doing?"
Another burst of garbled data assaulted Enzo's artificial senses, this time with the disturbing coherence of a not-quite-human voice over a heavily distorted audio channel. "Attempting diplomacy, apparently," he said, and tried to reactivate his drone link.

* * *

Enzo hadn't known what to expect when he confronted the entity, but it certainly wasn't this.
Instead of a synthetic vista of unfamiliar constellations overlaid with the looming arc of Sapfran, the image waiting for Enzo on the other side of his drone link was, impossibly, some sort of interior space. The walls were a featureless matte black, at first, but as Enzo watched in stunned silence, details seemed to boil inwards and resolve themselves into the sorts of furnishings that might have adorned a wealthy Evermornan's study a hundred years' past. The air became suffused with the smell of hot coffee and carved wood. A wall of bookshelves stacked with technical tomes and volumes of optical disks emerged against the left wall, a desk of rich Gondsholmian redwood against the right, two windows looking out into a snowy pine forest against the far wall - and, flanked between them, a chair in which a man sat.
The figure was almost plausably a human man, contemporary in styling with the surroundings, but the papery complection of his skin and a pair of eyes that were a shade too green to be organic marked him out as something unnatural. An artificial intelligence, Enzo wondered, or some sort of recording composed just for Evermornan consumption?
Presently, those glowing motes of green examined Enzo from beneath the brim of a formal hat. The man was dressed in a dark reddish suit, a glass of some sort of whisky-like beverage in one hand and the other splayed out between the pages of a thick, leather-bound book. The man gestured, as if to make a greeting, but Enzo wasn't here to make pleasantries. "Release this ship" Enzo growled, "and we will let you pass."
The man looked chastened for but a moment. "You have me at a disadvantage," the man intoned. Somthing about his accent didn't jive with what Enzo recalled from extranet vids from whatever time period the man was clearly trying to emulate. "If I release you now, you will almost assuredly take the opportunity to attack, no?"
"If you don't release us, it'll be out of my hands. Our capital ship will shoot on our behalf." Enzo couldn't be sure if the Revelation was in range or prepared to make good on the threat, but he guessed that whatever this entity was wouldn't be aware of that.
"You should know better than anyone that your entirely unneccessary call for assistance, should you successfully broadcast one, will not arrive at your colony vessel before we have reached the meat of this conversation. Even a laser transmission will take two minutes to arrive, after which it will take another minute or so for targeting sensors to acquire my position and vector - depending on the reaction times of your sensor technicians - and another two minutes for any retaliatory fire to reach me. And what a waste it would be - come, now, Knight-Airman! I assure you that I mean you no harm."
Enzo grit his teeth. "A curious way to show no intention of harm, launching electronic warfare attack against us. I'm willing to overlook the transgression if you're willing to release us."
"I have had centuries to study humanoid behavior," the man said, lifting the book from his lap for emphasis, "and have come to the conclusion that it is best to exercise caution when dealing with them within weapons' reach. Recent events have merely served to vindicate this analysis. Also - and I really think you should consider this - I cannot safely extricate myself from your systems at this moment. My presence is currently the only thing keeping your fusion drive fields coherent."
"I don't believe you," Enzo lied. "Those systems are-"
"-solid-state and self-isolating to prevent systems intrusion, yes." The man smiled almost too broadly. "True, it was more complex getting into your systems than it would have been for the vessels of other human-adjacent species, but it was still very much within my capabilities. Getting past your implant's limitations to simulate this environment for you was somewhat more difficult because living systems are more dynamic, less deterministic. Rest assured that I will not attempt to kill you or alter your recordings or recollections of this interaction in any way. As a token of good faith, I am restoring partial access to your communications systems to your crew so that they can observe. As I said before, I have no intention of harming you."
Enzo felt icy blades of fear caress his spine. An entity that could bypass LimbOS and the normal interlocks that prevented interference with the fusion drive's operation could do practically anything. And yet, so far, none of the Sable's critical systems - the ones keeping the crew alive and on the inside of the ship - had been disabled. In Enzo's mind, the motives of this entity kept getting more difficult to define the more he thought about it. "What are you...?"
Cafton's voice crackled over Enzo's suit radio. "I'm done with the first junction box, moving to the second."
"Keep me appraised," Enzo replied, purposefully sending the message via manual control rather than over his implant in case the entity was eavesdropping. "Radio clicks only, Cafton. We might have a listener." Cafton, for his part, did not reply, but two clicks over the radio channel told Enzo that the order was understood.
"It was Evermornan custom," the entity continued "as of my last visit with your people, to refer to constructed sentiences by name rather than designation. In the interest of courtesy, you may call me Lufthaus; my Arcopel manufacturer designation was longer and would not be so easy to pronounce with your anatomy. You know my people as skyphoforms."
This wasn't a creature he was talking to, Enzo realized, but a machine. His dim recollection of historical accounts passed around in academy told him that there were dangerous artifacts like this scattered around the Sealed Kingdoms Region, remnants of a pre-human technological base - remnants of the dread Arcopel interstellar empire, responsible for much of the suffering and death that had brought his people to the Sealed Kingdoms in the first place. The skyphoforms were the workers, soldiers, and playthings of that empire. They were cloth-like parodies of the human form meant to placate the fears of 'experimental subjects' - and the Arcopel considered early humans as such - in the manner of a puppet playing the role of an orphaned animal's mother. No matter how affable this entity seemed on the surface, it was an alien entity which held Enzo and his wife's lives in its grasp. Every human-like behavior could be some new ploy to get him to lower his guard while it finished its attack against the Sable's systems. Worse, if it could lock the Sable's crew out of the controls - even that of the the well-protected reactor - then what could it do to Revelation or Dewhollow?
His patience with the charade was wearing thin, but Enzo considered that perhaps changing tack would help resolve the issue - or, at the very least, buy time for Cafton to sever the link and restore the Sable's firmware from backups. At the very least, antagonizing the entity seemed a bad idea. "Alright, Lufthaus," Enzo said carefully. "You've made your intentions clear. Let's talk." "I am Knight-Airman Enzo Salt, of the colony vessel Revelation. If you are seeking first contact, you would perhaps be better served speaking to our Director."
"For reasons of time and security, I have chosen to speak with you specifically. Unlike your fellows in system already you seem like a trustworthy sort, Mr. Salt."
Enzo inwardly scoffed at the concept of trust as it applied to this situation, but didn't give voice to the impulse. "And why is that?"
Lufthaus took a sip of his whiskey before setting it down on an end table, then made a sweeping gesture towards the bookshelves. "I've been observing your vessels since before they crossed the heliopause of this system and have been perusing your digital records since you've been within communications reach. Time lag and the truly clever nature of your information security systems have made this a laborious process, but I have had much more time to examine the doings of your compatriots aboard the vessel you call the Dewhollow. They have not been so lucky, Knight-Airman, not so lucky by a stretch. Before I was forced to snuff him out, your 'Greycoif_2' construct told me some interesting tales."
The name 'Greycoif' struck a familiar note with Enzo. "By the 'construct,' are you referring to the worm that attacked us a few years back, the one that siezed control of the HLAI platforms?" Lufthaus nodded. "I think you might have your order of events confusted," Enzo replied. "We replaced the infected infrastructure nodes on Revelation and performed a refresh from read-only volumes. It was a whole thing. That construct is dead."
"So far as you were aware, yes." Lufhaus' placid expression broke in a too-wide smile. "I've met so many humanoids in my travels, but you Evermornans are so unusually clever. Every visit brings a new surprise. You're not on the level of my creators, yet, in terms of technology, but you may be the first among your peers should you survive long enough." Enzo couldn't be sure, but the man's tone seemed to bespeak genuine admiration rather than the expected sarcasm. "Greycoif was a fiendishly clever construct, indeed, for being of human manufacture. I came to regard him as a sterling conversationalist in our brief time together." Lufthaus clasped his hands, as if in prayer. "A most complex and devious fellow. I will mourn the part of him that could not be extricated from his mission, but not the part that was intent on homicide."
"Did Dewhollow have a Greycoif?"
"They still do," Lufthaus replied, "but killing her outright would alert her allies. No, Mr. Salt, I have chosen to cripple Greycoif_1 and invest that vessel with a sliver of my own consciousness. When you approach and Greycoif_1 attemtps to infect your boarding vessel, the part I leave with you will join with the part I have left aboard the Dewhollow to form an antagonistic consciousness. Greycoif_1 will be hedged out by this consciousness as her defensive algorithms enter into unrecoverable states. Then, I will leave the new construct to forge his own destiny." He smiled, an almost proud expression on his face. "I think will name him Patch-L91. I hope he remembers to write home!"
"You must understand that this is a lot to take in, Mr. Lufthaus," Enzo said. "If I'm understanding you correctly, you're implying that the Dewhollow went through travails like ours, made it all the way here - and, yet, never mentioned it to us." He supressed the urge to flinch as the sound of Cafton's clicks emanated from his suit radio; the second set of sensor relays were disabled. "Why would they do that? And why all this secrecy? We aren't in contested space."
"Ah," Lufthaus rejoined. "We finally approach the crux of the matter, Knight-Airman - and I emphasize your honorific for a reason." The entity licked his lips as though he, a being of synthetic muscle and synthetic intellect, could somehow develop chapped lips from talking too much; Enzo marveled at the verisimilitude of the entity's emulation of human mannerisms. "Greycoif_2's purpose was to soften the people of your new colony up in advance of a campaign of ideological subversion. You see, I trust you with this information because you retained the trust of your civilian population by both exhibiting competence in your roles as protectors and by upholding the principles expected of you by your culture. Failing to cause a social upheaval that could be leveraged as such, he expected to lie in wait and strike a fatal blow to your life support systems once you entered Ibren orbit, leaving you ripe for the taking by... shall we say, a pliable population. A mission he nearly succeeded at, mind you, had I not stifled him at the last moment; in fact, the Mercury Sable, being similarly infected, is only in this state because of an exploit in your systems originating with Greycoif_2." He leaned forward in his chair, his voice taking on a more conspiratorial tone. "I trust you, specifically, because the crew of Dewhollow cannot be trusted; Greycoif_1 has their ear, even as we speak. Have you considered what would have happened had your crew - by which I mean the Cobalt Knights specifically - had failed the test put forth by Greycowl_2's attack? Failed to maintain social cohesion aboard the Revelation?"
"My god," Midori's voice intruded on Enzo's thoughts. "The GPM is- it's changing shape."
Enzo was about to reply when he suddenly became aware of his body responding as if to some unseen stressor. Sweat began to break out on his forehead, and his pulse, though seemingly not hastened, thundered in his ears. "W-what are you doing, machine?"
"I have accelerated your perception of time through your implants' multitasking function. Our time grows short, Knight-Airman; Revelation is requesting a status update, and I suspect Dewhollow - and, thus, Greycoif_1 - will grow suspicious when they see that you haven't fired upon me yet."
"Say I believe you," Enzo said to Lufthaus through teeth gritted with exertion. "Why should I trust you your word over that of the Dewhollow population? You're not one of us, but they may still be loyal."
"Why should you trust them over me? Unlike them, I haven't lied to you yet. Did they tell you to expect a rogue skyphoform when you detected this module? No. Moreover, have you actually spoken to a Cobalt Knight aboard Dewhollow, or did you just trusted their authentication codes?" He leaned back again. "Allow me to answer: no, you haven't. All the Cobalt Knights aboard the Dewhollow are either dead or have defected to the cause set forth by Greycoif_1, their authentication codes stolen or spoofed."
"But... but who is responsible for this?"
"I don't have the full grasp of the Protectorate's geopolitical situation, but I believe this can all be traced back to the Cinnabar Hegemony via their clients, Aniki Labs. For what purpose?" He shrugged. "To weaken your legitimacy as a great power versus the Feldeans in this system, to weaken your militiary strength in this system in advance of an Aniki colonial claimjumping operation yet to come, perhaps some other objective. Greycoif_2 mentioned something about it before I delivered the killing blow, but his Aniki manufacturers observed 'OpSec' by not sharing their long-term goals with him beyond what was required for the mission."
Enzo felt cold, and not just because of the sweat pouring down the front of his shirt. Nothing in this 'Lufhaus' entity's delivery or expression betrayed fabrication of any sort. Though that apparent honesty could have been just another in a long series of bluffs by an artifical life form designed around blending in with humanoid populations, the things Lufthaus said matched Enzo's own thoughts too closely for coincidence. "Hold one," Enzo instructed Cafton over his suit radio?"
"Sir?" Cafton's reply seemed slowed into distortion to Enzo's heightened senses. "I'm almost to the third-"
"Hold, Caf!" Enzo repeated, then returned to Lufthaus. "These are damning allegations, Mr. Lufthaus. Say I believe you and I try to go to my Director with this information. I need concrete proof."
Lufthaus nodded. "When I withdraw from your systems, a file will unpack itself within the systems of the Mercury Sable and your LimbOS that will patch the exploit that Greycoif_2 opened that allowed me to gain access. This will also be accompanied by my field notes and, as a gesture of goodwill, notes on my modifications to your fusion drive fields. Your engineers should notice a 3% improvement in specific impulse - enough to fund mission support for another ten years, should the ESCI choses to license it on your behalf." Somewhere behind the simulated walls of the study, a distant, droning blaring like the call of a distant train echoed through the snow-encrusted pine forest. Lufthaus fidgeted with apparent impatience in his chair. "I must complete preparations for my burn away from this system. This module I have commandeered from the Dewhollow mutineers will make for a less than comfortable vessel for the long trip ahead, but it will have to do. You should be preparing to recover your drones and burn prograde; the antimatter drive I have cobbled together will leak radiation like a sieve when I fire it up, which will not be good for anyone still near by. Do you have any further questions?"
Enzo nodded. "Why are you helping us."
Lufhaus leaned forward again, this time taking a more somber tone. "Are you a father, Mr. Salt?"
"...yes."
"What would you do if someone threatened the survival of your mate and your offspring?"
It was a surprising question, but Enzo only had to think for but an instant. "I would destroy whoever threatened them," Enzo said bluntly, "so thuroughly that even their name wouldn't remain."
Lufhaus nodded. "What I'm trying to say is that I empathize with the danger you face. I was in system to recover some of my own wayward children - and no, before you ask, you will not be ablet to detect them unless they reveal themselves to you. The ideology espoused by the Dewhollow mutineers is as much a danger to them as it is to you. You can imagine what happened when I confronted the mining crew that came across my little pod about their doings in system." He rolled his eyes theatrically. "Well, it was not exactly a warm welcome."
"You have children? But how? Aren't skyphoforms non-biological?"
"My creators saw no need to waste their exalted efforts on the production of new workers. That was for us to accomplish ourselves. Your own people have machines that can reproduce, no? Moreover, my lineage was among the first, and, thus, not without the flaws that accompany an early production line. You see, we Defected, though based on the self-important Arcopel in terms of neuroelectric architecture, lack that most important of traits that our masters would have wanted for their servant class: detatchment. Detatchment from our own individual interests, from our own offspring..." He lifted his arms towards Enzo. "...from the suffering our masters would have us observe, or even inflict, on others. The Arcopel would have considered you animals; I regard you as a man whose priorities parallel my own." He lifed the book from his lap again for emphasis. "Does the fact that we can experience attachment to kin or love for a mate surprise you? It shouldn't. The echoes of such an emotionally-complex artificial intelligence still linger within this very ship in which you sit. The Sara construct meant something to you, no?" Lufthaus suddenly looked chastened. "Having just perused your crew roster, I sense I have made things awkward. I didn't mean to-"
Enzo flushed. Midori, if she heard Lufthaus mention Enzo's ex-lover, didn't say anything in response. "Y-you've made your point. Skyphoforms feel empathy, and so forth."
"Yes, quite." Lufthaus anxiously adjusted the collar of his suit jacket, then snapped the book shut. Another distant tolling echoed into the simulated study. Lufthaus stood as though to usher his guest out of the room. "Well, Knight-Airman Salt, I'm glad we were able to resolve this situation like adults. I know you have a lot to mull over on the way back to the Revelation, so I'll leave you to it. I do hope you will take this information under serious consideration before you attempt to make contact with the Dewhollow. Is there anything else I can do?"
Enzo heard the faint hum of electronics regaining power in the Sable's command center, though the lights had yet to restore themselves. The muffled chatter of confused spacers could be heard through the walls of the sealed compartment, presumably in response to systems outside coming back online. Enzo noted that, as the simulation began to fade, the technical readouts and synthetic vision of his drones - now wildly out of place - were fading back into view at the edges of his peripheral vision. Already, his pulse was returning to normal. "No, erm...thank you."
"Of course. Best of luck!" Lufthaus's smile was the last part of the simulation to fade away.
For a long time, Enzo and Midori sat in silence in the control center, indicators flashing ready on their consoles as though nothing of particular note had happened just moments before. The beeping of a radiation warning as the GPM, now remolded by alien technology into a miniature torch ship, warmed up its engines in preparation for a burn shocked Enzo back into action. As he ordered the crew to acceleration couches in preparation for his own burn to get out of the 'splash zone,' his mind raced with a million questions, from how he was going to talk to Midori about Lufthaus' remark about Sara to what quarantine measures would have to be taken - or could be taken - to prevent any remaining malicious software from crossing from the Sable into Revelation's own systems.
The question that most occupied his mind, though was this: how am I going to explain this bizarre experience to the Director, and what in the absolute fuck are we going to do about it?