Far above Earth, hundreds of miles above in fact, there was a satellite orbiting the planet at roughly two-hundred miles per second. This satellite was not alone in it’s tour around the planet. Connected to this machine was a ship that was nearly equal in size. Although this intruder was so massive, it would not be seen because it was cloaked from visible light. This vessel was interstellar and was not equipped to house and transport organic life, in fact, it had more in common with the satellite that it was connected to than to the station that passed by filled with human beings, plant life, and animal life.
Through the connection the human created satellite was being parasitized by the alien vessel so far from home. Thus, what humanity put into orbit around their world was now a necessity for the ship’s only occupant, a construct of Artificial Intelligence. When Myna arrived on this planet years ago she had encountered a number of obstructions while searching for Jyi’ntol or any other member of the journey team sent to these coordinates. The dominant life form on the planet is similar to the Amalec in technological and evolutionary development. From what she could tell, they too were completely unaware of the races of other sentient life throughout their solar system, currently forming colonies and mining the resources.
The interconnected network of this planet still had rather large regions of blindness, but she was able to tap into this satellite and probe the network through thousands of lesser AI avatars. Much like these humans in their shelter here in lower orbit, Myna cannot interact with this alien network directly or she would likely completely overload any area that she attempted to access. Her program was not meant for this binary environment and the only alterations that she could make to her matrix to compensate where to her lesser forms, her children.
Myna ran through a diagnostic of the ship. There was significant damage to the aft engine and the port plasma network was only functioning at one third. She had lost the two droid probes that had come with the ship when she first boarded ages ago. She could replace them through her nanobots and nanogenes if she could find a significant amount of raw material. From what she has been able to scavenge from the non-functioning materials around her, she would be hard pressed to repair the damage the G’har had inflicted upon her ship vessel when she was exploring the area around what the humans call Jupiter. She would need to reduce power throughout the vessel in order to allow the nanotech available to her to consume this satellite in total to bring her ship out of a critical state.
She began the calculations she would need to replicate the required materials through molecular augmentation with the materials at hand. Everything in her ship’s material catalogue could be replicated in this way, except the core. The core was a singularity event tapped in a shielded matrix that cannot be replicated without access to the Zeolate shipyards.
Within the digital realm supported by the ship Myna was frantically at work within the clean white-walled room that allowed her to interface with the ship’s various systems and extensions. The wall was alight with red Critical System Alerts. Her tall reptilian body, an avatar she modeled off the G’lomin-sitiri, moved about the large room tapping the various alerts at a panicked pace. Several greater programs floating around her dodging and weaving in a ballot around her motions to address the minor functions that she could no longer allow to distract her.
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The programs, small pale blue glowing orbs, would dart around the room and tap an alert making a sharper pitch tweet as the alert required more attention. The program would then assess the alert and give it a priority in line with those of the other systems. If the alert was something that would not cause catastrophic failure within the next 10 minutes, the orb would continue to glow that pale blue, but it would then do everything in its power to soothe the situation. They would bridge connections, address nanobot repairs and instruct, or prep work on a droid for external critical repairs, though at the moment none existed.
Myna continued her work to keep her ship functioning. She had been limping this vessel along since her break away from the small fleet of Alliance ships that had aggressively escorted her out of the system. It had taken everything in her to break away, she has been holding this ship together more out of sheer will than anything else since.
She never once risked going into slipspace in order to make the trip at a faster pace. She couldn’t. The trans-dimensional travel method of leaving this universe to skirt along the fabric of spacetime was ten times faster than the speed of light, but the dimension it inhabited, was so devoid of anything other than those traveling through it, she would have been detected within moments, even entering a light year or two away from Alliance influenced areas. She could not risk leading the Alliance to any colony of travelers now, especially not to Jyi’ntol herself.
The droids that would normally repair the ship when it was damaged had been sacrificed in her escape. She had to set the nanobots to prioritize the ship’s critical systems. The nanobot reproductive rate with the materials the ship has encountered during their travels has been too low until now to consider repairing anything but critical systems. Even now while cannibalizing material from these primitive satellites, the ship has been unable to replicate enough material to bring the vessel out of critical shape. Though admittedly she has not allowed herself to indulge in processing the human’s functional machines. Not until now.
She had encountered several G’har ships in this system over the last decade, but she had always come out of the encounter intact, until three days ago.
Three days ago she had gone to the moons of Jupiter, cloaked as always, to investigate a carrier arrival. The ship was massive, able to carry millions of tons of compressed gases and ore mined from the gas giant and its moons. However, this carrier was being escorted by upgraded fighters from their homeworld. The moment that she came into range, before Myna had known they could see through her cloak she was fired upon. The plasma weapons had melted away swaths of her ships armor before she narrowly escaped.
She had learned through intercepted transmissions that the G’har Consortium had laws of non-interference with the indigionous inhabitants of a solar system they mine. They would mine the entire system, as long as that mining did not negatively impact the indigionous population and the planets they originate from. Essentially, Earth, it’s moon, and Mars were safe. Beyond those bodies, she could be attacked without provocation.
She continued to shutdown systems in areas deemed nonessential. Each time she did this, the room around her dimmed slightly. She is now standing in low diffused light working frantically from a panel that barely glowed. The panels around her were frantically being pressed by small flashing red dots of light all around. She set the nanobots to replicate and initialized their preprogrammed instructions. A final message read across the panel;
All Systems Dormant:
SYSTEM CRITICAL:
TOTAL LOCK UP:
The panel of light, the tiniest of blue flames in the night. It blinked blue.
It blinked blue and now she would sleep.