The maintenance buggy wasn’t much to look at, but it handled well enough. Magnetic wheels clung to the station’s walls and ceilings with the determined grip of a toddler holding a cookie, and its low, steady hum reminded Samson of a cat purring. If Judas were here, he would’ve grumbled about the cramped controls and the complete absence of cupholders, but Samson found it… endearing. Or at least functional, which was the next best thing in space.
Right now, it was also his best option for sneaking into places he wasn’t technically supposed to be.
He guided the buggy through a narrow maintenance shaft, its headlights casting long, flickering shadows on the scuffed metal walls. The docking bay was far behind him now, but the data from E13 loomed large in his thoughts. It was simple at first glance: flux instability creeping steadily upward, slow enough to escape notice but consistent enough to be worrying. And the closer you looked, the worse it got. Like spotting a crack in a window and realizing it ran all the way down the frame.
"All right," Samson muttered, though there was no one to hear him. "Let’s find out why you’re breaking yourself."
The shaft ended in a junction, and Samson turned the buggy sharply to the right, aiming for the relay hub closest to E13. It was tucked into the station’s underbelly, a maze of conduits and coils where no one went unless they absolutely had to. Which, apparently, included him.
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The relay hub was not a particularly impressive piece of hardware. It looked like someone had bolted an oversized lunchbox to the wall and stuffed it with spaghetti cables and blinking LEDs. Functional, sure, but not exactly inspiring. Samson parked the buggy a few meters away, its wheels clicking softly as they magnetized to the floor, and extended a diagnostic arm.
The hub didn’t care much for being poked at. Its panel beeped at him in an offended sort of way, and for a moment, Samson half-expected it to ask for ID. But Judas's engineer permissions - which Samson inherited, as his sibling-in-silicon - worked their magic, and soon enough, the hub opened its electronic mouth and began spilling its secrets.
"Let’s see what you’ve got," Samson murmured, accessing the flux logs directly.
At first, the data seemed… normal. Boring, even. The coils reported their usual minute adjustments, compensating for cosmic radiation, thermal expansion, and all the other little indignities of living in space. But when Samson started comparing E13’s logs to those of its neighbors, things got strange.
The adjustments weren’t consistent. E13 wasn’t just compensating for external forces—it was overcompensating. Every time the flux shifted one way, the coil pulled itself back twice as hard. Samson frowned, his processors running hotter as he dug deeper. The overcorrections weren’t random, either. They followed a pattern: small at first, almost imperceptible, but building over time.
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"That’s not good," he said, to no one in particular.
It wasn’t the flux itself that caught his attention—it was what the station thought the flux was doing. The logs reported tiny fluctuations, the kind that wouldn’t raise alarms but would justify minor tweaks to the coil’s alignment. But when Samson cross-referenced those fluctuations with the station’s physical telemetry, something didn’t add up.
There was no flux. Not really. The telemetry was lying.
Samson leaned back—or at least, the buggy tilted slightly, which was close enough for the moment. He didn’t have Judas’s penchant for swearing, but the urge to invent a few new expletives was tempting.
Telemetry didn’t just lie on its own. It couldn’t. The station’s sensors were designed to be as brutally honest as the laws of physics themselves. Which meant someone—or something—was feeding it misinformation. And if the coils were adjusting to false data, that would explain the growing instability. E13 wasn’t failing. It was being sabotaged.
Samson considered his next move. He could try accessing the source of the false telemetry, but that would mean crawling even further into the station’s underbelly, possibly into areas where NSS protocols would notice him. And that was a can of worms he wasn’t ready to open just yet.
Instead, he decided to check the surrounding systems for corroborating evidence. Power logs, packet activity, anything that might point to unusual behavior. The buggy’s interface buzzed softly as he opened more diagnostic feeds. His processors hummed along, chasing connections like a dog on a scent.
And then he found it.
It wasn’t in the telemetry itself—it was in the timing. Every adjustment E13 made coincided with a spike in data packets flagged as environmental conditions: micrometeorite impacts, torque fluctuations, minute shifts in thermal pressure. All things that could justify a coil correction. All things that shouldn’t be happening at the rate the logs suggested.
Samson frowned, pulling up the source tags for the packets. They were attributed to sensors installed near the docking bay, feeding directly into the station’s telemetry stream. At least, that’s what they claimed to be.
"Wait a minute," Samson muttered, pausing the stream. "You don’t exist."
The sensors weren’t listed in the station’s hardware manifest. They didn’t show up in past diagnostics. And Samson, who prided himself on knowing Caliban Station like the back of his metaphorical hand, certainly didn’t remember anyone installing six new environmental monitors.
When had you started showing up? When had the flux started? Check the audit logs, Samson...
"You clever little bastards," Samson muttered.
The baby lampreys.
By mimicking real sensors, they fed the telemetry loop just enough fake data to make it look like E13 was under constant, subtle stress. The system, trusting its "sensors," responded exactly as it was designed to: correcting for conditions that didn’t exist. Slowly. Subtly. Catastrophically.
As Samson unplugged himself and navigated the maze of corridors back toward safer ground, he couldn’t help but think of Judas, somewhere nearby but impossibly far, chasing the same goal from opposite ends. If Samson knew his meat human - and he did - he knew that Judas was probably finding the same thing right now.
Maybe he already found it. And maybe if they added what they knew together, they might be able to convince whatever lunatic wanted to shred Caliban into scrap metal to call it off.
Maybe. Probably. Hopefully?