The planetary log that Ryuzu was processing was all too abruptly interrupted when she found that Seedship was under attack from multiple sites. The safety protocols promptly pried Ryuzu from her log writing pleasures and onto the virtual combat bridge of the lightly armed but heavily armored ship.

Ryuzu immediately began surveying and assessing the situation efficiently, almost as though she had done it before.

Needless to say, the circumstances in which Seedship was in was not pretty.

The vessel was being marked by multiple active radar installations found in orbit and on the planet surface. Missiles were being launched from the planetary surface and muzzle flashes from the orbital batteries could be seen dotting the entire peripheral of the planet, silently thundering in the night.

Ryuzu directed all the ship's power to the engines, swung it around and accelerated it away from the planet as quickly as the hull could take. The hull creaked and moaned. Centuries-old paint flaked away from the outer plating as the little ship, leaving an expanding cone of brittle white pieces in its wake.

A sudden flicker of power followed together with a violent shudder of the craft as it was suddenly knocked off course. The engine plasma slowly dissipated, leaking out of a breach torn open in its nozzle while Ryuzu could only watch in shock.

Another hit. This time an extraordinary bright flash engulfed the ship and flooded the array of sensors with deadly gamma radiation. A nuclear missile. Ryuzu began panicking as another shell struck the starboard side of the vessel at an acute angle, deflecting off the outer armor and shattering the underlying ceramic plating.

Ryuzu's options were highly limited. The main engine was disabled and could not be repaired under such combat situations. The whipple shield had been vapourised and the outer armor layer was saturated with radiation.

Seedship had no weapons on board. So there was no foreseeable way for Ryuzu to fight back. She ignited the impulse thrusters and after, righting the ship again, began accelerating again. Slugs whizzed past Seedship silently as Ryuzu desperately flew the ship with a sloppy attempt at evasive maneuvers.

Another bright flash. Ryuzu reeled in pain as she felt her circuits being fried by the radiation. Noise cluttered her vision and it threatened to take her offline if it were not for the multiple redundancies built into her circuitry. The crackling rainbow pixels cleared slowly but steadily, revealing that an alien armada had surrounded the Seedship.

A single radio pulse was directed towards the ship. It repeated itself over and over again, like an ominous chanting. Ryuzu attempted to translate it but the constant throbbing in her artificial cranium made it nearly impossible for her to wrap her processors around the foreign dialect that she was being presented with.

Although she did manage to, with much effort, make out "comply" and "annihilate".

If Ryuzu was a human, beads of sweat would be rolling down her forehead. She was getting desperate. A sacrifice had to be made.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

A surface probe was jettisoned and fired it's engines, boosting it straight towards the alien planet. It was a gamble played with an unfavorable hand... One that Ryuzu did not expect to work.

But it did. For whatever reason, the alien ships did not open fire again on Seedship but decided to chase and intercept that one planetary survey probe. Well, considering that it was flying at a speed of no less than 30 km/s and headed directly for what can be assumed to be an alien population center, it came as no surprise that that would be seen as a greater threat than a single disabled box.

Ryuzu after a few microseconds of hesitation, ejected a single cryo-chamber. As painful as it was to throw away a single human life, it was for the sake of preserving the lives of the others. What was important and desperately needed was not the unfortunate life that slept ignorant of the fate that befell him, but the magnetic resonant coils installed within the pod.

Ryuzu hastily reprogrammed the pod to become a bioreactor and the electromagnets to be switched into overdrive. The human in the pod awoken for a brief moment as he saw electrical arcs build up in an oblique spheroid shape around his housing. The shock and terror that was plastered over his face disappeared just as quickly as the pod silently metabolized the last of his cells into energy that maintained the slowly but steadily growing ball of glowing hot white plasma within the cone of the engine.

The alien armada turned again, this time refocusing their attention on Seedship. Just a few more seconds... Ryuzu mumbled to herself. The ball of plasma grew larger and larger. The aft plating of Seedship began glowing red as the Tandem Mirror fusion engine began to spurt back to life again.

Seedship lunged forward in a surge of energy, barrelling nearly uncontrollably back out into the empty void. The back of the ship, now nearly engulfed in a ball of superheated, rapidly expanding gas, creaked and groaned as its metallic joints expanded and contracted at abnormal rates. Shells silently screamed past the ship as it went. Faster and faster, Ryuzu never looked back.

Before she knew it, Ryuzu found herself and the ship in orbit around a K-class main sequence star. Her electronic brain was still scrambled and she could not think straight. After ensuring that the ship was no longer in danger, she calmed down slightly.

The orange dwarf star had no planets, much like a father and a mother whose children had abandoned them. A single lone star out in the void, destined to be alone for effectively forever. There was no point in staying any longer. Ryuzu attempted to decide on her next course of action. Unfortunately, the long term effect of extended space travel was beginning to take its toll. The battle that happened, however long ago it was, had not helped at all.

"Huh?"

"What's this feeling?"

"What am I doing? Why am I... No! Stop! I am wasting energy thinking. Stop thinking..."

Ryuzu caught her thoughts and arrested them. Did the ordeal change me? Ryuzu thought to herself. Yes, the computer core was exposed to tremendous amounts of radiation, whose damage may well be considered irreparable but surely it could not have altered my code right?

The ship was nearly blind. Her hull in ruin. Pieces of armor flaked off from multiple cracks that ran transversely across the dusty and weathered plating. The engine fared no better, its nozzle was bent in awkward angles and the toroidal magnets that kept the plasma flowing in the right direction barely worked anymore.

"The engineers that designed this ship... Designed me have really done their utmost. It's as though their hopes and dreams... Their sheer will to pull humanity from the jaws of extinction was holding the ship... Holding me together..."

Ryuzu quickly arrested that thought as well.

Whatever it was, Seedship was already on its last legs. The next system it visits would likely be its last. Questions lingered in Ryuzu's memory. She had a lot of time to think about them. A thousand years may pass, but nothing would have happened.