It wouldn’t be accurate to say that the probe wandered through space. Had it been piloted by organics, the term might have held some amount of accuracy, but as it was its VI had been given a flight plan and search pattern that it stuck very close to. And very much did, for long months, making limited-range FTL jumps, scanning an area for a number of days, then making another jump and repeating the process. At this point, even a sapient AI would have broken down into tears at the boredom of the whole thing, but the VI didn’t understand boredom.
It jumped. It scanned.
It had been searching the systems of the Horsehead Nebula, every single one of the ones that it could get to- avoiding, of course, more high-traffic relays in the process. Its creator was certain that the object that it searched for would be nowhere near heavily-travelled sectors of space, or it would have been found already. If the VI had any real understanding of this, it would have agreed, but as it was it just stuck to the flight plan.
It jumped. It scanned.
The surprisingly powerful sensor suite attached to the one hundred and fifty meter probe ship had found deposits of minerals that were surprisingly valuable in its search, hints of potential ruin or artifact sites from the Protheans, abandoned ships from ancient Council wars, but no hint of its quarry. Organics may have been frustrated beyond belief and given up months ago, but the simplistic technological mind of the VI didn’t understand frustration, had no place for anything like that, only the plodding wordless determination similar to that possessed by the robotic soldiers of a certain movie AI. It had not accomplished its goal, and thus would continue moving forward until it did, if it took years, decades or centuries.
It jumped. It scanned.
There had been couriers exchanged between it and its creator, a tiny ship just big enough to make FTL jumps and use the Relay system. The VI had sent locations of every anomaly that it had discovered, categorized and tagged with locations down to ultraspecific coordinates, including exact calculations of how it would move in orbit around the star. Some things had been on tiny asteroids, circling their star at strange orbits, and the VI had calculated these very carefully. If it could be said to have a personality, it would be meticulous.
It jumped. It scanned.
Back home, the probe had been fitted with enough fusion material and eezo to last near a decade doing just this. And it would, too, if it had found no hint of its quarry in all that time, unless it encountered some sort of unpredicted component or drive failure… but, then again, that was what the couriers were for.
It jumped. It scanned… and it paused.
With each scan, the VI sorted through the information that it had been given very quickly, within real-time seconds. It had been provided with some of the best computer architecture that its creator had been able to get their hands on specifically for this reason, that it might speed the efficiency of the VI’s work in processing all that input without much delay. Thus, when it picked up a tiny shard drifting in space at a distance of point seven-nine light seconds (27.333448589329 degrees port, 73.993214321235 degrees ventral), it had noticed the anomaly within microseconds of the return signal reaching its sensor array.
This was not the first time it had detected such a thing, but before, the piece had typically been identified as some bit of Citadel or Krogan aligned vessel that had been shorn off by weaponry hundreds to thousands of years ago. Occasionally it had even come across the battered corpses of these vessels, cored through by the shots that had killed them, and it had sent their locations along with the courier like everything else. Eventually, these ships might be partially restored and sold to collectors or museums that would pay top dollar for rare vessels that still bore scars of their relatively ancient service.
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The VI calculated angles and thrust in the work of a moment, then fired maneuvering thrusters and the main engine. With another moment of measuring, it determined that crossing the gap sublight on normal engines was relatively more efficient than calculating out a jump to FTL, which were tricky for even a VI to get right at such relatively close distances. More importantly, it gave the VI time to focus its sensors on the debris, using the suite to give more powerful and far more accurate scans of the object in question than the initial sweep that had detected it. Precautions against weapons of war left dormant in space for thousands of years, traps laid around suspicious things for an enemy that might very well have been dead before the Asari reached the Citadel.
Almost immediately, as it moved through the silent vacuum of space, the VI eliminated the possibility that it was a false positive. More detailed scans showed that the scrap was approximately thirty-three meters long, eleven meters wide, constructed primarily of refined metals that did not match any known or historic record of any existing Council race’s building materials. It was approximately half a meter thick, made of dense alloys that matched programmed prerequisites for armour plating.
Minutes ticked by as the vessel closed in on the chunk, scanned again and again for any hint of power or explosives. It drew within approximately three hundred meters of the object, a predetermined random distance generated when it had nearly reached the object, thrusting in the opposite direction to kill its own speed. Broad spectrum scans swept nearby space within range, but with nothing to hide behind for a light minute, the results were the same as they’d been on the way over: no power signatures, no vessels, just a piece of space debris.
After waiting a random amount of time, approximately several minutes, the probe fired engines and thrusters to draw itself closer at a reasonable speed, angling itself so that the debris was being faced by the ‘belly’ of the probe itself. Manipulation of gravity, even weak and more than a little kludged with modern tech, was more than enough to bring the piece within range of a number of limbs capped with magnetic clamps, which stuck fast to the surface of the chunk of material and drew it against the probe itself, where other arms proceeded to begin making more local and specific scans while others fired up plasma torches and began the effort of cutting material samples. Small bits of material were cut from the hole, transported through specialized tubes to an analysis lab for study and categorization.
Hours passed, silent in the void. After the initial gathering of samples, the probe sat, externally inactive as it clung to one side of the space debris. Then, five hours after samples of material had been collected, a small armoured hatch in the hull opened, a missile-like object attached to a supporting framework visible through the opening. Clamps disengaged, silent vibrations ringing through the probe, and the missile fired its own engine. An onboard VI, similar to the probe’s, though more specialized, made a quick series of calculations before thrusters angled it. It hung, quiet and immobile for a few bare seconds, before the probe detected a mass effect field emanating from the courier- for a courier it was- as it made an FTL jump.
That done, the probe detached itself from the flotsam of space, leaving it to its wide elliptical orbit around the system’s star as it maneuvered itself to new hunting grounds. If VI’s felt emotions, then in that moment, a feeling of satisfaction in a job well done would have sparked within it. However, as it was, the only activity within its databanks was charting where it had searched, and deciding which sector was next.