As it turns out, a COG vacuum suit is more akin to a small spaceship than the flimsy bit of, admittedly high tech fabric I wore when I was kicking out that vampire from the hole it had made in the ship. Instead of fabric, most of the suit was made of articulating plates, that connected to my new set of implants almost as soon as I put the helmet and backpiece on, making it feel less like piloting a mech and more like moving my own body.
You know, other than the fact that it was as bulky as the space suits astronauts in my own time wore.
“This is pretty cool... arguably cooler than 100% synch, since I don't feel as disconnected from my body.” I said as I moved the arms of the suit in the small space of the airlock that was currently cycling.
“From these readings you are still at 100% synch, just with the suit,and since the suit has less processing power I believe your brain is still able to process both it and your bodies inputs. The suit also has overall fewer inputs and outputs, so it is likely your mind is less overwhlemed by stimuli” Hook said, this time not coming through inside my head but through a tinny little speaker built into the helmet.
“You sure that's why?”
“No I am not sure. The suit is a black box to me other than what you directly transmit.”
“Hook, are you not able to interface with my implants through this thing?”
“No, the suit is shielded against all EM radiation and is designed to be hard to hack. You will have to manually accept all inputs you want from the outside. If you wish the suit to relay me to your implants, you just need to think it.”
“Mmmm... let's keep you on radio for now. You've been talking in my head so much sometimes it gets hard for me to discern you from the random thoughts I have to myself.”
“Fine” Hook said, sounding miffed.
“I'm going to head over now.”
“With your permission I will task two of the remaining combat drones to fly escort with you.”
A permission box appeared to me, I thought-clicked it as I pushed my way out of the airlock. and felt authorization codes flow from my... internal network? To the ship.
I tumbled in space for a moment, vertigo fighting with a feeling of wonder. The last time I had been outside the ship I had been dangling from a rope and fighting for my life, but now I got to revel in the feeling of weightlessness.
With a thought my tumble stabilized as my suit fired thrusters to arrest my roll, and with another thought I turned and beheld the ship I had been flying for the last few days.
It was significantly smaller than it had been. When Bait had been flying the vessel it had been a wide wedge with a very narrow profile top-down. Now it looked more like a broad spear tip, with flattened sides and a swollen belly where we had put in the extra cargo space.
As I watched two drones popped out of the remaining drone bay.
They were not what I expected.
When I thought drone I had thought, maybe something at most human sized, with wings or something.
Each of these was the size of a motorcycle, and instead of wings they each had... eight arms? More? These arms seemed to aim any which way the drone wanted, firing off blasts of plasma to send it in whichever direction it chose at any particular moment.
They seemed to swim through space, like a squid or octopi from old earth, their arms folding behind them and forming a combined thrust plume that jetted them towards me, before flaring all their arms out and firing their thrusters forward to arrest their momentum right next to me.
As I looked closer at the chassis, I felt a sort of... organic take on the design. There were two sensor domes mounted next to eachother, and below that a wicked looking barrel of what must be the primary weapon. The rest of the drone was geometrically shaped, hexagonal and octagonal plates fit together in a way that was sleek and pleasing. I received a request to link to my implants from the drones and accepted, half because the thought of irritating Hook appealed to me, and half because these drones were fascinating right now.
I reached out to the drone and ran my hand across it's paneling. I had expected it to do nothing, but instead I received a pleasant feedback hum through my fingers, and the drone rolled over to present it's 'belly'. Taking the hint, I rand my hand over the paneling, pausing for a moment when I felt a panel shift, and pressed on it. It gave a satisfying 'click' as it slid fully into place, and the drone span away.
I got a link request from the drone directly, and unlike with Hook, I accepted it into my implants.
Instead of a rush of data, I got what felt like a rush of emotions,
GRATITUDE
PLAYFULNESS
WATCHFULNESS
I felt more than saw an exchange between it and the other drone, which looked virtually identical to the first, though presumably without the loose panel.
ADMONISHMENT
VOID=DANGER
The drone I had been playing with paused, and somehow with it's arms managed to look chastened, and took up an escort formation with the other drone.
I looked over to the other drone and reached out for it, but it gently 'swam' out of my reach.
“Not sentient my ass, these things behave like cats. Or maybe dogs and cats, I am getting a distinctly cat vibe from this one.”
“As I said before, the drones are entirely non-sapient, just like me.” Hook replied
“Yeah I'm not sure I believe you on that either. I think I'm going to have to look at Bait's personal logs to see what she says about that.”
“Captain-Hook's Personal Logs are sealed.”
“Pretty sure Captain's authority can open them.”
“Yes, well, maybe you shouldn't.” Hook replied curtly
“See, it's things like that that make me damn sure something more is going on with you. And with these drones.”
The one on the right, the 'cat' drone, was maintaining a fairly fixed distance from me, but the other one was moving in close, definitely within arms reach, before darting away.
Once when it got close enough I brushed my fingers over one of it's limbs... tendrils?
It immediately flashed a few of it's lights at me, did a little spin in space, and darted off.
Once more I felt more than heard the transmission from the cat-drone that was more of an angry Blurt than anything intelligible.
“I think I'm going to call you Dog-drone.” I said to the rambunctious drone that kept moving in for pats.
There was a happy blurt from the Dog-drone.
“And you are Cat-drone”, I said to the drone keeping it's distance.
No response from the Cat-drone.
“That's about what I expected.”
We got nearer to Joe's ship and we had to slow way down. The missile that had gutted it had flung debris everywhere, and I was surrounded by razor sharp shards of metal.
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Cat-drone moved ahead and began using half of it's tentacles to shunt debris out of our path, while puppy-drone moved until it was actually touching me from behind. A little clamp grabbed onto my suit and all of it's tentacles surged around me, covering me from all angles.
As we moved I started to take in the relative sizes of the ships around me.
Hook had shrunk in size but I was still surprised at how much bigger than it CupAJoe was. Joe's vessel was nearly twice as long and eight times as wide as Hook, resembling more a flying wing than anything else. And they were both dwarfed by the ark, which looked like it could have docked ten CupAJoe's easily, lengthwise, at it's longest, and I had no idea of it's width.
“Hey Hook?”
“Yes Captain Cofey?”
“How many pods are on board the ark?”
“Fifty-thousand approximately, I have no idea how many of those are still viable.”
“Damn... How were Bait and Joe going to wake everyone?”
“The plan I believe was to tow the vessel somewhere they could make a facility to handle everyone. That obviously did not go as planned.”
A sliver of razor sharp hull metal came my way, knocked towards me by one of the pieces of debris cat-drone threw impacting another piece of debris, and puppy-drones tendril swiveled out and knocked it away, before said tendril went back to surrounding me, protecting me I realized.
“These drones are very good at their jobs. It's a full blown kessler syndrome out here”
“We have spent a long time getting the AI in our drones, both combat and repair, to be the best of the three factions.”
“Still out shined by the alliance though huh?”
“The alliances drones are bullshit.” Hook replied hotly
“Really Hook?”
“They use space magic. They cheat.”
“Someone sounds defensive.”
“I'm not being defensive. They cheat. They use combinational synthesis of several esoteric xeno organs to create effects that have no place in reality.”
“You are just miffed you cannot replicate the effects with technology aren't you.”
“Not 'just' miffed. You know we were the leaders in all drone technology until they figured out how to cast their minds to drones? Up till then they were just using their powers from their ship, which was fine, sure suddenly getting your ship slammed into another out of nowhere is grating, but we have special equipment we can put on our ships that make the other factions pull their hair out. But now they have things like blink fields and telekinetic shields around each and every one of their drones? It's bullshit. Bullshit of the highest order.” Hook ranted
“Not sapient my ass.” I muttered under my breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, almost at Joe's ship.”
We had arrived during Hook's rant. While Bait's ship Hook had been a sleek delta shaped vessel originally, Joe's vessel was a wide semicircle, the engines clustered on the flat end. Most of the port side was totaled, but the rest seemed to be intact enough.
“So that is the CupAJoe... I cannot believe how you people name your ships.”
“What do you mean 'you people'”
“Don't worry about it, we'll go in through the damaged section.”
I indicated with my thoughts and cat-drone sped off in a tangle of limbs and began darting from one section to another at the damaged section. Dog-drone and I just hung there, though it popped out from behind my back and moved it's chassis forward, so it was hovering just beside me. I could see several of it's sensors swiveling back and forth.
I rested my hand on the top of it's chassis and ran it over it's hull metal. I could feel a low rumble from deep inside it. It was comforting, in a way, like a cat's purr or the beat of a heart.
Some time later Cat-drone moved back up to us, using two of it's arms to clear a corridor in the debris for us to advance.
We followed, Dog-drone taking up it's position behind me, which I belatedly realized gave it the most reach on it's arms to block debris from hitting me, while still allowing it to use the main drive on the rear of it's hull without torching me. I hadn't noticed because they had not lit it off while I was around them, but the massive cannon assembly in the front of each drone was matched by an equally massive cone or thruster on the back.
“Hook, do the drones main guns and their drive share a power source.”
“More than that, they are effectively the same apparatus. The drive in the back is designed to direct exhaust from their fusion plasma core in a powerful flare to propel them, while the front is designed to encase said plasma in electromagnetic packets and fire it out to destroy targets. A mechanism similar to this is in the end of each of their limbs, but both less specialized and less powerful.”
“Less specialized meaning?”
“They can use the fusing plasma coming out of their limbs as either propulsion or cutting torch, or even a short range flamethrower of sorts if they are in a boarding action.”
Suddenly the limbs surrounding and protecting me took on a more dangerous air.
“So... this lil guy is doing more than just herding me with his arms isn't he.”
“Correct, it has it's arms set to a point defense mode. If any object is coming in too fast to just move it out of the way or block it it will use it's fusion torches to both attempt to destroy the incoming object and move you away. One of the upsides of using plasma as your primary weapon, you can also use it as propellant, and vice versa.”
“These guys must burn through a lot of fuel then... Hydrogen?”
“Mostly, we have a few additives to the fuel that help achieve fusion at a lower temperature but essentially.”
We had made it about halfway through the field during this conversation, when all of a sudden dog-bot's arms all rotated in sync and fired off a hellstorm of white-hot flames at something moving too fast for me to see. My visor instantly went dark, saving my eyes, and I felt myself slammed back into the drone as multiple limbs wrapped around me.
I blinked and thought-sent a request for an update to the drones, and they began filling my head with telemetry which... I found I could understand, strangely enough.
A big chunk of debris had come whipping around the far side of the Ark ship and had nearly bisected me, Dog-bot had fired all eight of it's plasma-burners... fusion burners? The dog-bot didn't call them anything but a string of ID numbers. Anyway it fired all eight of those at the piece of scrap, which deflected it, but had sent us off of our course and onto a direct collision course with the CupAJoe, at which point Dog-Bot had grabbed me and forcibly moved us back on course to safety...
And driven us almost all the way to the entry point that cat-bot had found.
I blinked, I hadn't really had a chance to be afraid, but now the fear was coming, and instantly being replaced with relief at still being alive
I waved to the two drones and gave dog-drone a thumbs up.
It wiggled back and forth in space at me.
“Stay here, I don't think you'll fit.”
It sent what felt like a whine through our connection, while cat-drone simply moved up over the entryway wwe were going to be using to cup-a-joe and draped itself across it, staring at me.
“I'll be back soon.”
And with that I headed inside.