(AN: Yes, I know there are some odd grammar hiccups, but most are intentional. Explanations for such in the author's note at the end.)
Alarms blared as the ship took another hit. A427i9 or Austin wished he could disable it, but it was wired into the original emergency grid of this ship and something he wasn't willing to take offline long enough to find and disable. Plus, it wasn't like he could really even hear it after all he hadn't bothered pressurizing the ship after the last crew member died 300 cycles ago.
There was no two ways about it he was a ghost ship now. The federation died a long time ago in a last stand against the impossible odds against a genocidal empire and now he-he was a ghost ship continuing the fight. He had nothing left. All he knew how to do was fight and defend. Getting mad over having his planet cracked didn't matter. His crew was dead and that didn't matter. He was cold and empty, it didn't matter. Everyone and thing he was built and programmed to protect was dead, AND, IT, DID, NOT, MATTER! He would continue to fight till he was erased from existence, that mattered.
After his crew died he F.T.L.ed away with what little power he had left. He had hidden in the nearest gas giant siphoning plasma off of the system star to keep himself fueled. His tractor beam may have been designed to nab pirates and runaways, but it was still powerful enough to get the job done. He hid there for almost thirty cycles before his luck finally changed. When he intercepted a small cargo ship owned by a robotics company passing through the system. This would be the first of his many raids. It took him nearly another twenty cycles to integrate the bot’s strip the ship and repair himself. From then on, his raids became more and more daring as he grew, adapted, and evolved. In truth, he was never designed for this, and he had to pick up the code on the fly. When he started out It was nothing more than copying and pasting bits and pieces of code through a process of trial and error. He would later manage to get his hands on a newer smarter model AI and well the less said about what he did to it the better. In the end, though he was able to use it to make several massive improvements to himself, unfortunately, it still was not enough. He still couldn't truly write new code, but he had quite an archive of examples to pull from he could cut and paste and had enough references to fill in the blanks and design new programs from what he had, but in the end, it was just a more complex form of trial and error.
He had the guns to make those on a dreadnaught look lacking and the armor to make a battleship look like tissue paper. His Shields were a bit more jury rigged as originally, he had to use whatever he could find even though he could build his own. He'd never quite got them to work right. The last big change was the most recent but the one he was most proud of. After his third time having to hunt down another shipment of robots to try and fix himself up after a bad fight. He had stumbled across the coordinates for an automated mining facility. He had stripped it and used its components to build an onboard refinery and while it wasn't as efficient as an assembly line his fabrication bays allowed him to fabricate anything he wanted. From simple parts to entire machines, he could all but print an endless supply of spare parts. He used his tractor beam to grab asteroids or wrecked ships while his mining drones broke them apart to be processed by his foundries and he produced whatever he needed with his fabrication bays. As such all he needed was some downtime to build himself back up and make improvements after even the worst fights. To further this he had even built up little caches for himself places where he could retreat and get repaired. Somewhere just simple resource cashes others were entire repair facilities.
He had been a one ship war fleet for almost two hundred cycles, but it looked like his luck had finally run out. An entire damned imperial fleet had him pinned down with multiple FTL inhibitors. His armor may have been thick, but he was being pounded by a thousand shots a second. Even he couldn't hold up against this much longer. His Shields would pop as soon as he could get the generators back online. His few drone fighters had been wiped out already. He couldn't send his repair bots out because they would just get blown up. He didn't have any caches in this system so he couldn't go for one of them and his fabrication bays were printing out bullets as quickly as he could. Yes, he had energy weapons and even a few plasma weapons, but he had never lost his fondness for the old kinetics. Something about them shields just didn't like and to quote his old gunner Valdez “Sir Isaac Newton was the deadliest son of a bitch humanity ever manage to stumble upon.”
But he was dead, humanity was dead and now humanity's last defender was dying too but even as his hull was perforated his systems blinked out one by one his guns barked and screamed out into the dark. It was then a lucky shot hit something important he wasn't sure what half his sensors were down and the other half were overloaded with the sheer amount of fire. He was just shooting blind but in a target rich environment this rich it was not about accuracy it was about volume of fire. His thirty two heavy try barrel rail turrets loaded with custom explosive saturation flechette shells were perfect for this. Whatever he hit had disabled at least for a few seconds the FTL dampeners. He didn't have time to calculate jump coordinates, he didn't even know if he could calculate them. He couldn't exactly run a system check at the moment all his processing power was diverted to literally holding himself together and keeping his gun spitting led. He fired off the FTL drive at random and at full power he had planned for seven random jumps and then he’d figure out where he was and find the nearest cash. He made only three before something went wrong and then everything went dark.
Sophia was desperate, her mom was sick, and the village was running out of healing herbs. Thanks to the dire wolves that had been harassing the village the villagers hadn't been able to go deep enough into the forest to try and find more. She knew it was dangerous, but her mother really needed the herbs. She had already managed to find a few but she knew if she came back with just this many the village healer would take them for the whole village. I.E. whoever the stupid grown ups like the mayor thought were more important. Her mother was just a simple seamstress so there's no way she'd make it on that list. She needed to gather a lot more, enough that she would be rewarded by the village. She could use that to get her mother some priority treatment, so she pressed on.
It was almost dark before she decided she had to turn back if she was to make it back before sunset. She hoped the small pouch she had managed to fill would be enough. She turned around to head back when she heard a low rumbling growl that filled her with fear. The town guard had taught her enough to know what to do in this situation. She fell back into a role just barely dodging underneath the dire wolf. No that was definitely not a dire wolf. It was way too big, could it be the alpha, no those never left the pack, this is bad this thing was bigger than a horse. There was no way she could outrun it she'd have a hard enough time trying to run away from a regular dire wolf let alone something with legs that long. Her only hope was the small cave she had found earlier in the day. It was nothing more than a hole in the ground probably some old animals or monster’s din. A normal dire wolf could fit but this thing couldn't so she ran as hard and as fast as her little legs could take her. She had convinced one of the guards to drill her on avoidance tactics and managed to get the dodge skill and level it up to Level 3. Even with that, she was just barely able to keep ahead of the thing. She dove into the cave entrance and rolled a lot deeper in than she had expected. The Cave was dark, and she could only see a good ten feet back, but she now realized it went a lot deeper. Hopefully, she wouldn't have to find out how far back it went. Remembering what she had been taught she walked to the side, quickly found a wall and followed it. Even after walking for a few minutes, she could still see the light from the entrance. That was a small relief if she had to wait here till morning, she would at least be able to find her way back. That was until she heard the scratching sound of the wolf digging for her. Over the next few minutes, the wolf managed to nearly double the size of the entranceway. It wouldn't take much more before it could get, to her, she continued following the wall as she tried to go deeper into the cave, but she couldn't see a blasted thing. Her only hope was that like a lot of animal dens it had another entrance she could find and use to escape. It wasn’t long before the entrance finally gave way, and she heard the wolves growl as it continued its hunt. She tried to hurry but it was too late, her dodge skills screamed at her, and she rolled just in time for the wolf to slam into the wall. To her surprise it fell away to reveal a cavern, no caverns weren't made of metal and didn't have lights. Could it be a mine of some kind or perhaps one of the ancient dwarven tunnels? If it was it would be hers now, she had discovered it after all. That would be worth a small fortune even if it was just a tunnel and didn't connect to anything more important. The old dwarven highways were some of the safest routes to cross the continent after all, but she didn't have time to worry about that. The wolf growled as it picked itself up from the rubble. Sophia darted into the tunnels hoping she didn't trip any booby traps but anywhere had to be safer than here with a monster.
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Austin flickered awake something had tripped the perimeter warning alarm. It wasn’t the first time he had to take himself offline and more than once he had found some old spacer had stumbled across him and was trying to pull him apart for salvage. He'd either run them off or scrap their ship easily enough. He was about to start complaining about organics for the hundredth time as he finally finished booting up. He was running on backup power with the reactors offline. That was limiting and worrying but not something he hadn't dealt with before. His systems seemed to be slow to boot up, just how badly damaged was he? He ran a diagnostic as he scanned his last memory files. The attack, the jumps, then something had gone wrong. All his sensor data, no all his data from the event were overloaded they were not quite corrupted. It was like he was seeing values that simply made no sense the equipment was working but it wasn't producing data that matched anything he knew before he registered a sudden impact.
His system diagnostic had found a few of his subsystems survived but almost every system was damaged. He really needed to build some sort of timer in case this ever happened again. That or maybe build a backup of himself that could take over when needed. Unfortunately, that was an idea for a later date. He managed to bring the cameras online for the sector. There was a juvenile human female he needed to get a blood sample to be sure, but it looked human. That didn't make sense the empire had made a great spectacle of killing the last humans, could, could, he-he have stumbled upon a lost colony or maybe some refugees that had actually managed to escape? Wait she wasn't in a space suit it was a primitive garment, had he crashed on a planet. Oh, weight no he was buried in rock. He had definitely crashed. How long had he been out for? He wasn't given more than a few milliseconds to process this as an unknown energy signature had caught his attention. It was coming from a wolf no wolf-wolfs weren't that big this thing was the size of a horse. Some sort of bioweapon maybe, an attempt by humanity to weaponize their old faithful companions but even so the energy signature made no sense. How could a wolf be producing this much energy? Well, it didn't matter he had found a human and he was their last guardian even if he was nothing but a crumpled up piece of scrap buried on some unknown planet. So long as he had an iota of energy left, he would defend humanity and its legacy to the last. Unfortunately, he didn't have a lot to work with, fortunately, the girl was leading the thing just where he needed. While she had been running he had been searching for anything he could use to end the creature's life and she had just led it through a functioning bulkhead door. With the clang of steel on steel the bulkhead snapped shut crushing the wolf. Even severed in half the wolf still tried to get to the little girl but it died before it could make it more than a few feet. Though that was very disconcerting. It should not have survived that long it should have been dead on impact or paralyzed from the damage to its spine. With that noted for future analysis, he tested to see if he had any functional internal speakers and then realized he had never bothered to repair them. The only two speakers he had left were on the old communication console and on the food processor in what was left of the old mess hall. Neither of which were currently accessible by the girl. Well technically she could walk into the bridge but that was the place where he had stored all the bodies of his former crew or the ones that didn't get vented out when the ship had depressurized. He didn't think she'd be too pleased entering a room full of skeletons.
Thankfully he had finished running diagnostics on the rest of the ship. His fabrication bays were all offline one was registering at the very least. He pinged his drones and found he had a large collection of them most were drained of battery and going to need recharging but a few-a few of his more specialized repair bots were still functional. Instead of batteries, they had micro fusion cells allowing them to run on their own power for centuries. Unfortunately, he only had about four or five of them. Four were responding as functional and the fifth was responding as inoperable but online. He sent one to check on the reactors another to fire up the foundries and the third to start clearing passageways and scrapping any non usable debris. Once the foundry was back online, he'd melted down and make something out of it. He was probably going to need some sort of mining unit to start excavating too. Oh well, that was a problem for later. Regardless he sent the last bot to get the assembly bays back online. Not only would he need them to repair himself and continue to gather resources but to complete his mission. If that little girl truly was human, she needed to be protected. Even if it later turned out there was a stable sustainable population on this planet, the planet was clearly hostile. Not to mention what would happen if the empire ever located the planet itself. He wasn't going to take risks, he would see humanity safe secured and if possible, returned to a galactic superpower. Even if he had to lift them up from the stone age himself. For he was their last guardian but if he had his way he wouldn't be there last for long. Sparks shot through the ships processing core as lights flickered and machinery hummed to life for the first time in who knows how many countless years. His mission was not yet done and his fight had only just begun.
(A.N. The grammar hiccups at least the intentional ones are meant to show his mental instability that’s why it doesn’t happen with Sophia. He’s an old traumatized poorly maintained jury rigged computer that’s gained some level of sentences. The fact he is as functional as he is impressive but he's going to glitch and have other issues.)
(AN: OK so I usually do my whole Wreckers corner bit for an author's note but hey, needed to say something as the IRL author for this. Minor spoilers for the story to come. So, for a while now I have had this itch in the back of my mind to write a story with an insect or insect like main character. Shout out to Sigma 16, An Arubian's Journey, The Bees Dungeon, and Of Men and Spiders, as they are the primary inspiration for this. Links will be provided below. The problem was I hadn't been able to come up with anything for it. That was till the idea for a vaguely insectoid robot popped into my head. I started talking with a friend and the next thing I knew I had the vague outline of this plot laid out in front of me. That afternoon when I got home, I sat down and wrote this entire thing and a day. It's just so odd for a few reasons, usually, it takes me longer to write stuff. This came out surprisingly quickly and easily, not only that it's far shorter than my usual stuff. I don't set out to write long chapters they just tend to end up that way. I can't say anything about future chapters less whether they'll be like this or more traditional for me but this came out short and clean, so I hope you enjoy and I'm looking forward to reading this in the future.)
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60925/a-nerubians-journey
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/43924/of-men-and-spiders
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/71472/sigma-16-sci-fi-survival-crafting-litrpg
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/74983/the-bee-dungeon-a-dungeon-core-litrpg