“They call me mad, but upon observing my own thoughts, I think that I am quite sane. Maybe they are the ones who are mad?”

-The Overmind

***Outer Rim***

***Centipede***

Centipede was just one of many observation drones, a copied undermind of the Cyber. It had long since stopped thinking of itself as 'human'. For decades it had drifted in space, waiting. Many ships had come and gone over the years. They had paid only brief attention to the asteroid belt of this unnamed and unimportant system.

The Overmind had nonetheless seen it necessary to position a stationary force in this area to keep an eye on things.

The long periods of inactivity were nerve-wrecking and Centipede slowly got bored with doing nothing. Once every few years, a ship from the Prip would pay the system a visit, but the Prip were a primitive race, barely capable of space flight. They didn't warrant much attention.

Their computer security was laughable and easily breached without even touching their ship, so Centipede and others like it hadn't had any excitement in years. Not that such a thing meant much to an augmented mind like Centipede. It could bend and stretch its perception of time as it pleased to bridge the long timespans of waiting and doing nothing, playing the silent observer.

That didn't make the appearance of an unknown ship any less exciting.

The swarm of observer drones immediately locked onto the intruder and followed its course while specialized elements tried to analyse the ship's emissions in hope of finding a radio-frequency or some other means of communication to infiltrate their computer systems.

But to Centipede's and its comrades' surprise, the ship was completely silent and unresponsive. Apparently it relied completely on passive means of gathering information. There also wasn't much to learn from the claw-like, slightly ominous shape.

The ship flew in a slight arc through the system, using one of the large gas-giants as a means of changing its trajectory towards the asteroid belt.

During the manoeuvre, another drone came close enough to shoot a few high-resolution images. The images were fine, but after a detailed study of the ship, the swarm only knew as much as before. The unknown species clearly didn't think much of placing any names, markings, or letters on their ships, which was slightly puzzling. Normally, a few markings on airlocks or the like were enough to glean at least some information.

Maybe they were blind?

When the strange ship entered the asteroid belt, something unlikely happened. Well, it wasn't really unlikely, given that the system was swarming with thousands of drones just like Centipede. What was unlikely, was that the ship chose a course which brought it into Centipede's reach, instead of one of its brethren.

G.O.D.: New Quest! Investigate the strange ship.

The swarm quickly exchanged a flurry of communication as G.O.D. issued a new quest, something that didn't happen all too often nowadays. At least not for lowly drones like the ones which made up the swarm. Normally, only the highly independent and individual overminds would be given such opportunities.

So it wasn't much of a surprise when the swarm opted to take the quest. They had orders to stay hidden and to investigate any possible threat to the colony. Their orders were clear, and normally they wouldn't have taken the risk of revealing themselves by investigating the ship.

But a quest was a possibility for them to become overminds of their own. Being faced with the potential gain, the majority of the swarm voted to construe their orders in a way which made it necessary to investigate the unidentified ship.

After analysing the ship's trajectory, it fell to Centipede to intercept it.

After decades of waiting, Centipede coiled its segmented body up like a spring and pushed itself away from the asteroid it had clung to.

Centipede folded in its many legs and used some of its fuel reserves to propel itself onto an interception course with the strange vessel. Unlike solar energy, the fuel couldn't be easily replenished and Centipede registered the loss of every drop.

Should there be a mistake or something unforeseen, Centipede could easily end up drifting off into the void of space, which would turn Centipede into a drifting asteroid, completely bereft of the ability to influence its fate.

The drone's mind was far removed from the troubles and worries of an organic being. Should it perish, it's mind would be simply copied to a new body, but it still didn't like the thought.

Of course, the swarm could easily send one of the drone carriers to collect Centipede, but Centipede knew that the swarm would reduce its fate to a simple calculation of cost to fuel ratio.

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And a drone carrier needed a lot of energy to move its bulk, which made the question of whether a cheap spying drone like Centipede would be saved rather illusory.

Such calculations went through Centipede's circuits as it slowly closed in on the strange vessel and finally almost touched its hull. Skittering and scratching, Centipede tried to gain purchase and was finally forced to burn some more of its precious fuel to gain a solid hold on the ship's surface.

The smooth exterior was perfect and didn't offer any nooks or crannies to hold on to. Centipede also noticed with some astonishment that at least the outer layers weren't any form of metal, but some form of bonded carbon, like diamond.

Unhappy with the development, Centipede used its electromagnetic manipulators to move across the hull. It seemed like the outer layer was just a form of armour, and beneath it was still enough metal to gain at least some hold through electromagnetism.

That was the drone's luck because otherwise Centipede would have simply slipped off the strange ship and disappeared into the void, which would have made the swarm none the wiser.

After some searching, Centipede finally came across something like an airlock, where the otherwise perfect hull was interrupted by overlapping plates. It took Centipede just a few seconds to locate a control mechanism exactly where it expected it to be.

Cracking the lock was complicated, but not outside Centipede's capabilities. Though getting to the circuitry proved difficult and the drone broke three diamond drills before it finally got access.

The airlock opened and Centipede slithered inside, its many manipulators clicking and clacking on the hard surface of the ship's material. There was no sound, but Centipede felt the vibrations through its many sensors.

Then the lock closed and Centipede found itself faced with another problem, as its connection to the swarm simply winked out.

It took the drone a long time, about a full second, to come to terms with being utterly alone.

After checking and re-checking the connection suite which linked it with its brethren, Centipede finally concluded that the problem wasn't the equipment, but some sort of interference by the strange ship. They had some sort of network security which interfered with other wireless networks.

The drone hovered for another half a second on the brink of indecision. It wasn't clear how to proceed, but turning around without having learned anything at all wasn't logical. Risking a single drone for information would always win out over doing nothing.

And Centipede had already used invasive forces on the airlock, so the owners of this vessel would find out that something had tried to gain access one way or another.

Having made its own decision, something it was unused to, Centipede continued onwards and opened the inner locking mechanism, now more familiar with the technology.

The interlocking diamond plates slid aside and revealed a long, arching hallway. The drone quickly compared the hallway to the dimensions of the ship and concluded that the tunnel leads deeper inside.

Centipede advanced and entered the new environment. It registered the gravity and the air composition. Clinging to the ceiling, it slithered its long segmented body here and there, searching for an access point to some sort of computer network.

Now inside the ship, Centipede registered clear activity on several frequencies, but all of the network activity was scrambled and encrypted. It would take a low-level drone like Centipede hours to crack the encryption codes, so it had to find an unencrypted access point.

Unencrypted communication could be used as a Rosetta Stone to guess at the encrypted data.

Halfway down the corridor Centipede encountered a little, red thing. Following its scripted reactions, Centipede lashed out and tried to kill the little humanoid. Being discovered now would pose a problem.

But – to Centipede's surprise – the organic evaded the first blow, something that shouldn't be possible for mere carbon-based muscles. The little thing shrieked and chattered something in a strange language.

The drone recorded the sound for later cross reference and, now used to the thing's speed, hacked again with one of its manipulators, pinning the little monster to the floor. To Centipede's utter annoyance, the offending thing didn't even have the dignity to die when it was supposed to.

It only fell quiet after Centipede used the sharp blades on its manipulators to dice the creature into three pieces.

Registering an answering call with an acoustic sensor, Centipede ramped up its progress. The answer to the little thing's chatter was a lot louder and had clearly come from something that was larger than the little red thing. The drone sped up and rushed down something that looked like the main corridor, deeper into the ship.

If these aliens had any sense of logic, then they would place important equipment like ship's control system as deep inside as possible. The ship also wasn't exceptionally large, so Centipede's goal couldn't be far away.

The drone turned around another corner and was suddenly face to face with a bona fide demon!

Centipede had racial memories of such creatures and very clear orders from the overminds on how to proceed, should they be encountered.

Whirling and swirling, hacking and dicing, the drone pushed past its opponent and into something like a command centre. The Demon proved resilient and even managed to break off one of Centipede's manipulators, but that was just one of over a hundred. The drone shook its opponent off and proceeded onwards.

There was only one object of interest, a chair with silvery plates in the form of hand-prints on the armrests.

Recognizing a means of direct interaction with the ship's computer, Centipede rushed forward and placed one of its manipulators on the connection pad. It took only milliseconds to work out the handshake protocol.

Centipede already saw itself inside the ship's control system and its database when-

'Error: Non-humanoid physique detected!'

And the link shut down. Cursing the overminds, the drone rearranged itself and placed ten manipulators on the connection pads, one for each finger. Using its electromagnetic warfare suite, Centipede tried to emulate the bio-electrical field which it had detected previously from the demon.

'Error: DNA mismatch! Not enough organic matter!'

Shaking in frustration, Centipede turned back to the Demon who lay in a slowly-spreading puddle of silvery blood. If necessary, the drone would cut the pilot to pieces and use his parts to get access to the computer network.

When Centipede approached, the Demon raised his hand and – strangely enough – offered it to Centipede. That caused the drone to halt in its tracks. Had the Demon guessed what Centipede was after and judged that giving it up freely was the easiest way to get it over with?

Though, that wasn't what the Demon's defying grin implied... and Centipede also cross-referenced from its databases that the single, raised finger had an entirely different meaning. What made Centipede sure of the fact that it had fucked up, was the large, blinking system message.

G.O.D.: ~GAME OVER!~

The swarm didn't get much useful information from the encounter. As soon as the drone had entered the strange ship, it lost the connection. Soon afterwards, the little ship exploded in a flash of brilliant white, obliterating a sizeable part of the asteroid belt and several dozen drones which were too close to deal with the electromagnetic pulse which came with the explosion.

Judging by the fallout, it was clear that the little ship had detonated an antimatter device, wiping out any trace of its existence.