Chapter Twenty-Five (Sam) (2/2)
Poor kittykitty, the VI thought to itself before it reduced itself back to hash and loaded itself into the hash storage memory.
Satisfied that adding air the bay wouldn't start a fire, he pressurized the bay, added microgravity, and deployed more repair waldos. Scans showed severe scorching, not only on the armor but on internal mechanisms that should have only been exposed to fire if the armor, outer shell, inner protective fields, and the armored core had been breached.
Moving carefully and watching closely he opened up the maintenance hatch and looked inside.
He jerked back, yanking his awareness away with an electronic cry of disgust as blackened meat that the kernel identified as maggots poured out of the the gap between the armored housing and the circuit board. Swallowing thickly he went back in and saw that the maggots had chewed on the circuit board. A quick check showed that maggots preferred the same thing as they were.
Meat.
There was the access port, next to the emergency transmitter. Sam-UL double-checked the transmission array. It was weirdly pitted in a way he'd never seen. The metal was spongy, soft, full of holes and gaps.
The station kernel's medical program, so far never used, loaded up the medical VI and checked before reporting to Sam-UL.
Rotted? What's rott... EW! Sam-UL jerked back again from the torpedo.
help... please... help...
The kittykitty's voice was getting weaker. Sam-UL realized that the scan showed that it didn't know he was there. That it was blind, deaf, and unable to feel anything. The intricate circuitry should have interlinked the entire torpedo to the kittykitty's creation engine built biological component, but it was...
ew... rotted... Just where have you been, kittykitty? Sam-UL asked it.
He plugged in an omnijack to the access port. He felt the kittykitty reach out to him, felt a soft little paw touch his gently probing thoughts. It trembled and started to slip away.
It squealed, a dying squeal full of code, and then Sam-UL saw the biological component die. It only took a second for the electronic pulses, generated by biomatter, to fade.
But Sam-UL was a full AI, and that second stretched for an eternity as he stared in horror. He'd never seen another sentient, even one as dim as the kittykitty actually fade away. He tried pulsing it with microdoses of power, but nothing happened. He tried to reach in through the access port and hold onto those pulses. For a second he felt a warm, soft body in his fingers, making a faint subsonic rumble, and then it crumbled away into random electronic signals
and was gone.
The station kernel noticed that Sam-UL hadn't ”moved”, was still connected to the now dead probe, and tapped him a few times. It took a moment, but the kernel, a VI rather than a full AI, noted that code strings were altering in the AI core, that something had happened.
The VI ran a check. It was outlier checksums, but still within valid ranges.
Sam-UL stared at the dead torpedo on the workshop table in front of him. He had kittykitty neural tissue templates loaded now. He could see the scorching, the rot that was pushed into its folds, that the little torpedos brain had been savaged by whatever made the scorch marks.
For the first time in his electronic life, Sam-UL was crying.
The kernel found a match for the scorching pattern and threw out emergency codes.
Sam-UL felt the entire station go onto Red Alert before he could even completely hear the codes that the VI was throwing out.
Hellspace? It was near a Precursor? Sam-UL asked. Sam-UL looked at the datapack that the kittykitty had passed to him with the last of its strength, opening and unfolding the compressed data and staring.
Systems. A map jumping from system to system deep in the Great Gulf. Someone had been jumping from deserted barren system to wrecked and scorched system, sometimes barely staying long enough to get a cursory scan of the system.
The kittykitty torpedo had been launching between two systems. Both of them ”down” from the galactic plane. It had been released in Hellspace, launched into the ravening energy of that in-between everything. There was another packet inside the map and Sam-UL felt himself trembling as he looked it. The code was wrong somehow, twisted, and he could hear it snarl and growl at him.
Sam-UL wrapped the map back up, thinking of what to do next. It was Confed Code, but damaged somehow. He lacked the processing power to unlock it, but whatever it was, it was important.
And Sam-UL wasn't going to let whatever was so important for a kittykitty to go through Hellspace, a place that AI and VI couldn't go without going insane or catatonic, just languish in some file buffer.
Another Confederate Fleet was coming. An old one.
-*- Three, nothing wrong with me. Four, nothing wrong with me-*-
The kernel ID'd as an old TerraSol unit. 2nd Armored Division.
Sam-UL wrapped it up in an emergency datapulse blanket with a description of what it had come from, scans, and pictures of what the actual torpedo looked like. Still shaking, feeling like he was bleeding electrons from a wound deep inside that he didn't understand, projected his consciousness into the hyperspace communication array, and cocked back his arm.
The fleet was massive, all huge dropship carriers, with swarms of support and combat ships protecting the massive dropships. A ship flickered at him, extending out a catching net.
Sam-UL heaved the databundle and the ship caught it.
Sam-UL pulled himself out of the data net and back into the station.
The kernel watched in concern as Sam-UL projected himself back to the workbench and went still again. He found the CRC code of the kittykitty's biological part, the random number the synthetic flesh had been created from.
He just stared at the torpedo as he held the CRC close and bled from that wound he couldn't understand and the diagnostics couldn't find or repair.
The kernel just watched.
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CONFEDERATE INTELLIGENCE
Damaged data attached to system travel maps. Arrived on a Hellspace scorched torpedo guided by an bio-synth kittykitty brain through Hellspace. Initial analysis suggests torpedo was launched while creator was traversing Hellspace.
Transmission to TerraSol and DASS Intelligence Core Systems a priority.
--------NOTHING FOLLOWS---------
DASS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS MEMO
Sam-UL-4481 sentence commuted - Special Circumstance.
Recall for therapy.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Physical therapy frame required during therapy. Patient will require a purrboi companion.