Around her, the ship groans.
Early in the galactic expansion, the self-repairing vessels of one of the many lost offshoots of humanity struggled on, crewless and masterless, doing their best to fulfil their programming, and evolution did what it does: a brute-force search of the possibility space of survival.
By the time humanity stabilised, assured its own continued existence, and stumbled on those ships’ great-great-descendants, things were…interesting. The great academies are still furiously disagreeing whether scientific study of the wild fleets falls under the purview of some new subdepartment of biology or engineering, or perhaps some unholy new interdisciplinary hybrid.
As long as somebody’s signing off the research grants, Xail doesn’t much care.
“Ohhh, look at this, look at this!” she enthuses into her videologger, pointing it down into a honeycomb fabrication cell, top sealed with polymer film. Silverish nanobot goo squirms in the bottom half.
Much of the ship’s interior volume is filled with similar hexagonal cells, filled with nanogoop or fuel or — like this one — in the process of converting goop to some piece of onboard machinery. Mechs scramble constantly through corridors laid out to some distantly corrupted version of a human deck plan, vestigial cockpits glimmering with mutated status displays. One function they perform is guiding the construction of new mechs, by inserting blueprints into nanogoop storage cells.
Nobody’s sure what kind of glitched order process the blueprints are derived from. They’re complex structures, crystalline stacks of 3-tesselating units, bearing information in their shape, and also in what specific units they’re built out of: some passives of various materials, some electronic, some capsules filled with variously programmed nanotech. When dumped into the goop cells, they’re disassembled, imparting incredibly complex sequences of instructions via passive apprehension of their structure, direct assimiliation of programs held in electronic or nanotech form, but also in the complex interplay of diffusing chemical interactions that happen in waves as they’re melted. It’s fascinating; it’ll take lifetimes to unravel.
The mechs themselves pretty much ignore the researchers. After so much evolution in isolation, they’re finely tuned to deal with other machines, and retain basically nothing about interacting with humans.
Xail is following one of the worker mechs as it inserts blueprints from an internal storage pouch into a series of fab cells,the polymer seal self-welding shut after they’re poked through. She holds her breath as she gets the most amazing video to date of the blueprint in front of her, slowly settling into the goop, clouds of dissolved metals already dimming the silver around it.
“That,” she whispers excitedly into the logger, “is not a worker blueprint.”
She knows what it is. The senior researchers will tell her off if she says it on the record before they can run structure-scanner data through the database, but she knows what she’s looking at. It’s an EVA combat unit; a boarding mech.
The ship is going hunting for another.
The ships’ systems are no longer well-suited to human interpretation, and the internal networks have evolution’s messy developments layered on top of the original milspec encryption. Extracting flightplan data was an initially difficult problem.
As with many hacking tasks, physical access to trusted resources allows you to ignore a lot of outward-facing security.
Heavy research focus on blueprint configurations slowly unravelled some layers of the mechagenetics. Carefully taking compiled blueprints from the ship’s stockpiles, modifying them, and inserting them into unused cells eventually resulted in successful atavistic throwback drones, brainless, cockpits large enough to take a person. Controls almost recognisable; enough to tap into and extract usable data streams, cyborg mutants. More sophisticated mechagenetic attacks would probably rouse the e-war immune system; this crude mechanical hijack, for now, passes beneath its attention.
“Ohhhhhh,” Xail croons over her tablet, looking at the ship’s navigational projections plotted against the position data for various vessels that researchers have tagged. “Her? Ambitious, babygirl.” She idly pats the bulkhead she’s sitting against, and spins up a solver for a newly tweaked set of human-pilotable mechs; as the vessel gears up for ship-to-ship combat and possible breaching actions, the stakes of accidentally fitting a target profile get higher. Going unnoticed, and passing muster if not, are safety-critical. The new designs should let her stealthily shadow the EVA action, maybe even get unprecedented footage of boarders breaching hull, and data on exactly how mech-to-mech combat happens once inside the target’s hull.
The target is fast, highly manoeuvrable, battle-scarred. Xail’s primary study ship is high-spec herself, experienced and wily. It promises to be an interesting matchup.
Xail lets herself get carried away.
Her ship drops into realspace practically on top of the target, blows her drive field into a big shimmery mess of paraspatial noise that nobody can jump through, and launches breachers.
Space between the ships fills with competing swarms of mechs, firing on each other at distance and rapaciously tearing into each other with e-blade, claws, and wrecking mandibles. It’s a profligate spend of midweight-to-heavy elements; years, maybe decades of careful asteroid harvesting and salvaging the wrecks of lesser vessels, smashed on each others’ point defence in short, hot minutes.
Xail’s stealth profile, her misfit irrelevance to either ship’s targeting algorithms, holds. She sweeps in close to the target, where a cluster of her own ship’s mechs have latched on and coordinated perimeter defence and hullcutting. This is well within data collection parameters; it’s all been risk assessed.
No, where she oversteps is when they breach and are immediately embroiled in a firefight with the target ship’s internal security mechs. Breacher firepower buys them enough temporary advantage to clear the entry point and get nearly a dozen on board the target, and Xail can’t resist, this is a one-in-a-lifetime research opportunity.
She hops through the sizzling hole after them.
It’s hard, after almost a year on board, not to anthropomorphise her ship’s mechs just a little; to remember that when they fight the target’s internal security, they’re not valiant or glorious, the defenders not desperate or implacable; they’re expressions of competing algorithms. Just pieces in high-stakes chess played by the ships themselves.
The video footage alone will see her writing high-impact papers for the rest of her natural life, she thinks dimly, following the last three survivors as they hullcut efficiently through internal walls, seeking one of the vessel’s specialised structures.
A leaping security unit, all limbs and saws, mutually annihilates with one of her own ship’s finest. The remaining duo take turns with their hullcutters on the reinforced wall of the objective, tagging out when they risk overheat to train ranged weapons on anything approaching, instead.
And finally: they’re in.
It’s like a gigantic geode, Xail thinks in wonder. Like a machine cathedral; and the most factory any structure has ever been. She very, very carefully steps in after them.
There are no security mechs here. Only the big ovoid chamber, lined with complex fabrication mechanisms; only, nearby, the control plinth, and next to it a shallow cell of nanogoo recessed into the floor, awaiting the special delivery of another ship’s very own, fabulously complex, structural and computational blueprint. Melted, interpreted, recombined with this ship’s, this chamber will build the core of a brand-new vessel before ejecting it into some iron-rich asteroid belt to make its own way in the world.
Xail wants, she wants so very badly, to see the moment of data transfer acceptance. The conception. She sneaks closer than she ought. Closer. Trying to keep the video stabilised and catching everything as the control plinth flowers open, extending a graceful picking arm.
The academic consensus is that the blueprint core is structural to the boarding-pattern mechs, and must be violently wrenched out. It’s thought that at that stage, in line with their functional purpose, they don’t resist destruction.
One of the boarders is standing ready, exposed and vulnerable. The picking arm rears back, tension in every line.
There’s a pause.
“I’m not sure what’s happening!” Xail whispers for the recording. “Maybe this is normal—”
The picking-arm moves suddenly; not to spear the waiting mechagamete, but to refocus. In complex space battles, mechs representing several competing ships might bring the fight right into this chamber; the target is not merely a passive receptacle for the winner, but actively perceives, and has a role in evaluating the blueprint phenotypes on show, choosing which to harvest.
“Oh,” Xail says in a panicky sort of way, for the sake of posterity, as the picking-arm coils back just a little tighter right before it lunges; “apparently this system can see through our target-recognition camouflage, and thinks that’s an attractive trait in a mate—”
