Weekly Drabble #316: Fragile (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'flesh is weak and therefore underestimated' from AS9000, bringing us back to Heresy and Hope. Enjoy!

~

Fragile:

The image of the alien ship rotated slowly on the holo emitter. It was an asymmetrical collection of sharp spars, connected by gantries with shorter, fatter modules wedged between the larger, longer hull sections. It reminded you of a bundle of toothpicks.

“Study of the unknown vessel, classified as Urchin, is ongoing,” you say, beginning the briefing. Hope’s senior staff, sitting in their chairs in the conference room, are all looking at you. At the head of the table is Captain Mueller, fingers laced together. The senior staff were already informed of Urchin’s discovery; this briefing was on the initial discoveries of the survey teams.“But we’ve already discovered several interesting things.”

Two chairs down from the nearest human and closest to you is Eris. The Purge’s wraith watches you with those unsettling black eyes. You nod towards her. “As you know, Eris detected Urchin before us. She’s conducted the first surveys of the derelict,using her drones to stabilize damaged sections and make it safer for our people to do their work. She’s also agreed to share her findings with us, as we will with her.”

There was a brief rustle of grudging acknowledgement from the assembled officers. Eris made a minute tilt of her head in response. It was hard to deny that humanity owed its existence to her and despite her nature, she took her self-appointed role to preserve human life.

“For quality assurance purposes, our people will still be conducting an independent survey of Urchin,” the captain adds. He had no reason to expect Eris’s conclusions to be flawed, but he also couldn’t be seen to be relying on, or especially supportive of, the Purge. At least he didn’t have to worry about offending her. Who took it personally when a penned dog barked at them?

Mueller gestures for you to proceed. “The first thing we’ve learned is that Urchin is about two hundred years old,” you tell the assembled group. “We’re dealing with an entirely unknown method of construction, so our estimates on the vessel’s age have some wiggle room, but based on hull abrasion and the accumulation of stellar effluvia, we can determine that the vessel has been in Lighthouse for approximately two centuries. Its arrival appears to have been the result of a combat-damaged FTL drive.”

“Combat?” Lieutenant Commander Ashely Murano, Science Division, asks.

You nod in confirmation. “Yes, lieutenant commander.” You bring up image feeds from Eris’s drones side-by-side with Hope’s own recon units and shuttle data. On Urchin’s many hulls, there is clear evidence of carbon scouring, melting and small breaches. The damage was minor, but carefully targeted.“The vessel was attacked prior to its arrival here, although this wasn’t the source of the damage to its FTL system.”

“Then what was?”

You look at the captain. He gives you a nod to proceed. You were intending to build up to this, but you knew these questions were coming. “Urchin was boarded,” you tell the assembled staff. “And its crew massacred.”

That causes a bigger stir than Eris’s presence, but Chief Engineer Cross, Arms Master Yuri Tetrovich, Captain Mueller, yourself and Eris were already aware of this. “Hope,” you say. “Please bring up video segment three from the boarding team.” You’ve found yourself addressing the ship’s AI more genteelly these days. At first it was just around Eris, but it’s started to slip into your regular vernacular.

On the screen behind you, a flat image of Urchin shifts to helmet cam footage from the survey units. Urchin is eight light-hours out from your current position, so there’s no live feed. This information was what spurred the current meeting.

At first the picture on the screen is that of a nightmare. An arachnid construct larger than a man crawls through the corridor. Setting aside the atavistic unease such a sight triggers, familiarity makes that fear sharper. It’s a Purge salvage unit. Able to operate in hard vacuum and atmosphere, many good men and women have died screaming under the guns and dissecting limbs of similar machines. Fortunately, that isn’t the case here.

This one belongs to Eris and it pays no mind to the humans in their bulky EVA suits, continuing past them on its own survey of Urchin’s decks. The feed comes from Lieutenant senior grade Jacqueline Darby’s suit and she watches the spider-thing walk away before turning back to the sight in front of her. “As I was saying,” she begins. Her earlier comments, ending in a string of curses and orders to hold fire when the spider arrived, were clipped out. “We found all of them like this. Final count is twenty-three dead at this location.”

The team was in a large hallway in one of the smaller secondary spire-hulls. Against the bulkhead were two dozen crewmembers or passengers. The vacuum of space has perfectly preserved their bodies and though they had spent centuries in zero-gravity, they had been chained together and locked in place. There was a bag over each of their faces, a discoloured reddish hole in the middle of each of their foreheads and a corresponding splatter on the wall behind them. You can’t see their faces, but the aliens themselves are bipedal. Their limbs are proportioned differently than those of humans and their torsos are thinner. All you can see of their bodies is their hands, each of the dead having them tied together at the wrists. There is a thin layer of fur over the backs of their hands, but the fingers and palms are bald.

Sprayed across the bulkhead just over the heads of one of the aliens had they been standing, each letter or logogram larger than a human head, is unknown alien text.

You pause the recording, looking back at the staff. “At last reporting, the teams have found four similar sites and many more individual bodies. Most appear to have been killed in the boarding action, but others were rounded up for execution like this group.”

Lieutenant Commander Omari Jackson taps his forefingers together. “I don’t suppose we have a translation for that,” he asks, pointing his paired digits at the spray-painted epithet.

“No, our linguistics experts haven’t yet been able to-”

“Traitors,” Eris interrupts, looking at Jackson. “It says ‘traitors’.” She turns to you. You think there’s a sense of smugness there, but you can’t be sure.

Your first instinct is to ask her how she knows that, but you quell it. Eris is a machine intelligence as far beyond you as you are ants. She’s probably smarter than the entirety of humanity at its height and with access to technology thousands of years beyond yours. Deciphering an unknown alien language is far less impressive or inexplicable than the creation of the humanform body sitting in front of you. “How much have you been able to learn?” you ask instead.

“Degradation of function systems aboard the vessel is extensive,” she tells you. “Species designate... ‘Urchin’,” If it weren’t for the palpable disgust, you’d swear there was a note of amusement in her voice at using the human term, “has a technology level several standard deviations below your own. Based on this sampling, they remain within expected developmental parameters for their grade of fauna. I estimate they solved faster than light travel no more than a century before this vessel was commissioned.”

Now the Purge sounded mildly annoyed. Miffed, even. “Examination of the physical makeup of their systems suggests limited or no development of vital existences and nothing that could be Awakened. I require more data to determine if the species would be useful hosts or require culling.” Eris pauses, apparently remembering that she is supposed to be a Heretic. “Orif their existence has any intrinsic value.”

A pronounced silence falls over the room. Your head is spinning. That statement is monumental in its admission – Eris only begrudgingly shares information, and almost never volunteers it to lower life forms, even ones she is protecting – but you don’t understand half of what the heretic Purge just said. Captain Mueller stirs in his chair. He doesn’t look as surprised as you feel, but to one degree or another, the rest of the senior staff mirror your reaction to Eris’s comments.

For her part, the machine construct stares evenly back at you as if what she just said was self-explanatory. “Due to the primitive nature of their technology and the additional fragility caused by low periods without maintenance while exposed to hard vacuum, activation of the vessel’s systems will be delicate. I have recovered saviour box with a shielded data core. It’s en route to my ship-self now.”

“You never mentioned that discovery to our teams,” Cross points out.

“I am mentioning it now. Your fleshy fumbling about and crude technology create an unacceptable chance of the data core being damaged or destroyed during recovery. If it anything can be salvaged from it, I can do so.”

“I expect,” the captain says with a growl as he leans forward. “Copies of all restored data, not just what you feel is relevant.”

“As you wish. I am aware of the benefit of additional minds provide in analysis.” It feels like Eris stopped herself from adding qualifiers to that initial statement, but her follow-up makes you less certain about that. “Despite their inherent and terminal flaws, organic species are not without resources nor the ability to surprise us.”

Mueller’s mouth twitches under his beard. “I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on any of those incidents?”

Eris looks over her shoulder at the captain. “No.” She turns back to you. “Enough samples of their language survived on non-electronic records that I was able to decipher it and learn some details for the vessel’s mission and theorize why it was attacked.”

You open your mouth to press her on her earlier comment, but the captain catches your eyes. He gives you a single shake of his head. It’s not a don’t, but a not now. “What have you learned about Urchin?” you ask instead. “We appreciate any help you can continue to give us.”

A man might not care about a dog barking at him, but he might pause and smile when one came up to lick his hand.