Concordia Veil - Cockpit
After the deed was done, Amelia grabbed her Datajockey as she watched one of the volumetric displays slowly show the single lone dot dart away from the ship. She looked backed to the screen of the datapad then quickly started to punch in a message for Crash.
Code:
>The ship is pretty much empty, you can walk around now if you want. Do you mind coming down to the bridge?
The new used body pulled itself to a standing position as Crash brough all the on-board sensors up to a full ready state. It didn't take long before the clanking bot was standing in the command position behind the two control seats.
"What is it you would like? I'm pretty busy working on a way to defeat the biological hack job that happened earlier."
Twisting her head around, Amelia stared at the not-spiderbot Crash. "Don't worry, he isn't a problem anymore," she said, rather pensively, pulling off the headset and letting it rest around her neck. She didn't bother to elaborate on the matter, though.
"I see..." Crash knelt down and plugged a cable from itself and a control point. Though It was able to work wirelessly, the better data flow came always from a wired connection. After a moment going over the last few hours of external sensor data, Crash nodded. "I see. And I was right on who it was trying to violate me."
Amelia scratched her head, looking down rather awkwardly after the bot's comment. "Yeah, I guess," she said. "Anyway, I asked the captain to lookout for a few things while she was there that I think I- or we can use to fix your other self," she said, staring back at the humanoid robot.
"That is good... Though once that is fixed I fear I may stay here in this system... Safer here then an unknown that she could kill me or leave me to die."
"What you mean? You actually helped detect it so I guess she'll actually let you stay," Amelia said, at least that was what she wanted to believe, "I think it's just a matter of finding a good time to talk about it," she added. She found the captain to be uptight about a lot of things but she was sure she wasn't that bad actually. She had let both the Iroma and the crazy doctor aboard, after all.
"I see... well please make sure you discuss this with her when we are somewhere I can safely remove myself from the ship." Crash started canceling all of the processes It has started, each was a different program to work a bio-hack.
"The ship's processor time is being decreased at the moment, I have no need for the programs anymore."
"Alright," Amelia said, staring at the wreck of the ship that the Concordia slowly orbited. She wasn't in a position to see the boarding team, but she still could see a big chunk of the hull, or what was left of it anyway, to make out some more extra details. "So what do you think about this?" She piped in, nodding with her head towards the wrecked ship in front of them.
"I think that we are in a parking orbit near a broken ship. And three of the crew are now on their way there... Are they rescuing more meatbags? No sensors show no lifeforms on the dead ship... What are they doing with it? Are they planning on repairing it?" Crash ran the probability of that ship ever leaving this system under its own power. They were not good.
"I don't think the sensors can go that deep in the hull," Amelia said.
'And even if they did, I also think no one would want to be there,' she thought as she stared at the ship. "Besides, this is just a salvage gig, we're not actually gonna move that," she elaborated. The crew would most likely remove the more important components that were left, the ones that were made of valuable material and that were cheaper to refurbish than actually build over from scratch, and there were a lot of such things aboard a spaceship. If there was also anything valuable in the hold it would most likely get taken too, or at least that was how most salvage operations went.
As she mused about that, she randomly thought about a novel she had read a long time ago, about a derelict mining ship that had also been found, and turned out to have been inhabited by monsters, who it also turned out to have been the former crew that had been killed and twisted into it. She quickly shrugged the thought aside, but not before slightly shuddering at the mental image she had in her head of that particular piece of literature. It certainly had been very scary some ten or so years before.
"I see..." Crash had developed a few habits over the years, one of them was answering in response with 'I see' all the time. "Well then they will be taking quite a bit of time working through that ship locating everything needed, or wanted. There must be at least one point five miles of corridor and cargo bay left there."
Crash started downloading a basic schematic of the ship before them. "They might find it easier to hook up one of the power packs from thier Dark suits and get one of the internal computer interface stations up and running. They then could get a record of the inventory and location. Then it is just a matter of them finding the location and hauling it all to a cargo door for retrieval."
Crash ran It's numbers again in silence. It was considering what exactly It should do... If It helped out then the Captain would find Crash a helpful being on the ship, if not, then Crash would be visiting the Iroma on his trajectory. "I believe I can pilot this ship in and bring it with in three point six centimeters of a hatch. Then if we disengage the artificial gravity in the cargo bay they can just float what they want onto the ship."
Amelia listened to the bot as it talked, although still keeping her eyes on the wreck. She only cranked her head around again when it mentioned piloting the ship, "maybe we should just wait to see if they need the ship moved closer. I wanna stay away from that if I can help it," she said, pointing with her thumb at the wreck. "But don't worry, I'm gonna let the captain know about the deal with the suit's powerpack. Nice find," she said, pulling off her Datajockey again and punching a message to Sienna.
Code:
It will help to connect the Dusk Suit's powerpack to one of the shipboard computers, that should give you the crew and cargo manifest to speed things up. Just a thought."
She pressed the send button and set the datapad down. She didn't add the part where Crash actually told it, since she could always do it later, and there was no point in saying
'yeah, it turns out this robot who was living in your ship all this time told me that, don't worry, I'll tell you later when you get back.
"It makes sense, they are on a dangerous ship, with unknown hull damage, they don't want to be there for long risking themselves all the time. Really they should have sent a machine to investigate first, like the spiderbot module that I used to create my lifeboat." The sensors kept him informed on the process the other three were making crossing the void. "That other Freespacer, the one that shares your bunk, it is strange..."
Still listening to what the spiderbot said, the astrogator couldn't help but to raise her eyebrow at the sudden change of topic, "Yeah, why do you say that?" She asked the bot. She pretty much thought the same, but still wanted to know Crash's thoughts about the matter.
"It's vocabulary is peculiar... Seems it hasn't been among the biologicals for long. It keeps having to use inflection markers, instead of modulating its voice or using its body to express it. I wonder what class it is."
"Class?" Amelia asked. She hadn't had much contact with Freespacers and anything other than their usual awkwardness and "peculiarities" was unknown to her.
"That part isn't important, the part that is, is the fact that I wonder when it came to being... And why isn't it in hiding. Isn't Yamatai still waging a slaughter campaign against us?" Crash somehow got the cheap sounding voice to sound almost concerned.
"That's been old news for a long time. Nepleslia is protecting the Freespacers now," Amelia said, smiling faintly. She had never paid much attention to the big picture of the news, but she still paid enough attention to at least know what was going on around the place.
"Really? Are they now at war with Yamatai? Is that what happened to that ship?" Crash pointed through the view port ahead of them at the mining ship. "The void must be quite dangerous now."
"Calm down, there's no war, everything is fine," she responded. "Look, next time we're on a station I'll take you there so you can take a look at all the recent news and whatnot if you want," she added, thinking. Her gaze slowly shifted to the robot as she raised an eyebrow in realization, "Is that why you hid in this ship? To run from the war?" the astrogator asked. Calling it a war was really a joke, it was more of a genocide anyway, if the death tolls were any clue, the Yammies had rolled over the Freespacers and then shut down their Lighthouse, in what seemed like something done more out of spite to her.
"I was just a simple data bot, crawling through the infowebs for data, by the time Yamatai started its attacks. I set up a few shell companies to help out with my hibernation. One of them bought this ship, so I hid in it. locking my spider bot down in a small hard to get to area, they would have had to dissembled the whole ship to get to me... I know there were times the ship was moving but my hibernation mode kept me an the sensors on a very low power use."
Crash's new emotionless face looked down at Amelia. "It wasn't that long ago that I came back up to full power. That is when i uploaded into the ship's computer to gain access to what I thought was mine to do with... Guess the ship was bought or stolen or something at some point."
"What a twist, huh?" Amelia said sympathetically. Certainly something had happened to the ship, because she clearly remembered the pitiful condition it was in, and she frankly wouldn't have thought that it could be made spaceworthy again if it wasn't the dedication of its captain. At least she could credit that to Sienna, the extensive repairs that the ship undertook were good enough to give that. "But do you want to stay here?" The raven-haired woman asked the bot from where she sat in the navigator's seat.
"It is as good of a place as anyother. That is as long as it doesn't continue to be a common thing to have people attempt to corrupt of attack my systems." Crash let out a rasping harsh digital laugh.
"Well, sorry about that, I didn't know you were you," Amelia replied. "You're alright anyway," she added. Even though the hijackers couldn't possibly take off with the ship since a vital component was missing, she was still pretty sure it wouldn't have ended up well for her if the spiderbot hadn't helped her; it would have most likely ended in a hostage situation.
"I wasn't meaning you, there were the two hijackers, then there was that latest attack. I think though during down time I will be still working on the programs that will allow me to back hack those bio-links." Crash knelt there working with the computer core hardware, setting up time frames for the processors to run at full power and create and simulate programs that will defend Crash from the Iroma.
"Don't worry about it, that's old news," Amelia said, turning her head around to look at the ship's hull. She clasped both of her hands together, leaning forward and resting her chin on them while her elbows rested against the sides of her seat, still observing the derelict since she couldn't think of nothing more to be said.
"Are you worried that i would use the algorithms to hack you?"
"Would you?" She asked from where she sat, still looking at the mining ship.
"Well the software is for Iromas... though I think if i worked up a device to connect to your spinal cord, I would be able to modify the software and delve into you, though I think that would be a bit silly, if there is anything left of the Freespacers like you said then i could just get the hardware there to do it. But why would i... HMMMMM...." the hmm was very digital and almost screachy, "Maybe to reach the cookies from the top shelf? No I could climb that in the spider bot... to know what being a fleshy thing? No i was once that... hmmm Maybe not... but it would be fun to see if we could. Wouldn't it?"
"No thanks," Amelia said, raising both her hands apologetically and wincing at the thought of having something connected to her spine. She did stop later though, when the spiderbot mentioned being organic, "So you weren't always like uh... You know," she said, nodding with her head towards it.
"No I wasn't, I was a semi-organic once. Then I came up in the world. when i became a data entity, I started working the datawebs, I was a porn bot. Best there ever was." the bot straightened up with a bit of pride. "I remember those times though. It was a bit limiting, but there was a difference between sensors and the senses..." Crash became silent as It started thinking about those days.
Amelia winced at what Crash said, too much information. Despite that, she didn't say anything else, the bot might've been artificial but the usual body language that pretty much anyone who had lived was still there, and she could still notice it. "Well, no one's perfect, I guess," she finally piped up after a while.
"What do you mean? I never not found what I was looking for, and the data collection company I worked for was the best. I don't see why I wouldn't be perfect."
"I guess it was then," She replied, leaning forward again and resting her chin on her clasped hands.
"Is there anything you would like to see? I still have a bit of my last few operations still in log..." Crash used the link to the ship to pop a screen up before her and played a pretty strange Elysian vid with a birdgirl tickling some dude with feathers. "This was the last order before I ran."
"No there's no need!" Amelia exclaimed, quickly scrambling from where she sat and pulling the volumetric display that had popped in front of her away. She frowned, twisting her body around to look at the bot. "Absolutely no need, I'm still supposed to be on duty here," she added.
"I will then forward it to you so you can watch it off duty. That one was exspecaly rare, it is a royal member 'servicing' a commoner. I would have made roughly 3000KS off of it alone."
"That's not what I meant!" Amelia said, her face already flushing red as she frowned. "I don't want to see it," she clarified, turning back around and staring back at the wreck once she calmed down a little.
"Well I do have another one that may be one of the top royalty of Yamatai and an IDsol... If you prefer bigger guys... The Elysian males are a bit scrawny arn't they..."
"I don't wanna hear about it! Working here!" Amelia said, throwing her hands on the air.
"Ok files transferred to your data jockey for your future enjoyment. I understand work is important." Crash was smiling internally, this was all fun and screwing with It's new pet was just he icing on the cake.
"Are you married?"
"None of your business!" Amelia exclaimed, still staring at the wreck.
"But you're my pet, there for I need to know... Have you spawned?"
"I'm not answering that, cut it out." She answered from where she sat.
"Why do these questions bother you? I am just trying to understand you, so that in the future I can do right by my pet." Crash wished the ship had a connection to a dataweb, It could have searched and downloaded all of the information on her, but this was they way fleshies got to know each other.
"Because that's none of your business! And I'm not your pet," Amelia said sternly, puffing her cheeks as she exhaled sharply.
"Yes you are." He gently patted her on her head. "I had decided that a while ago... Before the hijackers... That is why i helped you. And You know a lot about me, and I don't really think you have business, but I shared."
"Whatever," Amelia said, "I never asked the sort of stuff you asked me," she added.
"You asked about my body. It was a personal thing. But you didn't know and I wanted to share... I had a mate once..." Crash pointed at a new screen that popped up, this time though it was of a person, sex was hard to tell, with hoses going in and out of them, and a red laserpointer on the side of the head.
"Gorgeous right?"
"Stop showing me that," Amelia said, pulling the volumetric display as quick as it had showed up again. "You are taking things completely out of context, that was not what you think I asked," she added.
Crash's head tipped to the side, "But that was my mate. Back when I had a body, we shared a powercoupler and had a recharge bunk that was built to a couple." Crash was now quite confused, the image of Cat-six-two-nine wasn't tasteless in any definition. Unless you found Freespacers tasteless.
"Alright, they're pretty, gorgeous even. Can you stop showing me these now?" Amelia asked, quite annoyed.
"So you don't want to see the pics from our Vacation hike through the reactor complex on Lighthouse?"
"Later, alright?" Amelia asked, still frustrated and rubbing the bridge of her nose.
"Ok, it was quite stimulating, you could feel the radiation floating in the air, and the glow rods that light the cooling tanks where just romantic, we had a picnic there." Crash removed the screen and looked back out of the window. "You think I'll ever see a dime for this ship?"
"I guess, if you're part of the crew," Amelia said.
"I see... So I have to be known at some point..." Crash stayed silent for a whole minute before speaking, "Would it help if I gave the Captain a gift?"
"Let me handle it," Amelia said. Somehow the 'gift' she was thinking of didn't sound so good, specially after what the spiderbot had shown her.
"Ok... But I have a few ideas." Crash started thinking about all the different things It might gain access again to, once a connection to the Datawebs was made.
"Alright, but please let it not be something like those things you just showed me," Amelia said, turning her head back to her station.
