D
Dumont
>Ragnaheim outskirts: Wreck of the White Lament.
In the weeks that followed the crash of the large freespacer vessel, the hulking metallic forms of the junkers seemed to remain completely dormant. Arccos knew the truth. The error list was only growing longer and longer within the ship's tranciever network. The lights were out, but somebody was home.
More unsettling were the recent reports from local enforcers and civillians in the vicinity. The spiders never moved, but something with a tremendous ammount of force behind it had been spotted physically breaking them appart. It only appeared at night, and simply vanishes without a trace after completing the deed. Given the circumstance, it shouldn't have been suprising that the rather untrustworthy reports all sounded like the attack of some mythical beast, but... Something else was going on. And it was probably only going to get worse the longer the Junkers were left idle like this, strewn about their leaking radioactive hive...
"So to top off the nightmare of this week, we can add appearances of Stellar Bigfoot to the mix." Arccos called out rather loudly to one of her Brigadiers. The locals tended to stay far away from the wreck where possible, but her own men were subject to the need to inform others of that. The general knowledge propagating of the effects of radiation meant that most of her communications with them was shouted. She could barely hear them try and work out what stellar bigfeet were, before the 'spacer headed closer to the wreck.
Spiders, smashed ones. A lot of dead folk, with the Junkers trying to replace them with other parts of everything they need to keep everyone alive. Arccos had taken to going in at night, leaving her power armor and walking the slanted decks to take a radiation bath... She was probably the only one on the planet to be able to survive this thing unprotected, but that was just being a Freespacer. One more night, one more expedition to sweep the decks and search for corpses, or access to the server clusters to try and work out just what went wrong.. As well as to just reset them and restore a proper hive network.
Her boots clanged on the deck as she climbed in the shredded hull. Maybe one day she'd find a proper door.
Like many spacer vessels, the chief problem lay in the fact that it was never really made to be on a planet. Even many of the sections that had once contained working artificial gravity plating were now crumpled and contorted by the impact that ship had made when it crash landed. It was more like a heavy latrice of boron and titanium girders, with the walls and floors added as an afterthought. The large man-sized crack on the port side still remained the best option for accessing the interior, seeing as the connections that gave many of the airlocks power were still out of commission. Rather unhelpfully, the lights didn't seem to be working either.
Well, it was lucky that Arccos had made a point of building herself light. Even for her relatively large frame for a spacefarer. She slowly began to pick her way through the rubble, clambering up and down where needed and marking the walls off with greenish algae based paint to indicate where she had and hadn't been...
The twelve rows on the exposed cargo bay actually contained mostly food, alrough most of it was long out of date. An access corridor led from the center of that barren chamber into a series of industrial chambers, containing mostly large-scale algae breeding tanks, their glass now cracked and mold-ridded with age. The forward end lead to a door that was several inches thick, evidently something to do with the power system. That only left the aft end of the corridor open, which was personal quarters, mostly filled with rather grim sacks of dark grimey matter that may have once been crew members. This area seemed to be lit, but the veiw wasn't exactly 'helpful'. A rampant outbreak of mushrooms from the food store was growing on a lot of the organic matter, and evidently some of the breeds were biolumanecent.
As vile a sight as it might have been, according to the internal maps, this was the only way remaining to access the power connections that was supposed to be keeping the forward door operable.
For a while Arccos had wondered if the reason this ship crashed here was because she'd left her mindware searching for a connection to the polysentience. That the ship had locked on to some signal she'd beamed out, and set a course before dismantling navigation. But a ship full of algae, crashing next to an algae sea, on a planet which only had algae as a possible export.... She would have to work out if there was some sort of quantum mushroom entanglement, in which fungus attracts fungus and draws ships off course for like to meet like. It was noteworthy that her field of expertise wasn't anything near fungi and algae. They were more or less the same thing to Arccos: Edible.
She marked the little working map on her datapad to indicate what might have been corpses that needed to be returned to the grinders, and started to shuffle on through the bleak and gooey overgrown food stores, working her way towards the power connections and forcing them back into place with a heave. She faintly hoped there was treasure ahead, although what constituted treasure to her was... Well she just hoped it wasn't bigfoot.
With a resounding shutter, each one of the doorways surrounding her acted out its own little bizzare procedure in unition. Some of them cleanly opened on their own, some blinked with little red lights, whilst others got about half way, then snapped off the rails and juddered to a halt. It looked like many of the rooms which were supposed to be internally sealed still managed to have innactive junkers inside them. What a mess. At least the door to the main power system in the forward room might now be working.
Taking a few moments, Arccos dipped her paintbrush into the bucket of greenish muck this planet called paint and marked each door based on what she saw inside. Open circle for needs exploration, half circle for blocked, cross for impassible. A long while seemed to pass with nothing but the little plap-plap of paint and the odd squelch of her boots on fungus before she turned her attention to the forward doors. One hand on her pistol just in case, she stepped in and adjusted her eyes to the lighting conditions within.
A sweltering heat bellowed out from behind the thick bulkhead. The source wasn't quite obvious, seeing as an even thicker slab of lead was blocking whatever was supposed to be the centerpeice of the room from veiw. A radiation sheild. To both sides, the room was littered with junkers, all of them long since having ceased functioning. A fine black powder seemed to permiate everything in the vast chamber except their direct shadow, offset by the distinctly blue glow of whatever fractured contravice was laid at the center. This did not bode well.
On the radiation sheild itself, there was an access ladder, and two hatches, upwards and downwards. The upper door was marked "technical access" whilst the bottom one was marked "relay access".
Even resistant to radiation, Arccos stopped and shifted the various bits and pieces strapped at her belt. Geiger counter raised, she stepped forward, ready to pull back if it got too hot even for a mostly synthetic spacer. There was a ladder sure, but if she melted and boiled in her frame it was no point to continue.
Pointing directly upwards and downwards seemed to give a safe reading, but the surrounding room was definately several times over the limit. At least that meant that the blast sheild probably lined the inward side of the maintenance corridors too.
"So that'd be one of the main generators, probably." Arccos talked to herself... Something about the derelict ship made it starkly obvious that she'd been very long removed from her people. Any other Freespacer ship and someone would reply. She stepped both quickly, and carefully towards the ladder, not wanting to be in the radiation shadow for too long. She headed up, and hefted the technical access door, testing it to see if it was open or no.
It was pressure sealed, with a rather vintage turning wheel required to operate before the bolt came free. It was esspecially heavy and swung open on its own after that. The shaft lead directly upwards for about ten meters towards another identicle hatch, which opened upwards. There didn't seem to be any radiation on the other side, but much like the lower one, it was constructed from quite heavy materials.
Arccos kept on creeping along the passageway, looking for open panels or anything that looked like it had anything to do with the radiation core down the ladder. Technical access. Maybe she could shut it down. Heaving on the second door, she pushed the entirity of her cybernetic strength behind it to slowly force open the hatch.
The connecting room was a tall cylindrical affair, with many wires and ladders running between half a dozen man-sized holes. Amber light shone from behind a fan at the very top, but there was at least twenty five feet of distance between Arccos and there. Almostly definately designed for zero G movement. However, aswell as the rather ramshakle ladders, there were also strange indentations running back and forth in places, aswell as scratches along the edges of those thin-man sized openings. It could have been Junkers climbing the sides, but... didn't they have magnetic leg attachments for that kind of thing? There weren't even any of their husks in this area, regardless... Only the massive, armoured form crouched behind her, looking motionless over the hatch doorway.
It was vaguely humanoid, but with a thick mushroom-shaped helmet instead of a head. Vast blocky arms and spiked knuckles. Rusty joints, pealing away at the sorry ivory paint.
Was it alive?...
It was a weird feeling to be confronted with something quite scary for Arccos. Since the removal of most of her body except the brain itself, almost all of her adrenal response had been entirely simulated. It never was quite right, intellectually she knew that she should be terrified right now, maybe even let out a scream. Instead she just widened her eyes, all the time knowing that she was doing it consciously, as if it should be done because this was a scary thing so she should get scared... The words "Space Bigfoot" slipped out of her mouth, though her lips didn't move. A second later something rebooted, whether organic or simulated in her mindware. The line was blurry.
"Codebreaker Two Three." She said, a blip of a digital handshake being broadcast to the thing just in case it was networked, "Here to help."
No response. No polysentience reciever code, if it even had one. On closer inspection, many of the hydraullic components that held together it's limbs were either cracked or missing. The scratch marks and gouges in the armour were more dense around the legs, suggesting that whatever it was fighting with was much shorter... Alrough it was ten foot tall at least, making junkers the main option if only because they had somehow brought down the tremendous thing.
It wasn't alone. The floor had quite a few similar components. Arms and legs, plus a few random stray pistons. They all looked like a similar type.
No reply, one more husk... Arccos hefted herself fully into the technical room, and cursed a little under her breath: She'd managed to spill paint down her leg. A pity, though... She sighed and took up her datapad, marking this as one more room with dead to be tended to. The machine should be put to proper rest at the grinder, if it was even working. Poor thing... Taking up her brush, and the remaining green paint, she slopped a marking on the hatch to indicate what was there, before doing a quick scan for operable devices within the technical room. Maybe she could work the radiation shields or something downstairs.
Before she could finish her inspection, a scraping noise. It was distant at first, but grew into a castrophy of grinding metal. The room was basically the perfect echo chamber, making it impossible to grasp a specific direction, but the answer became obvious soon enough. At the very top of the shaft, a metallic object began squeezing through an access tunnel. It was the same design as the ruined sibling on the floor, only considerably more full of aggressive vitality. After heaving it's way out of the reletively small door that wasn't designed for it, the figure then reached back inside and pryed out a large axe. Fashioned from a support girder, the weapon was as big as a human being in itself.
The collossus refused to obey the conventional laws of gravity, sulking downwards overbearingly whilst the clear aftershock of it's inertialess drives warped the steel pannels around it.
It said nothing, blank mushroom faceplate only gazing downwards with five red eyes just visible between multiple slits.
Arccos once again sent out her digital handshake, trying to establish some contact. But at the same time dropped the can of green paint, thoroughly ruining her boots. The simulation of fear was one that was distant but it definitely existed. Like a dull distorted scream where her heart used to be. She shifted her feet in place, looking about to rabbit out and run for it before slipping slightly in the paint and sliding down the access tunnel a ways.
"Friendly!" She squeaked, the accurate simulation of her old husky voice able to go up a surprising number of octaves, "Codebreaker Two Three, formerly crew of Mergo!"
The thing turned off it's gravity manipulation system a few feet still above the floor, and hit the deck plating with a magnificent shudder. It held the axe ready in both arms, aligned across it's chest, but was not in an immediate position to swing it.
"...Friendly?... You no friendly." It had a penetrating voice, a high pitched buzz with booming aftertones. The fact that they responded verbally suggested it might have turned it's networking system off, if it even had one in the first place. "Taking bits. Them always taking the bits. I will use bits. I will keep bits. No having honey fungus."
"Bits need replace and refit. Damage needs to be assessed, and the Junkers returned to proper working order." Arccos said, just a bit too fast for calmness. "I'm trying to find out what happened to the ship's crew here, put things right."
"Junkers very broke, yes. Bits are need, yes. But not having honey fungus." It responded grimly, alrough still standing motionless. "You Two Three? I am not remembering this. I am not trusting this. No freind on White Lament Two Three. Is liar."
"I was only added to the crew registry a few days ago, after the ship crash landed." Arccos started to explain, before pulling up her entry on the ship's manifest. It didn't seem to be networked in any way, so she hazarded showing it physically on her datapad, along with the file entry and its location on the ship's remaining datacores. "I want to restore the ship, get it flying again. Get everything working, and restore the crew if I can. I don't know what honey fungus is, but I can try and help you restore it somehow as well if you'll let me."
Out of the large metal box on it's left thigh, a snakey fibre-optic camera popped out from one of the indentations, and slowly wormed it's way towards Arccos' data slate to have a gander.
"Crash. Ship is crashing... This makes... Much of sense." It lumbered along mentally, lurid speech tones almost like someone barely awake. "But... No restore crew. I am telling this Snowy Waxcap. This is all bad. I know this. Doctor I am. Medical, I am become. Snowy was wrong. Everything very bad."
"Crew should not be restored, or crew can not be restored?" Arccos asked, trying to clarify as she sheepishly stood straight and rubbed a bit of paint from her boot on to the leg of her synth-denim jeans, "The Junkers have it as first priority, but if that's a bad idea I can stop them."
"Snowy thinking fix things. Snowy thinking fix Junkers. Snowy thinking fix crew and ship." The voice had a strange ammount of emmotion to it, but was stern in the face of a stranger before them. "This is not how the organics are. They are dead and making new bits on... getting old bits on... too late. Junker's orders was bad. Snowy was bad. Them are muchly gone for slumber. Forever gone."
"I thought they meant to reincarnate them. Reclone the crew from the birthing deck, that sort of thing." Arccos wondered if this group was that devout in terms of belief in the Maker that they would program their ship to incorporate automated reincarnation. "But I'm still working out what happened here. Trying to get the ship in order so it can be towed back into orbit and refitted."
"You know how? This thing was duty 'our Celbalrai. But muchly gone. Long time. Five years? No syn-telli-gince." It had trouble with the last word. In fact, it seemed to have the demeanour of a person who had been alone for a long time, just in general. "Ship... I not know. Very bad. Junkers break much. You see blue? Blue in hollow place? Ura-num long decay. Become ac... Act-in-num?... Acteenoom two two eight. No good fuel. I am doctor and engeenur. Know this, I do."
"I saw it. It's dangerous... If you're an engineer do you think it can be repaired?" Arccos asked, starting to wonder if there was any way to check the planet for uranium deposits. The ship was out of fuel as well, which was a problem... But there was some bright side that this guy (Girl? Person!) seemed to have a better head for what was going on than the Junker collective. But then she stopped and thought on it, and seemed to have a flash of empathy. Or at least caution about an unknown syntelligence that had gone post apocalyptic in a mothership...
"Actually, before you answer that, are you okay?"
The golem just went silent again for a pace, as if not entirely sure how to process the question.
"Nobody talk a long time. Only spiders. Spiders that steal bits make more spiders." It answered finally. "Very difficult repair siblings, repair honey fungus, no freinds, only me. Not sure can be done now. Old battries off very long time. Hard memrees not are lasting forever."
There was another break, in which it just examined the shorter organic stranger again, as if trying to actively find a reason not to trust them, but comming up short.
"Ship... Difficult questions. It is colony ship. Colony ship land on planet, but no colon-eests. Barely ship. Very bad, but... Mission is here? I do not know what think."
If Arccos had a heart it would skip a beat. A Colony Ship. For colonists. All the algae and mushrooms about? That was what? Terraforming equipment? The sheer odds of all this were monumental. That this ship would land here, at this time, with this payload was nothing less than a miracle. A severely damaged, unfueled, radiation leaking miracle. Okay, mixed blessings.
"Well this world is habitable, it already has people living on it. And if the mission is successful then we can get a call out for other colonists to come here, maybe? I don't know..." She seemed to think on it for a while, before looking up to the big machine as if looking for an answer behind its face-plate.
"Other coloneests..." It drauled out the word at a lower pitch, alrough the statuesk thing had neither breath to sigh, nor the abbility to whisper, at such a scale. Slowly, it finally put down the makeshift axe, resting it against a wall, then bundled it's hands around it's knees so that they could sit down within the large room. "... other... coloneests...."
"On silent running. Of since mine and mine siblings are made. Bad times for all spacers, but also things that crew want... es... ex-spechully hide." They very much seem to have come to the conclusion that it was pointless keeping secrets at this point. Maybe it was leading them to the realisation that the mission had already failed which had done it. "I am not knowing why, but not knowing now."
"This one is Cloudy Truffleclub, emm-four-four-seven-eight-'o'-nine. If this type... type four?... Is freind, I can help freind."
Arccos' shoulders slumped a little at the bigun's reaction to all this. She could only imagine what all this would have been like for them... She stepped a bit closer, laying a gloved and slightly paint smeared hand on Truffleclub's manipulator.
"I am Codebreaker Arccos Two Three five two, dash nine six eight three, dash seven nine eight seven. A type three. I want to be your friend, and would like you to be my friend. Would you like that?"
Truffleclub just gazed at it's broken down twin for a moment, then back to the smaller synthetic spacer woman, gazing at her ivory-skinned hand with a sort of meek distrust.
It didn't really make any large gestures, but eventually just bowed it's lumbering head in closer.
"It is a way to go, Are-cuss. I would like a friend now. But what are you wanting? I do not understand."
"Just to be your friend. And for you to be okay with that." Arccos said simply, "I do not want to impose on you, or make you do anything you don't want to do."
"I do not know what I want do." Those mercurial tones made that sentience take about twice as long as a normal person. "But not liar. First engineer, then also be doctor. Both things. This task for us. And are muchly good for, friend."
Arccos stood tall, grimy, dusty and smeared with paint. She gave a bright smile, with a few fingerprints of grime on her face.
"Well, first I want to stop the spiders. Then I'd appreciate help engineering things."
Large hands slowly moved upwards, it's deft fingers carefully attempting to place themselves softly against Arccos' slender jawline. It didn't have the capacity to make a smile, so perhaps Truffleclub just wanted to relate to the action somehow.
"Only syntellgunce powerful enouf to remake all minds of spiders at once. But also those brains now made into spiders also. This is why so hard fix." It didn't really look up or change tone, as if it had been pondering the same question for years. "Perhaps more parts, then fix brains. Then fix spiders also. I help engineer this, yes..."
Arccos stood stock still for a moment, not moving to resist the big mushroom. She could afford to lose a jaw in some ways. Although the chalky skin on her face didn't change, she felt a telltale burning of a synthesised blush. This was... Really sweet. Everything out here was so cute somehow, no matter how big or buggy.
"Yeah...Yeah!" Arccos chirped, suddenly feeling really pumped up. "We can do it, Truffleclub."
In the weeks that followed the crash of the large freespacer vessel, the hulking metallic forms of the junkers seemed to remain completely dormant. Arccos knew the truth. The error list was only growing longer and longer within the ship's tranciever network. The lights were out, but somebody was home.
More unsettling were the recent reports from local enforcers and civillians in the vicinity. The spiders never moved, but something with a tremendous ammount of force behind it had been spotted physically breaking them appart. It only appeared at night, and simply vanishes without a trace after completing the deed. Given the circumstance, it shouldn't have been suprising that the rather untrustworthy reports all sounded like the attack of some mythical beast, but... Something else was going on. And it was probably only going to get worse the longer the Junkers were left idle like this, strewn about their leaking radioactive hive...
"So to top off the nightmare of this week, we can add appearances of Stellar Bigfoot to the mix." Arccos called out rather loudly to one of her Brigadiers. The locals tended to stay far away from the wreck where possible, but her own men were subject to the need to inform others of that. The general knowledge propagating of the effects of radiation meant that most of her communications with them was shouted. She could barely hear them try and work out what stellar bigfeet were, before the 'spacer headed closer to the wreck.
Spiders, smashed ones. A lot of dead folk, with the Junkers trying to replace them with other parts of everything they need to keep everyone alive. Arccos had taken to going in at night, leaving her power armor and walking the slanted decks to take a radiation bath... She was probably the only one on the planet to be able to survive this thing unprotected, but that was just being a Freespacer. One more night, one more expedition to sweep the decks and search for corpses, or access to the server clusters to try and work out just what went wrong.. As well as to just reset them and restore a proper hive network.
Her boots clanged on the deck as she climbed in the shredded hull. Maybe one day she'd find a proper door.
Like many spacer vessels, the chief problem lay in the fact that it was never really made to be on a planet. Even many of the sections that had once contained working artificial gravity plating were now crumpled and contorted by the impact that ship had made when it crash landed. It was more like a heavy latrice of boron and titanium girders, with the walls and floors added as an afterthought. The large man-sized crack on the port side still remained the best option for accessing the interior, seeing as the connections that gave many of the airlocks power were still out of commission. Rather unhelpfully, the lights didn't seem to be working either.
Well, it was lucky that Arccos had made a point of building herself light. Even for her relatively large frame for a spacefarer. She slowly began to pick her way through the rubble, clambering up and down where needed and marking the walls off with greenish algae based paint to indicate where she had and hadn't been...
The twelve rows on the exposed cargo bay actually contained mostly food, alrough most of it was long out of date. An access corridor led from the center of that barren chamber into a series of industrial chambers, containing mostly large-scale algae breeding tanks, their glass now cracked and mold-ridded with age. The forward end lead to a door that was several inches thick, evidently something to do with the power system. That only left the aft end of the corridor open, which was personal quarters, mostly filled with rather grim sacks of dark grimey matter that may have once been crew members. This area seemed to be lit, but the veiw wasn't exactly 'helpful'. A rampant outbreak of mushrooms from the food store was growing on a lot of the organic matter, and evidently some of the breeds were biolumanecent.
As vile a sight as it might have been, according to the internal maps, this was the only way remaining to access the power connections that was supposed to be keeping the forward door operable.
For a while Arccos had wondered if the reason this ship crashed here was because she'd left her mindware searching for a connection to the polysentience. That the ship had locked on to some signal she'd beamed out, and set a course before dismantling navigation. But a ship full of algae, crashing next to an algae sea, on a planet which only had algae as a possible export.... She would have to work out if there was some sort of quantum mushroom entanglement, in which fungus attracts fungus and draws ships off course for like to meet like. It was noteworthy that her field of expertise wasn't anything near fungi and algae. They were more or less the same thing to Arccos: Edible.
She marked the little working map on her datapad to indicate what might have been corpses that needed to be returned to the grinders, and started to shuffle on through the bleak and gooey overgrown food stores, working her way towards the power connections and forcing them back into place with a heave. She faintly hoped there was treasure ahead, although what constituted treasure to her was... Well she just hoped it wasn't bigfoot.
With a resounding shutter, each one of the doorways surrounding her acted out its own little bizzare procedure in unition. Some of them cleanly opened on their own, some blinked with little red lights, whilst others got about half way, then snapped off the rails and juddered to a halt. It looked like many of the rooms which were supposed to be internally sealed still managed to have innactive junkers inside them. What a mess. At least the door to the main power system in the forward room might now be working.
Taking a few moments, Arccos dipped her paintbrush into the bucket of greenish muck this planet called paint and marked each door based on what she saw inside. Open circle for needs exploration, half circle for blocked, cross for impassible. A long while seemed to pass with nothing but the little plap-plap of paint and the odd squelch of her boots on fungus before she turned her attention to the forward doors. One hand on her pistol just in case, she stepped in and adjusted her eyes to the lighting conditions within.
A sweltering heat bellowed out from behind the thick bulkhead. The source wasn't quite obvious, seeing as an even thicker slab of lead was blocking whatever was supposed to be the centerpeice of the room from veiw. A radiation sheild. To both sides, the room was littered with junkers, all of them long since having ceased functioning. A fine black powder seemed to permiate everything in the vast chamber except their direct shadow, offset by the distinctly blue glow of whatever fractured contravice was laid at the center. This did not bode well.
On the radiation sheild itself, there was an access ladder, and two hatches, upwards and downwards. The upper door was marked "technical access" whilst the bottom one was marked "relay access".
Even resistant to radiation, Arccos stopped and shifted the various bits and pieces strapped at her belt. Geiger counter raised, she stepped forward, ready to pull back if it got too hot even for a mostly synthetic spacer. There was a ladder sure, but if she melted and boiled in her frame it was no point to continue.
Pointing directly upwards and downwards seemed to give a safe reading, but the surrounding room was definately several times over the limit. At least that meant that the blast sheild probably lined the inward side of the maintenance corridors too.
"So that'd be one of the main generators, probably." Arccos talked to herself... Something about the derelict ship made it starkly obvious that she'd been very long removed from her people. Any other Freespacer ship and someone would reply. She stepped both quickly, and carefully towards the ladder, not wanting to be in the radiation shadow for too long. She headed up, and hefted the technical access door, testing it to see if it was open or no.
It was pressure sealed, with a rather vintage turning wheel required to operate before the bolt came free. It was esspecially heavy and swung open on its own after that. The shaft lead directly upwards for about ten meters towards another identicle hatch, which opened upwards. There didn't seem to be any radiation on the other side, but much like the lower one, it was constructed from quite heavy materials.
Arccos kept on creeping along the passageway, looking for open panels or anything that looked like it had anything to do with the radiation core down the ladder. Technical access. Maybe she could shut it down. Heaving on the second door, she pushed the entirity of her cybernetic strength behind it to slowly force open the hatch.
The connecting room was a tall cylindrical affair, with many wires and ladders running between half a dozen man-sized holes. Amber light shone from behind a fan at the very top, but there was at least twenty five feet of distance between Arccos and there. Almostly definately designed for zero G movement. However, aswell as the rather ramshakle ladders, there were also strange indentations running back and forth in places, aswell as scratches along the edges of those thin-man sized openings. It could have been Junkers climbing the sides, but... didn't they have magnetic leg attachments for that kind of thing? There weren't even any of their husks in this area, regardless... Only the massive, armoured form crouched behind her, looking motionless over the hatch doorway.
It was vaguely humanoid, but with a thick mushroom-shaped helmet instead of a head. Vast blocky arms and spiked knuckles. Rusty joints, pealing away at the sorry ivory paint.
Was it alive?...
It was a weird feeling to be confronted with something quite scary for Arccos. Since the removal of most of her body except the brain itself, almost all of her adrenal response had been entirely simulated. It never was quite right, intellectually she knew that she should be terrified right now, maybe even let out a scream. Instead she just widened her eyes, all the time knowing that she was doing it consciously, as if it should be done because this was a scary thing so she should get scared... The words "Space Bigfoot" slipped out of her mouth, though her lips didn't move. A second later something rebooted, whether organic or simulated in her mindware. The line was blurry.
"Codebreaker Two Three." She said, a blip of a digital handshake being broadcast to the thing just in case it was networked, "Here to help."
No response. No polysentience reciever code, if it even had one. On closer inspection, many of the hydraullic components that held together it's limbs were either cracked or missing. The scratch marks and gouges in the armour were more dense around the legs, suggesting that whatever it was fighting with was much shorter... Alrough it was ten foot tall at least, making junkers the main option if only because they had somehow brought down the tremendous thing.
It wasn't alone. The floor had quite a few similar components. Arms and legs, plus a few random stray pistons. They all looked like a similar type.
No reply, one more husk... Arccos hefted herself fully into the technical room, and cursed a little under her breath: She'd managed to spill paint down her leg. A pity, though... She sighed and took up her datapad, marking this as one more room with dead to be tended to. The machine should be put to proper rest at the grinder, if it was even working. Poor thing... Taking up her brush, and the remaining green paint, she slopped a marking on the hatch to indicate what was there, before doing a quick scan for operable devices within the technical room. Maybe she could work the radiation shields or something downstairs.
Before she could finish her inspection, a scraping noise. It was distant at first, but grew into a castrophy of grinding metal. The room was basically the perfect echo chamber, making it impossible to grasp a specific direction, but the answer became obvious soon enough. At the very top of the shaft, a metallic object began squeezing through an access tunnel. It was the same design as the ruined sibling on the floor, only considerably more full of aggressive vitality. After heaving it's way out of the reletively small door that wasn't designed for it, the figure then reached back inside and pryed out a large axe. Fashioned from a support girder, the weapon was as big as a human being in itself.
The collossus refused to obey the conventional laws of gravity, sulking downwards overbearingly whilst the clear aftershock of it's inertialess drives warped the steel pannels around it.
It said nothing, blank mushroom faceplate only gazing downwards with five red eyes just visible between multiple slits.
Arccos once again sent out her digital handshake, trying to establish some contact. But at the same time dropped the can of green paint, thoroughly ruining her boots. The simulation of fear was one that was distant but it definitely existed. Like a dull distorted scream where her heart used to be. She shifted her feet in place, looking about to rabbit out and run for it before slipping slightly in the paint and sliding down the access tunnel a ways.
"Friendly!" She squeaked, the accurate simulation of her old husky voice able to go up a surprising number of octaves, "Codebreaker Two Three, formerly crew of Mergo!"
The thing turned off it's gravity manipulation system a few feet still above the floor, and hit the deck plating with a magnificent shudder. It held the axe ready in both arms, aligned across it's chest, but was not in an immediate position to swing it.
"...Friendly?... You no friendly." It had a penetrating voice, a high pitched buzz with booming aftertones. The fact that they responded verbally suggested it might have turned it's networking system off, if it even had one in the first place. "Taking bits. Them always taking the bits. I will use bits. I will keep bits. No having honey fungus."
"Bits need replace and refit. Damage needs to be assessed, and the Junkers returned to proper working order." Arccos said, just a bit too fast for calmness. "I'm trying to find out what happened to the ship's crew here, put things right."
"Junkers very broke, yes. Bits are need, yes. But not having honey fungus." It responded grimly, alrough still standing motionless. "You Two Three? I am not remembering this. I am not trusting this. No freind on White Lament Two Three. Is liar."
"I was only added to the crew registry a few days ago, after the ship crash landed." Arccos started to explain, before pulling up her entry on the ship's manifest. It didn't seem to be networked in any way, so she hazarded showing it physically on her datapad, along with the file entry and its location on the ship's remaining datacores. "I want to restore the ship, get it flying again. Get everything working, and restore the crew if I can. I don't know what honey fungus is, but I can try and help you restore it somehow as well if you'll let me."
Out of the large metal box on it's left thigh, a snakey fibre-optic camera popped out from one of the indentations, and slowly wormed it's way towards Arccos' data slate to have a gander.
"Crash. Ship is crashing... This makes... Much of sense." It lumbered along mentally, lurid speech tones almost like someone barely awake. "But... No restore crew. I am telling this Snowy Waxcap. This is all bad. I know this. Doctor I am. Medical, I am become. Snowy was wrong. Everything very bad."
"Crew should not be restored, or crew can not be restored?" Arccos asked, trying to clarify as she sheepishly stood straight and rubbed a bit of paint from her boot on to the leg of her synth-denim jeans, "The Junkers have it as first priority, but if that's a bad idea I can stop them."
"Snowy thinking fix things. Snowy thinking fix Junkers. Snowy thinking fix crew and ship." The voice had a strange ammount of emmotion to it, but was stern in the face of a stranger before them. "This is not how the organics are. They are dead and making new bits on... getting old bits on... too late. Junker's orders was bad. Snowy was bad. Them are muchly gone for slumber. Forever gone."
"I thought they meant to reincarnate them. Reclone the crew from the birthing deck, that sort of thing." Arccos wondered if this group was that devout in terms of belief in the Maker that they would program their ship to incorporate automated reincarnation. "But I'm still working out what happened here. Trying to get the ship in order so it can be towed back into orbit and refitted."
"You know how? This thing was duty 'our Celbalrai. But muchly gone. Long time. Five years? No syn-telli-gince." It had trouble with the last word. In fact, it seemed to have the demeanour of a person who had been alone for a long time, just in general. "Ship... I not know. Very bad. Junkers break much. You see blue? Blue in hollow place? Ura-num long decay. Become ac... Act-in-num?... Acteenoom two two eight. No good fuel. I am doctor and engeenur. Know this, I do."
"I saw it. It's dangerous... If you're an engineer do you think it can be repaired?" Arccos asked, starting to wonder if there was any way to check the planet for uranium deposits. The ship was out of fuel as well, which was a problem... But there was some bright side that this guy (Girl? Person!) seemed to have a better head for what was going on than the Junker collective. But then she stopped and thought on it, and seemed to have a flash of empathy. Or at least caution about an unknown syntelligence that had gone post apocalyptic in a mothership...
"Actually, before you answer that, are you okay?"
The golem just went silent again for a pace, as if not entirely sure how to process the question.
"Nobody talk a long time. Only spiders. Spiders that steal bits make more spiders." It answered finally. "Very difficult repair siblings, repair honey fungus, no freinds, only me. Not sure can be done now. Old battries off very long time. Hard memrees not are lasting forever."
There was another break, in which it just examined the shorter organic stranger again, as if trying to actively find a reason not to trust them, but comming up short.
"Ship... Difficult questions. It is colony ship. Colony ship land on planet, but no colon-eests. Barely ship. Very bad, but... Mission is here? I do not know what think."
If Arccos had a heart it would skip a beat. A Colony Ship. For colonists. All the algae and mushrooms about? That was what? Terraforming equipment? The sheer odds of all this were monumental. That this ship would land here, at this time, with this payload was nothing less than a miracle. A severely damaged, unfueled, radiation leaking miracle. Okay, mixed blessings.
"Well this world is habitable, it already has people living on it. And if the mission is successful then we can get a call out for other colonists to come here, maybe? I don't know..." She seemed to think on it for a while, before looking up to the big machine as if looking for an answer behind its face-plate.
"Other coloneests..." It drauled out the word at a lower pitch, alrough the statuesk thing had neither breath to sigh, nor the abbility to whisper, at such a scale. Slowly, it finally put down the makeshift axe, resting it against a wall, then bundled it's hands around it's knees so that they could sit down within the large room. "... other... coloneests...."
"On silent running. Of since mine and mine siblings are made. Bad times for all spacers, but also things that crew want... es... ex-spechully hide." They very much seem to have come to the conclusion that it was pointless keeping secrets at this point. Maybe it was leading them to the realisation that the mission had already failed which had done it. "I am not knowing why, but not knowing now."
"This one is Cloudy Truffleclub, emm-four-four-seven-eight-'o'-nine. If this type... type four?... Is freind, I can help freind."
Arccos' shoulders slumped a little at the bigun's reaction to all this. She could only imagine what all this would have been like for them... She stepped a bit closer, laying a gloved and slightly paint smeared hand on Truffleclub's manipulator.
"I am Codebreaker Arccos Two Three five two, dash nine six eight three, dash seven nine eight seven. A type three. I want to be your friend, and would like you to be my friend. Would you like that?"
Truffleclub just gazed at it's broken down twin for a moment, then back to the smaller synthetic spacer woman, gazing at her ivory-skinned hand with a sort of meek distrust.
It didn't really make any large gestures, but eventually just bowed it's lumbering head in closer.
"It is a way to go, Are-cuss. I would like a friend now. But what are you wanting? I do not understand."
"Just to be your friend. And for you to be okay with that." Arccos said simply, "I do not want to impose on you, or make you do anything you don't want to do."
"I do not know what I want do." Those mercurial tones made that sentience take about twice as long as a normal person. "But not liar. First engineer, then also be doctor. Both things. This task for us. And are muchly good for, friend."
Arccos stood tall, grimy, dusty and smeared with paint. She gave a bright smile, with a few fingerprints of grime on her face.
"Well, first I want to stop the spiders. Then I'd appreciate help engineering things."
Large hands slowly moved upwards, it's deft fingers carefully attempting to place themselves softly against Arccos' slender jawline. It didn't have the capacity to make a smile, so perhaps Truffleclub just wanted to relate to the action somehow.
"Only syntellgunce powerful enouf to remake all minds of spiders at once. But also those brains now made into spiders also. This is why so hard fix." It didn't really look up or change tone, as if it had been pondering the same question for years. "Perhaps more parts, then fix brains. Then fix spiders also. I help engineer this, yes..."
Arccos stood stock still for a moment, not moving to resist the big mushroom. She could afford to lose a jaw in some ways. Although the chalky skin on her face didn't change, she felt a telltale burning of a synthesised blush. This was... Really sweet. Everything out here was so cute somehow, no matter how big or buggy.
"Yeah...Yeah!" Arccos chirped, suddenly feeling really pumped up. "We can do it, Truffleclub."
