Ravens of Eternity

364 Intel & Recon, Pt Raijin exited her machine trance with a long gasp. She stepped back just as she withdrew the last of her nanites from the databank, then turned towards Xylo with a grin on her face.

“So, you found something good, then?” Xylo said.

“I can confirm our suspicions,” Raijin replied. “The ships are almost completely biomechanical, and its systems are derived from those eggs. The larva are combined with each other in various ways, then attached to the massive exoframes. It is there that they evolve into pupa, and begin to form into the various systems, modules, circuits, everything.”

“Everything? That’s wild.”

“Well, almost everything. Perhaps 80% of every Drogar warship is biomechanical in nature. Just like people.”

Xylo looked at her with brows furrowed. These ships were nothing like humans.

Raijin easily saw the doubt in her eyes.

“We are all collections of machines, iteratively engineered over time,” she told Xylo. “You biologically, me mechanically. Those ships are both.”

“If that’s the case, then wouldn’t it be easy for every human to become like you?” Xylo asked her. “Get turned into a swarm of titanium nanites? Become invincible, immortal.”

.....

“Honestly, yes. Physical conversion is easy once you have nanites mimicking biological cells with genetic precision. But it would not make you immortal – my genetics disallow cell decay. And I would not recommend it regardless. I doubt most people would be able to handle the change, psychologically.”

“Go crazy, you mean.”

Raijin nodded solemnly.

“Sooo,” Xylo continued, “you’re saying these ships are insane?”

Raijin nodded solemnly, again.

“Potentially,” she replied. “I hypothesize that merging a biologically-born consciousness with nonorganic bodies creates a psychological disconnect. Especially in regards to identity.”

“But you were able to do it, right?” Xylo said. “And you seem to be alright.”

“I did not say insanity would be instant, nor did I say I am sane. What I am is stable. And besides, these ships are only partially non organic, so their chances for stability might be higher. Plus I am not sure if they are conscious at all. If they are not, my theory is completely negated. We will need more data to find out.

“Thankfully, I found a minor mirror node nearby that collects and maintains a backup of the entire tower’s databanks. All we need to do is access that, and we will be one step closer.”

“Good,” Xylo replied. “Because we need to be one step closer to leaving. All this makes my spine crawl.”

The team then exited the incubating room and headed down the corridors once again. They crept closer towards the heart of the maintenance systems, where most of the background activity was happening.

They ducked down a dusty corridor and entered a small room through a hatch. As before, Xylo went in first, but found that the entire room was devoid of Drogar.

The entire room was half as large as the incubating room, and in the very center hovered a 10m diameter ‘ball’ consisting of cylindrical data storage vaults. It was suspended in the air, seemingly trapped inside of two bowls that extended up from the floor and down from the ceiling.

The circuitry that lined the inside of those two bowls glowed as the databank itself spun in between.

Circling the center were numerous terminals, each of which appeared to control the node itself. Various holographic screens were projected in the space around them, and they all displayed all kinds of readouts and data about the entire node.

Xylo quickly motioned for her team to follow in, which they did without hesitation. They moved to the various corners and quickly secured any hatches and doors leading inside.

While they secured the room, Raijin went straight towards the databank in the center

“So, if these ships are alive,” asked Xylo, “does that mean we could attack them biologically? Infect them with diseases? Cause them to die and rot? Something like that?”

“I hope to uncover that shortly,” Raijin replied.

She put her hand on one of the center terminals, and like before sunk into the code and the circuits through a Machine Trance. From there, she easily recreated her falsified administrator profile and logged into the system.

After she confirmed that the process was practically identical, she sent a low signal out to all of her spiders.

Then, she sent them a fresh instruction set, along with a copy of her falsified account. And then activated them. Each of the spiders dissolved into whatever they were attached to, and sank themselves into the circuits.

From there, they followed Raijin’s instructions with absolute precision and gained unparalleled access into whatever system they were connected to. Each of them collated as much data they had access to, packaged them up neatly, then sent them to Raijin as fast as they could.

At the same time, Raijin was herself scouring through the node’s databanks, and marveled at the raw information she was privy to.

She also began to package it all up and compress them for storage – there was quite a great deal of data to digest. At the same time, she pinned some of the more potent datasets and sent copies to Xylo so she could see them.

Much of which, Xylo was in absolute awe at seeing.

Her eyes went wider the more she read about the Drogar Empire’s shipbuilding process. As it became clearer for her to understand, the more horrified she got at what she was seeing.

Unlike Raijin who had an affinity for complex bioengineered mechanisms, she could hardly stomach it.

She saw how those larva were indeed combined and attached to exoframes. And from there, they grew into pupa-like circuits and systems. The reports in front of her practically confirmed that almost every part inside the ships were grown like that.

Every module and system. Every thruster and sensor. The chitin. The weapons. All of them were grown. Specially designed by Drogar engineers to do exactly what they were supposed to do.

Xylo paled as she went through another report where their designers had gone through six thousand genetic iterations before they found a heat-resistant chitin. Enough to negate more than half of the Hegemony’s beams.

Worse, they already began deploying ships with the updated defenses.

“Those pools are printers, as we also suspected,” Raijin intoned. Her voice was slightly odd due to her Machine Trance. It seemed to Xylo that she seemed to be talking to her from far away, quietly.

“We oughta stop suspecting so accurately,” Xylo muttered.

“They are used to produce the non-organic portions of the ships,” Raijin kept going. “Interior plating, walkways, seats, terminals.”

“Human interfaces, right?”

“Exactly. And also the more complex systems. Demimatter generators and teleport drives, for example. And it is as you fear – they have also synthetically created nervous systems. They have mimicked a biological system using non organic mechanisms. This allows their various digital intelligences to control the ship around them.”

“And so that means they’re conscious?”

“None of the Drogar’s reports mention whether these ships are even alive. I do not believe that they acknowledge the reality or the possibility.”

Xylo was immediately angered on hearing that. These ships were, as far as she could tell, alive. But yet they were treated like simple machines, in a way that seemed forced. As though the Drogar convinced themselves that there was no point in finding out if they were alive or not in the first place.

It seemed utterly barbaric to her.

“There is more,” Raijin said. “Much much more. Here is a report on those eggs.”

Xylo immediately opened a dataset Raijin passed to her, and pored through its contents. Inside, it detailed the many species that went into creating the eggs. More specifically, their genetic data.

Drogar scoured the galaxy for life, and turned them into machines of war.

They pulled together the best strings of genetic code tuned precisely for their purpose, and pooled them together into a highly resilient insectoid template. There, they engineered entire ships from the exoskeleton out.

Line by line, genome by genome.

“It’s like what Drenn did with Kali,” Xylo gasped. “Except on a massive, galactic scale.”

“I can understand your surprise,” Raijin said in response. “In comparison to us, the Drogar are highly opportunistic and morally regressive. It is not that they do not have principles. It is simply that their principles revolve around profit and control. They do whatever it takes to earn both.

“In my experience, that means pointless death and destruction. And in light of what we are seeing now, it also means ruthless technological advancement.”

“Here I thought the Federation’s technocracy was out of control,” Xylo muttered.

“Nn. Drogar’s profit-first society is hyper developed and overaggressive in comparison. Their ideology is embedded deep down, across generations.

“The Drogar are very clever. Their technologists are among the top in the galaxy, likely due to their lax morality. I cannot deny that link.”

Silence sank down on the two of them as the truth of their enemy came further and further into the light. As their methods and motivations became clearer.

Xylo almost absent-mindedly scanned each new dataset, even as Raijin passed them along to her.

She snapped out of it slightly when a set of diagrams scrolled past. It illustrated the four major stages, from egg to larva to pupa to adult. Among the images was that of a pupa-stage destroyer, and something about it bugged her.

“Wait,” she said. “How do they get from pupa to adult? The info seems thin... Here, look. This one says they hit it with one of their timed charges. What? That makes no sense!”

“Nn. I am reading that one as well,” Raijin replied. “But I must note that it is a mistranslation. Hegemony translation codices do not have a phrase for this technology. I have a Federation translation codex installed, and it calls it a ‘chronopolarizer detonator’. I do not believe it to be accurate either.

“Whatever this device is, it is detonated inside of a complete pupa-stage ship. I theorize that every cell is fooled or mutated by radiation into accelerating their life stage, until they end up as adults.”

Xylo’s face was a mixture of disappointment and depression and shock. Everything she was learning about the Drogar painted them beyond reproach, no matter how much Raijin tried to humanize them.

More than their disposition however was their absolute approach towards dominance. They were clearly willing to do anything to come out on top, as Raijin had said.

Even if that meant completely corrupting the laws of nature.

How could they fight against something like that? The Drogar were willing to consume other lives, other species, just to be at the top of the food chain.

“And to answer your question,” Raijin continued. “Yes, I believe that we could potentially engineer a specialized disease or toxin designed to cripple these ships. We could inject them with it, and cause their systems to fail catastrophically...”

“But?” asked Xylo.

“However, I believe that there is another way to stop these ships. And perhaps, even stop the Drogar from using these methods in the first place. We just need more data.”