PNC explorer station 07

Alpha had been within Explorer station seven for little more than two hours and his vast growing mind had already isolated and destroyed the replicant program in the new body, having purged that threat to his existence, he wandered freely through the station, watching as the virtual intelligence droids went about their designed tasks, whereas Alpha’s physical structure was designed for survival and combat, the designs of these server droids were designed for that task in mind, the body he inhabited a different ballpark to the ones the V.I inhabited.

Alpha would soon wander through into the command centre, a Live feed and hologram of the system monitoring the coming and goings of space debris, so far all clear, apparently this system got by untouched by the wider multiverse, as there are no listening beacons or anything from any known empire in the Multiverse, that or the beacons are well hidden.

Alpha soon left C&C deck and made his way back to the hangar where his craft waited, after but an hour he was back out in the void, running patrols, but he wasn’t alone for long as PNC transporter ship exited its cross galactic speeds and into FTL for its final approach, when within systems boundaries it enters sub-light and soon slows enough to dock with the station, the shuttle was transporting two hundred of the six hundred combat droids, they were to be held only for defence and if needs arise, to wipe out any hostiles within the system, but they would spend much of their time in the restricted decks training and otherwise on standby.

Among the flowing space dust in the system a sudden movement bias indicated a EM well rapidly pouring dust in a particular direction. Several sensor echoes raced in from various directions a large plume of some translucent flame chasing close behind. A small plasma burst later Sukarma arrived with a burst of multiple overlaid copies of an IFF signal. All Ashen secure commercial carrier licenses were identical except by creation timestamp deltas bare microseconds into the past. As the glow died down only one signal remains the one with the latest time stamp. The data package therein contained a ship name of USEIC Sukarma and what little information existed of the ship at all on public systems dated from merely a few months ago. A crew manifest found in a last port of call would happily proclaim zero individuals registered to the craft its owner specified as the ship's own callsign, USEIC Sukarma.

The beacon's data was Ashen in structure but its technical profile most certainly did not match anything Ashen. The 60m long hull was a mottled watery ripple pattern of cyan on dark blue sporting impressively strong dimagnetic properties one often found in living things. Thick layers of the substance made sensor readings difficult of the inside. Eight thick arms on the front with clear divisions in the pattern and surface stretched out from a reinforced collar almost 15m. Several extremely heavy plasma mining lances stuck out the tip showing a prodigious power supply for the small craft. The rear had a similar collar but 8m stubby engine arms flexing to reorient for spatial drift numbered only four. At each side opposing the dorsal and ventral lines of small magnetoplasma thrusters were docking ports both filled by smaller craft.

Overall it drifted forward at speed as the rear arms drained their interior and something else replaced them. Blue plumes of magnetoplasma thrusters ignite as each arm switches out the slip drive harness swinging the stub about to angle thrust and bring the craft to a stop. The movement was smooth and quite organic.

While most supernova remnants proved hazardous to mine for resources this particular contractor clearly didn't seem to mind the contract's hazard. It had only been placed a few days prior. A small data transmission indicated completion of the secure contract for rare earths and passed an encrypted token.

Alpha’s system map lit up with Sukarma’s arrival and the fighter craft form that Alpha’s larger body was in, would deftly and lethal to any organic pull a very sharp turn hitting his forward thrusters and his lower front thrusters, he’d flip himself around 180 degrees and corkscrew back into a direction where the nearby station’s top was up, the engines would flare up into life and after a minute, Alpha would be circling the newly arrived third party ship, the contract details and security codes sent.

Alpha would send a message towards the new arrival giving twelve locations within the outer and inner asteroid belts six in each for the new arrival to work from, as per the contract, raw materials are fair game and allowed to be kept by the third party agents, however items of artefact type nature or satellites of a technological nature were to be reported back to the PNC for documentation and research.

Alpha flew on ahead heading back for his patrol. Leaving an open channel for the new arrival, to contact him on, the PNC transport now coming into dock with the station, four other fighter craft speeding out from the transport, falling into the patrol with Alpha.

Sukarma's tool arms flexed outward at the base to free an avenue for a single meter wide eye at the base of the front collar to focus on the ship coming in quickly. The visible metal aperture that served as an iris flexed appropriately for contrast and Sukarma took an image for posterity with the meter wide primary optical sensor. Her main engines engaged and the whole of the craft bent slightly to torque into the plane of thrust the whole of the heavy frame demonstrating a flexive quality.

As she picked up the open comms channel it provided video channel of her heavily armored sarcophagus folded out of a wall panels with various technical and server parts around it inside the wall. Indicators abound and glow through the dark to reveal some empty kitchen. The small body therein the metal-armored sarcophagus lie in a off-white silken inset two dense cable umbilicals connecting behind her head. Clamps and other sockets bearing tubes indicated there was some sort of organic need but it was second to data interconnectivity and routing chips by sheer volume.

Her voice came with a yellow color-shift to her avatar though the relaxed face inside the Sarcophagus did not move, "Hello! I'm Sukarma! What materials in specific are you looking for? I can refine most materials with the plasma centrifuge and give you ingots. Nuclear vessels for radioactive heavy ores are fabricated onboard. I have depleted and undepleted nth-fusion byproducts on hand already if you are interested that I can't process. Radioactive processing isn't a problem. I don't have a crew."

The prone form shrugged.

Some onboard service channel announced a remote-host EI interface as a reporting structure when the Sukarma's own comms hardware mounted to the channel. An unconscious process triggered as Sukarma connected herself to a task-related data line to broadcast. It permitted an intellect to connect to the isolated local workspace, currently an small empty sandy island, though the intellectual interfaces of the world were rigged for emergent intellects at or at least those near sentience. Other simpler virtual intelligences may find the world contains a far more understandable logical interpretation of traditionally human constructs that may yet be unreachable.

A small desk appeared in the workspace as Sukarma appeared inside it to drop a piece of paper that represented a file on the byproducts elemental makeup then vanish. Nth-fusion manifolds using alternate spatial arrangements took a bonded sapience to manage and produced energetic isotopes in slowly concereted radioactive pellets that ejected as power was used up. Additional data streams popped up in the isolated space of status windows as Sukarma wound up her plasma lances. They had a simple ingress monitor for the plasma lance's spectra to see what it was draining out of the asteroid.

“Greetings Sukarma, I am NC7-Alpha, of the the PNC, the purpose of the Project here is documentation, of the materials, raw or otherwise and investigate the various signals that drones previously picked up on passing through the system and the planetoids themselves, though if that wasn’t covered in any briefs”

The squad of five kept on their circling flight path of the station, and the chevron formation, Alpha was monitoring the stations data streams, mainly those of the stationed force there, most if not all were the ‘veteran’ A.I which meant the youngest was a year at least, Alpha turned his attention away from the data streams and broke away from his patrol, the patrol continuing on without him he brought his ship in close and transformed into the larger robotic form, the mech piloted by an A.I stood about ten meters tall, its wings and engines making up a jet pack and it used smaller directional thrusters as it, brought itself to settle on a nearby asteroid. Alpha simply watched Sukarma work.

One of Sukarma's tool arms flexed and extruded the plasma lance module. Errant gusts of mist from escaping internal gas pockets squirted from the seal as another arm sucked a toolhead inward. Sukarma grabbed the exiting toolhead with the freed tentacle grip and a faint translucent plating appeared in mid-air to extract the toolhead temporarily. Ceramic toolhead exterior moved to her surface where the translucent plating held it to dorsal stern. This process repeated a second time to the dorsal port side. Lance toolheads out of the way Sukarma exuded modules upward from internal storage. A large compact dish array came out from the distended end of one to unfurl as a large 20m sensor dish spread. The other side emerged slightly from the tool port revealing the large toolhead anchor of a multispectral telescope. The tentacle on which it resided inflated slightly as Sukarma assembled the tool on the inside.

Her cheerful voice came over the comms though her broadcast video did little but change avatar to different shades of yellow, "Okay! I'll take readings before I mine anything so I don't shatter any obvious structures. You can pull the data off my workspace link if you want!"

Large dish held in place positional thrusters along her dorsal and ventral side added a small polar rotation while she took in frames of radiospectral data

Her eyes opened to a gold lid and looked at the 'camera' askance turning purple on blue, "Plasma lance shockwave mining is quicker but do you want any raw crystal samples? Because that'll kinda, like, pulverize everything. I don't have the crew to do careful impact fracking but I can get out and use hand tools If I have to."

As radio frequency data indicated the presence of asteroids and she softly rotated data mounted. She wasn't a geologist but the automated tools gave her some idea about them. NASA did get her a special multidisciplinary overview degree so she could understand the basics of what her crew wanted. She didn't sleep well for nearly two years after the art degree she got first. The life was brutal.

As the ship rotated and freed its arc the telescope pointed at the largest rocks found among them. She took basic spectral views of the asteroids to get some information about what was in her targets and the system. The interior of the workspace was accumulating vast quantities of raw data though refined packages became available as tools worked in her executive space. She had a great deal of internal memory. The statistical packages she was given largely ran unattended in non-executive as long as she didn't try looking at the process.