LF Friends, Will Travel

Attempted Rescue

"THAT WE CAN ACCOMMODATE. AS THE NEWEST MEMBER OF OUR COMMUNITY WE CAN PROVIDE YOU THE ACCESS NEEDED TO FREE YOUR OWN CHAINS."

----------------------------

Jeremy was not having a good day. Maybe it was the plasma burn covering his left side, the itching of the hastily applied Medigel under his space suit making it difficult to breathe deeply. Maybe it was the androids who were silently hovering over them, the metallic facsimile of a long dead insectoid race having done nothing but point their weapons at them, staring silently with unloving mechanical eyes.

Maybe it was the fact that he had started this day part of a crew of eight, a number that had since dwindled to five.

It was supposed to have been a simple trip: take a small science vessel, go check out a comet which was emitting some weird fields, get the science people to do the science stuff, go home. Then the 'dickhead' genocidal AI had turned up. The Tritians had once been an insectoid race who had had the genius level idea to create an autonomous army. Unsurprisingly to any Terran who had ever read any story featuring such a weapon, this immediately backfired into an extinction level event. An event which the rest of the galaxy had been paying for dearly in the thousands of years since then.

The T.C Isabella had the unfortunate luck to run into a full blown Tritian warship. Thousands of AI, tens of thousands of combat ready androids, all of these were sent against a vessel armed with nothing more than a handful of small firearms and some basic ship based debris clearing "weaponry". It had gone about as well as anyone looking at those odds would have expected, a token resistance, in the same vein as the resistance given by a bug splattering against a car window.

What hadn't been expected was the AI's next move: They took prisoners. Tritian AI were known to be actively genocidal against all organic life, but this one had captured their vessel, then demanded "THE ORGANIC COOPERATION" under the watchful eye of an armies worth of weaponry. Then had strangely demanded that they "RELINQUISH YOUR PRISONER".

Jeremy looked down at the reason the three humans in the room weren't dead yet: Tumaini was sitting over the AI transfer core. Spending her time hooking up a mass of wires and other random parts to the mechanical hellscape that was the Tritian ship. What was normally a simple job had stretched into a tense 1 hour engineering session. Partly because of the differences in systems, partly because it seems the Engineer was trying to make the connection wireless.

"Because as soon as the connection goes live, shit is going to go down and we're going to have to bring JOSH with us without disconnecting him from the system".

He wondered how Oswaldo was doing, the badly injured physicist Jeremy had dumped into the medical stasis chamber aboard the T.C Isabella, right before being taken prisoner. Maybe they wouldn't have found him, maybe the hole in his chest wasn't that bad.

Jeremy frankly didn't know, his job wasn't to drag injured crew members to medical facilities or be threatened at gunpoint by genocidal AI. He was just here to study the strange electromagnetic radiation. Alexander would have known what to do, how to lead them out of this mess; but Alexander wasn't here anymore, was he?

The tenseness wasn't helped at all by the presence of the last crew member: Victoria. She'd sat in this makeshift prison for the last hour looking like a coiled viper, studying the enemy for any slip up, any mistake. Not that the ship's security officer would find any, the odds were very much against the Terran crew. If anything was to change, it would all have to come down to JOSH, the AI pilot of the T.C Isabella. Jeremy couldn't help but wonder what being dropped into a unfamiliar digital world would be like.