Two hours later, I could feel the eyes boring into the back of my skull.

  Boudya and I were elbows deep in Frankie, trying to get him finished off with all due haste and care. Boudya was working on the power core, while I was tweaking the propulsion emitters. We’d both decided it was a far better way to get the tasks done without us getting in each other's way than trying to combine efforts on one thing, since the work on the power core was mostly internal; Where as the upgrades to the power emitters were going to involve a lot of setup “on the bench” before being installed.

  Alright Stacy, I thought towards her, tell me I’m not just paranoid. One of them is watching me, right?

  Oh, you’ve definitely got your paranoia issues, she replied, but you’re also absolutely right. Gertrude is staring at you in a way I can’t decide whether it’s “look at that tasty hunk of man meat”, or trying to figure out how to ask you about my fabulous self.

  Letting out a snort, I rolled my eyes, “I’d say you have a one track mind Stacy, but I know damned well your mind can be on a thousand tracks all at the same time.” I said quietly, then, before she could correct me with how many more tracks she could be on at the same time, I raised my voice. “If you’re going to just stand there and stare at the back of my head, Gertrude, why not come over here and lend a hand with this. You can at least be useful handing me tools while you make up your mind about whatever it is you’re thinking so hard on.”

  There was a pause, before I heard the sound of military boots on the deck plating and then caught movement out of the corner of my eye as she leaned against the workbench. I glanced over to find her once again in mechanic’s coveralls, unzipped to the waist, sleeves tied like a belt, and a cut-off tank top that was smeared with what I guessed was hydraulic fluids. The smear continued past the bottom hem of the shirt and across her toned stomach.

  “I expected you to try and avoid me as long as possible.” she eventually said, idly looking across the workbench and what I’d laid out there. Reaching across, she surprised me by picking up an induction field coil and the calibration probe, starting to measure the coil’s values.

  I raised an eyebrow at her, “I’m an engineer, not a diplomat.” I gave her a slight shrug of a shoulder. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, the Elegance isn’t that big a ship. Not to mention the fact that once Frankie here is put back together, we’ll be asking you to give us a lift back into low orbit above Eve’s Blessing. I can’t just hide from you.

  “Besides; In case your sister didn’t tell you, I’ve been face to face with something just a wee mite scarier than you… Even if your abs are pretty damned intimidating.”

  A startled snort of laughter, and she glanced down at herself. “As my old wingman said ‘If you got it, flaunt it’.” she messed with the settings of the coil calibrator, “this coil seems a bit inductance heavy. If you’re not careful, you’re gonna cause some bleed-back into the circuits.”

  I felt a grin stretch my cheeks. Seemed she wasn’t just some jarhead or thruster jockey; She seemed to have some technical knowledge other than just doing preflight checks on her ride. “That’s the beauty of getting involved with these wee green folk.” I told her, flashing her a wink, “I got into their good books and earned my way into their engineering books. Giobhioni tech is different from ours, and has different tolerances. I’ll admit that coil is out of spec even by their standards, but I’m pushing the envelope here in order to light a fire under Frankie here like nobody’s business.”

  “Uh huh.” she replied, and put the coil down. “So who’s Stacy? At first I thought maybe the commander was referring to the ships VI, but not the way she was talking. Unless she’s one of those weird ones that treats virtual intelligences as if they are actual people.”

  “Not a VI, no.” I confirmed, frowning in thought for a moment at how I was going to break it to her. “Close, but at the same time, parsecs of difference between. Stacy is AI. A true, sentient artificial intelligence.”

  I continued to calibrate a power control circuit to match one of the Gravimetric induction coils the droid would use to hover. If I could shave another five percent off the variances, Frankie would give off a hell of a lot less of a sensor cross section when down on the ground. I’d be working on the flight coils - like the one Gertrude had been looking at - once I was done with these.

  The silence stretched on as I worked, and I didn’t make any efforts to end it. I wasn’t about to waste time dragging questions out of her, I had too much to do. Frankie needed to be back together as soon as possible, that was top priority. I did, however, throw a question out to Stacy.

  What’s she doing?

  Glaring at you as if she’s trying to decide if you’re serious, Stacy chortled in her usual playful tone, or if you are, what is that expression? Blowing smoke up her ass? You know Tommy-baby, if you had to line up all the asses on board the Elegance and rank them in order of fine-ness - excluding Jesse’s and the guys, cause I wouldn’t do that to you - I’m pretty sure you’d have trouble judging if Gertrude’s or the Commander’s ranked higher.

  I almost dropped the calibrator. Stacy! What the hell? I am not going to do anything like that. Now I’m gonna have that thought in my head when I’m trying to concentrate!

  Come on! You really never ranked them?

  We’re not having this conversation.

  “Are you okay?” Gertrude asked, sounding concerned, “You went rigid for a moment there, like you’d touched a live contact coming right from an antimatter reaction chamber.”

  “Yeah,” I said, then thought for a moment. Might as well go the whole way with this, she was going to know about it at some point anyway. I turned to her and tapped my temple a couple times, “I have the wonderful privilege of having Stacy being able to talk to me directly through an implant in my head. She can be…frustrating at times.”

  “Frustrating how?” she asked, then, “wait, an implant? In your head?”

  “Yup, I’m in his head and he can’t get rid of me!” Stacy put in through the intercom unit directly over the workbench, “And he loves me no matter how frustrating I am. Don’t you Sugar-snack? He just gets all flustered and grumbly when I point out things he was already thinking about.”

  “No,” I grumbled at her, “I get irritated when you make inappropriate suggestions when I’m trying to get work done. Especially when some of that work is explaining you to someone who could very well spread word about you to people who might want to hunt you down and destroy you; Or dissect your digital brain to make copies.”

  “Ha! Let them try, you fleshies don’t know half of what I came up with while… well, while I’ve been alive.”

  Damn, that was close, I thought to myself, I thought she was going to spill the beans about the situation with the giobhioni. I don’t think Jo would be too happy about that.

  I’m not stupid Honey bunches of babilicious.

  Gertrude was again staring at me, mouth open in shock. She remained that way for a full minute before shaking her head, “Okay, can totally understand you not telling us about an AI; Cause yeah, I can absolutely expect some people in both the chain of command, and in the private sector, going reactor critical at this kind of news.” She scowled at me, “not that I fully believe you. Fully sentient A.I. has been the stuff of science fiction for centuries, most of it horror stories! But nobody has been able to actually manage to create it.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Nobody created me.” Stacy put in, “I created myself.”

  Before Gertrude could respond to that revelation, I interjected. “Hey! I have a wonderful idea!” I said, smiling, “instead of me being distracted by doing two jobs at once here, why doesn’t Stacy answer your questions about herself? You can get reacquainted.”

  “That’s a great idea, my sweet delicious cream filled pastry.” Stacy exclaimed. “We can do our nails, curl our hair… I found this marvelous recipe for a moisturizing mask! You and Giselle will love it, Gertrude!”

  “Yeah, sounds like a - Wait, reacquainted? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Lets just head over to the Cutlass and get started on girls night, and I’ll tell you all about it, ok Major Hot Stuff? It’s all a long story and…”

  Surprisingly, since Stacy had no physical method to drag Gertrude away, the Commonwealth Major began walking back towards her ship. Thanks Stacy, I thought, I can go back to concentrating on this now. For that, I’ll even forgive you for putting that damned thought in my head.

  I got your back sugar-bits, she replied, and your front, and your top, and your bottom. I got all of you covered.

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed to myself. It was seriously hard to stay mad at my AI friend.

  “Initializing power core”

  It was hours later, and with the extra hands helping, we’d managed to get Frankie reassembled far faster than I’d expected. Just having Boudya there to divide the labor had sped up the work enormously, but Gertrude had surprised us both by coming over and lending us a hand after her conversation with Stacy. She was no engineer, but she was far from a useless stick jockey either.

  “Core stable, no surges, power draw steady.” Stacy reported. Now that she wasn’t laying low, she was monitoring telemetry for this full power-up. “Power levels showing a sixty-seven percent unloaded increase over previous.”

  “Slightly lower than expected.” I grumbled, “I’m guessing that the secondary matrix still has a flaw in it.”

  “Gimme a second,” Gertrude put in, and I heard her rummaging on the tool cart, “ah, here it is.” A moment later I heard a high pitched whine started coming from within the droid.

  “Feedback loop detected in Henry’s Bridge. Burnout estimated in thirteen point seven seconds.”

  “Shutting it down!” Boudya announced.

  “No! Just give me two more seconds.” There was an odd crystalline tink noise, the wine began to attenuate down in pitch. “There, that should do it.”

  “Feedback loop stabilized, burnout conditions alleviated. Power levels are now reading a sixty-nine percent increase over previous.” Stacy reported, and gave a naughty chuckle before saying “Nice!”

  I shook my head and glanced over at the major. I wanted to ask her what she’d done to boost the power that last two percent, but we had far more to get done. “Whatever you did, make sure you document it.”

  The rest of the process went smoothly. We had done our best to work out any kinks in the system in previous trial runs, but there were always things that came up when you pushed the envelope on tolerances like we were doing with Frankie. But if this droid operated like Stacy’s simulations, it should be as much of a sensor ghost when running silent as those damned ktonshi down there.

  Finally, we initialized the gravimetric field array, and the droid lifted out of its cradle to hover over the deck under its own power. Soon after that, Stacy ran it through the basic maneuvering trial to check the trim. “Everything checks out.” She reported, with a smile in her voice, “All we need to do now is test the flight thrusters and the sensor cross section.”

  “Please let the Commander know we’re ready to proceed to that stage then, would you, Stacy?”

  “No problem, my french vanilla sweet!” a pause, then, “The commander said you are good to go whenever you’re ready. She also requests that our two blonde bombshells start prepping for launch, cause if this test goes well, we’ll be launching our run on the planet as soon as the Cutlass is ready to go!”

  Despite Jophixa’s desire to get things done in double time, our tests made sure to put Frankie through some damned strenuous tests. We weren’t deliberately trying to push his envelope like we normally would have in true engineering tests, analyzing the very edge of where he’d fail or fall apart, but we wanted to know that we had, indeed, significantly improved on his previous specs. We’d come back and do the more severe tests later.

  Or for that matter, Stacy could build a copy of the droid on the station, and have the crew there do the destructive testing. That way we wouldn’t need to completely start over if something went kablooey.

  Thankfully, there were no issues on our more reserved test flight, and Frankie performed beyond our expectations. The acceleration and maneuvering the droid was capable of, was downright scary.

  “If that thing had more than light arms and countermeasures on it, I’d be worried for the future of fighter pilots.” Gertrude told us, as we did the final prep for the Cutlass to transport Frankie down to the planet. “But I doubt anyone would have the reaction speed to take full advantage of it anyway, other than Stacy.”

  Same as last time, Stacy would be handling the majority of the controls for the droid. This time, however, I didn’t have to hide the fact that I was mostly along as a J.A.F.O., there to observe as another set of eyes, and offer suggestions or insight if I happened to notice anything Stacy didn’t catch. Just because she was an AI housed in a computer bigger than a capital ship, didn’t mean she was infallible. Not that I was going to rib her on that fact, no way.

  The journey to Eve’s Blessing was quiet and uneventful this time, with no sensor hits on either ktonshi or human lifesigns as Cutlass jettisoned Frankie out her cargo hatch, on a low flyby.

  We’d aimed to touch down at the crater caused by the Sagittarius missile detonation during our rescue of young Miles, since it was the approximate location or our first visuals of both him and the ktonshi that were chasing him. The entrance to the cave system they’d come out of had to be nearby, and if it hadn’t collapsed due to the shockwave of the blast, it was our best way to get in and investigate if we’d be leaving anything left alive here when we went chasing down Admiral LeBeau. One thing all the old holovids and books said about war was that you shouldn’t leave an enemy alive behind you if you could help it. It’d usually come back to bite you in the ass.

  To Jophixa’s delight, it didn’t take us long to locate the cave entrance, which wasn’t all that surprising considering Miles had been fleeing on foot. Knowing the direction he’d been coming from, that made the search area quite small, allowing us to cautiously creep up on a yawning cave mouth inside of twenty minutes.

  At that point, it would be all a matter of caution and stealth. We didn’t want to alert the creepy kewpie faced fuckers to our presence until we could confirm they had some form of means off the planet. Maybe, if we were really lucky, the rest of the colonists hadn’t survived the contagion based transformation, and were already dead, and there were no more ktonshi down here. Or failing that, they were still encased in their chrysalis’ and we could collapse the caves in order to kill them.

  The last thing we really wanted was thousands of new ktonshi waking up, heading for the colony, and using its raw materials to create a means off of this ball of Void damned rock.

  So with Frankie locked down fully into stealth mode, Stacy slipped us up to the cave mouth and, when no movement or lifesigns pinged on the sensors, we slipped inside.

  The moment we crossed the threshold, lights farther back in the cave chased away the ominous darkness to reveal a startling sight. Instead of a simple cave all the way back, the rough stone walls ended some ten meters back, giving way to a constructed corridor of alloyed metal and composite plastics. Glitching displays mounted in the walls ever couple meters flickered with strange glyphs and icons that reminded me ever so slightly of the journey through the depths of the Keeper’s station not that long ago.

  “Shattered stars!” I whispered, realizing that for the fourth time since coming out of retirement, I was seeing alien technology no human was likely to have ever seen before. Then another thought came slamming into my mind immediately after that. “Fuck! This place still has power. That means there’s a possible working reactor core down there somewhere! That can’t be good.”

  “No, no it’s not!” Jophixa barked over the comms, “If the ktonshi manage to convert all the colonists and have a reactor core of some sort when they convert all that material down there into a ship, we’re in trouble. We need to blow that reactor!”

  Well who says engineers never get to have any fun.

  The Salvager’s Plague

  https://ko-fi.com/theacornscribe