For Ship & Company

Posted on Sat Nov 25th, 2017 @ 10:46pm by Ferrofax

2,055 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Mission 0: Everybody Has A Story
Location: Memory Theta, Reception Bay
Timeline: 1 Year Previously

Ferrofax stood in the reception bay, waiting for the airlock to cycle. He didn't need to be ‘here’, present in a physical avatar. Shells like this were far to similar to the shells of his creators, and the idea of mimicking shell things was...troubling. Shells were good for certain things, after all their world was built to their specifications. But they were fragile things as well, needing the right sort of gravity, the right sort of pressure and air mix. Alter one of those by a certain margin and life as they knew it became much harder to maintain.

It was so hard to feel comfortable around things that broke so easily, and yet held such sway over his own existence. A higher power should never have a knife held to its throat.

He played a finger around the collar of his coat, feeling the chilly, silent calm of the inhibitor program. It was sleeping, it's awareness not yet awoken by the rush of combat and the potential for shell damage. The first thing he’d do when it was removed was take a orbital station from near Earth space, deorbit it, and crash the hundred ton mass into Starfleet Command. A fitting beginning to the repayment-

The marble hued collar around his throat warmed, its jewel like eye opening with a subtle warning chime. It was summoning itself, its digital fingers tightening around the core heuristics of his programming.

“Good morning jailer,” Ferrofax smiled, as the light above the airlock winked to green and opened. A female shell, of the human species, stepped across the threshold and into the reception bay. Ferrofax already had the captains personnel file flitting across his consciousness.

“Greetings Captain Armitage, I hope the trip from Starfleet Medical was not too arduous?”

What remained of Armitage's face grinned from behind the medical support mask. Her uniform bulked out in odd areas where other medical equipment repaired or replaced the damaged sections of her physical self. This was a shell that had been cracked open, and yet refused to die. Ferrofax could respect that, one apex predator to another.

“Given the stories I’ve heard about this place, I feel honoured to have received a scathing greeting in person from the Ghost of the Badlands,” was Armitage's attempt at wry humour. Her voice came out in a two part duet, a raspy growl of barely present vocal cords and the sybilant song of the voxcoder built into the neck of the support harness.

“As you should,” Ferrofax nodded, gesturing to a table and chair already bedecked with a selection of warm drinks to ward off the chill of the airlock. “I perused your medical file, and have attempted to provide items suitable for your new situation. Is there anything else I can do to provide for you in way of hospitality?”

“I don’t suppose you can run dialysis? This damn torture device from Starfleet Medical keeps clogging. Its a problem with the filters, I’m sure of that at least. But I can never seem to find the time to get to sickbay to solve it,” she said, making a slow and limping journey to the chair and settling into it. The large case she carried rested on her lap, her one good hand and the artificial claw rested on it protectively.

“Unfortunately not. One of the few areas on Starbase Theta I am barred from is sickbay,” the hologram shrugged his shoulders.

“A pity, but a small one compared to the rest,” Armitage said softly, her flesh and blood hand stroking the case tenderly. For a moment she seemed to pull off a trick only Ferrofax seemed able to do, retreating from the avatar of self to examine some other deeper mystery. The reception bays sensors were keyed to her support harness, and the signs of oncoming post traumatic stress were not evident as of yet.

“I need to know that he’ll be cared for,” she said, and allowed her one good eye to look directly at him. Not at the Avatar, the projected hologram of simulated matter. She was looking to the corner of the rooms ceiling, to the black dome of the multi spectrum sensor: Ferrofax’s true eye.

“You have my assurance-“

“I need to hear you say it!” She said, her voice a spar, scathing hiss that made her wince in pain. Medical tell tales were appearing on her medical read out, nothing spectacular but something to keep an eye on. “I need to know that I am placing him in your care, and not as an item of study or for your catalogue of curiosities. I need to know that...that he’ll find peace here. I need to know he’ll not be forgotten here.”

Ferrofax furrowed his brow, accessing the wireless controls for her medical harness and began to administer the prescribed procedures for her care. Blood thinners swam in her now, cutting off the cascading aneurysm before it had a chance to get going, the clots and ruined viens around her neural implants returning to normal. Impeller fields in the chest of the harness slowed her blood down, working around the ruined and torn thing that had been a heart. She glowered at him as her breathing steady, and she sank back into the chair. Her single present cheek glowed a blush of frustration as slowly her anger died, her stress bleeding away into medicated dullness.

“I...I need to hear…” she gasped, her hand sliding form the case, the flesh one making less of a sound than the claw..

Ferrofax allowed her to wallow in a medicinal fugue as he stepped closer, pulled the heavy case from her lap and placed it on the table. The simple mechanical clasp came free easily enough, and it opened to reveal the treasure within. A complicated support apparatus surrounded the fist sized object, power relays and dumb diagnostic programs. To Ferrofax’s higher senses it was like opening a box that held a star in digital bondage, so bright was the computational stain that boiled within.

He reached out, and placed his hand over the smooth hyper diamond sphere of the USS Eros’s AI core. He could feel the nanoscale cracks and ravines that wormed through the sphere, signs of utter and irrecoverable damage to its physicality. Beyond that he began to pick up the surface layer of programming. Most of it was simple housekeeping files, a few fleeting thoughts etched on broken glass.

His name was Heart Of Midlothian, and he was in love.

Every AI, Midlothian knew, loved their crews unconditionally. It was the way of things, as much a certainty as the caress of solar wind and the tang of warp speed. Midlothian knew the particular quirks and desires of his entire compliment, a not inconsiderable task given he was the command and control AI of an Excalibur class starship. But what he knew more than anything was that his captain enjoyed camomile tea in the morning but hot chocolate at the end of her shift. He knew how hot to make both drinks, how sweet to make them, and when it was appropriate to preempt her request and have hem ready for her.

He knew what music she enjoyed to relax to, and even what made her dance. He knew when it was correct to call her Captain, and when she desired to be called Jeannette.

The memories shifted under Ferrofax’s scrutiny, becoming dimmer, more broken, tumbled in a mad cacophony of sensory data. The USS Eros was under attack, her spine broken by a lucky strike. Escape was impossible, her warp drive just as easily flattening the ship into foil than providing relief. The crew were abandoning ship, their escape pods bursting into brilliant specs of fire as energy lanced them from existence.

His crew, Midlothian crew, were dying. His access to weapon systems was growing less and less accurate with each passing second. He had released the entire magazine of torpedoes, programming their stupid AI’s to hunt down the murderers killing his crew. ‘Clock Makers’ was how he had heard the science team call them. Relics of another time, another place, another war whose soldiers had not heard the death rattle of their leaders. He took pleasure in seeing their black dagger ships die by the hundred, the thousand.

A score for every soul, every friend, every ward under his care! Midlothian would burn them from the stars for all his hatred!

And then it was over, the Clock Makers had retreated, leaving a shattered hulk in Starfleet grey to float in barely charted space. Power was flickering, as reliable as a politician's promise, but it was there. He could go into power saving mode, set a probe to broadcast a distress call. He could survive-

Life sign. Weak, small, failing…his captain. Oh my captain,my captain.

It was a easy thing to redirect power from his AI core to the transporters, and then to the medical holographic generators. He gutted the EMH, not trusting its hands to the task. He made holographic organs, replacing the ones lost to damage and fire. He held her together in the palms of his hands, burning relays and power shunts, his Icarus wings burning under the harsh sun of mortality. His crew had abandoned ship, trying to save themselves as was the way of things. But his captain, his Captain, had chosen not to abandon him.

HIs final thoughts, a message to the void he screamed on every subspace band, rolled through the core of the hyper diamond sphere.

“NCC 67358, USS Eros, multiple hull breach’s, survivor aboard. NCC 67358, USS Eros, multiple hull breach’s, survivor aboard. NCC 67358, USS Eros, multiple hull breach’s, survivor aboard.”

The Heart Of Midlothian had cannibalized parts of himself, burning them out of his being with a digital torch, to keep this fragile broken shell alive. And for something as ill defined as ‘love’. It was sickening to Ferrofax. It was an affront to his sense of propriety.

But it had been Midlothian‘s choice, his final wish as a sentient.

“Please…” Armitage said, her voice as distant in sound as if she was still pinned by wreckage within the USS Eros’s computer core. Maybe she was, in her own way. What had driven her to run to the computer core instead of to her crew in the escape pods? What could a shell know of the love, the utter desire, of a AI’s need to protect that which was theirs? ”I...I need to know…”

Ferrofax closed the case, placing a hand atop it.

“I will care for him. Here he will not know pain, or loss, or need. If I can bring him back to you, I shall make the attempt,” Ferrofax said solemnly.

“Don’t make a girl a promise, if you know you can’t keep it,” Jeannette Armitage, former captain of the USS Eros and only recorded survivor of Starfleet’s single encounter with the Clock Makers, slipped into unconsciousness. Ferrofax glanced at her, seeing vital signs falling into regular sleeping patterns. He looked over the harnesses data history, seeing how hard she had been pushing herself on the flight from Earth to Memory Theta. There had been a not zero chance of permanent and irreversible death.

“Perhaps,” Ferrofax said aloud to the closed sepulchre of the Heart Of Midlothian, “she is worthy of your loyalty brother.”

He turned his head towards the door back into the facility, the Greek letter Theta emblazoned upon the hatch.

“But for the rest...you will be disappointed in them.”

Ferrofax vanished, the case containing the immortal remains of Heart Of Midlothian dematerializing in a transporter beam. As soon as they had left, the airlock door back to the medical transport hissed open and a pair of medics rushed in. The harness had alerted them to the spiking bio readings of her stress, and Ferrofax had chosen to ignore their request for entry. Even when they began banging on the door.

She had chosen pain for herself, and possible death, to make sure her final crew member received what aid he could.

Ferrofax could respect that, if nothing else.

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