A red-haired woman stamped through the prestigiously battered door to the Embassy - taking careful care to duck her head and wipe her feet on the way in which, if she was honest, kind-of ruined the effect of stamping in the first place, but you took what you got as far as fiercely defensive monkeys were concerned - and eyed the lights, the screens, the projectors, as though they'd each personally insulted her grandmother. They hadn't, of course. That would have been crazy, and whatever else Sparks was, whatever kept breaking her probes, she remained stalwartly convinced that she was not insane.
Though if she was, she had to admit that she was in the right place for it. Struggling against the might of the Federal Republic was a task best suited to the slightly unhinged, after all. She didn't belong to that special breed of crazy that actually flew against them, though. She had once, but as it turned out an opposition to killing things made you rather useless as a resistance fighter. Perhaps she was just maladjusted. Sparks hadn't minded. Conflict broke ships as well as people and though she couldn't offer the injured much more than a kind word, there was never any shortage of birds that needed patching up. Everyone heard the cries of injured people, but there were so few that heard the groan of agony in a ruptured fuel line or the discounted rumble of a misaligned cooling unit.
Sparks heard them though. Heard the screams of the metal and the muffled weeping of a ship's electrics, the faint, gentle crack of a uncalibrated weapon like the click of a broken jaw, a hull breach like a sucking chest wound, bleeding atmo instead of blood. No, the ships spoke to Sparks and, occasionally, she even answered them. Not when anyone was watching, of course. That would have been crazy.
They spoke, and she answered. Or at least, they had until yesterday morning. Three probes, small simple constructs - not much more than some hi-tech cameras and low-tech thrusters (old hall effect models, ancient enough that they may as well have been fitted to a rowboat by sirian standards) - had simply vanished from her readouts, gone completely dark without so much as a flicker of warning. If they'd been detected and attacked - unlikely, considering that they ran without live systems, save the cameras - she would have expected something on the readings. A few reports of system damage, the scream of fluttering thrusters, a few last-ditch pictures, some hint that her steel and carbon children were dying. But there had been nothing.
And that silence, more than anything, terrified her.
Sparks wrung her hands, eyes raking over the, admittedly empty, bar; looking for someone, anyone, to talk to. Something to take her mind off the eerie silence of the machines, if just for a while. God, she needed a familiar face. She crossed her fingers and looked again, hoping to find one.
"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."
- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.
