Robots and Expendables First!

[Proselyte]

Not Built For Purpose

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The Blackout Event shocked Sirian society in a way that it had never quite been shocked before. It introduced a new idea to the popular consciousness regarding the jump gates. These beacons of supposed technological innovation had become foundational not just to the interstellar economy that feeds, clothes and employs so many teeming billions but to the way humans perceive themselves as living in an interconnected universe. Anywhere in House Liberty, under any habitat dome or inside any space station or under any of her several blue skies, the phrase "Going to Manhattan", leaving home to seek opportunity, means the same thing to anyone who's tuned into the culture.

Traveling nigh incomprehensible interstellar distances is so trivial to modern humanity that it plays footnote in a turn of phrase that might've once referred to traveling a couple dozen miles from your birthplace, let alone another star system.

The Pulse was a wake-up call. Though the precipitating Blackout was hardly the first accident that had occurred with a jump gate in Sirian history, to the public it had surpassed even the Dallas Incident in sheer scope. For thirty-one grueling hours, every star system in Sirius previously connected by a jump gate became an island unto itself. The possibility that these devices on which the shape of the sector depends could one day shut off and stay off, while not inconceivable before, was now seriously considered by anyone who spared a second's thought to the current inter-House system of trade. Even the sector's jump holes underwent widespread destabilization and realignment in this period. The sector stood still. For thirty-one hours, nothing was certain.

If there was one thing about the Pulse that was certain, and surprised no one, it was that the aftermath of its effects on the sector brought great change. Sirians are all too used to the fact that with great change, comes times of great opportunity.

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The orange hues of light reflecting off the Walker Nebula danced across the electro-optical receptors of a dull-plated M5-U48 Mining Drone, an autonomous spaceship cutting its way across the Dresden system at impressive speed. An industrial, rugged and visually indistinct rectangular craft, save for its hazard stripes and some externally-rigged H-Fuel tanks. It could be taken for any of a score of such units used by mining operations throughout the Omega Border Worlds, corporate or otherwise, but the crux of the difference here was in the software. Not slaved to a drone control console aboard a parent vessel or command center, this one was running truly autonomous, under preset parameters - parameters set by the Zoners whom it represents. It is no mission of material extraction they've set this small, utilitarian machine to either.

No, this drone gets to be a lucky first. A fact finder, set amongst the stars to glean new truths for the governing administration of Gran Canaria, primarily because the Canarian Survey Corps had nothing better laying around at the time.

At least, nothing that they were willing to lose.

Its designation: Lasso 1. Its likelihood of survival: slim to none, considering the mission it is about to undertake. This intrepid pioneer's most valuable quality: that nobody will miss it if it ends up on the universe's bad side.

The unit's operating system, moving the ship along preset waypoints, speeds the stubby spaceframe into the boundaries of the Feuerberg lava field, towards and directly into its destination: a jump hole. One that it'd have never entered, if not for the efforts of a previous ship of the Corps. When the machine's predecessors traversed this jump tunnel, that crew had stumbled into a system that was found to be vastly more dangerous than was previously recorded, before the Pulse played havoc with the jump connections outside Ageira's stewardship. And they had found something big.

The drone emerged from the tunnel, and Thuringia lay before it. Spending precious little time in the open, the machine follows its programming to beeline away from Planet Erfurt and disappear into a vivid, blood orange spew of dust and planetary debris further in system. While making nice concealment for the low-emission craft, this cloud is what holds Lasso 1's objective. Creeping between fragments and dodging high radiation pockets, approaching its final pre-programmed nav point, the subject of the day entered view.

A modestly sized planet, or what's left of it, loomed before the simple machine. With the final nav point reached, Lasso 1's free-flight programming took hold and allowed the craft to register the gravitational tear at the husk's core that had presumably fractured the world apart, to the extent that its detritus was littered across quite an impressive volume.

This is what the previous Zoner crew, in their nosing around, had stumbled into while carrying out the Walker post-Pulse reconnaissance the whole Corps was tied up in lately. Despite their freighter's jump stability monitoring hardware detecting the presence of something that vaguely resembled a jump tunnel, the rift now off Lasso 1's fore was nothing like the jump hole they had traversed, and no guarantee could be found with their limited scanners that the anomaly's gravitational eddies wouldn't flatten anything that approached into paste. The prior freighter, and now the drone, were practically swimming in proof of that, after all. With the confounding of their instruments, and a welcome reserve of common sense, those Zoners determined that barreling into the warped maw of a dead world could wait a while, and turned tail.

On their returning report to the Survey Corps leadership, there was a universal desire among them to send a properly-kitted science vessel to the system to examine this rift in detail, and a universal recognition that the security situation in Thuringia didn't allow for this. They weren't entirely aware of the facts of what had occurred in the Rheinland territory all the way back at the Van Hoerbeck Mission Control Center in Maspalomas, Gran Canaria, but they discerned enough to make a decision. The evidence left behind made plain demonstration of local conditions: the debris ring near Thuringia's navigational center, as well as the presence of the same hostile Rheinland ships that have lately been terrorizing the Omegas once again. Survey Corps commissioner Florentin Abreo declared to his subordinates that the system was just too dangerous to risk assigning a Corvo and her crew for extensive scans to determine the properties of this tunnel.

Lasso 1, on the other hand, was no Corvo. Following its refit and reprogramming, it existed for only one reason. To test one simple theory, and not bring unwanted attention down on the heads of the civilian spacers while doing it.

Its diminutive engine ignited, and its jump pathing subroutines initialized. Its last status update, sent before traversing the Dresden jump hole, slowly rebounded across the Zoners' Walker Nebula net relays back to headquarters in Omega-48, which would inform them that by this time, Lasso-1 would have committed to its objective, barring any interception. Fortune had seen fit to spare the drone that fate. It propelled itself into the gaps between the broken crust and into the core, vanishing beyond the event horizon of the unexplained anomaly.

The Canarian Zoners would not receive another direct transmission from it again.