Robots and Expendables First!

[Proselyte]

Roads Were Made For Going

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Propelled through a rift beyond Einsteinian space and ending up somewhere else altogether, Lasso 1 was perhaps unexpectedly in one piece.

A flood of information from its surroundings crashed against its limited sub-expert CPU. Immediately, the machine detected truly staggering energy emissions off its front, though compressed into an inconceivably dense point of space almost akin to a singularity. The presence of this enormous blip on the drone's feed nearly renders the rest of the sensor suite worthless against the background of such a blinding EM signature, save for at extremely close ranges. Its on-board cataloguing matrix can't even label the object properly.

A well-informed human pilot would have since recognized this shifting green infinity before them to be the ever-puzzling Earhart system. Its discovery by a multitude of factions sector-wide, utilizing a quirk in the functionality of the recently released line of Kishiro jump drives, has made it Sirius' most promising new frontier for economic exploitation. It is also the most inconvenient, namely for groups lacking straightforward access to the technology. Lasso 1's arrival in this space would no doubt be an exciting occasion for the under-funded Canarian Survey Corps. Discovering this mysterious rift in Rheinland space might just save them the trouble of having to get a hold of a whole jump drive, after all. The financial prospects of this throwaway scout were becoming promising indeed, more than its handlers knew.

Unfortunately for the CSC, Lasso 1's attempted post-traversal status update would fail to find its way over the Neural Net back to them. The rift it had moved through closed behind it, and if there was some other medium for a message to route through the Net to even reach Sirius in this strange region, it wasn't presently apparent to the machine.

Until then, the most they could know back home was that Lasso 1 had vanished with little ceremony.

It was alone. Nobody was coming.

If there were any capacity for cognition within the drone's optronic circuitry, space might have begun to seem impossibly vast. Lasso's free-flight programming, ineluctably procedural, determined its next course alone in this alien expanse. In the local space was a multitude of debris and other ships, as well as massive superstructures. This called for an investigatory sweep in absence of a clear return route. No doubt the extra H-fuel was going to be handy here.

A number of threats come close to adding Lasso to the imposing debris field. Investigating a ruined Liberty battleship brought the drone perilously close to the defense matrix surrounding the singularity, enough to draw fire from the ancient constructs. Spears of charged antimatter scream at startling speeds past the evading craft, saved by virtue of its tiny size and high speed. It manages to escape beyond targeting distance no worse for wear. Passing through a prominent cloud of dark matter costs the drone dearly in spent repair nanobots, before an exclusion zone was automatically created within its navnet parameters. Even mundane near-collisions with drifting ship debris almost take their due in damage.

This impromptu recon was eventually forced to a head. Lasso had explored all that it could within Earhart, taking up-close visual scans of the ring gates equidistant from the central defensive array. The only thing it hadn't attempted was approaching the outer bounds of the "system", such as it was, as its priority remained finding a jump hole to return to catalogued space. Protocol would have guided to the drone to escape through the most suitable jump tunnel, if there was one, but there was no suitable path for returning to Canaria that the drone could recognize.

Several of the alien rings it had scanned did not match any known variation of alien structure. Whether they functioned more like stabilizers of some kind than proper jump gates was of little import to the drone, but they did appear to be supporting more of these rifts. To the primitive drone's jump stability scanners, one extraspatial tear was as good as the next, and this was deemed as suitable of a traversal point as the rift inside Planet Gotha promised to be. It picked the nearest available opening, and proceeded into yet more uncharted territory.

The vessel's trek continued through space so distant from Sirius that scientists haven't yet managed to name stars as far from home as they were. Lasso's extended H-fuel tanks were draining at a steady pace. For every unknown wonder and megastructure recorded, its potential operational range burned away. So many of these places were many hundreds of light years beyond humanity's grasp, eons from the nearest link in the supply chain that pushes every ship through the uncaring void.

The good news, at least, was that after each excursion, it was necessary to double back to the nexus of the Earhart system by the simple lack of other jump holes to explore through.

Considering that new jump holes very well could have led the unknowing automaton further from home rather than closer in such distant space, that limitation was likely to its benefit. Instead of being swayed to wander unknown space forever in a fruitless search, its forced return to Earhart eventually found the drone stumble through a rift that would return it to its home sector. Plummeting through the opening and its EO sensors registering a brief torrent of formless light, Sirius saw the return of the retrofit mining drone, having by sheer luck survived the crucible of uncharted space in and beyond Earhart, only suffering superficial damage and depleting half its nanobot reserve.

The return, however, would not be as gentle as its handlers would have wished for, if they'd known it survived or a message could still reach them. Not everywhere in the Sirius sector is equally welcoming, or conducive to Neural Net communications.

Some places close to home are more dangerous environs than the furthest, most desolate reaches of space.