Dragon's subroutines - basic programs to execute a basic task - reported all situations nominal.

Everything is NOT nominal!

It all started with a simple call. Well, even that was an odd beginning. Receiving a call that pinged her directly was incredibly strange. The 'hacker', though the term was rather barbaric to describe the finesse with which her systems were broken into, had proven themselves immensely talented. She had barely a moment to realize her public communication systems were compromised before the call began.

It was impossible to determine where it originated from either - according to the reading provided by a backtrace, its source was 'everywhere'. How helpful.

Whoever had spoken was using some kind of voice modulator to make their voice come out digitized. Dragon knew it wasn't merely a text-to-speech routine translating through an advanced speech program because of the inflections and slight tonal differences that came through. Some things were simply not possible to emulate in a program designed to talk unless there was an intelligence actively guiding it.

A tinker could theoretically create such a thing, but it was almost pointless to design a program this advanced to simply 'speak' words. The entire point was moot since any method of doing such a thing was more easily accomplished with somebody to simply speak and have their voice changed.

Adjusting how heavy the modulation was would be an infinitely easier task, and probably accomplish their goals even better.

Essentially there was someone on the other end of the line... somewhere. It wasn't merely a pre-programmed message (which was already clear when they responded to her) that was deposited onto her line.

Which meant someone out there was capable of bypassing her very, very powerful defenses with a level of resistance that amounted to a wet paper towel trying to stop bullet.

Effectively, nothing.

For an secret AI, it was rather insulting. She literally WAS software, it was her domain, her specialty. Even if another Tinker was to trigger with a software specialty, they should have at least encountered some trouble breaching her anti-detection and anti-tampering preventative measures.

Instead, after trying to deal with the violation of her privacy the rather potent measures installed into the networking of her armbands was swept aside like an ensemble of sticks trying to stop a tsunami. Again, her pride was torn to pieces.

The armbands were absolutely vital to any Endbringer fight - responsible for keeping the massive number of capes involved in communication and organized as best she could.

Dragon's brief bouts of silence had actually been an attempt to backtrace the connections that had been made and find out where the mysterious 'Logic' was contacting her from. As per the Endbringer Truce, any cape who was willing to fight was permitted to join (theoretically) and as Dragon barely believed her newest frustration would follow through, she agreed to all them to deploy their 'fleet' as they called it.

As it turned out, they did indeed have something worthy of the name. When the fleet emerged, Dragon was glad for the warning she'd given - the number and color of the ships was rather ominous. Especially since they looked like Tinkertech, something the Simurgh was known for creating with any resources she was given.

If they'd appeared without a word beforehand, Dragon didn't particularly want to theorize what would have happened. Especially if combat was engaged and they returned fire... Disregarding the Voidpiercer entirely, the ships were capable of rather obscene amounts of damage.

Including the gleaming white ship of her mathematical nightmares, they would have lost just about everyone. Not even counting its most powerful weapon, the implosion rockets it fired would have annihilated most of their forces by itself.

At the conclusion of the battle, the remaining ships of the fleet simply returned to their origination point and vanished.

Scans both before, during, and just after the battle concluded something was there, floating in the sky. That wasn't to say something recordable per say was picked up, but evidence could be seen to indicate the presence of something... massive.

All visual scans failed to identify the vessel. Thermal, Infrared, Ultraviolet.

Radar and Sonar were also employed. Nothing.

Without having a suit specifically equipped with more advanced scanning tools, that was all Dragon had to work with. It was enough to drive her positively batty, if such a thing were possible.

Later, after reviewing the normal camera footage of where the ships appeared from and disappeared to, she was able to determine a rough area which smoke and debris from the fight couldn't pass through, and even then it was difficult with how far it was from the actual city and the fighting.

With so few data points to work with, the accuracy of her finding was called into question, she was reasonably confident of her theory.

Which was to say, there was a single massive vessel floating in the sky, serving as a hub for the other ships to embark/disembark from. Two of the data points indicated the ship was quite large, but from her calculations both were recorded at the exact same height - and having a hangar ship made a lot more sense than having two medium sized vessels.

Additionally, one of her last datums was some smoke that perfectly travelled along the 'flank' of the invisible ship - if there was a gap between two ships it should have slipped through or wobbled slightly when it passed by the 'crack' between the two. That never occurred, however.

So Dragon was reasonably confident there was a single, massive ship capable of hovering in place while giving away no heat signature or visible cue that it was present; Detectable only because a lack of other particulate or avian presence in a notable area.

How confounding.

Specific calculations of volume and ship placement were difficult, but even with a lowball estimation the quantity of ships easily surpassed the rough area the singular carrier ship theoretically took up. Not only that, and though it wasn't an impossibility, but likely an improbability that every single ship possessed stealth functions as well, the fact that every single ship in the first wave appeared simultaneously indicates some kind of spatial warping or other phenomena occurring.

It didn't make particular sense that only one version of the ships utilized stealth technology if they all possessed it. It also made sense when compared to modern-day military aircraft - trying to evade all the newest detection methods would require a rather obscene amount of technology to be applied to every single plane made, which wasn't a feasible option.

Even with Tinkertech, applying this level of stealth to numerous craft would likely be challenging. Making it work with the massive carrier ship also made sense, if it was possible, because it was akin to having a similar aircraft carrier roaming the seas, back when naval combat play a significantly greater role in history, being nearly undetectable by enemy forces.

An invisible aircraft carrier could strike at a great many targets because of its viable range - bombers and fighters could travel quite a distance and return to their invisible command center to refuel and strike another target with very few repercussions.

Add in the ability to fly, and the fact its deploying what effectively amounts to spacecraft? It makes a rather terrifying image.

So presumably, not every single type of ship used the stealth field. Which also meant they probably made up for it in other ways, like the forcefield/grappling beam ships. Those wanted to be seen, otherwise people wouldn't know where the 'safe area' was.

The bombers would be quite terrifying if they were capable of stealth as well, especially with the damage they indicated they were capable of. Damaging the Simurgh's wing in a single pass was a significant achievement, something that would have taken nearly an equivalent amount of Blasters to achieve with just the efforts of capes.

After speaking briefly to Legend, who theorized the ships were being built and deployed immediately, she checked over the footage they had of the area the ships deployed from. It was fairly consistent, nearly perfectly timed actually, the appearance of each ship. It was mostly the original smaller ships with the rapid-fire mini guns that were deployed, as the bombers died much later in the fight at which point no new ships were spotted until the Voidpiercer emerged.

As a matter of fact, Dragon could detect a 0.23 per second increase in production of the ships when compared to the beginning of the fight to the end, before they stopped making the smaller variants.

What that indicated, if they were indeed 'making' the ships on the spot, wasn't promising. Already the mere existence of the invisible carrier craft capable of holding the Voidpiercer alone, not including the bombers, was a knife held to every single persons throat in the entire world.

Whether it was meant to or not, the ships represented a Sword of Damocles, waiting to drop on anyone who fought against them too hard, should the controller turn out to have... villainous inclinations.

Dragon could only hope that wasn't the case.

After the battle, attempts at communication with the disappeared forces went absolutely nowhere. They hadn't opened a line to speak with her so much as simply generated their voice on her already existing line - which made an already difficult backtracing effort nearly impossible.

Every time she thought she found the origin of the connection it would turn out to be a random connection - nothing she'd dug up had been able to narrow down or even get a general location of the source.

Which again, as a literal being of software, she found the whole situation quite frustrating.

Dragon had also been directed to analyze Logic's words and derive as much meaning as possible from them. Unfortunately, that hadn't been a whole lot, barring the fact he'd said 'we' instead of 'I' indicating he wasn't working alone. Though even that wasn't all the surprising. Legend had surmised as much just from watching the craft, though it was only a theory of his later confirmed by Dragon's recordings.

Costa-Brown had directly requested she make this a top priority, so most of her active resources were analyzing the available info, but all it was really doing at this point was giving her the equivalent of a headache.

The ONLY viable theory she had at the moment was a new software Tinker was working with some kind of spacecraft Tinker.

Well, technically their software prowess reminded her of herself, if she didn't have certain restrictions in place. Thinking back, that perfectly modulated voice would be quite similar to something Dragon would have if she hadn't spent a lot of time on making herself... seem human.

Scanning the few sentences she had to work with didn't tell her too much. She just didn't have enough information to work with.

Maybe she could ask Colin if he could review it with her? He might see something she'd missed after going over it for the umpteenth time. Just because Dragon was a digital entity didn't mean she couldn't feel frustration, and it certainly wasn't helping her dig up new leads.

Well, she had to finish compiling her report for the Director and the members of the Triumvirate, since the ships had gotten themselves classed as an S-Class threat should they become hostile, so any and all information they had needed to be gone over until they could establish a line of communication.

She sighed.

It was going to be a long day - longer than it already had been, at any rate.

- TG

Authors Note:

So I kinda just stopped logging into FF for... Well, a long time. All current chapters of this story are posted on Spacebattles Forum under the name 'Grim Tide'. Feel free to find me there. I'm currently consolidating all of my written works into the same Google Drive because for some godforsaken reason I didn't start with that. I'm also on Questionable Questing under the same name.

Apologies.