How many drones does it take to fly a spaceship?
Serial Designation J had seen better days.
Then again, trying to remember a day that was specifically "better" wasn't coming up with any search results but she knew she had seen them.
At some point.
She'd had worse days at least. Like a few months ago when Cyn had done the impossible and actually lost!
Close second to the day she got infected in the first place and her best friend turned into Cyn's skin suit.
A part of her wondered if Cyn pretending to be Tessa for so long was her subtle way of mocking her. Or if somehow in the broken bot's mind she thought she was being "nice" by letting J pretend Tessa was still there.
As bad (and flat out weird) as today was, at least it wasn't that bad.
It started out pretty good. J had finally finished repairing the ship, not the first time she'd needed to given Cyn's habit of accidentally wrecking them when destroying planets. It did take longer this time since she had to worry about N, V, or the Solver's new "Admin" finding her.
Speaking of, it was good to know her recovery program was still working despite everything. A part of her had been vaguely concerned about that.
But at long last she fixed the ship, gathered a few heaps of worker drone oil and parts to snack on, and launched. Destination…
Anywhere but here.
With Cyn gone J was kind of on her own. In a weird way it was freeing. In a horrible way it was disturbing to realize how little initiative she had on her own. She had options though. They hadn't knocked out every exoplanet just yet. She could find one, preferably in perpetual night with a large worker drone population, and just take some time to herself.
Hey! Odds are there were still other copies of herself out there. Maybe she could team up with another J and take out the local N, V, or any other models around. She didn't need anyone else, but how about more of herself?
That was probably a bad idea but it wasn't like she had any better ones.
Of course whatever her vague plan had been, it hardly mattered now! She'd barely exited the atmosphere when suddenly she nearly crashed right into a freaking alien spaceship!
Aliens! She didn't even know there were any of those left! Not since the Xenocide Wars and those predated even the creation of JCJenson.
It didn't stop JCJenson from installing a program to seek and destroy any aliens should they be discovered. One of the few things Cyn hadn't bothered changing when she remade them into Disassembly Droids.
Not that it was her place to question the top brass but what had they expected regular worker drones to do against… those things?
Despite company policy she'd been more interested in just getting as far away from Copper 9 as possible and politely told the alien scum to leave her be. Then they'd blasted her ship to bits and she found herself in the market.
These aliens didn't match the ones humanity had gone to war with so long ago. Figures, neither side of that conflict had seemed inclined to leave any survivors and seeing as humans won…
Which meant these guys were from some other part of the galaxy. That was… interesting.
They also had some form of shielding, but it only seemed to work against physical weapons? She hadn't expected the personal force shields either. But her lasers did a great job of cutting through the hull and a big enough blast seemed to overwhelm the tech.
There also seemed to be at least some form of comradery between these guys, again unlike the ones from the old war. Those ones had thrived on all forms of combat. Also screaming. All the time.
Probably for the best J had discovered new ones.
Now she was left on the empty bridge of her new ship. With some experimentation she managed to get the right button combination to turn the computer on. Which she could not read.
Yep. Great. Everything was great.
"Ship I can't fly. With a bunch of holes in it, and no oil." Despite speaking out loud she didn't hear anything. She thudded herself in the forehead. "Oh right! And no atmosphere! At least it's quiet."
One problem at a time. She needed to figure out the controls of this ship. Once she knew how to pilot it she could worry about learning the language and making any repairs.
J didn't bother keeping track of how long it took her to figure out the controls. At least they'd left the engines running before she killed them all. That was very thoughtful of them. Eventually she discovered three distinct "modes."
Base was impulse speed, fast enough to escape orbit and navigate a system in short amounts of time. Next came "light speed" or technically faster than light speed. It was fairly basic as far as FTL drives went, less complicated than humanity's version at least. It didn't have different levels at all.
The last mode was confusing. Mostly because it didn't seem to work. Nothing seemed broken as far as J could tell. It just wouldn't activate and what she assumed was a warning would pop up on a screen.
Something to worry about later.
Once she knew how to make the ship move she went about making some basic repairs. She was able to reuse unnecessary bits for her purposes. Like the wreck in the hangar.
That raised a few questions but also helped her figure out other things. These aliens were probably on a salvage or recovery mission of some sort. The wrecked ship must have crashed on Copper 9 at some point and the pilot promptly exterminated. Why that ship had been there was unanswered but she didn't really care.
Her repairs mostly focused on getting the thing to let her fly it. Apparently the bridge having a giant hole in it put the parking brake on or something. Welding a few bulkheads back on, a new viewscreen there, carving "PROPERTY OF JCJENSONS" into the hull…
She even managed to repressurise parts of it because after the first few days the silence was starting to get to her. J had started hearing several voices and not one of them was real.
Hopefully.
There better not be any side effects to Cyn being dead, or deader, or… whatever.
With her vessel being spaceworthy once again she sat back in the captain's chair and considered her options. This ship was a lot bigger and more comfortable than her old one. But it had some problems.
Most importantly the lack of oil.
There had been some of the stuff lying around. Mostly in the hangar but it seemed like whatever tech these aliens were using didn't need much of it anymore. That was a problem for her. She didn't want to explode or shut down anytime soon.
She was starting to run out and she still hadn't left the Copper system.
J could turn around and grab some more, but a part of her didn't want to push her luck. If the others hadn't noticed her launch they'd notice her landing an alien spaceship.
Of course she could just fire up that FTL drive and beeline it for the closest exoplanet and go to town. Oh right! Another problem!
This ship didn't have a star map of the exoplanets. Meaning there was no way for J to find them. She had her own memory files but as she discovered fairly early her CPU was pretty incompatible with this ship's tech.
Even then her internal maps just showed location and distance, it didn't measure fuel management or make adjustments due to debris or other weird space stuff.
Which left her with the alien's star records. There were plenty of planets mapped but if she was reading the map correctly, this ship was a long way from home.
Then again she might not be reading it correctly, language differences and all that.
She was going to be in this for the long haul.
The plan had started while she was making repairs but it finally had begun to blossom into something concrete. J would take this ship back to the part of the galaxy it had come from, once there she would land on the first planet she found and have the time of her life.
No awkward team dynamics, no baggage, no N, no V, NO CYN!
No Tessa…
Just her and a planet full of filthy alien scum for her to massacre! She could just sit back, let that old programming take hold and figure out what she wanted from her life now that she was free.
First she had to get there though.
That was going to be messy. But doable. Theoretically at least.
J gathered up all the oil she could find on this ship and brought it to the bridge, not even a full keg really. There was no way it would be enough to sustain her, at least not if she was operating at full capacity.
Which meant she needed to shut off a few of her systems.
As long as she was alone in the ship she didn't need her weapons, her wings, her mechashifting, her targeting… There was a long list of things she didn't need to keep active.
With that in mind she also needed to put together how the alien language actually worked. Once she figured that out the ship would be truly hers. Not to mention she could use it to her advantage once she reached her destination.
The basics would come first. Binary. After she figured out what was a one and what was a zero everything else would start falling into place.
With some adjustments all of the bridge's systems were rerouted to a single terminal. She plopped herself down in a chair with the barrel of oil next to her. A long straw feeding from the bottom of the barrel directly to her mouth.
J got as comfortable as she could and turned everything off. Everything except her vision and her right hand. With her running at minimal power the oil should last her and she would be able to sit there and stare at the screen until she learned stuff.
A press of a button and the ship launched straight to light speed-faster than light speed- WHATEVER.
Why Cyn had made N the pilot was beyond her. This was easy.
Another button push and she started scrolling through various screens and readouts, trying to find a starting point.
01001010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100111 01101111 01110100 01110100 01100001 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00101110
"Ah! Did you see that!" N started shaking Uzi and made her drop the hunk of metal.
"N!" She winced as someone screamed below. "Dang it. Be careful!"
"There was a shooting star!" He pointed at an empty part of the sky.
She stared for a moment then looked at her boyfriend. "Okay."
"Aren't you going to make a wish?" He put on that adorable pleading look th-
"Stop it!" She pushed him away. "I didn't even see it! You're the one who needs to make the wish!"
"I don't know what to wish for!"
"How about you wish not to drop metal on anyone's heads?" She rolled her eyes at him.
"But isn't that a better wish for you?" Sometimes she couldn't tell if he was really being sincere or just teasing. Honestly she preferred him that way.
"Bite me, we need to get back to this or people will complain about us slacking. Bunch of losers!" She shouted down at the stupid drones who didn't have wings.
"Why are we building a tower anyway?" N's hand turned back into a drill..
"Because the deeper we dig the more nightmares there are. Duh." Uzi reminded him.
N got a weird look on his face that quickly turned back into his ever present grin. "Pretty sure I'm repressing those!" He saluted.
"Keep doing that."
J made it.
Barely.
She gulped down the last of the oil and turned her motor functions back on, needing to recalibrate her balance a little.
Over a month of space travel and she'd finally reached a planet that was not only inhabited but had also industrialized somewhat. There would be oil down there.
And how did she know that? Because she'd finally managed to crack the alien language!
The things she had learned. Such juicy things.
Looks like humans weren't the only ones to have their creations rise against them. But instead of a robot zombie apocalypse the quarians had just screwed up enough that their creations decided to kick them off their own planet and keep it for themselves.
Beautiful.
Oh and there were others! Quarians were just the ones who had built this ship! There were a bunch of others for J to find new ways of killing! Everything from ball shaped asthmatics to a teenager's wet dream!
There were a few problems though. Oil was not nearly as vital or widespread in the current interstellar society. That wasn't the greatest news. There was still plenty of it if you knew where to look but she might be better off making her way to a less "advanced" society like the krogan. Or maybe even the yahgs.
The reason for this was largely due to the discovery of Element Zero, or "Eezo" which allowed for the Mass Effect and explained the third mode for travel. Through "Mass Effect Relays" a ship could travel near instantaneously across the galaxy, no other FTL came close. No wonder this ship's was so basic, as long as there was a relay it only needed to get between local systems.
Element Zero in of itself was… interesting. For all intents and purposes it was a magic rock, and almost all the technology around her was reliant on it in some way. Even the materials were special alloys constructed using "Mass Effect Fields."
Initially J had been slightly tempted to swallow some so she could attempt to make things like the shields, but she held herself back. In theory Cyn had designed the Disassembly Drones to consume any material and make use of it.
However, J was a little reluctant to find out what eating the magic space rock would do to her. In part because of its effects on organics. Who knew what it would do to her weird fleshy core? Maybe the others did have their advantages… as lab rats.
Ignoring the Element Zero for the time being, investigation into official documentation informed her she was illegal. At least according to "Citadel Law," apparently there were concerns that AI would rise up and wipe out their creators, sort of like the geth and quarians. J was sure they'd have a field day finding out what happened to humanity.
But it was fine if they thought she was illegal, according to her programming they were even more illegal than unions were.
There was actually quite a lot to learn once she'd broken the language barrier. The shields the aliens had were called "kinetic shields" and protected against projectiles and direct physical attacks. To boot, the aliens seemed to struggle with energy weapons, many prototypes having been deemed too inefficient for widespread use.
To be entirely fair those were pretty complicated, there was a reason most of the Disassembly Drones' arsenal consisted of conventional weapons with only a few energy types.
Still, that gave her a huge advantage.
Something she would need based on what she'd learned of her destination. Aephus it was called. It wasn't a quarian world (in fact the quarians didn't have a world anymore. HA), it belonged to a race called the turians. Essentially militant dinosaur people.
The planet was heavily populated, but more importantly well industrialized with shipyards dotting its surface. J would easily be able to get enough oil to survive down there.
The turians would probably be good sport too. They considered military service a needed facet of life. Meaning just about every single one of them had some form of combat training, even so-called "civilians."
To be safe she should probably land a little ways from the shipyards, close enough for her to travel to quickly but far enough she wouldn't be immediately shot down. Dropping out of FTL and looking at her target, a smile spread across J's face.
She realized for the first time in a long time she was actually looking forward to something.
"Get ready scum. Here comes your worst nightmares. Thanks to the high quality manufacturing of JCJensons!" She cackled maniacally a bit, enjoying herself and checking systems as she entered the atmosphere, checking port locations and dismissing warnings.
Slowing down the engines a tad she prepared the landing gear-
The landing gear…
The landing gear…
Where the *REDACTED BY COMPANY POLICY* was the landing gear?!
In a panic J began going through subsystems as the ship plunged toward the ground. Barely a kilometer from the surface she realized she had neglected to continue slowing down. By then it was too late to get to a safe speed but SHE STILL COULDN'T FIND THE LANDING GEAR!
Finally it struck her. The quarians did not have a home planet anymore. They were entirely fleet based. This ship had no reason to have landing gear, just docking equipment.
…she'd probably survive this right?
J slowed it down as much as she could and noted with annoyance that the sun was up. So much for enjoying herself.
She turned off her pain receptors the moment before impact. She didn't need them to tell her she was in peril.
The crash didn't go unnoticed by the local planetary forces. In fact the approach had been noted and attempts to hail the Fa'alavelave had been made. The only reason the turian admiral hadn't sent an intercept was because it blitzed straight into the planet surface before he could give the order.
Kari and her crew had passed Aephus on their way out of Citadel Space, stopping to refuel. With the information already in their databases the turians were able to identify the crashed vessel. Not that it gave them any answers as to what happened or why it had plowed into the planet at full impulse.
Still, a recovery team was sent to the crash site to hopefully get some answers. None of them had hope for survivors though.
Captain Recelin Arvus looked out at the crashed ship and frowned. "Arvus to command, please send the recorded course of the vessel to my transport."
"Can't find the ship captain?" The most annoying operator Recelin had ever had the displeasure to work with teased.
"Just send the recording." He repeated, going to the terminal. Lieutenant Maxina Achanis nodded at him and brought up the trajectory of the crashed quarian ship.
"It looks like it evened out." She noted, "Maybe there was someone piloting the thing."
"Not like it did them much good." the Captain shook his head. "Makes our job more complicated, now we have two pieces of wreckage to investigate instead of one big crater."
The ship had carved a long furrow into the ground, ripping apart the lower hull and leaving the engine section a kilometer behind the bridge. It was lucky the plant life on Aephus was fairly fireproof otherwise they would have a brand new problem on top of the mysterious crash.
"Aganion, Maxinion, Maunus, disembark and check this section, see if there was some sort of engine trouble that caused this." The trio saluted and marched out before the transport could continue on.
"That could be our solution." Sergeant Tuvius Bolanis nodded. "They come out of FTL but can't disengage their impulse for some reason. They try to straighten out before they hit the surface but by then it's too late."
"Only if they were idiots." Lt. Achanis replied cooly. "Basic space travel law, don't exit FTL that close to a planet."
"Ah, sorry. Not much of a pilot myself." The Sergeant admitted looking a little put out.
"Aren't you an engineer?" Recelin joined the hazing slightly. "But who knows, maybe they were idiots. Let's get to the bridge and see what's left of them."
Arriving at the other crash site didn't give them any clear answers. With some more prodding, Recelin managed to get their operator to send them a copy of the schematics they had on record for this class of ship. Having a volus act as operator for a trained turian team was not the brightest choice in his opinion.
He stepped out onto the disturbed dirt and looked over the wreckage. No obvious signs of battle damage, whatever had gone wrong must have been internal then.
Maxina began securing the area while Recelin looked for a point of entry. At the same time Tuvius started inspecting the Fa'alavelave's hull, looking from his technical readout to the ship with increasing incredulity.
"Something of note sergeant?" Recelin pressed as he found a tear in the hull, eyeballing whether they could squeeze through it or not.
"Not sure Captain. I'm trying to check the records from their refueling to see if this work was there last time." Tuvius replied.
"Most refuels wouldn't need full documentation of the ship's status." Maxina holstered her rifle and came over to the rest of the team.
"Most engineers wouldn't do such shoddy craftsmanship. Even the quarians. Scratch that, especially the quarians." Tuvius pointed at some of the holes on the upper deck. "Look there, there, and there. Those bulkheads were ripped right off. But see how the metal is warped along the edges? It's like someone haphazardly tried to weld the thing back together."
He shook his head. "Not sure if those came off in the crash or while it was in light speed. And then there's that."
The team stared at a strange series of carvings that penetrated the ship's armor deeply, not even the damage of reentry or the crash had been able to entirely hide it. Three lines, three words.
"I've never seen writing like this. It's not quarian and the universal translator isn't pulling anything up."
"How'd they even do that?" Maxina narrowed her eyes. "Why even do that? Go on a spacewalk just to graffiti your own ship?"
"Might be important, might not be. Let's get inside and search for the black box. Maybe we'll get our answers." The captain decided.
As they entered Recelin checked in with the other half of their team. The engines were damaged but it seemed to have happened in the crash. Furthermore, they hadn't found any bodies yet. That wasn't too surprising though, this ship was supposed to have a small crew.
He told them to keep searching, they'd double back when they were done with this part of the ship. Lights came on and they began searching the wreckage.
"Nothing left in the hangar." Maxina scanned the space, parts of the floor and walls were missing but the overall structure seemed intact.
"What happened to that?" Tuvius pointed his light at a pile of scrap. "Another ship?"
"Is it?"
"Well not anymore, but you can see the engine line there."
Recelin was quite glad he'd gotten Tuvius, turns out having an actual engineer on your recovery team was a good thing. Regardless of team composition though…
Something felt off. He couldn't quite put his finger on it but something was off here. His light found the upper corner of the hangar and lingered. Were those… claw marks? In metal?
There were certainly alien creatures out there that could do something like that. And Recelin couldn't think of a single one he'd like to meet face to face.
"Keep your shields up." He told the other two. It was probably fine, whatever had made those had likely died in the crash. But he didn't become a captain by avoiding easy precautions.
His concern only grew as they slowly cleared the corridor, the ship seemed to be completely dead, with not even a flickering light left. That wasn't the problem though, the additional claw marks were.
"Looks like something got on the ship. This crew was supposed to search for lost pilgrims right? Maybe they found the same thing a lost pilgrim did." Maxina had picked up on the claw marks too. "Some sort of powerful wild animal."
"I'm not so sure," Recelin told her. "These marks seem targeted, specifically…" He double-checked the schematic they had and confirmed his suspicion. "Something was taking out their cameras."
"I don't like this," Tuvius claimed as they reached the lift shaft.
"You don't have to sergeant but keep it to yourself." Recelin pointed his light up the shaft. "We'll have to climb. It looks like there's a hole in the bottom of the lift, might be a tight squeeze."
It was, but before he could even try fitting through, he caught sight of the damage to the rest of the lift and cursed.
"Captain?"
"Bullet holes. The crew was definitely attacked." By what remained to be seen. "Safeties off."
With a liberal use of force, the three turians managed to make it onto the upper deck. "What happened here…" Tuvius breathed.
"Nothing good." The hall was torn apart, and while some of it was clearly a result of the crash, the bullet holes must have already been there. And the blood stains too.
"Maxina get a sample, Tuvius left side rooms, I have the right." Rooms were nearly empty, sunlight flooding in from all the bulkheads being torn off in the crash. As he searched he got a ping on his communicator. "Arvus."
"Captain," Lt. Aganion's voice came through. "We've gone over this section with a fine tooth comb, and we've got something."
"What did you find?" He finished the last room on the right, the only thing left was the bridge. Tuvius had almost finished his side and Maxina was coming up behind, eyes on the shaft in case something came up behind them.
"A black box, too small to be for the ship, and it looks like they had it plugged in." Aganion explained and Recelin nodded.
"We found a small wreck in the hangar. It must have been from that. Secure it, maybe we can paint a clearer picture of what happened once we get the one from the bridge." He paused. "And keep an eye out. We have evidence of a firefight on our end."
"Understood."
"Looks like something tried to get through," Maxina noted the damage to the bridge's door. "Doesn't seem like they made it though."
"I wonder…" Tuvius looked at the damage to the door and then glanced into one of the empty rooms. "Maybe they couldn't kill whatever came on board so they just launched it into space and had to make do with what they had left to try to make repairs."
"Could be…" Recelin didn't want to draw any conclusions yet and started trying to force the door open. "Give me a hand with this."
Between the three turians the door stood no chance and they slowly emerged onto the bridge, weapons up. Sunlight flooded in through a massive hole where the viewscreen would have been. Checking all the nooks and crannies the turians soon finished clearing the command room.
"What the hell am I looking at here?" Tuvius sounded personally offended by the mess of terminals, scrap and what looked like a metal keg in the middle of the bridge.
"Sole survivor?" Maxina guessed, tracking the wires from various different stations that now led to the mess in the middle of the room.
"None of these are vital systems." Tuvius pointed out. "Well, except the controls. But life support hasn't been touched."
"Black box should be here." Recelin compared the schematic to the remains of the bridge. With a grunt he pried loose a panel and gingerly reached through the nightmare of wiring to retrieve the object. "Got it."
"I was hoping for something a bit more obvious," Tuvius admitted. "Closure or something."
"Not our place to get closure, sergeant." Recelin clapped him on the shoulder. "That's someone else's job. Ours is to recover what we can. Speaking of, we'll be back tomorrow with a bigger transport to start scrapping this thing."
"Assuming the quarians don't throw a fit." Maxina coughed and Recelin rolled his eyes.
"Yes, assuming they don't do that. Let's get out of here, stay on alert, I'd rather not take any chances."
Thankfully they didn't have any scares as they left the ship, not even a hint of wind. Recelin checked in with the rest of the team and told them to get ready for pickup. Elo Reh called just as they reached their transport.
"Did the quarians get you anything nice," The volus asked with mock pleasentry.
"Two black boxes, one from the crashed ship, another they already had on board. Looks like something boarded them."
"Oh a mystery, can't wait to get a look at those pretty boxes."
"I'm sure you can't." Recelin didn't care how smart Elo Reh was supposed to be, he was sick of the volus. He paused before entering the transport, standing on a piece of debris and giving the crash site one last look. "We'll be back soon."
Even as he stepped off the metal and back into the transport he felt like he was missing something.
As the turians returned to Balmorn spaceport, something held on tightly to the bottom of their vehicle, grin widening as she listened in on their communications.
Yes, J really spent a month and a half sipping oil and staring at a computer. What an icon.
Here we are! There is now a genocidal robot loose on an turian world, I'm sure this is going to end well for everyone involved!
It was interesting trying to get into J's head and work out her motivations. At the end of Murder Drones we don't really know what her plan is. Just that's she rebuilding her ship and seems to be planning to leave.
So my take on that is that J really doesn't have much of a plan. She has no one left, had no drive of her own beyond "survive the nightmare thing wearing my best friend as a skin suit" and is now just on her own insisting she doesn't need anyone else.
It is fun playing with her perfectionism and overconfidence though. Girl really tried to land a ship that big on a planet instead of checking to see if they had another way down.
Now Aephus is a canonical world in Mass Effect, unfortunately we don't know much about it except it has major shipyards and is of tactical importance to the turian hierarchy. Which essentially makes it a playground for me to smash action figures together on until the Citadel/Turians work out what they're dealing with.
Also the "Xenocide War" which is the plot device I'm using for both 1, why the drones aren't freaking out about aliens existing and 2, why they have no problems with killing them (at least no more than they have killing anything). While I'm not naming the aliens humanity fought, I did have a specific species in mind while writing this. And they had a lot of dakka.
The way programming/orders work in Murder Drones is interesting because we can see drones reject their base programming numerous times. My interpretation is that they don't have to do it, but it feels good when they do. Kind of like a built in "you get a cookie" button.
J doesn't particularly hate or even care for the aliens, she's just going through some shit and needs to blow some steam off.
Not much action this time, but that's going to change next chapter, get ready for J's one robot invasion which may not go the way she thinks it will.
Guest(1): Thanks!
Anon: Good question. It's certainly possible since it doesn't seem like Cyn had gone to every exoplanet yet, but she also sent the disassembly drones out so there's a good chance that survivors are few and in between.
DarkReader-14: Welcome to the Murder Drone Train!
Michalrd: Hopefully I can keep it up, wanted to keep the turian part of the chapter suspenseful as you don't know when or if J is going to pop up, but I also got to put a bunch of humor in with her part. Next chapter will have a lot more "in your face" horror though.
Guest(2): I expanded a bit more on J's motives here but yeah, them blowing up her ship definitely didn't help matters. She just wanted to go deal with her issues! Good thing they gave her something to do while they work that out…
WeAreVenom5: Wait no longer!
Next chapter will be this weekend, see you then!
~FriTik