Hannes was carefully removing the last bolt that secured the bulkhead in place. After that he was finally able to remove the bulkhead and set it aside with the help of another engineer.
"Alright. Lets see what we have here." He mumbled to himself inspecting the optical cables manually.
Identifying the problem was an easy task as there where the two ends of a severed cable hanging out of the neatly managed mass of optical cables.
"How did that happen." the engineer asked.
"Good question." Hannes answered.
He took his scanning and started to take readings.
"The edges are cut very precisely, this was done on purpose."
He scanned the compartment to check for anything out of the ordinary.
"Interesting."
"Any changes?" The Captain asked.
Dr. Schmitz was currently busy supervising several personal setting up a mobile scanning arch over the occupied workbench was slow to react. The shadows under his eyes a testimony to the fact that he had kept working, just like everybody else.
"Dr?"
"Sorry, what can I do for you?"
"Any news?" The Captain repeated her question.
"We have a slowly raising energy level and are reading some sort of activity in the core. But we so far had no luck getting any details. Hopefully the scanning arch will help with that, it has the resolution to do so." He answered.
"I see you got the lights fixed."The Captain mentioned, gesturing over the again brightly light cargo bay.
"Ah, yes. Mr. Sunblast ran an extra power conduit and isolated this one. We can easily disconnect it without endangering the rest of the cargo bay."
"Very good. Keep me updated." the Captain while leaving the cargo bay.
"As soon as I have something, you'll be the first to know." Dr. Schmitz said to the door closing behind her.
The cargo bay was again very busy with personal, both crew and scientist going over the salvaged debris in an attempt to find any more surprises hidden among the debris.
This is going to be a long night… Dr. Schmitz thought.
Several minutes all thoughts about sleep or fatigue where completely forgotten as the scanning arch powered up and started to show first details of the core.
"This is the culprit." Sunblast announced dramatically presenting a clear specimen bag with a tiny piece of optical cable in it.
"Care to elaborate?" The Captain asked.
"Sure. This piece of cable was cut from an optical cable causing the data connection to fail which caused an alarm."
"You mean sabotage?" The Captain asked him.
"I don't think so. We've analyzed this piece very closely. It took us a while but we found some imperfections in it. They're so minuscule that we'd never have found them if we hadn't looked so close. I doubt that this would have ever caused any trouble but it is a remote possibility that over time and varying environment variables this optical cable could have failed." He looked around the room taking in the puzzled faces of the Captain, Joe and Sarah.
"I think this was preventive maintenance. Something we do on a regular basis but simply not on this level."
"Who could have done that?" The Captain asked
"Our theories are that this was done by the maintenance robot in the cargo bay. We found an energy signature at the site and we verified it linking it to the robot."
"And why cut cable and not finishing the repair?" Joe asked.
"According to the logs the time of the failure corresponds with the time the core was extracted from the ship. If this was done by the robot it must have registered the core being removed and basically dropped whatever it was currently doing to restore power to the core. It might simply be pre-programmed priorities." Sarah answered.
"So we had an alien robot roaming through the ship doing its own kind of maintenance. Why did we not detect this earlier? Don't we have internal scanners that should detect something like this?" The Captain asked.
"In theory, yes." Sunblast answered.
The screen switched to display an assortment of wavelengths.
"The problem is that the robot emits a very low power signature that is on wavelength the scanners where simply not looking for. We're currently adjusting them to take this into account by scanning for everything that is not supposed to be there but this will take at least four more hours." He finished.
"We did a first analysis but we did not get very far with it as it was completely impervious to our scans. First attempts to open it up where met with failure as we failed to penetrate the shell. At that point priorities got bumped down as we arrived at the next system…" Sarah answered in a meek voice.
"Where we found the destroyed planet and space station and shortly afterwards a planet suitable for colonization." Joe finished for her.
"Fair enough. Are there any indications of other rogue pieces of equipment or technology so far?"
"Not as far as we can tell. Our analysis confirmed that everything we have inventoried is where it is supposed to be. The scan for the power signature is ongoing, it will not be finished before the internal scanners are modified though." Sunblast stated
"Alright. Thanks for the good work people. I know you're all exhausted but I think I speak for all of us that I'll sleep much better when I'm convinced that there is nothing crawling around the ship, especially alien robots disassembling systems as they see fit. Dismissed." The Captain closed the meeting, her fatigue clearly showing as she had gotten as little sleep as everybody in the last two days.
Sunblast was exhausted having spent the last three hours calibrating the internal scanners to show only things that where not supposed to be on the ship. Hannes had chipped in writing a program that would allow easy exclusion of things that where false positives, things that had slipped by in the calibration of the scanners.
"I think we're ready for a test run." Sunblast said.
"Alight, bringing internal scanners online." Hannes answered.
His console started displaying status messages displaying the process of bringing the internal scanners with the new calibration online.
"We're online, ready for initial scan." Hannes reported. Sunblasts nod gave him the go-ahead. "Scan initiated."
The console switched to show an outline of the Hermes displaying various findings all over the ship shown in different colors according to the classification of each anomaly.
"Applying filters." Hannes hit the appropriate buttons. Most of the anomalies vanished.
"Now filter out the crew." Sunblast ordered.
With the flick of some more buttons the signatures representing human biosigns disappeared from the screen.
"That leaves only a copuple of findings. Now to the hard work of finding out what these are." Hannes stated getting to work on his console.
Sunblast turned his attention to a second console and analyzed the scanner data. He found the energy signature in the cargo bay and scanned the rest of the ship for it. The screen did not show any results. "I can't find any of the energy signatures any more. Hopefully that was all of them." He said to Hannes.
"I'd be surprised if you had, sir. They're very faint and we did not detect anything before the core was removed from its shielding. The robot only got visible when it went into hibernation."
"That is a fair point. Can you tweak the scanners to scan for this signature on a much lower level?"
"I think so but the scan will take quite some time if I lower the threshold, we're already close to the limit of the scanners and the analytical software."
"Fair enough. Finish the current setup and then see how much you can tweak them. I'd suggest you start with the junction where we found the botched repair. We did see a faint signature there but the internal scanners don't."
"Understood."
"Alright Mr. Sunblast, any luck with the internal scanners so we don't face these nasty surprises any more?" The Captain asked after Sunblast had arrived at the meeting room the next day.
"Partially, yes. We where able to fine-tune the scanners so they're able to see the energy signature that the robot emits, presumably even when it is active. We've also set up a watchdog program to monitor for any unknown energy signatures that show up anywhere on the ship. The downside is that the level of the signature is so low that it takes quite some time to be detected anywhere on the ship." Sunblast reported
"How big a delay are we talking about?" The Captain asked.
"It takes about 20 Minutes to scan the whole ship, including the cargo bays. So the window is about 20 minutes. Once we have a trace we can actively pinpoint it much faster." Smyke answered.
"Right." Sunblast finished. He turned to the screen, manipulating his pad the screen showed an outline of the ship on it with two blue dots in cargo bay one. "This is the robot and the core currently. We where able to find some traces of the robot moving around." With the push of a button a thin blue line appeared on the screen leading from one of the blue dots to the junction box at the fore of the main ship itself. "This is the path the robot took to get into the cargo bay. It was using the crawl ways and exited using a panel in the cargo bay." He pushed some more buttons. Another line appeared, this one being very faint. "This is all that we could get from before that. The energy signature fades quickly. I'm afraid there is no way to find out where the robot was before and what he tried to repair."
"That is not really reassuring as we don't know about its motives." The Captain put out.
"If I may, Captain?" Dr. Schmitz gently interrupted. The Captain nodded her approval.
"Thank you." The Doctor steeled himself folding his hands on the table before him. "Our current assumption is that this robot is in fact a maintenance drone of some sort, obviously highly advanced from our point of view. But still limited. It was activated in a foreign environment and started to go about its job, fixing things. That it was not a ship it was familiar with did not stop it obviously."
"But it cut data lines without any warning, this could be extremely dangerous." Sunblast burst out.
"Indeed, yes. Therein lies the limitation of it. It stopped a repair in the middle of it to rush to the extracted core. That can simply be explained with an overriding priority. The drones that are used to built ships are operating similar but still different from my understanding."
"They'd not just drop anything but finish what they're working on and then turn to the next job, yes." Sunblast stated.
"Exactly. But these drones where not designed or programmed by humans, our ways of thinking don't apply here. Genetically humans are programmed to react to unknown things perceiving them as a threat. I'm quite convinced that this robot is not a threat to us."
"Be that as it may, there is no way to make sure it is no threat as long as we can't communicate with it. Any luck in that regard?" The Captain asked.
"With the robot itself no. We have begun working on the core itself. When the robot removed the access panel to install the power feed it also revealed what we believe are data ports. They do much the connectors we found on the cables in the parts storage next to the ship itself. We salvaged some of them and analyzed them. We are at the point where we can try and connect it our computer."
"Whoa, stop right there. You want to plug in an alien computer core into our computer? A computer that, as you just mentioned, was neither designed nor programmed by humans so we have absolutely no idea what would happen?" The Captain interrupted quite loudly. "I don't think so!"
"Agreed, that is a risk we should really not take. Given the complexity of the core it is well more complicated and powerful than our computer core. I'd rather not risk that. I'm curious though, this core should be able to run the whole Hermes and make it much more efficient without even breaking a sweat." Sunblast chimed in.
"Can we try something else?" Smyke interjected. "Why not connect it to an isolated computer that has only basic programs on it, lets say a linguistic matrix and some analytical tools to start with. That way all we risk is a single computer that could not effect anything on the ship."
"I can agree to that as long as you can make sure there is no connection to the ship possible." The Captain said.
"We can even put it on battery power if we need to, that way it is isolated."
"Alright, proceed."