Chapter 400: Fighting With An Unknown Enemy 2

Selvarin noticed first.

"One of them has been abandoned."

Lysara focused on the damaged construct drifting away from the others. Its outer frame was torn open in several places, one engine section was barely holding together, and most of its weapons had stopped moving.

"Power?"

"Still active," Selvarin replied.

Aurelian watched it for a moment before deciding.

"Do not approach yet. Disable the weapons from range first."

Rhoswen sighed through the channel, clearly unhappy with another delay, but Aurelian ignored her.

Selvarin fired carefully, targeting the remaining weapon housings instead of the core. One went dark, then another.

Veylora followed, destroying the last working engine section and leaving the machine drifting without any real way to move or fight.

Its power core remained active.

No self-destruct signal appeared.

That was promising, but Aurelian still didn’t rush.

"Send a drone."

Lysara moved one forward slowly.

The drone crossed the distance and stopped near the damaged hull.

Nothing happened.

A second drone approached from another direction.

Still nothing.

Eirenne studied the readings being sent back from the expedition.

"I think its combat control has been separated from the station network."

"Can we board it remotely?" Aurelian asked.

"Probably."

"Then use remote units only."

Several drones moved in together and attached themselves to the construct. One found an old access panel while another cut through a damaged maintenance hatch where the armor had already weakened.

The first images from inside appeared a few moments later.

The interior looked even worse than the outside.

Old Vhaloric framework was still visible through the center of the machine, but huge parts of the original design had been replaced over time.

Power cables ran openly through corridors without proper shielding, and different generations of systems had been connected through rough adaptors that looked like they had been added whenever something failed.

Some parts were clearly military.

Others looked industrial.

A few pieces seemed to have come from ordinary ships.

Veylora stared at the feed.

"This thing has been rebuilt hundreds of times."

Lysara studied the same images.

"Maybe more than that."

The drones continued deeper.

Eventually, they reached what had once been the main control chamber.

There was no bridge.

No crew section.

No chairs or control stations built for people.

Only a large central machine core surrounded by layers of repair equipment and secondary systems.

Eirenne immediately began studying the layout.

"Autonomous strategic construct," she said. "It was probably designed to operate without a crew for long periods."

"How long?" Aurelian asked.

"The original design? Months, maybe years."

Rhoswen looked at the feed.

"And this one lasted centuries."

"With support from the station," Eirenne replied.

That made sense.

The deeper the drones went, the stranger the machine became. Some of its parts were no longer connected in any normal way and had simply been fused into place.

Other sections were covered in a dark material that acted almost like sealant, though Eirenne couldn’t identify what it was from the scans alone.

Then one of the drones detected movement.

Not another construct.

The hull itself.

A damaged armor seam slowly pulled inward.

Metal shifted against metal, and a broken support arm began moving back toward where it had originally been attached.

Rhoswen leaned toward her display.

"Did it just repair itself?"

Eirenne watched closely.

"Yes."

The repair was slow, but there was no question about what was happening.

Several small internal drones were moving through the construct, taking material from less important parts and carrying it toward the damaged areas.

One drone cut apart an unused support brace. Another carried pieces of it toward the outer hull. A third used heat and pressure to fuse the metal into place.

Aurelian understood immediately.

"It is using its own body for repairs."

Veylora nodded slowly.

"To stay functional."

That explained why the machine looked so strange.

Every time something important broke, it took material from something less important and used it to repair itself.

Over centuries, piece by piece, the original frame had slowly changed into the uneven shape they were looking at now.

The others had probably done the same.

Aurelian shifted his attention toward Annex Seven.

"If all of them can repair themselves like this, destroying them one at a time will take too long."

Lysara agreed.

"And the station probably has more replacement material inside."

Eirenne brought the battle data onto the main display.

The seventeen surviving large constructs had already returned to the station, but they hadn’t used the normal docking bays.

Instead, sections of the station’s outer armor had opened and accepted them directly into hidden maintenance areas.

The most damaged constructs entered first.

Then the armor closed behind them.

Rhoswen looked toward Aurelian.

"So now we know where they go."

"Yes."

"And there are seventeen left."

"At least seventeen."

She frowned.

"You always make the useful number worse."

"The station is very large."

Rhoswen muttered something that he ignored.

Lysara stayed focused on the disabled construct.

"I want to copy its command records before we destroy it."

"Do it."

"If we can figure out what changed their orders, we might be able to stop the others without fighting every one of them."

That would be much better than slowly destroying ancient machines that might still be useful.

Aurelian looked toward Eirenne.

"Can you help from your side?"

"I can analyze whatever Lysara sends me, but the delay through Mournveil will slow the process."

"Do it anyway."

The first command fragments began arriving a few minutes later.

Most of them were badly corrupted.

Some made no sense anymore after centuries of repairs, lost memory, and system changes. Eirenne sorted through them anyway, pulling apart what remained and comparing old instructions against newer ones.

Then she found something useful.

One priority order had survived almost completely.

She displayed it for everyone.

Preserve Strategic Coordination Annex Seven.

Restore operational capacity.

Reject unauthorized command takeover.

Acquire replacement material as required.

Astra read the final line again.

"Acquire replacement material."

Lysara looked toward the wreckage scattered around the station.

"That could explain the old battle damage."

Aurelian thought the same thing.

The maintenance constructs had originally been told to keep Annex Seven alive. That was probably a reasonable order when the station still had commanders, supply ships, and people who could decide where replacement material came from.

But those people were gone.

The supply chain was gone.

The order remained.

Over time, the machines had probably started taking whatever they could find.

Destroyed ships.

Damaged equipment.

Other machines.

Maybe even working Directorate systems that got too close.

Anything useful became replacement material.

And because the order also told them to reject unauthorized command takeovers, anyone who tried to access the station without the right authority became another enemy.

Aurelian looked back at the first message Annex Seven had sent them.

Authorized Directorate command entity, identify.

Maybe the station hadn’t been threatening them.

Maybe it had been asking for someone with enough authority to finally end an emergency order that had been running for centuries.

"We need the strategic core," Aurelian said.

Lysara looked toward the station.

"Yes."

"Can the disabled construct tell us how to reach it?"

Veylora began searching the navigation data they had already copied.

Several minutes passed while everyone waited.

Then she looked up.

"I found an internal maintenance route."

"To the core?"

"Close to it."

Rhoswen smiled immediately.

Aurelian noticed.

"No."

Her expression changed at once.

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to suggest a reasonable response team."

"You are at Sanctuary Ardent."

"Details."

Aurelian ignored her and returned his attention to Lysara.

"Do not enter the station yet. Finish copying the construct, map the route properly, and find out whether those large machines can detect something moving through the damaged sections."

"And if they cannot?"

"Then we plan the next step."

Lysara nodded.

That was enough for now.

The expedition had survived its first serious fight with Annex Seven.

Four ancient constructs had been destroyed.

One had been captured, badly damaged.

No Crownward ships had been lost.

More importantly, they finally understood part of what was happening.

The station wasn’t simply hostile.

It was stuck following an order that should have ended centuries ago.

Its machines had spent all that time repairing the station because nobody remained who could tell them when the emergency was over.

Aurelian looked at the massive structure hanging in the darkness of Mournveil.

Somewhere inside was the command-support relic he had originally come looking for.

But now something else was worth recovering.

The station itself.

If Annex Seven could still be returned to proper Human command, destroying all of its defenders would be a waste.

Those machines had survived for centuries doing exactly what they had been ordered to do.

The problem wasn’t that they had disobeyed.

The problem was that nobody had ever come back to give them a new order.

Aurelian looked toward Eirenne.

"Find me a way to tell that station the emergency is over."

Her projection gave a small nod.

"I’ll start with the construct’s command history."

Outside the expedition’s formation, Strategic Coordination Annex Seven remained dark except for scattered lines of pale light.

The seventeen surviving war constructs had disappeared back beneath its armor, while the disabled one drifted under Crownward control as drones continued copying its damaged memory.

The battle had not solved the problem.

It had only explained it.

And for Aurelian, that was enough to change the next move completely.