"Pretty mangled," Briggs observed, visor up and looking around. The Corunsun Pendant was exposed on his chest, and he had one hand ungloved to show the Ring, expecting it would be useful here.

This place had indeed been pretty beat up. All the computer stations had been torn open, maybe looking for biomatter, maybe just messing up the electronics, which were definitely a non-functional mess. For some reason this whole section of the ship didn't seem to have had any repairs done to it, even topical, although the molmech sweepers seemed to be going though on a regular basis and cleaning up the dust.

It was pretty big, a good thirty yards across, and probably had several dozen crew manning it at one time. Whatever they had sat on had been reduced to scattered chunks of metal by now, of course.

There were a lot of punctures in the steel of the floor, any carpeting long gone, and several sections had been peeled up to reveal bands of cables now severed by unnaturally sharp objects, or fused to molten masses.

The central holo command center had been pretty hacked into, and I wasn't feeling any power in it. That would have been the main link to the ship's systems, with the stations scattered around the bridge for more specialized and powerful uses. The navigator and pilot stations were also reduced to many pieces in grim fashion, probably a little petulant. No doubt there was a secondary bridge, and the course had already been set beyond the ability of the 'vores to do anything.

Well, the captain's chair was still there.

The runes were acid-etched and filled with gold in a ring of mithral, nicely wrought and still glowing strongly after all these millennia. It was even still leathered and padded, the bright buttons on it polished and ready.

"Now that is a Ward," I complimented the maker. It wasn't that it wasn't overwhelmingly powerful, it was just finely done, so it had lasted all this time. It was just strong enough that it had lasted longer than they had time to deal with it.

"Little small," Briggs observed with a sigh. And this was with it being overbuilt to give it a thronelike air. I just laughed at him.

"Mock your predecessors not, Your Grace." I ushered him towards the chair.

"Yeah, yeah." Feel that bass, girls. All mine!... He sighed and stepped forwards.

He crossed the ring in the floor around it, and the runes in the Seal crackled, were answered by the pendant, and abruptly dimmed. He turned and sat down.

Yeah, it wasn't meant for an Ancient in power armor, that was certain. He examined the armrest, turned the jewel of the Ring down, and inset it into a convenient socket on the arm of the chair.

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There was a crackle that wasn't from psi. Buttons lit up from within, power hummed, and a whole lot of sparks popped off in the floor and ceiling as various severed cables protested that they couldn't do what they were supposed to.

"Greetings, Duke Corunsun. I seem to have terminal failure in most of my systems, and am unable to welcome you properly. I am the Celestial Tribute. How may I be of service to the new Duke?"

Briggs grunted, looking at nothing. "Tribute, confirm that you know how much time has passed since you crashed?"

"Your Grace, it has 9,707 Tellusian years since the last time the Ducal Ring touched my systems. As I lost access to many of my systems shortly thereafter, and went dormant, I cannot tell you what exactly has occurred since then."

"Are you aware of the cerevore and xenosym horde that ate your crew and cargo?"

"Yes, Your Grace." There was a definite note of profound regret in the voice.

"Are you aware of the suppression fire that prevented most of the horde from making a successful breakout?"

"No, sir. Once the ship was confirmed to be lost, the command systems of the ship are separated into different sections, physical connections between them are severed, and they are independently insulated and in control of their own areas, minimizing any contamination. My records indicate that there was infiltration from the engineering and life support systems, prompting the hard severance of those systems."

Briggs looked at me, I shrugged for him to go with it. If there was any AI that could survive all this time, it would have been the primary command system, with the best insulation and protection available on the ship. Time didn't really mean much to a machine or item spirit, after all.

"Tribute, we'd like to begin the process of restoring you and the ship, a process that will likely take a considerable amount of time. How would we go about getting started?"

"First, sir, you will have to address the matter of the corruption coming out of the ship's core. You will be unable to link up the ship's systems before then. Once that is done, you can initiate a hard reboot of all other systems, which should wipe any corruption, before linking them back up and restoring full unified ship command."

We looked at one another. Simple, true, and convenient. Of course, trusting the ship was likely not possible, at all. We'd probably need to do that hard wipe on anything and everything... or some alternative that was just as effective.

After all, we had the Ducal Pendant.

"Thank you, Tribute. We will be in further communication with you concerning this matter."

"Sir, my intraship communications are blocked, and I will be unable to contact you easily. If you have a relay you can plug into the chair, and can set up others in the main shaft, I will be able to reach you outside this section."

-Only a clean device with no ties or access to another. No letting it infiltrate other systems,- I /said promptly. Briggs nodded. Didn't need a sneaky AI taking over our systems.

"I will immediately procure one and get back to you, Tribute," he stated firmly. "Can you turn on power for any of this section, including the captain's cabin?"

"Yes, sir. They were automatically dimmed when there was no power drain for a sustained period."

There were hums outside the chamber, and we saw recessed lights go on. It would have been blinding, if we couldn't already see.

"Excellent. Thank you, Tribute. We will return shortly."

He stood up and exited the throne's Ward, which glowed back to life when he stepped away.

-Nice, you restored power to that printer. We should be able to make what we want, just have to make sure it doesn't have a hard connection to the ship's AI.-

-It's almost like we don't trust the thing, or something.- Briggs /grunted. -Any ideas on how to clean it up?-

-Sure. And you've got just the toy to make it all with.-

-That's right, I do. What are you thinking about?-

-A Vakker-tech devoted link, with no access to our Bands. What we're gonna have to do is employ a virus working through Rantha tech to remove any overt influence from the AI's, through a combination reboot and copy/pasting through the Rantha Tech hardware.-

-Will we be able to get them to use it?- Briggs /asked thoughtfully, liking the idea.

-Here's some really old tech that has proven to be resistant to the programming corruption of the Warp. Here's the schematics, here's the test results, plug in and go.-

-It doesn't even have to program anything. It'll just remove corrupted elements which shouldn't be there anyways. We'll just have to make it big enough and fast enough to actually be useful.- He rubbed his chin. -Okay, time for me to take some printer lessons. What are you going to do?- I certainly didn't need to be right there to help him with the design specs and stuff.

-I figured I could go scouting, and if you need materials, play fetch.-

-That sounds like a pretty good idea...-

------

Explosions blew through the corridor behind me as I pulled a rather impossible hard turn to the right, and shrapnel flew past as the shockwaves buffeted my Vajra, who patted them patiently and had them send me along even faster.

With mad whirrings, the drone suicide bomber squad zoomed after me, and I shot them.

On Bane/Construct and with Swarmbane active, the hived drone fleet unfortunately qualified on all cylinders, and had a distressing tendency to blow up when hit, which chain-bombed all the other drones within range, and sent dozens of them blowing up and turning the area behind me into a fiery hell as I zipped away as fast as possible, Tails and Paten firing behind me.

The guardbot came skimming around the corner, rotary lasers leveling and filling the air with hot, hard light ahead of me.

With a crunch, the hovering vehicle fell to the ground, and suddenly lacked much mobility. Its aim accommodated, but Faith was already a shimmering mirror, coherent light was bouncing off her to the walls all around, and then I was up on the skimmer and Chalice frzzp'd and kzzzzap'd, steel protested, Star Cores wagged, and Sun Strikes discharged in explosive displays of sparks. Its main logic engine got slagged, and it shut down abruptly. Easy to fix, just slap in a new one, but out of my hair for now.

Paten blew a shot down the corridor, and another dozen drones painted the steel with new shrapnel as I drove for the central drop.

More wheely guardbots, not using anti-grav, came rolling in rings of motion, held in place by gyroscopes and emanating light forcefields as dual-linked lasers opened up on me, finding my near invisibility very annoying as the programs couldn't get past my Vampire's Veil and were relying on relayed information from psi-powered systems on a Master bot right there to try and track me-

It had a good force field on it, but anti-Construct format was incredibly abusive to all aspects of constructs. Three shots from Paten shorted out its force field, and then the spikes from my Tails drove holes into it with Sun Shots attached, and the local AI lost its eyes on me. It had no means of foiling psi-ware, so all it could do is flood the area, measure what I was destroying and where I was shooting from, and hope for the best.

Well, I was moving much too fast for it to really do that, as I plinked off the rollers, two shots each to get through their shields, and then blew out the wheels and their mobility with it. They went careening into the walls and fell down useless, and then some drones zipped by above them, got intercepted by spikes, and everything was blown apart in chain reactions.

The AI here didn't like me raiding its material stores, but the Disk I was pushing ahead of me didn't much care, heaped as it was with various metals and crystals and stuff we'd need to print off our Purifier comps. Mmm.

-Hey, Fuzzy, I saw the area we need to go to connect the network up in this area, but there's a bunch of stuff atop it. We're gonna need to have some way to deactivate numbers of these bots if possible.-

-I'm betting the main system has some master command codes we can use. How did your looting go?-

I fed him the view as I jumped off the platform into the central plunge and began to fall. Angry clouds of drones zoomed out above and behind me, and started to follow me... until a salvo of Paten's robot-eating lasers and bane-spikes turned the area above me into fireworks that shattered every broken cryo-tube in its vicinity completely.