I've seen some weird things in my time, but this one might top the charts.
Plenty of the UES defense projects we develop have fully autonomous functionality. Hell, even the ship's janitor is a bot. Cool guy. Terrible at poker, though. He can detect every speck of dust or stain on this ship at all times, but can't calculate the odds that I'm bluffing a terrible hand.
But this thing? This is beyond anything I've ever seen. Science fiction pales in comparison.
We have no satellite scans of this thing ever entering the planet's orbit. The ship can spot errant scraps of space junk incoming at a few hundred thousand miles out, and we saw NOTHING. Couldn't have been on the planet either. We've done terrain scans of every inch of this rock, plus a couple hundred miles straight down. I can't figure out where the hell this thing came from.
But it has saved our hides.
We've been on the back foot ever since the first pods landed. The creatures of the planet are vicious. Everything down there wants us dead, and for every wisp or lemurian one of our guys kills, ten more take its place.
And now this giant machine shows up out of nowhere and just starts massacring everything in our way. We've been given the order to stay well away from it, and with good reason. It hasn't ever attacked one of our crew or our hardware, but I'm glad we're not risking anyone being within a few miles of that thing. Not when its shots can punch through mountains. Even our orbital weaponry can't do that kind of damage, and this thing's just firing a handheld blaster!
We've run every scan we have and can't find the neural traces you'd expect to see in our tech's AI cores. If there were a human operator inside, the G forces from its movements would have killed them, surely. The energy signatures from the machine's weaponry show it's putting out power that could run our ship for decades. I just can't make it make sense...
So I'm done trying to understand it, I'm just thankful it's here. It has saved countless lives without so much as glancing our way. Like an avenging angel come to deliver the justice of Heaven. Uncanny, and perfect, and pure. An anomaly, an impossibility...
A Unicorn.
No comments:
Post a Comment