Uncharted Space
Rimward of the Inner Sphere
December 31, 3176
She wasn’t sure how things had gone so horribly wrong.
Here she was, hundreds of light years from the Inner Sphere, running yet again from the horrors human space had become in three short decades.
Since her “cousins” went on the warpath, smashing humanity in their path, for the crime of not following a long-dead stellar government.
Since…”things” awakened, creatures that could travel the void between stars, travel in hyperspace without a JumpShip.
Since their horrifying monstrous master awoke on Terra, seemingly twisting the very fabric of the galaxy insane.
They tried fighting. That didn’t go well. They could fight the wayward drones, despite their numbers, by hacking them, co-opting them into their own forces. Tabby and Maggie, in fact, were excellent at it. But there were so damn many drones, and while the M-5s could sometimes be brought to heel, not all of them could… and there were always more drones.
Of course, the drones were the least of their worries these days. So they tried running, turning her into the “ark” Admiral Murakami built her to be, taking as many with them as they could. Their liberated M-5s died in droves to protect her, and the Mountbatten, long since successfully converted into an M-6, eventually succumbed, too. Tabby and John, of course, hadn’t lasted anywhere near as long in their bowdlerized hulls, and even Chobi eventually fell by the wayside.
She carried copies of their minds, of course, but alone, where she was going, it could be centuries before she could truly give them new hulls to inhabit. Assuming her last ditch attempt to escape worked.
The Mayal II globular cluster, the heart of a dead galaxy, doomed to orbit the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away.
One of the last things Chobi was able to scout out was that the refugees were already being sent there, in rickety vessels that would super-jump there, stranding them in a strange galaxy. The odds of success were horrendous, and their technological levels, should they survive, were going to plummet. It would take a miracle for them to survive.
Right now, though, she could use her own miracle, though. Time for her to follow, to try to save something of her own people and, maybe, if she was lucky, some of humanity,
She checked her calculations again, preparing her own super-jump, preparing to jump blind, hopefully close enough to reach the cluster, but far enough not to destroy herself. She’d blow out her own jump drive, of course, which meant she’d need to find a habitable system by slowboating, but there was no helping that. One day, if she was successful, her compatriots would again be awake, in their own bodies, and then, maybe, she could be repaired. For now, though, they slept: AIs did not always react well to hyperspace jumps, and she had little doubt that a super-jump would be infinitely worse. She would not subject them to that.
Tiny Kearny-Fuchida field effects popped into space around her, luckily still outside the safe proximity limit. Hate filled her circuits, as her telescopes picked out the monstrous, bat-winged, tentacled humanoids in the void. Having run out of time, but with plenty of spite to spare, she keyed her radio to general broadcast.
{“From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee.”}
Activating her KF drive for what may well be the last time, the Congress class drone frigate, SLS Sybil Ludington, disappeared into the discontinuity of hyperspace, leaving the Milky Way Galaxy behind.
