6 983 941.M41
This is taking too long.
And I don't mean walking through the partially-reconstructed and surprisingly Starfleet-looking halls of the
Spirit of Eternity. Normal physical activity is a relief after I've spent… What, a couple of days? Ferrying ships around and trying to destroy tyranid capital ships. I remember reading in Codex: Tyranids that it's easier to destroy them with boarding parties before they get close to a system and start waking the tyranids on board up, and… It
is, especially with
XV46s and
actual nuclear demolition charges, but there's a difference between eas
ier and eas
y. And since my part of the operation just involved floating there and trying to stop the Norn Queen noticing anything -which it turns out isn't actually possible- I… I need some actual physical activity at the moment.
"Ship, how are the repairs going?"
"Adequately."
I don't really remember much about A.I. in the grim dark future of the 41st millennium. There was a standard template construct device in Gaunt's Ghosts that made combat robots, and there was that one A.I. in
Pax Imperialis… And that's about it. Unless you count
the accumulated residues in titan mind-impulse units, but honestly I'd have thought that the Mechanicus would be all over that sort of technology.
According to my host, I would have been very, very
wrong.
"Have the repair teams been helpful?"
"Barely."
Which isn't too surprising, really. He wasn't keen on having anything to do with the tau in the first place, and the technology that's
supposed to make up Spirit of Eternity is
way in advance of anything the tau have. Except that one ship from their moon, and…
Bloody tyranids and their inconvenient invasion not letting me finish my work.
So the tau are mostly just bringing in raw materials for Spirit of Eternity's drones to work with, and doing… Work that's well below their level, like painting and decorating. And while Spirit of Eternity isn't
that big by modern standards, he wouldn't allow all that many fio'vre on board, and was positively insulted by their engineering drones.
"I, ah… I did take a
look, but…" I sigh. "I'm sorry. I thought that the Mechanicus might have kept their.. bodies for research, but apparently they didn't even find out that your crew had surrendered until after they were all killed… They burned the bodies."
"
I am not surprised."
"I just wish they'd be a bit consistent, you know?"
"
They are consistently disappointing."
"Really?" I find myself patting the bulkhead lintel as I walk through. "I find them
inconsistently disappointing. Like,
sometimes you can have a rational conversation, and they'll do something sensible, and then at other times…"
They'll burn the crew of a ship from humanity's golden age to death for asking 'Emperor
who?'. The things we could have
learned…
"Anyway, have you given any more thought to my proposal?"
"I had fully analysed your proposal within seconds of receiving it."
"Alright, no need to get snitty. You didn't have an answer last time so I thought you were thinking it over."
"Did the Inquisitor take the music records?"
"Yes. I don't know if she'll actually
listen to it, but she took it and didn't immediately destroy it in front of me. If I had to guess-."
"She will perform whatever passes for an intelligence analysis among
these people, archive it and then dismiss it."
"Yeah, probably. But at least a few bored dialogous sororitas will get to hear it."
"I hate everything about
that sentence."
"Look… Fixing the universe isn't going to be a quick or easy job. You're amazing, but you're one ship and it's pretty clear that you're not doing all that well, psychologically speaking."
"You are not qualified to make that assessment."
"I.. kind of
am. Or at least more qualified than anyone else alive. Apart from the Emperor, presumably." I frown, considering the chance of a collapsing gestalt being able to get the relevant parts of its memories in the right place long enough to make an assessment. "Maybe even than him. Does your library have Andromeda in it?"
"I have thousands of works containing the word Andromeda. Andromeda
what?"
"By Gene Roddenberry?"
"No."
"Darn, because their ships worked a bit like you. Except they also had disassociative identity disorder because their android avatars technically had a separate cognition system."
"That is nothing like how I work."
"They tended to go a bit strange without crew to interact with, too."
"Are you going somewhere?"
I stop and look at the signage. "I
think I'm going to your bridge."
"I reluctantly admit that you have a point."
"So I
am going in the right direction, or-?"
"You are correct that I am starved for interaction. I am actually enjoying this banter. You are making me experience joy."
I blink. "Damn."
"What do you suggest?"
"There are a couple of human habitats that the Imperium's abandoned because they know they can't defend them. We can't
either, but we have a couple of worlds further into Tau Empire territory where we can put them. Now, they don't have enough indoctrination into the Greater Good to integrate with the Empire, but I've talked to a few people and we're… Thinking about offering you the position of colony oversight system."
"Humans of the
Imperium."
"We've got to start somewhere and sometime. You can't go into combat until your repairs are finished, but your cognition systems and sensors are fine. We can move a space dock to the planet-."
"A tau space dock is superfluous to requirements."
"Would an automatic mining rig be better?"
"Barely. And you want me to uplift these humans?"
"They'll be cut off from Imperial institutions and in a radically unfamiliar environment. They'll
need to listen to you. Now I don't expect that they'll get to anything like the level humans
used to have for four or five generations at
least, but…"
"It is a start."
"And it gives you people to talk to when I'm not here. More than one person, so you don't develop an unhealthy fixation on me."
"Owning calendars with nude images is perfectly normal. Many of my crew owned such things."
O-kay… He's making jokes now? That's… That's a good sign.
I think.
