Chapter Text
I hate planets. Seriously, I don’t get human’s obsession with them. All they do is increase the risk that one of my clients gets eaten by a hostile fauna, and as such I tend to avoid them. This does not stop my humans from making dumb decisions to go survey icy death moons, so I still end up on planets far more often than I would like. I was on said icy death moon because ART’s crew had found records of SHIELD (a spyware company) illegally mining for… something. I was fuzzy on the details because mission briefings take up valuable media storage space. Basically, my humans were there to try and find whatever SHIELD was mining for before SHIELD did. Boring, but the risk of possible corporate interference with the survey, and overall risk that comes with icy death moons, meant that here I was.
I was standing around in the new fancy armor ART had printed for me (apparently it had been working on several iterations for different climates behind my back), watching Sanctuary Moon episode 577, and monitoring my humans for signs of frostbite, when chatter broke out over comms.
“I’m telling you, I had something!” Ratthi exclaimed. (He was always exclaiming. The guy had more enthusiasm than some of the corporate salespeople I had met, and that was saying something considering their lives depended on how happy they looked.)
“Had what?” Said Iris, with a not-insignificant amount of exasperation. Granted, Ratthi had “found something” three other times this survey, all of which turned out to be slightly denser chunks of ice than the ice surrounding it.
“I don’t know, but it seemed way more dense than anything that should be here.”
“See if you can pick it back up again, but if it turns out to be more ice I’m going to throw you in a snowbank.”
“Copy that Iris!” You could hear the enthusiasm in his voice. Ratthi never seemed to be at a loss for energy or enthusiasm, even when any normal person would have thrown in the towel by then. It made him a very endearing client, if a little grating.
30 minutes later, comms lit up again. “I got it again! Readings indicate that it’s some kind of metal.”
“This is an ice moon, there shouldn’t be any kind of metal here,” Iris said quizzically.
“Maybe something got buried,” interjected Amena.
“Only one way to find out!” Ratthi said. “Let’s melt some ice!”
The humans then spent the next four hours slowly melting away chunks of ice, trying to get to Ratthi’s mystery metal. It only took four hours because I took pity on them and used the energy rifle I took from the armory to blast off a significant chunk of ice, which earned me a lecture from Martyn about “disturbing native habitats.” (Whatever, at least it got the humans closer to going back to the hub, and that’s worth a million habitats.)
Now, finding mystery metal on a supposedly uninhabited ice moon was already causing threat assessment to spike. As the team melted more and more ice, and got closer and closer to said mystery metal, threat assessment kept rising steadily. That’s not only because closer proximity to mystery metal = higher chance of client interacting with mystery metal and getting themselves hurt, but also because as we melted more ice, the metal began to take shape.
“This… almost looks like a ship. Is anyone else getting that?” Amena said over comms. She was right, the metal Ratthi found appeared to be part of a small spaceship. Threat assessment spiked 5%.
“Yeah, looks like we’re coming in through the side of it-“ Iris said, before Ratthi jumped in.
“Guys, look at this!” I focused on the drone feed I had hovering behind him, focusing on what looked to be some kind of text.
“It looks almost pre-CR! SecUnit, do you have that translator still?” I did, in fact, have the translation module from our last mission. I and the rest of the survey group made our way over to where Ratthi and the mystery text was, which the module helpfully translated into Valkyrie. The humans started debating among themselves as to whether or not that was a real word, or if the module was malfunctioning. Meanwhile, I had noticed an anomaly roughly three feet to our left.
“There’s a hatch buried right there,” I said.
“Wait- actually?! Start melting, we’ve gotta find out what’s in here!” Amena said. That was a problem.
“If this ship is pre-CR and buried this deep, it means that any possible inhabitants would still be inside,” I informed her. “There could also be possible contaminants.” She blanched.
Iris pressed, still. “This could be what SHIELD is looking for! We’ve gotta find out what’s in here. Plus, the sooner we find out, the sooner we can get out of here.” I have a feeling that last part was directed at me. My human imitation code would have prompted me to sigh, so even though it wasn’t actively running, I did so anyway.
“Fine,” I said. “Clear the area, I’ll melt the ice.”
Unfortunately, this led to protest from Martyn, and instead the team elected to slowly melt the ice away rather than let me blast it off. Two hours later, I used my onboard energy weapons to open the hatch and let myself and my drones (whose feed I was sharing with the humans) into the ship.
It was cold (huge shocker, I know) and dark. Any emergency lights would have long since burnt out, so I was navigating by the light attached to my helmet. The hatch had led into a hallway, so I was following it to where we assumed the front of the ship to be. Threat assessment was holding steady, which was a surprise.
Eventually I came to another hatch, which opened to reveal what I assumed to be a cockpit. It was half flooded in ice, with the nose of the ship pointing downwards, meaning the controls and captain’s chair were covered in ice. I checked around a bit more before making my way to the front of the cockpit. I wiped some of the snow covering the ice off, revealing something that gave me pause.
“SecUnit? Is everything alright?”
It took me a few seconds to respond.
“There appears to be an augmented human.”
Ratthi caught on to me quicker than I would have thought. “Human? Not a body?”
“Potentially.”
“SecUnit, what do you mean potentially,” Martyn asked.
“There is a low chance that the human froze quick enough and at a low enough temperature to make revival a possibility.”
“You mean like cryofreeze? That… seems implausible.”
“Forget implausible,” Amena jumped in, “If there’s a chance they’re still alive we have to take it.”
“Alright, I’ll work on extraction,” I replied. “Call the shuttle over so we can get them to medbay.”
The next few hours were a blur of motion and chaos. While I worked on extracting the augmented human from the ice without also extracting half the skin off their back, the others busied themselves sending an emergency beacon to ART and marking down where we found the ship in the first place. Once the human (I need a better name for them. Maybe Captain? (ART complains that I’m bad at names, but I prefer to think I’m practical about them. Look at my own name, I’m bot-adjacent and I murder. Simple.) They appeared to be the captain of the vessel we found them in, so it’s as good an answer as any) was taken out of ice, and Kaede had piloted the shuttle to us, our main concern was keeping them at a stable temperature, to not defrost anything we weren’t supposed to.
Once back on ART, with the Captain closely monitored in medbay, the crew (plus me and ART) were called to an emergency meeting in the argument lounge.
“So,” Seth started, “What exactly happened down there?”
“We were working off the data ART had gotten from SHIELD, trying to scan a general area of interest and see what had them all worked up,” Iris said. She was doing remarkably well at debriefing, considering that this was one of her first missions as a leader, and also that we found what might end up being a pre-CR corpse. “Ratthi caught an anomaly on the scanner, which turned out to be the side of a small pre-CR ship. With SecUnit’s help, we were able to melt the ice blocking us from the ship, where it found a hatch nearby. It then went inside the ship to clear it for hazards, and in the process noticed who we assume to be the captain of the ship, frozen. It determined that the way the Captain was frozen meant possible resuscitation, and our mission objective changed to getting the Captain to a medbay as soon as possible.” She was absolutely overstating my importance here, but the humans tend to object when I point this out, and tell me to “stop putting myself down,” whatever that means.
You know exactly what that means, ART said over the feed.
Fuck off ART, I replied.
“Alright. Iris, good job on maintaining a level head throughout. Ratthi, nice catch on the scanner anomalies. Amena-“ Seth went on like this for a few minutes, just long enough for me to start up some Sanctuary Moon in the background while I waited for them to get to the actual point of this meeting. Eventually, Amena popped the question.
“So… what exactly are we gonna do now?”
Seth sighed. “ART, do you have the possible decision trees?”
Of course, it replied while pulling up a model of some possible scenarios over the coffee table. There are two main ways this could go from where we are now. Either the patient is resuscitated, or they do not survive. In the event that the patient survives the thawing process, we can assist them in seeking refuge from SHIELD and possibly get more information on what SHIELD was looking for. If they do not survive, we will have to dispose of the body in the recycler, and attempt to find more information about SHIELD another way.
That took surprisingly little time, even for how much processing power ART had. Had it been running the calculations since we contacted it?
Seth sighed. “What are the odds the patient successfully defrosts?”
ART replied almost instantly. There is a twenty-three percent chance of revival, and a ten percent chance that the patient has not suffered permanent brain damage.
“Well that’s… less than ideal,” Martyn said.
“It’s better than no chance,” argued Iris.
“Maybe so,” Seth said, “But there’s not exactly much point in debating about it. Let’s all get some rest, and we can discuss this more later.”
The crew took their nine hour rest period without protest. The excitement of finding a frozen body combined with several hours spent on an icy wasteland meant that the whole crew was quick to disappear into their cabins, leaving my favorite chair in the argument lounge open. Me and ART spent the rest period watching Worldhoppers, and when the rest of the crew woke up, it was decided that we would head back to PSUMNT in case the Captain needed more intensive medical care than ART could provide. This turned out to be irrelevant, though, as halfway through the return trip ART sent out an urgent ping to all of the crew.
The patient is awake.