Ravens of Eternity

363 Intel & Recon, Pt The commando team filed into a dark, low, and narrow maintenance corridor as quickly as they could. Behind them, Raijin closed the hatch they came through, then followed right behind.

The maintenance corridor was lined with pipes and wires and tubes along each of its hexagonal sides. And it was small enough that they were all forced to crouch as they moved through. This was no doubt a crawlspace for the Drogar, and wouldn’t likely be in these corridors and tunnels at all.

Xylo shot at a few maintenance drones that were hovering around with her disruption pistol, which fell to the ground completely neutralized.

Some in her team picked up the deactivated drones for later deconstruction and examination.

Raijin picked one up, and absorbed it immediately. Though she decided to analyze it later.

There were also small access ports and microterminals at random intervals as they went, some of which were clearly meant for drones and other autonomous maintenance units. Raijin stopped every so often to wave at them with her baton, but found most of them were protected and scrambled like the rest.

She created spiders for a handful of them anyway, just in case. Just like the first, these placed themselves somewhere out of reach, then spread out, flattened, and camouflaged themselves.

The team eventually reached the first of numerous hatches along the branching, maze-like corridors. Xylo opened it up slowly and carefully, then peeked inside with her pistol at the ready. Surprise spread across her face as warm air from inside hit her.

She was expecting all sorts of machinery, perhaps attended to by engineers and technicians. But instead, she found that this room was a kind of hatchery. There appeared to be large eggs placed inside specialized hexagonal crates, each of which stacked up on each other in floor-to-ceiling racks.

.....

And there were rows and rows of racks inside the room itself.

Everyone in the team was in absolute awe at what they saw, even as they entered through the small hatch. Not that they got to be dazed for too long – Xylo immediately ordered them to sweep through the entire room as quickly as possible.

As they sped down the rows with their disruption pistols out, Raijin hovered up to one of the racks in sheer delight. She waved her baton at one of the eggs, and surprisingly, could easily see the data it was producing.

For the first time in a long time, she was utterly astonished at what she was seeing. This was a biologically engineered machine.

“It is as we have suspected,” she whispered to Xylo. “The Empire’s ships are, at the very least, partially biomechanical. What’s inside this particular egg appears to be a kind of circuit. Or perhaps a module.”

“You can’t tell what it is?” asked Xylo.

“If we think of their ships as insect-like, and we are seeing proof of an egg-like composition, then we can theorize that they go through stages. These will likely become larva, then turn into pupa.”

Xylo nodded in understanding.

“And finally adult,” Xylo added. “Each step would be radically different, right?”

“That is my theory, yes,” Raijin replied. “We will need more data to fully understand their process.”

“Alright, so do we take a few eggs, then? Bring it back so we can reverse engineer it?”

“We cannot. If we take even one, they will know that someone has been here. More importantly, it will likely not survive leaving this room. This appears to be an incubation chamber. I would much rather pull raw data and attempt to recreate it in my lab.”

She waved her baton at the egg one more time. But this time, she downloaded the raw data that was inside. As she compressed the data down for storage, a thought struck her out of the blue. So she waved her baton at another egg in another rack.

Then she waved it at a few others in other racks.

“These are all different circuits,” she said in astonishment. “The eggs in every column are nearly identical to each other, but the eggs in separate rows are different. If we follow the theory, these eggs likely birth different systems.”

“What, like these ones are repair modules?” Xylo pointed at one. “But these ones are life support systems? Is that what you mean?”

“Something like that. I am unsure. Like I said, I need more data.”

“First feathers,” one of the commandos reported over their DIs. “I found some sort of terminal in the center. Figured you might wanna take a look.”

“Well done,” Xylo replied. “Carry on.”

The two of them headed towards the center of the room, which wasn’t all that far. The entire incubator was only about 100 meters in diameter, which like most of the rest of the structure they were in, was hexagonal in shape.

And thankfully, was devoid of Drogar.

While the commandos posted up defensively at the entrances into the incubator, Raijin and Xylo investigated the terminal in the center. It was actually a ring of terminals surrounding a sealed databank in the center.

The databank itself stretched all the way from the floor to the ceiling and seemed cool to the touch. Certainly much cooler in temperature than the rest of the room that surrounded it.

Raijin’s eyes went wide as she waved her baton at it.

“Some of the data stored on this is completely readable,” she said. “I am unsure if they are supposed to be open, or if this was a security oversight.”

“Can we get in through there?” Xylo asked.

“I will do my best.”

Raijin walked up to one of the terminals and placed her hand on its screen. She quickly connected to the data using a guest account, and at the same time injected thousands of nanites into the public portions of the circuit itself.

Although she wanted to read the actual data itself, she was much more focused on finding exploits in the code itself. While she scoured the dataset for flaws, her nanites scoured the circuit for vulnerabilities.

Her probe only lasted for a few seconds before she found something she could potentially use to gain access. More importantly, she was able to confirm that this facility didn’t use nanoscopic security. Or, at the very least, this exact terminal didn’t.

And that made her confident enough to enter her machine trance and slip directly into the code.

Unlike the city-like code structures that human systems often took, Drogar systems appeared to be more like ocean ecosystems to Raijin.

Data seemed to float ethereally in clouds or clusters, like schools of fish. She could see the datasets clearly, even as they darted around her.

But these were just the open datasets, as revealed by the public circuits. Though she could see far more ocean that stretched out in every direction, she couldn’t get to them. It seemed as though there were impenetrable barriers between her and the rest of the databank.

More than that, the data in those unreachable areas were fuzzy and out of focus. Every time she attempted to peer at them across the distance, they would also dart out of her vision elusively.

Giant shark-like code structures appeared in their place, which peered back at her in suspicion. No doubt one of the system’s myriad security systems.

Raijin paid it little mind.

As long as they were separated, they couldn’t get to her. Instead, she explored her open space and went down the few pathways out to other open datasets. It was clear to her that entire sections of open data were connected to each other, accessible through the public circuit on the databank.

Each of the datasets seemed to document the myriad rooms nearby, including the incubator. In that specific dataset, Raijin confirmed her theory on what those eggs were. Some reports stated which batches where which, and how they were utilized in their larval stage.

Though these schools of data were filled with plenty of juicy information, Raijin resisted the urge to read all of them. Instead, she first tested the data’s integrity by creating a few errors on purpose. Nothing too major: she simply threw a few glitches into the data, randomly. And she even tossed in a handful of logical loops for good measure.

Any system worth its salt would immediately correct them.

But she found that while the code cleaned up the loops and dismantled them, the data was completely left untouched. She wondered if that was a result of data preservation rules, or if it was an oversight altogether.

Regardless, she found her exploit. All she needed to do was test it out before she implemented her workaround.

Raijin immediately went towards the nearest school of data to test it. She opened up its index header and only performed a single change – its security flag was flipped from ‘Open’ to ‘Secure, Level 1’.

The moment she closed it up and saved it, she was booted right out of the area. She suddenly found herself in the sector she was in prior, in front of a completely different school of data.

And when she tried to look for the pathway back, found her way closed off.

So, she thought to herself. The data is certainly far from immutable, and changes are accepted instantly. Time to look at personnel logs...

She opened up the dataset’s index header and navigated to the access logs. There she found her own anonymous, invisible guest at the top. And multitudes of others across numerous cycles prior.

It appeared to her that most of those who accessed the dataset were technicians entering in small amounts of data at a time. Every so often, someone with even greater permissions came in to review the data itself and left their notes here and there.

She quickly accessed the personnel records through the databank, created a copy of the account with the most permissions, then sank it back into the database as a local administrator.

Then, she logged out of her guest account, and into the newly-minted administrator account.

Though she was completely limited to just this databank in the entire facility, she had sweeping access. The new account could very clearly open up most of the datasets in the entire bank, and though the security sharks were curious, they simply swam away after confirming the account’s validity.

One of them went right up to her, unsure even as it scanned her. In response, she reached out with a hand, and injected one of her engines into it.

It swam away right after, even as it continued to convert from the inside-out.

Raijin toured the vast ocean with a grin on her digital face.

Low security protocols were the bane of any organization, and breaking through them gave her a thrill like no other. There was something in the act itself, that ability to find the flaw, and expose it. There was a kind of power in it.

And, without skipping a beat, began to copy all of the data in front of her.