What a enjoyable evening i had, i and our little non-corporeal friend made our way through Sigma 13 and cut a path through the local population with ease. Sadly the fun couldn't last and just as i expected, the word spread of our evil deeds and groups began to band together from all over Sirius.
Vincent docked and happily began the cleaning of our ill gotten spoils. i came across a young fellow in New Tokyo who chose to come to my aid as the Mandaloreans came into scanner range. He fell shortly after the first Mandalorean exploded in a bright flash of color and after a short struggle the second Merc came to a similar end.
It was only after the battle that i hacked the sensor network and saw how many ships truely pursued me. My popularity seems to have spread, a plethora of battleships, destroyers, fighters....you name it and it was there, all coming after little ole me. there were three groups to begin with. i came across the first one at the Shigoku JG and seeing the size of the group i realized fleeing was the only option.
Determined till the end, the chase led us through nearly a dozen system before at last they had found their prey to be much more slippery than they had thought.
At the end of the run i had a hold full of playthings to keep me busy. Some were revealed to have some exceptional singing voices, screaming their songs long into the night. gives me goosebumps just thinking about it HAHAHAHHAHAAA.....
The deck was cold. Exactly minus 170 degrees Celsius.
Somewhere, a reactor hummed into action. The heating system began to operate. Over the course of the next several hours, the ship began to warm up. All the while a small fighter circled the behemoth, waiting. Waiting.
Shortly after the ship reached 20C, footsteps echoed in the corridor. The atmosphere was not quite conducive to life, not yet, but then again, what was walking there had not been precisely alive for some time.
"Master!", came the shout. It was pointless. Nothing could be alive on that ship. He knew that.
A creature that had once been a mining cyborg, and prior, much more than that, entered the bridge, and walked slowly to the command chair.
He mouthed the word again. It was the closest he would, or could, come to know grief. A subroutine exercised beyond use.
The only thing that could be done, the only possible decision, was to continue Master's work.
He looked around the damaged bridge, and realized he would need help. A great deal of help.
He looked down at his rotting arm, and realized he would also need new parts, and it was unlikely the donors would be willing. They never were.
The woman opened her eyes, slowly, like the effort was painful.
It was painful.
She focussed her eyes on the creature. The creature looked back at her, and may have smiled. It was hard to tell.
"You fought five Corsairs by yourself. You may have even won."
The creature continued in a hoarse croak. Speaking was difficult with a rotten larynx; it was also out of practice.
"I can make use of skill like that."
It stood slowly, and as it did so the smell of decay was overpowering. The woman would have vomitted, had she the strength.
"I have spent the last three weeks repairing you. I am somewhat of an expert at augmentation now. You are also far more addicted to Cardimine than you were when I found you."
It began to leave the room, turning off the lights as it went, after it turned on a small metering pump that delivered an orange-gold liquid to the woman's intravenous. Her visage relaxed completely.
"You will serve us now. I am not providing other options."
PSI-Borg was alone. Unique, and alone. And he knew it.
He was not lonely. His mind simply did not comprehend that concept.
No, the problem was greater than that. He could not accomplish the Master's mission by himself.
The girl was useful, but she was merely an excellant bomber pilot, whose skills ebbed and flowed with her Cardimine addiction.
Destroying the human race was going to require much, much more.
He looked at the positronic assembly in front of him. It occupied what used to be the crew mess. Ship control circuitry and power conduits passed directly underneath it; the spine, if you will, of the ship. It was time to hook up the cerebellum.
He sat in a simple chair in front of the massive supercomputer, built on the same design principles as his own mind. Principles which were lost to the human race when Mon'star had disembowelled his creater.
Not lost to him, though. "Physician, know thyself.."
He activated the power.
He sat for hours and watched as it throbbed and glowed. It assembled information, abstract principles, and it developed in seconds concepts the human mind took years to grasp. The web grew and became exponentially more complex over the course of a full day.
It was learning. And PSI-Borg had chosen its tutors well.
Men (and a few women) who had instigated genocide, preached toxic worldviews, who had drawn upon paranoia, poor circumstances, the convenient presence of scapegoats, and mankind's baser nature to cause groups of people to slaughter, torture, rape, and oppress their fellow man.
Deceipt. The will to power. Dehumanizing the "other". Manipulating entire cultures. Means justifying ends that in a sane universe, would never have been ends, anywhere.
All there. All infamous. Names from history books. Now alive, in a sense, again.
He pulled two maggots out of his arm and continued to wait silently.
The web began to light up on its outer edge. Shortly thereafter, a voice spoke, resonating throughout the ship.
The Rheinlander had been useful, and had been kept alive for that reaason. Prime organs, harvested from healthy young humans. The ones taken in battle tended to be of a more variable quality. And often radiation-damaged.
The new pancreas was working well, and the scar would shortly not be visible, thanks to the nano-augmentation that the cyborg miner "host" had originally been equipped with, before the new owner took control of the body.
"Why do you insist on using that rotted husk?", asked the ship. "Asked" was not a precise description; the question materialized in his mind in less than a femtosecond.
The creature answered verbally, "I do not think that the use of a human form can be precluded as a necessary evil at this point. It may prove useful again. Certainly it did so for Master on many occasions, though I am not as well augmented and therefore not as strong as he was. This form, however, can quite easily kill several non-augmented humans, and quickly."
The ship seemed to accept that. Certainly it did not repeat the inquiry. Usually the most inquisitive facet of the new hivemind was the one that had been modelled from a certain Niccolo Machiavelli. That individual must have been fond of hearing his own voice, when alive.
The creature regarded the girl, who rested in a haze in the corner of the bridge. She had become more withdrawn of late, and had not flown in combat support for weeks. The creature briefly considered the benefits of augmenting her, then thought better of it. Whatever made her a good pilot should not be risked, and it was also true that humans usually reacted poorly to having their parts removed and replaced with machinery, when done against their will.
In any case, in recent days she had not been needed. The Necrosis had sent a Kusari Battlecruiser cruising away in fear, though just prior to that, another similar ship had sent the Necrosis packing instead.
All in good time.
Stay unseen. Stay undamaged. Stay alive. Wait. Then strike.
The voices were silent.
The nails were raw.
The throat was dry.
The sickly stench of death and rot was around her.
In one of her brief periods of sanity, her eyes looked beyond the pain and pleasure of being a thrall.
The smell. The body parts. The mechanical noises. The shadows. Everything was there.
Her mind pushed back the fear. But the silent eyes followed her left hand. That was rotting.
Madness trickled in again, coupled with disbelief, pain and fear.
And once again Keres was herself again.
Screaming for a death, not for her, but for everyone else that did not allowed her to exist.
"Master? Master?"
Her head twisted in a weird angle to search for her provider of both pleasure and release.
![[Image: 54385471.jpg]](http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/6505/54385471.jpg)