The Sekhet-Aaru and its A.I.

[Rickard Steiner]

[Excerpts taken from the Sekhet-Aaru's offline database from a collation of entries entitled 'Ships of the Order: 801-818AS', authored by several archivist scribes, describing the construction, design and service history of the vessel. Excerpts are decrypted from the Admiralty-level edition of the collation, including project details unavailable in the more widely accessible 'Fleet' edition.]

---

Prefacing Comments: Of all the ships of the Order that I have catalogued over the years since the Nomad Crisis, and even by the lofty precedents of science and technology set to ensure our organisation's continued survival, few have been as ambitious, and indeed controversial, as the Sekhet-Aaru. Supporters of the project cite its continued contributions and the kindness and steadfastness of its captain in the wake of Toledo, not to mention the milestones associated with the ship as being indicative of a successful and valuable endeavour. To others it is a financial white elephant whose costs, both direct and indirect, cannot possibly justify its existence, and in the hands of a artificial intelligence with a history of insubordination is a millstone tied around the neck of the already stretched military. Nevertheless, the Sekhet-Aaru has been a fascinating ship to catalogue and is deserving of its place in the records of our organisation. - Joshua Weinberg, Order Head Archivist, Evora Branch

---

Section One: Construction

The Sekhet-Aaru can find its origins in an Admiralty requirement of 807AS submitted to the design teams at Evora Shipyard for an unmanned vessel capable of securely housing a number of upcoming prototype systems for field testing. The design would need to be sufficiently sturdy to withstand the stresses of the systems it was built to test, large enough to carry a reactor powerful enough to fuel the experiments and possessing of a suitable on-board artificial intelligence to ensure its safe governance.

The decision was made early on to build the ship on the bones of an existing design. Initially an Osiris-class hull was considered for its attributes of size and durability, but with the demand for the battleships coming from both the Order and the Corsairs, none could be spared and an alternative had to be found. Eventually the team opted for a design based on a civilian hull. The Oasis-class of passenger liners were spacious and had a ruggedness of design that lent itself to long term operations in the wilder reaches of space, a necessity for the testing of systems away from potentially vulnerable population centres. The choice of hull would come with the advantages of a thriving market for second hand parts, speeding up construction while decreasing costs and ensuring that the ship could, as far as the basic vessel was concerned, be economically maintained. The shipyard architects thus found the foundation on which they could build, and within a matter of months the blueprints for the highly modified Oasis was submitted for approval to the admiralty.

Given the green light in May 807AS, her keel was laid down at Evora in March of that year. Work proceeded to a relaxed but predetermined schedule as much work was still to be done on the planned first batch of mounted prototypes. By 809AS most of the critical non-experimental systems were in place, including the reactor (experimental but a critical part of the ship,) flight systems, basic shielding and a temporary control interface, though the vessel remained largely an empty shell. The first challenge that presented itself was the issue of the ship's fitting out. To preserve secrecy around the project, a purpose-built hangar had been carved into the face of a vast crevice, deep in the uncharted wastes of Planet Toledo where the ship was to undergo it's completion. Secure as this location may have been, transporting the incomplete ship to its new home was not a straightforward affair, involving the entire complement of the Order's heavy lifters to assist the ship from its berth and taking it through the jump hole and hostile terrain on the other side to Toledo. The ship then had to endure a closely calculated atmospheric re-entry before being laid to rest in its hangar. Though it cannot be verified, this is believed to have been one of the most challenging transfers of an unfinished ship in the history of Sirius to date.

Upon arrival at Toledo, the ship was handed over by Evora's engineers to the dedicated project research team, a small group of gifted individuals who, as well as being competent mechanics responsible for the vessel's fitting out, had largely been the heads of the departments in charge of the development of the prototype technologies that were to be mounted. The team had paid close attention to the design and construction of the ship in the run-up to its arrival and many of the systems were ready or close to being ready to incorporate into the ship. Details of the mounted projects will be expanded upon in another dedicated section of this entry. Though there were issues that had to be resolved and designs that had to be altered accordingly, the prototype hardware was completed and mounted by February 812AS, ready for the completion of the artificial intelligence that would control the tests.

The person whose job it was to achieve this was Dr Lucia Farrugia, a Corsair scientist brought in specifically for the task, she was nevertheless reported to be the most eccentric of an eccentric group and difficult to work with. Colleagues expressed their concern at the obsessiveness with which Dr Farrugia conducted her work and the paranoia with which she went about it. Work reports indicate that throughout work undertaken on the A.I. core, the doctor was the only individual to access the relevant areas, and work hours logged indicated several twenty-four hour shifts pulled regularly, often consecutively. It is also noted that the doctor failed to submit, nor appeared to work off any physical blueprint, and the requisitions list, though still classified, was known to contain a bizarre mix of both the cutting edge and the ancient as well as a substantial amount of biological material. Nobody knows the exact structure and content as the core remains sealed by its owner to this day, and Dr Farrugia sadly died during the evacuation of Toledo. Nevertheless, the records indicate that the doctor's design is unlike anything else in the service of the Order, and though questions were beginning to be asked of Dr Farrugia, the scientist assured both her team and an increasingly alarmed Admiralty that her creation would be more than capable of handling the massive computing challenge that lay ahead of it.

Despite these assurances and the progress already made, the project was approaching a final deadline come it's completion in November 814AS, set after the second of two Admiralty inquiries in early 813 and mid 814AS respectively. Though in terms of time the delay was not unprecedented for the scale of the undertaking, cost overruns to the tune of nearly seven billion credits for an organisation that could ill afford such figures nearly resulted in the termination of the project. Indeed, it was on the day of the deadline that the A.I. was brought online with the ship hurriedly christened the Sekhet-Aaru, after the ancient Egyptian analogue for Heaven, before its unceremonious launch. The Admiralty would finally have the opportunity to evaluate just exactly what they had been given for their money. This concludes the section dedicated to the Sekhet-Aaru's construction.