A cold win blew through the rotting hallways of the warship, indicating that the ships engine had completely died out, making its interior feel closely like the "warmest" points on California Minor. Its no wonder, really. All the maintenance robots have been mauled down to their oily deaths by a frenzied cyborg in his daily blackout rage episodes, all together with the unfortunate AI crew which used to navigate the ship. In combination with all the robot scrap, destroyed dashboards, dented plating and knocked over equipment shelves as well as the smoking engine, war vessel Glacier, once the flagship of Arcani's first successful fully augmented unit and former Guildmaster of the Core codenamed "Frostbite", was now a certified ghost ship, drifting through the outer edges of the New London system, where the trail of bread crumbs left behind by Ruby Hydra had completely ceased, killing all hope he had left of ever finding her.
The interior had an odd design compared to most other ships of its class, as the control room was stationed bellow the living quarters. Due to the fact all of the crew was automated, during the first month after Andrews upgrade, he had the leisure to create the so called "Frozen Throne" of the Glacier, which was a large viewing room, meant to serve both as a means of demonstrating his dominance, and as a suitable place from which he could spectate the demise of Hydra's enemies. Within it, on the last step before the throne, stood Frostbites kneeling suit of armor, while on the throne itself, still seated, was Andrew's electronic carcass, which still held a grip over his own cracked up and broken augmented blood pump.
Though he had committed suicide, due to the nature of his almost fully augmented body, his nervous system was being kept alive and functioning by prototype emergency life support meant to serve in situations where the unit's vital augmentations were damaged during combat. Frostbite was fully aware of that, but with no jump anomalies or other objects of relevance within the remote asteroid field in which he conducted surveillance and pieced together information about Ruby's whereabouts, the almost man was certain that despite the fact, by the time someone found the ship, he'd be long dead. But nothing in this universe can go fully as planned, with so many unpredictable factors just standing ready to strike and shake up your world. In Andrew's case, it is the Regulation and Emergency Response System Model 01, the "Spiritus".
The artificial intelligence worked in harmony with both his suit of armor, and his bodily augmentations, never showing signs of its existence while gathering data on everything ranging from the state of its hosts vital functions and neural activity, up to physical behavioral patterns and in-combat data. Its even capable of regulating dopamine levels, adrenaline flow, blood pressure, most things which can affect the way someone responds to certain situations, so the Spiritus played a big role in keeping the unit cold, calm and collected. And should the emergency life support sound off, the AI would immediately attempt to connect and upload itself to the neural net in order to make its way back to the Core, where the few selected individuals can de-crypt its travel log and stored data, leading them back to the host unit. Due to the nature of Arcani's work, the AI is capable of doing so by bouncing off through public nodes and low-encryption civilian ship systems.
As the Glacier's neural net connection was offline, the only thing the AI could do was connect to the ships scanner and low-range transmitter, searching for anything it could possibly latch on to. Time is slowly ticking away for Andrew, towards his official death, and in such a desolate part of space, even if it is a capital system, mere Junkers are a rare occurrence, let alone random civilians with low-grade cyber protection. But despite all of that, on the 32nd hour of its search, by the work of our theoretical god, Spiritus picked up a signal. It was a simple "Gull" transport, displaying no allegiance, carrying a cargo hold full of Cardamine at exactly 13.4 kilometers away. A very old and used up vessel, most likely trying to avoid authorities by taking such an obscure route, obscure even for seasoned smugglers.
<signal located> [01:07:59:01]
<scanning and authenticating> [01:07:59:02]
<N/A>
<CT-49X>
<N/A>
<N/A>
<connecting and uploading> [01:07:59:06]
<upload complete> [01:08:00:01]
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"The vessel is in acceptable working condition, measures to sustain functionality will not be taken. Destination is set to the Cambridge jump anomaly according to the vessels navigational data."
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"Navigational data has been updated, the following waypoint leads to the Omega-5 jump anomaly, the vessel will be passing by an installation logged as "Cardiff Mining Facility" at a distance of 15.1 kilometers. Authorized to re-direct the course by 1.2 kilometers in order to upload to a public node. The vessel will be strafed 2.6 meters at a time periodically to avoid detection."