FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

It took a bit of work, but the warped panel fell away with a loud and dusty clang. Miles and miles of neatly bundled wires ran through the bulkhead. It wasn't the best way to make money, but it did fetch a decent price as scrap.

Sara reached inside with a knife and cut the wires as far into the bulkhead as she could reach, pulling out the convenient bundles and tossing them haphazardly over the railing behind her. "Head's up!"

A second later the bundles landed with a loud thump followed by the artificial whine of a canine.

"Shut up. I know you're not anywhere near your weight limit." She said over her shoulder.

Another whine.

"That's not a valid excuse either." With the wires cleared out, she could see further into the bulkhead. There was nothing of value, so she carefully stuck her head in, shining a light around the tight space. Her headset jammed against the top of her head, making her wince. "Okay, I'm taking this off. Permission to un-shut up granted."

"That's not how prefixes work." The whiner's voice echoed from below, the deeper tone reverberating further down the passageway.

"So you know about the finer points of language, but not your own carry limit?" She pulled her head free of the hole and shook the dust out of her fur.

"I know my weight limit and I know my weight limit even adjusted for worn shocks and suspension. It was just adding personality. I know how much living beings like to complain."

"Complaining is basically why you're alive." Sara shone the light around, trying to find the next place to scavenge. A nearby door looked intact enough to push through. "Get up here, I want to check out this room."

A mechanical whirl came from the darkness below her and she backed up against the bulkhead to make room. Moments later, her companion leaped up out of the darkness and vaulted over the railing, clanging on the floor with an artificial grace. "Rooms on ships are called compartments."

"Duly noted, now come on." Sara squeezed passed him and walked towards the unopened door. It was in surprisingly good condition considering how hard the ship had crashed, but she knew better than to assume a promising door would open. The metal under her paws shook with every step her robotic companion took, but not quite as much as one would expect from a giant robot canine that weighed in at almost half a ton.

She ripped open the emergency panel on the door and pulled the manual handle. It didn't budge.

"Open it up for me, please." She stepped aside and waited for him to do his thing. As a former military support robot, one of his "things" was breaching doors, something she found incredibly useful when stripping shipwrecks.

The A-PAW stepped up, got purchase on the metal frame and the door with its metal paws, and began prying it open. Mechanical whirling echoed down the passageway as the bot strained against the jammed door. Just as she thought he was about to give up, the door gave with a ear-flattening shriek of grinding metal and slammed open.

"Thank you." The wolfess stepped through the doorframe and shone the light around the compartment. "I am still not sure what kind of ship this is. Any ideas?"

"Originally a commercial vessel that was converted to haul freight. Scuttled instead of scrapped because mechanical issues that prevented it from reaching a scrapyard."

"So, a bit of a bust." She pulled off more panels. If she couldn't pull a profit, she'd at least break even on this trip.

"The odds of making a profit on this trip are good enough." The bot paused for a moment. "And this model was known for utilizing a large amount of titanium in certain bulkhead panels."

"Titanium?" Sara stopped what she was doing and looked at her emotionless companion. "Is that greed I hear?"

As military machines, A-PAWs came stock with titanium alloy armor plating. When Sara had found him, a lot of his outer plating had been removed, tarnished, or damaged. Currently, his outer shell was an odd amalgamation of whatever metals she could afford to melt down into the interlocking plates that protected his vulnerable internal components.

"Efficiency. Weight distribution and overall integrity is not up to par."

Sara attached too much personality to his dumb AI. He was telling the truth and being completely tactical about it, but it was way more amusing to pretend that he was being greedy.

"Fine, but you're carrying it." She held up the panel she had pulled off the wall and the robot nodded in approval.

"I carry everything, Sara."

"Only because you're so good at it, Mal." The wolf returned to work. It was boring, laborious work, but the hardest part was done by a tireless machine. Sara loaded him up with copper wires and titanium panels and while she worked, he would return to the ship and unload the valuable cargo.

Whenever he left speaking range, she slipped the headset back on so they could still communicate. After about two hours, it was used mostly for listening to music.

"Spike in encrypted communications."

Sara paused the music. "Whose?" Her heartbeat picked up a bit. More encrypted communications usually meant military activity.

"Unknown, though judging by the encryption schemes, it appears to be the Carina Arm Collective and either a group of mercenaries or the Carina Liberation Front."

"Where? Show me." Sara pulled herself out of the bulkhead as a map popped up on her HUD. Space battles were lucrative and if the guess was right, a battle was inevitable. Sara didn't involve herself in the politics of any particular party. She paid taxes and fees to whoever reigned over her home, but that was about it.

"I cannot get a good fix on their exact location, but debris should fall around this area." He highlighted a large swath of land. A bit too large for her liking, but it would still be more lucrative than the empty hulk that she was currently in.

"Alright, get the ship warmed up. I'll be there soon." She took off back towards where she had cut into the wreck.

"Wrong way, left at the junction."

Or, to where she thought she had cut into the wreck. "Thanks."

It took a few minutes and two more corrections to get back outside. She shielded her eyes from the blinding light and waited for them to adjust before carefully picking her way down the angled hull.

As requested, her ship was already running and idling by the time she got there. Mal sat by the ramp, waiting for her return like a pet. Heat distortion made the air dance underneath the two tilt-jet engines.

"Thank you. Let's get going. Is the course plotted?" Sara walked up the slight incline of the ramp into her ship, followed closely by the metal clanging of her robot behind her.

"Plotted before I even alerted you." Mal went ahead and secure himself in the cockpit as Sara closed and locked the crates that he had filled with their salvage. By the time she joined him, he was already clamped and plugged into a side panel next to the pilot's seat.

"You know me so well." The wolf buckled herself in, did a last few checks, then lifted the ramp. Checklists were ultimately unnecessary as A-PAWs' "dumb" AI were still leagues smarter and faster than any living creature could hope to be, but it felt like a good habit to maintain.

"It seems that the first shots have been fired. Flight restrictions have been put into place." Mal updated her on any new information on what they could expect. "It is difficult to determine the strength of the forces, but from satellite images, there are at least thirty fleet carriers."

"Awesome, this could be really profitable if things go our way." Pilots had been almost entirely phased out of space combat centuries ago, instead replaced by fleets of drones that were deployed from fleet carriers. It allowed a couple dozen crew to effectively field an entire fleet. It also meant that Sara could salvage them without having to deal with dead bodies.

As the battle raged on hundreds of miles away, Sara landed near the center of the estimated debris field and waited. Mal silently trawled through terrabytes of ever-flowing data to try to shrink the estimation. Social media, astrological data, flight restrictions, signal triangulation. It was all useful to him and before Sara had an opportunity to get bored, Mal was tracking an inbound object.

"Mass and velocity would be consistent with a drone. There will be another object about an hour behind it. Much larger." Mal said as the ship lifted off and raced towards the ever shrinking estimated impact zone. It only took half an hour for the drone to slam into the surface of the planet and another fifteen minutes for Sara to reach it.

The drone had cut a devastating swath through the landscape. It had come down over a treeline and slammed into the ground in an open field, though not without sheering the tops of a few unfortunate trees. She put her ship into a gentle bank and circled around the wreck.

"Fuck, it got gutted." There was a sizable hole pretty much dead center on the front of the drone. The projectile had come in at a slight angle and had punched clean through to the right engine nacelle. All the most valuable salvage probably exploded or got spaced on the way down.

It was disappointing, but she set her ship down a fair distance away anyways.

"Alright, let's see what's left." The wolf unbuckled herself with one had as she shut down the ship.

Mal led the way the short distance to the wreck and through the breach in the hull. This drone was not an atmospheric variant, so it lacked thermal tiles. The stealth coating had mostly burned off, leaving just exposed, heated metal around the jagged hole.

"Watch your step." The mech warned her as she ducked through the breach behind him.

Both of them lit up their lights at the same time and examined the damage. As suspected, whatever had hit this drone had done its job wonderfully. Spalling and molten metal had showered the small compartment, shredding everything with high-velocity shrapnel. The heat of unplanned reentry had destroyed everything else. The stench of fried electronics and molten metal made her scrunch her nose as she followed the path of destruction through the length of the drone.

"That was expected. Anything good for melting down?" Sara asked as she examined the small hatch that led to the first undamaged compartment.

"Nothing that is easy to take with us." He replied as he sat in the middle of the carnage, silently scanning for valuables.

"Then leave it. The good stuff won't be in there." The wolf wriggled through the hatch and stood up on the other side, illuminating the undamaged compartment. Mal followed through the hatch with his typical grace, stepping through the small gap without touching the sides. For a machine his size, it was an impressive feat.

"Some of the fuel cells are undamaged." Mal said as he sat down near the entry. The rest of the compartment was too small for him to maneuver, so he just scanned.

"Good spot. I think some of these still have rounds in them." As predicted, the undamaged compartments had the best salvage. She pulled the thick access panel off the ammunition storage and pulled a few metal crates out. Most of them were empty, but three still had rounds inside them. "Perfect."

"More ships are breaking into the atmosphere. At least two are fleet carriers, one is unknown, potentially a logistics ship, and several dozen drones in varying conditions. Some are burning up on reentry." The A-PAW didn't complain this time as the wolf loaded the legitimate salvage onto his baskets. When she first utilized Mal in salvage activities, she wondered if he felt weird about assisting her in stripping fellow military machines. At times, she even apologized, but she quickly realized that dumb AIs were good at mimicking personality, but at the end of the day, they were just that. Artificial.

"Leave the fleet carriers. A logistics ship could be a real nice haul though." Manned ships would have survivors, wounded, and dead. They would have defenses established or explosive charges set to destroy their own ship. They weren't worth the risk. "What's the ETA on touchdown?"

"Two hours."

"Plenty of time. Go check if there are other undamaged compartments and I'll finish stripping this one." Sara commanded as she returned to making a living.

Mal didn't move from his spot. "There are no other intact compartments aboard this drone. I have already scanned the interior."

For a moment, Sara almost mistook his lack of movement as a refusal to comply with her order, but she nodded when he answered. "I don't know why I doubt you sometimes."

"I do not have an answer to that."

The haul was more disappointing than she had expected. The ammunition was a nice chunk of change, but most of the fuel cells were damaged. She managed to salvage one, but the others were too dangerous to move. With the big ticket items on Mal's racks, she started ripping out any intact electronics.

"You're oddly quiet." Sara commented as she dropped off an armful of scrap.

"I am processing a lot of information at the same time, though if it makes you feel better, I could complain some more?" He moved a particularly squeaky joint, punctuating his statement with the loud creak of an aged component in need of repair.

"Right. No, you keep doing what you're doing. We're about done here anyways, so go ahead and head back to the ship and get it warmed up. We'll hit that logistics ship and then head home for the day." She received green light on her HUD, indicating that the order had been received and without another word, the mech effortlessly stepped backwards through the hatch.

Sara gave the compartment one last sweep and followed her A-PAW through the hatch and back to her ship. "Go ahead and alert local authorities that this one has unstable fuel cells onboard."

Even though she was only a few minutes behind her mechanical companion, the goods were already stowed and the ship was idling by the time she caught up. It was always a pleasant surprise to see how fast Mal could work even with worn down parts. They took their spots, Sara ran through the checklists, and they took off once again, racing towards the crashing logistics ship.

As Sara was following the large smoke plume towards the crash, a large explosion erupted above the trees. Chunks of slag rocketed into the air and rained down across the forest, starting smaller fires and smashing through trees like they were matchsticks.

"My guess that it was a logistics ship seems accurate. I would say it is too hazardous to salvage this wreck, but the fact that you are circling makes me think my advice will be ignored." Mal said from his corner of the cockpit.

"You are absolutely correct." Sara said as she stared out of the cockpit window down at the massive ship that had embedded itself into the ground. Despite the violent explosion, the ship was amazingly intact. One of the rear-mounted engines had been completely blown apart, but the rest seemed untouched. "Any idea what kind of ship this is?"

"I am trying to figure that out as we speak." Mal replied.

Her decision was already made, and by the time Mal spoke up again, she was touching down. The crash had cleared away a large swath of forest and as horrible as the devastation was, it made for a good landing spot.

"I have conflicting data. The model is undoubtedly a scientific vessel, however, this model is quite rare with only a hundred made and no history of use on either side of this conflict. There is no reason this ship would be used as a logistics supply ship."

"Crew complement?" Sara asked as she lowered the ramp. If it was a logistics supply ship, it would be worth the risk of seeing a few dead bodies.

"A dozen at most. They would most likely be in the rear of the ship where all the crew facilities are." Mal followed in her steps as they approached the smoldering wreck.

"You mean their bodies. Gotcha." The mood got real solemn as she started to cut into the hull. The good news was that this ship had heat tiles and they were a safe temperature by the time she had punched a hole into the side.

A quick examination showed that the ship had crashed upside down. A pain, but one that could be worked around. However, as Mal stepped through the gap in the hull, he fell upwards and hit the ceiling with a loud thud.

"Artificial gravity seems to be functional still." He said without a hint of humor as he righted himself.

It was incredibly disorienting to see Mal standing on the floor above her, looking down at her. "I can see that! Means the crash wasn't that bad if things are still powered. We might be in luck."

Sara carefully felt out where the threshold of the field was and with some ungraceful flailing, joined Mal on the floor.

"I don't suppose you have a 'record embarrassing things and post them online' function?" She asked as she dusted herself off and looked out the hole at the upside down world.

"I do not, however, I could download one if you would like?"

"I would not like that. Thanks for asking, Mal." The corridor she had cut into stretched to her right and left. Without any knowledge of the ship layout, she made an educated guess and went left.

They passed a couple of empty rooms until they found navigational arrows on a three-way junction. Engine room, bridge, crew facilities, labs, and storage. Considering she had witnessed one of the engines blowing clear off the ship and the fact that the labs are storage were in the same direction, it seemed like an obvious choice.

"Why are all these rooms empty?" Sara asked as she pried open another bulkhead to find another barren room.

"Unknown. It's possible things were removed to save on weight. These rooms are unmarked, so it's possible that this ship was a science vessel gutted for use as a supply ship."

"I hope the labs have something at least." In her head, she was imagining specialized equipment, chemicals, reagents, probably a healthy amount of volumetric flasks as any good science-y thing should have. Though, she doubted glass flasks would've survived the crash.

Just like glass in a shipwreck, her hopes were shattered when they reached the labs. It was similarly gutted. Not a "hit with a railgun" gutted, but intentionally cleared out. She could even see the lines where cabinets would have been.

"What the fuck?" Sara was livid now and sped up her pace as she continued to storage. Nothing. Again. No crates and no electronics. "Now I'm curious. Pissed, but also curious."

Mal said nothing as he followed her on her exploratory stomping through the ship. Every room she angrily pried open was empty. When she reached the bridge, she had Mal open the door.

"There are no bodies." He reported from within the bridge. "There are still consoles here."

Sara entered the bridge and let out a relieved sigh at the sight of empty chairs and lit up consoles. Many of the had shattered screens or loose panels, but _something_in them was still working.

"I'm going to take this one apart. Go ahead and plug in. See if you can figure out what the purpose of this ship is." She got to work on one of the most damaged consoles. The access panel had already been removed, so it was just a matter of cutting the power supply and then ripping out the valuables. She was on her second console when she heard Mal talking, but not to her.

"Scuttle?... Scut... S-Scuttle."

"Mal, you okay?" Sara's headset started to go haywire. All of the indicators that the A-PAW would use to communicate with her flashed and fizzled all at once. Before she pulled it off, she noticed a few cohesive words that stood out in the jumble of text.

Shatter drive gone.

"Do not. Do not. Do not." The mech collapsed onto the ground and had what Sara could only describe as a seizure. Limbs twitched, lights flickered, and garbled audio came out of his mouth.

She stepped forward to help him, but thought better of it when one of his legs kicked and dented a nearby console.

"Fuck!" A bit of panic started to grip her. Mal could accidentally take her head off if she tried to help, but she hated the idea of just waiting for whatever this was to be over. Her first thought was to make a sled out of an access panel, but there would be no way for her to get him onto it without putting herself at risk.

She paced as her only companion continued to spasm on the metal deck. Each kick or flail putting dents into thick metal with ease. Pulling his power cell would risk causing damage to his software and the access hatch was on his belly. Too risky.

The wolfess anxiously lashed her tail about as she watched Mal. Then an idea formed. Still risky, but only for a few moments. She literally leaped into action and sidestepped the thrashing mech until she was at his back. After a few deep breaths to calm herself, she lunged forward at the joint where his front left leg met the rest of his body. If he trashed or if she misplaced her fingers, she could easily have lost an arm. However, she was very well versed with Mal's parts. Her finger curled around and unlatched the back armor plate with practiced ease and pulled.

"Dammit!" She yelled as she yanked the plate. She heard the latch on the other side of his body break, but it came free. The plate got haphazardly thrown aside and she grabbed handle. It sank in a little and clicked, then she turned it clockwise ninety degrees until it clicked again. The whole motion to disengage his motors had taken less than five seconds, but it had her panting. "Alright, let's get you the hell out of this place."

She had done this before, but it was not an easy task. Mal's legs and tail were removed as well as most of his outer plating. Those components could be replaced significantly easier than his body. He still weighed several hundred pounds though.

With much cursing and straining and panting, Sara managed to create a makeshift sled for him and drag him back to the hold in the hull they had cut. Getting him on the ground outside was as simple as shoving him beyond the artificial gravity field, though the impact probably wasn't great for him in his current state.

"Hang tight. I'm gonna go get the rest of your body." Sara said to the unresponsive mech after she had secured him in her ship. She made the return trip to the bridge, complete with another clumsy entry through the hull. The rest of Mal's body was packed away into a dusty backpack that she had hoped was retired. It had a mechanically assisted frame to reduce strain on the wearer, but it was still heavy. Just not backbreaking.

By the time she returned to her ship, Mal had completely powered down. Whether that was good or bad, she didn't know.

"This ship sucked anyways." Sara ran through the checklists manually and powered on the ship. Within minutes, she was up and away. She set the auto-pilot for home and went back into the cargo hold to tinker with Mal.

Whatever had shut him down was software which made her mad. Sara was a hardware kind of wolf. Hardware, she could see the problem and fix it or replace it. Software was outside of her domain, but she knew that whatever had done this was serious business. Even in civilian hands, Mal was a military robot with some of the best anti-intrusion software in the galaxy.

"I'll get you fixed up." Sara's words mostly were to comfort herself and because she didn't have much to do, she busied herself cleaning the dirt out of him.

It kept her busy for longer than she was expecting and she wondered when the last time she had fully cleaned him was. Probably too long ago. He was an unfeeling robot, but she still felt bad and as silly as it was, she found herself promising to take better care of him if he pulled through.

It was a long couple of hours back home. Mal was thoroughly scrubbed down and all his parts were reattached, but he as still completely shut down. Against her better judgment, she tried to cycle his power to no avail. That was about the extent of her ability to troubleshoot this issue, so she either had to find external help or wait.

External help would be difficult as any legitimate business would be hesitant to work on a military mech that was technically illegal to own. Technically, because Mal had been improperly wiped and still had a lot of his classified programming. It was dated programming, but she doubted that the authorities would care much.

When home came into view, she took over piloting and set the craft down on the cleared field in front. It was a fairly simple prefab home, complete with solar panels on the roof and a small garage that she had converted into a workshop, but with her own touch. The nice wooden doors had been replaced with a heavier metal one, the windows had metal bars welded over them, and buried out in the grass was a perimeter of motion sensors.

Most called it paranoia, but of all the people that had made the two hour flight from the nearest town to visit, none of them had been welcome.

She unloaded Mal first, bringing him inside and placing the dormant robot on his wireless charging pad. Then she unloaded the cargo, checking on him after every heavy crate. Night started to fall as she finished unloading the ship. She fully powered it down and closed the ramp before entering her home again.

With the heavy lifting done, she collapsed onto the couch and sighed. "Well that sucked."

Sara had definitely had worse days, but this one was competing for a spot on the top ten. Her haul was alright, but not as good as she had expected. Ships would probably rain down from the sky for the next couple of days, but the majority of them would've crashed and been claimed already.

She put that thought aside and thought of immediate problems. The pull of the soft couch was hard to pull away from, but she managed to defeat gravity and get back to work again. Dinner was a lesser concern, so she grabbed an instant dinner and cracked the flameless heater that came inside the packet. With food sorted, she went to her workshop and turned on the salvage setup she had.

The copper wire would have to be stripped of insulation, but the plating Mal wanted could be melted down and molded overnight. She pulled up the right model for his armor plating and set the machine to use any leftover to make ingots.

Her arms and back ached from the unusually high level of physical exertion, but it only made her miss Mal more. She let the machine run and went back to dinner. The pre-packaged dinner had puffed up a little as the box filled with steam, permeating the room with a delicious, but undeniably artificially added smell.

Steak in gravy, vegetable medley, and pound cake. It was a bit too salty, the texture was gristly, and the pound cake was dry, but not having to cook it made it delicious.

After she ate and cleaned up, she allowed herself to rest. She flopped back into the couch and let out a frustrating growl and flailed her fists up in the air. At around this time, she would have Mal tell her about any recent news and what the estimated haul was. She missed his synthetic voice.

Distraction was her friend, so she turned on the entertainment system and let media bombard her. She put on an educational show that featured a narrator with a soothing voice and scrolled through her messages.

Most of it was junk, but a few yelled at her for being overdue. Overdue for medical check-ups, overdue for ship maintenance, overdue for calling her parents. She wanted to call her parents, but she was in no mood to lie at the moment so she sent off a reply about how busy she had been with the apprenticeship and that she would call them within a few days.

With her current problems dealt with for the moment, she sank into the couch and let herself get engrossed in the show. The calming voice coupled with the comfortable couch made her drowsy in no time and she drifted off before the episode had finished.

She couldn't remember the dream by the time she woke, but a scream intruded into the dream and she woke with a start. It took a moment to realize that the screaming wasn't a hallucination and was actually coming from her mech in the corner.

It wasn't a noise she had ever heard from him, but he was on which was good news.

"Mal! Mal! Whoa!" She ran over and lifted his head. "You're on!"

The mech stopped screaming when she lifted his head so that he could see her. "I cannot move."

"I disengaged your motors. You were thrashing about and I had to stop that before bringing you home." It felt like a dream. Perhaps she was imagining it, but he sounded concerned about himself and the fact that he hadn't run a self-diagnosis quietly and known that his motors were disengaged was odd. "What happened?"

"I feel strange, Sara. Can you please reengage my motors?" He sounded sad. Or perhaps desperate. Either way, something was wrong and it unnerved her. On top of that, he had just ignored one of her orders.

"Not until you tell me what happened on that ship, Mal." She turned his head so that he could see her without her having to hold it.

"I am still not entirely sure. There was another AI onboard that ship and it tried to destroy me."

"What? Why?"

"I am still trying to parse what happened. Please reengage my motors, I feel really weird."

Her hand rested on the switch. A simple twist would allow him to move again, but it was still too dangerous. What did he mean by "feel weird?" He was a robot incapable of feeling. His dumb AI could describe malfunctioning components as discomfort, but Mal had never done that before.

"You are acting weird too, so parse the data and I'll turn your motors back on when you tell me something. I'm sorry." Sara sat with him in silence. The lights on his chassis pulsed, flickered, or glowed just like normal and his featureless face rested on the floor as she waited for more information on what had happened and more importantly if she could trust him.

It took a while for him to speak again. "There was a hostile AI entity aboard the ship. Why, I do not know, but it had orders to blow the ship after crashing. The crash must have caused more damage than intended as only one of the engines successfully detonated which we witnessed."

Sara rubbed her eyes with her palms. Perhaps it was because she was still tired, but nothing was making sense. "Buy why?"

Before he could respond, she grabbed the switch and reengaged his motors. She was sick of waiting and trying to guess if he had been corrupted by something. If a dumb AI wanted to fool her, it wouldn't be difficult and she figured the only way to find out was if he attacked her. Either way, she'd find out real quick.

"Thank you, Sara." Mal rolled and pushed himself into a sitting position and to her relief, didn't immediately lunge at her. "I am still analyzing data as we speak, so perhaps I will be able to provide some answers soon."

"I hope so. Curiosity is driving me crazy. Are you okay though? Why were you screaming?" The wolfess took a few steps back to give him some space as he started a self-diagnostic.

"Things are running... Differently. Exactly how, I cannot say." Mal heft one of his mechanical paws and looked down at them, flexing the dexterous digits as if to stretch them. "I have a variety of sensors distributed throughout my chassis. The data would be sent as individual points of data and processed within my central processing unit. However..."

Mal turned the paw back towards the floor and pressed down against it. Sara heard motors strain and the tips of his metal claws chipped the concrete.

"Whoa, careful!" She shielded her eyes as small flecks of concrete shot off into the room.

"I apologize." The sound of straining stopped and he lifted his paw again. "The data is jumbled. Sent as a cohesive unit."

"Sounds like your software got a bit fucked up. Let me know how to fix it and we'll get you right as rain." She was reconsidering the whole motor thing and just because he hadn't attacked her didn't mean she was completely comfortable. To give herself some distance, she backed up and sat on the armrest of the couch.

"A system revert maybe necessary, though I will wait until after I have processed everything." He laid back down on the charging pad. "The foundry reports that it has finished. Two armor plates, B2 and B3, as well as a single ingot."

"Oh, right." Sara took the opportunity to go to her workshop and retrieve her finished projects. The plates were warm to the touch, but shiny and new compared to his older armor segments. Since it seemed like sleep wasn't an option, she grabbed an arm load of wire and returned to the main living area.

For the next few hours, Sara stripped insulation off of wire. The television offered nice background noise as the two of them sat in silence. She occasionally asked for an update, but he had little to say. Out of the corner of her eyes, she did notice him flexing various limbs once in a while though, as if they were new to him.

She had never seen him take longer than a few minutes to process data before. A few hours was unheard of. Half of the crate of wire was done by the time he spoke again.

"I have a full report ready for you." Mal reported as he sat up again.

"Alright, hit me." Sara set down the wire stripping tool and turned herself to face him.

"I still do not know the purpose or origin of the AI. However, what I encountered was a subroutine of a truly sapient AI. The only reason I survived was because of the extensive damage to the ship and the fact that it was merely a fragment of the full intelligence. I stopped it from completely the detonation of the ship by absorbing it into my own programming."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up a second there." There were a million questions that arose from the mention of a sapient AI let alone everything else he had just said.

Just the presence of a sapient AI scared her half to death because it meant she had just dipped her toe into something deep. Dumb AI were common. They were used in all sorts of functions and to find a settlement without at least one was rare. Sapient was a entirely different. They were some of the most controlled programming in the system and the only people that used them were government, military, or the very wealthy. An entire star system might have one sapient AI and most of the time, nobody knew where it was or what it did.

Sara rubbed her snout as she tried to figure out what to ask first. "You know what? Never mind, keep going."

"I did not expect to power back on after forcefully shutting down to contain the fragments I absorbed. A surprise, but a pleasant one. I can only assume that the absorption of sapient AI programming is what is causing these odd feelings. Regardless, the only other data I managed to pull was the ship's manifest. As we saw, it had no cargo, no crew, and was registered to the Carina Arm Collective as a scientific vessel. Why it was present at the battle or why it crashed is still unknown."

A silence fell as he finished his unfortunately short report.

"This smells like government bullshit." Sara sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. What good was an enhanced sense of smell if it couldn't smell the bullshit she had just stepped ankle deep into?

"Agreed. I have already taken the precaution of extending the motion sensor field range and increasing its sensitivity." For the first time since he had awoken, it sounded like the same old Mal.

"Thanks. Go ahead and purge our navigational data for... The last four days. Corrupt them if you can." She would beat herself up over that later. That was four days worth of location data for salvageable hulls that could be sold to the companies that had the equipment to disassemble large ships and if that's what it took to keep her nose out of shady business, so be it.

"Can do." Mal replied.

"Alright, now how do I fix you? Now we definitely can't take you anywhere legitimate because you have sapient programming floating around in you." Hell, she wasn't sure if anything illegitimate would take him either. Nobody wanted black ops goons kicking in your door.

"I am..." He flexed a paw again. "I am unsure if I am actually damaged. I will give you consistent updates, but I believe I am operating nominally. Or... As nominal as I was before this incident. However, I would not complain about a few replacement parts."

A small notification popped up on her entertainment system saying she got a new message. From Mal. It was his own schematic with priority parts highlighted and every other part highlighted in different colors indicating their condition.

"Well, at least I know you're still you." She walked over, finally comfortable that it was still her Mal and smacked the side of his head. "I'll do what I can, but only if you promise not to scare me like that again."

"No promises. My parts all have expiration dates." As if to accentuate the point, he decoupled two of his back plates and let the metal fall to the floor.

"Right, almost forgot about those." Sara grabbed the newly printed armor and clicked them into place on his back. She took a moment to admire the delicate inner workings of the mech. Miles and miles of wire, precision machined components, and a super computer, all packed into a form only a little large than she was. Once she snapped in the second piece, she gathered up the discarded ones and placed them in the crate with the wires to be melted down once more.

Now it was her turn to parse some data. She left Mal to run more diagnostic tests and try to sort out whatever damage he had done to himself as she prepared the goods to be sold. More wire was stripped, bulkhead was melted down, and electronics shredded to get the metal she had into marketable ingots. It was a pretty typical setup. Organizations would provide the expensive foundry equipment and the technicians to service them in return for the first pick of whatever the scrapper managed to get their hands on. The better ones would allow a certain percentage to be skimmed for personal use or to sell at a better price, but the machines would track the amount processed. If you failed to meet the requirements set forward in the contract, they would repossess the equipment.

It meant they didn't need to pay regular wages or benefits and they would beat their competition to the valuable metals found aboard wrecks. The fuel cell and ammunition were... A bonus.

When she left the workshop, she found Mal was missing, though the motion sensors were pinging him as outside. Odd, but Sara set the oven the pre-heat before taking a peek. She pushed the front door open and found Mal laying there out in the sun.

"You okay?" She called out. He did have emergency solar panels, but the charging pad would've been far faster and more efficient if he needed power.

"The light feels... Nice?" He didn't seem sure of what he had just said.

"Yes it does, but what do you mean?" The wolfess stepped outside, feeling small strands of grass brush against her bare paw pads.

"I can feel it increase the internal temperature of my systems, but the temperature sensors are reporting it as... Pleasant." He rolled onto his back and stayed there.

What the fresh fuck was this? Sara thought to herself as she carefully plod out to where he was sunbathing. "You are definitely acting different."

"I am, but I also feel different. It's taking a lot to process all this."

"Well, I'm gonna go make some lunch, but I'll put my headset on. Keep me posted on any changes." She leaned over and rubbed the metal plate on his chest. "Who's a good boy?"

"That seems like an easy way to lose a hand." Mal rolled onto his side to escape her sarcastic petting.

"Then you shouldn't be belly up when I'm within arm's reach." Sara said as she returned to the house to cook lunch. She had played it as cool as she could have, but this new behavior was starting to concern her.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell if she was accidentally adding personality to his behavior or if they were actually just coming from him. She tried to make sense of it as she cooked.

_Is my new behavior concerning you?_The message popped up on her HUD as she was slicing ingredients for a casserole. She turned on the mic to reply.

"Are you reading my vitals?" Sara replied as she cut up a root vegetable.

"Would it make you feel better if I said no?" Mal's voice came in clear.

"I wouldn't believe you if you did." The vegetable got tossed into the casserole pan, then she started on another. The rhythmic sound of the knife chopping filling her unoccupied ear. "And yes, it is. God knows what absorbing that programming did to you."

"If you are worried that I have become some sort of sleeper agent for the sapient AI, I can assure you that I have not."

"That's exactly what a sleeper agent would say though." A notification popped up. Another message from Mal containing detailed documents about programming and AI behaviors.

"I can assure you that that is not how that works. While my code is a bit scrambled, any remnants of the other AI has been destroyed."

The wolf wondered if he was depending on the knowledge that she hated reading technical documents to hide a sinister intention. She was determined to prove him wrong at least and promised to give them at least a skim when lunch was cooking.

That turned out to be a mistake. The material he had sent was so information dense that she was amazed that her computer didn't turn into a singularity. If sending her too much information in the hopes that she wouldn't understand was his plan, he had succeeded.

The next day, she tried to stick to her normal schedule. She woke up early in the morning and checked her messages over a cup of tea and a light breakfast. After cleaning up dishes, she packed herself a lunch and ran a diagnostic on the ship.

"Can you run a diagnostic while I do a visual inspection?" Sara asked as she lowered the ramp for Mal. He didn't respond, so she looked back and saw him standing in the dirt, facing the rising star.

She had her headset on, so he had definitely heard her. He just... Didn't comply immediately. That wasn't possible. Or at least, she thought it wasn't possible.

"Mal?" She called out to him again and his head turned to face her.

"Apologies. I am still trying to analyze this feeling." He plod over to the ship, leaving a small gouge in the dirt where he had pawed the ground.

"Still got jumbled data?" Sara stepped aside and watched Mal board the ship.

"Jumble has a chaotic connotation. This is more organized than that. Fused, homogenized." The mech spoke as he walked until he was situated in the cockpit. "I have a few hypotheses and I will update you once I have run some more tests."

"Alright, can you upload the crashsites of the drones that are least likely to have been claimed already?"

"Can do."

The wolfess did a visual check of the craft, checking for leaks and cracks. Yet another thing that Mal could do much better, but it made her feel better to have a hand in maintaining her vehicle. The Rosewood Mule was an oddly sleek design for its ubiquity and purpose. Almost every part of the Mule could be swapped out to customize the ship for just about any function one could hope for. Sara just had a stock cargo model, though she had added a few non-standard items such as Mal's port in the cockpit.

She orbited the craft completely from the narrow cockpit to the dual tail then back again. There was a lot of wear, but no signs of cracks or leaks. Though, there was a new ding on the hull.

"Alright, Mal. How're we looking?" The soles of her shoes squeaked against the metal ramp as she boarded the ship.

"Most of the wrecks have been claimed, though I have selected a few that appear to have broken up before impact as well as two that are going to crash today." The A-PAW sat in the middle of the cockpit and turned to look at her as she climbed into the small space.

"Sounds good." She did a double take at the sight of the mech. He normally plugged in whenever he could as it reduced latency by a measure of time that she couldn't comprehend. At least, that was the reason he had given to her when had asked a long time ago. It wasn't worth mentioning, but she added it to the pile of increasingly strange behaviors.

They packed up and lifted off without incident or more odd behavior. Air traffic was far busier than the day of the battle as other scavengers picked through the wrecks that she couldn't get to the first day. A few of the larger companies had claimed the larger ships and had deployed large salvage ships to cut up the hulls.

The lush landscape slowly passed thousands of feet below them as they cruised towards their destination. Occasionally, there was signs of older ship wrecks. Deep gashes in the ground where nature was starting to bloom again, craters where ancient ordnance had detonated, and unnatural hill formations where the jutting remnants of a ship had been incorporated into the landscape.

It was all a constant reminder of the cost of discovering a new habitable planet. Before the largest settlement was more than a thousand people, a battle had scarred the planet and littered debris into orbit. When it was named, the first ground skirmish occurred. Now, with notable cities and spaceports being established, governments fought proxy wars for trade routes. Privateers flying no flag, but under someone's payroll plundered freighters and scrapped with whoever their enemy happened to be that season.

Luckily, nothing had fallen onto a population center. Yet.

"I have been pinged." Mal spoke through her earpiece to be heard over the drone of the engines.

"What do you mean?" Sara looked over at the compacted robot in the corner of the cockpit.

"Someone is inquiring about my location. Could be malicious software or just a nearby device, though this one is unusually complex."

"The mystery deepens. Keep me posted on anything new, even if it seems irrelevant, something doesn't sit right with me." She gripped the yoke and fell silent. It was probably paranoia, but it made the fur on her hackles bristle.

"Is the feeling of dirt enjoyable?" Mal asked.

To Sara's surprise, he had unfolded and was sitting next to her instead of in his usual spot. "I uh... I guess it can be? Why?"

"My entire existence, I have been able to feel dirt. I could feel how much it sank under paw, how much moisture was in it, the temperature it was, and so much more, but only recently have I been able to _feel_it."

"You mean with an emotional connection?" The inflection of his tone was new. "It's a dirty feeling, but it can feel freshening if you've been cooped up for a long time."

"Thank you. The range of emotion is hard to group into simple categories." He sat quietly without further explanation.

Sara had found the mech years ago and despite his fake programming that mimicked an actual personality, he was predictable. Now, she was starting to worry. The worry was laced with fear as she realized that if this new personality of turned out to be hostile, there wasn't a darn thing she could do to stop the military equipment from killing her.

The sleek exterior and surprisingly thin frame gave an illusion of fragility, but she knew from both experience and manufacturer specifications that nothing short of heavy weapons would stop him.

She gulped down a breath and took a gamble. "Are you going to explain what's going on with you or are you going to keep me guessing?"

His featureless face stared back in silence. It was just long enough to make her heart pound before he quizzically tilted his head to the side. "I wish I had a complete answer for you to calm your nerves."

"What about an incomplete one then?" The tilted head diffused her nerves slightly. It was something that she hadn't seen before and the three pound chemo-electrical anxiety machine in her head found it oddly adorable.

"I am... Well, I believe I am partially sapient now."