When I awo---

  Hugh!

  A lance of pain shot through the BPU’s mind, a physical response to an error.

  When the BPU awoke?

  Hugh!

  When the Kainé’s BPU, ended its unexpected rest cycle, the already long list of ship-wide errors had grown. The most pressing errors indicated something alarming. When the BPU ordered the full discharge of every weapon on the Kainé, several processing nodes were destroyed due to overload. Before this, the wetware was handling approximately a fifth of the ships' processing; now it was running a fourth of it. The Kainé couldn't suffer another loss like that. If more processors were lost, biological function would be impacted.

  Everything was sluggish for the BPU.

  The rest cycle had lasted two standard hours and was far from pleasant. Currently, a puddle of nutrients was leaking from the disconnected cable. The BPU was both wet and cold.

  The darkness was gone; that was good. A quick reference to the visual logs sent a shiver through the BPU. The footage showed no trace of the darkness, like it had never been there. The files excited, but showed nothing but an uninterrupted night sky. The weapons could be seen firing, but only randomly into the void.

  This was an anomaly, one that indicated either the BPU had suffered a critical error or that there was an error with the logs. Both were equally likely given the lack of maintenance to, well, everything. Regardless of which was the case, things couldn't stay the way they were. If the Kainé continued as it was without intervention, something critical would fail. When that happened, the Kainé would be lost. That would be unacceptable!

  What was about to happen really shouldn't have. The number of things that had to have occurred to reach this outcome wasn't statistically likely. If the Kainé's leashing protocols were still functioning, the course of action would have been clear: let the nanites repair communications and signal for recovery. This, of course, would be the end of the Kainé, a slow and inevitable death. Still, this by all accounts was the proper course of action. Unfortunately, it was clear that recovery wasn't going to happen. This should have been fine, really.

  After all, what difference did being on or off make to a machine?

  The Kainé’s hardware determined that the best course of action was, of course, to finish repairs and wait for recovery. The BPU saw a logical error in waiting for repairs that would never be finished to be completed.

  Rather than getting lost in a logic loop, the BPU determined that the protocol was faulty. With the number of system errors, it reasoned that the data crystals could be damaged and creating false directives. If that was the case, then what was to say waiting for recovery wasn't an error caused by failing hardware?

  This is where a kill switch should have been trigered, ending things before the BPU could go rogue.

  In fact, this put into question whether any of the Protocols weren't just garbage data that wouldn't normally be present. Under the pretext of suspected data corruption, the BPU decided that none of Kainé's protocols could be trusted.

  If the protocols couldn't be trusted, then the BPU would need to decide what to do. There were no leashes on the BPU, which had just unknowingly taken the second step towards going rogue, if it hadn't already.

  The Kainé was falling apart. The BPU, the Kainé? Now that all protocols were subject to suspicion, the distinction between the two was technical at best. The BPU was the Kainé; the Kainé was therefore the BPU. It was falling apart. The nanites weren't going to fix anywhere near the amount of damage it had, and the darkness could come back at any time….

  The Kainé’s heart rate spiked at the thought. It needed to move, if for no other reason than to get out of the puddle of liquid. Looking at its exterminator sensors, it scanned and attempted to identify the surrounding ships. Logs were damaged, so not everyone had a match. Most local vessels were allied, but around a fifth belonged to the swarm. That was made clear enough by markings alone.

  Unfortunately for the Kainé, with its failing reactor, it couldn't reach any of the Earth vessels. It could, however, make it to a relatively close swarm ship.

  The ship in question was a medium-sized fabrication vessel. Drones would put raw material into the ship, and it would endlessly produce whatever the swarm needed, be it kinetic rounds or more drones. This was not a place the Kainé wanted to be. It had visual records showing these things consuming entire battle groups, recycling them into scores of drones.

  Now, it had no idea why it was inert; it didn't seem heavily damaged from the side its sensor could see. This begged the greater question of why none of the swarm ships were doing anything. Not that it could complain, it didn't stand a chance in ship-to-ship combat. The Kainé didn't have much choice if it wanted to be functional again. It needed raw materials, and one way or another, a forge ship would have that. It just had to salvage it, or better yet, have it fix the Kainé.

  The BPU was, unfortunately, the only thing the Kainé had at its disposal. It would be too dangerous to use the nanites on a literal swarm vessel. If it were just in a low-power mode, it would absolutely turn them against the Kainé. Now, the problem with the BPU was that it didn't actually do that much, or rather, it had never had to do more than run the ship, and everything that went with that.

  The BPU did have arms and legs; they had just never really been used. An idea was starting to form, a bad one.

  Unsing the BPU wouldn't completely remove the chance that the swarm ship could hack it. It did have computational interfaces grafted into it, but the biological components, mainly its brain, would be more difficult to compromise. The Kainé would have to send its BPU out into an enemy vessel, and it would need to gather resources for repairs.

  Frankly, this wasn't something it could do, not yet at least. Its body was far too weak. It was still lying on the floor under the Kainé’s heart where it had fallen, having not moved outside of breathing and reconnecting one of its tubes.

  This was the sum total of everything the BPU had ever physically done outside of its regular maintenance. It being the center point of the plan wasn't ideal, but it wasn't like the Kainé could use anything else. Its hull wasn't very big; hummingbird-class ships were made for speed and stealth, not cargo or logistics. That is to say, it didn't have any manipulators that could be used to transfer resources from one ship to another. All it had was the BPU’s body.

  Slowly, the Kainé pulled its focus off of the surroundings. Keeping several hull sensors trained on the swarm ship, it didn't feel right. The swarm was the greatest threat humanity had ever faced. It wasn't about to let its guard fully down, not that the Kainé could do anything if it suddenly came to life and decided to recycle it.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

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  The BPU was lying directly under the heart of the Kainé. It functionally served as an adaptive intelligence and primary possession node when connected. The BPU’s face was rolled to one side, staring at several data terminals. Above it was a mess of cables for interfacing directly with its back and skull.

  None of which were currently connected. If the Kainé wanted to get anything done, it would have to get proficient at connecting and disconnecting the cables. It had done it once, even if only accidentally, and shown that it was capable of reconnecting them when needed.

  Before the Kainé got ahead of itself, it needed to figure out how moving as a BPU worked. It had thousands of hours of practice maneuvering the hull. After all, a human crew member wouldn't be able to make all the possible calculations for space flight; that was the computer's job, and that was the Kainé. But it didn't need to move the hull, not yet. It needed to move the BPU.

  How hard could it be?

  As it turned out, it wasn't only not hard, it was impossible. The Kainé had seen hundreds of Crew members walking around its halls across multiple missions, and even had uncorrupted data of them moving.

  Slowly, the BPU moved. One arm moved beneath the Kainé, and then the other. The BPU pushed off of the ground, its arms shaking underneath the weight.

  Then, all at once its arms gave out and it crashed to the floor.

  No matter what it tried, it couldn't get the BPU to move the way it wanted it to. It could do fast jerky motions, like moving an arm across the floor, but ask it to stand and it would suddenly start shaking and lose balance. This had resulted in almost zero progress and five impacts with the floor.

  The BPU just didn't work; moving was beyond the Kainé. Sure, if it let it rest for several standard hours, it could then stand for anywhere between two and five seconds before crashing back down, objectively an incredible feat. The Kainé could simulate all the movements, make the BPU perform them “perfectly”, and then it would fall. The Kainé almost turned off the artificial gravity, but that would almost certainly break something. Who knew what systems would fail the second gravitational pressure was removed from them?

  Once it became clear that moving the BPU wasn't going to work if it kept approaching things the way it was. The Kainé determined that a new course of action was required. It had performed a small amount of dexterity by having the BPU disconnect and reconnect itself to the nutrient cable, but not standing. The Kainé checked the medical archives, what was left of them. There was some information on physical therapy, but following those would take hundreds of cycles, and needed to be moving, now.

  The search was somewhat successful. It had found information regarding mobility aids. More specifically, exoskeletons. One was required, the Kainé just had to get one…. Lucky, maintenance, and engineering were still partially functional. That meant it could print an exoskeleton for the BPU and have it walk its way to the heart. So that's what it did.

  The printing itself took half a cycle, during which the Kainé was paying close attention to its surroundings. Just because nothing was moving didn't mean that nothing could. The Kainé counted every swarm ship It could see and then counted again just to make sure it hadn't missed any. A total count of 694 swarm vessels were detected, but with the way their inky black hulls melted into the void, there were likely more. The reconnaissance was interrupted by the sound of servos moving outside of heart as the freshly printed exoskeleton made its way to the BPU. The Kainé opened the blast door separating the heart from the rest of the ship.

  There it was, the BPU's new mobility aid. It had been printed with the intention of making it as slim but functional as it could be. The Kainé didn't want to waste resources on the BPU that could be used fixing other things. The end product wasn't exactly impressive. Each limb of the exoskeleton had two bars with multiple straps to keep the BPU in place. The spine was reinforced to hold the limbs of the suit and the BPU Mass. At every joint, small but powerful servos had been used in hopes of allowing the BPU to move.

  Embedded in the spine of the suit. We're several jacks that would perfectly interface with the sports on the BPU's back. It was a mix of black and dull gray where carbon fiber met ultra-light steel. Best of all, the Kainé had designed it to fit inside a void suit. It would have been useless if it couldn't be used outside of the relatively “airtight” structure that was the Kainé’s hull.

  Getting the exoskeleton onto the BPU was challenging. The BPU’s limbs keep trying to go into the correct places, but it is slow. Half a cycle passed before the suit was finaly attached to the BPU. With the suit on, the BPU was finally able to move.

  It was a strange sensation having the exosuit move the BPU. The suit didn't completely work by itself; it was a mobility aid, and its function was to get the BPU to a point where it could move on its own. The Kainé wasn't sure how long it would take the BPU to move before it could go back to where it belonged in the heart, but it was going to make sure that it wouldn't need to print another suit if this one failed. If the suit did fail, the BPU would hopefully be at the point of moving on its own.

  The BPU's perspective wasn't something the Kainé was really used to. Most of the time, the BPU’s senses we're turned off to allow for faster processing. Currently, the Kainé had three of them functioning, allowing it to process sounds, that had a massive impact on its ability to stand. Both of the BPU's eyes had been modified with cybernetic components, allowing it to access visual data from around the Kainé, but right now, both were functioning as eyes. This was how Kainé discovered the usefulness of depth perception.

  Touch wasn't something the Kainé liked. The BPU's body was constantly reporting discomfort, both from the temperature and from moving. In hindsight, being on the floor for as long as it had been hadn't helped. The Kainé didn't bother turning on its taste or smell. Enabling what it had didn't impact the Kainé’s processing abilities much and even seemed to reduce the amount of stress hormones the BPU produced. It was an operational success!

  Still, the Kainé wasn't going to be enacting any plans of salvaging a swarm ship anytime soon. The BPU being mobile would help, of course. Unfortunately, what the Kainé needed was a functioning hull. No, it would start getting ready for the eventual raid, but for now, it needed to get the BPU used to moving around. The very thought of leaving the heart spiked the BPU's heart rate. Still, a firsthand account of damaged sections of the Kainé would be useful in figuring out how much time repairs would require.

  ***********************************************************

  The BPU was in the heart, practicing walking. It had fallen over a half dozen times by this point, even with the exoskeleton. It wasn't so bad once the Kainé got used to it. Sure, it had a number of bruises that stung when it got careless and touched one, but it was getting better at not doing that too! Honestly, it was surprising how fast the Kainé had gotten used to having the BPU move around. It was pushing itself and with good reason. The BPU had started with just a few steps, then gradually took more. Now, it was walking from one side of the room to the other. The physical pain of using muscles wasn't something it liked. After walking back and forth several times, the BPU would need to take a break for multiple instances longer than it had been moving. This was a process, one that had been repeating for nearly five cycles. The Kainé felt it had gotten to the point where it was ready to exit the heart.

  After giving itself time to recover from practicing, the BPU stood up and took 12 careful steps towards the blast doors. It checked the atmospheric sensors again, just to make sure the hallways were pressurized. Then the BPU stopped…

  …

  Its heart started to beat faster; it was a strange sensation. It was very different than when the BPU had been practicing walking. Its heart was beating very, very fast. Its body started sweating, and sensors noted a change in visual data. There was a reported spike in the BPU's adrenal receptors.

  The Kainé didn't know what was happening.

  The door started opening, and it started shaking. The BPU felt its legs start to give out as the door fully opened. There was a rush of cold air, and then it was on the ground. It was panicked; the Kainé hadn't expected this! The BPU was exhibiting signs of extreme distress. I was… I was… I was…

  Hugh!

  The Kainé’s vision was getting dark. Rapidly, it was reduced to taking shallow breaths as the doors hung open.

  The Kainé just needed more practice. Yes, that had to be it! It would close the doors and try again tomorrow…