The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

On a very special Princess of the Void, the rains of Oshanta intensify for a Drone.

Waian elbows Ipqen’s hip and keys her communicator on. “Indus Blue. Your squadron just dragged an active drone into my hangar bay.”

“We EMP’d it, chief,” comes the reply. “Triple-confirmed. It was entirely inactive.”

“How’s an EMP not stop that? Fuck’s sake.” Waian makes a frustrated noise in her throat. “Get away from it, mek-Taqa. Before it pulls a self-destruct out of its ass. Put the isolator on, Maz.”

“One second.” Ipqen sniffs the drone. “Uh. Chief. Think I know how the thing didn’t shut down.”

This is a fucking tooth.

“What’s that?” Waian smells the air. Grant follows suit. Charred meat.

Ipqen hangs the drone back into its harness. Her ink-festooned muscles bulge beneath their sleeves as she mantles it in place. “Can you get this thing flipped on its tail after we isolate it, Specialist?”

“Er. Right.” Mazek stabs a few buttons on her workstation and the modular harness hums into motion, clinging tight to the alien drone and turning it round. “Isolator engaged.”

Ipqen gets her cutter back out and slices the drone along its central fuselage. She tugs armor plating away and shifts internal plates and components. A watermelon-sized lump of burnt and bleeding flesh is tucked into the central bubble.

“This thing isn’t all-the-way robot,” she says.

“Shitfire.” Waian approaches the dented line drawn in gunfire across the hangar and pries something from the wall’s puckered metal. She holds it up.

“This,” she says, “is a fucking tooth.”

Mazek has that about to faint look to her again.

Waian keys her communicator back on. “Majesty, these things have organic component failsafes integrated into their systems.”

Sykora’s incredulous voice crackles through: “You’re saying these are living aliens?”

“Living? I dunno. Depends on your definition. I think they’re still manufactured. What I’m looking at isn’t… I mean, it’s clearly built for purpose. They’re machines. They’re just machines made partially out of meat.”

(...)

“This is another adaptation. Gotta be.” Waian slips a knife along the vein and digs it out of the metal housing. “Either lab-grown, or they turned their originators into this… goop. Kept working on themselves with the corpses of their progenitors.”

Grant’s eyes are dry from staring. He forces a blink. “When Sykora originally told me about the Empire’s technological sumptuary laws, I was skeptical.”

“Oh yeah?” Waian wiggles the gridded net of veins on the tip of her knife. “How about now?”

“Now I have no comment,” Grant says.

Waian titters. “Their dead creators tried hard as hell to rub them out. Like a penicillin-proof disease. Must have been a real fucking nightmare of an uprising.” Her knife tip points like a lecturer’s baton. “You can see it’s already got fresh mechanical augmentations in place to counter us. The seams on this camera cluster here to track our ships through the digital chaff we put out, the enlarged bore on the guns when their old calibers weren’t getting through the membrane. They’ve been shooting at us less than an hour and already they’re morphing themselves to get better at it. Fuckin’ freak stuff. No choice but to be impressed.”

“And horrified,” Grant offers.

“No. I mean, yes, but no, this is good. This is our vector. If it’s meat and machine working in concert, what we do is attack the handshake.”

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2003611/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617.../514-drone