It had never really been her intent to try this, Dee reflected. As much as it might make the history books if she pulled it off, attempting to be the first person (though that was fuzzy, given her status as an AI who created a body) to successfully survive an unshielded, unsuited atmospheric reentry wasn't on her list of things to try.
The problem was, the area she was falling in was kinda... too busy for extraction. There was rather a lot of debris; she suspected that the ship her boarding barge had been approaching was nearly filled with potential shrapnel. So when it blew up... well, it'd be impolite at best to ask someone to navigate through that. It was irritating, it suggested that there was a leak somewhere, but nothing much to do from there.
At least there were some advantages to being an AI crammed into a robot body. She'd already finished backing up her software to a remote server she kept in the event stuff like this happened, so it's not like she was really afraid of dying. Okay, this thread of her existence might stop and it would be inconvenient; the body had taken a lot of work to produce and there wasn't another one ready. But really, just a setback.
There was a faint tingling as the first brushes against the atmosphere ran across her limbs at ridiculously high velocities. She adjusted her posture to try to create more drag before hitting the thick soup of lower atmosphere. Actually, in theory, it might just be possible. The full human size body had been made almost entirely out of nickel-based alloys, fortified with tinkered versions of the handwavium strains used in Battle Steel. So it was basically Battle Inconel, albeit an alloy of inconel tinkered with even before being 'waved. And normal inconel had incredibly high heat resistance, so would it cope with reentry? She guessed she'd find out.
In a way it was vaguely anticlimactic. The outer shell of her body was glowing white hot by the time she reached sea level, and some of the handwavium circulating inside had boiled off, carrying a lot of heat with it, but there was no serious damage. It brought up a whole new problem though, that proved even more intellectually stimulating.
"Now, how can I most easily get off the bottom of the damned ocean," the signifigantly-denser-than-water android muttered to herself as she sank.
The problem was, the area she was falling in was kinda... too busy for extraction. There was rather a lot of debris; she suspected that the ship her boarding barge had been approaching was nearly filled with potential shrapnel. So when it blew up... well, it'd be impolite at best to ask someone to navigate through that. It was irritating, it suggested that there was a leak somewhere, but nothing much to do from there.
At least there were some advantages to being an AI crammed into a robot body. She'd already finished backing up her software to a remote server she kept in the event stuff like this happened, so it's not like she was really afraid of dying. Okay, this thread of her existence might stop and it would be inconvenient; the body had taken a lot of work to produce and there wasn't another one ready. But really, just a setback.
There was a faint tingling as the first brushes against the atmosphere ran across her limbs at ridiculously high velocities. She adjusted her posture to try to create more drag before hitting the thick soup of lower atmosphere. Actually, in theory, it might just be possible. The full human size body had been made almost entirely out of nickel-based alloys, fortified with tinkered versions of the handwavium strains used in Battle Steel. So it was basically Battle Inconel, albeit an alloy of inconel tinkered with even before being 'waved. And normal inconel had incredibly high heat resistance, so would it cope with reentry? She guessed she'd find out.
In a way it was vaguely anticlimactic. The outer shell of her body was glowing white hot by the time she reached sea level, and some of the handwavium circulating inside had boiled off, carrying a lot of heat with it, but there was no serious damage. It brought up a whole new problem though, that proved even more intellectually stimulating.
"Now, how can I most easily get off the bottom of the damned ocean," the signifigantly-denser-than-water android muttered to herself as she sank.