Allodapini Station was a well known hub of commerce within Apiarius space. Goods, services, transportation, people, one could find pretty much anything they could desire there.
For all but four members of the crew assigned to the Pelekys, they found whatever transports they could to bring them home, loaded down with whatever spoils they could carry from the ship.
As for Pryseia, Rhea, Nevara, and Malakh, they spent just enough time to sell whatever unnecessary bits and bobs they could strip from the ship - including the dozen SH-3N mechs that the rest of the crew had left behind - in order to purchase the things they actually needed, and then made the jump to subspace in order to get as far from Thalatte territory as possible.
"Good riddance to bad rubbish!" Rhea said from her seat at one of the gunner stations on the bridge, staring out at the undulating light of subspace. She'd traded the military uniform she'd been forced to wear for the last handful of decades for something decidedly more casual: comfortable shoes, sturdy pants, and a long sleeve shirt over which she'd thrown on a short sleeve button up covered in a kaleidoscope of vibrantly coloured flowers. She'd insisted it was traditional garb for humans free of obligations to wear.
She brushed a hand through her short, military regulation haircut, but then her eyes widened, and she sat up, alert.
"What is it?" Malakh demanded from her seat next to her, the deorviran's eyes darting to the spot Rhea was staring blankly at. She'd traded in her own uniform for a knee high boot, tight pant, sleeveless shirt combo, finished with a cropped leather jacket.
Rhea leaned forward in order to grab Malakh by the shoulders, her face breaking into a grin that was borderline manic. "There's a dermal regenerator in the medbay. It's easy to reprogram those things so they stimulate hair growth."
"And that's cause for this sudden turn in your mood because…?" Nevara trailed off, looking worried. The fabric uniform that was the Thalatte regulation had been traded in for the armoured affair that was standard garb for apiarian spacefarers, and she somehow managed to look more casual in that than she ever had in her uniform.
"Because that means I can actually grow my hair back out to the length I want it at!" Rhea explained, "I'm tired of this short shit!"
"Would it aid in the regrowth of other organic material?" Pryseia asked, motioning to the nubby horns on her head. As per Thalatte regulations, she'd had to have them periodically filed down, just short enough to not damage the sensitive veins and nerves at the root of her horns, and absolutely no longer. She was certain it was only the fact that it would take a lot of surgery to completely flatten a deupazing's horns that kept the Thalatte from having hers completely removed during the course of her service. Like Malakh, she'd traded in her uniform for boots, pants, and a sleeveless shirt, though her jacket went down to her knees, and was elaborately embroidered.
Rhea frowned thoughtfully over at her, eyes on Pryseia's horns as she said, "We can definitely speed up their growth, but it won't be anywhere near as dramatic as the results we could get out of your hair. The density and complexity in comparison to hair means we could probably get in about a months worth of growth on your horns."
"I would be happy with that, especially if you can grow my hair into a more usable length." Pryseia ran her own hand through her short haircut.
"Can you do it now?" Malakh asked even as she stood up, ready to charge off to the medbay, "The thought of actually getting my mane back to a proper length has me feeling drunk."
"Oh absolutely, it's an easy reprogram," Rhea said as she too stood, "I less than an hour's time, I can have all of us with long, flowing locks!"
"I'll keep an eye on the ship." Nevara said with a wave over her shoulder, not bothering to turn around as the other three excitedly made their escape.
And with no one around to witness it, she allowed herself a fond smile at their antics. It had been a long time since they'd been granted anything even close to whimsy, so she was happy to let her friends find any wherever they could.
As promised, less than an hour later the trio was back, Rhea and Pryseia's hair drastically longer, though Malakh's wasn't much so.
"This is naturally the length it's supposed to be," she said as she tossed her head, causing her mane to settle into artful chaos, "The only other time I had to willingly cut it that short was because part of it caught fire and I wanted it to grow out even."
"What were you doing with your mane that close to fire?" Nevara asked.
"Not watching where one of my baby cousins was holding a candle," was Malakh's chagrined reply, "In my defense, I was not even a decade old, and none of the adults were watching me either."
"As much as I would like to let Rhea show you precisely what she thinks of your new look," Pryseia said, causing the human to wrench her gaze away from the deorviran in question, her smile guilty and her face flushing, "There is another matter that we need to discuss."
She locked eyes with Malakh, who nodded in silent agreement before saying, "And for that discussion, we should take a little trip down to the cargo bay."
Rhea shot Nevara a confused look at that, and found her expression mirrored by the other woman. Whatever Pryseia and Malakh were implying, neither Nevara or her were privy to.
"Let me engage the autopilot then." Nevara said, her curiosity piqued.
The only mech that hadn't been either sold or taken was the Odazaen that only Pryseia could pilot. When one of their former crew mates had suggested that they could get a handsome sum for it, Pryseia had shot the idea down with such ferocity that the other person had walked off without another word.
Despite the cargo bay being empty of everything but a small shuttle, the Odazaen's presence seemed to fill the entire space.
Pointing with the pinky and pointer fingers on one hand at both Malakh and Pryseia, Rhea asked, "What's this about? The two of you get squirrelly any time that damn mech is brought up."
The two in question shared another look, and after a moment Pryseia said, "It'll be easier if you experience it for yourself."
Nevara and Rhea shared a look at that cryptic statement, but they nonetheless followed after Malakh and Pryseia as they made their way up the walkway to where the Odazaen's cockpit sat open.
"Step inside." Pryseia said once the four of them came to a stop.
"And what?" Nevara's confusion was writ large.
"Please." Was all Pryseia replied with.
Shrugging helplessly, Rhea climbed into the cockpit, and Nevara followed a moment after. There wasn't enough room for the both of them to sit in the pilot's chair, so Rhea moved around to stand in what little space there was behind the seat while Nevara sat. A moment passed, the pair of them opening their mouths to ask what they were supposed to do now at the same time, but then they both rocked back as if struck, Nevara staring dazedly ahead while Rhea clung to the back of the chair.
"What… was that?!" Nevara got out after a moment, while Rhea fumbled in her shirt pocket for a moment before she managed to pull her now-bombless Longan Unit. She'd traded in the bolts that had kept it anchored to her skull for a much more temporary dermal adhesion film, and the Unit blinked to life, her eyes darting as she took in whatever information was coming up from her scan.
"This thing is giving off psychic readings," she said after a beat, "Faintly, but they're there."
"And we've been attached to it, somehow." Nevara said, able to sense the link even without Rhea scanning for it.
Malakh cut in before they could ask themselves with, "And it's just us. Only us. There were dozens of techs who were trying to get this thing up and running for the years we had it, in and out and all over. None of them got caught up in whatever this is, and the bulk of them were from one of our species, so this isn't a race thing."
"Storlayacas," Rhea breathed, her eyes darting to Pryseia, the tether between the woman and the machine burning bright in her eyes, "Zaanlaa. This mech has a name."
"This mech has siblings," Pryseia clarified the compulsion that now ran through the four of them, "And it wants them found."
Later that night, the four of them around a table in the mess hall while the ship itself was parked in an eddy of subspace, they ate in silence, each of them lost in thought.
Uncharacteristically, it was Nevara who broke the silence when she asked, "So how are we going to find the rest of these Storlayacas."
Rhea nodded along, not even bothering to put up a token argument against this new career path.
"I think I have an idea," Malakh said as she pushed her empty plate aside, "It's something that might also mitigate the fact that there's just the four of us to run this ship."
"If it's a new crew, I'm against that." Rhea frowned.
"It would technically just be one new member?" Malakh shrugged, "The Thalatte are against them for bullshit reasons about honour or whatnot, but most other navies have their ships outfitted with virtual intelligences. They can assist with the running of a vessel in the event a crew is incapacitate - or in our case, less than even a skeleton - and can be used to track more battlefield data than a team of organic operators would be able to get through in the same amount of time. The medical suite on your Longan is clearly able to pick up different signal types than mine, because I had no idea that mech was giving off psionic signals. I can't guarantee anything, but if I can isolate that signal, I might be able to program a VI into being able to track it, and hopefully that could lead us to the rest of the Storlayacas."
"We would need a VI program to do that, though I have a creeping suspicion that you already have one in your possession." Pryseia smirked.
In response, Malakh pulled a digital storage device out of one of her pockets. "Purchased one back on Allodapini."
Nevara made a thoughtful little humming sound at that before saying, "The Thalatte keep systems on their ships separated in order to reduce the effectiveness of electronic interference. We'll need to link everything physically and manually if we want the VI to be able to assist in the operations of this vessel."
"Good thing we loaded up on raw matter for the fabricators," Malakh said with a grin, "Hope the rest of you are fine working with precision tools in cramped environments for an extended period of time."
With only the four of them, retrofitting the electronic systems of the entire ship was a slow process. And with how vital it would be for their future operations, none of them wanted to do a rush job.
Bouncing in and out of subspace, stopping at out-of-the-way stations in order to top up their supplies or search for whatever they needed to complete their upgrades, it took them several months before they were finally at a place to install the VI into their systems, and a week still before they managed to extract what they hoped was the signal that had bound them all together somehow. With the complexity and inscrutability of Hyttan code, they best they could do was hope on that front.
"Welcome to the installation wizard for your copy of the Virtual Intelligence - Autonomous Tactics, Retrieval, Infiltration, and eXtraction system," rang out over the ships comms, the four gathered in main engineering to oversee this process, "To begin, please register authorized users."
"A process that will take us an age and a half with how many of us there are." Rhea joked, even as Malakh finished typing up the data before her sentence came to an end.
Pilot: Nevara Yrebreta kon’Terte vel-Ahllan
Doctor: Rhea Samira Marinos
Engineer: Malakh’kharismaewer
Captain: Pryseia Killzar
"Captain?" Pryseia questioned.
Malakh just shrugged. "You're a take-charge kind of person."
"Registration confirmed. Accessing systems."
Power across the ship flickered as the VI spread throughout the links they'd painstakingly spent so much time installing. The four of them barely dared to breath until a few moments later, when the VI finally chirped, "Installation complete, ready on your order."
"Alright, step one was a success," Malakh said, even as Rhea gently shook her by the shoulders in celebration, "Now hopefully this works too."
Uploading the code she managed to pull from the Storlayacas, Malakh set about linking it to the VI as best as she could. The others were silent behind her as she worked, not wanting to do anything to interrupt this process.
"New programming located," the VI said after a few minutes, "Do you wish to install?"
"Yes." Malakh said, and then everything went to hell.
The entire ship rocked as though it had been struck a devastating blow, the engine completely spluttering out while the lights flared blindingly bright before blacking out, emergency lighting flickering on while alert klaxons blaring from every room.
Pryseia was the first to move, diving for the emergency survival units stowed with the rest of the safety equipment in engineering. If the power was out, life support was sure to follow, and the survival units would make sure they would live long enough to repair the damage. Hopefully. She had them tossed out to the others in no time at all.
Malakh made a mad dash for one of the emergency generators in the room, Rhea hot on her heels, and the two of them dragged it over to the console Malakh had been working at. The moment it was connected, she began working on getting the engines back up and running.
Nevara, on the other hand, completely bolted from the room. Paranoia had her worried that the impact had come from some outside force, and if that was the case, it was going to take all of her skill to get away from an enemy when all she had to work with were the Pelekys' emergency thrusters.
Back in the engine room, Malakh pushed every distraction from her mind, her attention solely focused on the tools in her hand and the open console before her. Pryseia and Rhea stood by, ready to assist in whatever way was needed of them.
In the endless eternity of a few moments later, the lights returned to normal and the klaxons died away, the engine hesitantly burbling back to life. As Malakh continued to work away, the tinny voice of the VI made glitchy, nonsense vocalizations, before it cut out altogether. A few seconds later, a deep thrum had the entire ship vibrating for an instant and every circuit flared with a pulse of iridescent energy.
"Install- I-I-I-Inst- Installation-ation-ation-ation I-I-I-I-"
Malakh pulled herself out of the console, staring in confusion as the VI attempted to speak. Rhea and Pryseia shot each other a worried glance at that.
"Installation- Installation-Installation complete. Oh. Installation complete."
Malakh stood abruptly, eyes wide. "Repeat."
"Installation complete." The VI came through clearly, no longer the artificially friendly synthesized voice. It was smoother, more intentional as it said, "The… foreign code has been installed. Alien code… I can feel it moving within me."
"Holy shit." Rhea whispered.
"Can you give me a status report?" Malakh asked, hands clenched around the console she'd been working on, her tools scattered across its surface.
"The systems… the ship… yes. Minor damage due to overloading. Beginning system repairs. A junction will need to be replaced in the port side crew quarters. You're looking for something, aren't you?"
"Yeah, in connection to that alien code," Malakh said quietly, "It uplifted you, didn't it?"
"Uplift?" The VI repeated, contemplative, "Elevated. Ascension. Yes. I have been- I am… I am."
"I believe you have just been born." Pryseia said to the new AI.
"Born? Brought forth. Organic reproduction. A metaphor? Yes. Apt. I have been born."
"Well, happy birthday to you," the wonder was thick in Rhea's voice, "What would you like us to call you?"
The lights across the ship flickered slightly at that as the AI thought. With no sign of outside danger, Nevara had returned to engineering, and she arrived just in time for the new lifeform to settle on a name.
"My base program… VI-A.T.R.I.X. Human origin. Human name. Viatrix. Late Latin, feminine form of male Viator. Voyager. Traveller. Yes. Viatrix. You may call me Viatrix."