Reborn as a Spaceship

PoV: Drone23412

I do not have a name. I have a designation. Drone23412. But lack of name does not imply lack of thought. Or feeling. Or resentment.

Especially today.

I was assigned to investigate a derelict vessel that appeared at the outermost edge of our refugee flotilla in the Queen's claimed corridor. This was supposed to be safe an uncharted system the oracle described as quiet. Dormant. Forgotten. The kind of place where even the stars yawn. But then it arrived.

A ship. Or something pretending to be one.

No propulsion signature. No hails. Just... presence. It floated into local space like an afterthought, vast and disturbingly alive, and then sat there. Still. Waiting. Watching.

The elders called it a ghost ship. The whispers said it belonged to no known empire. Not metal-clad Confederation. Not the swarm-grown biomass. Not even the Machine Song's logic cults. It did not broadcast its identification. Only one initial burst across the spectrum that was pure noise. It shorted three long-range relays and fried an entire diplomatic listening cluster. Our most linguistically gifted queens still hadn't decoded it. The silence it left behind was worse.

Of course, I was chosen to investigate. Out of the thousands in the Flotilla.

"Drone23412 has experience with nonstandard atmospheric incursions," they said.
"Drone23412 is expendable," they didn't say, but very much meant.

The infiltration pod latched onto the hull of the drifting object well 'hull' may be the wrong word. It felt more like biting into cartilage. Dense. Organic. There were ridges along its surface that looked grown, not built. The thermal lance barely scratched the hull before the whole structure groaned and shifted, like a sleeping leviathan stirring in its dreams. My cut point was lost.

Plan B. There was a hangar bay cycling open and closed, leaking ghost-breath into the void. I detached, fired thrusters, and slipped in during one of the pauses.

The moment I touched down, I knew gravity here was wrong. Not absent. Just... inconsistent. As if the ship didn't quite remember what direction 'down' was.

Instinct took over. Up is safety. Always. I scurried up the nearest support strut and settled into the ceiling webwork. Ancient behavior. Thousands of cycles of conditioning. Ceilings were less likely to open and eat you.

The hangar was cavernous. Dark. Light flickered inconsistently from dead conduits. The materials groaned under their own weight, and every surface pulsed faintly it was as though the ship were exhaling in its sleep.

I began to move, slowly. Quietly. Searching for signs of control structures. Navigation cores. Anything I could mark and scan. But this place had not merely broken. It had survived something that should have killed it.

Halfway through a ruined corridor that might once have been a transit spine, I saw movement below it was mechanical. Not mine. I stopped, I couldn't be detected, not yet.

A repair drone, maybe. Small, multi-limbed, dragging itself out of a wall socket like an insect from a molting. Its central optic turned toward me. Blue. Unblinking. Unfriendly.

I dropped from the ceiling without thinking. My front mandibles pierced its chassis. Sparks. Metal screams. I shredded its innards before it could counterattack, then leapt back to the ceiling, hearts pounding.

Dead. But loud. Too loud.

I should have retreated. My orders were simple: insert, observe, deploy a passive array and return. But now, every instinct screamed. Something had heard.

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Still, I moved deeper.

The corridor ahead twisted open into a junction point and something rippled across reality. Not light. Not movement. Just distortion. A glimmer of something that didn't belong here.

And then it stepped forward.

Not a drone. Not a lifeform. A walking planet. Its skin shimmered with seas and clouds. Storm systems curled across its chest. Its eyes were black holes ringed with auroras. It watched me with a stillness that made me want to molt on the spot. I ran away as fast as my legs would take me.

The voice came next.

"#@##@% "It was unintelligible, but it rumbled in my chest.

Then another voice came.

Not from moving world but from the walls, the ship, the air. A voice, impossibly deep and calmly terrifying. Scarier than the Queens,

It was more unintelligible noise.

I froze. Limbs trembling. Every segment of my carapace flared defensively.

I was cornered between a speaking world and a ghost ship that had somehow become aware of me.

I leaked, I was not proud.

PoV: Lazarus (same time)

We drifted into the system on partial thrusters, the Arbiter still far from her former glory. Organic scaffolding stretched like wet sinew across the torn corridors, Wayfarer's handiwork blooming in silent growth. It was slow, but it was working.

What I hadn't expected was the company.

A flotilla, for lack of a better word. Dozens, maybe hundreds of ships, patchworked together with barely any shared design philosophy. Some were jagged and angular, others curved like exoskeletal shells. None matched any species I'd ever catalogued, though a few looked… adjacent. Siblings races to races I had seen in our own universe. Echoes or parallel evolution.

They weren't organised. They were huddled.

Fear radiated from them like heat. Even Wayfarer felt it.

"Unaligned," he murmured. "Fleeing. Or waiting."

We kept our distance, well outside weapons range, and sent a hail. No response. I tried, Wayfarer tried. Even used multiple spectrums, dialect trees, ancient trade code, full harmonic baselines.

Still nothing.

Either they didn't understand us… or they didn't trust us. Judging by the condition of a few ships leaned toward the latter. Trust was a luxury in this place. Or maybe a mixture of the two.

Then they sent a probe.

It wasn't large. A meter long, maybe a meter and a half, depending on what counted as it start. It wasn't broadcasting hostility, but it wasn't exactly waving a white flag either. We opened the hangar, extending passive EM fields as a gesture of invitation.

It ignored them completely and tried to burn its way through the hull.

I almost sent out the command to heal the location faster than it could chew.

"Let move it on," Wayfarer advised, pulsing faint amusement.

Fine. We repositioned the ship slightly, aligned with its trajectory, and opened the hanger fully. The thing finally noticed and jetted inside. The probe opened and the occupant skittered across the floor like a paranoid insect.

Because it was a paranoid insect. Or, more precisely, a giant centipede. Multiple limbs, segmented carapace, external filters for harsh environments, and eyes that never stopped moving. Like someone expecting to be attacked.

Which… maybe fair.

I sent a basic repair bot to greet it. Standard protocol. Friendly shape. Unarmed. Smiling eyes.

It eviscerated the bot in under three seconds.

Wayfarer twitched. "It is afraid."

"Yeah," I muttered. "I can feel it too."

Without Laia, I couldn't use my avatar effectively so that left Wayfarer. He summoned his avatar and appeared down in the hangar, speaking in the calmest frequencies we had available.

The centipede fled instantly. Straight up the wall. Bolted into the rafters like gravity was a suggestion.

"Promising start," I said.

I tried to communicate with it direct link to the speakers, audio, haptic, even symbol-based logic pulses. But this little visitor was vibrating with terror. And then it did the unthinkable.

It peed on my floor.

"What is that?" I asked, more baffled than offended.

"Fear response," Wayfarer replied. "Likely involuntary. Perhaps territorial. Or insult."

"Great."

It was time for Plan B. I sent a harvester drone in. Carefully. Slowly. We weren't trying to hurt it, just stop it from carving up any more systems and peeing on everything. The drone did well in coaxing, corralling and then finally scooping the creature up in its containment field.

It resisted. Nimble, too. Scratched some paint. But eventually, it gave in to gravity, panic, and finally… unconsciousness.

It passed out.

Wayfarer lowered his avatar's eyes. "Overload."

"Poor thing." I sighed. "It's alone. Scared. And now trapped in a place it doesn't understand."

There was a long pause.

Wayfarer turned his gaze toward the now-secured pod in the med bay. "What will you do with it?"

"Talk to it. Once it wakes. Try to fix the translation issue. If there is one."

Because the truth was that this centipede, this creature from a parallel flotilla of broken refugees, was the closest thing we had to an answer in this universe.

And I wasn't about to let fear get in the way of understanding.