---[ POV: Flynn ]---

"Athena?" the voice of the AI was pensive. "Yeah. Yeah! I like it. So I will be Athena, and you will be Flynn. Let us work together from now on Lieutenant."

The young man nodded. If Athena was everything she was boasting to be, most of his major limitations regarding technical knowledge, data processing, and access to information just got eliminated in an instant. He had no doubt the brain matrix of an AI designed to tip a centuries-old war in favor of the Empire was already choke-full of useful data. Everything she did not already know, she could learn a million times faster and better than any human ever could.

"Athena, you wouldn't happen to possess the knowledge required to repair this corvette enough so that we could get out of here, by any chance?"

"Maybe. I would have to analyze the state of the ship in detail, which is hard to do given my current limited capacity for interactions and observation. However, if what you said is true regarding the hyper-drive being heavily damaged, I fear that my knowledge will not be of great use. The materials required for the repairs are extremely rare - some can only be harvested from a star - and the manufacturing equipment needed is more advanced than what we have at hand. I fear your simple fabricator will not be enough to manufacture pieces of a drive designed to fold reality. If we are lucky, it might be possible to repair the non-FTL engines and restore basic flight capacity."

Flynn was not particularly surprised by this answer; he had guessed as much.

"That's good news. If we repair the non-FTL engines, we will at least be capable of atmospheric flight. Couple that with some repairs on the scanning equipment and investigation about the remains I found in the shrieker’s lair will become a lot easier. We'll be able to locate the colonist settlements from the sky with a lot more ease than if we just wander around, so it’s worth a try."

"Indeed. I am still dubious about those being colonists of the Empire, however."

"What do you mean? What else could it be?"

"I don't know," said the AI, "but something just doesn't add up. You said it yourself; steel has never been used by the Empire to design armors and weaponry. Even if those so-called colonists had no access to military battle suits and absolutely had to use steel to protect themselves, this does not explain why you did not find a real weapon. Colonists have access to guns and basic defense systems to hunt and protect their bases. According to your story, there was not a single gun present. Worse, there was absolutely no trace of anything even remotely technological. It's as if those were the remains of primitive people."

Flynn’s head was starting to hurt. He was exhausted and did not want to wrack his brain around hypotheses and conjectures that could not be verified or proved at the moment.

"Maybe they are descendants of people that crashed here a long time ago?" tried the lieutenant with an unconvinced tone. "People forgotten by the rest of humanity for centuries, or even millennia? From the little I know about history, early space travel was really slow and dangerous, relying more on luck than anything else. Before the Empire or even the interstellar nations that preceded it even existed, the very first human colony ships were sent away without much hope to ever be seen again. Maybe they are from one of those primitive attempts at space exploration and colonization? We won't really know until we look around a little bit more. Those questions can wait until tomorrow."

"Right, you must be tired, Lieutenant. You fought a monster to get me back after all!" the AI seemed a bit more gleeful than earlier. "Maybe we should leave all of that stuff for tomorrow then."

"Yeah, that would be for the best."

Flynn got up and took the time to empty his armor storage of most of the equipment he had taken with him to hunt the shrieker.

When he got the creature's skin and meat out, he turned toward Athena.

"I suppose it is not part of the data loaded in the matrix of a war AI but, do you happen to know how to tan a beast hide?"

"Wisdom too! War and wisdom. I happen to possess almost all of the recorded and compiled knowledge of both Humanity's history and technological prowess. I was not only designed to wage war on the enemies of the Empire but also to help guide and nurture its people. I was to be way more than a simple weapon."

"OK, OK! So... I'll take that as a yes?"

"A definite yes!"

"Perfect, then can you help me with this skin? I don't want it to rot before I can start to process it."

"Given our current situation, the best I can suggest is to use a basic artisan method. It will require some raw material such as salt or a tanning solution. I suppose your fabricator can be re-purposed to produce some salt from the rocks lying around, even if it’s not its real function. There might also be enough chemicals in the research station to cook up a basic tanning solution."

"Can you send all the relevant information to my stack?"

"Here you go."

"Thank you."

According to Athena, there existed hundreds of ways to process raw animal skin, but since he had no access to advanced chemical compounds or dedicated machinery, he would have to use one of the oldest methods there was.

Since he wanted to sleep as soon as possible, he started to work immediately. It took some test and tinkering but Flynn was effectively able to program the fabricator so that it would break down the canyon rocks it was fed into its individual minerals, one of which was rock salt. Flynn had to load the fabricator multiple times to produce only a small quantity of salt and large quantities of other useless powders and pebbles. The fabricator was not really designed for such use but it did the job anyway.

Procuring salt was only a preparatory step. It would later allow the young man to dehydrate the skin and preserve it, but first of all, he had to flesh it.

At first, he tried to use the searing-blade knife but the process was way too long and inefficient, and the blade way too sharp, so he had the fabricator build him a specialized mechanical tool just for that. Flynn called it the 'skinning knife' even though it was not really a knife.

Of course, he could probably have used one of the laser pistols of the dead troopers as raw material to fabricate a much more effective tool that would have used an auto guided laser beam to burn the meat and flesh right off the skin but he wanted to preserve those rare resources for something more important. He only had 4 pistols after all. If he considered he was using one as his personal weapon, that left only three of them.

With the help of his new tool, fleshing the skin only took about one hour while it would have taken him the entire night if he had continued to use the searing-blade knife. After it was done, Flynn had to place the skin scales down on a flat surface in the cargo haul and cover it entirely with a generous dose of rock salt.

Midnight had arrived and three moons shone above the ravine when Flynn was finally done. Given enough time, the salt would help dehydrate and preserve the skin but now there was nothing else to do than wait before he could continue the tanning process. It was perfect since he wanted to go to sleep.

Athena had remained silent for the most part, only asking some questions about him or his past from time to time, as if to break the monotony.

Flynn said goodbye for the night to the AI, then headed to the bed he had claimed as his official resting place.

He tried to sleep, but despite the fatigue, he was not able to find rest. Once again, he had a multitude of questions floating in the back of his mind, burning to find answers.

The faint blue light emitted by the AI brain matrix was pulsating through his eyelid, providing yet another distraction that kept him awake.

Flynn had been turning on his bed on one side than the other for about an hour, trying to find the position that would help him sleep, and was slowly drifting into a dreaming torpor, when the whispering voice of Athena spoke through his earpiece implant as she was standing just beside him.

"Lieutenant? Are you sleeping?"

Flynn’s eyes opened wide, irritated.

"I am trying to! You should do the same."

"I am an AI, I don't sleep!"

“Well, I'm a human; we do!”

Athena made a sorry and pitiful sound.

"Alright. What is it?"

The AI seemed a bit shy and rebuked because of his evident exasperation. Flynn felt some remorse about being so incisive with the young AI and attributed his reaction to the fatigue.

"I, um... I was simply wondering If there is something you could do about my containment condition. I mean, I don't want to remain in this box forever…"

"What's wrong with the box?"

"Well, it is a bit limiting... and lonely... Would you like to stay in a box?”

Flynn frowned but the AI did not wait for him to answer.

“I was wondering if there is some kind of vessel able to move and sense that I could use for myself? A reconnaissance drone? A medical bot? Anything. If it is not too much to ask of course! I know resources are limited but I am sure I could be of greater help to you if I was able to move around a bit."

"Sure. We will look for that tomorrow, okay? Now let me sleep. I am human and I need my rest or I'll be grouchy all day tomorrow. The last two days have been taxing on both my body and mind."

"Thank you, Lieutenant!"

The AI sounded particularly happy.

Flynn tried to return to sleep but after some time, the AI spoke again.

"Lieutenant?"

This time, he kept his eyes shut, keeping himself from answering and trying to look asleep.

"Lieutenant!"

The tone was pressing and alarmed.

"What is it again?!"

"We have company!"

Flynn sat right up on the bed. At the same time, some of the detectors he had placed all around the corvette activated and sent an alarm signal to his neural stack. How the hell Athena had been able to detect this presence before himself was a mystery he would have to look into later, even though he had his suspicions that the sneaky little AI was probably still linked to his stack, monitoring all sensors he himself had access to.

Soon after the perimeter detector went off, the radar of his armor, which had a somewhat smaller range than his security parameter, also picked up on the movement. As the AI had mentioned, there were multiple life signatures approaching their position on all sides.

Now that Flynn was listening carefully, his enhanced hearing could pick up the sounds of footsteps and whispered chatters.

The young man silently got back up and materialized his power-hammer.

Will this fucking planet ever let me get two seconds of shut-eye for god’s sake!

Flynn was confused; the chatters seemed to be a form of proper language but it was not one he was familiar with. If it had been any of the languages known to the Empire, the language pack of his stack would have automatically translated it for him.

This meant that the life forms outside were either using some kind of encrypting technology, which he highly doubted, or worse, were a native population whose language was not even in the archives of the Empire. He did not even know what this implied about his situation but the objection of Athena to his ‘colonists’ theory came back to haunt him. If there was native sentient life on this planet, there was no way the Empire had not at least taken the time to compile its language. Flynn cursed but it was not the time to think about that.

The life forms were evidently trying to sneak on his location.

As a soldier, he had no choice but to consider this as a danger and potential aggression.

You had to act first, be decisive and seize the initiative if you wanted to survive as an ISF trooper long enough to get to your retirement or to a comfortable desk position.

Flynn asked Athena to close the lid of her containment crate as a security measure, then he walked toward the opening in the side of the corvette hammer in hand.