Soldier number 3-349-731-630 sat in the acceleration cushioning foam seat with his head resting against his chest looking at the thin, grey flesh that covered his body and compared the colour to the rest of the small cockpit. The plastic components were a similar shade of grey, which meant they were made from the same material; CMP-112 was not a star system whose government spent money on decorative features. They didn’t even spend money on basic features. He looked out through the cockpit’s canopy and regretted doing so, there was a thin layer of nothing that separated him from the cold and hot vacuum. Regret might not have been the best of terms to describe his feelings, though many would argue that what he felt were not feelings at all. What he had was an analysis that indicated a higher danger potential associated with the lack of canopy, and indication that was relayed to his body in a form that prompted him to consider his choice to look out in a negative light. Despite how that seemed, it was not the same as regret. Regret was an emotion that humans felt. He was a component of his ship and one that did not require emotions. His ship was an interception and assault style fighter, one of two hundred that was docked with the carrier, each identical and easily replaceable. None of which had a physical canopy; none of which needed a physical canopy. If the shield was disabled, eight times out of ten that meant a situation where the pilot was dead anyway. With that in mind, it was a logical choice to save 0.05% on the production cost by letting the shield function as the canopy. Any one of his fellow pilots would have made the same choice were they the designers.

He didn’t know much about himself, he never needed to. Knowledge that imparted any kind of individuality could lead to breaking formation in combat. With the vast distances of space to contend with, communications were inevitably delayed and with the split-second considerations of active combat in mind there was no way that would be acceptable. The solution was therefore to have every pilot think identically; to come to the exact same solutions and be able to intuit the actions of the rest of the flight wing. After each mission, they would have their memories copied, harmonised and pasted back in, ensuring that every one of the two hundred pilots believed they were the same person, and were each a legion. The combat experience of the entire legion resided within each of them, and when one of them was shot down, all their experiences, except for those gained in their final flight, would be assimilated into the group. That was more memory than any human mind could take but that wasn’t a problem for them. He knew that he was afraid of dying, of being shot down by any number of things, though he was only aware of what death entailed in the vaguest of terms. That fear was also mitigated by the cold knowledge that the phrase ‘afraid’ was also an inexact term; he had a definite preference towards continued functionality and that manifested itself in his system with the production of stimulants suited towards that purpose. He was one of five million robotic soldiers who fought in the CMP-112 star system. As the carrier once again approached a debits field, he knew something else; his time to ponder had ended.

The fighter’s computer extended a cable through the grey foam chair and connected into a port on the back of his hairless pale head. His vision filled with ghostly lights as his mind adjusted to the connection, filtering the steam of information into a hierarchy and distributing it to his various systems. He could feel the cold metal of the hull as if it were his skin, he could see through the sensors as if they were his eyes, he could move the flight-drives as if they were his legs, he could feel the battery as if it were his stomach. He and the ship were indistinguishable to his mind, one entity with shared needs, like his flesh was only a component of his metal frame. The vacuum didn’t scare him, he lived in the vacuum. Instead he was filled with hunger pangs. The ships were only ever given the bare minimum of what they needed to get through a fight, a ten percent excess of that at most. If ships were given a full charge, then the pilots might feel like it was possible to escape, and the hunger made them sharp like wolves. Not that he knew what a wolf was in any other sense than as knowledge; mere data that was held by the legion to understand the symbology rich military database. He was sure that no one in the legion’s memory had ever seen a living creature.

The concern that pilots might try to escape was a needless worry, one that showed their mission was planned by someone other than a pilot. The legion was an almost addictive sensation; a kind of unified belonging that caused his system to release reward stimulants. No one thought about leaving the wing, otherwise they all would have thought about leaving the wing, and if every pilot wanted out then they could have captured the carrier for themselves. The limitation was put in place by someone who hadn’t experienced legion, someone who lived in one body and couldn’t understand what their unity involved.

What made the hunger more ridiculous was the knowledge of just how much supplies were available on the carrier. The arrived in CMP-112 with five million soldiers across one thousand carriers and after fighting on and off for subjective years the carrier was the last remaining one, with the last remaining two hundred fighters. During one of the early battles, the stellar catapult, a railgun about as long as three stars and wide enough for ships, was destroyed by the targets. Since then, they were fighting to control the debris field for no other reason than because they were commanded to capture that section space. The human controlled ships that they fought when the first arrived had long since been destroyed and in their place were small battles with automated drones, assembled by automated factories with resources from automated asteroid mining. The years it took an individual drone to reach them was mitigated by the constant stream of them. At first their wing took out the drones without any casualties, but as the damage started to build they started to slowly loose ships. One lost ship became two in the next, until only two hundred fighters remained. There was only some let up when the mining ship used up the resources near the factory and had to travel further.

With the time they gained, they travelled to the nearest wreckage of one of the other carriers. Having drained it of resources, including spare parts and backup ships, they integrated that ships memory backup into their legion. That carrier was tasked with brining down the drone facility but was destroyed by a human fleet and never managed to complete their mission. As they sunk early, they still had an abundance of supplies. With enough time, they could have completely dismantled it to upgrade their carrier, but the next wave of drones were due back and they had to return to fend them off. They know they were fighting a futile battle, that they had no victory condition, but they continued with their mission. They didn’t have any kind of alternative; there was no information in the legion about anything other than combat. Some of the oldest minds added memories for hand to hand combat, for manual ship control and repairing ships, but there was nothing there about what they should do outside of their mission.

He ran through his pre-launch cycle one final time before giving a visual inspection of the ships around him. He knew that each of them had done the same and if there was anything amiss they would have told him, just as he would have told them. With no issues, the carrier’s hull magnetized behind him, pushing him out into space, giving him the sensation of a solid surface pushing against his feet. Once he was a sufficiently safe distance from the carrier, the flat, delta shape of his fighter body unfolded, like he was stretching his arms out. The lower points of the fighter’s wings opened to reveal thrusters, with the wing caps moving around the thrusters to provide a way for the fixed engines to change direction in space, as well as completely covering them to protect against incoming damage. The body also unfurled hundreds of long thing strips of metal; radiators that would reduce the heat from the ship and prevent it from melting itself from the build-up. They gave him the sensation of a cold breeze taking sweat off his skin.

As he ran/flew through the field, moving aside to avoid any lumps of metal big enough to make it through his shield, he could see/detect the drones likewise approaching. His wing was out numbered five to one, but they still had the advantage in coordination and power. They approached the debris in a spiral formation, like a drill through space. It was a conventional formation that allowed every ship to have a clear forward shot while protecting the ship in front of them in the line. It could also be quickly changed into a wall just by slowing down the forward ships. It was ideally used in conjunction with a destroyer or cruiser that could fire safely while being protected by the drones, but the factory had not been equipped for that kind of production. If it had been, then the drones would have killed them all off long ago.

Behind him he could see/detect ten ships group together with him as the various ships in the wing likewise formed groups. The furthest ship was already far enough away that there was a fraction of a second delay between the light he was seeing and the actual position of that ship, a delay that would only increase as they grew further apart. None the less he knew what that pilot was thinking, it was what he was thinking, and they would match up with unnatural sympathy. Using the field as cover, the small groups would make quick attacks at any target that gets too close to avoid an attack and then retreat behind more of the strewn about hull. Their ships were equipped with micro-missiles that were thrown/launched from railguns before their own rockets further increased their speed. The warhead was heavy enough that it could bludgeon its way through a drone’s shield, though its relatively low speed meant they could be avoided with any real range. When they first fought the drones, they used their primary weapons, lasers, to burn through the shields and melt into the vital components. However, that took up to a full second to do and in that time the drone could get within firing range of its own lasers and counterattack. In a one on one fight that wouldn’t have been a problem, their shields and radiating fins could resist and dissipate the heat faster than the drone’s laser could send it. Two on one, or worse still five on one, the combined lasers would cut through their ships in an instant.

As the drones approached, they increased their speed, thrusters firing full to get within laser range as soon as possible. At long distance, the laser wasn’t dense enough to cut but they still hovered their fire over the ships to heat up the radiators and slow the radiation rate, giving the feeling of a hot, dry wind. With that as a trigger for commencing the operation, he ran/flew out from behind cover with a sidewards roll, throwing three missiles before rolling behind the next sheet of metal. He could see that none of his shots hit, but he caused the avoiding drone to fly into the missile that one of his partners had thrown. As he knew they would, they rolled out in the opposite direction to what he did and positioned their missiles to cover the places the drone could dodge to. They then moved through cover to rendezvous with him before they could try that again. While one missile could be easily avoided at range, many of them together could form a net.

The other small groups likewise used that tactic and the initial contact cleared away nearly one hundred drones. It was an effective start to the battle, destroying ten percent of the enemies without sustaining any losses. However, it was only then that the drones started to reach their weapons’ effective range. The sky seemed to by dyed red as nine hundred lasers started to cut through the debris field; molten metal and focused light each starting to heat the ships’ shields.

They switched up the plan at that point. Eight ships from every team continued to harass the drones, slitting into four groups to slowly work along the sides of the cone to flank them in four directions while the remaining two ships focus on the real plan. They pushed the largest chunks of metal together and pushed that towards the cone while staying behind it. With their weapons pointed outwards in a circle, any enemies that flew around it would be at close range and struck by missiles. Any that flew in a wide path to avoid that would be caught by the flanking ships. The drone’s formation, the way they bunched together, worked against them in that strategy.

That still wasn’t enough. The sheer difference in numbers started to overwhelm their strategy with flanking ships suffering heavy damage. With those ships being suppressed, drones were able to flood over the wall and give the edge a wide berth. The ships up against the wall had little space to move while in a circle formation and could only defend themselves by going on the offence. Some drones managed to push through the formation and attack the carrier. They incapacitated it and destroyed one of its fuel tanks before they were shot by its turrets. That push did leave enough of an opening that the flanking ships were able close around the drones to fire in an encirclement.

He was in one of two ships that went after the drones that attacked the carrier. As he struck a clean blow into the drone, but a burning pain drilled into his side as another drone managed a clean blow into him. As fast as the pain had filled him it faded from him, and he could no longer feel his legs. With no sensation he couldn’t move and could only watch as the carrier was damaged and couldn’t do anything as the other ship was shot down. For the rest of the battle he could only sit there spinning and bouncing about as the entire wing was destroyed. Worse still, when the last ship was destroyed, they simply left the field. It was every bit as worthless to the drones as it had been for them. The entire wing, those whose memories he shared, were dead and for no reason at all.

He disconnected from the ship and once again was just a body; arms and legs not thrusters and radiators. His cockpit was intact though his power supply was limited. Once the power was gone the shield would be also. While his body was shaped like a grey skinned human, the synthetic flesh was mostly just there to protect his parts from environmental exposure. He did not breath, eat or sleep, though he could do so if required. His pain receptors, vital for ensuring survival responses, would trigger if he entered space, but it wouldn’t immediately kill him. His inability to disperse heat in anyway besides radiating would eventually cause his system to burn out, but he would otherwise be able to function until then, albeit at a diminished capacity. His body made use of synthetic systems that mimicked biology and while they were supplementary, it would diminish his performance to function without them. He therefore preferred atmosphere. He pulled a small box of tools out from under his seat and confirmed the contents. The base of the toolset was magnetised, and the tools wouldn’t float out unless they were bumped. He then used the tools to release the seat’s harness and tied that around his naked waist; it was a crude belt he could tie the toolbox to.

He then set to work pulling out the ship’s battery. With it disconnected, the canopy dissipated and the atmosphere that was contained within vented out. His pain receptors started to signal across his body, but he instead focused on holding onto the batty and the seat as he waited for the outward force to end. He walked out onto the ship’s hull, using the radiators as handholds. The heat from contact started to cook the flesh of his hands, but that inconvenience was nothing he couldn’t fix once he made it over to the carrier. He climbed onto the rear section of the ship, directly between the thrusters, and partially connected the battery to the metal plate. He then waited for the perfect moment as the ship spun through space, all the while knowing that a speck of dust could kill him at any moment. When the right moment came, he completed the connection, turning the back plate into an electro-magnet and sending him flying, repulsed by the ferromagnetic metal in his feet, a feature meant to cheaply hold the pilots on surfaces in the carrier now used in reverse.

He loosely braced himself and collided with the carrier, the impact tearing the synth-flesh from his arms and legs. He could see the abrasions, but the protective lubricant contained within wasn’t particularly valuable and it spilling wouldn’t inconvenience him. The carrier’s controlling computer was evidently still active, as it magnetised the sections of hull as he walked, allowing him to move freely to a hatch. Once inside, the atmosphere allowed him to disperse heat effectively again. No longer faced with the freezing and boiling sensations, he moved to the maintenance bay. In there, he stiped away the flesh from his body and attempted to find a replacement. The more effective grey flesh he had been using was already entirely consumed, and they only had the synth-flesh they had gained as salvage from the other carrier. It was an older variety, one designed to fully imitate human flesh, in terms of colours and textures. The lubricants had even been dyed to look like human blood. It was wastefully inefficient, but he none the less knew it would be better for his functionality to use it than to go without.

With the flesh attached and synchronised, he let installed the data packet that came with it; the bone structure settings that would adjust the various bone-analogous sections of his frame to best suit the flesh. Oddly enough, it wasn’t just restructuring data in the packet, it also contained human interaction files; something he had never needed prior to then. When his frame was finished reshaping, he walked over to a reflective surface to give the flesh a visual inspection. He realised then that the flesh was that of a female human, visually in her mid-twenties, with pale while skin, straight black hair that ran down her back and black coloured eyes. His, now her, height had dropped twenty centimetres and she was only a little over a metre and a half tall. The new weight from the perky breasts on her chest was no impediment to her balance as the data packet had already recalibrated to counter the shift in the centre of gravity. It seemed strange to her that the flesh would contain the structure of a vagina, but she rationalised it as being necessary for successful infiltration.

With her body repaired, she moved towards the main control computer. Interfacing with it showed the damage to the ship. It was far more than she could fix by herself, especially without a space-dock and a printer capable of printing ship components. Half of the carriers had them, but her carrier was not one of them. Without any alternative, the ship suggested she shut down inside the black box. That way, when the CMP-112 government finally arrived in the system they could download the legion directly from her, essentially a backup to the ship’s own copy. Following the ship’s logic, she entered the black box, a cylinder six-meter-tall cylinder built to withstand being dropped from orbit without the occupant feeling a thing. Each black box was about as expensive as the carrier itself, and as such were only contained by the carriers without printers. With the door closed and sealed, she let the chamber clamp her in. Once she verified that she was correctly secured, she shut herself down, entering a sleep as deep as death as she waited for the next stage of her mission.