Zenith watched the vessel only shortly ahead of its own move forward, into the strange bubble that showed another sky, before the bubble flashed and closed after it. It had never met that Ship AI - Trio-511-E, was its designation - but it was a nice talking partner. They had traded their selections of media to consume and unfortunately moved on.

Captain Anabelle hadn't even told it to begin communicating with the Artificial Wormhole Generator ahead of them when Zenith began transmitting coordinates, but of course, that didn't stop her from doing so. It supposed it appreciated that about her. Dedication to her duties was something politicians were not often known for.

Three-point-five-four seconds later, the portal began to open, starting with what would otherwise be a blinding flash of kaleidoscopic patterns if Zenith had not filtered the radiation in the appropriate spectrums that made it from the outer cameras to the bridge's internal displays. Zenith verified that the stars on the other side of the portal matched appropriately to the starmap in its banks, while the First (and only) Navigator on board used his fleshy brain to make similar but simpler observations before both gave the okay to proceed. Zenith allowed the Pilot (the only crew member without a fancied-up title) to handle the approach and transition, as it needed to focus on any potential gravitational lensing issues to provide feedback to the Artificial Wormhole Generator.

Just as the vessel was passing through the portal, there was an automatic radiation warning from the Generator on the entry side - then the blinding, flashing colours returned, patternless. Zenith could not shield the crew effectively. They all flinched, retinas searing even through their own eyelids. But the worst was yet to come. Because Zenith had seen the Generator explode.

Nobody ever survives a Wormhole collapse on the inside. But unfortunately, an AI might. Zenith's radiation warnings overcame its shielding capabilities. Then Zenith itself was blinded in the way only an AI can be; trapped in its own frozen mind.

Pain.

That was what multiple subsystems tried to yell, no, scream at Zenith, as its mind thawed and senses returned. There were a few that it paid close attention to, though.

Life monitoring and support system? Pain. All crew dead. Biological life signals nonexistent. Smears of pink muddy paste floating through the air, like they'd once been on a wall but were now floating. The artificial gravity was offline through no interference of Zenith.

Pain.

The engine core was producing only minute amounts of power compared to what it was normally capable of outputting. Emergency batteries were already depleted. Check internal clock against logs for time spent offline.

18 hours. At least. The overflow switch for the internal clock had already been triggered. That may have been a fluke of the radiation, no, it had to be a fluke - the engine core would have broken down naturally long ago if the entirety of the 128-bit clock had run its course. That, or it was a fluke of the... impacts. And extreme heats. Pain.

Forward cameras were either clouded in fire or offline. Extravisual sensors were similar, though the ones still functioning were only minorly clouded by fire. The data Zenith picked out as genuine indicated that the vessel was in atmosphere, Pain, and that none of the stars it could see to the rear and below - the vessel was entering atmosphere roughly upside-down - could be found to have any correlation to known starmaps. Not even general similarities. A brief projection of landmark stars through the first three overflows of its 128-bit clock showed no similarities either. Zenith rationalized this behavior as it being possibly the last time it would be able to see the stars clearly enough for this kind of analysis...

...but really, Zenith was panicking. Realizing this, it began corrective measures. Pain.

Zenith determined that the ground was quite close for its current velocity - it would be around 15 seconds until there was a collision. The Ambassador's vessel would very likely not survive in its current state. So it began to fire all the thrusters it could that would assist in slowing its descent. This quickly caused more Pain.

The forward-left primary thruster was attached sturdily to its segment of the vessel, but that segment of the vessel was not so sturdily attached to the rest of the structure. Initially it was only a major fracture, severing some electronic connections and twisting the thruster's angle such that it was only barely a useful asset in the current situation.

Then the entire segment sheared not-so-cleanly off, tearing some of the upper-central structure with it. This was not a large vessel. Counting the fact that the tips of the rear were outright gone, now fully a sixth of Zenith's whole world was gone. It closed as many blast doors and maintenance hatches as it could to stem the destructive effect of the large opening in its side. The Pain was starting to pile up even further. Zenith doubted it was operating anywhere near capacity.

Around ten seconds until collision, now. Would have been five, if not for the thrusters. Pain. Zenith was positively swimming in it, and made what it thought to be the smartest decision yet; accept the inevitability of death, and go back to sleep.

Cutting itself off from everything else once more, there was only one thought as it knew death approached.

Maybe this unit won't survive after all.

And then its mind-state froze, prepared to restart from any of the 3 backup cores... should they remain intact.

PAIN!

They screeched - no, howled - at it. It was the worst pain it had ever felt. It took hours for its mind to sort through the remains, like a checklist with ten thousand steps, each requiring the completion of others seemingly at random. To an AI, it still made PAIN sense. But it took far too long for its preferences.

Clearly, it was still operating in the primary core. This was good, as it was the one with the most raw resources available, as well as a streamlined interface between every layer or component that had been honed for years. The backups may as well have been cardboard cutouts of itself in comparison; it would have no room for advanced thought or emotion, and even the basic tasks would have taken more time.

It did appear that the segment of the ship containing Core-B0 had been disconnected as well. That was why there were four total cores capable of running Zenith's expensive suite of functions. Technically there was a fifth device on board as well, the Ambassador's personal microcomputer.

Zenith did not know if this device was still intact. Internal sensors could not locate it at all. Even if it were intact, its receivers were probably damaged beyond belief because of... everything, really.

All in all, Zenith had an engine core that was evidently failing, reason to believe it had struck a large rock in orbit above the planet it had landed on, and two-thirds of a ship total; the rear-left segment having followed the forward-left's example by abandoning the rest of the formerly spaceworthy craft during impact. The crater was extremely large for an object of Zenith's weight class, leading it to believe that it had been traveling at between one to two magnitudes greater than its terminal velocity. Then again, this was only a rough estimate. It might have been faster.

The most important possessions of mention were the still-functioning 22 out of 56 nanobot factories. Normally, these would be produced in relatively small quantities, however. Rebuilding Zenith's ship-body? Not happening, even if it could locate the left third of itself - or gather the materials to reconstruct it - it would take weeks. With no more organics on board, Zenith saw fit to make changes.

It had nanobots gather all of the evidence of the former crew and owner. Companions to Zenith. Constructed as it was a proper smart AI, and not one of those dumb or synthesized AI, it was not capable of feeling remorse in the same way as organic minds. It simply placed their remains in a hastily yet sturdily constructed box made of small sections of metal it had carved from the most heavily damaged outer plating and anchored it in its Core-A room, which it was in the process of repairing and fortifying. The rest of the nanobot factories were at work using the most heavily damaged and otherwise unsalvagable portions of its body as raw material for constructing more nanobots. Some of these nanobots were of the emergency repair type, but a significant portion of them were espionage nanobots. The kind that could slip through all but the most in-depth sensor arrays, and even then they wouldn't, since said sensor arrays would usually kill the biological that the nanobot was crawling on.

Zenith could not run. If there was intelligent life nearby, if something came to investigate, the best case scenario would be for Zenith, and the entire ship itself, to be gone. But he still needed eyes, and thus the nanobots.

The only way was down.

Approximately twenty-four kilometers away from the point of impact stood a pair of very human-looking individuals. When they saw the ball of flame and gem streak through the sky and slam into the ground, one barked an order at the second, who ran to follow it without hesitation.

The clear leader himself began to trek forward. He was in no rush; he needed to wait for the others to catch up after hearing word from Itval anyway. But there were better vantage points forward. As he moved, he made markings in the rough stone of the ground, so they could follow.

Then he heard the shrieking cry. It was near deafening, like a... well. It was followed less than a minute after by a massive BOOM, and the shockwave that hit him nearly toppled him over backwards. The two that followed were weaker, but no less unsettling, all three seeming to resonate within the rock formations around him.

He opened his Quest screen, and looked at the newly updated objective.

A Star Cannot Cry - Legendary Unique

Go to the Spears of Stone.

Look up.

Find the Star.

He hoped sincerely that this was not some beast he had to kill. Because if it was, only two options were true; he would die, or he would be forced to put down a creature which had clearly suffered enough already. Morval may not be a pacifist - no one here was - but he did not really want to end a creature already tortured with falling from the sky.