Home, if only briefly

So much to tell. So little time to get it into this diary. As I write this, Wave Equation is tearing through the Black on a maximum burn short time vector from the KHI shipyard over Ariel back to Hale's Moon. General's curled up on the couch with Haley, and Imrhien's asleep back in the living quarters.

So much has happened in the last few days, I'm not even sure how to process it all. Spending the annual 'Last Day' celebration at Firefly's on Blackburne was a roller coaster. A chance to dress up. A chance to spend a long, long, yet not long enough, never long enough, time dancing with Imrhien. Another long dance with Sabrina - the only woman I've danced with in a long time who I don't have to look up to see into her eyes. Watching Immi get a little too drunk, and Td hitting on her something fierce. And then, finally, a long trip back to Hale's Moon, alone, in the Black. Though, I admit, Haley seemed pretty enthusiastic to sleep on the bed when I got back.

Just didn't know Beagles snored.

Hard to believe that barely a day later Lily and Imrhien took off into the wastes for something: some kind of mission of Lily's I only knew the scantest pieces of. But Imrhien came back, injured, with xOxO in tow, and Lily still in the wastes looking for the 'cured' Reaver she calls 'Daddy.' I would be lieing if I said I wasn't worried for her. I love Lily. Not in the same 'tragic doomed romance' way I love Imrhien, but I still love her. Losing her would be like losing a sister and not something I want to contemplate.

So many revelations to digest. The truth about Immi being registered as a Companion. A band of watchers, like some mythical guardians from an Earth that Was fairy tale - though very real. A deeper relationship between her and Td than I suspected. The depths of Sabrina's natural skill. But worst - Experimental Alliance weapons systems turned loose on civilian populations and the terrible, gut wrenching, thought that, somehow, my own Kin were responsible for that weapon.

The machines that attacked Imrhien and xoxo on the way back from the wastes were some kind of combat drone. Small, but dangerous. Not entirely unlike the ones that used to plague the area out by the mines on Hale's, and evidently part of the weapon system that had supposedly attacked more than one Independent-friendly outpost. As Imrhien told us, gathered in Firefly's, about the machines and the self replicating mining machines they were based on, my heart sank.

I remembered a project, not long after the war, launched by one of my Uncle's at KHI's Research and Development lab to design and build exactly that. Self replicating mining machines. Drop a mother bot on a black rock and it would build a swarm of smaller mining drones. The drones would go out and start mining, bringing their finds back to mother who'd process then and eventually build another mother who'd move off somewhere and start the process again. The mother bots were programmed to set aside a good portion of the mined resources, then call back to someone to come pick it up. The whole idea was to help the rim worlds rebuild without having to risk people in mining operations on dangerous worlds. Just the kind of idealistic, mostly crazy, project Uncle Elsoph was known for. But also something he'd be able to make work given the resources.

It wasn't safe to wave Uncle with the kind of questions I had, so we mounted up - myself, Imrhien (I still need time to finish bandaging her wounds), General, and Haley - and burned full speed back to the yard. En route, I finished tending Immi's wounds and let her take a bath. She was bringing out a side of me I didn't know I had, but that was another matter.

Fortunately, we managed to avoid dealing with a lot of people. I'd been coming to the yard since I was little, and people still treated me as "The old man's favorite granddaughter." With my friends, it was almost embarrassing. They knew me as a friend. A small town Mayor on a frontier colony. They didn't know me as the daughter of an Industrial Giant, but I couldn't worry about impressions. Asking Uncle Elsoph directly about the old mining drone project was why we were here. That, and to give Imrhien the opportunity to get some real medical attention from the only doctor in the 'verse I trusted completely.

Uncle Elsoph confirmed my worst fears. He had designed the mining machines and gotten them to work. Actual, working, von Neumann machines. But other than the first prototypes, and a generation of 'daughters,' the project had been long abandoned. Explaining the project, the mining machines weren't even actually armed. At least not specifically. There was a lot of gear on a mining drone that was lethal to get in front of, but they were never designed for combat and were specifically designed to avoid injuring any Humans who happened to be around while they worked.

Elsoph also managed to dig out some records indicating the Alliance Bureau of Frontier Development had paid for most of the research, and then outright purchased the prototypes and the engineering data on them. What he hadn't known, because it was a deeply classified secret, was that there were several Black Ops development units hidden within the BFD bureaucracy, including at least one specializing in exotic weapons.

We were humped. Perhaps we were all humped. If someone had weaponized the von Neumann technology, things were going to get very scary out on the Rim.

Hell with it. There's nothing any of us can do about it now. I'm going to go in back and snuggle with Immers until she wakes up.