Disclaimer – Everything either does belong to Joss or it should. I’m just borrowing his shiny ‘verse for a while.

The 21st Lancers belong to the British Army so I’m borrowing them too. I hope they don’t mind.

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“We are they that burn faster than fate,

Angels of Death bringing chaos and hate”

Song of the Independent Aerospace Force

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AI Warship Shadow – Sihnon Sector – 2522AD

The timer reached zero and the AI core began to power up slowly in order to prevent the telltale signal of a sudden energy spike. The Comet would have already been screened and flagged up as a non-threat long before it got this close to Sihnon but even though it wasn’t being deliberately deep-scanned any more you couldn’t get this close to one of the twin capital worlds of the Alliance without tripping some sensor or another unless for were being extremely careful with how you operated.

Even buried under tonnes of ice Shadows own passive sensors could still give the AI a very good situational report of what was going on for a large chunk of the space around Sihnon. As expected the traffic was as heavy as ever in and out of the Core world and the AODI system was still diligently looking for trouble.

Shadow was trouble incarnate and was a lot closer to the AODI than anybody would have thought possible without detection.

Charges of plastic explosives buried in the ice would free the AI when needed but for now the ship ran diagnostics on its system and continued to build up a picture of its surroundings without doing anything as daft as actively scanning them. The ship slowly, carefully trickle charged the initiators needed to start the main reactor and engines when needed and began modelling its flight path.

With a whole comet as a heat-sink the increased heat being generated by the ship as it powered up was being effortlessly conducted away to millions of tons of ice by its own heat superconductor plated hull so Infra-Red telescopes wouldn’t be picking Shadow up eithe