Two days later we were approaching P3X-989 in the final jump. I had commanded the ship to enter a red alert as we should be prepared for the worst and as we had time to prepare, most combat ready officers, myself included, were suited up in our combat gear and armed to the teeth. This was having a somewhat double effect of both making the other officers feel protected, but at the same time, also quite on edge. Then again, they were trained for this.

"Exiting FTL jump in 120 seconds." Ellie announced over the intercom. A couple of her android security bots were also standing around and the rest had been dispersed throughout the ship with the exclusion of her special project that stayed behind in her core which I had allowed her to be armed as well, just in case anyone tried to breach her room.

"How's everything holding up?" I asked my officers.

"I'm nervous but apart from that everything looks great, Commander." Zu replied.

"Ready for evasive manoeuvres, ma'am." McAllister commented.

"Engines are purring like a kitten." Lieutenant Bailey added.

"Weapon systems are online too." Luna finally rounded off the checklist of the most critical systems.

"Okay, sit tight everyone and pray for a peaceful encounter." I smiled. "Or just cross your fingers, that's fine by me too."

"Thirty seconds." Ellie called out but the bridge stayed silent. "Ten seconds…"

You could cut a melon with the tension in the air.

"Five… four… three… two… one…." Space warped around the ship as we left our FTL jump.

"Scan the area." I commanded.

"On it, Commander." Zu replied swiftly. "No contacts in the AO. Space looks clear."

I sighed a breath of relief. "Alright, let's set course for P3X-989. It should be somewhere behind that brown planet. Let's see if we can make contact with the resident species."

"Uh, Commander…" Lieutenant McAllister looked back from her pilot seat. "I'm pretty sure that is P3X-989."

"Are you sure?" I looked at the planet in front of us. It looked like a gray-brownish ball, nothing like the lush green planet we had seen on the scans.

"The layout of the continents is identical from the images I've studied."

"It is the planet in question, Commander. The Lieutenant is right." Ellie.

"What happened to it?" Luna asked.

"I'm detecting traces of radiation coming from the planet's atmosphere. Craters are visible in what looks to be former urban centers. No lifesigns detected."

"Fuck, the bastards nuked themselves into obliteration…" Bailey cursed and banged his console.

"Are we sure it's nukes?" I asked our AI.

"More than likely, Commander." Ellie responded. "It must have happened somewhat recently, depending on what kind of weapons that were used, ten to twenty years ago, maybe."

"Shit." I heard Luna whisper beneath her breath. Pretty uncharacteristic of her. "So those images we saw…"

"Because of the distance, those were probably rather outdated…" Zu finished Luna's sentence.

"Quite, yes." Ellie replied. "I'm sorry to disappoint, Commander."

"It's not your fault how physics works, Ellie…" I countered and leaned on my own console, feeling rather defeated. "It just sucks." While I didn't know for sure, I was pretty confident that I voiced the thoughts of everyone on the bridge. "Is there anything we can salvage from this? Knowledge? Materials? The planet is pretty much written off in any case unless we want to terraform it for… ages."

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"No debris in orbit, Commander." Ellie commented.

"It looks like this species hadn't invented spaceflight yet." Luna explained. "Otherwise there would at least be signs, right? Like space junk in earth's atmosphere"

"Correct, Lieutenant-Commander." Ellie answered. "There might not be something in orbit but there should be salvageable gear in the vault of this planet. I will need to get closer to the planet to scan it better though. It has a similar kind of protection as the other gaia world we visited."

"I'm picking up some weird noise though." Lieutenant Zu stated with some concern clear in her voice.

"That's the background radiation, Lieutenant." Elle replied.

"Hmmm… I'm not so sure about that, Ellie." Zu shook her head.

"Can you explain what you mean?" I asked to which Zu nodded and broadcasted the audio she was hearing to the bridge. To me this pretty much only sounded like white noise though. "Uh…"

"Let me highlight it." With a couple of taps on her console Zu highlighted a couple of parts within the audiostream. "These parts, to me, sound strangely mechanical. The rest is noise from the radiation, but those parts seem off to me."

"They all fall within normal parameters." Ellie replied.

"You don't only need to look at the parameters, Ellie." Zu countered. "My gut feeling tells me this is wrong. Like listening to a song and just knowing that something is wrong about it, even though nothing is objectively wrong about it…"

While I did trust Ellie's judgement, I wasn't just about to dismiss Zu's intuition, especially not considering we are close to a planet that nuked itself. "Alright. Let's proceed closer to the planet but limit the speed to 1/10th of combat speed, putting all remaining power into shields and maneuver thrusters."

"Will do, Commander." McAllister obeyed my command and slowed the ship down to a crawl.

"Ellie, can you work together with Zu to keep an eye on the parameters she selected?"

"Yes, Commander."

"Good, let's gather all the information we can." I nodded and straightened my back, crossing my arms while standing next to Luna who also looked rather tense. "Do you think the Empire's work?" I asked in a whisper.

Luna slowly shook her head and replied softly. "There wouldn't be much of a planet left if this was the Empire's doing."

"Damn… So the poor fools did nuke themselves…" I stared to the front of our ship as the planet kept getting closer. "Such a shame."

We slowly approached for about half an hour until both Zu and Ellie drew our attention. "Commander."

"Yes, Ellie? Did you find out something more?"

"The Lieutenant was correct, Commander." She replied. "There was in fact something mechanical going on. Now that we are closer I have also managed to visually confirm it."

"Put it on screen." I nodded.

Ellie showed us a picture of the planet's landmass that was currently not covered by clouds and zoomed into ground level on one of the urban areas. The picture wasn't crystal clear but there was definitely movement visible. "So there is in fact life on the planet?"

"Not biological in any case." Zu was quick to reply. "The mechanical noise I heard was in fact just that, a mechanical thudding."

"So robots?"

"Tens of thousands of them moving in exact unison. Like the ticking of a clock." Ellie added.

Ellie made some more images pop up on the big screen in front of us from other entities she has been able to capture somewhat clearly and overlaid the audioloop, albeit enhanced, on the image as well. Like a metronome, each spike coincided with the movement of every single entity on the screens. Ellie then exponentially opened more windows, showing the exact same thing happening everywhere.

I leant forward onto my console "Fucking hell. AI?"

"Very rudimentary at best." Ellie replied. "While I can't know for sure until we get something on the ground which I can interface with, if it were truly AI, they would not be mindlessly wandering like this. It would constantly try to improve itself."

"Well, unless the goal of the AI is not to improve itself." Zu replied.

"That's why I said I wasn't sure." Ellie fired back.

Lieutenant Bailey looked away from his engineering console for a moment, raised his hand. "Should we really go down there then? What if those robots threw the nukes and they didn't throw them all? I'd rather not have our troops bombed."

"That's a good point, Bailey. Ellie, what are our options?"

"I think a stealth operation would grant us the highest possibility for success. It's also possible to go in and put one of my security bots down on the planet, but that would require the pilot of the shuttle to be in more danger than necessary."

"That's a bit counterintuitive, isn't it?" McAllister also weighed in on the discussion. "Sending people down is less risky than robots? Not to mention the radiation."

"My robots will make a lot more noise than people will do." Ellie replied. "Those security bots are really heavy and they are not the most agile things either. So you do need to be very careful with them when dropping them off. A team of soldiers could disembark faster and quieter, and we only really need to get a few people on the ground to set up the communication uplink."

I nodded quietly as the plan ahead was clear for me, at least, until I looked to my side and saw that Luna was staring daggers at me. "Wha-?" I backed away from her with one solid step.

"Don't you dare volunteer for that. You can go down to the planet once Ellie has confirmed there's no nuclear weapons around anymore, but not a second before that, understand?"

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