"So when were you planning on returning the architect's ship?"

"When he askes for it back."

The bridge of the Empyrean was more alive than it had ever been.: ten stories of bridge crew beginning on the ground floor, ad climbing the walls until it was almost like they were flying in a small amphitheater. Bright golden white light, spilled through channels in the floor, and into the bridge consoles, lending power to the men and women who heled run the ship. Little floating platforms made it possible for important systems managers: navigation and weapons, to be as close to Adam as possible.

Or, Adam and Ramirez who floated at the Seventh story out of ten.

They still had a lot to learn about the Empyrean. Her bridge was huge and each station did something specific, as it turned out there was a copilot configuration, which reduced the need for spooning to power the ship. Floating back to back, Adam took care of major flight decisions, while Ramirez executed small orders and monitored vital systems. The ship was technically designed to have only one pilot, but until Adam or Ramirez could access Anima power, that was unlikely to happen.

A soft sound reached Adam's ears, a sort of rolling clatter that began at the base of the room, and rolled itself upwards. It was the sort of sound you would expect to hear in some kind of horror flick but he barely bothered to glance upwards, "Glados."

Overhead the Adaptid rumbled deep in her chest. She hung suspended against the ceiling like a spider, using her ten powerful legs to brace against nearby platforms. Glados had experienced some kind of growth spurt in Adam's absence, and now about the size of the average Clydesdale. She had eight massive, segmented legs, like a spider, the back four tipped in soft gripping pads, while the front four were tipped in spiks. She had a smaller pair of legs or arms on her front thorax which had soemthing like fingers on their ends, allowing her to manipulate objects. Her head was even more wolflike than it had once been, the gentle fuzz of her baby hair now course blond fur. The only thing noticeably human about her, were here eyes, wide, expressive, and shimmering emerald green

"The engines are ready, father."

After so many years, hearing that last word come out of an Adaptid's mouth no longer shocked him. His relationship with his half hybrid children had always been rather strange , if not a bit strained. Their existence resulted from the theft of his DNA and on at least one occasion, being stuck with an alien egg sack, a time in his life that he did not dwell on with fondness. But now, after all those years, time, maturity, and lets be honest, a little bit of money, he had better been able to support the hybrids.

Many of the hybrids had been adopted out to couples on Noctopolis, and continued to live with those adopted families, while others of the hybrids had remained at the facility Eris had put together for them before she eft for earth. After Arcadia was founded, Adam had used a good chunk of his not insubstantial fortune to move the remaining hybrids and some of their families to Arcadia, which he considered to be a more welcoming enviornment.

Once on Arcadia more hybrids found homes, and Adam himself made it a routine to check on the welfare of each and every one of them.

Glados had a much improved temper since her childhood, though she still remained acerbic. Adam swore one of her favorite pastimes was scaring the shit out of people. Perhaps the only person she wasn't openly mean to weas kay.

Adam had worried that Kay might be frightened of Glados considering how big she was, but it seemed that the boy was surrounded by so many strange things on a regular basis that it didn't bother him much. In fact, he had loved glados from the beginning. Glados pretended to be annoyed, but Adam was almost certain she loved the positive attention, and would gladly let kay ride around on her back like some sort of demented horse.

Adam closed his eyes and raised his hands out to either side. There was a sort of rolling vibration inside his chest as his intentions were made known to the ship, "All crew members be advised, warp will commence in Ten seconds, Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five...." He would have made a speech about strapping themselves in or getting their heads potentially bashed, but the Empyrean had no such problem. Whatever warp dampening technology she was using, it was advanced beyond what even the Celzex understood.

There was only the mild sensation of warping air, and an abrupt change in pressure that made his ears pop, but otherwise warp could almost be ignored. In a way it made him a bit sad, he had always liked aggressive Warps, they were scary, and kind of exciting.

As soon as they came out of warp, Adam knew soemthing was off.

The Empyrean, Adam had come to learn, was not simply a ship, but it seemed to have some sort of artificial intelligence. It had been difficult to notice at first, but the ship itself seemed to.... Behave. It wasn't something that they noticed all together, it was mild occurrences here and there that gave them all that impression.

It did little things to get their attention, repeatedly opening and closing doors, or flashing lights, or any number of things. Glados claimed that the ship had led her to a leaking power line, luring her through the engineering deck with a series of flashing lights and blinking panels.

Adam himself had come up with two informal classifications for Ais: Discreet and overt. Overt Ais were like Desmond's NEMO, able to talk and communicate at the level of another human. Discrete AIs didn't talk but still had plenty of personality, not to be confused with simple AIs like computer NPCs. He would almost compare the difference between overt and discrete AIs with the left and right brain of a human. Only the left brain is capable of speech, but if you sever the two halves of the brain there is evidence that the right side thinks independently of the left, has its own feelings and ideas about things even though it is incapable of verbalizing those feelings.

Fealty and Empyrean were the same sort of AI, nonverbal, but with clear and distinct motivations. Fealty was a combat AI, though it enjoyed plenty of related activities. Anything that allowed it to get up and move and this included sports, or scavenger hunts.

Empyrean was harder to parse out. Fealty was designed to have similar motivations to a person, but the Empyrean was a ship, it didn't understand people and probably never would, but it knew its systems, it understood when things were wrong, and it knew how to seek help. It also cared about its crew in a way that Adam couldn't really understand.

Its primary motivations seemed to be to keep itself healthy and running and to do the same for the humans on the ship. Everyone had been a bit startled upon learning that empyrean had somehow accessed all of their medical records, and it had freaked Krill out terribly when he learned that the Empyrean had control over its medical equipment, and that included an auto controlled surgical suite.

The point being that even though the ship didn't speak, she certainly had no issue getting her point across.

As soon as the warp went through, the entire room around them turned red. It was a startling change, and a murmur rose up from the waiting bridge crew.

All light emitting surfaces from the strips on the floor to the holographic projections at each station began to pulse deep crimson, almost like they did when the alarms went off, but without the sound. No one else was entirely sure what was meant by it, but somehow..... Adam did. Adam knew a lot about the Empyrean that he shouldn't have known, but since the day he had learned about her existence, he just.... Knew.

She was giving them a warning, not an outright panic, but she was uneasy.

"What are you picking up." He asked her, not sure if she understood him or weather, she just sensed his intentions. He was one of two people powering the ship after all.

Off to his side Sunny muttered something where she floated at the weapons station.

Most of the lights stopped pulsing red, all accept for one.

A woman at the side of the room shot a glance at him before turning back to her pulsing screen, "Sir, Kree homeworld detected, running scans now."

On the omen, such a battery of scans might have taken anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, but almost half a second later, the entire room before them was lit up with a massive blown up projection of what the scanning lieutenant was seeing.

"Adam could probably have understood the readings if he had taken the time to study them, but he didn't need to. This is what he had bridge crew for."

"tell me what I am looking at." He ordered.

"Sir, Empyrean scanners are detecting heavy Void presence on the planet's surface."

"Adam cursed and a murmur of surprise went up around the room."

"Someone get me visuals." Adam ordered.

It took no more than a moment before the massive projection split and a long distance view of the Kree homeworld was suspended in the air next to its scans.

Another murmur of shock ran around the room.

"Dammit." Adam said

The once blue planet, was tinted red, clouds of thick red mist covered entire continents, congregating mostly in the upper hemisphere.

"More, information." Adam ordered, "Do we know what that mist stuff is?"

"Er." There was a pause as the woman looked over her scans, and then frowned, "I uh." She made a face her knuckles going white against the table, "Sir, its.... Not exactly a gas?"

"What do you mean?"

She rubbed the back of her head, "it's essentially not a gas but fog or a cloud rather of....."

"Of what?"

"OF Human blood?"

The room went very silent for a very long time.

"Say that again, but slowly and not trying to freak me the hell out."

She shook her head, 'You heard me correctly sir. Its basically aerosolized human blood, or at least that's what the scans are telling me. There are other trace elements, mostly toxic but I'm not sure what else to tell you."

"that's some real Doom shit right there." Adam muttered, "So you're telling me that that entire planet is covered in clouds of human blood."

"Yes sir, that's what gives it that red color."

"Ah.... Thanks, I hate it."

Ramirez nudged Adam in the back, "I am going to go out on a limb here and say that we might have arrived a little too late, and the big cloud of human blood probably serves the same purpose as a big ass billboard saying, Stay the fuck away."

Adam sighed very long and very deep, "You know we cant just.... do nothing."

"you aren't serious."

"you've said it yourself, I always choose the dumbest course of action. Besides neither the UNSC or the GA is taking the void as seriously as it should. There's no one else willing, or even trying to help these people and no one will."

"You mean Except us?" Ramirez muttered.

"You're Damn right."

He blew out a deep breath through his cheeks, "Ok, well shit."

"Do another scan, see if we can't get signs of life."

The woman nodded and turned back to her console. Tentatively Adam moved the empyrean forward. The ship was not eager to go, but it followed his orders. She was the biggest address ship in the galaxy, and Adam didn't know if this help, but he tried to think reassuring thoughts that included reminding the ship that she had guns big enough to blow this planet into a minor black hole if not simply glass the surface.

It went easier after that, and soon enough they had fallen into high orbit above the planet.

Out the front view screen, the sight was.... Sobering..... horrifying if you happened to think too long about the swirling clouds of red mist.

"Sweet architect." Someone whispered.

"Alright, we will be using one of the Empyrean drop shuttles for this." Adam began, "I want only SE enabled soldiers on this mission. " Of course he included himself and maverick in that grouping. Ever since his return from defeating the Behemoth, Adam had pushed for increased military spending on Arcadia, knowing that they should be expecting direct conflict with the void I the next few years. He had not received much pushback from the program, and out of the deal at least forty more soldiers had been equipped with SE exoskeletons. There were five soldiers per SE team, and Adam had allowed each team to give themselves a name, the only requirement being that it had to be either nerdy or badass preferably both. Mostly that had been for his own enjoyment, but he thought it was a great way to get the teams working and having fun together, while simultaneously fostering a sense of team cooperation and belonging. Plus if he ever went to war with anyone, he would definitely like to be able to threaten people with cool sounding names for his different SE units."

"Ramirez you have the ship." He rested a hand on his friends shoulder, feeling the protest coming, "I only want SE guys down there." Sorry.

Ramirez wilted but shrugged. He had thought about getting some armor, just like maverick had, but t there was something keeping him on the fence about it. Any other day Adam would have wanted Ramirez with him, but today it seemed dangerous to have anyone but the SE soldiers going.

It was going to be stupid to begin with, a fact that he had grown to accept about himself.

The line between bravery and idiocy was a thin one, so instead of trying to distinguish the difference he just ran headfirst into idiocy and hoped it turned out.