Nina and Malachi stepped off the elevator near the forward cargo bay and started walking. At the door was an armed guard. He stood with his hands behind his back, and a holstered pistol at his side. He eyed them as they approached, and watched them quickly walk by and turn corner.

"What was that?" said Malachi, his heart pounding.

"They increased security. This thing must be more valuable than I thought."

"Well, that's it then. We're not getting in with guards on the door. We should get back."

"You're funny." Nina tried some nearby doors. Once opened she pulled Malachi, who came reluctantly, inside.

"Get me a schematic of the cargo bay and this deck," she said. "I'll find us a door."

"The doors are guarded," said Malachi. As far as he was concerned, that was the final word on the matter.

As far as Nina was concerned, it was merely a delay.

"The forward cargo bay is two decks high. That door was to the upper part of the bay. If we can find a maintenance tube, we can climb down in that and get inside."

"Only if the bay extends beneath this room," said Mal.

"Right, so check the schematic." Nina locked the door and circled the room. This was a secondary storage room, a place where smaller items of cargo could be decanted and stored before distributing throughout the ship. There was nothing exciting in here, just racking, common medical supplies, kitchen equipment, and so on. Nothing important, and nothing with a high turnover. They were safe for now.

Nina found the room's primary maintenance port in the wall and removed the air tight panel. They were designed to be big enough to crawl into, and often, but not always, crossed decks. It meant maintenance and repair could be carried out completely internally, without having to move from room to room.

"Oh, bad news," said Malachi when he saw the schematics, and realised the maintenance panel in here led to the cargo bay below.

"Perfect!" said Nina. "Lets go."

"We shouldn't. This is against all the rules."

"Which rule?"

"Well they sealed off the cargo bay."

"Did they issue an order preventing access? I didn't hear one."

"Well, no..."

"And you're working on a tachyon emitter right now, aren't you?"

"What does that have to do with it?"

"You're literally breaking the rules of physics with that machine. I don't see you worrying about that."

"That's different."

"Uh huh. Tell me about it in the cargo bay."

They climbed down the small ladder past bundles of data cables and ship infrastruture. The light from the room above quickly faded as they descended, but Nina explored with her foot until she found the next panel.

She quickly descended the next few rungs and released the hatch. She lowered it slowly to the floor in the cargo bay, and laid it down without a sound. She climbed through the hole and Malachi followed.

They found themselves in a rear corner of the cargo bay, in an area where someone had stored hoses, pipes and cables in big hoops on hooks. At the other end they could see the space doors and two cargo shuttles. Between the shuttles was a platform surrounded by devices on tripods. The devices were spaced into three rings, each ring at a different height and distance from the object at which they pointed.

Nina and Malachi crept forward until they could see the doors into the room. There were no guards on the inside. They were alone.

Nina skipped over to the nearest shuttle and stood behind it. Malachi sloped over.

"What's the point in hiding now? We'll be seen immediately if anyone comes in."

"You're no fun sometimes."

Nina stopped her pretence and stepped out from the cover of the shuttle, and closer to the object.

"What are these things for?" she said, pointing at the tripods.

"I don't know," said Malachi. "But I can find out." He pulled the visor from his bag, and switched it on. He settled it on his head and touched the band controls. In his vision, orange lines glowed around every device and item in the room. He focussed on a tripod and read out the information it displayed.

"These are phase inverters. They suppress transmissions with destructive interference."

"Oh, the transmissions I detected, of course," said Nina. She bent down for a closer look. "Why so many, do you think?"

"They like to be thorough I guess." Malachi swept his gaze around the rest of the room. The outlines picked out the shuttles and identified them by name and purpose. They picked up the tools stored neatly in a nearby rack, and labelled each one. Then he swept the visor's gaze over the object, and saw nothing. "This thing isn't in any database I can access," he said.

"So what is it?" Nina wondered. They separated, walking around the object in two circles, clockwise and counter-clockwise.

The most obvious feature was that physical security was high. The object had been secured to the transport platform by multiple strong, steel cables. The platform itself has been bolted to the floor on every side.

The second most obvious feature of the object was that had been damaged. Part of the upper hull has been destroyed. It must have been a glancing blow or a lucky hit. The thing looked too small to easily survive a direct strike. They could see components inside. There was the power core, mostly undamaged, and secondary components had burned out or melted from the strike. Circuit boards and processing units were built around the core in a circle, and there seemed to be a lot of sensors or transmitters.

On the outside, it was black, with obviously military styling. There was a design language which spoke of utility and power visible on every part. It was about three metres wide, perhaps a little less. It was round but angled, as if someone had built a miniature fighter but could not decide which side was the front. Thrusters were visible at all angles, including the upper surface, and when they crouched lower, the underneath too.

On one side was the barrel of a weapon. There were few markings on the surface. A series of numbers ran along one angled edge, from the centre to the rim, and on the opposite side to that was an abstract pattern of black and white that meant nothing to either of them. A closer underneath revealed the same abstract pattern was there too.

The object projected a sense of dread. It was clearly a weapon, but not one that looked like anything they had ever seen.

"Do we even know if this thing is the right way up?" said Nina. "Which one of these is the main thruster? There are so many."

Malachi shrugged. It was hard to tell. The only obvious clue to a direction on the thing was the weapon, which they could only assume pointed forward.

On a whim, he scanned the visor over the interior components. The view flickered as items were identified and tagged but rejected as unknown, until one chip glowed green.

"Hey, I have something here in the database."

Nina peered into the machine. Malachi tapped a visor control and a thin red laser beam sprang from the front of the visor and picked out the chip.

"It's an input-output controller. It's nothing special. They're in everything."

"But it's the only thing you recognise?" said Nina.

"I can tell the general function of some of these parts, but not specifically what they are. Do you see anything?"

"I see a data port. Want to plug me in?"

Malachi took the cable she offered, and compared it with the connector inside the machine. They were clearly an incompatible design. He told her so.

"This is where I need your brain, Mal. Can you get me in?"

Malachi pulled out a diagnostic tool and connected a thin probe attachment to it, and began checking the terminal connections one by one for voltage and signal identifiers.

Nina circled the machine again while he worked. This wasn't salvage. That much was clear. At least, it wasn't commonwealth salvage. This was something new, but what? Some kind of experimental tech? It had a weapon, so it was a machine of war. But that was as far as her knowledge took her. It was a small unmanned craft with a single weapon and multiple engines, and had an incredible ability to transmit and receive information. So it was, what? Some kind of communication drone? But with the ability to defend itself?

Malachi pulled his head out of the machine and put away the diagnostic tool. He opened his datapad and fed in the specifications of the machine's data port and Nina's cable, and let it solve the problems of connecting one to the other. While it worked, he laid out tools and dozens of thin wires, and stripped the end from Nina's cable.

"We are going to get in so much trouble for this," he muttered.

"Relax, Mal, no one will ever know we were here. All I need is a copy of the data, and we can go back to our rooms and work there.

Malachi continued to grumble to himself. "If it isn't you making me do things I don't want to it's Tila, and if it's not Tila it's Ellie and her racer." The datapad beeped, and Malachi worked quickly, threading and binding wires together. Sometimes they were direct connections, other times ha passed the wire through other components to modify the charge and ensure compatibility in the data stream.

"You're a people pleaser Mal," said Nina with a smile.

He wired the last pieces together, sealed the unit, and handed his frankenstein device to Nina.

"Done," he said.

"Thank you, Malachi!" Nina connected to the dataport and plugged the other end into her portable terminal. She fired off a command, and the terminal got to work.

Malachi repacked his tools. "How do you know that's going to work? This tech is so different."

"If that chip is known component it must be communicating with the rest of the system in a way I can understand. I just need to break in, and then we can see what we're dealing with."

Lines of code blurred up one half of the terminal's screen. Next to the code, a diagram of the data port was displayed, and one by one, connections lit up in green as Nina's software completed a successful connection. In a few moments, they were all green.

"Great, let's go," said Malachi.

"Slow down Mal, that was only the connection, I still have to break in and suck that juicy data out."

She tapped in commands and sent in a software spider to explore the digital environment of the machine. It would crawl every connection it could find, building a map from which Nina could identify areas of interest. The more connections any part of the data had, the more important it would probably be. It wasn't foolproof - an on/off switch is a vital part of any machine, but only has one connection - but it helped her visualise the data model of the device.

As results came back and her model grew, she triggered secondary programs which were optimised to extract the type of data she expected to pull. Navigational data was on obvious request, but so was the engines, communications, power management, sensors, and all the sub-systems and bridging circuitry that made the machine whole. She wanted it all. After some false starts and on-the-fly coding, she started to get it. Data flooded back into her terminal.

"Oh, um, one small problem," she said.

"Let me guess, it's hacking your terminal and it's going to kill us all?"

"Nothing that exciting, but I'm running out of space."

"How much space do you need?"

"Another half-petabyte."

"How much have you filled?"

"One point five petabytes."

Malachi fished the pouch of data chips from Nina's bag, and handed it to her. She selected four, and connected them one at a time, until the data transfer was complete.

"All done?" said Malachi.

"All done," Nina confirmed. She unplugged the cable, and they packed away their gear.

"Did you do a wireless scan?" Malachi said.

"I didn't think it was worth trying. Hardwired is faster, and I thought these things made it impossible."

"They limit transmissions from getting outside the circle. They might not be so effective inside."

"Do you think I should try?" said Nina. It was a question, but she was already getting her datapad back out.

"Just a thought. It was broadcasting when you found it."

Nina set her datapad to receive E band transmissions, and turned it on. At once, the receivers in her device were swamped with a full spectrum burst between seventy and ninety Gigahertz. The bursts were incessant and furious. Every quarter-second, they cycled through a pattern of coded transmissions, followed by microsecond pauses, followed by a stream of modulated data. Waveform patterns zipped across the pads display with every burst.

"Whoa," said Malachi. "What is that about?"

"It's a handshake," said Nina. "It's saying hello. I've seen similar patterns when machines are isolated from networks without warning."

"Should we say hello back?" said Malachi.

"It's only polite," said Nina. She tapped a control, and transmitted the same datastream back to the machine.

The transmissions stopped. The machine sat there, waiting.

"Now what?" she said.

"Uh, those transmissions you received. Were they encrypted?" said Malachi.

"Of course. It's obviously military hardware."

"But you haven't cracked those codes yet, have you."

"Not yet, but I will. Why?"

"You transmitted the same codes back to it. The same handshake. Wouldn't it be expecting something different? Like a challenge and response."

"I sent another challenge.

"Yeah, and now it knows we're here, and not responding properly."

"Oh..."

"We should leave," said Malachi, his voice rising in fear.

They stepped backward, and the datapad in Nina's hand sprang to life again. Now the pulses were coming in every tenth of a second, in patterns she didn't recognise.

The machine glowed. The power core brightened, casting shadows like teeth across the ceiling of the cargo bay. Thrusters came to life and the machine began to rise. It pulled against the steel cables until they were taught. It pulled up the platform until those cables were taught, and it began to turn.

It began to hunt.