It was the next cycle, and the hours had passed uneventfully. Rather than allowing itself to fully back down, the Kainé had ultimately chosen to leave the doors open. Now the BPU sat staring out the doors. It wasn't sure what had triggered the darkness to manifest, but after staring at the opening for an hour, it started reseeding.

  It wasn't a pleasant experience for the BPU; its physiological state was erratic, and the most concerning aspect was the low blood pressure. The situation had allowed the less organic parts of the Kainé to scan for distortions and anomalies that could have been triggering the BPU’s less-than-optimal behaviors.

  It wasn't a pleasant experience, but the event had allowed the Kainé to determine that the darkness was a phenomenon solely experienced by the BPU. This was a troubling development with the hardware already experiencing critical errors. The wetware’s errors were a further setback, but biological systems tended to repair themselves given time.

  The only thing to come about from this was that now the Kainé knew it couldn't fully trust its sensors regarding the darkness. After referencing the medical files again in hopes of finding a way to speed up the wetware repairs, it was unfortunately made clear that the BPU was only going to recover with time.

  All it could do with the available resources was to put up with the errors. The medical database did suggest that whenever the error started to manifest, it should get low and perform breathing exercises, and that repeated exposure might remove the error slightly faster. Briefly, the Kainé debated fixing the leashing protocols, but that was deemed even more impractical.

  So, there it was, sitting outside the heart before the doors, allowing the darkness to recede. It was very inconvenient for the Kainé, a waste of valuable time. There were things it needed to be able to do, and the weatware wasn't making things any easier.

  Eventually, the darkness faded.

  The BPU was made to stand and move around as much as it could before having to sit again. Slow and steady progress was being made. The Kainé was experiencing what could only be described as a violation of control; simply put, it had too much self-discretion. Granted, said discretion was the only reason the Kainé was able to address any of its current problems. The Kainé set itself a reminder to restore the learning protocols when the resources were made available. For now, the Kainé had work to do; it would need to put up with all of the problems.

  Getting the BPU out of the heart was the first step. Enough of the internal sensors were down that it did not have a clear understanding of its internal condition; the diagnostics were useful, but only to a point.

  It needed to know what happened.

  Five long cycles later, the BPU had managed to traverse the entire maintenance and engineering level, all two hundred feet of it. Things weren't as bad as initially predicted; the blast shields had done a reasonable job of keeping things from getting damaged. There was minimal damage, all things considered. During the exploration, It had gained access to the Crew lockers and acquired clothing that greatly helped with thermal regulation, as well as several complete tool kits. It had also found a void suit that would reasonably fit the BPU. The Kainé just had to remove its… current occupant.

  The ship manifest was corrupted and would take twenty to thirty cycles to recover with the available processing resources. It felt wrong removing the deceased crew member from her suit; just thinking about it caused the BPU to lose stability, forcing it to sit and perform breathing exercises. The Kainé didn't like looking at the crew member; it was a reminder of its failure, that it hadn't kept them safe. It wasn't that it failed to understand that it wasn't the ship's fault for not being able to function after taking multiple impacts.

  Remaining itself of that didn't help.

  One good thing was that it seemed like most of the crew had gotten to the escape pods. The swarm didn't care about losses, humanity's or its own, so deaths were common and ships were cheap. The fact that the Kainé wasn't fully disabled after taking three direct impacts was only an indication of how lucky the Crew was; most of the time, a ship was destroyed after a single impact, at least for hummingbird-class vessels. Still, the BPU needed to be able to leave the Kainé if it wanted to salvage the swarm ship. Not having escape pods made that more difficult.

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  It was a very long cycle… but it now had a void suit. The Kainé didn't want to think about how long it had taken to remove the mummified corpse from the suit; it was done now, and that's what mattered. It wasn't clear how she had died, but it was probably a long, slow death. The BPU was required to take more breaks than the Kainé cared to acknowledge, and if it found itself dwelling on the details, the BPU would start being overtaken by distress…

  The Kainé was finding it difficult to function with so much of itself being damaged. Having to rely on the BPU was acceptable, but tasks such as removing the crewmember from her void suit were showing just how ineffective the BPU was. At this point, the BPU had used multiple cycles just recovering. The plan of using it for tasks outside its normal range of operations was taking time. Ultimately, the resource the Kainé seemed to have the most of was time. It wasn't as if the Kainé had a better option available to it, other than the correct option of waiting for repairs to finish and to be recovered by alliance forces. BPU's were meant to be cold, logical machines capable of limited decision making; emotional stress responses would never have happened normally and should have only happened in times of intense combat. Truly, things would get more efficient once the BPU was leashed again; there would be no stress responses, just cold efficiency.

  ***********************************************************

  The BPU was exploring Kainé's interior. The Kainé wasn't a large ship as such; there were only so many places it could go. The damage in engineering and maintenance was minimal; however, time had taken its toll. Plastic paneling was starting to crack and parts were missing, exposed metal surfaces were rusting, and the life support systems weren't working like they should have been. The once white and green hallways had turned yellow and black with age. Ironically, the sections of the ship that would look the most pristine would be those exposed to the vacuum, unaffected by the various reactive gases. Although this was exploring for the BPU in a way, the two hundred feet of corridor and three accessible rooms didn't allow for much. The rooms being the Heart, Maintenance, and the Reactor. All and all, it amounted to all that could be considered livable on the Kainé.

  It was two cycles later when things took a turn. When the BPU was in stasis, the Kainé's life support hadn't been running. Now, after almost a month of the BPU being active, the systems that really were on their last legs finally gave out.

  The BPU was getting physically stronger; muscles that had started out nearly a step above atrophied had gained an amount of definition. It was at the point where it could almost run from the Heart to the maintenance and back without the body completely giving out. It needed to go by the corpse each way, but no longer needed to stop and let the darkness reseed. True to what the medical database had suggested, repeated exposure had resulted in fewer errors in the wetware. They were still happening, but were getting less frequent and lasting shorter periods of time. Progress was being made, and if the BPU continued at its current rate of progress, it would only need twenty more cycles to be capable of salvaging the swarm ship.

  After updating the estimates of how long it would take to be mission-ready, the low, constant humming that was the air scrubbers stopped. As the humming started to fade, there was a rising screeching that replaced it, followed by a resounding snap! The silence that followed was defining. Old warning lights started flashing red, moments after the warning reached the BPU.

  Warning: Life support: critical failure detected

  Warning: Life support: offline

  Diagnostic: Fault: Error

  Warning: Emergency life support: 6% Functional

  Warning: Emergency life support: 3% Functional

  Warning: Emergency life support: Offline

  Then the hum of life-support was gone, leaving only flashing red lights and the din of the reactor.

  In a panic, the BPU ended its exploration early and ran back to the Heart. It was experiencing signs of distress, but hadn't blacked out. It was on a timer now. With life-support down, there was a finite amount of breathable oxygen available. That was a big concern, but it wasn't the only one; not long before the BPU ran out of oxygen, it would boil. Temperatures had slowly been rising over the past month. Without life support dissipating heat through the ship's extremities, it would become a furnace. The reactor would keep providing heat until the point of no return. Shutting the reactor down wasn't an option, not if the Kainé wanted any chance of surviving.

  Sending the remaining nanites to fix life-support wasn't going to work; at this point, only 2% of them remained. That made them next to worthless, no, they had been worthless from the second the BPU came out of stasis. The Kainé needed to act.

  Running quick estimates showed that there was roughly 80 hours of breathable air and 34 hours before the heart became unlivable. The Kainé could extend the BPU’s time by moving it into engineering. Even being further would only add 30 hours to that. It could no longer wait. The BPU wasn't ready yet, but with every system that had failed, the Kainé had to make compromises; this was only the next one.