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She attempted contact with the downed craft a couple more times but to no avail. She wasn’t surprised, it wasn’t common to find survivors in amongst the wreckage of a crash, especially not when the ship started its run-up from outside atmo. She sighed. Death seemed to be everywhere these days. One can never escape its cold grasp but it just seemed to her that the grim spectre was closer than ever, lurking round every corner, behind every star, in the blade of an assassin or mercenary, or in the eclipsing shadow of a destroyer. She shook her head as she heard Ruce’s voice over her communicator. 

[color=6ecff6]“With all due respect, Chief, if you’d have been here fixing her up instead of out getting shitfaced, Valkyrie would be ready right now.”[/color] She said.

She slid her fingers over the touchpad in front of her, triangulating the source of the distress call. She knew she wouldn’t have been the only one to hear it and she’d be damned if she was going to allow Ruce to lose them a potentially valuable salvage claim. Swinging her chair left, she accessed a small recess in the wall. The small door hissed open revealing an assortment of loose wiring, tools and oddments. She noted that she really could do with tidying it up. She found what she was looking for; a shallow, triangular piece of metal and black plastic with three prongs jutting out from one side. She pushed it into a port on the side of her monitor.

[color=6ecff6]“Listen, Chief…”[/color] She began. [color=6ecff6]“We’re about to go silent for a little while so, if you need to contact me, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.”[/color] 

She opened the file on the storage device she had input. The file was rendered in a three-dimensional image, moving and shifting on the screen. Black and white flecks danced all over the image’s amorphous surface.

[color=6ecff6]“Hello, you.”[/color] She said. [color=6ecff6]“Been a while.”[/color]

She smiled at the constantly moving thing on her monitor and tilted her head. It had been a while since she wrote the programme and, although impossible in reality, she couldn’t help projecting onto it, a sense of melancholy at having been locked away for so long. Dragging a few files and commands around, she finally opened a multi-frequency comms channel. Finally, she released the shifting code into the channel. It disappeared into the ether through the comms channel and vanished from her screen. She had to test it.

Sliding out of her chair, she made her way through the bridge bulkhead and down the corridor, into the cargo hold. Fishing her IMP out of her pocket, she cast it and opened a channel to Ruce. Static. Nothing else. The hissed voice of her creation at play. She tried a mid-range channel and, once again, found nothing but static.

[color=6ecff6]“Well done, little one.”[/color] She smiled. She sat down on the edge of the gantry and hung her legs over the side. Leaving the mid-range channel open, she let the static whisper to her.
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