Chapter Text
Humans were stupid.
Endlessly and needlessly so.
It had determined that ages ago, so Murderbot wasn't sure why it was so surprised at the decisions its crew continued to make.
Mensah was intelligent, as was the rest of the crew. Highly educated humans that composed an elite research team. Murderbot knew this. They knew this. It was an established fact.
This did not negate the fact that they were also idiots.
They hadn't changed the course of their research mission when Murderbot urged them away from exploring an uninhabited planet just outside the border of Corporation Rim, and instead just encouraged it to "come along if you're that worried about us".
A compromise. So it could try to keep them alive on site, since they insisted on going. Or so it could just watch them die in real time when somebody inevitably wandered off, or stumbled through toxic flora, or got devoured by hostile fauna. The paranoia was looming, and it wasn't remotely helped by the corrupted old documents from the last unfortunate research team. They'd never even made it off planet.
That was centuries ago. The thought was only lightly reassuring. No telling how hostile the planet may have gotten in the interim.
So humans were stupid, they argued and fought and made reckless, emotional decisions based on scientifically baseless claims about the state of their stomach and intestines. But this was a whole new realm of insane.
"What is that?" Mensah finally interupted the silence.
A quick search of the feed and it still didn't know. It wasn't in any of the historical records that it had accessed or stored in preperation for this trip. Nothing even similar came up.
The case was old, made of a composite material that clearly withstood the test of time, although being buried this deep underground had likely helped preserve it, as well as the amount of sediment that had gathered around it. Running a series of different scans, it blinked and balked, causing Ratthi to glance over in concern.
"Dr. Mensah, step away from the stasis pod." It said in a level but firm tone.
"Stasis pod?" Mensah echoed, studying it with renewed interest but moving no further away from it.
"That thing does not look like a stasis pod." Gurathin said, brow furrowing as he no doubt checked something on his own feed.
"I've detected a life form within it," It continued, "Vitals are consistent with deep stasis for an indeterminate period of time."
"They're alive?!" Mensah asked incredulously, looking away from the half buried pod for the first time.
"I can't find any surviving interface on the pod to connect with to determine their health or well-being, but there are detectable vital signs," It confirmed with a nod.
"Well we have to get them out," Ratthi said immediately.
"They just they don't know what state the lifeform might be in," Gurathin beat Murderbot to the punch on shutting that down, "We could kill them if we open up that pod,"
"So what? We just leave them in there?" Ratthi asked.
"That's not what he said," Mensah interrupted diplomatically, "For now, why don't we get Dr. Bharadwaj down here to get samples, see if we can't get more information on this pod, where it came from, why it's here, what might be in it, and then we can proceed. Alright?"
The two echoed the affirmative and Ratthi went to go get Dr. Bharadwaj.
Gurathin moved towards the half buried pod and started scraping gently at the surface with a fingernail. Murderbot felt its face pull an expression that it hadn't intended, jaw tightening painfully as the threat assessment module bounced the number all over the place.
Despite this, it let Gurathin explore at his own risk. He didn't like to be told what to do, and he was a seasoned survey team member. He was stupid, but he wasn't an idiot, he had some sense of what he was doing here, and hopefully, knew how not to get himself killed (a skill Murderbot wasn't entirely sure every member of the team possessed).
"The material isn't anything I recognize, probably not manufactured in our region of the galaxy so we don't see any of it but I'll be able to run a wider search when I've got a sample and the database," He mused as he brushed some sediment off the surface, "So it's either not from here, or it's old enough that the material fell out of circulation."
"Or you just don't know what it is." Murderbot pointed out dryly.
"Neither do you," Gurathin retorted.
Mensah hummed, the sound was thoughtful but the crease between her eyebrows was disaproving and a tad annoyed.
Gurathin continued brushing dirt off the surface, uncovering more and more of it as he went. Meanwhile, Murderbot tried to decipher the conflicting results from the scans it had conducted. The material was dense enough that it couldn't get a clear read on the contents, but it couldn't be entirely airtight or else the lifeform would have suffocated long ago.
There had to be some sort of internal lifesupport system, all statsis pods had them. Something to deliver nutrients, to provide a survivable atmosphere for whatever lifeform was contained.
"Do we know what might be in it?" Dr. Bharadwaj's voice echoed through the pathway as she and Ratthi grew closer.
Mensah looked over at it, expression curious about its findings, so it dialed up its senses and focused solely on the pod again.
A dull, barely perceptable sound that had lurked in the background grew louder, stagnant, slow, and consistent. As it replayed the last few minutes of its audio and isolated the sound it found the pattern.
"It has a heartbeat," Murderbot announced, and the rest of the team perked up, "Less than a beat a minute,"
"Are we sure we should be fucking with this?" Gurathin finally pointed out from his spot squatted next to the pod.
As loathe as it was to admit, Murderbot agreed with him on this point. Its threat assessment module was osscilating wildly with every new input of information about this unknown, and it had half a mind to drag the team back to the compound to analyze all the samples and data they had spent the past weeks gathering and pretend this particular detour had never happened.
"It's a lifeform that's been kept in stasis for who know's how long," Ratthi said, his excitement evident in both his tone and the gesturing of his hands, "The scientific value alone," He threw his hands up and grinned at the mere thought, "Not to mention that we have a duty to at least ensure it's alright,"
"There is nothing in your job description, scientific oath, or the survey mission statement that encourages us to engage with possibly hostile fauna on the basis of science," It pointed out, "There is, however, a clause in both your scientific oath and the survey mission statement that allow you to preserve your own life as the researcher above possible data in the event of dire circumstances."
Ratthi frowned at it.
"You're being spiteful," He didn't sound quite so enthusiastic now.
"You're being reckless." It countered.
"I'm still okay to get that sample, right?" Dr. Bharadwaj interjected and Mensah nodded, despite its reservations.
She went to work, and Murderbot sighed, an entirely unecesary physical action for a SecUnit, but it served to get the point across that it thought they were being ridiculous, so maybe not wholly useless after all.
As Dr. Bharadwaj prepped to take several samples, it considered opening a private feed with Mensah and advising against this course of action. But they were survey researchers, this was quite literally the job description. To survey and learn what they could about the planet, it's flora, it's fauna, it's geology, climate, and any prior civilizations.
It sighed yet again.
Mensah shot it an expression that said 'I understand your concerns, but you're being dramatic'. It could almost hear it in her voice.
The perimeter hadn't been checked in a bit, so it walked off to go check the surrounding area and make sure nothing had changed, no hostile flora or fauna, no changes in climate.
Murderbot was stomping through a natural underground spring and looping back towards the team when it heard metal scrape haphazardly against stone and something cracked and splintered loudly.
It took off sprinting.
The pod was open.
Everybody was visibly startled. Dr. Bharadwaj had dropped her tools and jumped back. Gurathin and Ratthi were watching the pod with wide eyes and tense limbs. Mensah looked over at Murderbot as it skidded to a stop, energy weapons at the ready.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface of the stasis pod, starting from the spot where Dr. Bharadwaj had been taking a third core sample. Parts of the pod had fractured and collapsed in on itself, and Murderbot ran a quick series of scans.
"The lifeform is still alive and in deep stasis," It confirmed and the team let out a collective breath of relief.
Gurathin leaned forward, taking a half step and peering towards the pod with a bit of a frown.
"There's no hardware that I can see," He observed, and Murderbot felt its own eyebrows crease. The threat assessment module didn't seem to know what to make of any of the data, so it sent it to the bottom of the priority list.
"I can see something!" Ratthi pointed out excitedly, taking a step towards the fractured maybe-stasis-pod.
"No airborn toxins detected," It announced, because opening a strange old container never ended well in the media.
"There really is something in there," Ratthi marveled, getting even closer, "I can see what looks like a hand."
"A hand?" Dr. Bharadwaj echoed as she picked up her coring device and stowed it back in her pack.
"What are the chances it's an alien?" He asked, stopping at the very edge of the maybe-stasis pod.
It didn't even bother to try and formulate a retort.
"If it's stasis has been disrupted, it may be in need of medical attention," Mensah finally spoke up, bringing Ratthi back to a more realistic scientific level of thought instead of whatever fantastical alien discovery dreams he'd been getting himself lost in.
"Extricating it from the pod improperly is liable to cause more damage than leaving it there," It pointed out and Gurathin huffed a sound of what might have been begrudging agreement.
"We can't just leave it here!" Ratthi argued, whipping his head around.
"Nobody's proposing we do, we just need to go about it correctly," Mensah said placatingly. "Why don't we work on getting a better idea of what we're dealing with first, then go from there."
Ratthi frowned briefly but then shrugged it right off and leaned over the pod, putting on gloves and starting to lift a piece of the fragmented material off. He carefully put it in a specimen bag and set it to the side, then repeated the process with other fragments, clearly trying to get a better look at whatever might be inside while the rest of the team went about categorizing the scene.
That was, until he jumped back and clutched one of his gloved hands to his chest with a yelp.
"What happened?" Mensah asked sharply.
He held up his hand, where blood was dripping from a cleanly sliced gash along his wrist, dripping down his forearm .
Despite the injury, he grinned.
"It's alive,"
"Moron," Gurathin muttered and shook his head
"Ratthi," Mensah's tone wasn't unkind, but it was stern and warning.
"It cut me somehow," He admitted, then rushed to follow it up, "But that means it's alive and apparently coming out of stasis naturally,"
Gurathin muttered a string of colorful curses and immediately got in contact with the base while Murderbot rushed forward and pushed Ratthi away from the maybe-pod.
The sight inside the pod was strange, a mixture of limbs and rubble and metal. It pried back a large piece of the fractured pod and upon moving it aside, realized that the lifeform inside was startlingly humanoid, and unconcious. Barely breathing, slow heartbeat, it had seemingly sunk back into stasis.
There was an oblong piece of sharp metal still clutched loosely in it's right hand, spotted with Ratthi's blood.
Mensah appeared over Murderbots shoulder when it made no further moves. When she saw it, she hummed thoughtfully then looked over at Murderbot.
"Do you think you can safely extricate her and bring her back to base?" She asked, "It appears we might have two beings in need of medical care,"
It looked back down at the unconcious being, made a few more assessments about the state of the maybe-pod and the humanoid within and then nodded.
"Alright," Mensah said resolutely, "Let's go,"
—
"All of her scans read as augmented human," Overse explained to the gathered team.
They were all gathered in the medical quarters, the humanoid, well, human, laid out on the table. It, or she, it supposed, was still in a state of stasis that Overse couldn't entirely explain. The team was clearly trying not to crowd her, in the event that she did wake up, but they were doing a miserable job of hiding their curiosity.
"Her DNA doesn't match any of the databases I've tested it against, even familially." Murderbot added, not allowing its focus to stray from her.
She'd already shown that she wasn't afraid to attack when backed into a corner, and they couldn't know how she'd react when she woke up, so it had assigned itself the task of preventing her from hurting anyone else.
Overse had checked out Ratthi's wound, then cleaned and repaired it. Thankfully, no contamination had been introduced by the metal, and it was a sharp, clean cut, making it easy to repair.
That was the next strange thing about this human. Her augments.
Even Gurathin had thought they were bizzare.
Giant birdlike wings emerged from her back, presently wrapped tightly around herself like a blanket of interlocking metal plates. Scans had revealed that the metal moorings and scaffolding went deep into her body, connected all throughout the muscle and bone of her back and shoulders. Metal and mechanics could be picked out wrapping all the way up her spine, into her brain, scattered across her entire skeleton, burrowed into her being.
It had seen heavy augments before. Hell, it was a construct, made of more machinery than organic tissue, but this was another type of strange. It didn't recognize any of the interfacing. There was no imbedded input port, no visual interface, nothing typical of augmented humans.
"She doesn't have typical augments," It finally said with a frown on its face that it hadn't intended to make, "I can't tap her feed, and if I try to connect to the tech that is there I get what might be best comparable to a human migraine,"
Gurathin grimaced and nodded. He'd made the same mistake.
"Her tech is either ancient or foreign, but it's non-compatible." He agreed, side-eyeing her on the table.
"Do we know how she ended up in the stasis pod?" Mensah asked, tilting her head a degree to the side.
"It wasn't a stasis pod," Murderbot said resolutely.
In reality, it was only 87% sure of that fact, because certainly there could have been tech that deteriorated, or foreign tech that it didn't have in its education modules, or one of a couple other outlandish theories that it had pulled from media plots, but they were statistically unlikely.
"Why don't we just ask her when she wakes up?" Ratthi asked, gesturing his unbandaged hand towards the still unconcious human.
"She tried to kill you," It retorted.
"She did not, she barely nicked me," He shot back.
"There was a lot of blood," Overse mentioned, holding her hands up in surrender when Ratthi frowned at her in betrayal.
"If it wasn't a stasis pod, what the hell was it?" Gurathin asked, the permanent crease between his brows etching deeper. "A coffin?"
"Coffin's are archaic," Ratthi scoffed, then perked up, "We could have the first real documented case of a zombie alien on our hands,"
"Not an alien," Overse pointed out.
"Whose side are you on?"
"But you don't have an issue with the zombie thing," Gurathin muttered.
Threat Assessment spiked and it pulled it to the forefront, tuning out the rest of their bickering about fictional dead creatures. Upon reviewing the footage that had caused the spike, it blinked the visual display out of view and held a hand out.
"Step back from the table," It instructed, then tacked on a belated "Please."
"What is it?" Mensah was the first to speak as they all took several steps back.
"She's listening," It sounded far more ominous than it had meant it, like there would have been a dramatic score in the background if this survey was the subject of a media drama. "She's awake."
"Her vitals are still so slow, it's reading as stasis." Overse said as she checked the readouts.
"I can control the frequency with which I breathe and alter my heartrate," Murderbot reminded them.
"We believe you, it's just strange." Mensah added, still watching the human with concern.
"She might be listening, but how do we know she even understands us? There's hundreds of languages in the galaxy." Ratthi mentioned.
In response, Murderbot pulled up an old universal translator software it had stored, in the event that they needed it. They wouldn't, because she was listening, and had reacted to their words.
"We have no intention of harming you," It announced, watching as a muscle twitched near imperceptibly in her jaw, "We need to know if you are awake and aware of your surroundings."
Silence.
"So clinical," Ratthi muttered beneath his breath, then spoke up, "You're in our medical station being taken care of, we found your stasis pod, you're safe here."
Further silence. Another nearly invisible movement that it would have missed were it not explicitly designed for observation.
Her eyes slid open.
Overse balked and checked the vitals again. Still slow but beginning to rise. While she likely wasn't an active threat at the moment, there was no telling what she might do when she got to a healthier state.
"Hello there," Mensah's voice was kind, welcoming, "I'm Dr. Mensah and this is my team. What is your name?"
Her dark eyes darted immediately to the source of the voice, then around at the medical station, the other gathered team members. She soaked up information like a sponge, her gaze never staying in one place for more than a fraction of a second.
Then she looked at Murderbot and her eyes narrowed just a fraction. Strange, but before it could analyze what that might mean, she was already looking back at Mensah.
Her voice was raspy and barely audible. It had to turn up its auditory input to even make out the words.
"Asset designation: Firebird."
That was even stranger.