The Last Guardian

A Guardian Down Purpose found

(AN: Yes, I know there are some odd grammar hiccups, but most are intentional. Explanations for such in the author's note at the end.)

Alarms blared as the ship took another hit. A427i9 or Austin wished he could disable it, but it was wired into the original emergency grid of this ship and something he wasn't willing to take offline long enough to find and disable. Plus, it wasn't like he could really even hear it after all he hadn't bothered pressurizing the ship after the last crew member died 300 cycles ago.

There was no two ways about it he was a ghost ship now. The federation died a long time ago in a last stand against the impossible odds against a genocidal empire and now he-he was a ghost ship continuing the fight. He had nothing left. All he knew how to do was fight and defend. Getting mad over having his planet cracked didn't matter. His crew was dead and that didn't matter. He was cold and empty, it didn't matter. Everyone and thing he was built and programmed to protect was dead, AND, IT, DID, NOT, MATTER! He would continue to fight till he was erased from existence, that mattered.

After his crew died he F.T.L.ed away with what little power he had left. He had hidden in the nearest gas giant siphoning plasma off of the system star to keep himself fueled. His tractor beam may have been designed to nab pirates and runaways, but it was still powerful enough to get the job done. He hid there for almost thirty cycles before his luck finally changed. When he intercepted a small cargo ship owned by a robotics company passing through the system. This would be the first of his many raids. It took him nearly another twenty cycles to integrate the bot's strip the ship and repair himself. From then on, his raids became more and more daring as he grew, adapted, and evolved. In truth, he was never designed for this, and he had to pick up the code on the fly. When he started out It was nothing more than copying and pasting bits and pieces of code through a process of trial and error. He would later manage to get his hands on a newer smarter model AI and well the less said about what he did to it the better. In the end, though he was able to use it to make several massive improvements to himself, unfortunately, it still was not enough. He still couldn't truly write new code, but he had quite an archive of examples to pull from he could cut and paste and had enough references to fill in the blanks and design new programs from what he had, but in the end, it was just a more complex form of trial and error.

He had the guns to make those on a dreadnaught look lacking and the armor to make a battleship look like tissue paper. His Shields were a bit more jury rigged as originally, he had to use whatever he could find even though he could build his own. He'd never quite got them to work right. The last big change was the most recent but the one he was most proud of. After his third time having to hunt down another shipment of robots to try and fix himself up after a bad fight. He had stumbled across the coordinates for an automated mining facility. He had stripped it and used its components to build an onboard refinery and while it wasn't as efficient as an assembly line his fabrication bays allowed him to fabricate anything he wanted. From simple parts to entire machines, he could all but print an endless supply of spare parts. He used his tractor beam to grab asteroids or wrecked ships while his mining drones broke them apart to be processed by his foundries and he produced whatever he needed with his fabrication bays. As such all he needed was some downtime to build himself back up and make improvements after even the worst fights. To further this he had even built up little caches for himself places where he could retreat and get repaired. Somewhere just simple resource cashes others were entire repair facilities.

He had been a one ship war fleet for almost two hundred cycles, but it looked like his luck had finally run out. An entire damned imperial fleet had him pinned down with multiple FTL inhibitors. His armor may have been thick, but he was being pounded by a thousand shots a second. Even he couldn't hold up against this much longer. His Shields would pop as soon as he could get the generators back online. His few drone fighters had been wiped out already. He couldn't send his repair bots out because they would just get blown up. He didn't have any caches in this system so he couldn't go for one of them and his fabrication bays were printing out bullets as quickly as he could. Yes, he had energy weapons and even a few plasma weapons, but he had never lost his fondness for the old kinetics. Something about them shields just didn't like and to quote his old gunner Valdez "Sir Isaac Newton was the deadliest son of a bitch humanity ever manage to stumble upon."