>>5559085Riding high on your victory, you allow a small hint of your pleasure to filter through the link to the ship - enough to encourage and positively affirm its acquiescence to your request. You hope the same rules for training stray dogs back home apply to unruly voidships and you aren’t just undoing all your hard work. You feel a wave of exhaustion begin to peak despite the fact you’ve been barely exerting yourself. You're definitely going to need to train your mind for this sort of thing in the future.
You take a deep, steadying breath and force your wavering concentration to hold on to your command link - trying to ascertain if your voidship’s intelligence is sentient enough to recognise your praise. The blissful joy you receive back through the connection is almost too much, and you desperately try to constrict the link lest you be overwhelmed. Like an overenthusiastic and eager to please puppy, the intelligence batters itself against your mental link and you decide to throw it a bone if only to keep it at bay.
You quickly put together a mental image of the damage report you received earlier on the bridge, adding an impression of needing a status update - and press it through to the exuberant ego. Or at least you think that's what you did, the abstract manner of communication still very new to you and you can’t be sure exactly what got through to it. Nevertheless, the battering against your mental walls abates and you perceive only hints of deep concentration through your rapidly fraying connection. Your mental fatigue finally catches up with you and your tie to the ship’s brain snaps - fortunately not in a violent manner as was the case in many of your previous encounters.
You sigh, and stagger to your knees, barely able to keep your eyes open. You’re slightly disappointed with your mental stamina but you know that like a muscle, it takes time to build up strength.
<span class="mu-s">PING</span> You jerk in surprise as your comm emits a message tone - a data packet opening on your visor’s HUD without any sort of input or acknowledgement on your part.
What you see before you is a strange amalgamation of a standard ship’s status report and a drawing more likely to be found on a kitchen fridge than anywhere else. It seems the Pee Dee has annotated the original damage report by… hand? How would that even… You shake yourself slightly and focus on deciphering the hieroglyphics. At least the power section seems to have been left largely alone. If you’re interpreting this correctly, and that’s a significant ‘if’, it appears that the void core has suffered no ill use from its kick-start procedure and is rapidly building to its running temperature.
