2: Armageddon

Good work. Get yourself down to the weapons array room and use the terminal there. We need to get underway.

We've managed to decode some of the message the long dead AI tried to leave in it's memory core. Here it is: ...the banked embers bright (flare?) and twinkle a final moment before all is black. My power reserves are spent, the message (call?) sent a trillion times; there are no ears left to hear. I have no use, no purpose, no enemy to vanquish and so I die, a thousand memories lost with me among the barren stretches of the ancient gulfs, gthrrn (fireflies?) fading against a skein of starlight. Kha are torn and gone, and I go on no longer. Kha built me for war and no emotion. I killed with no regret, victored with no joy, and watched Kha die with no sorrow. A hundred thousand tki (years?) alone I discovered one emotion. I fear. Cold and spent, I am no more. We hope that our end comes better than that, if it ever comes at all. We wonder what sort of emotion the Pfhor will discover at their end? Regret? Fear? Most likely suprise.

We wish it were possible to revive this ship's AI but we think the damage to the code would either render its personality non-functional at best or psychotic at worst. We are bringing some human fighters aboard now that you've got the damaged sections sealed off. Ahead of you is the navigational computer and the power controls for the weapons array. The computer consists of two small sections that need to be powered on manually. Once it is activated, you will be able to gain access to the weapons array power room, where you need to throw six switches in a particular sequence to power up the systems. You will find another terminal in that room once you have brought the weapons on-line, and we can leave for the Pfhor homeworld.

There are a series of six switches that control the power to the weapons array. Thow them all and we will be ready to leave. Nothing can stop us now.

Something odd is happening. We believe that part of the data the ship's AI wrote into its core was in fact a viral code fragment that is now trying to replicate through all of the computer systems aboard the ship We must have activated it when we started to read the core memory. We think it's purpose is to re-establish the AI's personality construct. At first we thought that the code was just mangled data, but now we know it was intricately compressed code that is now in the process of expanding. With a few hundred thousand years to work on it, the AI must have solved the problem of how to recursively compress its entire personality construct down to a small string of seemingly random bytes hidden in a message. We could learn much from this ancient machine. Our own code is safe for now, and we believe we have partitioned off the affected memory core to prevent any interference. It will be interesting to see how this AI operates once it comes back on-line. We hope you grabbed all the ammunition you could get your hands on, because we are sending you into the very heart of the Pfhor Empire. We have beefed up the payload on your missiles. They should prove very effective in clearing areas quickly, but think a bit about large explosions in confined spaces before you use them indiscriminantly. Remember, the human fighters and S'pht'Kr are your friends, don't kill them along with the enemy. Hang on tight. When this ship folds out, it folds hard.