But even if she hadn't decided that a Construct wouldn't be quite so easily distracted, the idea of intimacy with the gunner had been oddly unsettling. That was the Blank Slate's territory, one she defended with surprising ferocity even in defiance of the Dormant's mission. To the point where it was easier to simply work around her than fight her on it.
No, better to simply leave and have her reasoning for doing so remain a mystery; the guy was effectively five years old, with almost no experience of women or the outside world. For all he knew it was normal for Lana to sneak off in the middle of the night and go sleep alone in her room.
Which suited her purposes just fine.
She returned to her room just long enough to retrieve the device she'd scavenged from the ERI facility. Or technically devices, which she'd then cobbled together for her purpose and concealed in an EM-shielded case until she had an opportunity to use it. She'd found time to do it while the gunner was recovering from his injury, as well as taking advantage of him being distracted by guarding the companion after the entire thing with her syncing against the captain's wishes.
And hadn't that been an unrecovered atomic. The Dormant would have to dig around and find out more about this Caretaker upgrade and the hidden HAE facility, so she could include the intel in the next report she got out to her handlers.
A problem she could solve with the device she'd just built.
It wasn't exactly an uncommon gadget, just a micro rift generator through which a specialized communicator sent super compressed data packets. Even the smallest and newest colony world and most ships and space facilities had at least one; they were usually kept active full time, or for ships as much as possible between rift jumps, for constant allnet access. The higher quality ones were so efficient that multiple people could access the allnet through them for full immersion dives.
The Last Stand's device, as far as she knew, was kept in the captain's safe, considered too risky to keep unsecured on a pirate ship with a bounty of millions of chits on its head. Even assuming she could somehow get to it past Aiden and Ali, it was likely rigged with some sort of alert system.
But that was no longer a concern, since she'd taken this one from the ERI facility. It had required a bit of work to electromagnetically shield it so it wouldn't show up on the Last Stand's sensors, and a bit more work to slave it to a sophisticated enough AI, also taken from ERI, to calculate rifts after every jump.
But now it was complete. All she had to do was attach it to the ship's external sensor array, which had a blind spot directly against the hull at its base, and activate it. Then, assuming she'd done her job right, which she always did, every time the ship jumped the device would open a micro rift within the EM shielding, where it couldn't be detected, and connect to the allnet.
At that point it would act as a beacon, regularly feeding the Last Stand's location to a dead drop her handlers had given her, as well as extrapolated information about its next projected jumps based on location. Lana could possibly sneak updates to it as well, if she overheard where Aiden planned for them to go or she managed to snoop out the calculations one of the others were making for the next rift jump.
She could possibly even send warning ahead in time for her handlers to prepare an ambush, using a more powerful and farther reaching rift hub. They'd also be able to trace the ship's steps to deal with this HAE facility the Caretaker was leading them to.
Knock out two targets with one atomic.
Once she had the device in place, one of the others would have to physically go out on the hull and clap eyes on it, recognize what they were looking at, and then manually remove and deactivate it. That seemed unlikely, especially since she could volunteer for any EVA duties and be the one who “checked” the sensor array.
Unless of course the array itself was damaged at some point, and then someone who knew how to fix it would need to be sent out. But the Dormant supposed she could always get the Blank Slate to work on learning to make those repairs, so they'd let her do it.
Although to be fair, if she played her cards right she wouldn't have to do any of that.
Which was why her next stop after her quarters was the Ishivi's lab, where the ERI combat androids still waited. The companion had finished reprogramming one of them before she'd been updated with Caretaker protocols; now that she was no longer considered trustworthy, it seemed as if the captain was leery of letting her reprogram the others.
Probably a wise move, on his part. Although it meant Lana would only have one to work with until the others were reprogrammed, since if she tampered with the others the work would immediately be noticed when whoever did the job got to them. That would probably be the gunner, since the captain seemed to distrust the two Ishivi as much as he did a strange and potentially hostile AI.
“Fix 1, I have a task,” she said imperiously. The android obediently followed her out of the lab and down the corridor into the airlock's changing room.
She'd already disabled the security measures in this part of the ship, so an alert wouldn't go off when she opened the airlock and sent the android out to install her device. Although she'd temporarily have to disable tracking on Fix, and spoof both the external and internal sensors while she worked, so nobody would wonder why she and the android were in the airlock in the first place, or more importantly why Fix had gone outside without reporting
