On the Run Again

The new ship was nearly ready when Evan returned, something had changed about him but we didn't have time to stop to figure out what he had done. He helped us finish everything and once it was ready Ambri, Nira and I boarded and took it for a quick test run. The drives seemed to be fine, though we would know how well they worked only when we performed our next jump. We double checked our food supply and virtual world garden, which would hopefully grow quickly and provide us with more food during our flight. We knew it was dangerous, but we desperately needed to reach the planet this thing had come from and try to determine how to stop it. Once we had finished Nasero informed us that within 10 minutes the ship would break through our star shield, which meant that the power supplies were going to go critical and could cause the star to explode if we didn't relieve the strain on them. So with no more delays we left the system, purposely approaching the ship before changing course and jumping. It took only a moment for the ship to stop its assault and pursue us, it knew we were the ones it wanted to overtake. Lucky for us our drives seemed to have improved enough, we felt no gravitational pressure on the ship which meant we were staying far enough ahead. Nasero reported that the power supplies were now cooling down and the shield was still strong enough to protect the system, Evan would go to the star base and work on improving the output of the system.

Once everything was repaired Evan then had time to report his findings to us. I was very anxious to hear what he had discovered. As it turned out we did have the cube that was the one that contained all the research on the cubes themselves. It had been the cube that Evan came from, the original one and we had it ever since capturing the planet ship, we just needed to extract it from the rest of the stored mass. Evan had taken the time to have the cube restore itself with all its information and then rejoin with it, though not to become the cube again but instead to get all the technology and ability he had before but now in his humanoid form. It changed his density but the wonder of the cube technology had made it possible for him to retain his shape. He was still going through all the information, for it was a tremendous amount to absorb all at once within the smaller frame he had constructed for himself, but he was quickly figuring out a way to use the technology that the entity had used to create its ship against it. The cubes all had a basic programming and signal that they would respond to, no matter who gave the signal. The programming had been overcome in him when he was no longer a part of the cube, and after rejoining with the cube he was able to disable this particular function, making him immune to the same manipulations. The signals would allow someone to change the shape of the cube to suit them, which meant we didn't need to adapt to the cubes to dock but instead they could adapt to us. This also meant that with the right changes we could disable the ship that was chasing us, at least for a time. The only problem would be detecting the ship long enough to be able to send the signal, but first we would want to see if we could disguise the signal and encrypt it so that it wouldn't figure out where or what we were doing to cause the problems it would have.