Wildwing surveyed the wreckage of the Aerowing. It had taken the effort of all eight of them, but they had gotten the fighter, piece by piece, back to the hangar. It was laid out before him, on the floor, in roughly the arrangement that it should have been. The sheered port wing was laid alongside. The crumpled remains of the landing gear were carefully tucked by the nose. The stands in the stadium above were still destroyed, but with all trace of the craft removed, they could turn its repair over to Phil's capable hands.

He could not gauge the damage objectively. Rather, he could only circle around the craft’s history. Canard told him it was the last of its line. It was vital. They couldn't lose it.

They couldn’t keep losing.

Tanya stood nearby, hunched over the enclosure that housed the navigation computer, retrieved from the cockpit of the wreckage. She had hooked it up to the building power, and was cautiously preparing to boot it.

“We've brought it back from worse,” she assured him.

“Have we,” Wildwing grumbled.

“Oh sure!” she chirped. “Remember the creeper vine that caught it?”

“How did this happen? I thought we had safeguarded everything after last time.”

“We did,” she agreed. “From-from radio waves. Because that was his av-avenue of attack last time. Everything in the base is either shielded or encrypted.”

Wildwing gestured to the crumpled fuselage before him. “So, what is this?”

“Lets find out,” Tanya said, throwing a switch and booting the nav computer, scanning the lines of code that read out on a display.

“It survived?” Wildwing asked, approaching the console.

“These things are built for int-interplanetary combat, a thirty meter toss isn't going to dent it.”

Wildwing nodded, feeling slightly encouraged. Most of the Aerowing could be rebuilt with materials sourced from Earth, but its software would be too complex to replicate. If the computer still worked, it may be only a matter of sourcing aluminum and titanium to rebuild the rest. Tanya did not touch the console keys, only read the display as it scrolled.

“Well,” she concluded, “there's your answer.”

Wildwing shook his head, unable to decipher whatever it was she saw.

“It's corrupted,” she explained, “Complete random noise. There's no operating system, no command line, no diagnostic.”

“It's scrambled?” Wildwing said. “Permanently?”

“I have backups in storage, physically locked and isolated. I can wipe and reload it.”

“The crash did that?”

“No, I'd say this was prior. The engines never fired because the se-sequence that contains that command was already alphabet soup,” she leaned on the console, looking at the keys instead of the display, drumming on her thigh.

“What are you thinking?” Wildwing prompted.

“I am…. More willing to entertain your theory that Droid has gotten in here somehow. These systems aren't magic, they run on rules. You have a limited n-number of ways to interact with them. We removed radio waves. It must be another route. The slingshot is monitored by Drake One, so maybe it was triggered through a connection to the internet. The Aerowing though?” She looked at the pile of debris. “The only way to get into the nav computer is phys-physical contact. Its a combat hazard if it can be easily tampered with. It's d-designed to be inaccessible to anyone other than on board crew. Something got inside the cockpit without us knowing.”

He nodded severely. He did not like the implications. They had dedicated so much time into the Pond’s design, to keep everything out. The Aerowing’s launch system was relatively benign, compared to many of the things within the base that could be weaponized.

Wildwing considered again the crushed compartments of the fighter, and then gazed around the hangar proper, into its dark corners and high ceiling, the floor of the arena a hundred feet over their heads. “How does the loudest man on the planet get in here without any of our surveillance noticing?”

“I don’t know,” Tanya admitted. “It seems unlikely he would just tamper with one system and then quietly leave.”

“We’re going to have to go through everything,” Wildwing groaned. The reality of the situation was Tanya was going to have to go through everything, as the only person really qualified to inspect each piece of tech. He would, at best, be able to lessen some of the workload by assigning other people to inspect the non-mechanical portions of the Pond. Mallory would inventory the armory, Duke could inspect access points.

Tanya still hadn’t touched the console, and instead watched the scrolling lines of code before her, eyes darting through it, perhaps looking for anything legible, or a pattern that he was unable to discern. They stood in silence, for several long minutes, until finally he decided he would have to interrupt her pondering, else she may never remember that he was there.

She looked up at him, brow knit together in thought.

“What is it?” he asked.

“He shouldn’t have been able to do this,” Tanya said.

“It’s not your fault,” Wildwing assured.

“No, no that’s, that’s not what I mean,” she shook her head. “This computer has the strongest encryption p-pro-protocols Puckworld’s military had to offer. I don’t think I would be able to crack it. Droid shouldn’t be able to do anything close with human tech. It would take a human m-machine longer than the lifespan of the universe to brute force its way in, and the nav would brick itself in defense before it came close.”

Wildwing looked doubtfully at the scrambled readout. “Maybe he got another source. Alien tech seems to fall on this planet constantly.”

Tanya sighed. “It could be simpler than raw computational power. Maybe… maybe we make sure Nosedive didn’t write down the launch codes somewhere,” she suggested, a half smile on her beak.

“I think Nosedive is avoiding me,” Wildwing said, and then immediately wished that he hadn’t. Tanya was not without understanding of interpersonal conflicts, only she often did not care to hear them while she was working. She found them annoying, a waste of time. She was not necessarily wrong.

But she surprised him, by giving a loud, single laugh. “Do you suppose its because of something he’s done, or because of something he’s planning to do?”

He looked away, embarrassed, pretending at sudden deep interest in the wreckage. “I think this one might have been my fault.”

“Ah,” she said. “You should probably address that then.”

“Probably,” he agreed.