Remember that plan that I'd scrapped earlier? The one that involved me going into the cargo bay guns blazing? That was the new plan.
It didn't happen exactly like that, of course. What actually happened was, I stepped into the cargo bay and was hit by about a dozen blaster bolts at once. The belt-full of FAST units I'd put into my belt all burnt up. I then, one by one, vaporized the robot guards.
I was surprised that it hadn't hit me before, really. All of the robots I'd dispatched took exactly one shot to kill, provided, of course, that one shot actually hit them somewhere. Why would that be the case? Because they had no shielding, of course.
When I'd activated all the ship's systems, I hadn't noticed it missing. When I was fighting or scavenging from robots, I was a bit distracted to see the big picture. It wasn't until the robots made no reaction to my own shields that I realized they didn't possess any themselves. Against all probability, the Ulix who constructed the robots appeared to not possess shielding technology.
The robots didn't even understand it. They all fired upon me simultaneously and then assumed me destroyed. That's the other reason people tend to think that robots are dumb. When a situation comes up that they've never seen before and can't explain, they just sit there. In this case, they sat there and waited for me to blow them up. For all I knew, they would have let me walk right into my ship, but I didn't want to take the chance of them recognizing that me moving was a sign I wasn't dead and deciding to shoot at me again. If they were going to take anything as a sign of my continued existence, it was going to be me blasting them to bits.
I didn't waste any time; for all I knew they'd called in reinforcements. I got in my ship, blasted through the doors of the docking bay with the weaponry - it would have probably been easier to ask my computer to slice into theirs and open them automatically, but that would not have given me the visceral relief of blasting my way out - and got the hell away from the Messenger from the Past.
That was a few days ago. According to my sadly outdated maps, the empire could go on for another few months. Or less. Or, if they were as off as I suspected, more. As the maps had been made before the advent of the exodus of the Ulix, there was really no way to know. I'd just have to wait for the Border to show itself and then hope that I could find some way through again. I did it before by sleeping, it seemed, so that's how I intended to do it again.
Worst case scenario, I figured, if I was trapped in Ulix space forever, at least there were plenty of supplies.