Naysha had tried three more bodies that day, just to be certain. All of them had been refused.
So the Mekharan had to be alive. And living Mekharans did not cooperate.
In combat, they moved far too fast. They darted and weaved and twisted through space, never staying in one place for longer than a few seconds, and the System needed them to hold still long enough for a full scan to complete.
It was not a quick process. On Jalun, the full scan of a Rank 2 Mecha in a quiet hangar, with no one shooting at her and nothing moving at all, had taken several minutes. A living Mekharan in the middle of a battle would never give her that kind of time.
The few times she had managed to begin a scan, it had never finished.
She remembered one in particular, a Mekharan scout she had caught near the edge of the system about four months ago. It had been damaged in the fighting, one of its legs torn away, and it had been drifting slowly enough that she had managed to start the scan.
