by Tao Wong
When we do reach Mikito, we’re two-thirds of the way to the secondary engine chamber. It’s also here where we find the cause for the lack of opposition. Down a ten-foot-wide corridor, Mikito’s being swarmed by security drones, the robots crawling along the floor, the walls, and even the ceiling in their attempts to finish the Samurai. Ali’s floating beside her, just outside the range of her naginata, tossing lightning that jumps between assailants in his best attempt at backing her up. Most of the drones are two-legged, with a pair of smaller limbs near the hip that they use for either running or firing weapons while the upper two arms are just hands with sharp blades. A quick glance gives me their unimpressive stats.
Tier II Security Drones
Durability: 89/137
Abilities: Networked AI, self-repair, Link of Omniscience
In the pause while I take in the scene, three things happen. First, Mikito manages to destroy another three drones; second, four drone parts manage to pull themselves close enough to form up and weld themselves together; and lastly, Bolo rushes right past me, turning himself into a flipping hammer of doom. He hits the corridor at an angle, tearing upward and sideways so that he misses Mikito and nearly clips Ali while clearing the corpses of the drones. Each drone corpse that he hits is imbued with additional energy that explodes and showers all of us with molten metal.
“What the hell is that about?” I snarl.
A part of me wonders where the various Sect members are, but the rest of me is rushing down the corridor. The metal gunk slides right off my Soul Shield, but I’m not a fan of friendly fire. Since Bolo cleared one side, I take the other and open up a pathway with a simple Metal Wall spell, sending a tsunami of moving metal to clear the deck.
“They’re golems,” Bolo explains as he drops down from the upper deck where he ended up after his little display. “Mechanical golems, but golems nonetheless. So long as whoever is controlling them has Mana, they’ll keep reforming.”
“But not anymore.” I finish his thought, eyeing the pile of drone parts I shoved aside. Even now, I can see how parts of them are moving, my actions having put some pieces closer to one another. For a moment, I consider calling forth a Beacon of the Angels, wasteful as it might be. But between having to teleport the attack all the way in, the weird interference effect the hull has on Skills, and the size of my attack, I give it a miss. Instead, I switch to the simpler Inferno Strike spell, hosing the entire area in flames and destroying the enchanted circuitry.
“How much Mana do you have?” Bolo says after a minute of my blasting, the Dragon Lord leaning against the shaft of his hammer.
With the way I’m baking the entrance, none of the drone golems are successfully forming. Even the newcomers are coming apart before they can reach us, giving Mikito a break to recharge and regenerate.
“Not enough to keep this up forever,” I mutter.
In fact, eyeing my Mana, I’m down to less than a third. As an Erethran Guard, I have a higher base Intelligence score than a Dragon Knight, but Bolo has dedicated more of his free attributes to Intelligence, giving him a much higher Mana pool. But unlike him, I’ve dedicated a large amount of my attributes to Willpower. That keeps my Mana regeneration high, unlike Bolo, who relies on his passives. So when casting a low Mana cost per minute spell like this, I can keep it going much longer than Bolo can. That said, whoever is controlling the golems doesn’t seem to be running out either.
“They’re sharing the Mana cost. Security room, Mana drain consoles, and a single Golemancer would do the trick. Powerful, but single point of failure,” Ali reports back, having done some scanning of his own.
“Can we get to it?”
As if to answer my question, Bolo holds up his hammer, shrinking down the handle a little. “No more time. I’m going to punch us a way through.”
Bolo releases the hammer in an underhand throw, the hammer itself enlarging as it flies down the corridor. By the time it disappears into the orange-red flame of my handheld flamethrower spell, it covers half the corridor. I kill the spell, but I’m nowhere near as fast as Mikito, who has taken off behind the hammer.
“Hey, Leeroy, slow down!”
I run after the Samurai, wondering if this is how it feels to deal with me. A lot of my tactics follow old-school SWAT tactics that I’d read about after initial breach—move and keep moving. Once you have them on the backfoot, you want to keep going.
Bolo follows, using gauntleted fists to punch through the few drones that manage to get themselves in his way. It must be quite a sight, Bolo in his medieval plate and scale armor, ornate helmeted headdress and gauntleted fist, running alongside me in my high-tech powered armor and sword while he punches out the lights of semi-sentient droids. In the lead, Mikito comes to a halt, her jaw dropping as she stares at the creature holding the T-intersection.
“I thought it was too easy,” I say, skidding to a halt beside Mikito.
The creature before us looks like a giant squid, floating in midair off gravitic propulsors. Its tentacles are wrapped around the hilt and body of Bolo’s hammer, slowly rotating the entire thing around to face us. Against the floor, I spot multiple crushed tentacles slowly reforming and flowing back toward the squidroid, making the entire thing look like an advanced version of the T-1000.
“Interesting. It’s not a Master Work, but it’s strong enough to block my attacks,” Bolo says, eyes roving over the creature. “It seems unfinished.”
“You call that unfinished?” I protest.
In reply, Bolo raises his hand and calls his hammer back, tearing off tentacles that attempt to stop the Skill activation. The numerous tentacles begin their slow squirm back while Bolo catches his hammer in one hand. If not for the fact that his Mana took a noticeable drop, I’d never have guessed that the simple-seeming action actually required a significant investment.
“At a guess, boy-o, it’s someone’s advancement Quest item,” Ali says. All around the squidroid, blue outlines appear, most of them no larger than my hand. Even as I spot them, they shift and morph. “Those portions are not using the liquid-metal. If you can hit them, you’d be able to do real damage.”
“Fire then?”
“Won’t work,” Mikito says. “The metal is resistant to heat, cold, and most other elements. Area effect attacks will be blocked by the tentacles, unless you can fill the entire corridor. And even then…”
One of Mikito’s advantages is that all the time in the arena means her breadth of knowledge in fighting has grown wider than mine. It’s why when she corrects me, I don’t even try to argue. So unless I can cover the entire area—and that mostly means a Firestorm or Beacon of the Angels—dealing with the squid might take even more time.
“Great. Suggestions? Also, why isn’t it attacking us?” I say.
“Behind us,” Bolo replies, turning his head at the same time. “The golem drones are reforming and gathering. And I have view of multiple other sentients incoming.”
“Delay tactics.”
There are ways to clear the corridor, if I really wanted to. Army of One would destroy and clear the squidroid and at least a few walls behind it. Not the main defensive wall around the engine room though—those, for obvious reasons, are significantly plated. Worse…
“If you haven’t noticed, the fight outside is getting worse. The battlecruisers weren’t able to take out the other Dimensional Smoother,” Bolo says. The Dragon Lord seems to be able to keep track of what is going on, unlike me.
“Thousand Hells.” I swing my blade a few times, sending a couple of Blade Strikes as a warning to the drone golems that continue to try to creep up from behind.
The squidroid continues to stare at us, unmoving and patient.
“Plan needs two down,” I say. We could still win this. Problem is, they haven’t used any of their Advanced Classes or any other hidden tricks. If we burn all our Mana getting past the distractions, we’re vulnerable to whatever traps they have within. Even if there aren’t, we still need to get off this
ship. “Can we do it with one down?”
“Not a chance.” Bolo hefts his hammer and swings it upward.
It extends, punching through the floor above and the one after that. The Dragon Lord looks upward then lets out a roar as he swings the hammer down, tearing through a few more metal struts as he impacts our own deck. And keeps going. He punches through about four before it stops.
The hammer is already shrinking to its normal size as Bolo reaches the edge of the hole. The Dragon Lord is fast, making a decision to not continue the mission that quickly. “Coming?”
Bolo drops, not bothering to wait for my answer.
“Go, John,” Mikito says, stepping forward to fend off the tentacles that have suddenly woken up and are trying to tear us apart.
“Mikito—”
“I serve.”
I want to argue, but Bolo’s hole is closing. Rather than waste more time, I jump down, falling through all six floors before we impact the hull. In the time I took to argue with Mikito, Bolo seems to have torn through to the hull, where he’s busy attempting to dent it and make our way out.
“You going to help?”
“One second.” I look up, waiting for Mikito’s falling form. As the hole begins to close further, I throw a series of Blade Strikes at the opposite end of the hole from her form to ensure she’s still got a way to drop.
Long seconds pass before the Samurai finally drops down toward us, closely followed by the drone-golems and a slew of metallic-silver moving tentacles. In the minimap, Ali’s adding a whole bunch of other red dots for our living opponents. Seems like they’re done stalling.
It’d be rude to not greet our guests, so I waste a bunch of Mana by calling down a Beacon of the Angels, letting it originate a floor above where we were and come all the way to us.
A magnificent sight, the blinding white, searing mass of energy that boils skin, melts metal, and crisps enchanted cloth. The security personnel manage to mostly dodge the blast, unlike the metal droids. The attack tears through the struts, hammering the hull on this side, and catching all of us in the blast radius as well. My Soul Shield cracks, as does my armor’s shield and the contingency ring’s. The armor does its bit to reduce the damage even as I cook myself. Mikito’s fought with me long enough to know what was coming and is crouched low, using a last-ditch protective shell enchantment to keep the damage off her.
Under the effects of my attack, Bolo is enraged even further. He swings so hard that he punches through the damaged hull plating, blasting us and our surviving assailants into space as explosive decompression takes effect. Sadly, squidroid doesn’t come with us. My last glimpse of the monster droid is it gripping the edges of the tear with its tentacles. In the midst of us shooting away from the Dimensional Smoother and into the waiting arms of Dornalor as he swoops in, I can hear Bolo’s shouts.
“Dragon’s tooth! You’re insane, Paladin!”
What was the joke? If it’s insane and it works, it’s not really insanity?
***
Once we break away from the firing range of the Smoother and battleships, things get a lot less hectic. I let myself drop out of the weaponry console, rubbing the back of my neck in pain as my overheated neural link sends shards of electronic pain straight into my brain. Even my increased pain resistance is doing little to stop it from aching, which gives you an idea about how bad it is.
“That should be it,” Dornalor says. “The AI should be able to handle the rest of the shots.”
I grunt, shaking my head in amusement. One thing I’ve learnt over the past few years is that what they call AIs aren’t exactly that—it’s a bad translation because we don’t have the right word for it. Most AIs—not counting the X-23s and others of their ilk—aren’t really sentient. They have extremely sophisticated base programs and a bunch of fuzzy-logic learning programs, allowing them to tackle unique problems and yes, grow. KIM, my ex-settlement AI, is a great example of that kind of program—powerful, but limited by programming. Given enough time and resources, KIM could gain actual sentience, but the mechanics of it under the System requires her to inhabit a specific type of body to do so. No jumping from System settlement core to the next, she actually needs a specific kind of core. For all that, her ability to emulate sentience can trick most of us.
Perhaps one of the biggest differences between a non-sentient, or limited, AI and a fully enabled one is the use of Mana. The X-23s, fully powered sentient AIs, and their like have a Mana pool. Droids, no matter how powerful, are unable to access Mana. They might be System-registered, but they have no Mana pool. Once a program gains full sentience, they gain a Mana pool. Or perhaps it’s vice versa—the ability to have a Mana pool allows these AIs to become fully sentient.
In either case, there’s still discussion about the morality and the issue of free will among AIs. That these programs are constrained to serve, even that certain types of information or knowledge is barred to them by the System and their programming, is a cause for concern among certain Galactics. It’s a discussion that has on occasion gotten violent, especially when the Systemers get involved. To the Systemers, since the AIs aren’t System-registered—in the sense that they’ve got full status sheets—they obviously can’t be sentient. And, not surprisingly for a Galactic-wide religion, there are certain fanatical groups who will enforce their beliefs. Right now, we’re at the point where the cultural swing leans toward the fact that limited-AIs aren’t really sentient and thus aren’t really slaves. They have no soul to feel hurt by being constrained by programming or the System.
Still, I can’t help but worry about it. Maybe it’s one too many bad sci-fi movies, but it’s why I haven’t picked up a personal AI of my own. Even if, in certain areas, they’re much more useful than my lazy-ass Spirit.
“Shields are recharged enough,” I say in agreement, cracking my neck again in a vain attempt to make my head stop hurting. “Sorry about the rear cannons.”
“I’d rather lose them than the ship,” Dornalor says. “That was an appropriate time to pull out the stops.”
I chuckle, recalling the swarm of fighters that arrived once we broke far enough away from the Dimensional Smoother. They were surprised when our point defenses suddenly managed to reach them, burning away their thrusters and sending many of them to the scrap heap. After that, I’d used everything I could to keep the ship in one piece as we fled. Even then, the ship’s more damaged than when we first arrived.
“Now what?” I say, eyeing the glowing damage reports that crisscross the board. From an internal camera, I watch as Bolo stomps back into the ship, returning from his excursion to the top where he’d been tossing his hammer around like a living wrecking ball.
“We go back, get this fixed. Let the Politicians do their thing, drag in more people. And we do it again, except this time, we come back with most everyone,” Dornalor says, shaking his head. “They should have done that the first time.”
“But no one wants to get their ship shot up.” I shake my head at how selfish most sentients were. Oh, there are exceptions—exceptional races even. Though most of those races never went far from their home planets. Being entirely communal and unselfish has a tendency to backfire on you, especially when the Galaxy is out to get you. “Regretting not running?”
Dornalor shakes his head. “And get banned from Spaks? No thanks. It’s our station of last resort around here. We lose it, and life gets infinitely harder.”
I can’t help but nod. Having lived on the murky grey line between the rebels and proper Galactic society, I can see his point. At least we can still land on Galactic planets, get our stuff, and go. Those with Reputation scores or Fame in the high ten thousand negatives have it even harder—finding it nearly impossible to receive any services or work in reputable locations. There are places that will turn a blind eye, and you can always shop at a System Shop, but the System Shop is expensive. And piracy still needs to be profitable to succeed.
“We’ll get them the next time.” Dornalor’s v
oice is insistent and full of confidence.
Before I can answer, shrill alarms go off all around the ship. Both our heads snap sideways, notifications flooding our views as multiple interstellar translations are picked up. At first it’s a couple dozen, then the numbers keep climbing until there are hundreds. Some of the first ships that translate in do so too close to the meteors or wreckage that litters the system, exploding in balls of fire. Others are destroyed by the few remaining mines that have managed to hide their presence from the battleships. But the ships after the first few seem to adjust their translations as the explosions decrease then stop. I kill the damage details, just keeping track of the numbers, watching as more ships translate in outside the Dimensionally Smoothed geography, enveloping us in a wide array of steel.
“Well. That’s a problem.” And I’m not even sure if it’s Dornalor or me who says it.
Chapter 15
By the time we get back to the station, it’s pandemonium. No one expected the fleet to arrive so fast—the last information we had was that they were still gathering. Luckily, we manage to dock without issue, whereupon Harry rushes into the ship and seals us off, breathing hard as he wipes away congealing blood on his forehead. The team—sans Dornalor, who’s still handling the piloting—is all waiting at the docking hatch, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see the harried-looking reporter.