The Laboratory Omnibus

by Skyler Grant

  More beam weapon shots followed the first. Wherever they sought to land the cloud simply billowed away from them while sparks of power continued to crackle outlining the shield as a bubble of energy around the ship. Then with a snap the shield faded, the energy drawn away.

  Ships jumped in. I’d calculated the precise jump trajectories for the entire fleet. If we appeared within the firing arc of one of those guns they would take the shot.

  Cannons unloaded at close range blasting massive rents in the ship’s hull. Then forces began to dive through the gaps.

  The need for caution meant that no team was especially near their objective, and on a ship so unnecessarily huge there was a lot space. The weapons team emerged into what looked like some kind of internal park, trees and flowers carefully trimmed, but what must be some sort of automated system. The shield team entered a recreation center with an enormous pool beneath a bank of windows with a view on the outside world. The bridge team meanwhile found itself in a casino. Slot machines and gaming tables stretched as far as the eye could see.

  All were empty. In a ship this size Boreas’ crew was barely present, for all that they had no doubt come excellently armed and if there were any automated defenses they’d have taken control of them.

  The interior of the ship wasn’t what I’d been expecting. It was clearly a ship of war, but looking around the interior it seemed almost something else. A ship of leisure.

  190

  As all teams were getting settled it quickly became apparent this would be more difficult than expected. Once we got past the ship’s exterior defenses the hopes were that it didn’t have any sort of automatic defenders inside.

  It wasn’t proving to be the case. Within the park trees were coming to life, animated in some fashion into golems. One swatted a Scholar aside and sent them soaring through the air at least ten feet.

  In the recreation center it was more mundane combat drones. Oozelord tried to slime one and it shot him with a beam weapon that left him stumbling back clutching at his shoulder.

  In the casino it was robotic security guards. Firing pistols at the Righteous, who were firing back with their rifles.

  I couldn’t let myself get too involved with any of these fights. Oh, I’d provide them my usual tactical support and overlays, but my focus had to be the Agate. I’d only step back to these teams if needed.

  One of my Valkyries had far less armor. I’d instead filled her suit with high-powered sensors which were even now sweeping the inside of the Sword of Light. When I had my destination I began jumping an airship to close by.

  I couldn’t do so for long, but then I didn’t need to, teleporting a few dozen drones to where I detected the strongest energy reading—engineering.

  I lost three drones instantly upon arrival to perfectly placed headshots by Boreas’ lieutenants. I wasn’t surprised. It also didn’t matter. I didn’t have the hindsight of a temporal rewind to help me, but I did have vastly more computing power than the human brain and I began to lay down fields of fire that couldn’t be escaped.

  They were winning. My first drones were all felled and had only taken one of the lieutenants down, then my next wave appeared and we finished off the rest of Boreas’ people. Of course, that was when the automated defenders arrived.

  There was nothing mundane about these defense bots. They hovered about a meter off the floor, completely encased in rippling bubbles of energy. A whip formed out of some sort of plasma emerged from one and cut one of my drones in half even through the Valkyrie’s heavy armor.

  A set of phase blades slid right off the shielding and a few rounds from a Gunslinger met with a similar poor fate. I hadn’t expected to encounter energy shielding that strong inside the ship. Normally they had more limited use in personal combat.

  With the unusual strength of these shields and the fact that the teams elsewhere on the ship hadn’t encountered them, I suspected they had to be drawing power from the Agate itself. It was also possibly a result of Vattier and his technology simply building a better defense drone.

  I lost another two drones while I was thinking about it. Whatever intelligence was powering them was fast, quite possibly faster than I was.

  I paid a price in operational speed for being a bio-computer, for all that I still outdid your average human. It also let me think beyond the immediate. If these drones were drawing power from the Agate there had to be some sort of distribution node. It would be the first thing an attacker would think to target. Vattier was smart, he respected intelligence before all, and he’d want every drone to be as intelligent as it possibly could. There had to be a central controller at least for this section of the ship—and maybe for the entire vessel.

  For security he’d likely build local clusters that switched over to the next node if they were damaged. That would assure redundancy for the systems.

  I teleported over a few sensor droids.

  There were so many systems here it wasn’t easy to locate the core, but by focusing upon the timing of the droid’s blasts I was able to detect the specific data traffic controlling each one and follow it back.

  Once I’d identified the processing core it was simpler to check for safeguards and the relay to a secondary system in case of failure. I didn’t want to use any of the Bioreactor bombs yet, but they weren’t the only explosives I had. I had drones teleport over a few blocks of high-yield explosive and soon the deck was trembling beneath my drones’ feet as it detonated.

  One enemy defense drone snapped off a last shot still in the system before they all went silent. Repair routines were already engaging. A part of me wondered if this vessel were actually self-aware. I hadn’t met any other artificial intelligences since my awakening apart from Amy and really she was barely worthy of the name. By taking it out, I could be killing something of a family relative.

  Still, the relative was doing a fair job at trying to kill me first. I really shouldn’t waste any time on sentimentality.

  With the drones gone I could take a moment to really study the Agate. It was a large sliver of stone suspended in a glass tube in the center of engineering. It shared many of the attributes of a power crystal although I’d never seen one so large or having the coloration.

  The power readings were huge.

  I’d have no trouble removing it from the cell. The deactivated defense drones were supposed to keep away those that didn’t belong here.

  It was there for the taking.

  191

  With things in engineering taken care of I needed to help the other teams accomplish their mission and get to their goals.

  Of the three teams we’d deployed so far the Righteous were having the most success and were making slow but steady progress through the casino. The defenders here were some of the fiercest, but firepower made a difference. For the moment the Righteous were fine on their own. They were a few minutes away from an elevator that would take them to the bridge.

  The group in the park was having a lot of success as well. Caya and her perfect people were almost deserving of the name. Excellent reaction time and visual acuity meant that their shots went where they aimed them and beam weapons against plant monsters were making this a one-sided affair.

  Oozelord and his people were having a more challenging time. The defense droids they fought weren’t organic and his abilities didn’t have any effect on them. Without the compulsion nature of his power set he was also rather useless for most purposes except for being somewhat acidic.

  I scanned the interior for something that might be helpful. There, a storage room containing stockpiles of bacteria used for keeping the pools and drains clear. I had a Gunslinger open fire with a chain-gun and soon organic sludge was pouring across the floor. If anyone knew how to make the most of sludge, it was Oozelord. As soon as he dipped a foot into the substance waves of orange rippled outward and pseudopods of orange slime began to writhe in the air knocking drones down.

  “Yeah! You want some of this!” Oozelord bellowed as thei
r carapaces cracked apart.

  “I’m reasonably sure no one ever has or will,” I said, taking over a drone for a moment. “But follow me and I can find you more of that stuff which is nearly as disgusting as you are.”

  “Babe, once you go slime you never go back. It’s all about the friction,” Oozelord said.

  Perhaps one day I’d have him in a testing cell and I could experiment on that properly. Trapping a slime monster between high speed panels of hyper-friction material to properly judge how it held up under such adverse conditions. I could call it the Frictionater. I doubted he would be a fan.

  The defense drones weren’t stopping, but after another three storage rooms had been blasted into fragments and added their contents to Oozelord’s mass they weren’t as much of an issue.

  That was good, because now it was another group having an issue.

  The park had stopped throwing golems and instead there were six humanoid defenders fending us off. They were each dressed in a different color and seemed to have wildly divergent weaponry. Blue was armed with some of spear that fired energy blasts, red had gauntlets wreathed in flame. Each wore a badge stating “Park Ranger”.

  They were a good bit more dangerous than the defenders before and the exchange of fire had Caya and her people taking cover.

  Caya tugged on the arm of one of my drones. “Emma?”

  “Not exactly her at the moment lady,” the drone answered. That was true, the drone was Emily and was something of an underachiever looking at her record.

  “Then put her on,” Caya said.

  “It doesn’t work …” Emily started to say before I proved her wrong and took over.

  “This is Emma. While I realize that it is sadly typical for perfect Princesses to flirt during firefights I assure you, it would be difficult to find one less interested than I am,” I said.

  “This perfect specimen of humanity is more than aware of how to handle herself in a firefight and she even recognizes where the designer of this ship got some of his inspirations. If those Rangers start to lose, they’ll combine into a giant robot with a super-weapon,” Caya said.

  That was utterly absurd. Who would possibly build independent combat units far weaker than a combined form they were meant to transform into? Certainly not someone as intelligent as Vattier.

  Still there was something unusual in the design of these Park Rangers. Proportions that weren’t quite right.

  Maybe there was something to this perfect human thing? Her instincts were right on, it was a brilliantly stupid design choice and thus tremendously unlike Vattier, but I couldn’t argue with what my sensors were telling me.

  “Focus your fire on green. They are the center point and without them there won’t be any giant robot,” I said.

  Caya spoke into a wrist comm and in unison her people opened fire on the green. I had my drones do the same, even when it meant leaving themselves open to fire from the others. The goal was to take that one down quick and to do so in such an overabundance of force that it wouldn’t stand a chance.

  It worked, in an explosion of green flame we neutralized that target and the others redoubled their efforts. Individually they were still problematic, but at least the bigger threat had been averted.

  There you are … I was wondering if we’d get a chance to speak

  The voice was coming from nowhere and everywhere. The closest comparison I could make was to it sounded like when I was in the head of Sylax.

  But nobody was in my head but me.

  Not true, strictly speaking. I was disappointed it wasn’t you to find the Sword.

  Vattier was supposed to be long-dead. We hadn’t seen any signs of him being still active. I wondered again if the ship had an artificial intelligence.

  It does and I’ve hacked you through it, but we are not the same. I see your plan and I may allow you to walk away with the Agate if you prove worthy. I appreciated the aims of the Society even while I felt their means lacking. If you should survive this tell my daughter and Mechos to come find me.

  My world exploded in agony and I blacked out.

  192

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been knocked offline, I’d even taken some precautions for if it happened again. My drones having such a high level of autonomy and personality wasn’t just because of utilizing a human template, I wanted my various parts to still largely keep working even when I was absent.

  I’d rigged subprocessors to kick in and streamlined my reboot configuration. Even so, it had still been over seventeen minutes that I’d lost and I was sluggish as parts of my network continued to come back.

  Vattier—or an AI masquerading as Vattier—had really done a number on me.

  As my sensors began to come up I quickly realized it was worse than I’d thought. They had turned on the teleportation gates and used them to bring in various threats throughout the city. Enemies composed entirely of some sort of Von-Neuman machines were fighting in the streets of Districts Two and Three. There were jungle beasts in districts Four through Seven, and it looked as if we had King Boreas’ soldiers in Districts Zero, One, and Eight. If anything had been so foolish as to try to invade Flickers’ District Nine, it was probably lost for all time in the licensing bureau.

  I’d taken most of the city’s Bioreactors up on the airship to blow the Sword. We were operating off emergency power and the fixed cannon emplacements were down. There were over a million drones in this city though and in times of crisis all could wield a gun. There were also the District Lords and their focus, none of whom I’d taken on the Sword mission because of my intention of scuttling the ship.

  “Emma, you’re back up. About time. Kill the jump gates,” Anna said through her comm.

  Of course that was the first thing I did. I’d cut off any enemy reinforcements, but we still had to deal with those in the city. That was no problem, most places.

  District Zero was another matter. It was filled with corpses.

  I replayed the security logs. Zero was the one district where I’d kept the power online for the city core. Within the first minute of me being down my own automatic defenses put most of the population there to death. Fortunately, they were drones, I could bring them back in time, but it left me undefended.

  Worse yet, the reactors had been overloaded and so those automated defenses weren’t available now to kill the real enemy.

  I said, “Once again you unerringly choose the least interesting and most obvious thing to say. This was Vattier’s doing, or something pretending to be him. They neutralized my defenses and are moving on my core.”

  “I know. Hot Stuff was coming to assist but some flame giant thing put a sword through her. I’ve got the Graven incoming to give some support,” Anna said.

  That would be helpful, but it wouldn’t be enough. The enemy force wasn’t large, however it was Powered. Three teams of three, each with a time-shifter and two others of more diverse abilities. One of them probably had a Compulsion core. If they could get to my processor core they could try to control me.

  Enemies that diverse were dangerous and the time-shifting only made them more so. I needed big guns to stop them and I could only think of one person without a district of their own to defend that had kind of firepower, Sylax’s academy. First of all I had to check if they were already in use.

  Crystal had insects out in force to defend her district. They buzzed through the skies and tore people apart with massive mandibles. In the past she’d made heavy use of hybrids, but she seemed to have gone more old-school into her past. Perhaps a part of that was the result of Sylax’s fall from power, perhaps the humanizing bits had been hers all along.

  I opened a comm to Sylax.

  “Emma, you’re siccing enemies on your own people now. You grew amusing faster than I’d anticipated,” Sylax said over the video feed. It looked like she and her students were still in their school—no, locked in their school. Crystal wanted to make extra sure they’d be unable to join the fight. That didn’t work fo
r me, not now.

  “Not my doing. I’ve got Powered squads closing in on my core and my defenses are down. Can you and yours assist?” I asked.

  “We’re ready for a fight. You realize that if I save your skin I’ll expect things in return?” Sylax said.

  Sylax never was one for subtlety, it was one of her few good attributes.

  “You know I take care of my friends. I’m opening a teleportation gate into your central courtyard and sending you what I have on the enemy forces,” I said.

  “Three temporal manipulators, a disassembler, disruptor, voider. My, we really did get his attention didn’t we? I’m on my way,” Sylax said.

  I didn’t doubt it. I’d have to trust her, as absurd as that concept was on every single level.

  More of my systems were coming online and I was regaining use of my long-range sensors and reestablishing connections to my non-city based drones.

  The Sword of Light was on the move, it was coming to Aefwal.

  193

  What was Vattier doing? That voice in my head sounded almost friendly, but these actions were anything but that. Forcing me into a shutdown, sending troops throughout the city, bringing the Sword of Light here.

  Was he attempting to destroy me? No, if that were truly his goal he could have done it. While my main systems were down he could have taken steps to assure Aefwal was destroyed. He was testing me.

  The Divine tested me, Vattier tested me—a part of me had to admit to the fairness of it all. I tested people all the time. A part of me also didn’t like it and was determined to make them pay for their bravado.

  I hadn’t solved Vattier’s riddle first, yet had been getting ready to run off with his prize. That realization forced him to increase the difficultly level, to make things harder, to make me earn it according to his twisted sense of logic. I’d have much preferred logic puzzles to a superweapon surging at my city but then, in some sense, the two were the same thing.