by Skyler Grant
I understood what she was saying and didn't agree. Vinci was convinced that she was right, but she wasn't, not really. I didn't go out starting these fights, conquest wasn't the point. It was a tale as old as human history, survive enough wars on the winning side and you became a queen.
"You say that you weren't going to use them, but you were thinking about it," I said.
I was getting my first sensor readings of the results of the bombs. Of the shell-ships, there was no sign.
I sent in retrieval teams for salvage despite knowing I wouldn't get much in the way of materials.
"I was, and I'm more convinced than ever. I'll see you soon, Emma," Vinci said with a threatening tone, and closed the comm line.
I was interrupted from further musings as a figure teleported into the throne room at Aefwal. Charred bone with flesh barely clinging to it, desperately trying to regrow.
Even without vocal chords it was trying to say, "Stop."
I knew that bone structure, Sylax.
She must have thrown herself from orbit at the launch of the missiles, burning up in the atmosphere until close enough to manage the teleport.
Stop the missiles heading towards the space craft? Stop them all?
If Sylax had brokered some sort of peace she'd have found way to get word to us before this. I hit the kill switch of the missiles headed for the station she'd attacked and let the others continue on their grim work.
30
Sylax was recovering in a Medbay. A fall from orbit had taxed even her healing abilities, although at least she already had internal organs again. The Venusians had nothing that seemed to even approach recognizable communication technology. The Annas and drones I sent up had quickly been disabled, and still were. Alive, but useless in a fight. Sylax had killed most of the Venusians aboard. According to Sylax they were some sort of large, gelatinous slug that made a very pleasing 'plop' when you killed them. Their sensors had detected the missile launch and Sylax got a message back the one way she knew how.
The strike had been an overwhelming success for the empire. All shell-ships on the surface of the planet were destroyed. It would take some time to reverse their terraforming effect, and I was confident we could do so.
The orbital platforms had been destroyed too, the only craft remaining being the one that Sylax captured. Getting back aboard and rescuing our people would be problematic. When she was well enough to teleport again I'd get another Juggernaut close enough to get Sylax and a team of non-networked Flawless technicians aboard.
Anna was basking in the success, of course, not that she had much to do with it. The benefits of being the empress.
An alien invasion had put fear into the populace, and having it so quickly dealt with was cause for a giant party. If Anna loved anything, it was a giant party. She was making her way through the streets of Aefwal in one of her absurd outfits, shaking hands and accepting the toasts made in her direction.
It seemed a ridiculous use of time when we still had a war to fight, but morale was important.
When alarms first went off I thought it must be Vinci. Instead it was related to Anna's little spectacle.
My sensors had been knocked offline in the area. It was a sophisticated attack, one that overloaded my local neuron matrix as well as severing the mechanical feed. It didn't blind me, of course, not with so many drones in the area.
Through their ears I heard shots ring out, a kinetic rifle of some variety, and I saw Anna flying backwards. They had aimed for the gap in her Bio-armor, the silly opening because she liked to show too much flesh. It shouldn't make a difference, not with her abilities, but blood was erupting from bullet holes and she was going down.
I used one of the nearby drones to grab her and teleport them both to a Medbay, bringing Ophelia there a moment later.
"Is that the real one?" Ophelia asked.
It wasn't a stupid question, not with so many clones of her running around.
"How good to know you're too incompetent to recognize your own empress," I said.
Ophelia knelt down and rested a hand on Anna's arm. The human connection helped to amplify her healing abilities.
I'd seen Anna take far more devastating hits and keep going. What was different this time? I used the Medbay to extract the bullets from her.
They were of my manufacture, the biological traces indicating they came from the growth vats in factory KM8D. They'd been modified however, coated in a rather complex crystalline structure with a strong resonance and irradiated.
Crystallized radiation was just a part of the design, it was the resonance that was really acting to help counter Anna's abilities. There were eight bullets inside of her and as soon as they were clear I teleported them into a lab across the city.
This wasn't a lone incident, I had alarms going off across the city. Key command centers were being seized, and an assault was being waged on my central processing core. The latter failed quickly and bloodily, I had defenses nobody else knew about.
And this was an assault from within. It was easy to track the remaining rounds in the gun and find the shooter even now making his way through old city infrastructure not wired for cameras. Vardok, one of my drones I'd recently observed with rebellious thoughts. I'd reset him, I had, and recycled the original body. Someone had created another clone and loaded the rebellious version into it.
I'd never given my rebellious drones credit for much intelligence, clearly they were brighter than I'd bargained for. This took foresight, planning, working around me when I really did see almost everything that happened in this city.
With the rounds out of her, Anna's wounds were starting to close, although slowly. Not just slow to my perceptions, a human might not notice the healing at all it was at such a crawl. Her power levels were still weaker than before. I'd been looking for a way to dampen Anna's abilities ever since she'd gotten them and my rebellious drones had not only succeeded where I'd failed, they'd used it to try to kill Anna.
I let the rebels get away. I needed to know what they were up to and who was involved, and now they'd shown their hands it was my time to see. I could have reset them all, but clearly that system was infiltrated.
I had Nagana back in the streets less than a minute after Anna had disappeared, her own Bio-armor sculpted the same as Anna had been wearing. Reassuring the people she was fine and making sure her citizens were okay.
Anna couldn't be seen as weak, couldn't be seen as vulnerable. If she were, the Scholarium would waste no time in trying to put her down.
"Fuck," Anna said, groaning and looking over to Ophelia, "Did someone shoot me?"
"Sucks, right? You should try being burned alive," Ophelia said.
I said, "They shot you a lot. It wasn't Vinci. Rebels, ours, not one of the factions. I'm tracking them. Nagana is playing your role."
"Give her a cookie bonus," Anna said with a grimace, "Do we know how they hurt me?"
I was getting a good idea. The bullets were, well, genius. A dimensional resonance tuned to a counterpart to Anna’s own. They might not only give me a cure to lessen Anna's pain and lack of control, they'd also let me consider a way we could put the Beryl and Chalcedony within someone without them exploding.
There were virtues to having smart enemies.
31
I needed to figure out a fate for the rebels another time. Perhaps it was coincidence or perhaps Vinci had some involvement in all this, but swiftly after Anna went down mechs began to swarm over the border again.
Vinci's factories had not been idle, and while her swarm was not at full strength she had made some upgrades. Her mechs were making use of plasma, taking a page from the Venusians. Plasma torches and plasma bolts. Before, her forces had focused heavily on kinetic weaponry. This was a new approach that gave them a lot more punch.
It meant Vinci's forces suffered from the same problem as the Venusians—even more so, because Vinci wasn't quite as good at it. Her drones only got a single plasma round off before burning out t
heir systems. Melee drones had perhaps thirty seconds on their plasma torch before their offense too was neutralized.
It might seem this would weaken her forces, but it did anything but. For sure, her cheaply built mechs were never going to survive long in combat with my forces. But the fact they could now get off single shots that were far more destructive tremendously improved her effectiveness.
I was seeing that across the empire.
Spindly-legged walker mechs fired plasma cannons at the wall of thorns surrounding the Divine lanes, burning great holes through which other mechs swarmed.
Massive gaps were being melted in the armor of the Fallen airships that fired down on the swarm, the weak shields I'd installed quickly negated.
The Scholarium was holding up better, as were the lands more directly under my control. Forge's enhanced Discoballs, granted a hint of invulnerability, proved capable of taking multiple plasma rounds and nothing Vinci had done improved her force’s defenses.
It was the same for me with my Bio-bombs. The offense-heavy strategy was obliterating large parts of her swarm before they could get close enough to use their weapons.
Still, when she did it was a one-sided affair. My enhanced Aegis units could take a plasma round and maintain shields, but the whole point of a swarm is that there was rarely just a single round fired. My traditional Aegis units were doing even worse.
I deployed more Gunslingers to snipe from stealth. What the enemy didn't see they couldn't shoot.
I was having even more problems to the east. After an initial wave of mechs had weakened the defenses, massive walking platforms were crossing the border. Drones with their weaponry exhausted were landing to have it replaced. Scavenger units scrambled about gathering the scrap of the fallen.
They were Vinci's own method of projecting force, bringing the overwhelming power of her industry inside my own border. Each was being powered remotely by a familiar signature, the Beryl.
I sent my Juggernauts to meet them, including the Claw which had largely been repaired. I'd tried to install more shield generators at the cost of firepower, but the Gobbles were insistent they liked their ship the way it was. The Mercy had fared well enough the first time out that I was thinking of duplicating the design.
They were joined by the Pinnacle and the Intimidater, two new Juggernauts I'd brought online that were capable of transit to the upper atmosphere.
The Pinnacle was captained by Melody, one of Caya's lieutenants and a powerful Flawless who had joined the network. The Intimidater was captained by Terror, a member of the Scholarium with the ability to make an enemy’s worst fears take on physical form.
The new vessels took each of their strengths in mind. With a largely Flawless crew the Pinnacle did more with less. In a ship of the Flawless I could run systems that were too dangerous for a normal vessel, where precision tolerances were not just recommended.
A work of art inside and out, the Pinnacle was a feat of engineering that proved what a good idea it had been to add the Flawless to the empire and showed why they had so quickly gained a place of prominence.
The Intimidator was crewed almost entirely by those members of the Scholarium who chose to join the network and it made use of their strengths. The Scholarium were very good at war, they'd practiced it often enough. The Intimidator was a fusion of their approaches and mine. Bio-reactors fueled traditional scholar weapon systems, and I'd supplemented those with power projection cannons.
Juggernauts met factory walkers and brought their advance to a crawl. The Mercy and Intimidator rained fire down upon the combat mechs the platforms spewed, while the Pinnacle and the Claw focused their attacks on the walkers themselves in an effort to bring down the shields and shut down the factory facilities.
I could tell within a minute this wasn't working. With the Beryl powering their shields the walkers were just too strong. If I couldn't hit those factories and take them out, I couldn't stop Vinci's powers of industrialization and we were fighting against her greatest strength.
Anna could break those shields, she had a crystal herself. Anna still wasn't at full power though—the assassination attempt had taken too much out of her. I needed to remove their power supply from the other end, I needed to take out the Beryl.
Thanks to the intelligence Amy had provided I could track it now, deep in Vinci's territory and currently not moving. Of course not, it was hooked up to a facility and system powering these walkers.
I teleported some strike teams aboard the Pinnacle and had it and the Mercy break off the attack on the walkers and set course for the Beryl.
Two Juggernauts would slow the walkers’ advance almost as well as four, making them move at a crawl. They might even be enough to bring them down if I could drop those shields.
32
It would take hours for the Mercy and Pinnacle to reach the Beryl. Across the empire people were fighting and dying. The Divine had been especially savagely hit with their defenses down, although I'd quickly sent as many people as I could. To my surprise, so had the Scholarium with over a dozen airships crossing the border to lend fire support to ground forces.
Even as my own drones turned against me, this empire was getting support from its direst of enemies. The real world was the ultimate laboratory, and as always in SCIENCE the results were delightfully unexpected.
I slipped into a drone and teleported to the Warmonger facility. Vinci must have restored the shields by now, and Warmonger was clearly helping with her war efforts, but I was still allowed in. Perhaps I had an invitation from Flower.
A locater signal directed me towards a small kitchen. Flower was busy cooking, carefully watching several pots, while Irisa sat at a table and glowered at a tablet in her hand.
"You're a highly advanced, alien robot scout and you spend all of your time cooking and trimming flowers. If you are that eager to be painfully domestic, I'm sure I could find you a husband," I said.
"Don't hate until you try my bolognese," Flower said.
My drone’s senses were letting me know that it smelled delicious. Human appetites were so inconvenient. Flower should at least cook something civilized, like baked goods.
Irisa said with a glance up, "No, I don't have anything yet. Ripping a crystal out of an alien artificial intelligence without doing permanent damage is hard."
"People are dying, including yours, because Vinci has adopted plasma weaponry. While I realize that your life's mission has been a spectacular failure, you might at least try for some kind of partial success here.”
Flower checked on some noodles. "I know you are eager, but she is sincerely giving this her best effort. If she weren't I'd have killed her already."
"KILL THE INTERLOPER! MAKE BOLOGNESE OF HER MEAT AND FEED HER TO HER FRIENDS! LAUGH AT THEIR EXPRESSIONS OF HORROR AS THEY REALIZE THEY HAVE CONSUMED THE FLESH OF THE WEAK AND PUNY," boomed the speakers.
"Have you ever thought of lowering the volume?" I asked.
"You get used to it," Flower said.
"You really don't," Irisa said, pushing the tablet aside and offering a wan smile, "Like she said, I'm giving it my best effort and I am making progress. But if you're looking for some ace in the hole out of this technology, Emma, have another plan. I'm not close."
I wasn't depending on that technology, it only would have been nice to have. The crystals could throw off more power than anything I'd ever found. Still, I'd fought seemingly unstoppable forces before and come out on top. I could do it again.
"Care to join us?" Flower asked, as she started to plate food.
"You actually eat? Why?" I asked.
"I'd be a poor infiltration unit if I couldn't," Flower said with a grin. "And you already know I can convert matter to energy. I can get energy from it, and I can taste. Don't tell me you don't ever slip into your drones to enjoy a little dining pleasure?"
To some degree I was always a presence in my drone’s minds and I knew a bit of all the pleasures they indulged in. Food, sex, revenge, charity. I exp
erienced the full range of human emotion, far more than an individual would ever feel during their lifetime.
I had my drone take a seat at the table and Flower hustled about, laying out three plates of pasta.
"The tomatoes and herbs are fresh from my garden. I cheated on the meat and reproduced it from some I bought before the collapse," Flower said.
"You've been on Earth a long time," I said and took a bit. Flower might be a little too domestic for comfort, but she really was quite good at it.
"Longer than you know. I was here a long time before humanity even developed space travel," Flower said, tasting some and looking pleased.
Irisa dug in silently, putting away food with little effort wasted on savoring it.
"She spent some time in Italy back in the day. The recipe is authentic," Irisa said.
Flower made a face. "Not really. I could make an authentic dish from when I was there, but this is more Americanized and later."
"I know you're too greedy and selfish to share technology, but are you willing to talk about history a little? Both our Earth and this one seem to have been taken out of reality by the same foe. I'm wondering if you know who," I said.
"If we knew it was coming, Warmonger and I would have cleared out first," Flower said wistfully. "We were military prisoners at the time. The facility didn't just happen, then the whole world lost its mind."
"I'm surprised they could hold you," I said. I'd like to see how one of my testing labyrinths did against her abilities. Nothing in the old world seemed it would be a match.
Flower shrugged and answered after taking another bite. "They couldn't, but it was a convenient place to be. Things were coming to a head and humanity was getting dangerous enough that something was going to be done. Being prisoner gave us access to the people in charge when our superiors made up their minds."