Andien nodded to Hutch, and the two of them moved swiftly to the rear of the ship. The plan was for all of Ghost to escort Prisma and Leenah out into the hangar, where the girl could interface with a terminal.
The Forresaw’s repulsors throbbed to life, and the ship settled onto the almost mirror-like finish of the empty hangar bay. Ruh-Ro dropped the cargo door and sniffed at the air, even though sensors indicated they had good atmo beyond the force-shielded entry they’d been allowed to pass through. After locking the cargo door in the down position, he nodded at the armored legionnaires, the two girls, and Garret.
Andien had positioned herself to watch the troop depart. As Garret passed, she softly asked him, “Did you transmit the message to Keel?”
“Yep,” Garret answered in a whisper.
Andien made no indication she’d heard him.
The moktaar didn’t wait for them to make it down onto the hangar floor before he’d deployed the mounted heavy blaster. He grabbed the firing handles, charged the weapon, and swiveled it about its targeting trajectories. Written on the side of it in white lettering were the words Problem Solver.
Hutch tapped his bucket at the monkey as he walked down the cargo ramp. He was the last one off the ship.
Enda was on point, and the rest of Ghost surrounded Leenah, Garret, and the little girl at the center. The war bot brought up the rear. From the cargo deck, Andien watched them make their way across the sprawling and empty hangar, checking every possible direction from which they might suddenly take fire. Ahead lay the main blast door leading into the ship. To the right of that door was a terminal. That was the first objective.
A hundred meters before they reached the massive door, it slid open, and out walked a bot—a standard Repub protocol and admin bot, sheathed in white ceramic laminate chest plate, with a head-mounted processor unit.
Andien wondered why she wasn’t getting anything over comm even though they had a line-of-sight link. She was a comms expert, and a distant klaxon was sounding in her mind. What would cause that? Beyond the jejune. What was the big, major problem that might stem from this?
And then Ghost Team, Leenah, Garret, the war bot, and Prisma all disappeared through the blast door.
It irised shut behind them.
***
It was a personal admin series bot. Anyone who’d been around the military forces of the Republic for any stretch of time had met one of the incarnations of this series in some form or another.
“I am CAT37,” the bot greeted the remnants of Ghost and their charges. “I will escort you to a confirmation terminal. This way.”
Ghost quickly discussed their options over comm.
“Feels funny,” said Maas.
“Yeah… it does,” muttered Crutchke.
“Enda?” Hutch asked. All of their powerful sub-minis were trained on the hapless protocol bot. They were each a soft squeeze away from annihilating the automaton in an instant.
The normally quiet Enda took a long moment to deliver an answer. “True,” he began in his rich voice. “But how normal can a fleet with no biological presence feel? Still. Agree. Something’s tickling my spider senses. And I don’t like it.”
It was an old phrase, and its origins were lost to time and the past. But the meaning was clear: beyond any sort of actual evidence one could put a finger on… something was indeed up.
“I thought there was supposed to be a fleet,” Hutch said over local audio—speaking to the bot. “How come there’s just this one ship?”
“Oh… yes. Quite. Of course.” The bot clicked, chittered, and then seemed to come to itself after a second. “I think you will be given access to the information you require once we’ve performed the biometric scan on the authenticating unit. Which one of you might that be?”
The bot scanned the group. Everyone was smart enough not to move.
“Right. Well…” The bot paused, its soulless optical sensors taking everyone in, its joints and plates articulating absurdly and stiffly with each gesture. “I think I understand perfectly. Again… may I escort you to the terminal? It’s just this way.”
“All right,” Hutch replied.
Over comm he whispered, and he had no idea why he was whispering, “Be ready for anything. Mission focus is the little girl. Anything goes wrong, get her back to the ship and away from here. Everyone else… buy time.”
The blast door irised open, and the bot walked through the portal with slow, mincing steps. Ghost Team and its charges followed.
***
Andien was still speaking into the comm, trying to reach Hutch and his men after the blast door slithered shut, leaving the Forresaw alone inside the giant, spotlessly gleaming hangar deck. She uttered a curse, tore off her headset, and slammed her hand down on the tactical display.
“Something’s not right.”
When she turned, she found the moktaar staring bloody murder at the wobanki, who looked like he was just waiting for something to happen that might give him an excuse to cut the monkey. The cat’s tail drew lazy, hypnotic figure eights through the air. The tension was obvious.
“Guys!” shouted Andien. Her voice echoed across the cockpit.
The moktaar only glanced at her. “Everything in the Republic may be kumbaya… is that your word? With your ‘diversity is strength’ slogans. But you have no idea how much we would love to slay each other here and now. We have grievances far older than your Republic. Our hate is wired into our DNA.”
Andien weighed the moment. Shooting one of them right now would solve some of her immediate problems. But it would also create a whole new set of problems for later.
Then the moktaar looked out the cockpit window and made a face. His protruding jaw dropped open. “What in the…”
Andien whirled.
Skrizz refused to turn his back on the moktaar; he had anticipated the monkey would try a stupid ploy like this to distract him. He was definitely going to kill the monkey, and he would enjoy doing so. That was at the top of his things-to-do-today list. And he hoped to accomplish this in the next few minutes, which counted as a long-term goal for a wobanki.
“Oh… my …” Andien said.
Beyond the cockpit windows, out across the massive hangar, three groups of bots—they were definitely bots, because they had the over-articulated smoothness about them—came from three opening blast doors along the hangar walls. Each group contained at least a hundred bots.
Andien didn’t recognize the bot design, but they looked like some form of hunter-killer unit. Their frame looked similar in some ways to legionnaire armor, except these were made of highly polished chrome. Instead of a head, each bot had a helmet that looked like a tech-infused version of those worn by ancient Greek hoplites. And upon the face of this processor/helmet, three burning optical sensors glared red like malevolent eyes.
Each bot was carried a heavy blaster the size of a crew-served N-50. Except instead of one barrel, there were three.
And the bots were eight feet tall.
A little bigger than the old war bots.
And new.
New, and definitely lethal.
25
Ghost Team and its charges were halfway down a corridor within the gigantic ship—a seemingly endless corridor of pristine white ceramic modularized compartments of functional design—when Hutch asked the bot how much further to the terminal.
“Oh, just another 239 meters from our current location. Not long now,” it replied cheerily.
And then Enda asked a question. “I’ve never heard of your series model before. What was it again?”
“Ah.” The bot clicked and whirred as it minced ahead of the armed legionnaires down the seemingly endless corridor. “CAT37.”
Hutch wondered, briefly, what Enda was playing at.
“What’s the technical classification?” Enda asked. “I’m unfamiliar with the CAT designation class.”
“It stands for Capture, Acquire, and of course… Terminate. The ‘Acquire’ designator
seems redundant to me, but it denotes my unit’s advanced interrogation techniques to acquire sensitive information. I… Oh my. I think I’ve given away a bit too much.”
Hutch raised one fist.
Ghost Team stopped in its tracks. The bot turned to face them.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” whispered Taylor over the comm.
“Yeahh…” Hutch murmured.
And then all the ceramic compartments that lined the passage popped open with hydraulic whines, and out came forty bots, twenty on each side.
At first they were almost folded in on themselves. They merely scrabbled out of their compartments like awkward machine-crabs. Then they unfolded themselves and rose upward to their full eight-foot height, unpacking their weapons and armor as everything locked into place in a sudden and sharp series of metallic clacks. Within seconds, their tri-barreled heavy blasters were aimed at Ghost Team and the crew of the Indelible VI.
Maas read aloud the information sweeping across his HUD. “Tactical analysis is calling these improved versions of the old Titans. War bots from the Corasaam Conflict. But those things never had N-50s like that.”
“Houdini time!” shouted Enda, tossing three metal balls he’d pulled from his gear, lightning quick. The balls were designed to disable pursuit sentries, security bots, and hunter-killer drones. Anything that ran a limited AI and classified as a bot would be stunned for a few minutes by a carnival of spam and electronic interference. But there was no knowing if it would work on these models.
As soon as Enda called the play from his place on point, each member of Ghost knew exactly what to do. They had one shot to extricate themselves from a blown plan that was rapidly devolving into a hot mess.
Hutch threw his back into a wall and laid down a base of rapid fire, sweeping the screaming sub-mini across the line of deploying Titans. Bright fire tore into their armored torsos. Onboard power cells popped and exploded with sudden discharges of static electricity. MicroFrame processors took direct hits.
Enda fell back with Taylor to set up the second line of defense. They would fall back in segments until they reached the blast door that led back to the hangar. Crutchke grabbed Prisma by the hand and pulled her back, past everyone, trying to get cover between her and the Titans. Leenah followed, as did Garret, who’d already tapped the hotkey that activated KRS-88’s war bot mode.
Maas ran, one hand’s fingers chattering over a virtual keyboard visible only in his HUD display. He was trying to hack into anything he could get a signal on—maybe find a way to shut down comm and telemetry from whoever was running the bots.
The bots recovered quickly. Even the heavily damaged units. Few had been destroyed outright, although Enda’s ECM attack seemed to still be messing with the Titans’ targeting systems. And behind all this, the admin bot was laughing at them. Electronically barking like some deranged automaton with cheap programming in a terrible circus. Its synthesized voice gleefully echoed down the soulless corridors of the ship, seeming somehow to even infiltrate their comms.
Within moments it was a full-blown firefight down the length of the passage. The operatives of Ghost were using the molded white ceramic storage units mounted along the walls as a kind of cover to lean behind while they unloaded hot bursts of blue blaster fire at the gleaming Titans.
Maas got it in the arm and spun down onto one knee. A second later he got it in the back and fell face forward. Hutch leaned down, firing with one hand, and dragged the wounded leej close to the wall.
Behind them, down the passage leading back to the hangar deck, a series of heavy blast doors shut like bright guillotines.
“Watch out…” stuttered Maas as his armor tried to control the massive damage he’d taken from the two heavy blaster shots.
In the life support diagnostic on his HUD, Hutch could see the man was fading.
Maas raised his trembling gauntlet and pointed at a ceramic panel. Then he whispered over comm, “Manteca access hatch. Tunnels…”
He died right then and there.
Hutch pivoted and unloaded a full burst from the sub-mini on the hatch. It exploded inward, revealing a gap that opened into darkness beyond.
“In! Now!” Hutch shouted.
Again, Ghost Team knew exactly what to do, how, and who moved first. They reoriented to a new course track like a unit that had endlessly trained to move as one. Enda first, on point, literally dove across the blaster shot–filled passage, seemingly swimming through a sea of angry red fire, and went head first into the darkness.
“We’ll cover you!” Hutch shouted at Leenah. “Get her out of here!”
But before Hutch, Taylor, and Crutchke could step into the passage to meet the oncoming bots, KRS-88, who’d been crouched in evasive mode, rose up to its full height, seemingly filling the passage, and unloaded on the advancing Titans with both wrist blasters. Return fire battered his frame with off key-notes and whining ricochets that smashed into the ceiling and walls all around.
They don’t make war bots like him anymore, thought Hutch.
“Crash!” screamed Prisma as Leenah dragged her across the passage and into the darkness beyond the blasted-out panel. Garret followed. Then Crutchke. Then Taylor.
“C’mon, time to move, tin man!” shouted Hutch as he pulled the detonator on Maas’s armor. “Follow me!”
KRS-88 turned abruptly and ran after Hutch into the darkness.
The Titans swarmed the evacuated firing position, their blaster rifles pointing into the darkness where their prey had gone. The electronic squawk of their number-nonsense electronic chatter, constantly reasoning out their next move, ceased when Maas exploded.
***
Enda switched to low-light scanning as she moved quickly through the darkness. His armor’s radar began a series of active pings, pulsing out into the unknown passages ahead. Processors reinterpreted what he was seeing based on this, then combined it with thermal-sensing overlays. The tunnel was a maintenance passage, common enough on capital ships, the kind that allowed engineers and techs to get around inside the guts of a ship to effect repairs.
Fifty meters farther on, following the barrel of his sub-mini, Enda emerged into a hexagonal vent shaft. Gleaming steel ladders climbed up and down the sides of the shaft. He stuck his bucket out into the pit and checked both directions for hostiles.
Nothing.
He tried to tag the Foressaw in his navigation subroutine, but the armor could no longer locate the ship. And neither direction seemed to lead back to the hangar deck.
Ghost Team protocols always opted for going “down.” Sewers, maintenance, sub-basements. Lots of places to move fast and get lost when everything went to hell in a handbasket. “When in doubt, get low”—that had always been one of the columns upon which all their training was based.
“Going down shaft!” he shouted over comm, his breathing sharp and rapid.
“I read the route,” Hutch replied. “We’re looking for access back to the hangar deck, so take anything that heads that direction. I read ninety degrees from your current heading.”
“Roger tha—”
And then Enda was gone from the HUD roster.
“Enda!” shouted Hutch. “Comm check. Taylor! Hold them up!”
“Done,” Taylor replied. “We’re stopped at the shaft. No sign of Enda.”
They’d been maybe fifteen seconds behind him.
Hutch pushed forward past the other legionnaires. He stared down into the shaft’s shadowy depths, cycling through all his optical sensing modes. There was no sign of Enda. Even his armor’s secure transponder wasn’t broadcasting.
He opened a menu and forced Enda’s suit to ping itself.
But it was gone.
Flat-out not there anymore.
As gone as Maas was. Except Maas had been detonated with an erase-all-tracks failsafe that Ghost Team maintained for plausible deniability in their covert missions. If you got caught… you detonated.
Hutch switched over to ambient vocal. “En
da!” he bellowed down into the cavernous darkness.
He heard his own voice echoing into the distance. It sounded forlorn and hopeless, and it never came back.
“Hutch,” said Taylor. The urgency in his voice was plain. “We gotta move. They’re coming through back there. More of ’em now.”
Hutch looked back. He could see the target tags filing into the smoking gap back at the main corridor. “Taylor, you’re on point. Take them up along the ladders. We need to get access to a new level. Radar says there’s another maintenance access just above us. Get up there, then find a way back into the hangar.”
Hutch squeezed past the princess and the little girl in the half-lit darkness, moving to the rear of the tiny column.
“There’s some major encryption going on here,” murmured Garret as Hutch passed. The kid was staring into his datapad, his face blue and mesmerized.
“No time for that. We’re scrubbed, kid. Time to boogie.”
When he made it to the war bot, Hutch ordered the towering thing to follow the column and prevent it from taking fire. “Shield them with your frame if you have to, tin man!”
In a hollow, ghostly tone, KRS-88 acknowledged the command.
Already Taylor was working his way up onto the ladder that crawled along the shadowy tube above and below. One by one, Prisma with the most ease, they began to climb up to the next level.
Everyone except Hutch. He kept an eye back the way they had come—toward the Titans who were squeezing down the maintenance passage, coming for them en masse.
Hutch opened fire.
***
Taylor hauled himself up onto the next landing and brought his weapon to bear on the narrow duct that was the next maintenance passage.
Nothing but darkness and machinery.
He took a quick glance below and saw the code slicer crawling up the ladder with some difficulty. He’d either make it, or he wouldn’t, thought Taylor.
He started forward, crouching to make his way into the low tunnel. He passed shutoff and power transfer switches, and a small terminal scrolling nothing but ones and zeroes. Tubing and wire bundles followed the passage.
Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) Page 21