“The ship itself could well be sentient,” Yamashida added. “That was common with the later Mirai designs. No, we had best take due care with this operation. What would you suggest, Haruhi?”
“Perhaps we can cut into the piping to take samples, my lord? We also have a disassembler technique that works on inactive armor matrix, but I’m afraid it’s very slow. It would take several days to check each tank that way, although we could work on twenty or so in parallel.”
“We can set up gravity meters and do a density check first,” another yard dog pointed out. “We can probably rule out two thirds of the storage tanks on that basis alone.”
“The size will also help,” another one said. “Some of those tanks hold more than twenty million cubic meters of feedstock. We’re obviously after something smaller than that.”
“That, or this year’s bonuses are going to be quite large,” Akio joked. “Alright, so it seems you can solve that problem. Major Wen, how do we keep these bots from becoming a threat?”
I sat back and listened to the grizzled old inugami in charge of the marines talk. She seemed to know her stuff, just like the techs. They didn’t need me for this part, so I’d just stay quiet and see what I could learn. Hey, maybe things would be smooth sailing from here on?
Yeah, fat chance of that.
Chapter 26
We parked the Square Deal inside one of the empty hangars along the ship’s port side. It was more than big enough, a cavernous space twelve hundred meters wide and nearly two kilometers deep. So the marines sent in an advance party to sweep for hostiles, and then Beatrice took the ship in and landed us on the inner surface of the hanger. Not that there was any gravity to hold us in place, but it turned out our landing gear had emitters for a tractor field system for just this kind of situation.
I frowned as the clamps engaged.
“Mina, why aren’t there any wrecked bots in this hangar? It must have been swarming with them during the battle. Did you guys already clean this part out, or something?”
I was alone in the observation lounge, but the techs had given me access to their online systems again. The damage control queue was empty and the engineering monitors all showed green, but the private comlink they shared was always active.
“No, it wasn’t us,” she replied with a knowing grin. “This is one of those cases where it’s important to know where you are, Alice. What’s different about physics in the Delta Layer?”
“Quantum mechanics are the same everywhere, but every universe has its own cosmological forces,” I answered automatically. “The Delta Layer has that weird repulsive gravity force that keeps stars from forming… oh.”
Right. The doors were open, and the Emperor’s Hope was easily massive enough to generate noticeable microgravity. Here in the Delta Layer that was a repulsive force instead of attractive, so anything in the hanger would have long since drifted off into space.
“Sounds like you’ve got it,” she said. “Doesn’t your physics sense cover the hyperspace layers?”
I sighed. “Yes, and all the known subspace layers too. But that’s all separate from the quantum reality engine, and I guess I have to actually pay attention to which model I should be using. I was defaulting to normal space without even thinking about it.”
“Got to watch out for those manufacturer defaults. So, want to learn how our external power distribution works?”
“Sounds good,” I agreed. “Naoko’s got me fielding engineering assistance requests from the yard dogs, and I’m sure half of that’s going to be power supply stuff.”
The shipyard workers had to unpack a lot of their gear before they could get anything productive done, which meant setting up a work camp in the hangar. But they weren’t used to working in the field, so there was a lot of confusion. The salvage crew were helping out, but even so the techs and I had an endless stream of ‘emergency’ requests to deal with. Running power and feedstock lines from the utility hubs that dotted the Square Deal’s belly. Setting up big radiator fins extending out of the hold. Reminding the horde of junior techs not to plug anything into the wreck’s systems, no matter how convenient it would be to repurpose existing conduits.
Instead we had to fab up our own cabling, and run it through kilometers of cargo holds and internal vehicle bays to reach the colony module that was our destination. It was a big job, and it got worse as we worked our way further in.
There we found the bots I’d been expecting. There were hordes and hordes of wrecked machines that I swear must have been intentionally designed to be creepy looking. Insectoid things covered in spikes. Weird close assault designs that looked like a mass of tentacles tipped with buzz saws and needles. Bulky machines designed to capture civilians by eating them. There were lots of normal gunbots too, but the creepy stuff caught my attention.
The defending bots had been built with a completely different aesthetic, although at first glance they didn’t seem any more practical. Lightly armored, mostly single-function bots, with an emphasis on smaller designs. Shouldn’t there be more heavy weapons and tanks guarding a battleship?
Then again, there were easily a hundred wrecked Swarmlord bots for every Mirai design. It was hard to argue against a doctrine that racked up that kind of exchange ratio, even if the Swarmlords did tend to emphasize quantity over quality. There was probably something going on there that wasn’t obvious from the wreckage. Maybe the heavier Mirai bots had all been nuked to make sure they wouldn’t just repair themselves?
The attackers had set off enough tactical nukes in here to make that seem plausible. There was some kind of energy dissipation grid built into the bulkheads that had carried off most of the heat from the blasts, but even so a kiloton-range bomb could easily wreck a whole building-sized compartment. Here and there the meter-thick internal bulkheads had been breached as well, or the heavy security hatches between compartments were blown open.
Once we got into the colony module things got kind of depressing. There had been colonists there, and no one ever did anything about the bodies.
We came across the remnants of last-ditch defenses first. Hasty barricades of quick-fab materials thrown up to block corridors, and holes burned or blasted through them by attacking bots. Minefields that still had a handful of active mines. Defensive positions where desperate men in powered armor had tried to hold off the invaders, once they’d run out of bots.
For the most part that hadn’t worked out so well for them. Civilians with guns just aren’t much of a threat to decent war machines, even if they hadn’t been outnumbered. Human reflexes are too slow, and squishy human bodies are an awfully fragile cargo for a suit of armor to try to protect. A warbot’s innards are mostly a solid mass of micromachines, about as tough as a block of mild steel, and of course they think at electronic speeds.
There was only one compartment where it hadn’t been a complete slaughter, and that one was kind of odd. It looked like there had been three or four people, and an endless sea of bots closing in on them. But the whole compartment was choked with wrecks, every one of them disabled by a perfectly placed shot to some vital point.
Supersoldiers, maybe? If so they’d been pretty good. I could have done the same, but I wasn’t sure Akio or Kavin could have. They’d been overwhelmed in the end, though, and the compartments beyond that were full of dead civilians.
The fabricator bay that was our destination had been thoroughly wrecked, and the techs slaughtered alongside their human leaders. I spent a few minutes checking for survivors while the yard dogs debated how to cut their way into the feedstock lines, but someone had gotten there before me. Every android’s AI core had been methodically extracted and destroyed, and the humans had been shot in the head.
I was relieved we didn’t have to go any further in. The dead men at the barricades were bad enough. The apartments at the core of the colony module were bound to be full of women and children, and I really didn’t want to see that. Just thinking about it made me feel a little sick. Jud
ging from the number of bodies we’d already found there must have been hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions, if there was a cold sleep facility somewhere in there.
The push into the ship’s interior wasn’t nearly as bad. There the fighting had mostly been machine vs. machine, and the work crews rarely found bodies. In some ways it was a lot tougher, though, because the fighting had gone on for a long time.
The interior of the ship was a maze of tunnels, winding through and around the great machines that filled most of the hull. Finding our way towards the officer’s area and the hopeful location of the secure vaults would have been hard before the battle, but now it was a nightmare. Time and again we found places where choke points had been blocked by quick-fab barrier walls, or corridors that were so packed with bot wrecks it was impossible to move through them. There were minefields that were only ninety percent dead, and booby traps that sometimes still worked. Here and there the work crews even found Swarmlord cybertanks that were still operational.
After the first time one of those woke up and started shooting they got really careful about them. Just like the captain had said, these Inner Sphere war machines were a lot deadlier than anything the Masu-kai could field. The marines lost two troopers before they managed to catch it in a crossfire and burn through its armor, and even then they only got it because it was out of anti-laser smoke.
I was glad I wasn’t on an exploration team.
Word was, they kept finding signs of a long and bitter fight down in the interior of the ship. Places where battles had moved back and forth across the same area for weeks, with each side improvising defenses that the enemy destroyed when they re-took it. Fabricator bays that had been turned into bot factories, wrecked, repaired and wrecked again. Miniature fusion plants set up in mess halls and cargo bays, to replace the ship’s crippled reactors.
The ship’s crew might have been evil space Nazis, but you had to respect their dedication. They’d sold their lives dearly, and kept fighting to the last man. But in the end there had just been too many bots.
I made a mental note that if I ever had a giant warship of my own to command I’d make sure we had lots of defenses against boarders. A few regiments of marines didn’t seem to get the job done when the enemy could drop millions of warbots on you. Maybe a brigade or two of regular troops, and a giant bot factory somewhere in the interior that we could fire up to make more defenders if we needed them?
Okay, maybe I was just being silly. It’s not like I was going to be commanding a battleship anytime soon.
The crews investigating the tank farm took a lot longer to get anywhere than I’d hoped. Apparently tracing kilometers of feedstock pipe through a giant maze of corridors and maintenance tunnels wasn’t easy. The salvage ships were providing a lot of their engineering support for that effort, but the Square Deal was still their main base of operations. Which meant that I got to sit around being bored for hours at a time waiting for a call to come in, and then I’d suddenly get eight different people all insisting that they needed a power line or water pipe or a hundred-ton tank of coolant fluid right away. It was a good thing I could multitask, or I never would have been able to keep up with it all.
On our third day of investigation they finally found something promising. Not the gold, but a small tank full of iridium-bearing feedstock that was almost as valuable.
“At current market rates the contents of the tank would be worth about twenty million credits,” the leader of the survey team announced at the inevitable meeting. “The same assembly has similar-size tanks we expect will contain other noble elements, including gold and platinum. Unfortunately the tanks are all armored, and the contents have long since frozen.”
Lord Yamashida frowned at the display. “Surely this is not the full extent of the cache?”
“No, my lord,” one of the salvage captains hastily interjected. “We’ve identified three other tank farms in the port hangers, and the drone survey indicates that the starboard layout is symmetrical. We think they simply split the valuable elements up among multiple locations to ensure they wouldn’t all be lost to a single catastrophic event.”
“Sounds like the Mirai,” Akio agreed. “Their backup systems have backup systems. How long to extract it all and convert it into a portable form?”
“Probably several weeks, my lord,’ the shipyard chief said nervously. “We’re going to have to cut each tank open, carve up the frozen feedstock inside, and move it to a processing plant to turn it into bars.”
“That is unacceptable,” Yamashida said coldly. “The first courier is due to arrive in eight days, and I expect to have concrete results to report. Put the work crews on double shifts if you must, but I require this project to be completed expeditiously.”
“I’m sure we won’t need to resort to special inducements, Uncle,” Akio said mildly. “Will we, Yumi?”
“No, my lord! We’ll get started right away. I’ll work my girls around the clock if I have to.”
“Good. Now, I understand the marines have some news for us?”
“Yes, my lord.” Major Wen pulled up a cutaway diagram of the ship. “One of my recon teams has found a way down into the objective area. They had to go in through the hole where the number three turret used to be, and open up a route through the lasing chambers and some other engineering spaces. But the security bulkheads in that area were all breached in multiple places by the invaders, just as we’d hoped. We’ve broken through into officer country, and I’ve just received confirmation that the route to the captain’s cabin is clear. If the yard dogs are right about that secure hold’s location, we should find it in the next few hours.”
“Well done,” Akio said with a smile. “At this rate you just may earn yourself a personal reward.”
The inugami practically glowed at that, but Yamashida had to be a wet blanket.
“Let us confirm the discovery before speaking of rewards. We still don’t know if the mirror will be there. The captain may well have moved it for safekeeping, or made an attempt at evacuation.”
“Maybe, but I have a good feeling about this,” Akio said. “In fact, I think this merits some personal attention. If we do find the mirror here, it would be fitting to do it in person.”
“Very well,” Yamashida replied. He studied the twisting route the marines had found through the ship for a moment. “This appears to be a long trip.”
“Ninety minutes or so, my lord,” Major Wen confirmed. “You’ll need to take a shuttle around to the turret we’re using as an entry point, and then descend through the beam aperture. I’d suggest bringing a strong escort with you, just in case. We’re finding a lot of intact warbots down there, although so far none have gone active.”
“Of course,” Akio agreed. “There’s no reason to take unnecessary risks. Alice, would you like to come with us?”
“Me?” I squeaked. Darn it, so much for acting mature.
“If your captain has no objections. This could be a historic moment, if the mirror is actually there.”
“That’s fine,” Captain Sokol chuckled. “I’m sure the salvage work can spare her for a few hours.”
“Um, sure,” I said. “Only, these Inner Sphere warbots make me nervous. Is it alright if I bring a couple of shield bots, and an anti-bot weapon? Just in case something wakes up at an awkward moment?”
“Certainly, Alice. Take whatever precautions you wish.”
That was how I ended up venturing into the heart of the wreck with a bunch of heavily armed yakuza, with only Emla and a couple of shield bots to watch my back. Well, and maybe Akio. He might be a crime boss, but I was starting to feel like I could rely on him to look out for me.
It took two shuttles to transfer our whole party to the gaping chasm where one of the ship’s main turrets had once been. Akio had a whole platoon of inugami marines, Yamashida brought a squad of his own troops, and between them the two forces had several hundred bots. There was even a couple of mini-tanks, compact heavy gunbots design
ed to work their way through confined spaces like the inside of a ship. It almost felt like we were getting ready to invade someone, instead of just making a long trip through a deserted wreck.
Me, I’d decided to look pretty instead of tough. I wore a blue skinsuit that hugged the curves I was starting to develop, but was still modest enough not to raise any eyebrows. The kind of thing rich girls wear for sports or adventure vacations, with a bunch of build-in climate control features to keep me cool and comfortable no matter what I was doing. Of course, most rich girls don’t add zero-g maneuvering options to their outfits, let alone concealed armor and power cells. The stylish pistol at my hip wouldn’t have been out of place on most colonies, but it was the heavy anti-bot gun that really defined my look. The model I’d chosen attached to my suit, enclosing my right arm from elbow to wrist, with a barrel that extended just past my knuckles.
“You look like a space pirate’s daughter,” Emla had said as I posed in front of the mirror.
“Nah.” I called Ash over to sit on my shoulder. Perfect. “Now I look like a space pirate.”
She giggled. “I think I’m jealous.”
“Why? You’ve got real powered armor, and the same guns with a missile pack and smoke dispensers too.”
“Not of you, of Ash. He gets to sit on your shoulder.”
I blushed. “Oh, you.”
Ash preened. Useful!
“Yeah, yeah, you’re a fierce protector. But you’re staying home this time. None of your weapons would do anything to a warbot.
He hung his head. Useless.
Who thought it was a good idea to program a security bot to pout? Ugh. I had to spend a few minutes petting him and reassuring him that I still needed him before he’d perk up again. Then it was time to go.
I let Emla hold my hand on the shuttle ride. Sometimes it was a little much, the way she always wanted to be touching me, but I had to admit I was starting to like it. I wasn’t looking forward to the descent, and I didn’t mind sneaking a little reassurance.
Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1) Page 41