“We’re all loaded up, Mistress,” Emla called cheerily from the hatch that led back the shuttle’s cargo hold.
“There, problem solved,” I said. “Seal up and prep for launch, Nari. If anyone else comes along they’ll just have to wait for the next shuttle.”
The pilot’s ears drooped. “Yes, my lady.”
As the passenger door slid shut I put my hand on her shoulder. “Hey. You’re going to be alright, Nari. I take care of my people, and Akio is trusting me with you. Just follow my directions, and I’ll get you home safe and sound.”
She seemed shocked by my concern. “You’d trouble yourself over the fate of a simple tech, my lady?”
“This whole operation is aimed at rescuing a tech, Nari. Do you have backup support?”
“No, my lady. It isn’t worth bothering with for simple mass produced girls like me.”
It was a good thing there was a fight coming, because I really wanted to shoot someone. Instead, I patted her shoulder reassuringly.
“That’s alright, Nari. Just stay on the shuttle, then, and keep it ready for a quick exit. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes, my lady! Thank you, my lady. Command me as you will, I’m at your disposal.”
She scurried off to the bridge, suddenly all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Yeah, that’s a tech for you. All she needed was a little reassurance that someone cared.
I turned to the crew chiefs with a smile. “How about you two?”
“We have backups, Lady Long,” the short one said. “As long as the young master wins this fight we’ll be fine. Is there anything we can do to assist you?”
“If we get really unlucky and the shuttle takes critical damage I’ll need you to either fix it, or help Nari commandeer one that’s intact,” I told her. “Otherwise just keep your heads down, and stay safe.”
“Are you sure, my lady? We’re prepared to fight for our lord, and we do have basic infantry skills,” the taller one said.
“Trust me, ladies. I’ve got the fighting covered. Emla, let’s get suited up.”
The shuttle was a tiny model, with no weapons or proper crew quarters. Just a cockpit, a passenger compartment with a dozen or so comfy seats, and a modest cargo bay. The yakuza bosses obviously thought it was too small to be any threat, because according to Akio the boat bay was only guarded by a couple of marines and their bots. They were about to get a heck of a surprise, because the shuttle’s cargo space was currently crammed full of sleek black and red engines of destruction.
Standard bots would have taken much too long to build, but I’d found to my amazement that the Mirai had a whole separate tech tree of special quick-fab models. Designed to be thrown together in a hurry out of salvaged materials, they didn’t perform quite as well as the normal models. But they still made the bots I’d trained on with Chief West look like cheap toys.
I’d used an awful lot of my tritium reserve fueling them up, though, and even so they didn’t have much staying power. Enough for my plan, and a little extra, but if I got bogged down into a long fight they could start running out. I’d have to make sure that didn’t happen.
I slipped into my powered armor, and felt the suit settle into place around me. It fit me like a second skin, its systems interfacing with mine so seamlessly it felt more like an extension of my body than a piece of equipment. Suddenly I was a hundred times stronger than normal, with an amazing sensor suite and field emitters far more powerful than the ones in my body. A grenade launcher peeked over my left shoulder, ready to launch volleys of deadly guided munitions from the big magazine on my back, while the beam director of a powerful UV laser peered over my right shoulder looking for targets. Particle beam cannons mounted along both forearms gave me some long-range firepower, although hopefully my gunbots would be doing all the shooting.
I picked up the long, bulky shape of my chosen melee weapon, a rocket hammer with a two-meter shaft and a pointed head of hyperdense composite that weighed almost two hundred kilograms. Between my suit’s field and the fusion torch on the back of the massive hammerhead it could easily reach supersonic speeds, striking hard enough to crush warbots or smash through light bulkheads. The rocket doubled as a heavy plasma flamer, too.
I grinned at Emla. “Ready, partner?”
She’d decided that the frigate’s corridors wouldn’t have room for a giant dragon body, but Strange Loop Sleuth had given her other tricks. Instead she’d built two extra bodies for herself, and each of them had swallowed a Mirai compact fusion reactor to improve her power output. All three of her bodies were in dragon form, and they’d bulked up to a couple hundred kilograms apiece. I pitied any melee bot that tried to get past her.
“Ready, Alice. We’re going to kick butt this time.”
“You bet we are, Emla.”
Leaders are supposed to project confidence, so I tried not to let on how nervous I was. By any normal standard of logic Nari was right. Taking on a whole frigate full of marines with just a few dozen bots was suicide. Granted, the plan was to move fast and keep them too confused to react properly until we escaped, but still. I was only one girl.
Hope hadn’t tried to talk me out of it, though. When I’d come up with this crazy scheme she’d just chuckled, and started offering helpful suggestions. Like this kind of thing was expected of me, and she had complete faith that I could pull it off.
Was that what my family had been like?
If so, I had some big shoes to fill. But it gave me hope that I wasn’t making a terrible mistake.
The shuttle was coming in to land now, and Nari’s chatter with traffic control still sounded perfectly normal. That was one hurdle down. They’d directed us to the aft boat bay, so unfortunately we were going to be too far away from the bridge to take a shot at Lord Yamashida. He’d be somewhere in the secure citadel zone that was reserved for VIPs, with a company of marines and a bunch of fixed defenses between him and my forces. But the detention center wasn’t too far from the boat bay.
Neither was engineering, a detail I intended to take advantage of.
I reached out to the bots around me, feeling for the control channels Hope had showed me. It was as easy as breathing. Unlike the commercial bots I’d trained with they were designed to interface with me, and their IFF and data security were both good enough to satisfy my internal safeguards. So instead of trying to manage them all remotely like a juggler with too many balls, I felt my consciousness expand as I swallowed their computing nodes into myself.
The deflector swarms became mine first. Dozens of fast little hover units, designed to work in perfect harmony to extend and amplify my manipulator field. Their sensors were my eyes, their emitters my fingers, all just as natural as if I’d been born with them.
Then the gunbots, slow and heavily armored, but packing a mean punch. The breeching bots with their plasma flamers and micro-missiles. Little fist-sized transports full of microbot swarms, and assassin bots made of liquid metal. I’d prepared a bunch of surprises to keep the enemy off balance, and none of it was going to be running on some clumsy remote control. Every bot was running an extension of my mind, and we were all networked together into one seamless gestalt.
Emla joined the network, surrendering herself to our union with the same absolute trust as the last time we’d done this. Her resolute faith stilled my nervous doubts. We could do this. We had to.
The shuttle touched down.
I turned on my cloaking, and every bot in the hold followed suit. Even Emla vanished, becoming nothing but a faint distortion to most of my sensors. Only our radio traffic and emitter fields gave us away, and no one seems to track those as closely as they should.
I opened a com channel. “Akio? We’re starting.”
“Good luck, Alice. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Then the hatch opened, and every body under my command burst into motion.
The boat bay held another half-dozen shuttles and a gaggle of techs, but I immediately zeroed in on the defenders. An in
ugami marine up in the elevated control booth that overlooked the bay, along with a couple of techs. Another marine by the main hatch, with a couple of infantry bots. Six gunbots on the ceiling, covering the whole room. An assault team waiting in each corner, and four more infantry bots patrolling the row of parked shuttles.
Particle beams lanced up towards the gunbots, overmatching their armor and blowing them apart in spectacular fireballs. I threw myself across the room in the blink of an eye, and smashed the huge diamond window that protected the control room with my hammer. Emla was right with me, two of her bodies covering me while the third dove through the hole I’d made with a swarm of breaching bots on her heels. Her gun thundered, and the marine’s head exploded.
By then the marine down by the hangar door was dead too, taken down by a particle beam from one of my gunbots. Small flying mirrors popping up above the tops of the shuttles, allowed my lasbots to cut down the patrols with lasers before they could even deploy smoke. The lances of light struck with typical laser precision, hitting each target exactly on its most vulnerable points and reducing them to wreckage in milliseconds. The whole fight was over before you could say ‘speed blitz’.
I became visible as I swung into the control room, and pointed at the nearest tech. “You! Seal the hangar,” I shouted over the howl of escaping air.
“Y-yes, ma’am,” she stammered, and slapped a control. The big hatch overhead started to rumble shut.
“Please don’t hurt us,” another one pleaded. “We’re not combatants.”
The noise level dropped as my bots laid out a deflector field that stopped any more air from escaping the hole, and started to file into the control room. I was already heading for the door.
“Stand over there, put your hands on your head, and don’t resist when the bot comes to drain your power cells,” I ordered.
They hurried to comply, but most of my attention was already moving on to the next step. There were plenty of cameras in the boat bay and control room, and someone would be setting off alarms by now. I opened the door, and sent a breaching team through.
The corridor on the other side was empty, just as I’d hoped. But the detention center was eleven decks down and a hundred meters aft of the boat bay, so we needed to create as much confusion as possible about what was going on. I sent a combat team ghosting up the hall towards the ship’s bow, hoping Yamashida would assume this was an assassination attempt, and led the rest of my force down the nearest lift shaft.
Something must have been monitoring the load on the shaft’s manipulator field, because we barely got two decks down before the gravity in the shaft reversed and tried to force us back up. With the overpowered levitation fields my bots all flew on that barely made a difference to our rate of progress, but then an armored hatch slid shut to block the shaft a few decks below us. I bailed out well above that point, and had my bots blow open the doors for three adjacent decks to create some confusion about where I was going. The first intersection after that I sent a combat team aft towards engineering to create more distractions.
Suddenly the air filled with the sound of warning claxons, and an amplified voice shouting instructions. “Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! All hands to action stations!”
Akio’s people were supposed to start creating false reports of disturbances all over the ship at this point. I’d been hoping the security sensors would have trouble spotting my group, and give me time to reach the detention center while the enemy troops chased after ghosts. But I hadn’t counted on the number of crew that were suddenly scrambling through the halls after the alarm went off. How many people were on this ship, anyway? A frigate only needs around a hundred crew, which wouldn’t have been much of an obstacle in a kilometer-long starship. But there were frantic dog girls everywhere now. Were they all servants, flunkies and bodyguards, or what?
The first time someone ran right into one of my invisible bots and started screaming about assassins I knew my hopes of a stealthy trip to the detention center were ruined. But by then the team I’d sent forward was plowing through a detachment of marines, while the ones I’d sent aft were almost in position to plant a nuclear demo charge on one of the ship’s fusion reactors.
Hopefully that would divert attention from my real goal for long enough. But every passing second was a chance that someone would realize I was coming for Lina and move her, so from this point on everything depended on speed.
I shoved the shouting inugami away with my manipulator field, and arranged my bots for a coordinated fire plan. Every laser I had lanced out at the same instant to strike a specific location on the floor, and then shifted to draw an arc of fire across the deck. The surface of the smart matter armor vaporized, leaving a shallow trench and a cloud of plasma that would have blocked further progress if my weapons hadn’t already been shifting their aim. Instead my particle beam cannons fired one by one, carefully swiveling their beams to play along the trench as the arc swiftly grew into a complete circle.
It was still only a couple of cems deep, but the armor below that would be softened by the vast amount of heat I’d just dumped into it. Before the heat management system could cool it off again I stepped into the middle of the circle, and brought my rocket hammer down in a blast of atomic fire.
The damaged armor broke with a thunderous crash, and the plug of decking went careening down to smash through a layer of conduits and piping into the next deck below. My bots were moving through the gap before the fireball even cleared, checking for enemies and scanning the surrounding structure for weak spots.
We dropped three more decks in quick succession, before we reached an internal armor layer that was too thick for that tactic to work. Then we headed aft, blew a bulkhead with one of the half-kiloton demo charges I’d brought, and found a lift shaft that took us most of the way to our destination.
The team I’d sent into engineering set off a much larger demo charge, and the whole ship shuddered. The aft fusion reactor was completely wrecked by the sixty kiloton explosion, and a whole bay full of engineering bots went with it. My other team was fighting a running battle through one of the marine barracks areas, catching a bunch of the inugami still scrambling into their armor and mowing them down easily. So far so good.
Then we ran into our first real resistance. My breaching bots swarmed out of the lift shaft into a hail of mass driver fire, from enemy bots and several ceiling-mounted weapon emplacements. I managed to dodge or swat aside most of the projectiles, but one of them hit a bot and blew its leg off.
Normal doctrine would have been to pull back, lay down smoke and try to flank them, but there was no time for that kind of thing now. Instead I sent a volley of micro-missiles at the enemy, distracting their point defense lasers for the couple of seconds it took to flood the hall with bigger bots. By the time Emla and I exited the lift shaft there were so many overlapping deflector fields across the hall that their mass driver rounds just bounced off, and neither their shields nor their armor were much use against my particle beams. We charged down the hall, overrunning their position and wiping them out in a few moments of furious fighting.
Some of my bots were damaged in the action, but all of them were still partially operational. Unlike normal designs these Mirai bots didn’t have any single points of failure. There were always three or four small fusion reactors instead of one big one, and their power cells and computing power were distributed all through their structure. No wonder the salvage teams had found so few damaged bots back on the wreck. You pretty much had to blow one of these things to pieces to stop it, and even then the bigger ones might just fix themselves and come back for more in an hour or two.
Good. I was going to need all the advantages I could get, because the enemy was starting to get their act together. Someone must have finally figured out that I was using their own com system to communicate with my other two teams, because I suddenly lost network access. Then I started taking fire from behind just as I hit another fortified position around the last bla
st door in my path.
I couldn’t nuke this one, or I might catch Lina by accident. But I’d come prepared.
My assault units swarmed the position, hosing down the turrets and bots there with plasma flamers and then dismantling the survivors in close combat. I laid down smoke behind us, with a few cloaked recon drones to provide targeting data for my gunbots while they traded fire with the force to my rear. Then I hurried to the blast door, with one of the specialized bots I’d brought along following just behind me.
“This thing is sixty cems thick,” Emla said. “How are we going to get through it?”
“It’s a two step process,” I told her. “First, we get it nice and hot.”
My bots were already doing that. The jet from a plasma flamer is usually well over a hundred thousand degrees, more than hot enough to melt anything. Of course, they’d overheat and melt themselves before they made much of an impression on something as big as this blast door. It had a lot more mass than my swarm of bots, and the network of heat channels woven through the armor was already working frantically to cool off the overheated surface layers. But heat channels leak, especially at high temperature. The whole thickness of the door was rapidly heating up, and it would take time to cool it off again.
I let my bots fire continuously for thirty seconds or so, until they had to stop to cool down. Then the big destructor bot floated forward, hesitating only a moment to let the molten surface of the door slump away. A big, round abrasion tool swept over the surface, grinding away a few more millimeters of armor that had been softened by the heat. Then it withdrew, and the meter-wide mouth at the front of the bot made contact.
Most people would tell you that smart matter is immune to being disassembled by nanotech devices. Breaking apart tough materials takes a lot of energy, something nanites have only a very limited supply of. The stuff also has its own defensive nanites, along with a transport network to move them around and microscopic factories that can build more of them on demand.
Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1) Page 46