But nanotech tends to be pretty temperature sensitive. Heat them up a few hundred degrees, and most of those fancy gadgets quit working until they have a chance to cool off. Hot materials are more reactive, too, and chemical reactions run a lot faster at high temperatures.
The solution that filled the destructor bot’s tanks was a very simple nanomachine, more like an acid molecule than a proper nanite. At room temperature they were sluggish things, mildly caustic but not especially dangerous. Dump them onto a mass of hot armor, though, and they’ll eat through the diamondoid structural mesh like water poured onto cotton candy. With that gone the armor lost most of its hardness, and the honeycomb structure of other components that was left behind crumbled quickly under my bot’s drills.
The enemy smoke cloud rolled down the hall towards our position as the bot tunneled through the blast door, and I had to focus most of my attention on the fight. There had to be dozens of enemy bots creeping towards us to generate that much smoke, but my people had an answer for that too. The next volley of micro-missiles I fired had field emitters instead of warheads, and when they hit the edge of the smoke cloud they activated to form a single continuous field that repelled the air and smoke particles. They cleared the smoke from fifteen meters of corridor before they got shot down, exposing three squads of assault bots that I gunned down before they could refresh their cover.
I was pretty sure I’d managed to pick off some of their gunbots, too. Their advance stalled momentarily, and I could just picture the marines hiding around a corner somewhere trying to decide what to do. If I were them I’d bring in some tank bots to provide covering fire heavy enough to punch through my deflectors, and then drop the smoke and send in a wave of shield bots protecting some assault and breaching bots. That or just quit worrying about collateral damage, and nuke my position. I was kind of counting on them not wanting to do too much damage to their own ship.
Then the destructor bot broke through.
Naturally there were bots on the other side that immediately opened fire on it, and its tunneling mechanism was smashed by a volley of heavy mass driver rounds. But it had served its purpose. I shifted it sideways before it could be completely wrecked, and sent a small swarm of breaching bots and little recon drones through the hole.
Their sensors showed a good-sized room that was obviously supposed to be a guard post. Four massive humanoid bots stood in the corners, and there were a dozen or so turrets on the ceiling mounting an assortment of stunners, machine guns and capture foam projectors. A narrow hallway on the other side was probably a security checkpoint. It was partially hidden by some kind of portable barricade, with a group of armed inugami crouched behind it.
I frowned. Shouldn’t there be marines guarding the detention center, with real warbots? On second thought, they probably didn’t trust regular troops to guard this place. But then, shouldn’t whatever secret spy group was in charge down here have their own troops?
Whatever. I didn’t have time to puzzle over it. If the enemy wanted to be dumb, I was happy to take advantage. My breaching bots had barely started to exchange fire with the defenders when I sent one of Emla’s bodies through the hole in the blast door, and followed her through.
Two of the giant mechs were busy shooting at my little melee bots by then, but the other two both shot Emla. For a brief moment as she passed through the breach there was no room to dodge, and dozens of rounds from their autocannons smashed into her shields.
Even with my field bolstering hers we couldn’t turn all of it. I winced as several rounds tore through her body, mangling her arms and wings, and barely missing me. But a lot more were deflected to ricochet around the room, and with careful control of the angling of our deflectors I managed to control where most of them ended up. Two of the inugami behind the barricade went down in a spray of blood, and none of my own bots were hit.
Then I was through, with room to maneuver. I ducked around the hail of fire, my point defense laser blowing the few bullets I couldn’t dodge out of the air, and threw myself across the room at one of the mechs.
I’d thought I was fast on my own, but my acceleration in that suit was just insane. A million Newtons of peak force from my manipulator field, and only a hundred kilograms of mass? I could cross the room two or three times in a second, breaking the sound barrier each time, and that was without factoring in the fusion torch on my rocket hammer.
I caved in the first mech’s chest with a blow of my hammer, fired a plasma grenade into its face, and launched myself away again before the grenade landed. Across the room I smashed another mech’s right arm, where its guns were mounted, spun with a flash of rocket thrust and slammed my hammer into its side hard enough to send it flying into mech number three. I pushed off the wall and blinded mech four’s sensors with my laser for a split second while I threw myself back across the room, and knocked its head off with my hammer. A couple of plasma grenades into the hole ought to keep it from getting back up, and then I was coming back for the two that were tangled up in each other.
Emla’s other two bodies followed me through the breach, and quickly picked off the weapons on the ceiling while our bots took out the security forces. A few more whacks took the big bots out of action, and then-
“Stop! Stand down, or your friend dies!”
Down past the security checkpoint stood another uniformed inugami, holding a gun to Lina’s head. The foxgirl was naked, looking pale and frightened, with her hands shackled behind her back.
I cut the gun in half with my point defense laser, and launched myself down the narrow hallway as fast as I could. The walls of the security checkpoint warped under the force of my sudden acceleration, and when I braked the impact tore up the deck plates. But even so, in the split second it took me to get there Lina had already twisted out of her captor’s grip and kicked her away.
That made it easy to put my fist through the bitch’s head. It disintegrated into a spray of broken armor and shattered electronics, and the android collapsed.
“Alice? Is that you?!”
I brought my deflector swarm in to hover around Lina, wrapping her in layers of protective shields. Then I let myself drop to the deck, and dialed back my field strength to a sustainable level. I wanted to hug her, but my armor was way too hot for that to be safe.
“Yeah, it’s me Lina. Are you alright?”
“I think so. They were still running diagnostic probes, trying to figure out the best way to burrow into my head,” she said, hugging herself. “Fuck! I thought they had me, there. Thanks for the rescue. But how the hell did you pull it off?”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” I warned her. “But I brought you some armor, and I’ve got a decent exit plan.”
A fire team of bots caught up with me, and I sent them to scout the rest of the detention block. Lina’s eyes went wide when she saw them, and then she turned to give my armor an appraising look.
“Is that Mirai equipment you’re using, Alice?”
“Um, maaaybe?”
“Awesome! Hang on a sec. I need to stop by the break room and get some popcorn, so I can watch you kick yakuza butt in style.”
I laughed. “Your whole pack is nuts, Lina. You know that, right?”
“Says the girl who stormed a yakuza warship to rescue a tech.”
“They were going to torture you,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, they were. I owe you big time for this, Alice.”
A faint tremor went through the ship’s artificial gravity field. No, not just one. A faint, nearly continuous fluctuation. What the heck?
Lina frowned, obviously feeling the same thing. “Are they launching drones? Alice, you have better sensors than me. Can you give me a data feed?”
“Sure. Here you go.”
“Oh, shit. They’re scrambling everything they’ve got. What’s going on out there?”
Chapter 30
“I wish I could get a sensor feed,” I grumbled. “Akio set me up with access to a lot of the ship�
��s systems, but I can’t log in because someone keeps killing the com system wherever I go.”
“Is there a security console around here? Or maybe a damage control station?” Lina asked. Then she caught sight of the armor one of my bots was carrying in for her, and her eyes lit up. “Oh, sweet! Is that a combat engineer suit?”
“You bet. It’s a Mirai design, of course, but I’m sure you can figure it out. It comes with skill packs that are supposed to be compatible with your OS.”
Lina put her hand on the suit, triggering the login process that left her in control of it. I saw her eyes glaze over as it unfolded out of storage mode, and wrapped itself around her.
“These skill packs are amazing,” she said after a moment. “Normally I’d have to spend a few days practicing to really absorb everything properly, but there’s a bunch of adaptive integration features that are doing most of the work for me. Okay, I’m good. Find me a hard-wired network connection, and I’ll get us in.”
Another shift in the ship’s artificial gravity announced that it had just gone to full thrust. What were they doing?
“This way,” I said hurriedly. My bots had already found a side room that was set up as a security control station, with a bunch of screens the guards could use to monitor the detention complex. “The workstations are all shut down, though. Do you really thing you can make them work?”
She poked her head into the room, and rubbed her hands. “Piece of cake. Stations like these always have a local override that lets you turn them back on. Otherwise the guys in the security control room could take over the whole ship and lock everyone else out, which would be pretty stupid.”
As she spoke she ran a sensor over the workstations, and then sent some little toolbots floating down behind one. They opened a panel, and fiddled with something inside. The screen lit up with a login prompt.
“Bingo! Here you go, Alice.”
“Thanks, Lina. Let’s see here.”
I fed the console my ID, scanned the datanet looking for things I could access, and hurriedly pulled up an exterior image. The camera’s field of view was filled with the stroboscopic flashes of nuclear blasts in a vacuum, and the dancing glare of drive flames from thousands of drones.
Someone was staging a serious attack on the Masu-kai. So much for my exit plan, then. I’d been planning to leave my bots on board as a distraction while I snuck away, but there was no way a shuttle was going to make it through that furball. Especially not the under gunned, practically defenseless shuttle I’d come in on. No matter what IFF I showed, one side or the other would blow us away the moment we launched.
As I groped for another plan, a new window popped up on the screen in front of me. An incoming call from Akio.
“Alice! I’m glad to see that you’re still alive. Did you find your tech?”
He just didn’t get it, did he? I put my arm around Lina, and pulled her into the camera’s field of view.
“Yes, this is Lina. What’s going on?”
He pulled up a tactical display. One of the yakuza drone carriers had returned, but it was a crippled wreck. Three drone carriers of a different design had followed it, along with a frigate and a pair of light gunships. I checked their ID codes, and gasped.
“Those are Sleeping Dragon ships!”
“I knew the captain had a plan,” Lina grinned. “I bet they’ve been lurking somewhere around here just waiting for their cue.”
Akio scowled. “You mean Captain Sokol has been planning treachery too?”
Lina rolled her eyes. “No, we were just ready for you guys to start backstabbing each other and cleaning up the witnesses. Come on, did you really think we’d believe that a bunch of yakuza were going to peacefully split a score this big?”
Akio sniffed, and turned to me. “Do you always allow your techs to carry on like that, Alice?”
“She’s not my property, Akio. She’s my friend, and you might want to try being nice to her considering how badly your guys are getting their butts kicked right now. Lina, I don’t suppose you know what their plan is?”
“Of course not. But I know the captain doesn’t leave people behind. They’ll probably try to capture the ship and rescue us.”
“Uncle Noburu will never stand for that,” Akio said. “If he can’t win this fight he’ll run.”
I reached out across the ship’s datanet, and found that my other teams were still fighting. The team in engineering was pretty close to their second objective now, too.
“What if he can’t get away?” I asked.
Akio shook his head. “He has too much pride to allow himself to be captured by gaijin. If he’s cornered he’ll order the ship to self-destruct.”
“Your ships have self-destruct devices?” Lina exclaimed. “Jeez, that’s retarded. No professional navy does stuff like that.”
“You may not have noticed, Lina, but the Masu-kai are not a professional navy,” Akio said dryly. “To my uncles, the fact that anyone with the proper codes can destroy our ships at will is a strength, not a vulnerability.”
“I am not going to die here just because some devious jerk is feeling suicidal,” I declared. “What’s the yield on the destruct charge?”
“I’m not sure. Several gigatons, probably. Why?”
“Could we survive that if we ball up and go full shields, Alice?” Emla asked.
I ran the math, and grimaced. It didn’t look promising.
“Maybe. If it’s just one bomb, and we’re at the other end of the ship, and we shape our deflectors just right and overload them at the right moment. But even then it doesn’t look good. You’d probably make it, and so would some of the bots. But Lina and I are way too squishy to survive a shock like that, and Akio wouldn’t make it out either.”
Well, if Akio was really an infomorph I could probably just store a copy of him on one of the bots. But sooner or later Lina would report any secrets she learned to Chief Benson, so I couldn’t mention that without betraying Akio’s trust. Besides, it didn’t help the rest of us. Was Lina’s AI core rugged enough to survive getting launched into space like mass driver round? If my body was killed while I was inhabiting a bunch of warbots could I recover somehow?
A salvo of heavy mass driver rounds from the Sleeping Dragon frigate slammed into the ship’s deflectors. Several of them punched through to blow craters in the yakuza ship’s armor, wiping away emitter panels and a cluster of point defense lasers. Considering how badly the yakuza were outnumbered, this wasn’t going to be a long battle.
“I’ve been working on a counter-coup, but my people aren’t ready yet,” Akio said. “My uncle has too many warbots on the ship for a simple uprising to work, and trying to assassinate him isn’t feasible.”
Lina cursed. “So we’re trapped on a ship full of yakuza in the middle of a space battle, and as soon as they realize they’re going to lose they’ll blow us all up? Fuck!”
It did sound pretty hopeless. Frantically I pulled together everything I knew about this mess, looking for a way to survive. There had to be something I could do. I spun through one scenario after another, all the mysterious instinctive mechanisms in my subconscious working overtime.
Escape seemed impossible. There were too many unknowns, too many risks. Besides, I hated the idea of running away. So far I’d smashed everything in my way without so much as breaking a nail. I should be crushing the rest of these losers, not…
Wait.
Primitive biological threat assessment.
Yes. That just might work. Gaia, it was so obvious. An eager grin stole across my face, and I chuckled.
“No, Lina. We aren’t trapped on this ship with a bunch of thugs, backstabbers and poorly trained light infantry. They’re trapped in here with us. Akio, it’s do or die time. Can your people get me comlinks to my other teams, and feed me data on what Yamashida’s troops are doing?”
“Yes. But it will only take a few minutes for the security crew to realize what’s happening, and send marines to put a stop to our
interference.”
“Then I’ll hit the security room first, and your people can run things from there. I can spare a fire team to guard the door and make sure no one bothers them.”
“What about the marines? Alice, you can’t be planning to fight the whole garrison.”
“I know that, Akio. I’m using quick fab bots that aren’t nearly as durable as the real thing, and I didn’t have enough tritium to equip the force like I wanted to. If we have to fight for too long I’m going to start running low on fuel, and I only have a handful of plasma warheads. But they don’t know that. They don’t even know how many bots I have, because I came in cloaked and half my force hasn’t needed to shoot at anything yet.
“Don’t you remember how terrified everyone is of Inner Sphere war machines? All I have to do is hit them hard without seeming to take damage, and they’ll panic. Especially if your people are sabotaging everything they do behind their backs. Heck, have the data rats tell them I’m hacking their systems somehow. We both know that’s impossible, but I bet Yamashida would believe it. Guys who live by trickery are always ready to believe someone else has a better trick.”
He gave me a dubious look. “What if it doesn’t work? Or works too well, and my uncle decides to take you with him?”
“I’ll just have to make sure I take out the self-destruct device before he decides to use it. Akio, we don’t have time for a safer plan. One of my distraction teams is on its way to blow the main drive right now, and how long do you think it will take Yamashida to decide things are hopeless after that? Either help me or don’t, but I have to move right now.”
He sighed. “Alright, Alice. I’ll send word to my agents.”
“Thank you.” I stepped away from the console, and turned to the girls. “Lina, I’m running a combat gestalt with Emla and the bots, so we’ll do all the heavy lifting. You just stay in the middle of the group and do damage control. Emla-3, you’re Lina’s bodyguard until this is over.”
“Got it!” One of Emla’s bodies said.
Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1) Page 47