But all of that stupendous firepower hadn’t been enough. What remained of the ship was a mass of twisted wreckage only eighteen kloms long, with the fusion torch wrecked and much of the bow completely gone. Two of the twelve main turrets were missing as well, and seven more were very obviously wrecked. The secondaries were even more of a mess, and practically every square meter of the hull was covered in signs of battle. Huge impact craters from multi-gigaton RKKV impacts, and long trenches gouged out by graser cannons. Millions upon millions of smaller craters, from drone strikes and mass driver bombardments. Deep wounds where the outer armor had been ripped apart by repeated hits, exposing vast expanses of wrecked machinery.
For all that, the damaged sections probably accounted for less than a third of the great ship’s mass. I could barely imagine the level of self-repair a ship like this would be capable of, but I suspected it was the boarders that had finally taken it out of action.
“Once the point defense batteries were destroyed they must have swarmed the ship,” Captain Sokol was saying. “Everywhere we went, we found masses of dead warbots. The Mirai models are all destroyed, as are most of the boarders. But there are a concerning number of intact ones as well. It seems that the Swarmlords did not equip their forces for an extended stay, and the vast majority of them were powered by nuke packs that have long since decayed. But we’ve had several rather hair-raising encounters with fusion-powered cybertanks coming out of standby mode.”
“I take it this is the factor that limited your explorations?” Lord Yamashida interjected.
“My crew weren’t eager to meet any more of those things,” Sokol agreed. “The small ones are about twelve tons, but they’ve got the firepower and armor you’d expect from a twenty-ton machine. There are heavier ones in some of the cargo spaces, including some big thousand-ton models, and we didn’t want to risk waking one up.”
Akio frowned at the display. “That’s probably the wrong area anyway. Those holds are pretty close to the ship’s hull, and they look like they’re full of mining equipment. The gold is probably in a more protected location.”
One of the yard dogs raised her hand. “My lord? According to our information, Mirai capital ships frequently had secure holds located near the centerline in this region.” She indicated an area about four kloms forward of the ship’s midpoint, between the second and third gun turrets.
“Why would we care about cargo holds?” I asked curiously.
“I would expect a girl in your position to be more interested in wealth,” Yamashida said.
I huffed. “My point is, why would the gold be in a cargo hold? It was supposed to be part of the rare element reserve for this holdout colony, not a stash of money. So why would they have shipped it as bars? It’s probably in a big feedstock tank somewhere.”
Captain Sokol facepalmed. “Out of the mouths of babes.”
“That does seem logical,” Akio mused. “Testing the theory could be problematic, though.”
I looked at the display again. Several of the ship’s hangar bays had been filled with industrial equipment, and prefab housing modules that were obviously meant to hold colonists. There were giant tank farms attached to the fabricator bays, which to me seemed like the obvious place to look. They must have been some kind of military design, because the storage tanks were embedded in a giant armor matrix that had protected them pretty well from the fighting. But surely it wasn’t that big an obstacle.
“The armor on those tanks is only thirty cems thick,” I said. “Can’t we just cut them open with a mining laser or something?”
The yard dogs all winced at that. Akio slowly shook his head.
“That’s all smart matter armor matrix, Alice, and it looks like it’s bonded to the rest of the ship. That means it’s tied to the heat management network, and the Mirai are famous for their damage control systems. There’s no way to destroy the embedded computer network without physically melting the whole ship, and if we give it an energy source it’s going to wake up.”
“He’s right, my lady,” one of the yard dogs said apologetically. “Even our biggest cutting beams would take several hours to burn through that much armor, and the ship would recover three or four percent of the waste heat as useable electricity. If there’s an intact fabricator anywhere on this ship, it could power up and start making warbots.”
“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.