“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. Judging 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.