What do we do, Alice? She frantically asked. We can’t beat this many warbots at the same time. We don’t even have enough ammo!
We don’t have to, I reassured her. Yamashida made a big mistake. See how the bots haven’t started moving yet? He only took over the marines a few seconds ago, and they haven’t had a chance to give new orders yet. We just need to hit them hard while they’re busy telling the bots to kill Akio instead of protecting him. If we can get out of the vault we can get away.
Do you really think we can do it, Alice? There are six breeching bots in the cage with us, and that door is a terrible choke point.
Trust me, Emla. We can do it. Now sync with me, as close as you can, and follow my lead.
Alright, Alice.
Her internal data pathways opened to me. In the space of a millisecond her body became mine to command, almost as surely as my own. Her mind opened at the same time, exposing everything from her feelings to her tentative ideas about how to handle the most immediate threats. I was shocked at that, and even more surprised that a part of me knew what to do with that kind of connection. She eagerly surrendered herself to the gestalt as it formed, and then there was nothing between us but the trivial light speed delay of our comms.
I believe in you, Mistress, her heart sang with perfect devotion. Lead us to victory.
I brought my shield bots under direct control, and a query arrived from Akio’s comm. I assured his combat computer that Emla and I were still friendly. Barely two milliseconds had passed since Yamashida’s order, and the marines hadn’t even started to react. We could do this. We had to do this.
Emla and I spun in opposite directions, sweeping the space inside the cage with our guns as we moved. Two breeching bots and a marine were blown apart by the heavy slugs of Emla’s weapon, while I put a shot into Yamashida’s head before taking down the two marines on my side. Our turn kept one of the shield bots between us and the larger group of enemies out in the main vault, while the other shield bot started to float towards the exit from the cage.
Emla had the power systems of a warbot twice her mass, and she could fire off all thirty of the heavy antiarmor rounds in her weapon without stopping. But my power cells only held enough energy to fire my weapon six times, and it would take a good ten minutes for the little nuke pack in my suit to recharge them. Fortunately Yamashida had wasted enough time talking for my internal systems to load the tritium from that transport capsule into my internal reservoir.
I lit the fusion reactor in my chest. Power like nothing I’d ever felt sang through my network, and suddenly the drain of my weapon was nothing. Every time I fired my reactor automatically kicked into high gear, pumping out enough energy to recharge my power cells in a few milliseconds before throttling back down again. At the same time my hair unbound itself and spread out into a cloud of black strands floating in the vacuum around me. A tiny thread of thermal superconductor ran the length of each strand, turning all that surface area into a mass of radiators.
A cloud of prismatic dust from Emla’s smoke dispensers formed around us, obscuring the enemy’s vision. But some of the closer bots were starting to respond to our attack now. A mass driver round slammed into one of my shield bots, cratering its armored hull, and another flashed through the space my hand had been in a millisecond before. Two of the breeching bots launched micro-missiles at me, and one was close enough to add a shot from its plasma flamer to the barrage.
I called for more power, and my reactor surged. My field emitters lit up like a million tiny suns, and blocked the whole barrage with an impromptu deflector shield. The missiles blew up on impact, creating a cloud of smoke and debris that almost hid the breaching bot trying to charge me.
Akio caught it from behind, and ripped it apart with his bare hands.
I flashed him a smile, but there was no time for conversation. My lead shield bot was through the cage door, with Emla right behind it. A marine in powered armor tried to duck around it to take a shot at her, and her gun was pointed in the wrong direction.
Good thing that wasn’t her only weapon. Emla breathed a huge jet of plasma over the hapless inugami, blocking her view and cooking her in her armor. I ducked past the smoking body to huddle behind the shield bot, and snapped off a shot at a missile bot someone had left in an exposed position. Akio hurried to follow me, and I maneuvered the second shield bot around to give him cover.
But there were still an awful lot of enemies around us. There was an open area at the back of the vault where two marines and a dozen warbots had set up a defensive position, and there wasn’t any cover to speak of. More and more of the bots were turning around to face us, and the heavier models had too much armor for our weapons to penetrate. The shield bots were protecting us for now, but there was a limit to how much damage they could block before they started to fall apart.
I picked off another marine, and Emla’s smoke screen thickened up enough to provide decent concealment as we ducked into the closest of the long aisles leading back to the vault entrance. A plasma grenade went off just behind us, and another volley of micro-missiles zipped into our smoke cloud looking for targets. But I felt them the moment they entered my manipulator field, and crushed them before they could get close.
I was just starting to feel optimistic when a pair of gunbots appeared at the far end of the aisle, and opened fire on us.
They couldn’t actually see us through Emla’s smoke, and they were too far away for my field sense. But the effect of their heavy mass driver rounds slamming into our forward shieldbot was unmistakable. The first hit made another big crater in the bot’s hull, and the second smashed one of its cameras. A quick calculation told me there was no way the bot would survive long enough for us to close with the gunbots, and shooting at their heavy frontal armor from here would be an exercise in futility.
Darn it, I was not going to let Emla get shot to pieces by these things.
I darted around the shieldbot, and threw myself down the aisle with my field at full power. I was so light, and my field was so strong with my reactor lit, I could easily hit sixty gravities of acceleration.
The bots weren’t expecting that, and they picked the wrong response. One of them reoriented its gun to aim at me, and lined up a perfect shot that should have put a 25mm armor piercing round right through my chest. There’s no way something as small as me could carry enough armor to stop an attack like that, and dodging a hypersonic projectile at this range was clearly impossible.
Instead I focused my field, and swatted it aside.