There was only time to deflect it by a few degrees, but the exchange of momentum threw me hard in the opposite direction. The tungsten penetrator barely grazed me, tearing a hole in my suit but doing no real damage. The interaction also got me out from in front of the bot’s cannon, and by then there wasn’t time to line up another shot.
Belatedly, both bots started to launch missiles and swivel their point defense lasers to bear on me. Too late, suckers.
I shot one of the lightly armored laser turrets off with my gun, and smacked the first couple of missiles away as I flew the last few meters. The other bot’s laser grazed my hair as I grabbed them both with my field, slamming them together and dragging myself to a stop behind them.
There was a swarm of little cat-sized melee bots bounding up to cover the gunbots, but they were too late. I ripped open the service panel on the back of one of the gunbots, yanked out its nuke pack and used the heavy lump of unshielded polonium as a club to crush three of the melee bots in a swift exchange of blows. My field ripped two others apart at the same time, and a single shot into the open panel wrecked the gunbot’s power cells and gutted most of its insides.
Emla caught up with me just as I ripped out the other gunbot’s nuke pack. She fried the rest of the melee bots with a long blast from the plasma flamer hidden in her mouth, and Akio started laying down fire with a rifle he must have taken off one of the marines. We’d lost a shieldbot, though, and the one that was left had taken some hits.
“They’ll be waiting outside the vault door by now,” Akio said.
Emla’s smoke cloud billowed out around us, but that wouldn’t actually stop bullets. Someone was alright taking random potshots into the cloud, hoping to get lucky and hit one of us. We didn’t have time to sit around and come up with a plan.
“I’ve got this,” I said.
At my direction the remaining shieldbot started for the hole in the vault door. It was putting out a smoke cloud of its own, which would make it harder for the enemy to target it. It still wouldn’t survive long, since there were bound to be a bunch of gunbots outside the vault just waiting for a target. But it only needed to hold together for a few seconds.
Emla’s armor split open in the front, and she reached inside to extract a fist-sized egg shape that had been hidden in her belly. She stuck it to the back of the shieldbot as it passed, and sealed herself back up.
“What was that?” Akio asked.
By the time he finished asking the question the shieldbot was already charging out through the breach. There was a furious barrage of cannon fire, eerily silent in the airless room. Then the nuclear demolition charge went off.
It was only a tenth of a kiloton, not nearly enough to penetrate the vault door. A star-bright flash of x-rays shone through the hole momentarily, vaporizing a huge chunk of gold bars and filling the room with hot plasma. But the pressure was low enough that my field could hold it at bay, and it didn’t last long. With no air pressure to fight against it expanded out into the maze of empty corridors around us in the blink of an eye, dissipating before the heat could cause us any real problems.
The bots that had been in direct view of the explosion weren’t so lucky. Akio followed us as Emla and I flew out the hole in the vault door. A dozen or more bots had been reduced to half-melted wrecks, and the radio relays were gone. Good, that would make it a little harder for the enemy to coordinate their movements.
“You have your bodyguard carry nukes?” Akio exclaimed.
“Only one,” Emla said.
“I know I can trust her,” I explained. “Unlike your guards. Uh, oh.”
We made it maybe twenty meters down the corridor before someone started shooting at us again, and this time they didn’t have to worry about hitting each other by mistake. A flurry of light mass driver rounds tore through our smoke, and I had to strain my field to bounce the ones that would have hit us. We hastily ducked around a corner, only to find ourselves face to face with a squad of breaching bots.
At least I didn’t have to fight them all myself. Emla tore into them with her gun and plasma flamer, and Akio was surprisingly effective with his fists and the rifle he’d picked up. But the fierce little exchange used up time and ammunition, and by the time we broke through them my hair was glowing cherry red with waste heat.
“I can’t keep this up much longer,” I warned.
“We just need to get outside their perimeter,” Akio said confidently. “This way.”
He pushed off a wall and went sailing off into the darkness of a corridor that hadn’t been mapped as far as I knew. Emla and I followed, not having a better idea.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“If Uncle Noburu really had everyone subverted he would have staged a coup years ago. I’m betting it’s only the marines that he can control, and that means the rest of my agents should still be loyal. I’ve got a fallback point-”
That was as far as he got before an explosion blew our smoke away.
This time the enemy had a proper combat team deployed. Two heavy gunbots opened up on us with their big cannons while a smaller one hosed down the area with its rapid-fire gun, and a swarm of little melee bots charged us. I parried furiously, batting projectiles away from us with my field, but we still took damage before we could get around a corner. Emla’s armor was cratered by a shower of bullets, and a cannon round took a big chunk out of Akio’s left bicep.
We fled, returning fire as we went. But the enemy had more bots than we had bullets, and they were swarming after us from all directions. Another brief skirmish left Emla with two wrecked smoke projectors despite my best efforts, and I was going to get cooked by my own reactor if I didn’t get a chance to power down soon.
Alone, I could have easily outrun the enemy. Emla’s flight system was almost as good as mine, and with her emitters under my control she didn’t slow me down much. But Akio had to push off from walls to move, and even though he was pretty good at it that made him a lot slower. Maybe I could just drag him along? But he weighed more than Emla and I put together, and that would just be more of a strain on my overworked cooling system.
He must have realized the same thing, because the next time we had to dart through a hail of gunfire to cross an intersection he fell back behind us.
“Get out of here,” he said. “I’ll draw them off.”
“But Akio, they’ll kill you!” I protested.
“I have a backup. Here, take this.”
He opened a com channel, and passed me two big bursts of data. One was encrypted, but the header said it was several hours’ worth of memory backup data. The other was… wait, what? A recording of a VR scenario? What the heck?
I sped up my time rate, and sampled it. Oh, my. Akio and me in the Hungry Garden, kissing. His hand tangled in my hair, tipping my head back so his lips could work their way down my throat. His other arm around me, holding me tight against his muscular chest. My heart pounded, and my vision swam.
I popped back out of the scenario, blushing furiously. According to the timestamp there was more than an hour of that.