“What does it take to kill one of us?” I asked.
“You’re a nanomorph, Alice. You can recover from having as much as ninety-eight percent of your body mass vaporized, although it’s a long and unpleasant process. You also have numerous options for leaving backups in various environments, ready to develop into copies of you if you die. You can even integrate with a copy, if one gets activated by mistake.”
“Mom had all of that? Maybe she did get away, then. She must have gotten shot or something, but most people wouldn’t be all that paranoid about making sure she was really dead. Only, wouldn’t she have come for me?”
“If she could find you. The galaxy is a big place, and we don’t know what really happened. If she was badly hurt and didn’t have any money it could take years to get back on her feet, and years more to make any progress on finding you.”
She was right. My mother might still be alive somewhere. Of course, if she found me she’d probably expect me to help her conquer the galaxy. Maybe genocide all the inferior morph types to make room for their betters, and murder enough humans to make the rest fall in line.
Part of me thought it might be worth it, if only I could have a family. But no, I wasn’t that selfish. If she was alive, and I did meet her someday, it probably wasn’t going to go well.
I pushed that depressing thought aside. First, I had to figure out a way to survive this mess. Then I could worry about the future.
“Alright, so we have a fabricator, and I can power it. Can we get feedstock for it?”
“My reservoirs are all frozen, and the delivery system is wrecked anyway,” Hope said. “That’s why they built that big disassembler module. You’ll need to feed it raw materials before you can build anything.”
“We can work with that. Is the boat bay open to space, or are the doors closed?”
“It isn’t visible at all from outside the ship. The hatch at the end of the launch tube is camouflaged, and there’s seventeen hundred meters of baffling and blast doors between that and the hanger. No one is going to spot any activity from outside.”
“Great. Let’s get this secret door open, then. We can reclaim old bots for feedstock, and that will give us plenty of room to work. Emla, you’ve got the plans for all those funky micromachines that you’re made of, right? If we fab up a few batches, can you repair yourself?”
“I can do better than that, Alice. Give me a few hundred kilograms of parts and I can turn into a proper dragon. I’m tired of seeing you get hurt when I’m supposed to be guarding you.”
“Oh, Emla. You’re already a great bodyguard. I don’t expect you to magically fight off a whole platoon of marines by yourself. But if you want to go big I guess it won’t hurt anything, as long as you can change back afterwards. Hmm. After that we’re going to need a better power source. Hope, do you think we could build something out of the nuke packs from those bots?”
“We can build anything you like, Alice. My design libraries are yours.”
The link she sent me opened onto a design database that made the one on the Square Deal look like a few notes scribbled on a napkin. There were designs for everything from nuke packs to portable fusion reactors to big power plants designed to run a city. There was a massive assortment of industrial and utility bots, and huge libraries of software to run them. Android designs, and AI options. Warbots, tanks and drones of every description. Even spaceships. Not just little shuttles and freighters, but warships too.
I stared at the indexes for a long moment.
“Hope, this library includes designs for every class of warship the Mirai ever built.”
“Yes, Alice.”
“Hope, there are planet busters in this database. Why do I have access to… to rift bombs, and metamorphic nanoplagues, and adaptive von Neumann swarms? Wait, some of these designs were stolen from the Swarmlords! Shouldn’t this be classified?”
“You are an heir to the throne of Mirai, Your Highness. The full might of the realm is at your disposal. The Emperor trusts his family to use it wisely.”
Great Gaia. I was not ready to be a Mirai princess. No one had ever taught me anything about what to do with terrifying superweapons, and I knew I couldn’t trust my instincts. Not when my first impulse was to use them on anyone who got in my way. Fortunately it was a moot point, since the scary stuff was all way too big for me to build on my own.
I didn’t dare touch the AI designs, either. They were bound to have some kind of loyalty programming, and they’d all be true believers in the Mirai ideology. They’d probably be helpful and deferential and incredibly loyal to me, considering who I was. But they’d try to convince me to see things the way they did, and for all I knew they might succeed.
Alright, so what could I use?
There was a collection of accessories for people with my mod package, and I immediately zeroed in on a cooling harness that would let me run my reactor at full power as long as I was plugged into the ship’s heat management system. With that I could just power the fabricator myself while we threw together a swarm of stealthy little recon bots. Then I could send them out to find out just how bad the situation was, and come up with a plan.
“Right. Well, I think the wise thing right now is to keep things subtle. Emla, can you haul some wrecked bots in here while I power up the fabricator?”
“You got it, Alice!”
The work went quicker than I’d expected. Mirai fabricators were a lot faster than the ones on the Square Deal, and the recycling system wasn’t nearly as picky about what kinds of materials we fed it. It couldn’t digest armor, of course, but it was amazingly efficient about scooping all the machinery out of a warbot and leaving just the armored shell behind. There were nearly a hundred bots drifting around in the boat bay, left powerless by the relentless decay of the radioactive isotopes in their nuke packs, so it was easy for Emla to drag them over for reclaiming.
In less than an hour I had my heat management harness, Emla was putting her foot back together, and a dozen recon bots were invisibly working their way towards the hull of the wreck. I had a huge advantage over the yakuza when it came to scouting, because Hope was able to wake up parts of her internal com network to let my bots keep in touch. The enemy would have a lot more trouble with communication, since her internal bulkheads were all thick enough to block radio signals. They’d have to lay out trails of radio relays everywhere they went, or else be out of touch for long periods of time. Between that and the sheer size of the Emperor’s Hope, I wasn’t too worried about them finding me.
My effort to remain optimistic took a hard blow when the first of the little baseball-sized recon bots maneuvered itself into a position where it could see the hangar where the Square Deal had been parked.