“Thank you, Emla. You’re right, I could use a break.”
The Mirai designs were so odd that it took some work to understand what I was seeing. The regular warbots were all sleek and dangerous looking, with black hulls crisscrossed by ridges of glowing red crystal. I swear they were trying to make them look sinister on purpose. The clouds of centimeter-scale minibots that were supposed to surround them looked like swarms of menacing insects from a distance, and a lot of them even had glowing eyes.
But on closer examination the odd frills all served practical purposes too. The glowing crystals were field emitters, based on the same incredible momentum exchange tech that my body used. They were lightly armored because their deflectors were so strong, and with a fusion reactor in every warbot they had the power to use lasers and particle beams as their primary weapons instead of mass drivers. Not that they didn’t have plenty of those, and mini-missiles too. But in a boarding action the particle beams would be their main weapon.
They used the swarms of minibots as extra emitters to extend their manipulator fields, letting them make deep multi-layered deflector shields with clouds of anti-laser smoke trapped between the layers. They could also tear apart melee bots with them, and neutralize things like microbot swarms or nanite fog. No wonder the Swarmlord bots had done so poorly against them. These things were amazing.
I felt like a kid in a candy store. As soon as Emla had the fabricator moved I queued up a worker bot and a proper bot factory, so we could start building this stuff at a useful rate. Oh, and there were powered armor options for my mod set! Finally, I could get some gear that would interface seamlessly with all my built-in systems instead of interfering with them.
If only I could fuel the warbots. Civilian bots can run on power cells well enough, but nothing short of nuclear power will run military deflectors and mass drivers for any length of time. Let alone plasma weapons, or these particle beam cannons the Mirai favored for shipboard combat. Talk about a power sink. They were all designed to run on micro-fusion reactors just like mine, and guess what the only source of tritium around was?
I wasn’t eager to siphon off any of my limited fuel supply right now, but I might have to. There were designs that could run on a tritium-deuterium mix, but not ordinary hydrogen. Proton-proton fusion is hard, and even Mirai technology needed a few tons of equipment to manage it. So if I wanted warbots, I was going to have to cut into my personal fuel supply.
Well, I had almost two grams of tritium. I could spare a little of that, I’d just have to be careful not to get carried away.
By the time Hope informed me that she had a network connection my new bot factory was working on a pair of close defense bots, while the original fabricator laid down an awesome set of fully tricked-out armor for me. The life support in the refuge area was back up and running, and I’d even been able to grab a quick snack of emergency rations.
“Alright, let’s see what these codes are good for. Hope, I assume you’ve got some pretty amazing e-war software just in case?”
“Electronic warfare was primarily handled by my crew,” she replied. “But my core communication protocols and networking hardware are all proven secure. I’m certainly not going to get hacked by these primitives. The most they could hope to accomplish would be to find the bot that we’re using to connect to their network, and even that would require a physical search.”
“Perfect. Keep an eye on things, then, and pull the plug if the recon bot is in danger of being spotted. I don’t want to give away any clues, and I might end up getting distracted here.”
I logged in to the Masu-kai network using the code Akio had given me, and found myself looking at some kind of secret communication layer that was hidden inside the regular system traffic. Someone must have been paying attention because I got a connection request in less than a second. That opened a simple videoconference link.
“Alice!” Akio’s image said. “I was afraid something had happened to you.”
“Nope, I got away clean. What about you, though? I didn’t think you were going to make it out of there.”
He grimaced. “It appears that I didn’t, actually. Or at least, my embodied copy didn’t. I’m afraid that I’m technically an infomorph.”
“You are? Awesome! I was really worried about whether your backup system would work. You and your dad trusted that Yamashida guy way too much.”
“Believe me, I’m well aware of that. I’ve been trying to convince father for years now, but he insists that I’m just being paranoid. So, what happened? Uncle Noburu is telling everyone I bumbled into a tankbot and got shot, but I lost my datalink just after you found the mirror.”
“Oh, that wasn’t the real Yata no Kagami,” I told him. “If you run a high-res IR scanner over the box you’ll see ‘replica’ written all over it in kanji. I was going to tell you, but then your uncle pulled his whole big backstabbing thing. Here, you gave me a memory backup to deliver if I got the chance.”
I sent him the file, and he spent several seconds digesting it.
“What a mess,” he said. “I’ve been vetting my own people carefully to make sure of their loyalty, but I was never able to do that with father’s marines.”
“Well, he can’t have everyone under his control or he would have already taken over. Right?”
“True, although the backing of the other clan lords is also a critical issue. If he simply assassinated father and declared himself oyabun the other clans would contest his claim, and the Masu-kai would probably fracture into multiple organizations in the end. The prestige of finding the Yata no Kagami would help considerably, though, and there are a number of clans who could be bribed to support his claim.”
“Or he could just hire the Azure Star to spend a few months blowing up anyone who argues,” I pointed out. “Are you sure he doesn’t know about you?”
“As sure as I can be. Father had my core design work done in Alzone, and we’ve both been careful about keeping the important parts secret. I have an inner cadre of agents who are used to communicating with me this way, but I’ve encouraged them to think that I just use body doubles a lot. The only people who should know the truth are the two of us and father. Well, and possibly Noriko. She’s annoyingly good at digging up secrets.”
“Who is Noriko?”
He huffed. “Everyone has a theory, but no one seems to know for sure. She likes to appear as a kitsune with four or five tails, and she’s been meddling in Masu-kai affairs for at least thirty years now. Everyone seems to think she’s an agent for one of their rivals, but I’m pretty sure she’s more than that. No one human could have spent that long playing mind games with so many paranoid schemers without getting caught.”