“That’s alright, Nari. Just stay on the shuttle, then, and keep it ready for a quick exit. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes, my lady! Thank you, my lady. Command me as you will, I’m at your disposal.”
She scurried off to the bridge, suddenly all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Yeah, that’s a tech for you. All she needed was a little reassurance that someone cared.
I turned to the crew chiefs with a smile. “How about you two?”
“We have backups, Lady Long,” the short one said. “As long as the young master wins this fight we’ll be fine. Is there anything we can do to assist you?”
“If we get really unlucky and the shuttle takes critical damage I’ll need you to either fix it, or help Nari commandeer one that’s intact,” I told her. “Otherwise just keep your heads down, and stay safe.”
“Are you sure, my lady? We’re prepared to fight for our lord, and we do have basic infantry skills,” the taller one said.
“Trust me, ladies. I’ve got the fighting covered. Emla, let’s get suited up.”
The shuttle was a tiny model, with no weapons or proper crew quarters. Just a cockpit, a passenger compartment with a dozen or so comfy seats, and a modest cargo bay. The yakuza bosses obviously thought it was too small to be any threat, because according to Akio the boat bay was only guarded by a couple of marines and their bots. They were about to get a heck of a surprise, because the shuttle’s cargo space was currently crammed full of sleek black and red engines of destruction.
Standard bots would have taken much too long to build, but I’d found to my amazement that the Mirai had a whole separate tech tree of special quick-fab models. Designed to be thrown together in a hurry out of salvaged materials, they didn’t perform quite as well as the normal models. But they still made the bots I’d trained on with Chief West look like cheap toys.
I’d used an awful lot of my tritium reserve fueling them up, though, and even so they didn’t have much staying power. Enough for my plan, and a little extra, but if I got bogged down into a long fight they could start running out. I’d have to make sure that didn’t happen.
I slipped into my powered armor, and felt the suit settle into place around me. It fit me like a second skin, its systems interfacing with mine so seamlessly it felt more like an extension of my body than a piece of equipment. Suddenly I was a hundred times stronger than normal, with an amazing sensor suite and field emitters far more powerful than the ones in my body. A grenade launcher peeked over my left shoulder, ready to launch volleys of deadly guided munitions from the big magazine on my back, while the beam director of a powerful UV laser peered over my right shoulder looking for targets. Particle beam cannons mounted along both forearms gave me some long-range firepower, although hopefully my gunbots would be doing all the shooting.
I picked up the long, bulky shape of my chosen melee weapon, a rocket hammer with a two-meter shaft and a pointed head of hyperdense composite that weighed almost two hundred kilograms. Between my suit’s field and the fusion torch on the back of the massive hammerhead it could easily reach supersonic speeds, striking hard enough to crush warbots or smash through light bulkheads. The rocket doubled as a heavy plasma flamer, too.
I grinned at Emla. “Ready, partner?”
She’d decided that the frigate’s corridors wouldn’t have room for a giant dragon body, but Strange Loop Sleuth had given her other tricks. Instead she’d built two extra bodies for herself, and each of them had swallowed a Mirai compact fusion reactor to improve her power output. All three of her bodies were in dragon form, and they’d bulked up to a couple hundred kilograms apiece. I pitied any melee bot that tried to get past her.
“Ready, Alice. We’re going to kick butt this time.”
“You bet we are, Emla.”
Leaders are supposed to project confidence, so I tried not to let on how nervous I was. By any normal standard of logic Nari was right. Taking on a whole frigate full of marines with just a few dozen bots was suicide. Granted, the plan was to move fast and keep them too confused to react properly until we escaped, but still. I was only one girl.
Hope hadn’t tried to talk me out of it, though. When I’d come up with this crazy scheme she’d just chuckled, and started offering helpful suggestions. Like this kind of thing was expected of me, and she had complete faith that I could pull it off.
Was that what my family had been like?
If so, I had some big shoes to fill. But it gave me hope that I wasn’t making a terrible mistake.
The shuttle was coming in to land now, and Nari’s chatter with traffic control still sounded perfectly normal. That was one hurdle down. They’d directed us to the aft boat bay, so unfortunately we were going to be too far away from the bridge to take a shot at Lord Yamashida. He’d be somewhere in the secure citadel zone that was reserved for VIPs, with a company of marines and a bunch of fixed defenses between him and my forces. But the detention center wasn’t too far from the boat bay.
Neither was engineering, a detail I intended to take advantage of.
I reached out to the bots around me, feeling for the control channels Hope had showed me. It was as easy as breathing. Unlike the commercial bots I’d trained with they were designed to interface with me, and their IFF and data security were both good enough to satisfy my internal safeguards. So instead of trying to manage them all remotely like a juggler with too many balls, I felt my consciousness expand as I swallowed their computing nodes into myself.
The deflector swarms became mine first. Dozens of fast little hover units, designed to work in perfect harmony to extend and amplify my manipulator field. Their sensors were my eyes, their emitters my fingers, all just as natural as if I’d been born with them.
Then the gunbots, slow and heavily armored, but packing a mean punch. The breeching bots with their plasma flamers and micro-missiles. Little fist-sized transports full of microbot swarms, and assassin bots made of liquid metal. I’d prepared a bunch of surprises to keep the enemy off balance, and none of it was going to be running on some clumsy remote control. Every bot was running an extension of my mind, and we were all networked together into one seamless gestalt.
Emla joined the network, surrendering herself to our union with the same absolute trust as the last time we’d done this. Her resolute faith stilled my nervous doubts. We could do this. We had to.
The shuttle touched down.
I turned on my cloaking, and every bot in the hold followed suit. Even Emla vanished, becoming nothing but a faint distortion to most of my sensors. Only our radio traffic and emitter fields gave us away, and no one seems to track those as closely as they should.
I opened a com channel. “Akio? We’re starting.”
“Good luck, Alice. I hope you know what you’re doing.”