Then the hatch opened, and every body under my command burst into motion.
The boat bay held another half-dozen shuttles and a gaggle of techs, but I immediately zeroed in on the defenders. An inugami marine up in the elevated control booth that overlooked the bay, along with a couple of techs. Another marine by the main hatch, with a couple of infantry bots. Six gunbots on the ceiling, covering the whole room. An assault team waiting in each corner, and four more infantry bots patrolling the row of parked shuttles.
Particle beams lanced up towards the gunbots, overmatching their armor and blowing them apart in spectacular fireballs. I threw myself across the room in the blink of an eye, and smashed the huge diamond window that protected the control room with my hammer. Emla was right with me, two of her bodies covering me while the third dove through the hole I’d made with a swarm of breaching bots on her heels. Her gun thundered, and the marine’s head exploded.
By then the marine down by the hangar door was dead too, taken down by a particle beam from one of my gunbots. Small flying mirrors popping up above the tops of the shuttles, allowed my lasbots to cut down the patrols with lasers before they could even deploy smoke. The lances of light struck with typical laser precision, hitting each target exactly on its most vulnerable points and reducing them to wreckage in milliseconds. The whole fight was over before you could say ‘speed blitz’.
I became visible as I swung into the control room, and pointed at the nearest tech. “You! Seal the hangar,” I shouted over the howl of escaping air.
“Y-yes, ma’am,” she stammered, and slapped a control. The big hatch overhead started to rumble shut.
“Please don’t hurt us,” another one pleaded. “We’re not combatants.”
The noise level dropped as my bots laid out a deflector field that stopped any more air from escaping the hole, and started to file into the control room. I was already heading for the door.
“Stand over there, put your hands on your head, and don’t resist when the bot comes to drain your power cells,” I ordered.
They hurried to comply, but most of my attention was already moving on to the next step. There were plenty of cameras in the boat bay and control room, and someone would be setting off alarms by now. I opened the door, and sent a breaching team through.
The corridor on the other side was empty, just as I’d hoped. But the detention center was eleven decks down and a hundred meters aft of the boat bay, so we needed to create as much confusion as possible about what was going on. I sent a combat team ghosting up the hall towards the ship’s bow, hoping Yamashida would assume this was an assassination attempt, and led the rest of my force down the nearest lift shaft.
Something must have been monitoring the load on the shaft’s manipulator field, because we barely got two decks down before the gravity in the shaft reversed and tried to force us back up. With the overpowered levitation fields my bots all flew on that barely made a difference to our rate of progress, but then an armored hatch slid shut to block the shaft a few decks below us. I bailed out well above that point, and had my bots blow open the doors for three adjacent decks to create some confusion about where I was going. The first intersection after that I sent a combat team aft towards engineering to create more distractions.
Suddenly the air filled with the sound of warning claxons, and an amplified voice shouting instructions. “Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! All hands to action stations!”
Akio’s people were supposed to start creating false reports of disturbances all over the ship at this point. I’d been hoping the security sensors would have trouble spotting my group, and give me time to reach the detention center while the enemy troops chased after ghosts. But I hadn’t counted on the number of crew that were suddenly scrambling through the halls after the alarm went off. How many people were on this ship, anyway? A frigate only needs around a hundred crew, which wouldn’t have been much of an obstacle in a kilometer-long starship. But there were frantic dog girls everywhere now. Were they all servants, flunkies and bodyguards, or what?
The first time someone ran right into one of my invisible bots and started screaming about assassins I knew my hopes of a stealthy trip to the detention center were ruined. But by then the team I’d sent forward was plowing through a detachment of marines, while the ones I’d sent aft were almost in position to plant a nuclear demo charge on one of the ship’s fusion reactors.
Hopefully that would divert attention from my real goal for long enough. But every passing second was a chance that someone would realize I was coming for Lina and move her, so from this point on everything depended on speed.
I shoved the shouting inugami away with my manipulator field, and arranged my bots for a coordinated fire plan. Every laser I had lanced out at the same instant to strike a specific location on the floor, and then shifted to draw an arc of fire across the deck. The surface of the smart matter armor vaporized, leaving a shallow trench and a cloud of plasma that would have blocked further progress if my weapons hadn’t already been shifting their aim. Instead my particle beam cannons fired one by one, carefully swiveling their beams to play along the trench as the arc swiftly grew into a complete circle.
It was still only a couple of cems deep, but the armor below that would be softened by the vast amount of heat I’d just dumped into it. Before the heat management system could cool it off again I stepped into the middle of the circle, and brought my rocket hammer down in a blast of atomic fire.
The damaged armor broke with a thunderous crash, and the plug of decking went careening down to smash through a layer of conduits and piping into the next deck below. My bots were moving through the gap before the fireball even cleared, checking for enemies and scanning the surrounding structure for weak spots.
We dropped three more decks in quick succession, before we reached an internal armor layer that was too thick for that tactic to work. Then we headed aft, blew a bulkhead with one of the half-kiloton demo charges I’d brought, and found a lift shaft that took us most of the way to our destination.
The team I’d sent into engineering set off a much larger demo charge, and the whole ship shuddered. The aft fusion reactor was completely wrecked by the sixty kiloton explosion, and a whole bay full of engineering bots went with it. My other team was fighting a running battle through one of the marine barracks areas, catching a bunch of the inugami still scrambling into their armor and mowing them down easily. So far so good.