Then we ran into our first real resistance. My breaching bots swarmed out of the lift shaft into a hail of mass driver fire, from enemy bots and several ceiling-mounted weapon emplacements. I managed to dodge or swat aside most of the projectiles, but one of them hit a bot and blew its leg off.
Normal doctrine would have been to pull back, lay down smoke and try to flank them, but there was no time for that kind of thing now. Instead I sent a volley of micro-missiles at the enemy, distracting their point defense lasers for the couple of seconds it took to flood the hall with bigger bots. By the time Emla and I exited the lift shaft there were so many overlapping deflector fields across the hall that their mass driver rounds just bounced off, and neither their shields nor their armor were much use against my particle beams. We charged down the hall, overrunning their position and wiping them out in a few moments of furious fighting.
Some of my bots were damaged in the action, but all of them were still partially operational. Unlike normal designs these Mirai bots didn’t have any single points of failure. There were always three or four small fusion reactors instead of one big one, and their power cells and computing power were distributed all through their structure. No wonder the salvage teams had found so few damaged bots back on the wreck. You pretty much had to blow one of these things to pieces to stop it, and even then the bigger ones might just fix themselves and come back for more in an hour or two.
Good. I was going to need all the advantages I could get, because the enemy was starting to get their act together. Someone must have finally figured out that I was using their own com system to communicate with my other two teams, because I suddenly lost network access. Then I started taking fire from behind just as I hit another fortified position around the last blast door in my path.
I couldn’t nuke this one, or I might catch Lina by accident. But I’d come prepared.
My assault units swarmed the position, hosing down the turrets and bots there with plasma flamers and then dismantling the survivors in close combat. I laid down smoke behind us, with a few cloaked recon drones to provide targeting data for my gunbots while they traded fire with the force to my rear. Then I hurried to the blast door, with one of the specialized bots I’d brought along following just behind me.
“This thing is sixty cems thick,” Emla said. “How are we going to get through it?”
“It’s a two step process,” I told her. “First, we get it nice and hot.”
My bots were already doing that. The jet from a plasma flamer is usually well over a hundred thousand degrees, more than hot enough to melt anything. Of course, they’d overheat and melt themselves before they made much of an impression on something as big as this blast door. It had a lot more mass than my swarm of bots, and the network of heat channels woven through the armor was already working frantically to cool off the overheated surface layers. But heat channels leak, especially at high temperature. The whole thickness of the door was rapidly heating up, and it would take time to cool it off again.
I let my bots fire continuously for thirty seconds or so, until they had to stop to cool down. Then the big destructor bot floated forward, hesitating only a moment to let the molten surface of the door slump away. A big, round abrasion tool swept over the surface, grinding away a few more millimeters of armor that had been softened by the heat. Then it withdrew, and the meter-wide mouth at the front of the bot made contact.
Most people would tell you that smart matter is immune to being disassembled by nanotech devices. Breaking apart tough materials takes a lot of energy, something nanites have only a very limited supply of. The stuff also has its own defensive nanites, along with a transport network to move them around and microscopic factories that can build more of them on demand.
But nanotech tends to be pretty temperature sensitive. Heat them up a few hundred degrees, and most of those fancy gadgets quit working until they have a chance to cool off. Hot materials are more reactive, too, and chemical reactions run a lot faster at high temperatures.
The solution that filled the destructor bot’s tanks was a very simple nanomachine, more like an acid molecule than a proper nanite. At room temperature they were sluggish things, mildly caustic but not especially dangerous. Dump them onto a mass of hot armor, though, and they’ll eat through the diamondoid structural mesh like water poured onto cotton candy. With that gone the armor lost most of its hardness, and the honeycomb structure of other components that was left behind crumbled quickly under my bot’s drills.
The enemy smoke cloud rolled down the hall towards our position as the bot tunneled through the blast door, and I had to focus most of my attention on the fight. There had to be dozens of enemy bots creeping towards us to generate that much smoke, but my people had an answer for that too. The next volley of micro-missiles I fired had field emitters instead of warheads, and when they hit the edge of the smoke cloud they activated to form a single continuous field that repelled the air and smoke particles. They cleared the smoke from fifteen meters of corridor before they got shot down, exposing three squads of assault bots that I gunned down before they could refresh their cover.
I was pretty sure I’d managed to pick off some of their gunbots, too. Their advance stalled momentarily, and I could just picture the marines hiding around a corner somewhere trying to decide what to do. If I were them I’d bring in some tank bots to provide covering fire heavy enough to punch through my deflectors, and then drop the smoke and send in a wave of shield bots protecting some assault and breaching bots. That or just quit worrying about collateral damage, and nuke my position. I was kind of counting on them not wanting to do too much damage to their own ship.
Then the destructor bot broke through.
Naturally there were bots on the other side that immediately opened fire on it, and its tunneling mechanism was smashed by a volley of heavy mass driver rounds. But it had served its purpose. I shifted it sideways before it could be completely wrecked, and sent a small swarm of breaching bots and little recon drones through the hole.
Their sensors showed a good-sized room that was obviously supposed to be a guard post. Four massive humanoid bots stood in the corners, and there were a dozen or so turrets on the ceiling mounting an assortment of stunners, machine guns and capture foam projectors. A narrow hallway on the other side was probably a security checkpoint. It was partially hidden by some kind of portable barricade, with a group of armed inugami crouched behind it.