I frowned. Shouldn’t there be marines guarding the detention center, with real warbots? On second thought, they probably didn’t trust regular troops to guard this place. But then, shouldn’t whatever secret spy group was in charge down here have their own troops?
Whatever. I didn’t have time to puzzle over it. If the enemy wanted to be dumb, I was happy to take advantage. My breaching bots had barely started to exchange fire with the defenders when I sent one of Emla’s bodies through the hole in the blast door, and followed her through.
Two of the giant mechs were busy shooting at my little melee bots by then, but the other two both shot Emla. For a brief moment as she passed through the breach there was no room to dodge, and dozens of rounds from their autocannons smashed into her shields.
Even with my field bolstering hers we couldn’t turn all of it. I winced as several rounds tore through her body, mangling her arms and wings, and barely missing me. But a lot more were deflected to ricochet around the room, and with careful control of the angling of our deflectors I managed to control where most of them ended up. Two of the inugami behind the barricade went down in a spray of blood, and none of my own bots were hit.
Then I was through, with room to maneuver. I ducked around the hail of fire, my point defense laser blowing the few bullets I couldn’t dodge out of the air, and threw myself across the room at one of the mechs.
I’d thought I was fast on my own, but my acceleration in that suit was just insane. A million Newtons of peak force from my manipulator field, and only a hundred kilograms of mass? I could cross the room two or three times in a second, breaking the sound barrier each time, and that was without factoring in the fusion torch on my rocket hammer.
I caved in the first mech’s chest with a blow of my hammer, fired a plasma grenade into its face, and launched myself away again before the grenade landed. Across the room I smashed another mech’s right arm, where its guns were mounted, spun with a flash of rocket thrust and slammed my hammer into its side hard enough to send it flying into mech number three. I pushed off the wall and blinded mech four’s sensors with my laser for a split second while I threw myself back across the room, and knocked its head off with my hammer. A couple of plasma grenades into the hole ought to keep it from getting back up, and then I was coming back for the two that were tangled up in each other.
Emla’s other two bodies followed me through the breach, and quickly picked off the weapons on the ceiling while our bots took out the security forces. A few more whacks took the big bots out of action, and then-
“Stop! Stand down, or your friend dies!”
Down past the security checkpoint stood another uniformed inugami, holding a gun to Lina’s head. The foxgirl was naked, looking pale and frightened, with her hands shackled behind her back.
I cut the gun in half with my point defense laser, and launched myself down the narrow hallway as fast as I could. The walls of the security checkpoint warped under the force of my sudden acceleration, and when I braked the impact tore up the deck plates. But even so, in the split second it took me to get there Lina had already twisted out of her captor’s grip and kicked her away.
That made it easy to put my fist through the bitch’s head. It disintegrated into a spray of broken armor and shattered electronics, and the android collapsed.
“Alice? Is that you?!”
I brought my deflector swarm in to hover around Lina, wrapping her in layers of protective shields. Then I let myself drop to the deck, and dialed back my field strength to a sustainable level. I wanted to hug her, but my armor was way too hot for that to be safe.
“Yeah, it’s me Lina. Are you alright?”
“I think so. They were still running diagnostic probes, trying to figure out the best way to burrow into my head,” she said, hugging herself. “Fuck! I thought they had me, there. Thanks for the rescue. But how the hell did you pull it off?”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” I warned her. “But I brought you some armor, and I’ve got a decent exit plan.”
A fire team of bots caught up with me, and I sent them to scout the rest of the detention block. Lina’s eyes went wide when she saw them, and then she turned to give my armor an appraising look.
“Is that Mirai equipment you’re using, Alice?”
“Um, maaaybe?”
“Awesome! Hang on a sec. I need to stop by the break room and get some popcorn, so I can watch you kick yakuza butt in style.”
I laughed. “Your whole pack is nuts, Lina. You know that, right?”
“Says the girl who stormed a yakuza warship to rescue a tech.”
“They were going to torture you,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, they were. I owe you big time for this, Alice.”
A faint tremor went through the ship’s artificial gravity field. No, not just one. A faint, nearly continuous fluctuation. What the heck?
Lina frowned, obviously feeling the same thing. “Are they launching drones? Alice, you have better sensors than me. Can you give me a data feed?”
“Sure. Here you go.”
“Oh, shit. They’re scrambling everything they’ve got. What’s going on out there?”
Chapter 30
“I wish I could get a sensor feed,” I grumbled. “Akio set me up with access to a lot of the ship’s systems, but I can’t log in because someone keeps killing the com system wherever I go.”
“Is there a security console around here? Or maybe a damage control station?” Lina asked. Then she caught sight of the armor one of my bots was carrying in for her, and her eyes lit up. “Oh, sweet! Is that a combat engineer suit?”
“You bet. It’s a Mirai design, of course, but I’m sure you can figure it out. It comes with skill packs that are supposed to be compatible with your OS.”
Lina put her hand on the suit, triggering the login process that left her in control of it. I saw her eyes glaze over as it unfolded out of storage mode, and wrapped itself around her.
“These skill packs are amazing,” she said after a moment. “Normally I’d have to spend a few days practicing to really absorb everything properly, but there’s a bunch of adaptive integration features that are doing most of the work for me. Okay, I’m good. Find me a hard-wired network connection, and I’ll get us in.”
Another shift in the ship’s artificial gravity announced that it had just gone to full thrust. What were they doing?
“This way,” I said hurriedly. My bots had already found a side room that was set up as a security control station, with a bunch of screens the guards could use to monitor the detention complex. “The workstations are all shut down, though. Do you really thing you can make them work?”
She poked her head into the room, and rubbed her hands. “Piece of cake. Stations like these always have a local override that lets you turn them back on. Otherwise the guys in the security control room could take over the whole ship and lock everyone else out, which would be pretty stupid.”
As she spoke she ran a sensor over the workstations, and then sent some little toolbots floating down behind one. They opened a panel, and fiddled with something inside. The screen lit up with a login prompt.
“Bingo! Here you go, Alice.”