“Thanks, Lina. Let’s see here.”
I fed the console my ID, scanned the datanet looking for things I could access, and hurriedly pulled up an exterior image. The camera’s field of view was filled with the stroboscopic flashes of nuclear blasts in a vacuum, and the dancing glare of drive flames from thousands of drones.
Someone was staging a serious attack on the Masu-kai. So much for my exit plan, then. I’d been planning to leave my bots on board as a distraction while I snuck away, but there was no way a shuttle was going to make it through that furball. Especially not the under gunned, practically defenseless shuttle I’d come in on. No matter what IFF I showed, one side or the other would blow us away the moment we launched.
As I groped for another plan, a new window popped up on the screen in front of me. An incoming call from Akio.
“Alice! I’m glad to see that you’re still alive. Did you find your tech?”
He just didn’t get it, did he? I put my arm around Lina, and pulled her into the camera’s field of view.
“Yes, this is Lina. What’s going on?”
He pulled up a tactical display. One of the yakuza drone carriers had returned, but it was a crippled wreck. Three drone carriers of a different design had followed it, along with a frigate and a pair of light gunships. I checked their ID codes, and gasped.
“Those are Sleeping Dragon ships!”
“I knew the captain had a plan,” Lina grinned. “I bet they’ve been lurking somewhere around here just waiting for their cue.”
Akio scowled. “You mean Captain Sokol has been planning treachery too?”
Lina rolled her eyes. “No, we were just ready for you guys to start backstabbing each other and cleaning up the witnesses. Come on, did you really think we’d believe that a bunch of yakuza were going to peacefully split a score this big?”
Akio sniffed, and turned to me. “Do you always allow your techs to carry on like that, Alice?”
“She’s not my property, Akio. She’s my friend, and you might want to try being nice to her considering how badly your guys are getting their butts kicked right now. Lina, I don’t suppose you know what their plan is?”
“Of course not. But I know the captain doesn’t leave people behind. They’ll probably try to capture the ship and rescue us.”
“Uncle Noburu will never stand for that,” Akio said. “If he can’t win this fight he’ll run.”
I reached out across the ship’s datanet, and found that my other teams were still fighting. The team in engineering was pretty close to their second objective now, too.
“What if he can’t get away?” I asked.
Akio shook his head. “He has too much pride to allow himself to be captured by gaijin. If he’s cornered he’ll order the ship to self-destruct.”
“Your ships have self-destruct devices?” Lina exclaimed. “Jeez, that’s retarded. No professional navy does stuff like that.”
“You may not have noticed, Lina, but the Masu-kai are not a professional navy,” Akio said dryly. “To my uncles, the fact that anyone with the proper codes can destroy our ships at will is a strength, not a vulnerability.”
“I am not going to die here just because some devious jerk is feeling suicidal,” I declared. “What’s the yield on the destruct charge?”
“I’m not sure. Several gigatons, probably. Why?”
“Could we survive that if we ball up and go full shields, Alice?” Emla asked.
I ran the math, and grimaced. It didn’t look promising.
“Maybe. If it’s just one bomb, and we’re at the other end of the ship, and we shape our deflectors just right and overload them at the right moment. But even then it doesn’t look good. You’d probably make it, and so would some of the bots. But Lina and I are way too squishy to survive a shock like that, and Akio wouldn’t make it out either.”
Well, if Akio was really an infomorph I could probably just store a copy of him on one of the bots. But sooner or later Lina would report any secrets she learned to Chief Benson, so I couldn’t mention that without betraying Akio’s trust. Besides, it didn’t help the rest of us. Was Lina’s AI core rugged enough to survive getting launched into space like mass driver round? If my body was killed while I was inhabiting a bunch of warbots could I recover somehow?
A salvo of heavy mass driver rounds from the Sleeping Dragon frigate slammed into the ship’s deflectors. Several of them punched through to blow craters in the yakuza ship’s armor, wiping away emitter panels and a cluster of point defense lasers. Considering how badly the yakuza were outnumbered, this wasn’t going to be a long battle.
“I’ve been working on a counter-coup, but my people aren’t ready yet,” Akio said. “My uncle has too many warbots on the ship for a simple uprising to work, and trying to assassinate him isn’t feasible.”
Lina cursed. “So we’re trapped on a ship full of yakuza in the middle of a space battle, and as soon as they realize they’re going to lose they’ll blow us all up? Fuck!”
It did sound pretty hopeless. Frantically I pulled together everything I knew about this mess, looking for a way to survive. There had to be something I could do. I spun through one scenario after another, all the mysterious instinctive mechanisms in my subconscious working overtime.
Escape seemed impossible. There were too many unknowns, too many risks. Besides, I hated the idea of running away. So far I’d smashed everything in my way without so much as breaking a nail. I should be crushing the rest of these losers, not…
Wait.
Primitive biological threat assessment.
Yes. That just might work. Gaia, it was so obvious. An eager grin stole across my face, and I chuckled.
“No, Lina. We aren’t trapped on this ship with a bunch of thugs, backstabbers and poorly trained light infantry. They’re trapped in here with us. Akio, it’s do or die time. Can your people get me comlinks to my other teams, and feed me data on what Yamashida’s troops are doing?”
“Yes. But it will only take a few minutes for the security crew to realize what’s happening, and send marines to put a stop to our interference.”
“Then I’ll hit the security room first, and your people can run things from there. I can spare a fire team to guard the door and make sure no one bothers them.”
“What about the marines? Alice, you can’t be planning to fight the whole garrison.”