“I know that, Akio. I’m using quick fab bots that aren’t nearly as durable as the real thing, and I didn’t have enough tritium to equip the force like I wanted to. If we have to fight for too long I’m going to start running low on fuel, and I only have a handful of plasma warheads. But they don’t know that. They don’t even know how many bots I have, because I came in cloaked and half my force hasn’t needed to shoot at anything yet.
“Don’t you remember how terrified everyone is of Inner Sphere war machines? All I have to do is hit them hard without seeming to take damage, and they’ll panic. Especially if your people are sabotaging everything they do behind their backs. Heck, have the data rats tell them I’m hacking their systems somehow. We both know that’s impossible, but I bet Yamashida would believe it. Guys who live by trickery are always ready to believe someone else has a better trick.”
He gave me a dubious look. “What if it doesn’t work? Or works too well, and my uncle decides to take you with him?”
“I’ll just have to make sure I take out the self-destruct device before he decides to use it. Akio, we don’t have time for a safer plan. One of my distraction teams is on its way to blow the main drive right now, and how long do you think it will take Yamashida to decide things are hopeless after that? Either help me or don’t, but I have to move right now.”
He sighed. “Alright, Alice. I’ll send word to my agents.”
“Thank you.” I stepped away from the console, and turned to the girls. “Lina, I’m running a combat gestalt with Emla and the bots, so we’ll do all the heavy lifting. You just stay in the middle of the group and do damage control. Emla-3, you’re Lina’s bodyguard until this is over.”
“Got it!” One of Emla’s bodies said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lina agreed.
This time I wasn’t trying to keep a low profile, or hide the fact that my team had more warbots than the others. The results were pretty painful for Yamashida’s troops.
They kept trying to smoke up and snipe from a distance, using the cameras built into the ship’s corridors to give them an idea of where I was. But their own smoke made their point defense lasers useless, and I’d split up half of my tritium supply to make a few dozen plasma warheads to put on my micro-missiles. The yield on the micro-fusion devices was only a tenth of a kiloton, but that was more than enough to wreck a squad of bots.
Half the marines that were trying to keep me pinned down in the detention block died to a plasma warhead, and then we overran their position and wiped out the ones that were hiding around corners. The next two groups didn’t do any better, and then we were storming the security control room. It was protected by the same kind of blast door as the detention center, but by that point Lina had gotten my destructor bot working again. After we’d tunneled through the door the techs inside weren’t much of a challenge.
My wireless datalink came back up as Emla and I cleared the room. I smashed one last security goon to pulp against the wall, and answered another call on Akio’s secret com network. This time it was a perky-looking catgirl on the line instead of Akio.
“Lady Long? I’m Agent Hana with DS Team Three. We’re just down the hall from you, and ready to move in at your command.”
“Great, the security room is all yours. Can you get me datalinks to my other teams?”
“We’re on it, my lady!”
Six catgirls dressed in armored spacesuits hurried into the room, and took over some of the consoles. Just as they started to work the ship bucked violently, the inertial compensators failing to completely even out an unexpected acceleration change.
“Too late,” I observed. “That was a demo charge taking out the main drive. Get me those datalinks, and then do what you can to feed me intel and confuse the enemy. I don’t suppose you know where the ship’s self-destruct device is?”
“Yes, my lady,” a calico catgirl answered. “We have the uncensored plans for the ship. But we don’t have anyone who can disarm it safely.”
“What, is it an antimatter device or something?”
“Of course not, my lady. That would be crazy. It’s just a fusion bomb inside an armored box, but the whole thing has extensive tamper-proofing.”
“No problem, then. I’ve still got another demo charge. Just pass the word to get our people out of that part of the ship”
She blanched. Silly spy types, always ignoring the simple solution. A nuke is a delicate piece of precision machinery, and you can’t set one off by blowing it up. Taking it out with my own nuke was perfectly safe.
Or maybe she was just concerned about the fact that it was buried near the center of the ship, and the venting system that protected most compartments from internal detonations didn’t extend there. A forty kiloton explosion was going to cause all sorts of havoc.
Well, good. The more confusion the better, because I didn’t have nearly as many bots as I would have liked. I had to leave a fire team behind to guard the security room, and most of the distraction team back in engineering had gotten blown up by my own bombs. I’d have to leave guards with the one I put on the self-destruct device, too, or the enemy would probably find and disable it before I could get to a safe distance.
Then again, they might not realize what I was after. The self-destruct bomb was inside the hyperspace converter, right in the middle of the ship. The bridge was just forward of the hyperspace converter, so it would look like that’s where I was going. Maybe I could do something with that?
I left Lina in the security room, thinking it was the safest place for her to be right now. Then I had to fight my way through a long maze of corridors and maintenance spaces to get to the bomb, although the going rapidly got easier as the techs worked to feed me information. Before long I had feeds showing me where most of the enemy marines were, which made it a lot easier to avoid or roll over their attempts to set ambushes. I also got back into contact with my other teams, finally.
There was an odd moment of dissonance when I restored the connections to the copies of myself that were running those bots. A momentary sense of cautious evaluation, before we merged back together into a seamless whole. We were all the same Alice, still, but I got the feeling that might not be true if we were separated for too long.
I didn’t have time to worry about that, though, because the enemy had started getting desperate. They were taking a pounding from the Sleeping Dragon ships, and they must have been pretty anxious to keep me from doing any more sabotage.
A normal gunbot couldn’t penetrate my team’s massed deflector shields, but they’d broken out some tanks that had much heavier weapons. They also started using their own plasma warheads, apparently deciding that damaging the ship was better than letting me continue my rampage. But neither move did them much good.