The first time I encountered a spider tank I’d already seen it coming in the data feeds I was getting, so I knew not to walk around the corner it was covering. Instead I sent in a cloud of invisible, insect-sized bots floating down the corridor to drop loads of paint and caustic chemicals on its sensor pickups. When the tank’s escort of close assault bots responded by hosing down the area with plasma flamers I used the distraction to have a gunbot pop around the corner and put a particle beam through the tank’s reactor.
Yes, my weapons were heavy enough to penetrate anything they could throw at me. Just one of the perks of a tech advantage.
Their slow, bulky plasma missiles were equally useless, since I never blocked my own point defense by hiding my whole formation behind a wall of smoke. Instead I kept smaller clouds trapped between the layers of my deflector shields, using them to hide myself and Lina while still leaving plenty of my bots with clear fields of fire. Thanks to my superior lasers it was easy to shoot down their missiles before they got anywhere near me.
I lost a few of my smaller bots to mines and cannon fire, but the threat I was really concerned about never materialized. They didn’t seem to have any decent lasbots. Like a lot of less professional military forces they just assumed that lasers were useless, because everyone would always be covered by smoke. That mistake made things a lot easier for me.
They tried to overwhelm me with numbers next. I softened them up with one of my remaining plasma warheads, and then merrily carved a path through the heart of their formation. The marines fell back frantically, throwing in more bots to slow me down as they tried to avoid contact. I picked a couple of them off with assassin bots, clever things of animated liquid that were even better at cloaking than my normal units. Too bad my regular bots were all too hot to cloak by this point, or they’d really be in trouble.
They were worried, but they weren’t quite panicking yet. How could I turn up the pressure a little more?
Maybe a little drama would do the trick. I unlimbered my hammer, had Emla merge the two bodies that were still with me, and waded into the melee with a two hundred kilogram dragon at my back.
A blast of plasma washed over my shields. I danced through a hail of cannon fire, smashing bots into the bulkheads left and right. Another thread of attention logged into the ship’s PA system, so I could chat with my opponents while I fought.
“Hey, little puppies. Are we having fun yet?”
My hammer’s rocket filled the whole corridor with atomic fire, melting smaller bots and blinding the big ones. I spun in a full circle and brought the business end down on an oversized melee bot that had tried to charge through the fire, crushing it into the deck.
“You came to my ship and took something of mine. Now it’s my turn to take something of yours.”
Emla intercepted a pair of heavy assault bots that were scrambling to meet me, and tore them apart with claws and teeth. Strange Loop Sleuth had done some neat work on using short-range manipulator fields as cutting implements, and the shriek of tortured metal that erupted whenever her claws made contact with a bot was just the right touch.
I flitted down a corridor, slapping more bots out of my way as I went, and got line of sight on one of the marines. A blast from my particle beams took her head off.
“Aw. Bad move, Hyun-mi. Maybe one of your squad mates can do better. Nana?”
My last assassin bot dropped off the ceiling to land on another marine’s back. It drove dozens of little spikes into the neck joint of her armor, popping the seal and allowing it to follow up with a spray of disassemblers. The inugami screamed as the nanobots ate into her neck, and then collapsed with a horrible gurgling noise.
“No? What about you, Eun-mi?”
My four remaining gunbots fired in unison, burning through two walls and a mass of machinery that wasn’t nearly as solid as it looked. The hapless marine was just starting to stiffen at the sound of her name when the particle beams punched through the wall she was hiding behind, and made equally short work of her armor.
“Come on, that was pathetic. Don’t any of you puppies know how to bite? In-sook? Ye-jin?”
I flashed through the increasingly disorganized mob of bots to smash a marine into paste with my hammer, while a cloaked micro-missile with a plasma warhead snuck around two corners and went off close enough to catch another one.
Then I was surrounded by bots that really wanted me dead, and for a minute I was too busy fighting to pull off more precision strikes. But the damage was done. The enemy marines were pulling back in a hurry, sending waves of bots in to keep me busy while they ran for their lives. I giggled.
“Aw, running away already? That’s okay, puppies.”
I sent an email to each of their personal accounts. Each one said ‘I know where to find you’, under a picture of her bunk.
“You’re having way too much fun with the data Akio’s agents are giving us,” Emla told me.
“The more scared they are, the worse they’ll fight,” I explained. “These bots are annoying, but they’re a lot less dangerous without close supervision.”
By the time we finished off the mob I’d lost a couple more shield drones, and my melee bots were getting damaged enough that it was starting to affect their performance. But we’d finally reached the armored box around the self-destruct device. I put a couple of bots to work finding a good spot to plant the demolition charge, while I took a break to cool off. Even in an atmosphere, using my suit to its full potential generated heat way faster than I could get rid of it.
I took stock of the situation while I waited for my radiators to stop glowing. The distraction squad I’d sent after Yamashida had finally been wiped out, but they’d taken hundreds of warbots and several squads of marines with them. The few survivors from the group back in engineering had linked up with the fire team guarding the security room, so Lina and Akio’s agents there were reasonably safe.
The ship had definitely seen better days, though. It was quickly running out of escorts, and more and more of the Sleeping Dragon drones were getting close enough to make attack runs. Most of the missiles were still getting destroyed before they could reach attack range, but not all of them. Here and there a standoff missile detonated, sending jets of plasma lancing out to wash over the ship’s buckling shields. Sometimes they got through, washing over the hull and burning away some of the point defense lasers that struggled to keep them at bay.
If that was the only threat it might have taken another hour for the gradual accumulation of battle damage to become catastrophic. But the big guns on the Sleeping Dragon frigate were pounding away, punching holes in the ship’s shields and blowing huge craters in her armor. One of the smaller gunboats had retreated, badly damaged by the Masu-kai’s return fire. But the other one was still blazing away, and the combined weight of fire was doing a lot more damage than the drones. One of the main mass drivers had already been knocked out, along with several secondary batteries and a lot of shield emitters.