A hail of fire erupted from the smoke, along with a pair of grenades.
Emla’s eyes went wide, but she didn’t hesitate for a microsecond. She let go of the box she’d been carrying, and threw herself on top of me.
Chapter 15
The explosions were deafening. The first blast sent us drifting down the corridor, and then a big mass driver round tore a chunk out of my shoulder and set us spinning. Two more explosions and a hail of smaller bullets left me completely disoriented. But my dragons were on the job. I heard their roars behind me as I smacked into a wall, and stuck. But Emla…
Oh, no. Emla.
Her cheap bot body was never meant to take that kind of punishment. It was completely wrecked. Both legs and one arm had come off, and the power cell in her torso had been torn apart by bullets. The whole side of her head was gone, and I could see her exposed AI core. The armored box was wrenched half out of its socket, the interface plug warped completely out of shape. A starburst of cracks radiated away from the broken connector.
No, not Emla.
Her body was dead. She might be, too, if the damage had triggered whatever tamper proofing was built into her casing. Stupid android makers and their stupid copy protection schemes.
Suddenly I was madder than I’d ever been in my life. At myself, for screwing up and letting this happen. At the bots, for their stubborn attempts to kill us. But mostly at that treacherous bastard who had given them their orders.
Everything faded away but the fight. Enemies, allies, resources. Locations and vectors. Angles of attack, probable responses, weapon effects and performance limits. My fears washed away on a tide of icy rage, and I knew what I needed to do.
The box full of equipment she’d been bringing me had come apart, sending a spray of odds and ends drifting around the corridor. But everything I’d queued up for fabrication had been rugged, military designs. Most of it was still intact. I jumped into the cloud of debris, silent as a ghost, using my field to put everything where I wanted it. Smoke projectors on my shoulders and hips. Grenade launcher peeking over my left shoulder, with the big magazine of grenades on my back. Spare magazines for my pistol lined up along my waist, down both thighs and across my chest. A second pistol for my left hand, and a big power cell snugged into the small of my back.
Twelve hundred and fifty-seven milliseconds to get everything properly secured and plugged in. Then I leaped into the smoke cloud with both guns blazing.
The smoke blocked all vision, and the thin nitrogen atmosphere of the maintenance tunnel degraded my sonar performance pretty badly. But these weren’t proper military bots. They made all kinds of noise as they thrashed around trying to fight, and they didn’t have active sound suppression. The whir of motors and clank of metal limbs against the walls filled out my sketchy sonar picture beautifully, letting me know exactly where they were and what they were doing.
I shot out their little bot brains and power cells in a flurry of movement, bouncing back and forth off the walls too fast for them to track. Then I was off, sailing down the corridor towards the vehicle bay.
I fired off smoke grenades as I moved, keeping a barrier of obscuring fog between me and the rest of the bots. The smoke projectors wrapped me in my own personal cloud, and I held it around me with my field as I moved. The first group of bots I passed were all destroyed before they even figured out what was happening.
The next group opened fire blindly through the smoke, but that just made more noise to firm up my sonar image. I tracked the muzzles of their guns and stayed out of the line of fire, letting the heavy mass driver rounds whiz past me while I blew them away.
The group after that was bigger, and had grenade launchers. That was annoying. I had to use one hand to shoot the grenades out of the air while I took care of the bots with the other.
After that I was closing in on the vehicle bay, and suddenly there were bots everywhere. I covered everything with smoke and darted in among them, luring the ones with guns into shooting at each other while I took out the ones with more dangerous weapons.
Everything blurred together into one long dance of carnage. Duck between a cannon bot’s legs, shoot out a grenadier’s brain. Grab a machine gun bot by one arm and toss it into a group of spider bots. Dive over an improvised barricade, and toss out a strobe grenade to fool the mines into going off. A constant flurry of misdirection, to keep my brain-dead enemies confused and distracted while I killed them off one by one.
The vehicle bay had gravity, which made things a little harder. Grenade fragments and the occasional ricochet gradually shredded my suit, and sometimes one got through. I caught the edge of a plasma flamer’s blast, and had to block out the pain of charred skin and muscle all over my left side. There was nerve gas in the air now, and a virulent nanoplague that attacked my exposed flesh.
But there were only seventeen bots left in the vehicle bay, and the fabricators weren’t running anymore.
I grabbed a heavy mass driver from one of the larger bots, jumped into the air, and opened fire on the big cargo loaders that were guarding their master. Each shot sent me flying backwards, but that just made it harder for them to tell where I was. I used my field and what was left of my suit’s thrusters to spin in midair, firing each shot in a different direction, sending myself careening wildly around the huge room while I blew apart the last of the bots.
Then I discarded it, and dropped lightly to the deck. The smoke was starting to thin now, as the air purifiers strained to clear the cavernous room. But that was fine. All that was left was my target.
I stalked through the litter of sparking, smoking bot wrecks towards him. I could see the moment when he spotted me, and raised his pistol with shaking hands.
I shot it out of his grip.
He cried out, and backed away. He was saying something, but I didn’t care. I grabbed him by the front of his suit, and slammed him against the bulkhead.
“Why?”
“Surely you understand that I will not answer any-”
I punched him in the gut. He doubled over, wheezing.
The sight made the pain ease a little, so I did it again.
“Please!” He gasped. “I surrender!”
“I don’t care.” I hit him again. “Did you let Emla surrender?” And again. “Did she get any mercy?” A kick this time. “I don’t think so!”
I hit him until my hands were red with blood, and I realized that he’d finally stopped screaming. Then I fell to my knees, and cried.
I was vaguely aware of friendly IFF signals surrounding me, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t until I heard Lina’s voice that I finally stirred.
“Alice? Alice! Oh shit, what happened to you? I thought you were just going to sneak to the breaker box and back.”
“He killed Emla,” I sniffed, trying to hold back a fresh round of tears. “She trusted me to keep her safe, and then she died right in front of me. I… I kind of lost it.”