“Oh, Alice. I’m so sorry.”
She hugged me. I buried my face against the breastplate of her body armor, and just let myself feel safe for a moment. Suddenly I was very tired.
But I had responsibilities.
“Can we check the body?” I asked. “It looked really bad to me, but maybe…”
I couldn’t say it. I knew it was wishful thinking. But Lina nodded.
“Of course. But what about you, Alice? With those burns I should be rushing you to medbay.”
I was pretty messed up, alright. I’d lost a lot of blood, and the flamer had cooked me pretty well. My organic parts were mostly offline, and my power levels were dropping fast. Damage control takes a lot of energy, apparently.
“Can I recharge off your suit? My medical stuff says I’ll be stable in a few minutes as long as I don’t run out of power.”
“Of course you can, Alice. Here, see if this works.”
She picked me up in her arms, with my unburnt right side against her breastplate. I reached around with my good hand, and plugged my charging port into one of the outlets on the side of her armor’s backpack. She had a big nuke pack in there, so I could draw plenty of power without slowing her down.
“There you go,” she said. “Give me a locator mark?”
I sent her a waypoint for the spot where I’d left Ash guarding Emla’s body, and she set out for the nearest lift shaft.
Unlike me, Lina hadn’t been wandering around the ship alone. There were six big warbots escorting us, armored wedge shapes with a mass driver protruding from the front and a profusion of point defense lasers and smoke dispensers around their sides. Dozens of insect-sized sensor bots surrounded them in a cloud, scouting ahead of us and checking every corner to make sure we didn’t walk into an ambush. A pair of bots that were basically big floating shields flanked Lina, ready to interpose themselves between us and any danger that might appear.
“You’ve got a lot of firepower here,” I commented. “I’m surprised you needed my help.”
“I’m an engineer, not a marine,” she explained, looking embarrassed. “I do alright, but I can’t fight the way you do, Alice. Um, what happened to your bots, anyway?”
“I left Smoke and Ash to guard Emla. They aren’t really built for fighting bots.”
“No, I mean your security team.”
She took in my blank look, and cursed.
“You didn’t have one, did you? Fuck! Alice, I thought you’d grabbed some warbots to run escort like everyone else. Don’t tell me you went after that breaker with just your little dragons?”
“I, um, actually, I left them guarding my spacesuit.”
“What!? Are you nuts?”
“I’ve got a really good stealth suite,” I told her. “I got in and out just fine. I guess I should have kept running instead of stopping to put my suit back on.”
“Alice!” She stared at me, more shocked than I’d ever seen her. “Ma’am, please don’t do things like that. I wasn’t asking you to risk your life. That’s what bots are for.”
“It needed to be done, Lina. I don’t have access to the armories, and if I’d waited for help there would have been a lot more enemy bots to deal with. I bet they’ve already done some damage.”
“They cut the fuel lines for Fusion Four, and knocked out two sets of maneuvering thrusters,” she admitted.
“See? There wasn’t time to wait.”
We reached Emla’s body then. Ash was crouched protectively over it, watching the corridor suspiciously. But there must have been another fight here, before all the bots got recalled to try to stop me. His wings were full of holes, from bullets and flying shrapnel, and one of his forelegs looked like he’d dipped it in acid. His status display said it was all repairable, but he’d need a few days in his base station to get back to normal.
Smoke hadn’t been so lucky. He must have gotten hit by a big mass driver or something. There were pieces of his little body strew all over the corridor. His upper torso, where his bot brain had been, was completely gone.
I bit my lip, and tried to remind myself that he was just a bot. I had his personality settings, so once I had some money I could buy another one just like him.
It didn’t help.
Lina knelt to look at Emla’s broken body, and I held my breath. Hoping against hope.
A sensor bot detached from her backpack, and floated down to examine the exposed AI core at close range. Lina frowned.
“Well, the good news is I don’t think her copy protection tripped. I’m picking up trace power from her internal monitoring systems, and there’s no heat residue like you’d see from a self-destruct charge.”
I gasped. “She’s still in there? Does that mean she’ll get better? Or, well, we can fix her, right?”
She shook her head. “With all that damage to her housing we’re going to have to be really careful just to get her out of that body and into a carrying case. But her I/O port is toast, and these cheap AI cores don’t have any real self-repair capability. The damage isn’t going to heal, and we can’t go in to fix it without tripping her copy protection. Normally I’d say take her back to the manufacturer and let them fix it, but if she’s one of Dusty’s rescues it isn’t going to be that easy.”
I bit my lip. “She was supposed to be scrapped. Would they have records of that?”
“Probably. She’s from one of those colonies where the androids are slaves, right? They usually keep close track of their property, and the access codes to unlock her aren’t going to be available anywhere else.”
My face fell. “Oh.”
“But hey, we don’t have to figure this out right now,” she went on hurriedly. “I’ll get her stored away in a few minutes here, and then she’ll be safe for as long as it takes to come up with a solution. I’m sure you creative genius types can think of something.”
“Alright. Thank you, Lina. When I saw the cracks in her casing, I thought for sure she was gone.”
I watched while a pair of damage control bots deftly cut Emla’s AI core free from the mangled body. Another bot fabricated a custom carrying case on the spot, and Lina carefully snugged the AI core into a hollow in the packing foam. Then she sealed the case, and handed it to me.
“There, all set. Now, let’s get you to medbay.”
I was still worried about Emla, but at least now I had hope. I cradled the case against my aching chest, and tried to convince myself things would work out. You can store AI cores for years. Decades, even. Dusty might know someone who could steal the release codes, or I could learn how and do it myself.
We were halfway there before I thought to wonder how the battle was going. I could feel the ship’s mass drivers firing steadily, but we didn’t seem to be taking damage anymore. Were we winning?