When they finally ended the threat of Doctor Sinister by beating him up and leaving him tied to a support pillar, I covered my face with a groan.
“Goddess, that was awful,” I complained. “Do they think he doesn’t have offsite backups for his research data? Aren’t the colony security forces on the take from him? He’s just going to escape and start over!”
“Duh! He’s a recurring villain,” Lina said smugly. “He comes back for more in Sunraker, and that’s just the start. By the time he teams up with Octocock in-”
I covered my ears. “No! No more, please. I can’t take it. I can feel my IQ dropping just from listening to this.”
“Aw, does that mean you don’t want to watch the next one?”
I hesitated.
“Maybe one more.”
“That’s the spirit!” She crowed. “We’ll make a cheesy spy flick lover out of you yet. But first, we need popcorn.”
“I’ll get it,” Emla said eagerly. “Butter or caramel?”
“Bah! Caramel popcorn is a travesty. A corruption of the true spirit of movie night. Everyone knows real popcorn is smothered in butter and salt.”
It was silly, and kind of a waste of time. But I could feel the tension slowly unwinding. Maybe this was what I needed. A night of silly fun with my friends, to take my mind off my worries.
“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?” I said.
“You bet,” she admitted. “You seriously need to learn how to relax, Alice. Is it working?”
I took a deep breath, and let it out.
“Yeah. I think it is. Thanks.”
“Any time, Alice. That’s what friends are for.”
Chapter 18
Chief West’s idea of intensive training felt an awful lot like boot camp.
At least he was running a better VR this time. The hold full of bots looked pretty realistic, at least to human vision, and the simulated physics was good enough that I could walk around without feeling like I was piloting a cartoon character.
His avatar actually looked human for once. A big white guy with a shaved head and as much muscle as the captain, wearing a crisp black uniform and a surprisingly small sidearm. He waved me over to a row of stowed warbots.
“You did alright in the war games yesterday, but Drop Marine IV and the Sharp End series both use bot designs copied from old Inner Sphere wars. Today we’re going to start you on the warbots the Square Deal actually carries, so it’s time to see if you did your homework. What can you tell me about this bad boy?”
Good thing I’d taken a few minutes last night to eat the manuals he’d given me. I looked at the bot his hand was resting on. It looked sort of like a mutant dog, with a compact body and six weirdly jointed limbs.
“That’s a Holstein E-419 Intruder, Chief. It’s a breaching bot, designed to knock down doors and be the first unit to enter each room when a team is doing clearance work. Mobility is six legs with active traction control plus a levitation and bounce system, with a max speed of one hundred and twenty kph. Main weapon is a Mk314 plasma flamer located in the mouth, supplemented by two racks of fourteen 200g micro-missiles each and a big set of claws and teeth. Protection is twenty millimeters of Holstein’s Mk287 bot armor over the chest and vitals, and four to twelve millimeters over other locations. It also mounts a 40 kW UV laser for utility and point defense work, twenty 100g and eighty 20g recon minibots, and a smoke dispenser system that can take up to six 1 kg canisters of any Gen8 cloud formula.”
“Power source?” He prompted.
“Burst power for the weapons and deflector comes from a bank of power cells in the center of the torso, with a total storage of 100 kW-hours. That’s kept charged by the nuke pack, which is a standard medium-duration 200 kW model with a service life of one hundred days.”
“So you read the manual. What do you think of it?”
I blinked, and took another look. “Well, Chief, I get the basic concept of having the bot open doors and send the recon swarms in to look for trouble. But putting claws on it seems like a waste of mass, since they aren’t going to penetrate another warbot’s armor. I think the weapon designations are backwards, too. In a real engagement the mini-missiles are going to do most of the killing. The flamer might be good against smaller bots, but the reading I’ve done says microbot swarms are obsolete.”
“Which brings us to why we’re here. You can’t believe everything you read, and the only way to learn better is experience. Microbots are only out of style because everyone carries the counters for them, and offensive minibots are still pretty common. As for the claws, imagine your bot breaks in on a bunch of civies with hand weapons. They don’t know their ass from their elbow, let alone what a mini-missile launcher looks like. But a metal monster with claws and big teeth, that roars and breathes fire at them? That’s instant panic.”
I cocked my head. “People really think like that, Chief? It doesn’t sound scary to me. Kind of funny, really.”
“Yeah, that happens sometimes with combat morphs who grow up with their enhancements. You’ve got some kind of threat evaluator that’s busy sizing up everything you meet, right?”
“Yes, Chief. I guess most people don’t?”
“Oh, they do. But your threat evaluator was written by some intel weenie, so it’s thinking about how effective different kinds of hardware are against modern threats. Normal humans have a threat evaluator that was written by evolution, back when we were naked savages roaming the plains of Africa. It doesn’t know what a mass driver looks like, but big teeth are another story.”
“Oh. Oh, wow. I never thought about it like that, Chief.”
Now that I had, it was obvious how that would work out. I could run a threat model that only understood primitive weapons, and the results looked completely different than anything I was used to. Heck, even a hexagator would look pretty scary from that viewpoint.
Was that why the captain had been so upset about Naoko going into the swamp with me? Oops. Well, something to keep in mind from now on.
The chief was still talking. “We’ll be using simulated civilians for some of our exercises from now on, so you’ll get a chance to see how that works out. But for now, talk to me about this guy.”
He patted the bow armor of a much larger warbot. This one was a wedge-shaped machine designed to rely completely on levitation for mobility, with an intimidating array of turrets decorating its hull.
“That’s a Holstein G-411 Sharpshooter, Chief. It’s a gunbot, which is supposed to be the core of most infantry formations. Mobility is pure levitation, with a top speed of 200 kph but poor cornering. Main gun is a 25mm mass driver with a muzzle velocity of 6,000 meters per second, with four 80 kW UV lasers and two mini-missile launchers with hundred-round magazines as backup. Armor is the same Mk287 as the Intruder, but the thickness goes from 10mm over the field emitters up to 110mm for the nose and vitals. It also has a deflector shield to bounce fragments and small arms fire, smoke dispensers with six four-kilogram reservoirs, and a 40mm grenade launcher with a magazine of thirty smoke grenades.”