“Weak points?” He prompted.
“There’s a blind spot in the laser firing arcs directly in the rear, which leaves the service port for the nuke pack vulnerable to small melee bots. The main gun can have problems with overheating if you try to maintain a high rate of fire in a vacuum or thin atmosphere. It also doesn’t carry any recon drones of its own, so it’s completely reliant on the rest of the squad for targeting data.”
We went down the whole row like that. He had all the standard bot types here. Urban support bots with their big racks of smart missiles. Defense bots with their flamers and point defense lasers. Another defensive type that was just a big levitating slab of armor, for protecting vital targets from enemy fire.
“That means you, by the way,” he pointed out. “I know you think you’re invincible, but you need to keep in mind that you’re the target. Warbots are cheap and plentiful, but they aren’t worth much without someone to tell them what to do. So you should always keep a shield between you and the enemy, because these guys are going to be gunning for you.”
‘These guys’ were the heavy gunbots. Some people called them sniper bots, because their weapons were heavy enough to fire right through multiple layers of walls and internal bulkheads. There was one with a 40mm mass driver, and a variant on that with a big UV laser instead.
“How do you get anything done with a laser, Chief?” I asked curiously. “Isn’t the enemy always going to be covered by smoke?”
“People fuck up,” he replied. “You need to be ready to take advantage of that. Heavy lasers are the main reason ground troops use so much smoke these days, but that’s been the standard answer for years now. Long enough that some people have stopped bothering to bring the laser bots to a fight, figuring they’ll never get a clean shot at anything. Then they start thinking you don’t have any either, and get careless about staying in cover.”
There were a lot of important tidbits like that. After eating the manuals I probably knew more than the chief did about the technical stats of our equipment, but he had the experience. He knew how people use their bots, the mistakes they make, the psychology of different kinds of battle.
‘The moral is to the physical as three to one.’ Understanding how your opponent thinks is the key to winning any battle. And there I go, thinking in quotes again. Thanks, Mom, I really needed to have my head stuffed full of sage advice from famous generals. That’s obviously so much more important than knowing how to win an argument, or fix a hyperspace converter, or handle boys, or a million other things I could think of.
The rest of the day was a struggle. There were all these standard maneuvers in the manual, things like how to clear a room or evacuate civilians, and Chief West wanted me to have them all down perfectly. But I couldn’t just remote-pilot the bots to make them do what I wanted. Instead I had to give orders, and they had their own ideas about how to handle the details.
Every model of warbot had a sort of playbook of moves, and at first glance it looked like I could just grab the right set for a given maneuver and tell them to do it. The trouble was, the playbooks weren’t standardized. Every manufacturer programmed their bots a little differently, and whenever they put out a new model they’d ‘improve’ the programming too. So the first time I sent a detachment to plant mines and sensors at an intersection the gunbot on sentry duty parked itself out past the minelayer, and then floated right over a mine on the way back.
Ouch.
The bots were smart enough to handle some of the basic coordination issues, like making sure their weapons were always oriented to provide interlocking fields of fire. But there were endless details the programmers hadn’t thought of. It was my job to know about all the problem spots, and work around them one way or another.
It didn’t help that Chief West kept throwing in sneaky twists to sabotage me. Putting in booby traps that the bots weren’t programmed to spot. Laying out just the right kind of clutter to confuse the bots, and make them miss the spot where an enemy was lurking. Even simple things, like a non-regulation doorway that was a few cems too narrow for the gunbots to fit through.
I learned a lot, though. After each scenario we’d walk through a recording of the battle, and Chief West would explain what I’d done wrong. It was humiliating to have my mistakes picked apart in detail, but he wasn’t mean about it. His dispassionate, professional analysis was the best instruction I’d ever had, and I improved fast.
After hours of practice I finally got the hang of the command UI the Square Deal used, and started customizing the macro functions. I kept a second thread of attention digging through the options and working on improvements all afternoon, and that was totally worth it. It turned out there was a way to show more than the normal three camera views at once, and I could also pull up other sensors and even open multiple connections.
Trying to make sense of twenty or thirty different camera views at once wasn’t easy, especially since the bots didn’t all use the same sensors. The breaching bots were pretty good at close range, with a wide field of view all the way from deep IR to high UV frequencies, but they were terribly nearsighted. The gunbots had a narrower field of view, but they had magnification up to x50 and decent radio direction finding. The recon drones, minesweepers, shieldbots and support bots all had their own specialties, and I ended up with a horrible headache from trying to integrate all the data they fed me.
I had nightmares that night. I was locked in a coffin, blind and wrapped up in capture web so I couldn’t move a cem, and something terrible was coming for me. The only protection I had was a bunch of bumbling bots that spent more time running into each other and wandering in circles than they did shooting at the enemy. That made sense, though, because they were practically blind. Each one had a single camera that looked out through a long straw, so they had a tiny field of view, and they could only see one color. All the enemy had to do was paint their units blue, and I wouldn’t be able to see them. Wait, don’t assassin bots have chameleon skin?
I woke with a start, my heart racing.
A warm body snuggled up next to me. Strong arms embraced me, and Emla’s breath tickled my ear.
“It’s just a dream, Alice. I’m on watch. You can rest now.”
It felt so good to have someone hold me. I relaxed into her embrace, and drifted back off to sleep.
In the morning some inner sense informed me that I now had built-in VR support. I stared at the notice for a moment, yawning and blinking stupidly. Then I realized what it meant, and broke into a grin.