Rika considered the possibilities. <Think maybe they’re in cryo? Net energy use when in cryo is a lot less than a person up and about, eating, moving around, whatever…>
<Plus waste. Ships use a lot of power dealing with human leftovers.>
Rika nodded absently as she watched third and fourth fireteams slip into the airlock. She looked to her right where one-one was ranging across the ship’s hull, destroying surface cannons—most before they even came online.
<One-one, keep in visual range of the dropship. If we can’t see them, they can’t shoot at us.>
<You got it, Skipper,> Ben replied. <Just one more that could hit the top of the shuttle, then we’ll fall back. Probes are out, so we’ll see their ugly asses before they see ours.>
<Good job, Corporal. Keep in cover, two in the airlock, and two in the dropship. They could try to push us off again, or maybe even drop their shields. You don’t want to be in the open, if that happens.>
<Shit, no we don’t,> Ben grunted. <We really don’t. Double-time it, Whispers. Take out that last gun so we can stop being ants in a windstorm.>
Rika looked up at the dark clouds surrounding the Fury Lance. Though two atmospheres of pressure had seeped through the ship’s shields, there was a lot more out there.
Not to mention winds that screamed like howling banshees. Crazy as it sounded, she looked forward to the refuge of an enemy starship.
Rika set the feeds from her squad on the left side of her vision, and the feeds from the other two squads along the right side and bottom. Fifty-six layered squares surrounded the view before her, and Rika set combat detection alerts on them.
Satisfied that she could watch the entire breach with minimal obstruction to what lay around her, Rika jumped into the airlock and joined her Marauders in the storming of the Fury Lance.
THE FURY LANCE
STELLAR DATE: 05.01.8949 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: The Fury Lance
REGION: Within Armens, Hercules System, Septhian Alliance
Kelly was on point, with Crunch and Shoshin covering her six. She’d killed a dozen Niets so far; four of them had been unarmored, and she’d dispatched them without a second thought.
On closer inspection, two of those didn’t even have weapons, but she wasn’t going to wait for them to fire at her to see if they had malicious intent.
The only good Niet was a dead Niet.
Her fireteam was on a direct route to the network access point that Niki needed to reach, while the others were taking parallel passages, on the lookout for flanking maneuvers from the enemy.
Kelly’s probes rounded a corner ahead and caught a view of several Niets in powered armor—a moment later, the feed went dead.
<EM hit the probes. Saw…six. On the right.>
<We got it,> Crunch said as he passed Kelly with Shoshin on his tail. She turned to cover the rear, letting the heavier mechs do what they did best.
Crunch eased up to the corner, glanced back at Shoshin, and raised his KE-72, toggling the grenade launcher.
He fired a trio of grenades that bounced off the wall and disappeared around the corner, at the same moment that three came back.
Kelly had a moment of confusion, wondering how the Niets had kicked the ‘nades back so fast, before she realized they had used the exact same tactic at the same time.
Crunch screamed something, and dove to the side as the grenades detonated. The force of the explosion picked Kelly up and threw her back to the last intersection they’d passed.
She scrambled to her feet, sending out more probes while cycling her vision to see through the fire and smoke that filled the corridor.
She made out the shapes of Crunch and Shoshin and rushed toward them, but Crunch waved her off as he struggled to his feet.
<Clear the intersection, we’re OK…I think.>
Kelly nodded and walked past, JE-87 in her right hand, angling her GNR-40E on her left arm to get a clear shot at anyone who showed a body part around the corner.
She spared a glance at Shoshin as she passed him. He looked OK, though his faceplate was cracked, and the ablative plating on his right side was almost entirely gone. Poor guy was having the worst luck, lately.
Focus, Kelly!
She didn’t want to waste a probe, in case their EM source was still functional. Instead, she drew in a deep breath and then leapt across the intersection, firing at any shapes she could discern through the smoke.
Something moved on the left side of the passage, and it got a trio of projectile rounds from her GNR. Another shape got a burst from her JE-87, and then another burst from her GNR hit a third shape.
She landed and ducked behind the bulkhead, waiting for return fire, but none came.
Movement to her right caught Kelly’s attention, and she nodded to Crunch and Shoshin as they eased up to the intersection. Crunch had a slight limp, and she hoped it wasn’t enough to slow him down.
Crunch was an RR-3, and unlike earlier RR models, the 3’s had leg stubs like SMIs—which meant they could suffer injury to their thighs and hips. Unlike Shoshin, who no longer possessed organic limbs.
<You sure you’re good?> she asked Crunch.
<Good enough to kill—shit!>
An electron beam streaked down the corridor and struck something behind Kelly. She spun around to see a Niet in heavy armor fall to the deck, his neck half burned away.
<Yeah, frosty,> Kelly said, shaking her head. <Warn a girl before you do that again.>
<You snooze, you get the shit scared out of you,> Rika replied, waving Kelly on.
Kelly eased around the corner and walked past the six Niets who’d tried to take them out. One was moving, and she fired a round into the woman’s head without remorse.
Die, bitch.
With Rika bringing up the rear, the fireteam made it the rest of the way to the network access point without further incident.
Kelly rounded the last corner to see Kerry and the rest of one-three waiting for them at the NAP’s entrance.
<What took you so long? Find an ice cream shop or something?> Kerry asked.
<Yeah, your mom was running it, so I got her to make a double-dip sundae. You want one?>
<Hey, don’t be touching my mom’s sundae!>
<Cut the chatter,> Sergeant Aaron growled as he approached with one-four.
Kelly took a corner at an intersection twenty meters from the NAP and nodded to Rika as she passed.
<Give em’ hell, Chief,> she said to Niki.
<Always do,> the AI replied.
Kelly sent a probe down each of the two corridors she was covering and tucked each into corners, hoping they’d stay safe. She only had five more, and this party was just getting started.
* * * * *
<I like Kelly,> Niki commented as Rika approached the door to the network access point. <She’s boss.>
< ‘Boss’?> Rika asked. <What does that mean?>
< ‘Boss’, adjective, meaning excellent, outstanding.>
Rika stopped at the door and grunted. <Huh, never heard that definition before.>
<You’ve lived a sheltered life.>
<Is that what you call it?>
Niki laughed. <Well, I guess not. Drop some nano on the access panel so I can walk through this thing.>
Rika complied, while Niki muttered, <Stars, I wish you had better nano. Would make some things a lot easier.>
<Better nano?> Rika asked. <I guess some people might have better, but this is top-of-the-line stuff.>
<Really, Rika? You do know that Praesepe is a backwater, right? In the core, children have better nano than you.>
Children with advanced nano seemed like very bad idea to Rika. <How do their parents deal with that?>
<They have even better nano than their kids.>
Rika was suddenly very happy that she was not fighting against the core worlds. Thank stars the Hegemony of Worlds is eight-hundred light years away.
<OK, door opening in one…two…dammit, that’s not—>
The door slid open, and Niki let out a whoop as Rika entered.
<I thought you were having trouble?>
<I was, but I can solve problems a lot faster than I can talk to you.>
Rika ignored the jibe and looked around the room…which wasn’t a room at all. She stood on a catwalk encircling the center of a ten-meter by ten-meter shaft that dropped deep into the ship.
Rika leant over the edge and saw that the bottom of the shaft lay almost a hundred meters below; the top was another sixty up.
In front of them was a five-meter cube, with conduit streaming out of it to points on the walls around them and stretching down the shaft to another cube far below.
“This is not what I was expecting,” Rika said aloud.
<Quiet, it’s listening.>
< ‘It’? The cube?>
<Yeah, this is one of the NSAI’s nodes.>
Rika raised her GNR. <Can I just shoot it?>
<No! We need to access it, not blow it up. NSAIs on ships like this are multi-nodal. Take out one, and it just reroutes. We’re here to poison it.>
<What do you need me to do?> Rika asked.
<I need you to take your direct connect cable and plug it into the port on the console over there.>
<You want me to plug into this thing?> She had imagined just connecting to some secure panel somewhere. Connecting to the NSAI seemed like a very bad idea.
<Yeah, this is what we came here to do; you got that, right?>
<I did—do. But this is somehow more ominous than I thought it would be.>
<Don’t worry, you’re triple-buffered from what I’m doing. Remember, Carson added in additional firewalls.>
Rika drew in a deep breath and approached the console. <What about you?>
<Me? It’s an NSAI, not a core devil. I’ll be fine.>
<What’s a core devil?>
<Nothing,> Niki dissembled. <Just a crazy rumor that never seems to go away.>
Despite their promise to be open with one another, Niki seemed to constantly have more secrets that she’d allude to and never share. Rika knew the AI didn’t make slip-ups, so Niki was doing it on purpose.
Is it just to goad me into something? she wondered.
Rika pulled out the hard-Link cable and plugged into the socket Niki had highlighted. The cable was only a half-meter long, so she was stuck here for however long this took.
<OK, starting my game of cat and mouse,> Niki announced.
While Niki did her work, Rika checked over the other two squads’ progress through the ship.
Kristian’s squad two had taken some hits—only minor injuries, though. They seemed to be drawing the most Niets, likely due to the presence of The Van. Nothing like having a K1R-T stomp through your ship to make you pull out all the stops.
Third squad, which had Staff Sergeant Chris accompanying it, was nearly at the engineering bay. Rika saw that one of the AM-2s, a PFC named Kyle that everyone in the platoon called ‘Goob’, had taken a hit to the torso. He was still alive, but his armor had initiated an emergency coma. CJ and Yig had pulled his limbs off and were taking turns carrying him.
They were meeting with increasing resistance, and Rika was considering peeling off a fireteam from her squad to assist them, when Niki started swearing profusely.
<Awwww, shitty mcfuckface, this is bad. Fucking bad. Clusterfuck bad.>
<Niki, spit it out!>
<They patched the loop—well, at least the best trigger for it. Without that, there’s only a minute to attempt the takedown. It’s not long enough!>
<Then we have to scuttle,> Rika replied, reaching for the hard-Link cable.
<No, wait! I might be able to figure something out, but we’ll need to get it to the other breach teams.>
Rika groaned. <You mean the breach teams on the other ships that we can’t currently talk to?>
<Yeah, those breach teams. Shut up for a minute, will you?>
Rika wondered if they could relay the updated data to Klen, or if someone would need to take it up to him.
As she was considering her options, something pinged off the catwalk, and Rika realized someone had fired on her from below. She circled her drone around and saw five Niets on a catwalk, twenty meters below and moving to get a good firing angle on her.
<Aaron, I’ve got Roaches crawling around down below. Can you take them out?>
The squad sergeant sent a quick affirmation, and a moment later, two RR mechs dashed through the open door and leapt off the catwalk, firing as they fell. Rika watched them take out a Niet each on the way down, then land on two others.
Ten seconds later the five Niets were dead, and the RRs took up positions on either side of the lower catwalk’s door, ready to take out any other enemies.
<Nicely done,> Rika couldn’t help but smile at the mechs’ calm efficiency.
<Thanks, Skipper,> one of the RRs, a corporal named Mitch, replied.
<OK! I got it!> Niki announced. <As I’d hoped, their patch solved just one avenue of attack, not the core problem. I was able to leverage another vulnerability and get in. How are we going to get it to the other AIs?>
<Can we transmit it to Klen?> Rika asked.
<Yeah, it’s not a big burst…though if the NSAI sniffs it out and cracks it, the hack won’t work anymore.>
<We have to chance it,> Rika replied. <Running a datapod up to the dropship will take too long.>
<OK, sending to Klen’s ship.>
Rika sucked in a deep breath and got ready for what she was about to ask the pilot to do.
<Vargo, how’s it looking up there?>
<Great, Captain. Kim, Harris, and I are having afternoon tea. Had to fight off a drone attack first, though. How’re things downstairs?>
<We had a setback with the NSAI hack, but Niki worked out a solution.>
<Good to hear. Why are you pinging me?> Klen’s voice carried a note of wariness, and Rika suspected he already knew what she was about to ask.
<The other AIs are going to need this data. Niki has pushed it up into your comm stack; you need to get out there and deliver the data burst to each breach team.>
There was a brief pause, then Klen replied. <Understood, Captain Rika. I assume I should kick my guests out?>
<Yes, I’ll instruct them to meet up with us. You need to go now.>
<Aye, Captain. I’ll be back for the pickup, don’t you worry.>
Rika prayed he would. Once he started broadcasting the signal to the other teams, he’d make himself a target for every Niet ship out there. <I know you will. See you on the flip-side.>
<You bet. You’re buying too, Captain.>
<Damn straight, I am.>
Klen cut the connection, and Rika pulled a feed from Kim’s helmet. The dropship cut its weld-grapple free and lifted from the Fury Lance. A beam shot out from a point-defense cannon, but was bent around the dropship by the vessel’s grav shield.
Then the thrusters fired, and the Marauder dropship shot out of the relatively calm air within the Fury Lance’s shields and passed out into Armens’ raging storms.
Good luck, Marauder.
Rika briefly ensured that one-one was making their way toward the rest of squad one before returning her attention to Niki.
<The console here is showing errors in the node,> she said. <I take it that’s a good thing?>
<Yeah,> Niki’s response was curt. <Tight timing, here. Shush.>
Rika sighed and returned to monitoring her various teams. Second squad had slowed to a crawl, but their goal was to cause chaos—which they were excelling at.
However, squad three wasn’t doing much better. They were still fifty meters from the engineering bay, and were fighting flanking attempts by the Niets at e
very turn. Staff Sergeant Chris was out of commission, a series of chest wounds placing him in an armor-coma, as well.
Rika considered sending one-one to assist them, but they would take too long.
<Crunch, how’s the leg?> Rika asked.
<Good ‘nuf, Captain. Shoshin is a miracle worker with a brace, though I can’t say I’ll ever be as pretty as I once was. What’s up?>
Rika remembered all too well what it was like to get an internal brace jammed into her thigh. It was the furthest thing from fun she could think of. <Link up with Sergeant Karen and squad three. They’re getting hung up, and we need them in that engineering bay in five mikes, tops.>
<You got it, Captain. Run and gun is the name of the game.>
<Aaron,> Rika addressed squad one’s sergeant. <I’m lending one-two to Karen.>
<No problem, Captain. She always did need an extra hand.>
<Be nice, Sergeant.>
Weapons fire echoed down the corridor and through the entrance to the shaft.
<I’m always nice,> Aaron grunted in response a minute later.
* * * * *
Kelly ranged ahead of Crunch and Shoshin, keeping her eyes peeled for Niets and firing indiscriminately at any she saw. She followed her probes around a corner and shot a woman in the head, then slammed a man against the bulkhead, crushing his neck.
A door down the passageway opened, and a Niet appeared with a rocket launcher. He wasn’t armored, and would kill himself in the explosion, but Kelly had no interest in dodging missiles. She took aim, and fired a uranium sabot round at him.
The round struck the end of the rocket launcher, and shrapnel showered the man, tearing him apart.
<Nice shooting,> Crunch said as he came up behind her.
<Couldn’t let you get all hurt again, Corporal,> Kelly said with a smirk that he couldn’t see behind her helmet.
Weapons fire came from behind, and Kelly turned to see Shoshin unloading his chaingun on a group of Niets that had tried to flank the team. The enemy ducked behind a bulkhead, but it wasn’t enough to save them.
Shoshin’s gun tore through the plas and steel, and Kelly saw blood spray out onto one of the walls.
<Clear,>