Wednesday, September 9th, 2048

I started the day with a walk around the base. September made itself known with cooler weather than before, and I was glad that I already had installed heating and a bathroom.

Next in my plans was the analysis of the built-in weapons in the Battlecat. The claws would have to wait, first I wanted to know about the threat the gun posed. I had just begun to take it apart, when Elya informed me about a nearby incursion. I grabbed my rail gun and armor, mustered the fifty Macks at my disposal (including the Battlecat) and moved to the entrance with my entourage. This time there were two Twenty-Ones vaguely visible behind the trees, and a horde of attackers already moved up the mountain slope. Among them a Type 42 and four Battlecats. Overhead, a dozen Type Six approached. This would strain my defenses to the limit.

The first units that fired were my Type 4AE with the little 5.7x28 mm turrets on top. They shot down all the Type Sixes, although one got uncomfortably close and I was hit by some shrapnel in the arm.

The next moment, the enemy Battlecats were coming up the ramp to the base entry and firing left and right on my units from their insectoid tails. They were swarmed by half a dozen Fours each but lashed out with glowing claws. The Fours were decimated rapidly, losing tentacles in fiery trails of sparks.

But they also had some success. Here a Battlecat lost an eye, there one got its joints pierced by the hammering spikes of my Fours and lost mobility. At a gesture from me, my own Battlecat attacked an enemy unit from behind and sliced through its neck, severing the data bus and disabling that foe. Elya took over as commander of my Fours and directed more of them at the enemy Battlecats.

Meanwhile, I ducked into the base entrance, railgun at my shoulder. The Type 42 flew up to me on thrusters built into in its legs, landed a few meters from me and began talking in a monotone way. “Surrender. Resistance is fut...”

That gave me a moment to steady my gun and focus on her neck, where I knew the data bus was running down to the torso. As I pulled the trigger, a projectile left my gun with a whip crack and slammed through the spine of the Mack girl from the front. She collapsed, still weakly twitching but out of the fight for the moment.

Thank the gods for stupidly ranting enemies.

Two of the enemy Battlecats were down at this point, a third one was barely staying upright. As it presented a steady target for the moment, I fired a rail gun bullet through its tail-gun, which exploded in a fireball. Battlecat number four was going down under a horde of my fours. It took some of them with it into death, but too many of its systems were pierced and destroyed by the spikes of my Fours.

That left my own battlecat as the last one standing. I commanded “Elya, make our battlecat cut through the spine of the Mack girl”. Better safe than sorry.

Done. With minimal damage, so you might be able to repair her, my dearest loot gremlin.

I still had to deal with the enemy Fours. They were pressing my remaining Macks at the top of the ramp, with losses on both sides already.

But now I had sufficient control of the situation to switch to my old hacking techniques, with my Mack-zapper bringing Elya’s domination onto them. Now the number of my Macks grew again, as I hijacked them faster than I lost units.

I took stock of the situation. Thirty-six of my own Macks lost, but I had also captured ten new ones, all of them Type Four. Destroyed or thoroughly disabled enemy units: One Mack-girl, four battlecats and fourteen Fours.

That left me with twenty infantry-type Macks, the four Type 4 AE I had held back and which were undamaged. Now I still had to kill the Twenty-ones before they could call in reinforcements. I ran back into my base and fetched more railgun ammunition, then I and my Macks set out for the Twenty-Ones.

Once I was within a hundred meters of the enemy, they spotted me and covered their eyes with their armored limbs. A lost opportunity to destroy the eyes. But two weeks ago (was it really only two weeks?) I had used a captured Type 28 to shoot out the reactor controller of a Type 21. Which did the trick. Perhaps my new railgun also had the required penetration.

“Elya, project the location of its innards on my augs!”

A wire frame representation of the internal parts of the massive Mack overlaid itself in my view. I made sure that the muzzle energy was dialed to the maximum, aimed at the representation of the reactor controller, and fired. Three times I pulled the trigger. Three times I got a hard kick to the shoulder. Three times a dazzling flash showed the point of impact.

After the third time, smoke wafted from the bullet holes but the metal monster was still active.

It might still be running on its capacitors.

I moved to the other one, leaving the first one alone with the idea of maybe capturing it. Said other one was in the process of turning around and made the mistake of leaving its eye uncovered. Two rounds from the Shiv made sure it would not do any more turning.

In the meantime, I heard the typical whine of a teleport gate ramping up. The first Type 21 seemed to try and bring in another unit. But the sound suddenly broke up in an explosion.

That sounded like an incomplete teleportation. With the transported item getting stuck in the gate.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

With both Twenty-Ones out of commission, I could go after the remaining Macks. Nine of them, all Type Four. It was anticlimactic, I captured seven and destroyed the remaining two easily.

Now it was time to look after my wounded arm. So far, adrenalin and the present threat had allowed me to ignore it. But now I barely managed to walk back with weak knees and get my first aid kit. An expensive QuikClot and a bandage shored things up. Checking the entrance area of the base showed the Mack girl was still down. Tiredly, I asked Elya “Status?”

One Battlecat, four Type One and thirty Type Four Macks of various models available.

Neutralized or captured enemy units today:

One Type 42, four Battlecats, two Twenty-Ones, 11 x Type Six and 31 x Type Four.

Total points for today… 1950 points

New balance... One token and 3873 points.

But I was not yet done for today. With the help of a maintenance drone, I carried the Mack girl to a table and fetched my Type 42-hacking equipment. Only after Elya expertly removed the overseer software, I felt really safe again.

This is another enslaved human. It seems to be a bad habit on part of the Macks.

Hello, Captain Obvious. “Elya, please shut her down for today. I’m too exhausted to be a caregiver for lost robot girls right now.”

After some rest, I felt recovered and motivated enough to compare the robot bodies of Mack-Arina and the new girl. The faces were different, but otherwise they had the same height and stature. Apparently, individuality went only so far in Mack-Land.

Both had hard metal bodies from crotch to breast, not very snuggle-friendly. A joint in the middle allowed some flexibility and was covered by an wide, elastic sort of belt so it was not obvious from a distance. Between the legs was only smooth metal without any openings, no fun to be had there for the poor girls.

The skirts were also made from rigid metal plates and attached at the hips with fasteners I did not see how to open.

But first, clean up and research. I spent the afternoon collecting scrap with Herbie and cutting it up. My Type 9 collector drones carried the pieces off for recycling. As it got dark outside, I experimented with a Battlecat claw and various kinds of armor plate. It turned out that the compound plating of my current body armor offered more resistance than Mack steel or duratitanium alone.

Next, recycling the Battlecats. I removed the components I wanted to keep, then dumped the rest into the recycler to reclaim the titanium.

I started designing a Battlecat version with said compound plating as armor. For now, the quantity would be limited to four as I lacked the fairly rare potassium isotope 40K, which the radionuclide battery in a Battlecat “burned” to argon. Artificial core destabilization was a cool way to make a barely radioactive isotope a lot more active. And it was reversible:

Switch the destabilisator off and it returns to its almost stable state.

So I had to reuse the undamaged energy sources from the four BCs I had killed. WIth the cyberbrains I was lucky too, I found four intact ones I could reprogram.

I also finally got around to check out the gun in the tail. It was what Elya called a plasma weapon. Big fireballs, plenty of shots before you had to reload, but not too much penetration. It might be quite devastating against unarmored humans, but considering the opponents I was facing a version of the Shiv sounded more useful.

I settled on a shorter and more manageable version of the Shiv, with a maximum muzzle velocity of “only” two kilometers per second. The ammo would be drawn from a 200 round canister in the ass of the BattleCat.

Thursday, September 10th, 2048

First thing in the morning I called SHOCKS to inform them about the latest developments. B.S.O.D. took my call and was understandably concerned. There was no second Magical Girl missing though, fortunately. But who was my currently deactivated guest then?

Next I finally printed the bodies for the new battlecats. After assembly they had the same glossy exterior with a silvery mirror surface behind it as my cuirass.

The guns on their tails could punch through the armor of a Type Four or the original Battlecat design at 300 meters. I hoped the Macks would need a while to counter that.

Late in the evening, my base guard was back to acceptable strength and I had time to interview Miss Mack II. I replaced her destroyed voice box with the identical one from Arina’s old body and powered her head up.

“Hi there!” I greeted her. “You were sort of a mech-puppet for the Macks, but now I have freed you! At least mentally! Sorry that you cannot move yet, your current body was damaged while capturing you.”

“I hate it anyway. Hate it. HATE it.” Miss Mack II screamed. With a small voice she added “Is it possible to, you know, get rid of it?”

“Yes, I can build you another body. Still mechanical, but it would look a lot closer to a human body. Would you like that?”

“This body is horrible. It reminds me at every step that I am not human anymore! If you have something closer to my old existence,” she said, “I’ll take it in a heartbeat!”

“I promise!” I said and gave her a headpat. “It might even be possible to find your picture on the web, if you give me your name and date of birth. That might help me find images on the net and build a replacement body that looks a lot like the old you.”

After a bit of dry sobbing (because she lacked tear ducts), Miss Mack II collected herself enough to say “Wendy Wilson, born January 16th, 2023. And you should find a photo of me in the graduation yearbook of Victoria University, 2046.”

“I can make you sleep in the meantime, and the next time you wake up, you will look a lot more like the old Wendy.”

“I- I think I would like that.”

I already have the photos, plural, and some measurements from her last physical examinations.

Friday, September 11th, 2048

Salvage day! I repaired one of the Type 21s at the river by installing the eye I had extracted from the one I trashed before. Now I had two functional 21s, and together they were strong enough to drag the broken one out of the river bed. Just in time, as the weather forecast warned of heavy rains. I wanted that wrecked Type 21 available for recycling, not submerged in the floods of a swollen River Queets.