“Kursk, Voronezh, ETA?” Ivanka subvocalizes into her suit’s comms system.
“25 minutka”, “35 minutka”, they reply. That’s a long time to sit here waiting to plan to get more information. Every time we send a drone towards the bunker-like manufacturing facility, it malfunctions and then its battery explodes. I wish we had some of Penny’s magitech drones, they are tamper and hack resistant.
We don’t know much about what’s going on inside, but we do know that the Herrat are more technologically advanced than what we have access to and have completely rebuffed our attempts to infiltrate the security system from the outside. As the Empress has suppressed the distribution of large military weaponry above tier 1, intelligent munitions that would be able to flatten this structure without intense collateral are unavailable to buy. Not that many out-of-Empire manufacturers are selling to Astoria during the war anyway. Herrat backlash, they claim, as we are not expected to outlast the cat’s invasion.
“Snipers, start taking out cameras. Sappers, we need shaped breaching charges on two walls after the surveillance is taken out. Be ready to detonate when additional cells arrive.” Mic clicks confirm her orders and shots immediately report from around the facility.
Ivanka’s initial thought was to approach the building like the last one, overpressure the enclosed spaces and clean up disoriented or dead enemies. Turns out, an explosives manufacturing facility is designed to compartmentalize accidental detonations so that the whole facility isn’t injured when mistakes occur. Thermo-baric grenades are much less useful here.
“I know we searched the perimeter, but did we look for traps outside? These cats are supposedly a tier two technological society. Some sort of active camouflage should be possible for them.”
My love curses to herself.
“I did not think of that. If not light or heat, how do we find them?” She taps on the side of her rifle in thought. “Magic sensor or echo? Echo could work if we can get someone to cook up an algorithm the teams can share.”
“Most of the specialists we had in programming that were fast enough to do this died in the explosions.” I remind her.
“Well, then, guess we have to ask the Empire nicely then.”
“You’re going to bug Penny with this?” I ask, incredulous, as Ivanka knows that our friend and Empress is knee deep in a space battle.
“No Petra, the little Merc was never quick or clean with her magitec or coding. I’m talking about her ex-wife.” I don’t care for the grin that’s creeping up her cheeks.
While I will admit, Katie O’Connell is a genius, she’s been un-hinged since she started cleaning herself up and seeking revenge on those that hooked her on drugs and took advantage of her. Killed the leader of the Syndicate for it. We all understood and haven’t bothered her in months.
“Are we sure we want her involved?”
“No, but if we keep her pointed at the cats, maybe less of our people will die than if we didn’t call her at all.”
***
“Commodore, Mab and Titania report that the cutting teams are working through their hulls, and we are seeing many of the shuttles and ships around us are diverting to them.” My weapons officer says in a calm, detached voice.
“Understood. Helm, work with Nav to position us so that our cargo bay has an angle on these boarding ships, I don’t care how close we have to get.” That’s going to be a mess. At least the artificial gravity plates work no matter how the ship is oriented.
/Alaris, are there any capabilities that you have that I’m missing? Weapons, power, anything?/
\You have a mobile personnel gateway in the cargo bay. As per the Empress’ insistence, so do the other two ships\
/What!? Why didn’t you bring that up before?!/
\You instructed me to keep my opinions and recommendations to messages only unless the ship is in danger.\
Is she kidding me with this? Do these AI have no sense of what’s important? Give me a crew member any day.
“All right Alaris set up a transfer between us and Titania first and we’ll send more security forces through while we approach Mab to open fire on their unwelcome party guests.”
\Our resources are low. I will advise Titania to initiate the transferr.\
/Chief, I need you to organize half our security force by the gate in the cargo bay ready for transfer, loaded for bear./
\Aye aye, Commodore. What’s your stance on experimental weaponry?\
/Test them on the Enemy and don’t kill my Sailors in the splash./
\Copy that. Me and two teams will be down in five.\
If we can kill the boarding teams and perhaps half of the shuttles and fighters, then we may be able to stop them from trying this again with better tactics. Hell, if the ballistic breaching ships had been successful, we’d likely have been overwhelmed in minutes and secured in less than four hours. By the grace of God, they have underestimated our technology and I can only hope that continues with the troops they bring aboard my ships.
AI, is there anyway to import the other ship’s visuals into my head’s up display?
Yes, there are several options, each come with a loss of personal awareness. The first is viewscreen segmented for Mab and Titania with your HUD showing Alaris, another is to take up your visual cortex with the same information, just with a little more responsiveness. The third, is slightly more invasive and will take five minutes and some “experience” to modify some connections in your brain and would allow you to experience the signals without the decoding from the ships.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
That last one sounds like a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I’m not against it, but I don’t want to risk rushing something like that. Let’s go with option number two so that my department heads can keep monitoring the situation while I deep dive into the fleet.
There will be some itching and tingling behind your eyes, where the HUD implant is. I will also place some monitoring drones around your visual cortex to ensure we are linking to other parts of your brain with the other senses conveyed in the communications stream.
In little over a minute a warning pops up in my HUD telling me that visuals are ready to transfer and I hit okay. My true vision fades. When an image fades in it appears to be countless viewpoints in a rectangular mosaic.
‘What are the static-filled images?’
/DE Alaris, Titania may have rushed her efforts to bolster her shield matrix and compromised some of her higher functions. Tessa is currently using swarm nanites to build herself a decoder and stand in for her./
‘Can’t say I like the Admiral’s stooge interpreting for me, but what choice do I have?’
/Tessa is a forthright and honest intelligence, your choices are to remain getting delayed responses from Titania, get the nanite modification yourself, as your swarm suggested, or to simply ignore the ship’s plea for assistance. Of course, you could attempt to scuttle the ship once the Herrat onboard, but that is ill advised./
Using Titania as a lure for the Herrat could be an effective tactic if what we’re attempting fails. Even if we repel these forces, five warships remain on the cat side. There’s a small chance that the Admiral solves that on her own. A part of me wants to leave her to it.
***
So, the Herrat did not like the void zipper I put on their ship. An angry swarm of maintenance robots and industrial exo-suits spill from small bays around the ship in an attempt to stem the worst of the breaches caused by hungry, hungry magic.
It’s at this point that I want to play a shoot-em up mini-game as well as play infiltrator on the ship that’s less than 200m away. Tessa set me up with some magitec interface gear to aid in piloting drones with my parallel minds, might as well test out the operability with the fancy blink fighter.
I exit the fighter and push my self slowly to the new object of my harassment while my mind permeates through the ship’s systems. I walk it through a few maneuvers and check the targeting algorithm is functioning properly. So I hold the idea in my parallel mind of shooting acquired targets while maintaining a defense route of maneuvering. I can see the route in my head and then anchor it into the ship’s systems with a trigger that allows the fighter to blink away if it takes more than a few rounds of fire.
Regular me transfers a Navy Standard pulse pistol from storage, it doesn’t have the overcharge capability that I had on my now destroyed personal pistols, and a plasma saber from my inventory. Weapons in hand, I look through the airlock windows to see if there is any equipment in my way and teleport through. I feel some resistance, probably due to shields or an anti-teleport enchantment, but I’m not strictly using magic to teleport. My will is stronger than their enchantments and I appear in some sort of auxiliary storage bay?
My ripple drive keeps me from slamming my feet into the deck via artificial gravity, and slowly lowers me to the steel plating. With nothing but spare parts in here, I don’t exactly have to hide so I test the air I here, slightly toxic chemicals in the air, but nothing that will permanently damage me. I shrug, open my helmet and eat another galaxy fruit. Alright Penny, less magic and more martial arts that you’ve been training. I teleport aft and start running toward what should be engineering spaces.
The cats aren’t in any kind of armor or much of any clothing. It would be stupid to underestimate them, as they are a warrior race and from what I know, everyone is at least intermediate in their chosen martial form. I didn’t study a lot about them, just their historic responses to new Race accessions to the Matrix. They respond to tier 1 threats with 20-40 lvl crews, tier 2 they tend to stay away from, unless they are rich in resources, then bring their invasion fleet which carry their elite troops in the 50-70 lvls.
The poor bastards I’m coming across are in their high twenties. Very few of the Herrat I encounter have time to do more than gasp before scorched fur signals their end. When I get to their engineering area, I find a console, engage in some translation assistance from the Matrix’s language codices and find that these furballs are using ion drives and very clunky warp tech that does not match their technology signatures at all. Huh, space capable, but not very galactic. Weird. Sure, it’s not near as dangerous as anti-matter warping, but at least that got humans out of their solar system. Sheesh.
So the thing about ion drives, is that I don’t understand them very well. Or should I say, I don’t understand them well enough to push a large spacecraft full of people with them. I just don’t see how they’re pushing ten thousand tons of bullshit with three hundred tons of liquid gas. What I do know, is that there are more power generators on this ship than I would need for two of mine, and I over engineered them. As I might want to study these drives later, or at least scavenge parts, I find that there are 13 power conduits for the various charge accelerators and set about to chopping them with my plasma sword. After disconnecting the cut-off relays of course. Once the fourth relay comes down, the alarms start going off. Ah, well, better start teleporting instead of walking. I get through 10 conduits before a security team arrives.
The five cat team arrives in the aft segment of the ship with swords and bands that appear to be shield generators, and a backpack that might be the power source and control or said bands. I pop off a few shots with my pistol and a field pops up about 15cm off of the cat’s fur and flickers yellow. Ugh, I’m missing the overcharge function about now—half again as much power and I could have overloaded that shield.
The lead cat smiles at me, as though he has the upper hand before roaring and charging me.
Okay, not a chump, but not really using his head either. He twirls his sword like a confident ass before trying to bisect me with his under-enchanted metal blade. I push his blade with mine, causing angry sparks and hissing to issue from his blade as I duck and direct his momentum to continue while swinging my pistol hand in for a crossing punch. As soon as my muzzle is within 15 cm of his face, I pump light into his face.
The shock on his comrades fades quickly, but not fast enough to save the guy in the back that I’ve blipped behind and executed. Two of the remaining three turn and swipe their swords at me while mook number three backs off and raises a charging rifle. They do have guns. This one is giving off molten slug vibes. Induction headed coil gun? Okay, that sounds pretty cool, especially since it would mean they’d solved the demagnetization of heating the metal that much. Geek out on tech when they’re not trying to kill you with it, Penny.
I try my best to fight in the shadow of the two melee combatants, but they are more expertly positioning me to get shot. One deflects off my assailant and another impacts the shield over my arm with some red warnings popping up in my head as it splashes over the shield. When the timing for a third shot comes, guy has me dead to rights—so I cheat. I dilate time and space so that only me and my closest assailant are being sped up. As soon as he’s in my previous position in our dance, I let go of the spells and cat man gets caught in the chest with a molten projectile.
Knowing the timer for his rifle charges, I rush him and cut the shooter down with little effort. The last man of the squad takes a second to look around and decides to run. I take his buddy’s rifle and shoot him in the back before he can turn a corner. I make sure all five cats are dead, pocket some of their gear and head to the wing deployment bay? Fighter and shuttle wings, a parallel mind tells me as it reviews the downloaded schematics we stole.
“It feels weird talking to myself like this, but can you check the specks of that bay against that industrial reclamator?”
I get a chuckle and a mental nod as I run toward the extra gear hatch I came in from. I run into a roving watch stander and know as I kill them my time aboard is now limited. I pull the team of two into the materiel locker with me and inspect their weapons while I consider my next step.
The smile that peels over my teeth could only be devilish. I can convert these energy-based assault rifles into one-shot burnout cannons, and it will only take me five minutes.