Snatch

(Starspeak)

We would have died immediately if not for our psionic edge.

Vo and I dove out of the wide hallway, improvising ourselves a new route through the lattice of maintenance halls.

<…Wait!> Vo cried out.

Still tapped into the enemy comm network, they were monitoring what the enemy guards were saying in Tarassin.

I said honestly.

Vo frowned.

<…Right,> I said, shaking my head.

I followed Vo through a random series of rooms that didn’t fit the utilitarian labels on the blueprints, until Vo brought us to a sudden halt in the water purifier chamber.

Work stations still showed signs of recent manning: a still-steaming cup, several clipboards with documents dropped on the floor.

I asked.

I commented, noting the movements of the aliens on radar.

they nodded.

The two of us climbed up the massive water purifier dominating the exterior wall, squeezing ourselves into narrow gaps near the ceiling.

Sure enough, a pair of security rak stomped through the room, performing a cursory inspection of the floorspace before moving on toward the kitchens. But they paused at the far exit, waiting for four pawn-robots to stomp through the room after them.

“Hurry up!” one of them grumbled to the robots.

The pawns, on the other hand, did not visibly respond.

Vo and I made eye contact from our respective hiding places. Both of us had the same question on our minds.

Attack?

That same glance gave our answer. Better to wait for now, see if we couldn’t pick a more advantageous moment.

Unfortunately, it was the wrong answer.

The pawns filed out of the room, and the security rak followed only to immediately post up outside that very door.

I said, confirming through radar. More rak were repositioning off the kitchens to surround us.

Mav replied, tone strained.

I asked.

I said.

I left him to that for now and turned back to Vo.

I said.

Vo admitted, pointing down.

The Knight robot had tucked in its arms and crouched through the maintenance hall and into the water treatment room.

Instead of surveying the room like I thought it would, it immediately launched into action. The robot’s limbs whirred and clicked before whipping into action. Segmented blades extended in wide arcs, filling the space in the blink of an eye.

Vo and I both dropped to the floor in the nick of time, steel scraping against the pipes and girders we were clinging to moments ago.

The blade segments retracted back together into a sword six-feet long, and the Knight swept its arm, again extending the blade, but this time in a long wide arc right at chest level.

Vo cried.

My brain shifted into high gear, every one of my synapses and psionic tools firing on all cylinders. The sensation of Adeptry blazed to life in my hand almost before I knew what I was doing.

But I did know.

I crossed off dozens of possible options in the span of two heartbeats, and I arrived at the gamble that gave us the best odds.

In my hand materialized a simple knife, laden with ultra-dense psionics; the same ones I’d ripped from the Stiragu island cult’s proto-psionic sword.

Their leader had said the sword was supposed to let you see the future, but the truth was more akin to cognitive acceleration.

I fired up my superconnector, driving its links deep into my dagger’s constructs and drawing on its powers as deeply as I could.

The water purification chamber came into crystal clarity, and my limbs suddenly filled with lead. They weren’t falling though. They were heavy, just…hanging in front of me, frozen.

Segmented steel blades were still whipping towards me, but they were moving at a crawl now. In the periphery of my vision, Vo looked like they were crouching down through molasses. But with the world dragged into slow-motion like this, I could see that they would duck below the blade in time. Barely.

Time wasn’t frozen. I was just thinking and seeing fast enough to make it feel that way. I’d experimented with the sword’s proto-psionics in my downtime, enough to grasp their basic functions and start revising them into proper psionics: less ‘proto’, that is.

But right now, this was improvised work, and it wouldn’t last.

My eyes were the only part of my body that didn’t feel like lead. My gaze flickered up and down the Knight robot, getting a proper view of it.

It had less human proportions than the Bishop Madeline had fought; it’s torso was hunched over, still humanoid but with an undeniable predatory streamlining to it. Unlike nature’s predators though, there wasn’t a front facing head. There wasn’t a head at all, really. The torso tapered upward, giving the impression of a neck, but with just a swiveling spherical camera recessed into the stump of the ‘neck’.

The knees were inverted, complementing the loping hunched posture it took. As it swung the whip-blades at us, it was leaning so far forward it should have fallen on its face. But the segment swords extended from the primary set of arms.

A second, intermediate pair jutted out just below the first, letting it walk on its knuckles like an ape.

The last thing I focused on was the segment-swords themselves. Even able to observe their motion in excruciating detail, I still couldn’t make out exactly how the sharp segments were staying aligned as they swung.

I did get to see that they weren’t flat, though. It wasn’t a sword with two edges, like it had seemed at a glance. The weapon was actually triple-edged, not unlike Vorak pupils. Maybe the strange cable running through each segment did something to keep one of the three edges aligned with the overall momentum and trajectory. It looked like it was made of woven metal strands too fine and delicate for the vicious force they were whipping around, plus the cable seemed to flow up and own its length…it might even be prehensile. Somehow.

Before I had time to follow that train of thought, I felt my burst of mental acceleration wane, and the lead left my limbs.

I purposefully let my legs go limp. It was the fastest way I had to duck under the blade still swinging for me. My body still felt heavy as the thought acceleration petered out, but with some effort, I could at least move.

The feeling of weight came from the inertia of my own body. Once I actually got my arms moving, it felt all that much harder to stop them.

Note to self, actually controlling your body while your frame of reference is time dilated is nearly impossible.

I had to let time snap back into normal flow before I finally felt agile again.

The triple-bladed whip sliced just a few inches over my head, and I took the free moment to point at the Knight’s optical unit and materialize a paint bomb.

The effect was instant, and the bot froze while it processed what to do without sight. Vo didn’t miss the chance to make a counterattack of their own. A long lick of plasma lanced out from their stave, but the stream burst apart on contact with the Knight’s eggshell armor.

Crap.

Even if Vo could only do a knock-off version of the M&Ms’ smart-plasma, it was still more lethal than anything in my arsenal.

If it couldn’t put a dent? We needed regroup and get a new strategy.

I said.

Luckily, they didn’t really need to be told. We both bolted…unfortunately, the only avenue of escape we had was right through the guards surrounding us.

I warned.

I threw a flashbang into the hallway, and thankfully all the signatures radar flinched. Not that we had a choice though; the Knight robot only hesitated for a split second before it started flailing its blade arms again.

Vo and I barreled our way through the security detail, shoving our way into adjoining kitchens and—holy crap, the kitchens.

Not singular. Multiple.

There was no other way to describe the three separate sections complete with their own sinks, dishwashers, ovens, stoves, and cooks.

More than thirty rak were all waffling between heeding the alarms and continuing about their duties. For a moment, I realized that if the kitchen staff had been warned, they probably would have been able to mob both of us.

But they were probably too shocked by the giant robot chasing us.

I threw a glance behind me. The Knight wasn’t nearly as hampered by the paint on its face as I’d hoped. Squeezing the dagger still in my hand, slowed time again, and I looked it over carefully.

…Backup optics. Just like the camera unit sunk into the neck, there were smaller units built into the sides of the torso, and it looked like the knees might even have them too. What kind of robot had eyes in its knees?

Drawing on the time-dagger in motion was a mistake though, because time didn’t actually stop. It just slowed to a crawl, and I lost the ability to properly move my body for the split second that got dragged out.

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I lost balance mid-stride and careened into a rak manning one of the grills.

Vo, peerless savant that they were, actually saved me knocking a frying pan full of hot oil and food away from where I landed, spilling everywhere in the process and starting a small fire.

Shaking off the fall, I got back up to my feet just in time to watch the Knight’s blade arm telescope forward and skewer the whole grill.

The hiss of gas was enough for everyone to start screaming. We didn’t stick around long enough for a spark to set anything off.

I said as Vo and I climbed the stairs connecting the kitchens to the floors above.

Macoru asked.

she warned.

Right.

Mavriste said,

she said.

I asked.

Macoru said honestly.

I said.

I didn’t even pay attention to which one got on that, because my mind was stuck on Itun being the one to actually handle the vault.

Seeing right into my heart, Nai was one step ahead though.

she said.

he said.

I said.

<…Aye, aye, Captain,> he grumbled. It sounded like he might throw up.

But as reticent as he was, I found myself not worrying. I considered him the least reliable of the Puppies, but when was the last time he actually failed to deliver?

If the so-called ‘least reliable’ Puppy was as good as Donnie, it might be time to revisit their label.

There was still absolutely zero time to fret over the decision, because while the Knight-model of robot didn’t move as swiftly as the Bishop, it could contort itself through much narrower spaces. Even as Vo and I double-timed it up the kitchen stairs, its footsteps thundered close on our heels.

Not being able to track it on radar wasn’t just annoying; it nearly killed me.

Materializing earplugs was practically second nature to any Adept that even thought they might get in a scrape, but there were some tactical downsides.

I was sweating enough to loosen one of the plugs in my ears, and I was throwing myself so forcefully around every corner that one came loose.

It was sheer luck that I heard the segmented-blade snink and hiss somewhere behind me, and I twisted my way aside from the blade as it snaked up the stairs, even reaching around the corner at the landing.

Had the reach extended? I thought I’d been spacing it properly. But I didn’t miss the opportunity to improvise another idea: psionic glow-in-the-dark paint. I only had time to materialize a smidge of the stuff on the blade’s surface, but it was enough.

Good, the paint lit up on psionic radar just like I’d wanted. At least we could check the bot’s position now.

The Knight’s blade arms reminded me of Aaron’s automatons. Both had telescoping mechanisms built-in to really extend their reach. But where Aaron’s automatons went for piercing stabs, the Knight was content to flail and slash everything nearby to ribbons. A wider area of attack at the cost of proportionally shorter range.

Except now I’d just found that the Knight could launch swift stabs too, even curving them without a noticeable sacrifice in leverage.

It was slower though.

Vo and I managed to sprint up the last flight of stairs and burst out onto the casino floor. Awfully patterned black and maroon carpet, dozens of abandoned game tables, hell this place was at the bottom of the ocean. They had to be pumping oxygen in here.

The Diving Bell checked off everything on the list of casino mainstays—no slot machines though. Maybe those were on a different level.

All the civilians were thankfully gathered at the far end of the casino floor, trying to stuff themselves into the halls leading to the elevators and hotel rooms. Good. Our warning had come in time, and three-quarters of the floor was empty.

We had room to maneuver now.

I darted right and Vo went left, setting up a cross fire. Odds were nothing we could put out would penetrate the armor, but splitting its attention would buy us time for Macoru and Mavriste to arrive.

they asked.

I nodded.

Vo dove into their Spellbook and materialized a shotgun, tossing it to me before making a second for themselves. The Vorak-style grip was uncomfortable, but when pursued by vicious killer robots? You make do.

The Knight robot burst out of the same stairwell we’d come from, and immediately went for Vo. Abandoning their shotgun as quickly as they’d created it, Vo turned tail and bolted.

I was free to fire slugs at the gaps in the Knight’s armor. The swinging motion of the blade arms forced the robot to slow its advance, but even so, too many of my shots were bouncing off the exotic armor.

This was not the same eggshell armor as the Pawns. It sure looked the same though.

But this shotgun wasn’t even leaving a dent.

Mavriste announced.

Macoru said.

I asked.

Macoru cut out, and before I could properly ask ‘five what’, the casino floor exploded upward.

Pink plasma with green streaks burst through the hole, and the screech of steel followed immediately after.

At the center of the blinding storm, Macoru practically flew. No sooner than she was through the hole did four streaks of hot magenta plasma streak away from her cloud and pepper the Knight chasing Vo.

I asked incredulously.

she warned.

The shriek of metal warping wasn’t just from Macoru blowing through the floor. A massive new robot even bigger than the Knight was indeed following her.

This one bore no humanoid features whatsoever, resembling more of a crab—with firepower!

The upper portion of its body swiveled and fired on Macoru and I, but a burst of pink plasma solidified into a strange gel material that seemed to swallow every bullet.

Macoru warned.

That made it a Rook, if I understood my chess pieces correctly…

Surely that a coincidence. Had my silly names actually landed so close to home on CENSOR’s tactical designs?

I warned, seeing both robots and Vorak guards also burst into the casino floor.

Macoru ordered.

It was complete gibberish to me—I made sure to record every word—but Vo gave off a gasp of understanding.

Macoru said.

I said.

Macoru frowned.

I sighed.

I said, but I went into motion.

Jets turned all the way up, I darted out from behind Macoru’s gelatinous barrier. The Rook’s guns didn’t immediately swivel toward me, but as I circled around it, I saw that it wasn’t just a crab-like robot.

It was like two crabs.

Two flat sections joined by a mechanized axle, with limbs on all sides of each section. Like two crabs stacked on top of one another. The bottom one’s legs were for walking and climbing, the top one’s limbs were each outfitted with cannons!

While the biggest guns stayed trained on Macoru, a different set of limbs swiveled to aim at me. The second they even twitched, I throttled open the connection to my proto-psionic dagger, and time slowed.

My eyes, flicked back and forth as quickly as I could, taking in every last scrap of information I could, and I activated my copy of Tasser’s firearm-tracer construct. There was a worrying stretch where the construct couldn’t recognize the built-in cannons as ‘guns’.

But red holographic lines flickered into my view, showing exactly where their fire would go.

It was a narrow thing, but as I eased off the time-dagger’s psionics, I made the tiny adjustments to my body to keep myself out of the Rook’s line of fire.

Time snapped back to normal speed, and the guns let out a burst.

I felt the air ripple on either side of me as the bullets cracked past me, but I was untouched. The guns swiveled again, and I kept moving, drawing on the dagger’s psionics the millisecond before they fired again.

This was exhausting!

Three. Four. Five bursts of fire, I dodged, standing out in the open like an idiot while Macoru prepared a killing stroke

But something was wrong. My left eye was suddenly wet and red. I tried to draw on the dagger again, but my composure slipped.

Macoru didn’t miss the change, and fired early. A massive streak of pink plama arced out from behind the gel rampart. But she’d rushed her aim coming to my defense.

Instead of melting through the middle of the Rook’s body, it took a quarter of the limbs on the upper section. Namely: the guns that had been about to shoot me.

I turned up my jets and darted back to cover.

Macoru warned.

I said, touching my face.

She was right. I wiped the blood away from my eye and tried not to panic.

This is why you don’t rely on psionics untested in the field, I chided myself.

The time-dagger’s psionics were a really cool find to have picked up from some old Vorak relic, but it came with some more downsides, I realized. My eyes were the only part of me that still felt responsive at normal speed.

But that didn’t change the fact that they weren’t moving at normal speed. I’d overclocked the muscles in my eyes without even realizing it, just be glancing around in slow-motion. Because it wasn’t really slow motion.

I must have twitched my eyes dozens of times in one second. No wonder I was bleeding.

I said.

Macoru grimaced.

I warned.

she said, materializing a futuristic looking stave just like Vo’s.

Cascading it, I found that the stave was actually hollow, and it came pre-filled with the plasma, stored in a tank that fit inside most of the hollow haft.

I said, following her explanation as I dug into the stave’s embedded psionics.

Ther wasn’t time to dissect them properly, so I only got a general overview. But even just a glance at Vo, dueling the Knight bot alone with their own plasma-stave…I had an idea of how we could win.

I asked.

<…I can do that,> Macoru agreed.

She wreathed her body in roiling pink plasma and charged the machine, the first shot catching her square in the chest and blowing her backward. But the plasma surely had some kinetic asymmetry to it. Because while she was undoubtedly repelled, she was also unharmed despite the tank shell hitting her torso.

The plasma did notably shrink, however. Ah, it could be depleted. Another thing pointing to an asymmetric material.

I, on the other hand, didn’t stay hunkered behind the gel. Instead, I bolted for one of the dumbwaiters connected to the kitchens.

The Rook fired several rounds at me, but they were in haste, and I threw my body into the shaft and let myself fall before the bullets harmlessly tore into the wall instead.

How many flights of stairs had Vo and I climbed from the kitchens? Three? Four?

Regardless, I only needed to drop one.

I halted my slide down the shaft, keeping careful grip on the plasma stave, and kicked the door off the dumbwaiter a single floor down. It wasn’t the kitchens proper, but some kind of hall connecting the different service stations for the casino’s hotel staff.

I was looking for a hallway…no, not that one. Not enough wreckage.

The blueprints in my psionics helped narrow my search, but I hadn’t bothered to mark the exact spot in the moment.

There.

Long gouges and scorch marks in the wall, no doubt from Macoru’s plasma and the Rook’s own lumbering body scraping against everything…

I called.

Macoru replied.

She trailed off, but I stayed ready.

So as soon as the robot came into view, I killed it.

I pointed the plasma stave straight up, and as the robot’s body lumbered about, Macoru drew it close enough to the hole in the floor it had widened and climbed through earlier.

Crabs might have had exoskeletons, but even they still had soft underbellies.

Golden-orange plasma burst out of the stave in a beam, slipping between the legs of the bottom section and piercing into the top at an angle, taking advantage of the armor Macoru had already scoured.

The beam came lancing out the top of the machine with a crackle, and the guns ground in protest. Like a lightsaber that didn’t know to stop extending.

It still moved though.

I could hardly believe it when the guns tried to rotate again. But far slower this time. Macoru didn’t miss her window, throwing a smattering of plasma darts into its body. Each one struck the eggshell armor leaving it glowing hot, only for a second volley to land in the exact same spots, punching right through the armor and slagging the machinery underneath it.

I said, climbing my way back up to the casino floor.

The Knight was still fighting Vo, and gaining ground.

Macoru wheezed.

I said, turning my attention to Vo.

they said, desperation obvious.

I called, dashing toward still carrying the one Macoru lent me.

Vo got my idea and flung the weapon in their hands at the same moment I pitched mine toward them.

I threw Vo an empty stave, but they refilled it the moment they caught it, while I caught the full weapon they’d tossed me.

The Knight’s blades and armor could hold up to the plasma-staves, but that was with one person attacking.

Vo and I ignited the plasma staves, attacking on two fronts. The Knight swirled its blade-whips again, trying to deflect the beams and disperse the attack, but I had a follow up it wasn’t prepared for: charging in!

The segmented blades were deadly at mid-range, and they could be flailed rapidly through a pretty wide area. They were dangerous to even approach.

But once you actually closed the distance…much like a real knight in Chess, this robot didn’t excel at handling threats at point-blank range.

It tried to grab me with one of the second pair of smaller arms, but I wove my way in and pressed a hand against the armored torso, cascading for even the smallest gap in the machinery beneath…

No sooner did I find a small cleft between the batteries and the hip joints did I materialize a kinetic bomb in the gap.

Plain impacts might not damage the machine when it could absorb the impact with the armor, but inside its own guts? Well machines didn’t have the same cellular chemistry that disrupted Adept formation in living bodies.

The blast tore through the internal mechanisms of the Knight, instantly killing it and dropping it to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.

I said, and the three of us turned toward those same adversaries trying to guard all the exits.