The fighting is a little disappointing, the thought shocks 9S the moment he realizes he has it. But he can’t deny it. 9S had dreamed of taking the fight to the aliens throughout his admittedly short experience fighting in the machine war. And now, here he was taking the fight to the aliens, and it was …. Boring. He was a scanner, he was supposed to find information and well, scan, pick out enemies, find what they can do, and then tell an operator who’d tell a battler who’d go kill them.

Not that he often served in a scanner's traditional role, he could find information, tell an operator, and then get told to go kill them by said operator. But here? Finding the information was laughably easy, even a battler could do it. The systems were so weak to cyber attack that 9S nearly triggered failsafes because he didn’t think the true failsafes would be so weak. He’d assumed it was a trick of some sort and finding out it wasn’t had added seconds onto the trivial task.

Then, rather than sending information to an operator, Balistraia just pulled it from his pod and factored it into her battle plan.

Which lead to the greatest disappointment of all. The aliens sucked at fighting, their guns didn’t even dent the metal if 9S let his shields drop, their reaction times were slow enough that he could dodge the bullets regardless, and their melee skills were… well a newborn android was better with a knife, and stronger at that.

It wasn't the cathartic battle he’d wanted, where he fought against humanity's enemies in a brutal struggle. Just barely managing to survive. It was just tedious. They spent most of their time finding or traveling to ships, rather than fighting. Just sitting in the small common room playing games while waiting for a short and boring battle to start.

The naval androids would find an isolated group of ships, send out a swarm of signal scrambling drones, ram into the middle of the ships formation, cripple all the engines, power down the communications systems, and if they could he’d take control of the weapons systems. Then 9S’s pod would hardlink with the lead ship and he’d take control of its systems to ensure they couldn’t self-destruct. Balistraia or even just drone’s with limited AI would handle the other ships, and then androids in space capable spidertrons would be sent to board the ships, corral the Turians. (who were prevented from even trying to mount an effective defense by 9S liberally locking or unlocking doors, or sending fake orders through the sound systems he controlled.) put all the Turian’s on one ship, ideally the smallest one with enough life support to maintain them, and then steal the other ships to send to a research outpost in the dark spaces between systems.

Or just blow them up outright if they already had a few copies or thought the ships would be tracked. Wasn’t like they needed the metal or hulls for anything.

So far there had only been one ‘causality’ and that was a drone that got smashed by a malfunctioning door. And it’d been a defender drone, so the causality wasn’t even noted on any documentation. Some of the Turians had been injured, but it wasn’t even by the androids! They just hurt themselves trying to resist capture.

Honestly 9S had been more worried about androids killing the aliens than he’d been about the aliens. But aside from the first attack where most of the androids had fought no one had even cared enough to be rough with the aliens. It was just hard to imagine them ever actually hurting anything aside from themselves.

Then again, Balistraia had picked the androids that’d be going…. Which meant they were androids that would either follow orders or were kind enough to not want to needlessly kill. That seemed more likely admittedly. Balistraia could be scary when she wanted to be, and had an odd habit of locking him and 2B in enclosed spaces until the engineer made her let them out…

So far they’d taken out 38 ships, some of which weren’t even heading to the warfront. Just patrols heading through Turian space around said warfront.

9S had heard the Turians had forty thousand ships, but either that was a lie or they were all busy somewhere else. The Maker had said that it was ‘more a skirmish than anything’ but still!

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There had been one interesting thing to happen, and that’d been the attack on the human world. But that had happened before the androids had even gotten to the warfront, and all they’d gotten to do was cripple ships. Not even bothering to board them. Just take out the engines and the Turians would need to waste more ships towing their own totaled warships.

They didn’t even have any defensive systems that worked against lasers! Their little ‘kinetic barriers’ did nothing. Just one or two high powered lasers and bam, the ships dead in the water.

So 9S did what he always did when he was bored, he talked and hung out with 2B. And with how little was going on, he spent a lot of time talking with 2B.

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2B internally winced at a sudden spike of pain lashing into her temples. This whole link to the factory certainly came with complications, most of the sensations were dampened with her distance, but not all of them. And something like an entire outpost detonating from a suicide nuclear bug was one of the things that would make it through.

Still, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the sensation of bugs crawling through her organs that she’d felt before the engineer had ‘shielded her feeble mind from the admittedly annoying sensations’. The fact he called those things ‘annoying’ was something she still couldn’t understand, but it did help her understand why there were so many traps, so he could ‘scratch the itch, or more accurately squash it’. And 2B found she could control the traps just the same, though that was more likely to be one of the ‘fragments’ or minds just listening to her thoughts and doing it for her…

2B figured any other android would probably find that disturbing, but given she could see into their minds as well? It really didn’t matter, they’d already had an accurate guess as to her thoughts whenever Balistraia deigned to guess at them. Adding actual mind reading just allowed for the mind to confirm what she already guessed.

Though that now meant anytime she looked at an android she got a full breakdown of their personality, history, and current mood. But 2B was starting to find that more helpful than anything, the influx of information growing less and less jarring the more it happened. She’d even started trying to be more social, at least with the rest of the ‘Chosen’ androids that guarded the engineer, and the maid staff. At least she had with the maid staff, until their thoughts had started to shift in ways she was uncomfortable with. She did not need to know when an android started to form a crush on her, or their feelings about the engineer. Or what they thought the Chosen did with the engineer.

2B refused to believe those were the ‘normal’ ones, no matter that she knew Balistraia wasn’t lying.

That same feature had been useful in her actual mission on this trip. She was technically fulfilling her role to keep people from disobeying orders, but instead of simply killing the offenders and wiping their memory units she… just stopped anyone who looked like they would.

And given most of the YoRHa and Resistance androids were scared and respectful of her, apparently single handedly handling whole fronts would do that. It was an easy task, just teleport behind the androids Balistraia marked, either through extreme speed or actual teleportation, and loom in the general area.

It wasn’t even like there needed to be androids here, this whole operation was just Balistraia's idea to ‘prevent overzealous actions’ by making it look like androids were taking the fight to the aliens. All of their operations were recorded, edited, and sent back as propaganda. And it was effective.

Only seven androids had tried to sneak onto a ship of the Far Far Range to help fight the aliens, and of those seven all had been captured by A2, though one had actually made it into orbit with a homemade ship. 2B had figured there’d be hundreds of attempts by now, so that was less surprising than it could have been.

Still she couldn’t say she appreciated the mind's other actions on this trip. Bunking her and 9S in the same room was one thing, but locking the door until they held hands? She’d need to think of some way to get back at the meddling mind.