Hannibal’s Valley, Meridian III

Meridian System

Cyclops crouched against a stone pillar in a desert valley, unseen. A cloak of shifting sand hung from its shoulders, projecting the environment onto its imageshift mesh. A single, red eye stared out from a hood, watching. Waiting.

Artemis was a patient woman. Once she had sat utterly still for three weeks on Mount Finsternis, peering through the scope of her rifle while snow piled up atop her until she was nearly buried alive. It seemed excessive at the time. She knew Baron Harkon’s country manse like the back of her hand. At any point in those three weeks she could’ve walked inside, climbed the stairs to his study and shot him in the head- all while blindfolded. That hadn’t been the lesson the matriarch intended, however. The point became clear on the last day of those three weeks when Harkon treated his liege lord, Duke Garheim,to dinner. The paranoid, elusive Garheim, who never left home without a dozen bodyguards- he was the real target.

‘Strange time to get all nostalgic,’ Artemis mused.

Another patrol of drones flew by. She counted thirty six of them this time. Each drone was relatively small: three feet long, one and a half feet wide with a wingspan twice the size of their body length. They had two sets of wings beating in opposite rhythms.

Wings was a strange design choice. Rotary blades were more energy efficient. Anti-gravity thrusters were more stable and had a higher top speed.

Then there were the limbs. They were long, multi-jointed things, lacking digits for complex manipulation or wheels for rapid ground movement. Instead each leg ended in a sharp point. Perhaps for embedding themselves on vertical surfaces so they could perch?

The drones had thick bodies, bulbous heads and what appeared to be a laser emitter mounted to the rear. Artemis wondered if they were meant to mimic insects. A strange choice for a mining drone. The creator eschewed practicality for aesthetics. Artemis knew VKS Industries- they had their own strange obsessions, bugs weren’t one of them. This had to be the replicant’s doing.

She waited until the swarm had engulfed her, flying directly over her position. The red glow from Cyclops’s singular eye dulled to a candle flicker. The light danced in the reflective bulbs of the drones’ compound lenses. Artemis held her breath. Almost…

There. Flying in the center of the formation was yet another drone, almost identical to the rest; the only difference was the boxy antenna mounted to its thorax. Her sensors were picking up radio transmissions traveling between that drone and the rest of its pack. If she were a betting woman Artemis would assume it could also receive transmissions from elsewhere. If the replicant forces behaved similarly to a conventional military, these were the nexuses of a broader command and control structure. Mid-level officers that received orders from high command and acted on them according to a predetermined logic tree.

‘Take these out and the rest will go down with them.’

A pair of sidearms slipped into Cyclops’s hands. These were Terminus Inferno Pistols: compact, rapidfire laser weapons, made to liquify damn near anything in close quarters. They were effective within one hundred meters, technically- and the commander was within twenty five.

Still, she waited.

She waited until the radio drone was right overhead, when all she had to do was stand up and place the barrel of each inferno pistol against its fat, insectoid body and pull the triggers. Beams of bright orange light burned through the bottom half of the drone and exploded out the other side, flinging molten metal in all directions. The machine made a horrible, choking screech as it fell into two mushy halves. More mechanical screeches rose from the rest of the swarm. They flitted around her in a panicked mass, stingers up yet blind to the enemy in their midst.

“Terribly sorry, darlings, but ye never had a chance.” Artemis grinned, her accent slipping without her notice.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The celebration was cut short by a sudden pain in her exoframe’s shoulder.

A burst of radio traffic drowned her sensors like a buoy lost in a tidal wave.

The swarm descended on her, their senses restored by powers unknown, and unleashed a barrage of stabs and swipes with their stingers. Artemis muttered a string of curses as she leapt back through the wall of insects. Rising from her sides came Terminus Inferno pistols, screaming their displeasure like a pair of banshees. Chunks of superheated metal shrapnel filled the air as the Cyclops retreated and the swarm gave chase. Other packs across the valley began to move as well, converging on Artemis’s newly discovered location. Two dozen attackers would soon turn into hundreds if she couldn’t break away and reapply her camouflage

‘How the devil did they regroup so quickly?’ She wondered, mentally commanding her suite of sensors to ping again.

The results came back quickly: three more drones were sporting antennae where they hadn’t previously. That was alarming. ‘Flexible command structure. The entire cohort might be able to substitute for the commander.’

She needed a new plan, and fast.

The ground beneath her exoframe gave way without warning. Cyclops stumbled, something taking hold of its feet. A pair of huge mandibles emerged from the earth, attached to what looked like a compact tank on legs. The beetle tank wrapped its grasping maw tighter around her exoframe, dragging it down into the tunnel the beetle had emerged from. All the while the swarm was catching up, ready to pounce on her.

“Lemme go ye fuckin’ cunt,” she roared, bathing the thing in lasers. Layers of ablative plating roasted like kindling on the bug’s armored back, yet it held. “Shit fuck cunt shit-” she released the triggers only when her neurodeck warned her the barrels were close to exploding. Dropping the pistols, Artemis reached up under her cloak and released her primary weapon from its holster. The weapon dropped into her hands and began unfolding in half as she brought it out: a railgun as long as Cyclops was tall. The power pack whined to life, bursting with energy.

She placed the railgun inside the machine’s mouth. Electricity crackled along the barrel like a lightning rod. A stench of ozone filled the air. It took fifteen seconds to reach thirty-five percent power. When Artemis finally squeezed the trigger, the Stormwyrm MK IX summoned a maelstrom, and the world exploded.

The beetle was gone, eviscerated utterly. A shockwave bloomed out, swatting down dozens of the closest wasps.The rail spike burrowed hundreds of feet into rock below, causing the ground to collapse beneath Cyclops’s feet. Last to follow was a deafening thunderclap, drawn out by the breaking of the sound barrier.

Artemis had to scramble out of the crater of her own making. Her neurodeck protested the deluge of sound and fury that overwhelmed its systems.

For all the devastation her railgun brought, Artemis had only bought herself a handful of seconds. The wasps were regrouping. Thousands of silvery metallic forms were crawling along the horizon in every direction. Cyclops was not designed to fight against such an overwhelming numerical advantage. She needed to think, and fast.

‘Right. So disabling officers is off the table. What are the other steps in the chain of command? Something has to be feeding orders to them. Climb the chain. Find the head of the snake. Sever it.’

Fighting against her neurodeck’s complaints, she set her sensor suite to the task of tracking down the origin point of incoming radio transmissions. It started by finding the closest receiver- one of the antenna-mounted wasps barring down on her position. Then the computer latched on to the next incoming signal, following its travel path. These transmissions were running on short wave, high frequency radio, so they would always follow the straightest possible path to their destination.

‘Pretty simple tech for something so advanced,’ Artemis mused as she followed the likeliest path of egress.

Half a dozen drones descended on her from behind, stingers flashing in the moonlight. Cyclops lunged to the left, rolling along the ground. She retrieved one of her Terminus Infernal pistols from the dirt and loosed a volley in their direction. The pack melted into one another, forming a single, globular puddle of liquid metal.

Turning her attention back to the search, she found her target only a moment later.

Half a klick to her southwest on a hill overlooking the valley was the radio tower. It was disguised much as she was- an imageshift tarp had been laid over it, making it appear no different from the desert around it. Spotting imageshifting technology was easy enough when you knew what to look for: all Artemis had to do was switch on an ultraviolet flashlight and watch the image flicker wildly.

Artemis lifted the Stormwyrm railgun to her shoulder. “As I said earlier, lovelies,” she muttered, the weapon purring in her hands, “ye never stood a chance.”