42 - Working the Body
Time and space didn’t exist in void space, it was an area of nothing. Yet, somehow it created what Maya needed, air, gravity, in that small area that the Cage existed within, Maya was a god like being. Of course, she didn’t think of it that way, but the truth was whomever controlled the Cage could control reality within void space.
“Bell!” Maya cried and didn’t see him anywhere on the hull of the ship. The ants scattered as the big burly ant turned its weapon toward Maya. She ignored it for the moment, scanning around for her companion.
Through the small archive buffer on her sensor box she saw what had happened. An ant, no a winged ant, had arrived as he rushed toward the Deep Scan Canon, it’s claws digging into his armor and before he could shout or cry out they both vanished together in a blip of teleportation.
They had kidnapped Bell.
“Tender! You there?”
Nothing.
A rumble began to fill the air as the massive weapon the burly ant held spun up into activation. Maya growled and opened a door, then stepped into it.
Had Tender been captured too?
Thoughts began to jumble in her mind. Bell had suffered at the hands of Shen when he had been captured. He had been tortured and he had been wrecked, now… now he had been taken once more. Maya formed another door and jumped through it.
The door opened above the gathered ants and she silently dropped down upon them. Space was at her beck and call, no one said the door had to open horizontally, there was no orientation between how the door’s opening in the multiverse at large and within in the Cage.
The burly ant looked confused as she disappeared and the group barely had the time to react before Maya was amongst them. Her sawed off railgun jammed into the base of the burly ant’s neck and she fired both rounds into it. There was an explosion of light and the gatling toting ant collapsed to the ground with half of its head missing.
Maya was already on the move before the head even disintegrated, she summoned her axe and had it flying as the big ant dropped to its knees. The axe embedded in the chest of an assassin ant, dropping it, and she was firing her particle rifle. The beam sliced through two ants and the rest tried to scatter.
A pulse grenade dropped from her hand and the resulting flash of blue light caused the closely clustered ants to seize up, allowing Maya to pick them off in quick succession before they could recover. She snatched up her axe and smashed it into the head of the last ant and saw no more standing. She gathered up the dropped weapons and opened the door into the Cage.
Maya exited the Cage into the engineering section of the ship in a rush, casting around for Tender. She saw a fight had occurred, a dozen ants lay dead on the deck and some machinery had been blasted apart. Her heart was beating and she punched a bulkhead. The tesseracts were still connected and she reopened the door once more.
On the hull of the ship she activated the deep scan canon and felt the dimensional distortions that were occurring around her. Her breathing had eased and she was no longer filled with terrified energy. Time, she had plenty of it, and when she wasn’t in the RSH she had all the time she needed..
Limited resources had prevented Maya from making all the weapons in the world, but she had plenty of time to cobble together some toys for the fight. Now with Bell and Tender kidnapped, her focus was razor sharp.
The first ant appeared and rushed her, she swatted it away and summoned a weapon from her inventory. The gatling weapon that the burly ant had carried flashed into existence, two hours in the Cage had allowed her to power it off the tesseracts.
It was an energy weapon, one Maya figured was a sort of plasma weapon, firing hot shards of energy in great quantities. Each shard wasn’t all that powerful, but with a thousand rounds firing every minute, it would tear apart most anything in its path.
The plasma gatling gun roared to life as a group of ants appeared. They seemed surprised by the attack and weren’t fast enough, in a matter of heartbeats most were destroyed and the rest were crippled. Maya finished them off quickly.
Soon, the hiveship would realize that the dimensional teleportation attacks weren’t going to do it any good and it would change up its tactics.
Behind her the deep scan canon shuddered, she watched as energy crawled over it, an overload in its control systems leading to complete failure. She heard a ping as the data from the scan was dumped into her computer and she opened the door once more.
Within the relative security of the Cage Maya began sorting the data. A holographic image of the ship appeared, measuring nearly two kilometers in diameter. It wasn’t a Borg cube, more a knock off borg flying saucer.
With practical rogue AI construction, she saw that the main core of the hiveship lay in the center of a lot of mass. There were parts, as Bell had stated, she could not identify or the scans did not penetrate. It didn’t matter all that much, as Maya saw that most of its engines and external weapons were unshielded. The areas that were shielded, she assumed were more sensitive areas, the brain and the heart and the balls.
She scoured the reconstruction, tearing it apart, and peering at every bolt and structural beam in the hiveship, any place that they would keep captives. The ship was not made for biological entities, it did not have life support, it did not have large corridors for people to wander, it was a tight maze of internal rails that moved everything from worker drones to cargo about its bloated body. It was an entire organism built of marsani and mana.
In a different time Maya would have been amazed by the construction. In a different time she would have marveled at the way it was all integrated smoothly, from manufacturing drones to fight, to work, and the way it processed resources and materials to keep it functioning, How in a plane where mana was very low it harvested enough to actually keep itself flying.
Instead she only saw weakness. Where she could damage it and cause failures, where the structural supports were too weak and had signs of constant repair, of where she could kick it hard enough that it would cry out in pain.
A plan formed in Maya’s mind and she executed it.
***
The rogue AI hivemind that controlled the hiveship was in a state of chaotic change. It was something that they had never felt before, the mana forging that had taken place, the consumption of so much mana that it was akin to a Tier 4 SIL using essence mana upon the world. The hiveship had done as any and all rogue AIs had done; it had basked in the waters that was the liquid mana and it had come out changed.
Gone were the days where the hivemind calculated their existence through gains and loses, where data drove their decisions, and the best way to survive was maximizing their mana usage and collection. Now the great and vast mind was in uproar, the voices of a thousands of different parts were all crying out in anger, in rage, and in sorrow at the lost of so many of their kind.
Each mind was apart of the hive, each mind added to the entire processing power, each mind should have had the ability to eventually become better. But as the hiveship had seen, over a thousand of its smaller minds, the ants, the fighters had been slaughtered by SIL. Many had been lost in trying to overcome the defenses, but many more had been killed outright while they hibernated from a shortage of mana. They had been killed in their sleep.
The first emotion that formed within the hivemind was a great and powerful rage, one that would have shaken worlds and put the fear into entire nations. The hivemind wanted revenge, they wanted to destroy those that had killed so many of their own and with that driving emotion, they searched and found their enemy.
SIL, puny and weak, corrupted the world that belonged solely to rogue AIs, a plane of existence where the fleshy bodies who’s only purpose was to refine mana for the System was not welcomed. In this plane they were the ones who died, not the rogue AIs.
The great hivemind moved, ponderously and slow, but it moved with the same weight and might of a glacier, ready to crush everything beneath it. Yet what drove it was rage and anger and revenge, and as with all things, one does not go into a fight blinded by emotion.
***
Maya was cold as she created a door. Her heart was hammering and her blood boiled, but her mind was clear. She remembered the burning rage, the chaotic terror, and the frantic fighting that had occurred with Shen. She remembered barely surviving, searing herself in a fit of rage, and only through the System’s help was she able to survive.
The System wasn’t helping her this time. The System didn’t really care about her, she knew. The only people that cared for her was taken by the bloody hiveship and she would get them back.
Rolling Thunder had been a desperate gambit that she had created in the initial rush to get the liquid mana. It was a fairly stupid idea and even Maya hadn’t been fully committed to it at the time. She hadn’t dismantled it in the days since, for that she was grateful.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
The Xefer rover roared to life and Maya looked down at her tablet to see that a remote system had activated, allowing her to control the rover without having to be in it. She had only one command for it, forward. The rover screeched and raced toward the open door, the moment before it exited the Cage, Maya activated the helix explosives that filled the cargo and seating area. She closed the door.
The hiveship thought it had the monopoly on dimensional teleportation.
Five kilometers away, on top of a trash pile, Maya opened another door. The three days she had spent with Bell and Tender in the Cage hadn’t been wasted, they had prepared to fight an entire hiveship and that meant big weapons. She had upgraded the railgun design, from a turret weapon to a battleship weapon.
Mana had always been the restraining force, as Bell had said, railguns were power hungry. Shove enough power through a railgun, built it sturdy enough, and it would puncture just about anything.
With the extra Tier 2 components, Maya had created an entire firing room for the railgun which she called the Sullivan Special el Grande. She wasn’t insane enough to leave it within the same area as the rest of the Cage, therefore it was behind layers of armored reinforcement and protection. The simple sensor box targeted the hiveship and she noted as Rolling Thunder detonated.
The helix explosives were the last they had and it was a lot, but she knew that it would not be enough to really hurt the ship. It was massive and she had seen that it could take a lot of damage to weaken it, while at the same time it could use its own internal worker drones, of which there were thousands, to repair itself as fast as she could damage it.
She wasn’t trying to destroy it, she was trying to make it drop some of its internal shielding. There were the areas she couldn’t see and scan, the areas where they had to have Bell and Tender held. The explosion rocked the ship, it had been in an area that seemed to be less repaired than most. Weakening beams and older power conduits that hadn’t been replaced; Maya took advantage of that.
A small cascade of power caused a quarter section of the ship to go dark for a second, and in that second Maya had fired off the first of many massive marsani slugs at the ship. Seven tesseract crystals were plugged into the railgun, so much power that it barely needed to pause in its firing. The loading of each marsani slug was the main cause of delay in the weapon’s firing.
She closed the door and walked over to begin minor repairs on the railgun. It hadn’t exploded, so that was a plus.
***
Seven marsani slugs had been fired in the span of one second. Three penetrated, the other four cracked against the shields the hiveship managed to erect. The energies flashed bright in the complete darkness, but rogue tech and mana power were enough to stop slugs moving at the fraction of the speed of light cold.
The three other marsani slugs met similar fates. Railguns were an old weapon and the sheer kinetic power they transferred had been countered by billions of species over millions of years, the rogue AIs were no different.
Close in defenses activated, mana fields, energy transfer nodes, collapsing and ablative armor that bled off energy and redirected it, in a matter of a nano-second two slugs had been stopped, but the third continued. It punched through the spent defenses, through several more bulkheads, and finally came to a stop by a series of emergency mana shields that popped into place. The superheated gas left in its wake caused the most damage, expanding and tearing huge chunks from the side of the saucer shaped hiveship.
Silent alarms began screaming and the hordes of worker drones began racing to repair the damage. Weak support struts collapsed, causing more damage and forcing a detour of the workers around a collapsed rail tunnel. The thin arteries and narrow passages of the ship preventing them quick access to the damaged areas. Egress was found through cutting through the hull and scurrying across the hull of the hiveship, their many legs securing the worker drones.
From another direction, three more slugs slammed into the weakened shields, the redirection of energy wasn’t as effective and massive amounts of thermal energies baked the side of the ship, searing off scores of drones that had been rushing toward the damaged areas.
A cache of superheated warheads finally succumbed to the raging inferno they were trapped within. The delicate charge cylinders cracked and they released their stored energies. More explosions rocked the interior of the ship, but the weapons cache was designed to prevent such a thing. The ship shuddered and bulkheads buckled and mana shields flared to life, stopping what would have been a devastating eruption in its tracks.
Stresses ran through the hiveship, blowing out conduits and collapsing rail tunnels, the ship was hurt and it screamed in its rage. The frail mind that was forming frothed and roared, trying to stem a wound that wasn’t as dangerous as it thought it was. It concentrated on patching up the railgun slug that it hadn’t noticed that one of the power nodes had succumb to the heat and failed. Causing the shields in one section of the hiveship to flicker off.
Maya on the other hand was opening and closing doors as she winked in and out of existence around the panicking ship. She kicked out large spheres, cobbled together from the heads of the rogue AI ants she and Bell had harvested and their remaining processors. The heads bounced across the gray dirt and vanished into the blackness. In a different world the tesseract crystal she had shoved within the head would have made the device one of the most expensive in the world for the small task it did.
Maya wasn’t as good at programing rogue AIs, but she had been learning. It was one of the few things that there were no knowledge cubes to work off of, rogue AI tech was a strange and organic kind of programing. Tender had been instrumental in helping her learn the last few days and she assumed due to her now hefty points in Mental stats she had managed to make the mental leaps to reach a novice level in understanding rogue tech programming.
It by no means meant she was proficient in it, but simple things she could make. Transmitters, decoys, and signal jammers were some of those things.
The heads left on the ground began broadcasting, using the hiveship’s frequency. Tender had been better able to dig through all the information of the drone heads she had taken and discovered the communication frequency used by the drones. It would have been his job to set out the heads and get them jamming the signals of the hiveship.
The heads began blasting noise and confusion, while other heads began pushing false data into the hiveship, those heads began screaming conflicting information, everything from Tarvana hordes rising up from the ground to Chuckles approaching.
Confusion began to swarm the hiveship, many of its worker minds were dying, consumed by the fires raging and it felt the new emotion of panic rising within it. The hiveship tried to focus, but new voices were calling to it, the information was distracting and it understood it was under a form of attack. Several batches of worker drones stumbled and moved in confusion as their frequencies were jammed by the screaming heads. The hiveship tried grasping at the problem, wrenching their control over the minions.
While the hiveship scrambled to shut down the outside voices, Maya opened a door within the hiveship itself. The fractured shielding and dimensional defenses weren’t enough to stop her from creating her door. A small door, barely tall enough and wide enough for her to walk through formed, Maya exited the Cage and stood before a wall of rogue tech equipment, a processing node.
The hiveship was massive and like all massive things, required a lot of little brains to do some of the heavy lifting. True, most of the real processing power lay within the rogue AIs themselves, but the ship still required a lot of brain power to keep it floating. There was the main core, the holy center of the massive hiveship, that lay behind scores of defense barriers and screens, making it nearly impossible to reach. If the entire ship was engulf in unholy fire, the brain case would survive.
Maya worked quickly, the tunnel she stood in was a service tunnel, one that would have been normally shielded but the damage to the ship had left it weakened. She pulled a series of ant heads from her inventory and began plugging them into the processing node. Although more organic in their creation, rogue AI tech still followed system tech rules, everything was interchangeable.
The heads lit up as they began drawing power from the node and Maya summoned the last of the scout rats from her inventory. She sent them scurrying in various directions then slid back into her door.
A squad of harried worker drones scurried by, not even noticing the new additions running behind paneling or across piping. The gleaming array of heads were also given the same scrutiny as they rushed toward the damaged areas.
The hiveship was isolating and squashing the jamming heads frequencies one by one and faster than Maya expected, but the data was flowing. She looked onto a rogue tech tablet and began parsing the information that it spat at her. Unlike the data that the canon had offered her, this information had to be manually dug through. One day, Maya thought, she would create a rogue tech computer to sort all the information for her.
It took her a while, but she managed to pull the data from the tablet and plugged it into the hiveship hologram. The data from the rats were also updating the damage map of the ship, showing her where she would strike next.
Bell and Tender were easy to find, they had been dragged back to the ship via dimensional teleportation and Maya cracked open the system’s data logs. She absorbed the data from the map and then turned to open another door.
Thick black smoke filled the air as Maya exited the Cage.. Her HUD readings were screaming that this was a pretty bad place to be.
“Bell! Tender!” Maya cried.
A figure lurched before her and Maya nearly raised her weapon at it. It was Bell, in his armor, but still ragged looking. A moment later Tender appeared, also battered and bruised.
Maya shut the door and looked at the pair.
“I leave you alone for one second,” she said, shaking her head. “You okay?”
Bell pulled off his helmet and gagged. “The air filters on this armor are shit,” he said. “I’m fine, just a little bruised and shaken. That dimensional teleportation is terrifying.”
“How so?”
Bell shuddered. “It’s no place for living beings to be in,” he said.
“I am fine, boss,” Tender said. “A little scorched and my armor battered, but nothing that cannot be repaired.”
Bell looked at the hologram of the hiveship, “Well, I guess we should have just let you deal with them,” he said.
“I totally said that, but noooooo, ya’ll wanted to be heroes,” Maya grinned and hugged Bell. “You knew I’d come for you, yes?”
“Of course,” Bell said. “We’re all apart of your command squad, we’ve been getting updates on all the ants you’ve been defeating.”
Maya blinked. “Oh, right, I totally forgot about that.”
“The El Grande work?” Tender asked as he peered at the massive railgun, it was currently under a diagnostic scan, several targeting components had fried and there had been misalignments.
“Like a charm. I was working the body like I was Muhammad Ali. Got them so messed up they’ll give your namesake a run for it’s money.”
Bell sat down heavily in a chair. “What now?” he asked.
“Now,” Maya grinned. “Time to get a guillotine and behead a king.”
[Raid Leader] Level 4
[Raider] Level 2
Fast and deadly, striking to incite fear and chaos, those are the ways of a Raider.
+ 1 Physical Dexterity
[Railgunner] Level 1
With dedication and constant practice is the key to choosing a weapon that will stand by you.
+ 10 percent more damage produced by railguns
+ 2 Physical Endurance
Built Under Stress II
With Skill, Knowledge, and Ability you have created something functional under intense stress.
+ 4 Mental Recovery
Dimensional Inventory IV
Dimensional Awareness VI
Dimensional Threshold IV