Before Mark could leave the VR, I piped up.

“Are you sure you can do this? You can still stay home, you know? Let the Einherjar do this.”

Mark turned to me and grinned like a little boy.

“Nah, I got that. Will be fun letting it all out.”

Naveen interjected:

“We also think he can do this. We were a bit concerned about the armor jockeys, but his Exterminator should be more than enough for that.

Say, do you think the Einherjar could use it?”

Mark tilted his head for a moment, clearly thinking.

“It might, but I don’t think so. This thing kicks like a mule. In my combat body, I have to use two hands to use it.”

That made the old Indian shrug.

“Thought so, but it was worth asking. We can test it in a few days.”

“Another thing, will you give me access to your surveillance stuff there?”

“Of course. No point in hiring you and not giving you the resources to get it done.

Michael meanwhile looked at the map of the area surrounding the target building.

“Say… how do you plan to get up onto the roof here? I don’t see any ladders.”

“Easy. I’ll jump.”

“You will jump up 50 feet? For real? How much does your body weigh?”

“Around two metric tons. But no problem. Its muscles are strong, and we have included a few small grav coils. The max height is somewhere around 100 feet, a bit above really.”

Wait, what? Grav coils? Why did I not know that?

“Since when are grav coils part of this package?”

“Oh, that was a couple of months back. Allows me to jump pretty high, though not fly. That would be cool, but it would suck my batteries dry in minutes. No, it just reduces my weight enough that my muscles can push me up."

Honestly, that was… not stupid, but the energy expenditure had to be quite high. Manageable though, if it was only used in short bursts.

“Well, then, I would suggest you call Lt. Thomson to get things underway.”

Michael grinned.

“Already done. He agreed to let us use the Carnotaurus. We really have to look into getting a couple of assault skimmers for ourselves though. Or better a fleet.”

It took me a moment to realize that he was looking at me suspiciously expectantly. That made me raise my eyebrow and look back at him.

“What are you looking at me when you say that? I already agreed to buy assault skimmers.” Yeah, I sounded a bit accusing, but that made Michael only grin.

“Yes, but it will take around six months before ABAS delivers.”

Wait, wasn’t it around four months? A month ago? I barely noticed Mark vanishing from the VR, presumably to prepare for the fight.

“What takes that long? They should deliver the first ones in a quarter year or so.”

Michael snorted.

“Well, we shot ourselves in the foot here. ABAS is swamped with orders for the Raphael. Sure, it is good for us financially, as we sell them the grav coils, the Q-links, and the auto-doc for each of them, but they reduced the speed of all other skimmer productions by half. Enlarging the waiting list.”

While I was sure that their contract language explicitly allowed for such delays, I could not understand how they could think that they could afford to snub their customers in such a manner.

“They can do that? Nobody is complaining?”

Naveen sighed.

“We are the only customer that does not have any assault skimmers already in service. All the others prefer to get a Raphael instead of any other utility or military skimmer.”

Well, drat!

“So… we have to wait? Have they at least already begun designing the new assault skimmers for us?”

“Nope. They literally put every ounce of resources they can anyway spare into the Raphael production.”

I… already had a clue what he wanted, but I desperately wanted him to say something else, when I asked:

“And what expect you I do about that?”

“Well… we need assault skimmers, even if just to allow our bot army to be used inside of New York. So… please, would you, please, please, design it for us? I’ve seen the plans for the replicator on board that constructor. If you can make one 100m long, if you can make it maybe 50m wide, you can build an assault skimmer in one go.”

I shrugged.

“I can make one 100 by 100 by 100m. A tiny bit over that really, but that is the limit. The electric field won’t penetrate the substrate any deeper without frying the nanos in the outer layers.”

“So… we could build one of those big ones, and it would build what, 40 all at once?”

“If I take the Carnotaurus as a benchmark, more like 300. It is 48m long, 8 wide, and 6 high.”

“So… what is stopping us?”

“The lack of a one million cubic meter NADA for example? We have no designs for any of the onboard electronics. I used open-source designs for the constructor, because let’s face it, it is for all purposes a mobile crane. Doesn’t need good radar or anything. For this, we need state-of-the-art.”

“We can license the same tech that ABAS and Kobashigawa build into their assault skimmers. I’ve already looked into it. Yes, we lack the experience of ABAS in integrating it and a few of its proprietary technologies, but it should not be that hard. And I bet we can build one of those monster replicators in a couple of months.”

I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath.

“Fine! I’ll look into it. And now we wait until Mark actually starts the assault or what?”

“Basically, yes.” Naveen shrugged while he answered me.

I shook my head slightly and gritted my teeth. I had things to do and topics to study.

“Send me a message when it starts. I have other things to do.”

Yes, it was a bit rude, but I just switched back to my study VR. And was promptly stuck. I just could not concentrate on dry static mechanics right at this moment, and after a couple of minutes, I sighed and decided to do something else.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

My study gave me an idea though.

“Warden?”

Naturally, she was there instantly.

“Yes?”

“Please try to compute the most structurally tough material you can by employing higher dimensions. I would think you should start with carbon composite armor, transposed into the 8th dimension. Maybe tungsten carbide or depleted uranium.”

“I will start immediately.”

“I then want you to test those materials in Colorado about their suitability as armor material.”

“As you wish. Those materials will be excessively heavy though, compared to standard carbon composite.”

“I know, but mass is mostly irrelevant for skimmers and grav ships. Only volume counts here.”

She nodded and just vanished again, and I began to start the preliminary work on the assault skimmers.

Nothing too deep, mind you. Instead, I looked into the necessary avionics, and where to source them, as well as the general design parameters.

I did all that at only 4:1 compression as it was mostly to pass the time until Mark started his assault.

Finally, the message came, and I switched back to the office viron with Naveen and Michael.

Well, what had previously been an office viron. Now it was some sort of command center, with several large displays, and a few dozen seats. Most of which were filled by Naveen’s people, as well as Mark’s team.

I could not stop myself from quipping:

“Quite an audience, isn’t there?”

Michael chuckled.

“Well, it is the very first combat usage of the Achilles body.”

“Achilles?”

“Yes, we decided that combat body was a bit too cumbersome, and would not look that good on the marketing material. We also plan to design a whole series of lesser combat bodies to give our customers a choice. The Achilles, as Mark has it, is almost too big. Any bigger, and he could no longer use it in any buildings. But hush, it’s starting.”

On the displays, we saw the target building from several perspectives, as well as several rooms, with people in armor distributed in a guard position.

On a last display, we saw Dr. Pearson tied to a chair, obviously worked over a bit, surrounded by five Asian men in dark suits, as well as the three power armor jockeys.

Then, on one of the outer displays, the Carnotaurus appeared and silently landed out of sight of the target building, spewing out Mark and 20 Einherjar.

Mark had two rifles affixed to his hips, which I assumed were those Tunderwarriors he talked about. Compared to his body, they looked almost dainty, but I knew that they were quite large in reality. So large that I could barely lift them.

On his back was his Exterminator.

Naveen spoke loudly:

“It starts now, begin looping the cameras and the biomons.”

One of his operatives answered promptly:

“At once. Deploying EW. EW deployed. Injecting control override. Control override injected. Begin loop. Loop is stable. Cameras and biomons are looped.”

I interjected.

“Are there any other sensors?”

The same operative answered.

“Not connected to their security system, ma’am.”

Naveen nodded.

“Mark, the enemy sensors are blind. You can start at any point now.”

Mark’s voice came out of nowhere.

“Understood. Let’s start this dance, shall we?”

Almost immediately, his legs changed into a digitigrade configuration, the feet elongating and the toes spreading out. His knees bent a bit more, while his ankles became his primary leg joints. At the same time, he leaned forward a bit to keep his equilibrium.

I knew that this configuration almost completely eliminated walking sounds, at the cost of being more vulnerable. It also allowed Mark to move more rapidly, and jump higher and farther.

All that took a couple of seconds. And then he was gone. Only to appear almost out of nowhere on the roof of the neighboring building he decided on as his entry point.

Up there, he slowly, and going low to the roof, he moved to the edge close to the target building and waited a few seconds.

“I’m going in.”

We had a Lachesis following him closely when he jumped down from the roof, towards the sole guard in front of the side door. On the way down, a double-edged blade shot out of his left wrist, above his fist.

And then he landed, almost casually using his left hand, and the blade, to behead the guard, while simultaneously using his right hand to open the door.

That was the start signal for the Einherjar, that now moved along the alley to the door. Not that they got even close before Mark was in the building.

He moved blindingly fast, almost too fast for me to see. As soon as he had the door completely open, he gripped his right Thunderwarrior, while replacing the single flat blade on his left wrist with what we called his Wolverine Claws, after some ancient comic character. Three shorter blades came out from between his knuckles.

That left only the Mantis blades in his left arm to test. Oh, not to forget the elbow spike.

Did I think he had gone a tad overboard with the amount of blades he put into his arms? How could you get that idea?

He still barely made any sound walking, even stooped over thanks to the ceiling. When he came to the first side room that contained an enemy, a cyber zombie, he accelerated even more. From my perspective, suddenly the door was open like magic, and he had his claw through the head of the zombie, killing it instantly.

Yes, he was that mindbogglingly fast. What it was not though was silent. The door protested like a gutted pig, and he literally ripped off the doorknob.

Well, that was the end of stealth, and some surprised exclamations could be heard from the other rooms in the building.

That did not seem to deter Mark in the slightest, as his excited voice sounded in our command center:

“Oh yeah, no let’s play.”

By now there were three guards and a cyber zombie in the corridor, moving towards the door that hung a bit lopsided on its hinges.

Only for Mark to explode out of the room, putting three rounds through the head of the zombie, and clawing through the helmet, and the head inside it, of one of the guards.

Before the other two guards could even react, despite having their weapons on the ready, each of them got a single shot through the face plate. One of them still pulled the trigger, probably out of reflex, while he fell to the ground. Not that it did anything to Mark except scratch his paint.

The sparks were pretty though, and some of the bullets even hit the still-falling guards on the ricochet.

Another door opened, and two of the zombies stormed through it, followed at more human speed by another two guards.

The first zombie got a bullet through the brain, just like that, but the second reached Mark and used its own Wolverine-like claws to attack him.

Not very effectively, mind you, the claws slid off the armor without even leaving scratches. The problem was that the Zombie was too close for Mark to use the gun or the claws on his left arm.

Still, Mark delivered an essentially deadly knee strike into the zombie's stomach. Why deadly? Do you really think that the arms were the only places Mark had secreted blades? No, one of his tows on each leg had a large sickle claw, while each knee also had a spike.

A normal human getting hit by that strike would most likely have immediately gone down. The zombie though did not feel pain. It was still enough to push it back a meter or so, allowing Mark to use his claws to rip horizontally through the zombie’s face, putting it down.

The time this took was enough for the mooks to begin firing though. Fortunately with much the same effect as the salvoe from the first one. Again, pretty sparks.

By then, the first Einherjar had reached the corridor and dispatched the two guards with robotic precision. Only for Mark to mutter:

“Foul! Kill steal!”

By then, the armor jockeys began to react and prepare for immediate combat, while the remaining guards and zombies moved toward the corridor.

Mark tried to move through the door the last zombies and guards had come from, only to encounter additional cannon fodder.

By then, it was clear that neither the guards nor the zombies were more than a temporary speedbump for Mark.

The average time one of the guards survived when he encountered Mark was .3 seconds, while the zombies managed a respectable 1.12 seconds.

Finally, Mark managed to arrive at the door to the room where the enemy held Dr. Pearson. The armor jockeys had already pointed their heavier weapons at the door, while the five men in normal clothing moved to the back of the room, talking in Japanese:

“Do you think Enki has sent any cyber zombies of their own?”

“Of course not. They are far too weak to use such useful tools. Bleeding hearts and all. It is just a matter of time before they are extinguished.”

“So, what has taken out our guards then?”

“I would think they have sent a company of their bots. They are impressive for bots, but compared to the zombies they are lacking. And they have nothing that can go through the Do̅-maru.”

During that time, Mark had retracted his claws and put his gun back on his hip. I have to say it was smart to make the sheaths clean the claws when they retracted. Otherwise, Mark would be busy for a few hours to clean the claws and the sheaths.

Then he reached behind him and pulled out the Exterminator. He lovingly caressed the barrel and then pointed it at the door.

At the same time, his legs reconfigured back into the normal configuration. Clearly, because he wanted the stronger armor for them.

After that, it was over so fast that I failed to even notice it. Suddenly the door literally flew into the room, a long, loud, and deep boom sounded, and the heads of the power armors were not there anymore.

Yes, it was that fast. The three shots, if it were three and not more, sounded like one. And then Mark slowly and purposefully strutted into the room, pointing this monster of a gun at the five interrogators.

Followed by four of the Einherjar, pointing their guns at the Asian men as well.

Naveen quickly spoke:

“If you can, take those men alive. Maybe let the Einherjar use their E-lasers.”

One of the men spoke, again in Japanese:

“So, they have a bigger bot? We should have predicted that. But still no zombies.”

Apparently, Mark had some translation software, as he answered him, in English though:

“Why should Enki use limited, fast-deteriorating cyber zombies if they can have people like me?”

“The bot can think? It is still just a dumb bot.”

“You are an idiot. Enki has started with cyberware that does not cause CRS. The only reason to use zombies instead of soldiers is because the cyberware used to kill them. Enki does not need zombies.

I am not a bot, I am a cyborg. Hi, Doc P. I bet you did not expect to see me in this fashion, did you?”

With that, he opened his helmet, revealing his face.

The Asian men paled, briefly, before the Einherjar used their integrated E-lasers to take them out.