Eliso was on the balcony, staring down at the cold, bony hand reaching up to him. It was just frozen there, a mere few inches from the edge, the tip of a spire of unmoving corpses that, incidentally, blocked the bookstore’s door. On the opposite side of the narrow street was the corpse of a Beta, a solid mass of bone and muscle. He was sure a few well-placed laser shots could’ve taken it out, but its legs were thick. It must have been a fast sprinter. If it were close enough to pounce, then a “few” laser shots…would’ve been too many.
The Beta’s corpse lacked a discernible head, and the whole upper torso looked like it had popped inside-out. Those Assassin-E’s had been plenty effective.
“Eliso, where are you? We’re waiting on you,” Saito said through the tac link.
“Yeah. Going up,” he replied. He slung the rifle across his back before he hopped up on the balcony’s railing and started climbing up the ladder, nothing more than bent rebar embedded into the wall. Several Assassin-K’s dangled from his hip, and two SMR swarm canisters were strapped to his legs.
He arrived roof-side, pulling himself up just as Saito finished rolling up the solar blanket for transport. They acknowledged each other with a nod.
Coronel hopped down from an adjacent roof. The roofs around this one were all higher, but by only a story, at best.
“Bioweapon concentration around here’s higher than we thought,” he said. “Small hordes like that one are frequent.”
“We’ve already cleared out this area. Can’t we stay here and arm up?” Saito asked.
Coronel shook his head. “Alpha corpses are good feedstock, but we can’t stay here for long. If any of the Kartesian controllers find or have found us, they’ll surround us easily. Best to keep ourselves a moving target.”
Saito’s and Eliso’s eyes widened. “ ‘Feedstock,’ sir?” Eliso asked.
Coronel ordered the fab-bot to descend. It used its powerful limbs to drive a cable anchor into the edge of the roof, then it lept off and out of sight. “They’ll vaporize eventually,” Coronel explained, “turn into the stuff of the Kartesian Ocean. We can burn them, or make them useful to us.” Coronel looked the two in the eyes. “Either way, we can’t let them turn into Sea, to be turned against us. We burn what we can’t have. Clear?”
“Affirmative, sir,” Saito replied. Eliso just nodded.
Down below, the fab-bot rappeled and its paws landed on bodies. Several canisters on its torso opened their ports, and swarms of maxites attacked the battlefield like gnats. Even under mechanical deconstruction, the bodies looked like they were melting, along with whatever clothes and gadgets were on them.
Some of them had firearms. The fab-bot had them scanned for later review before reclaiming their metal, too.
It mostly just stood around while the maxites fed on the dead and shat out micro-doses of industrial raw material. It could have sat, but it could hear danger coming from somewhere. It just couldn’t see where.
A hand shot out from beneath it, pulling on one of its legs. It failed to topple or even spook the fab-bot, but the fab-bot couldn’t find the culprit under all the bodies, and it was at a bad angle to sever the arm. It could crush the arm, sure, but its rudimentary AI decided against it. Alphas were known for their tenacity, and “just” crushing its arm wouldn’t make it lose its grip.
Until, of course, the Alpha managed to pull itself out of the corpse pile. It showed its head, growling at the fab-bot.
The bot wound its head back, flipped its armored visor down in front of its head-camera, then smashed its head against the Alpha’s, killing it instantly. It raised its bloodied visor, and set to work trying to remove the Alpha’s hand, still clamped to its leg. It kicked and thrashed, crushing the arm until it was paste, and when it pulled, the arm disconnected from the Alpha’s body—yet it still stubbornly clung to the bot’s leg.
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The rudimentary AI did not think this through.
While the fab-bot was hard at work, the three humans and C4T each had their little tasks. Coronel resumed scouting further ahead, Saito and Eliso did a broader reconnaisance of the area with freshly-nanostructed micro-drones, and C4T prowled the rooftops for the highest peak for a small laser relay.
Saito and Eliso’s recon confirmed Coronel’s prior observations. There were thirteen wandering hordes of a size similar to what they had just annihilated. Had they been using loud firearms, they might have attracted the attention of two of them.
Where the hordes had been before they got here, they could only guess. The ruckus of their crash landing was more of a long wall of loud noise, and not a bomb from a single point. Any curious Alphas would have found it hard to pick a place to congregate.
Well, it was just a guess.
Coronel himself was in the emergency stairwell of a twenty-story apartment, about two kilometers south, intending to set up an observation post on its roof. It was dark, but he had retinal night vision—it felt like having his eyes’ resolution reduced to 144p in fullscreen every single time. Turning on his flashlight, however, was a bad move, so he persevered.
So far, he’d ascended 10 stories, applying wedges to the foot of every door just to make sure he didn’t get into a horror scenario of all those doors bursting open and Alphas flooding his only way down.
He reached the 11th floor, however, and there was no door at all. It was lying inside the corridor, crumpled like paper.
Annoying. He hated surprises behind him more than anything, so now he had to get in there and kill the damn thing that caused this, if it was here at all. He had to make sure the floor was clear, in either case.
His laser rifle, though quiet, lacked a preferable rate of fire in CQC against multiple enemies. He switched to his handgun, then sent a micro-drone through the door. One side was just an ingress with a window, and there was nothing there. The rest of the corridor was to the other side. Perfect.
He deployed a little helper in the stairwell: a noisekiller. It would detect the sound coming from one direction, then replay its waveform negative with just the right timing that they would destructively interfere, cancelling out—as much as possible, anyway. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough.
He poked his head into the corridor. It was pretty much what he’d seen through the micro-drone’s feed, though this time, he could smell the image, and it was dust and old iron.
He sent the micro-drone snooping into each of the rooms, all their doors opened. The drone confirmed a few Alphas hibernating, but it couldn’t find the suspect Beta.
The Assassin-K’s would be enough, he thought. He tossed out three of them, giving them instructions to take out whatever targets the micro-drone spotted. Their batteries ran out after just three rooms, so they had to return to him to recharge. It was slow and inconvenient, so he had to keep up, walking down the corridor, following the drones as they visited each door like angels of death.
The door at the end, however, was marked with blood, and it was closed. He only had one drone that could snoop in under it: a sort of baby snake. Its feed’s resolution was a lot worse than the usual micro-drone, but it could get into cramped spaces with little trouble.
He let it go from his hand, and it slithered under the door. The feed showed…not what he expected.
He kicked the door open. Among the racks of weapons and crates of ammunition sat a lone survivor on his lounging chair, a gunshot to his head. The flies scattered as Coronel approached. He frowned.
The SMR controller on his hip came to life with a single thought, and a standard SMR swarm flew out to meet the flies and sterilize the body. Soon, the buzzing died. From eggs to adults, they were all turned into raw material for the on-board nano-forge.
The smell persisted, but it wasn’t anything he wasn’t already used to.
He searched the room for any useful intel. There was a note from the dead man: “I can’t take it anymore. To anyone who finds me and this place, yeah sure, have all the guns and ammo in the world! Doesn’t matter to me anymore. Maybe you’ll save someone with it. Just not me.
“If you can, burn my body. If there’s some sorta virus out there that can still put me back together after I blow my brains out, I ain’t having any of it.”
Coronel decided on the second best thing, and unleashed his standard swarms on his corpse. While they were at it, he looked around. The guns and ammunition were a bonus, but they weren’t immediately useful. There were a few tools here and there, but they weren’t anything that couldn’t be nanostructed.
He directed a few maxite swarms to scan the guns, anyway. They were more likely to find local survivors than any of his own men, and there was no better way to trade favors for them than to trade in weapons and ammunition. He was no fool to arm strangers with laser weapons, at least not until he could ascertain their character.