After two days of fabrication operations, the Alliance strike force’s forcibly-detached detachment had finally achieved a sizable force that could potentially threaten a Kartesian forward observation post.
Coronel reviewed their bots and available resources.
***
[Combat]
51x Assassin-K
13x Assassin-E
2x Light Assassin Carrier
6x Wolfbot
[Support]
3x Short-range recon, aerial
2x Pack-bot
2x Pack-bot, steel
1x Fab-bot
1x Fab-bot, steel
[SMR Resources]
20 kg nanites, repurposeable
1 kg manites, repurposeable
***
They were a little low on SMR’s, but that was an expected outcome, especially after giving some of their bots limited SMR control—how else would Wolfbots turn steel and water into ammunition? They didn’t have the industrial base to produce purpose-made parts, so SMR’s did most of the heavy lifting. It was inefficient, but at least they had the capability.
The LAC’s—Light Assassin Carriers—were built on the DOG chassis as well, though a little bigger. Each could accommodate up to 40 Assassins on charging ports located on either side of its torso. It had a single tentacular blade for self-defense, and a bulky amount of steel, making it resistant to blunt force attack.
Their main job, however, was swarm logistics and optimization. Assassins could operate for about a minute before needing to recharge, but with more than fifty of them, they needed just as many charging ports or else they’d just start dropping out of the sky. Also, without a coordinator, they used a “target nearest” heuristic, which worked, but too many of the things were apt to bump into each other and make redundant locks on the same target. They needed something better.
…Especially because their recon flights found a horde, estimated at 2,032 individuals, halted along a major thoroughfare 1 km due south of their position, dangerously close to the survivor concentration about 5 km further south.
At the moment, the horde wasn’t moving. There was some sort of net strung along the entire length of the thoroughfare. Alphas were still leaking through the side roads, but for the most part, they were an imminent, not immediate, threat.
Problem was, they didn’t have the firepower to take it down. Not cleanly, anyway. They needed an extra day to make new combat bots, and given that it was just a horde of Alphas with a few token Betas, an Assassin spam sounded like the best idea.
The Assassins weren’t exactly mass-produceable. They might have been small, individually, but they needed dozens more of them, on top of new LAC’s to support them. Their rate of resource collection had also taken a hit ever since they decided to stay close to the horde.
So, Coronel tasked C4T and Saito with upgrading the Assassin-K’s design, the general goal being “increased kill rate by tomorrow”—could be by making the things cheaper, or more deadly, it didn’t matter. With the Machine’s computational wizardry and Saito’s background—on the order of “I was in a design competition in high school, once”—they should be able to do…something.
The current Assassin-K was more like a straw with a propeller on top and a grasscutter monofilament at the bottom. It only had pitch and roll control, which was accomplished by using the powerful burst motor of the grasscutter blade to, essentially, jerk the whole thing towards a certain direction. Flight controls were, therefore, extremely fucky, and they would sometimes miss whatever they were targeting.
C4T had the first turn at optimizing the design. Its new iteration of the Assassin-K had been reduced to nothing more than a rimmed propeller. A sawblade-like rim was fixed to spin with the propeller blades, which themselves were segmented so that blade segments could flex independently. This allowed for variable thrust and lift along different points of the blade, and by pulsing this variation at just the right timing, it was possible to increase and decrease lift along four quadrants of the whole propeller.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Effectively, a single propeller was able to simulate the action of four propellers of a quadcopter drone.
By virtue of the design alone, C4T had cut down the material cost of manufacturing an Assassin-K by 30%, and the time cost, by 20%. The further discovery of a compacted cube of aluminum cans in someone’s garage resulted in the decision to remake the body out of the material, saving on precious carbon.
Now, they could now make more precise Assassins, and for cheaper.
C4T insisted that it had already put the new design through one million different simulations and they all checked out with no problems, but Saito insisted on the more—definitely human—policy of live-fire testing.
The Machine waited expectantly. In an office building’s empty loading bay, the prototype Assassin-K-2 sat on a table, waiting for its turn. Saito came back, with a live Alpha in-tow. Rather, it was wrapped in gray, fiber-reinforced adhesive strips.
“Why?” C4T messaged.
“I said live-fire testing, didn’t I?” Saito replied.
He set up the squirming target downrange, applying more adhesive strips between the target and the wall. C4T expected him to give an attack instruction to the prototype Assassin.
It did not expect him to pick up the prototype and throw it like a shuriken straight at the Alpha, embedding it splendidly in the Alpha’s chest with an exaggerated arc of blood.
He transmitted a return instruction to the prototype. Its motor was definitely jiggling, but it was just stuck there, after all.
“Well, that’s a problem,” Saito remarked.
“You used it outside of its parameters.”
“Design parameters don’t survive first contact with a marine.”
“You’re not a marine.”
“One of us is, though.”
C4T chirped repeated UTF-8 encodings of ellipses.
They sorted through two solutions to the “got stuck; can’t return” issue: disposable bladework, and a more powerful motor.
C4T figured the chances of getting stuck on the target—after adding “random additional impact velocity” to the wildcard parameters—were at 1.019 out of 100 impacts.
With that in mind, using a more powerful motor immediately went out the window. It was just too expensive for what the added power was meant to solve.
On the other hand, disposable bladework required adding a few modifications to the LAC’s so they could service Assassins with damaged blades, but it was worth it, overall. Bladework simply became an operating expense, and a cheap one, at that.
Coronel dropped by, coming back from a short recon mission—mostly setting up some laser relays and remote observation posts. They could never have enough relays, or eyes and ears.
“What’s this?” He picked up a sample of the disposable bladework. For lack of a better word, it was a hollow sawblade.
“Ah, that’s for—”
Before Saito could complete his sentence, Coronel threw it at the Alpha, still duct-taped to the wall. The blade went right through, turning the Alpha’s chest into mist, before embedding into the concrete. The Alpha expired not long after.
“Cheap, reliable, durable… Give me a small supply of these,” Coronel said before disappearing into a corridor. “About fifty,” his follow-up echoed from further inside the building.
“You were right,” C4T messaged. Humans were just too full of side-effects.
C4T mentally sighed. Even if humanity was on the verge of extinction, it was this sort of bullshit that made the Alliance invincible. It admitted, somewhere deep in its digital heart, that its Machine brethren would not have been able to fend off the Kartesh for this long were it not for human nonlinearity.
“What if we made them explode, though…” Saito muttered. C4T shook its head.
By the end of the day, the Alliance had a little bit more heft to it—and barely any SMR resources remaining.
***
[Combat]
51x Assassin-K
22x Assassin-K-2, aluminum
13x Assassin-E
3x Light Assassin Carrier
8x Wolfbot
[Support]
5x Short-range recon, aerial
2x Pack-bot
3x Pack-bot, steel
1x Fab-bot
2x Fab-bot, steel
[SMR Resources]
2.9 kg nanites, repurposeable
50 g manites, repurposeable
***
.
.
.
Eight lanes of empty road, bordered by walls on the left and right; the neighborhoods besides were ash and smoke; the sandbags were fallen; the guns were silent.
But a net still held on. Steel stayed fast, even while the dead tugged, pushed, and strained, hoping the net’s cables would twist, fatigue, and fray.
Yet it still held on.
They could still hear the call, a persistent whisper, that they could find their prey in a certain place. That place was beyond the net, a net that wouldn’t break.
They could hear the whisper, but the net, the net wouldn’t break!
Damned net, why won’t you break!
These. These two. These two were responsible. There were more, but these two would have to do! These two would have to break!
They rocked the bus until it fell on its side. Even as steel crumpled and glass broke, and the dead climbed overhead until nothing of the bus could be seen from the sky, the two survivors refused to come out. Everything outside was zombie, blood, and smelly. There was no place to run, besides. They could only wait for backup, or hope for a death where they wouldn’t wake.
“So just kill me,” Aurelia said, pulling a gun on James. The trigger was slippery under her touch. James’s gun was out, its barrel staring at her, but his own finger wouldn’t touch the trigger. “Fucking Coward—or I’ll kill you, and then me!”