The ranged and physical attacks of the drones were too underpowered to be a significant threat to RX. But the number of bodies clogging the passage was definitely cramping his style. The cruiser's central AI had recognized the ineffectualness of the two drones in his cell and had gone for a mass attack strategy. His joint axes shrieked as he pulled his upper and lower graspers repetitively from their strangling grips.
His combat facilitator had recommended continued struggling with the mass of metal torsos and extremities clinging to him like nebulan ocher-barnacles. It was the safe strategy. Ultimately, RX would wear the lesser bots down, but his neural synth didn't like it. I still haven't seen the undead that netted me... And what if he has another net?
"...Well, at least we got out of the room. But what is blocking all the video feeds to the cockpit?" Anak interrupted RX's thoughts as he extended his lower graspers to try and smash the chassis of the drones worming behind him. They did bend at the pressure, but that was all.
"Hey, kid! You're back among the living! The receivers are blocked by the Cruiser's drone force. Don't worry... I'll beat 'em down... eventually. But right now, they kinda have me gunked up in this tight space..." RX's battle frame shifted from rocking back and forth to leaning side to side with no significant improvement.
"...Trying to generate enough room to get the first girkumber out of the jar if you know what I mean... From there, I'll be able to smash 'em off—Good job back there with the inhibitor! Really kid, thanks for the save." RX's vocal modulation lowered with sincere gratitude to his ally.
"We do it for each other... You know that. And it's too bad about the crunch of bodies here. It's exactly the situation that a full suite of Essence-enhanced void thrusters should help with... Where could we get some of those, I wonder?"
RX was now rocking in a circle in the passageway with minimal improvement in his situation. Though the heavy metal of the drone's bodies was very good at scraping the paint off the portals and bulkheads around him. "Yeah! Where could we get tho—Wait. Nobody likes a smart guy, Anak—"
RX's combat facilitator interrupted his thoughts with a priority emergency message. [Warning! Class A combat threat is now on intercept course]
Through his mostly blocked anterior receivers, RX heard the rapid approach of footfalls and saw the broad blade of a two-handed sword thrust four times in quick succession between his dome section and his chest plate. Warning messages flashed through his main comp unit. His vitality assessors reported that the attacks had severed more than fifty percent of the mecha-essence pathways to his dome section. Anak, perceiving the damage through their link, began absorbing Aura. He had already started shunting Essence from their joint pool to the damaged areas in massive waves. RX's nano tide was spurred to action. But that was a lot of damage in a very short time. RX noted that Anak had also flooded the navigation circuits with Essence to hyperactivate the mech's thrusters.
RX glimpsed the sword as it was raised above his dome with white armored arms. The big mech knew time was up. Another attack would sever Anak's Essence channels from the dome, and things would go downhill quickly from there. His command processes confirmed his neural synth’s thinking in a joint priority message.
[Immediate action is required to prevent the collapse of mecho-Essence pathways.]
For once, we agree!
RX threw the throttle down on his ion thrusters. All eight of his back-mounted jets and the four on his inferior graspers ignited the atmosphere into a torrent of flames. Accelerated atoms, the temperature of a white dwarf's surface turned the small passageway into a blazing inferno that a demon would need a volcanologist's suit to weather. Without a gap, high-pitched insectile shrikes of agony reverberated off the steel-plated passage walls. But the screams couldn't compete with the deep thunder of his boosters. RX's combat facilitator noted that the sword currently lunging for his exposed systems had been dropped. Most likely because the arms holding it had burst into flames. But that was just the start. The big mech's battle frame, the besieging mass of defense drones piled on him, and, in all probability, a very crispy vampire were launched in an acceleration vector down the passageway. With his visual and location sensors still mostly blocked, RX relied on his audio receivers. He wasn't disappointed in hearing the snapping of multiple metal limbs and the fracture of drone chassis as the hypersonic ball of metal and frames crashed into various structures in the open section of the ship. Good for you guys! Glad it's not my ship!
Less than a micro-gyra after RX had initiated his rocket burn, the meteoric mass slammed into the opposite side of the stealth ship's superstructure. The tortured sound of twisted alloy filled the deck as a storm of broken drone fragments scattered on thousands of trajectories.
RX staggered drunkenly in the burning wreckage surrounding him before finally falling on his metal keester. The battle mech's proprioception actuators massively overloaded as his internal gyros adjusted in inertial reset.
"Ancestors give us strength..." Anak half mumbled the prayer. RX didn't need his acuity facilitator to know the tamarin was sincere.
"...Sorry for the sudden stop. You ok, kid?"
"I'll live...the bambooyan pillows are back... Do you think we overdid it a bit there?
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"Nonsense kid. It worked, didn't it—"
The ship shuddered as warning alarms sounded among the flash of yellow emergency lighting. RX's proprioceptive sensors noted the cessation of light speed's constant tug as the ship fell from hyperspace. The grav-cells had also failed. Wrecked drone parts began to float freely as the cruiser slowly pitched forward in an axial rotation.
RX ignored all these things and answered his partner. "Well ...if you really want to drag the microscope out... We might have given it a touch too much... But hindsight is always within perfect specifications. I'm still giving us full marks for results, style, and delivery."
Finally recalibrated, RX stood up with only slightly wobbling lower graspers. In the zero-G he held a wall rail as he looked around. The trail of destruction was several hundred meters long. Several small to medium fires burned in the large open space they had flown through. And, for the second time in as many gyra, they were surrounded by dozens of destroyed combat drones. Deactivated ready lights and the infrequent spasm of flexing axes manifested their fading power supplies. With a free upper grasper, RX brushed absently at a single drone that somehow still clung to his posterior plates. Its fractured central processor made it beat its legless frame against his back in futility. Woeful warbling came from the drone's audio emitters as RX pushed it to the deck. This pitiful sound only increased as the battle mech attempted to crush it under his lower grasper without the aid of gravity. The caterwauling died in stages as RX got his entire mass over it. Grinding the broken drone husk into the now bent deck plates. "Yep ...Full marks for style."
Anak raised a thin simian brow, "If you say so... I'm just glad my mother isn't here to see this mess."
"That I can agree with, kid." RX's social facilitators had him internally cringe in remembrance of the lady's fondness for striking with her cooking spoon first and asking any relevant questions second. Only after all suspected offenders had been properly dislodged from any conceivable attempts to put a favorable spin on the story they were about to tell her. "Your mom made a very effective interrogator— Ahhhh... truth seeker— "
RX's battle frame clunked to the deck as his navigational processors activated the magpads on his upper and lower graspers. Then he rotated his dome to search the carnage about them. Finding what he was looking for, RX stepped away from the hull. "Let's get flush with Essence so the nano tides can start repairing internal damage. I've got one more thing to deal with."
"On it." Anak closed his eyes, and Aura flooded into their mecho-Essence conduits.
RX clomped twenty meters to a still-moving body with previously white but now charred and cracked exo-armor hanging in tatters from it. Black ichor smeared the deck from the sheared stumps of his legs above both knees.
Well he didn’t fare too well did he?
RX’s processors and facilitators didn’t argue. Though he could tell that their current silence only meant they were calculating the probable fate of the second vampire that RX had identified before their explosively searing and highly destructive journey through the ship’s underbelly ending in the high-energy impact against the hull. The big mech was certain that one of his upper echelon battle processors was also currently determining the probability of his and Anak surviving… and the vampire's obvious lack of doing so. But right now the numbers really didn’t matter. RX chalked it up to being made from an Essence infused and virtually indestructible metal, while the vampires were, well… not.
Nany nany boo boo and too bad for you. Get yourselves a better maker and fabricator or end up like you have.
The vampire was dragging itself to a second, charred body in shattered white exo-armor. This one was impaled and hanging upside down on a bent bulkhead strut. The severed ends of several optic data feeds poked askew from its chest in random directions. RX's MCU recognized the network components piercing the dead vampire and the sparking silicon ruin still burning beneath the undead carcass as vital elements of the ship's central processor. At least they had been until they’d been destroyed by the drone meteor that had recently passed through.
Hearing RX behind him, the crawling vampire looked over its shoulder and instinctively hurried his ponderous movements. After a moment, other thoughts must have prevailed, and the dying vampire rolled over on its back to laugh hysterically. Tears of black blood ran down its cheeks while it coughed up gouts of the dark, foul gunk.
The vampire’s laughing stopped, but it was still staring at RX's dome with a tight, maniacal grin. Hate was apparent in its unblinking eyes as the big mech strode towards it.
RX spoke with his intimidation modulation. "Save your energy. Your partner is dead. And I doubt you have a long time left in this iteration. Tell me the location of Dod Stal, and I'll end your suffering quickly... Otherwise, your passing may be significantly less pleasant." RX put his lower grasper over the undead's splayed fingers and activated his mag-pad. The digits were crushed to a pulp as his foot-pod squelched contact with the deck. The undead gasped reflexively in pain but didn't lose the disturbed, wide-smiling expression on its face.
For a moment, the dying vampire stared into RX's dome. Then, ichor exploded from its mouth with a genuine guffaw. With crystalline hatred it sneered up at RX. "Yes... my brother is dead. And I'm dead..." Sincere grief overcame its face before speaking the next words, "And she is dead... We both felt her go before the crash." The vampire leaned forward to drag his mutilated hand from under RX's mag-pad. The enmity on his face intensified to the frigid cold of the void as he screamed into RX's dome. "But so are you and that rodent you carry!"
RX's confidence slipped several rungs as his MCU took eighteen nano-Gyra to register that, to a 93.6 percent certitude, Anak had been spotted on sensor surveillance when he freed RX from the inhibition net. Who else was going to find out?
The vampire took RX's brief pause as an indication to continue. The glee still plain on its face as it nodded to the armored corpse hanging over the smashed central processor. "You see that destroyed hyperdyne processor? We were fleeing the primal expansion of a grade four singularity when you knocked us out of hyperspace! Now we're stalled in the path of its projected growth..."
The understanding of his impending final death finally caught up with the vampire. It fell onto its back from a slightly raised position. "... Enjoy the crushing oblivion—" A brief coughing fit sprayed RX's lower graspers in its fluids before it again cackled through the viscous globs of undeath. "...you don't have much more time than us—"
RX cycled his Water Attunement, and a liquid metal blade decapitated the vampire. Still choking, the head spun away in a thin spiral of black blood.
RX answered the undead's last assertion. "Ya, that might've been true ...But I know a guy."