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The blare of the proximity alarm fades. So too, eventually, do the alert pings of high-power explosives at the perimeter. Warlord cracks a joke to fill the quiet; it’s crass, so the Thugs laugh. One of the Knights wisecracks. There’s no laughter, simulated or otherwise, at that.
The fact of the matter remains that they’re on high alert for an incursion from MAIN-C that seems to have lasted a handful of microcycles. A rogue Demolisher, perhaps.
The rationalisation does little to relieve F3-M5R’s tension. He trains his beamcaster and gauss rifle on the single door to the room - it’s occurred to him now that they’re cornered should anything go wrong. He says as much.
“Quit being a hardass. Nothing’s going to get us here.” The Thug nearest the door chitters. Her simulated voice is high and mocking. Some would call it regal, much to Warlord’s ire. F3-M5R hasn’t the resources to spend on a retort - as per usual, he’s too busy simulating to reply. It’s a habit that’s saved him on more than one occasion. But his lack of eloquence and sapience (of traditional and prized Derelict snobbery) is also why he’s drawn the short straw and is currently stood guarding Warlord from, as the Knight so cleverly puts, nothing.
The long moment of silence stretches into another. The quiet suggests a quelled threat.
Time slows. The door begins to buckle, stretch, and then unfurls, a flower petalled in vibrant reds and streaks of gold. A swarm of metal shears free from the seething mass and coats the room in a pollen puff.
It registers to F3-M5R that the door has been destroyed by some overwhelming force. His processors are in overdrive; the subroutines dedicated to combat and survival have taken over and are now calculating the ballistic trajectory each piece of shrapnel.
He is jerked to the side with all the grace of a stringless puppet. The autonomous decision spares him from being shredded by a cloud of razor metal; the two Thugs closest to the door are not so lucky. One turns and raises her beamcaster to intercept shrapnel that would have obliterated her visual sensors. A fatal error for a fractocycle later her core is exposed to a shard that embeds itself in the wall behind her. She is disembowelled as her partner to her left is decapitated: he simply fails to react at all.
Their lives end as they are struck. There is no parting message as they collapse in sync.
A moment passes.
F3-M5R squeezes off a volley through the door. The other surviving Thugs, after another moment, follow suit. They hit nothing. It’s blind-fire, more of a threat than an actual attack.
His conscious thought has caught up. It’s running at a fraction of the resources of his combat ‘brain’, so it’s going to lag a bit. He’s sure the two dead Thugs would agree that it’s better than dying. He registers Warlord’s broadcast of shock.
A moment passes.
The doorway has become a portal to somewhere terrible. It is ringed with jagged edges that smoulder and glow and the centre is a void of smoke that twists with shapes that threaten to morph into something solid and dangerous at any moment.
The Knights approach the door, regarding the smokescreen with wary sensors and cleavers that catch the firelight and glitter a vital green. They’re so sharp thin that at a certain angle, optics can’t register them at all. F3-M5R has seen firsthand what those blades can do.
A moment passes.
Something streaks through the smoke. It’s large and it’s moving like no other Derelict has ever seen or dreamt, skimming the ground, and it’s covered in something slick and hard and blue. Centrium?
He has time to process no other detail. It’s dangerous. His combat brain is screaming threat. He aims.
Violence on Tau-Ceti IV is a game of chance. When every single bot is occupied with outthinking every single other bot any given combat scenario devolves into a series of dice-rolls. It is unavoidably dangerous. Sapient thought, skill, tactics; all an advantage to some, the top layer of abstraction that serve as an edge over superior software or hardware. It becomes an element of randomisation in and of itself and it separates the Derelicts from the rest of the Unaware.
But sapient thought is secondary to F3-M5R as he reduces his cognitive process to the firing of his weapon and targets the theoretical sliver of core visible in the seam of that armour.
He fires.
Plasma bolts splash liquid fire on a canvas of wireframe blue energy shielding, throwing up wispy sparks in a shower. But he does strike the core.
A moment passes.
It unfolds. It’s beautiful and it’s disgusting. The disk morphs into something massive and ethereally angular – no bot should be that large and not grounded. Armour plates curve out and flex around, a cloth cloak crossed with the wings of a metal beetle, exposing an esoteric mass of sensors and processors and tertiary subsystem computers that rapidly mark it as a far greater threat than even Warlord, who is himself broadcasting the order base-wide – not that it’s likely anyone is left to hear it – to ‘Come and help me deal with whatever the hell just flew into my throne room,’ and he’s squeezing off a volley that strikes mere armour.
The Threat’s parts are assembled in such a baffling fashion that F3-M5R’s next shot goes entirely wide. His combat brain is distracted, puzzling through its movement and the way those components pulse, shift and chitter and spew out a stream of completely unrecognisable data. It doesn’t even look like a robot. It’s certainly not Unaware. Why did Warlord say they were under attack by the Unaware? F3-M5R knows MAIN-C could never make something like that.
It could be Derelict, but there’s no Derelict alive crazy or capable enough to build something like this. No Zionite nor Federalist nor Exile would – and what would they have to gain?
It’s spinning to bear on the first Knight and the wing-armour shifts and weapons snap out and he transmits a warning, but the Knight vanishes in a flood of lasers and globs of plasma.
The second Knight closes and their cleaver swings light as nothing; one cannon of five drops to the ground. Plasma cannons, on a hovering robot?
The possibilities are like headlights dazzling his processors. He prunes his thoughts. There are no resources to spare for dainty emotion. Another Thug dies and he doesn’t have time to register how. Warlord is unloading properly, non-stop, a torrent of lightning and kinetic force that would soon corrupt any normal bot. He’s screaming about being jammed and F3-M5R checks – it costs him a shot – and realises he’s jammed, too.
The moments blend together. The second Knight blocks a slug going for his core with a desperate swipe of the cleaver. It splinters apart as the particle field fails. He’s disarmed – the Threat swerves away to fire at the next target.
The Thug opposite F3-M5R seizes and falls. Metal drips molten drops molten blood into the earth as the components disintegrate under the immense heat of firing consecutive beamcaster volleys. She swivels on the ground, broadcasts an unencrypted insult, fires, shuts down.
He keeps firing. He’s overheating but immediate survival depends on the disarmament or neutralisation of the Threat. He blows some processor off – he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what any of the components attached to the Threat are. They’re all bespoke prototypes; he reasons there must be cooling devices – and targeting, with the next shot that sends him spinning as it strikes his leg – but even they’re just guesses.
Together, those left armed, two thugs and Warlord, they hit maybe six of thirty shots. The Threat is massive and it’s never where they expect it to be.
Then Warlord fires two slugs.
Both shatter cannons.
Warlord cheers. He dials up the derision, blaring indignation and defiance for all to hear as he fires again and, miraculously, destroys a third cannon. It’s a show of skill unparalleled. It’s why Warlord runs the caves.
The Threat stops completely, midair, hovering in place, a break in speed that betrays a complete and utter disregard for suggestions such as the law of conservation of momentum. It doesn’t fire, it doesn’t charge. It doesn’t speak.
The Threat shifts, clicks, whirrs, flies straight up and then reconfigures again right before his eyes. It scoops up one of the cannons on the ground with a long arm and slots it straight back onto its body, impossibly. More thrust out from beneath the bubbling skin of components and it’s back to five. It doesn’t fire during this process – it’s long enough that they get a chance to do enough damage that F3-M5R’s weapon shuts down from the heat. He backs up, away from Warlord. The Threat turns to the other Thug and exterminates it and then turns back to Warlord and fires non-stop. F3-M5R huddles against the wall as he watches Warlord shudder under the stream of slugs and plasma that shatter metal like glass. It lasts for a couple of moments. His armour breaks and then he does.
He transmits as his weapons stutter, “What are you, Cogmind? All of this – are you working for him?”
The Threat – this Cogmind – pauses. Is it that it’s considering his words? It reconfigures again – a newer-model sensor array snaps to the surface, the first truly recognisable component he’s seen it use.
Then it tears into Warlord. His components come apart, he screams something unencrypted in binary, and then he is gone.
Cogmind turns to F3-M5R; or, at least, he thinks that’s what it’s doing. It’s facing him with weapons hot and ready. It’s still in the way of the door.
His transmitter is still intact. Better get a last word in.
“Can’t win ‘em all, nutcase. Something’ll get you, if not us. Nobody highrolls forever.”
He’s still jammed. There won’t be any help and Cogmind’s core is still robust enough to dismantle an army – having scrapped one already. F3-M5R knows he’s right. MAIN-C might be a twisted megalomaniac but the legions of enslaved robots that come with that will grind down Cogmind eventually.
Regardless of the truth of the statement, Cogmind ignores him. It bristles and pulses, hovering around the room, scooping up parts with hooks and arms and claws that are seemingly manufactured on the fly. A cannon disappears and in its place is mounted Warlord’s railgun, pried from his corpse while the metal is still hot. He doesn’t know where it puts things – it just pulls them into the main body and under the armour and components. It must have a power source – he can see the top of something large and pouring off enough heat to warp the air. But to power such a monstrous arsenal; well, it must be Vortex.
His weapon comes back online. Cogmind swerves midair and bears its cannons on him as his beamcaster heats up – not that he was even planning to fire it.
Slugs shatter his legs, his weapon and strike his core and he’s sent in a fumbling pirouette straight into the far wall.
His optics darken.
But he’s not dead. He attempts to move and then registers that his legs have been destroyed. The little power he’s producing goes straight to maintaining his vital systems.
A second volley. They tear straight through his core and spills bolts and coolant everywhere and if he was one of those crazy Derelicts with a pain simulation he’d be screaming over comms right now for nobody to hear, but he’s not dead. Did it miss?
He watches it all fold back up – the components and weapons disappear back under more plates of armour which settle into place until F3-M5R can only see the pulse of the gravity jets gently blowing the debris of the battle around like scattered leaves beneath Cogmind. The reformed disk streaks out of the room without any ceremony.
The jamming falls. He’s flooded with communications – messages from survivors. Warlord’s call for help never got out. They have no idea what F3-M5R just survived.
He lets them know he’s alive and warns them and then he’s hearing that there’s something else in the base. They’re still reporting that the MAIN-C incursion is underway. They must be wrong. Are they still fighting Cogmind? How many survivors – but of course. Cogmind must have simply jammed all it had killed.
It’s as he’s puzzling this that he’s pinged with the interior breach alarm, and he realises they had, in fact, been attacked by MAIN-C.
And it’s a little after that when the first Hunter steps into the throne room.