Three Square Meals Ch. 058

"No power?" he asked in surprise.

Dana frowned, and replied, "Seems unlikely. The rogue AI might have locked down the outer doors." She stepped forward, and flipped up a maintenance panel beside the button, and reached for the multi-tool at her belt.

"You can head back to the Invictus," John said to Jade over the comm interface.

"Will do!" she replied cheerfully. "Let me know if you need an evac, I'll be here straight away."

He turned and watched the glossy white gunship lift smoothly off the deck, then tilt back and blast out of the hangar with a deafening roar. He watched the Raptor flip and roll once it cleared the station, the Nymph clearly having fun as she returned to the Invictus.

"We're in!" Dana said with a triumphant grin on her face.

As she spoke, there was a dull clunking sound, then the whir of hydraulics as servos and gears began to part the heavy, reinforced doors. There was a slight hiss as the doors split apart, and when they parted and began to slide back in the frame, they could see the walls were nearly a metre thick. A heavy rumble made the floor tremble, and they could all feel the vibrations through their booted feet.

Rachel eyed the slowly opening portal, and observed, "That's a big door."

Alyssa smiled and said, "They sure wanted to keep people out of this place."

It was gloomy inside, with the overhead lighting out, and only dim illumination coming from adjoining rooms. John quickly cycled through the image enhancement overlays that were built into his helmet, to try and find a better one for the situation at hand. Infra-red was only picking up cool blues, while mag-view was a white blur. He settled for low light amplification, and carefully approached the gap, watching for any sign of hostile enemies.

It seemed still as the grave inside, but his enhanced hearing picked up a distant sound of strange metallic thumping. It was hard to place exactly what was causing it, as it wasn't coming from a big object hitting another repeatedly, the sound seemed too fractured for that, with a slight reverb to it. As he walked forward, trying to place the noise, there was an abrupt whooshing surge of overworked hydraulics.

*John, look out!* Alyssa screamed in panic.

The slowly separating doors had suddenly slammed closed, as though deliberately trying to squash him between their mighty weight. Reacting to her warning, he dropped his rifle then turned to his right to take the strain. John braced himself, catching the door to the sound of gears shearing off their spokes with a shrill whine. He expected the other door to slam into his back, but instead he heard the sharp grinding squeal of metal being savaged. When he glanced warily over his shoulder, he saw that the door had been bent in half, the front half ripped backwards with incredible force.

Alyssa's upraised hand provided a handy clue as to who had been responsible for watching his back, and he gave her a grateful smile, as he said with relief, "Thanks, honey!"

"Looks like someone isn't happy about us popping by to say hello," she noted wryly.

Rachel stared at her in amazement, and gasped, "That was amazing! I can't believe you reacted so fast, let alone being able to do that to the door!"

Dana had walked over to the sundered doorway, and she shook her head in astonishment as she examined the point where the door had been bent back at a ninety degree angle. "You're one hell of a badass," she said with an enthusiastic grin, as she looked back at her blonde friend.

Alyssa winked at her, while John picked up his dropped rifle to check it over for damage. Assembled from crystal Alyssium, it could take quite a battering, and it was still in perfect shape. He brought his rifle to the ready position once more, and said, "Shall we try again? I think it's fairly safe to assume we don't have the element of surprise."

"Lead away," Alyssa agreed, falling into step beside him.

The corridor was long, wide and with a high ceiling, and seemed to be heading straight as an arrow towards the central section of the facility. There was no movement here, and the place certainly gave the impression that it was deserted. Despite the lack of life, it was obvious there'd been trouble here, and of the violent kind at that. One of the first rooms they passed through was some kind of security checkpoint, where the corridor widened to accommodate a security desk off to the side, along with gates and scanners. It had obviously been the site of a pitched battle.

There were bullet holes stitching a chaotic tapestry across the walls, while the floors by the desk were drenched in blood and ichor. There were no bodies, but drag marks in the copious amount of blood clearly showed that they'd been removed after the battle. John walked over to the wall with all the bullet holes, to take a closer look.

"These impact sites are from ten millimetre rounds," he said confidently. "I'm guessing they were fired by the guards. From the damage to the wall, it looks like they were using armour piercing ammo."

"But it didn't save them," Rachel said, her tone sombre as she examined the gore around the desk. "I'd estimate at least four Terrans died here to produce this volume of blood."

He turned to look at Dana, and asked, "Where are the nearest group of lifesigns?"

Dana had uploaded the active scan results to her HUD, and she glanced over it before saying, "next level down, about thirty metres in that direction." Turning to the corridor she pointed into the blackness that led deeper into the facility.

"Alright, let's keep going," he said before walking further down the corridor.

The noise he'd heard at the entrance was growing louder, but he couldn't quite place where it was coming from. Something about this place made the echoing sound seem to come from all around them. They travelled deeper into the complex, eyes straining in the gloom until they spotted that the corridor was widening into a much larger room up ahead. Fanning out to cover the approaches, they swept in, and realised they had reached a central shaft that dropped down through the bored out asteroid.

"What the fuck is that noise?" Dana swore in annoyance. "It's been getting louder for the last half a minute."

John shook his head and replied, "I heard it as soon as we entered the place. I'm not sure what it is, but it sounds like metal thumping on metal."

"Whatever's making that banging must be enormous," Rachel noted.

"I don't think so," John disagreed, and walked over to the balcony surrounding the shaft. He pulled a flare from his webbing, ignited it, then tossed it over the side into the middle of the crevasse. It tumbled down, spinning end over end as it fell, casting crazy flickering shadows where the light briefly illuminated. After a long drop, it finally hit the floor, nearly eight hundred metres below them.

"Is that movement down there?" Alyssa asked, peering over the edge. "It's a shame we don't have Jade here, she'd already be telling us what it is!"

John looked over the edge through the scope on his rifle, and as he increased the magnification, his face took on a grim expression. "Yeah, it's what I thought. This place is crawling with robots!"

At that moment, they heard the clang of doors being thrown wide open from multiple directions, and the metallic thumping noise intensified. Alyssa quickly pulled out another flare, ignited it, then let it go. It floated in the air before her, before racing away across the ravine to the corridor opposite. They watched it float along eerily, then gasped as it came to an abrupt halt. Marching down the opposite corridor towards them was a seemingly unbroken line of armoured robots, with three of the automatons standing shoulder to shoulder across the passage.

They were roughly humanoid shaped, but with bulky upper bodies, narrow waists and sturdy legs. Adorned in what seemed to John to be an imitation of the standard Army combat armour, their faceless heads wore seemingly built in helmets, complete with the Terran Federation insignia. The familiar emblem of the sword flanked by wings pointing to a star was normally so reassuring, but now, it seemed the exact opposite.

As they stared at the marching robots in amazement, the front three raised their arms, revealing that they were carrying heavy looking rifles, and began to open fire. Simultaneously incoming streams of fire came from both flanks and from behind them.

"We're surrounded!" Rachel cried out in alarm.

***

Irillith moved her left hand, shifting the crosshairs on to a glowing tuning fork that was probing the wall for weaknesses, and pulled the trigger. The two cannon barrels began to pump bright red bolts at the code breaker that was attempting to bust through, and the shots sailed through the firewalls as though they weren't there, before blasting into their target, and blowing it to pieces. As it exploded into tiny glowing cubes, Irillith grinned with satisfaction.

Unfortunately there were still dozens more trying to break through, so she pre-emptively held the triggers down with both hands, then strafed bolts through the wall. Any shots that missed still ploughed into an aggressive program trying to find space on the wall, smashing the enemy invaders to pieces. The floor around the base of the wall was starting to pile up with debris, and she suddenly realised the memory buffer might overload, taking out the wall regardless.

"Faye, we have to try and clear the wall fas-," but she cut off abruptly as one of the codebreakers managed to penetrate the firewall, bringing it down.

The defensive programs attached to that outer layer of defence were quickly torn apart by the aggressive AI attack routines which surged forward. The leading edge of that line crashed into the next firewall, and the process began all over again, just as it had on the last two they'd already broken through.

"It's no good," Faye replied, sounding scared. "There's just too many of them!"

***

The corridors were lit up in staccato bursts as they were fired at by robots in all directions, with bullets sailing past overhead. Some of them got close, and were deflected with a whumping noise, but these were heavy rounds being fired their way, and more than a few were slamming into their armour. Fortunately, the ridiculously tough armour was holding strong, the evidence of the hit being pockmarked craters on the impact site.

"Stay low, and shoot behind us!" John called out. "We need to get clear of this killing ground."

The girls did as he commanded, and they opened fire on the incoming robots. The Punisher railguns sang out their familiar tune, with "VrmPkaow!" making up the chorus.

They picked their shots carefully at first, to check the effects of the twenty millimetre railgun slugs. John's first round hit a robot square in the face, blasting the head from its body, but with no discernible effect. Alyssa hit another directly in the narrow waist, which ripped it in half, and sent the torso toppling to the ground with an almighty clang. Sadly the upper body was still fully functional, and it twisted around and continued firing at them, as its compatriots stepped around it without a moment's pause.

Dana hit the third in the line with a direct torso hit, and the plate sized hole it blasted through the centre of the torso must have hit something critical. The robot appeared to have a violent fit, lurching around with arms and legs moving spasmodically before collapsing in a heap and thrashing on the floor before eventually lying still.

"Torso hits do the trick!" she called out to her friends. "Centre torso probably stores the gyro-stabiliser, so just aim for that!"

They began to move forward, intensifying their barrage of heavy railgun slugs, and cutting the bots to pieces in a blizzard of metal fragments. At the same time, robots were fanning out around the big room, and the volume of incoming fire was intensifying, shots plunking into their armour with distressing frequency.

"This isn't fast enough," John growled. "Clear the corridor with grenades! We have to get out of this room."

The girls nodded their understanding, and they began to fire three round bursts of high explosive grenades into the robotic horde blocking the passage behind them. The wide corridor turned into a fiery inferno of destruction, as one rippling series of explosions after another caused absolute carnage amongst the robotic troops. Metallic limbs went sailing away in the blasts, while the shockwaves sent even unscathed robots tumbling to the floor like bowling pins.

John drew his sword, once he saw the grenade salvo had cleared a path, then ran forward to finish any survivors. The girls jogged forward to get out of the incoming fire, and a few seconds later, they were in the relative safety of the corridor they started in. From back here, they could see that a concealed set of doors had swung open a little further along the corridor, and the robots were still pouring out of there.

"Keep pushing them back, I'll take out any survivors," John ordered, neatly cleaving a robot in half that had been struggling to stand.

Up close, they could see that the robot's armour was made of thick Titanium plating, but it offered scant protection from his sword. Paired with his prodigious strength, he cleaved straight through the flailing bots with ease, hacking apart any that had survived the railgun rounds and grenades.

No longer troubled by incoming rounds from the flanks, Alyssa, Dana, and Rachel were free to concentrate on their deadly marksmanship. Under Alyssa's telepathic direction, they began to dispatch three robots every couple of seconds, before quickly moving on to the rank behind as soon as the forward troops had stumbled to the floor.

John hacked apart the last of the partially damaged bots in the corridor, then quickly rejoined the girls. They had pushed the robots back to the stairwell inside the concealed door, and he tapped Alyssa on the shoulder, and called out, "Switch! You cover the corridor behind us, I'll clear the stairwell!"

She nodded, peeling back with her squadmates to kneel in the corridor behind the cover of the torn robotic corpses. They started unloading on the robots pouring in from the big room with the shaft down through the asteroid, and soon the dull squeal of metal echoed down the corridor as they blasted big holes through the robot's chests.

John stormed forward, sweeping his sword in a wide, two-handed blow, that smoothly cut through the torso's of the approaching robots. He glanced at his sword as he whirled around with the momentum of the swing, and murmured, "lightning."

Just as he'd been practicing, arcing lighting surged up the blade, the dancing tendrils looking hungry to reach out to their first victim. He slammed the sword into the closest robot, which was trying to clamber over one of its fallen brothers, and the electricity surged outwards, blasting through its metallic body. The robot flung its arms out wide, and danced a macabre jig as the lightning fried its circuitry. When John pulled his sword clear, it pitched over, smoke pouring from its armoured chassis in a dozen places.

He had a grin of satisfaction on his face to see the effect of the psychic lightning, but it was wiped away when the next two robots opened up at close range, hitting him with multiple twenty-mil rounds. Snarling with anger, he surged forward and grabbed the closest with his left hand, then hurled it away from him, sending it flying into the row behind which were sent tumbling back down the stairs in a tangle of limbs. The second was right at the top of the stairs, and he pointed his sword at it, and growled, "Dance you fucker!"

When he thought back on it afterwards, he'd only intended to channel the lightning swathing his sword into an electrical bolt. However, at the last moment, he'd remembered Edraele's chastisements about forgetting to use her for psychic energy. He sent her an urgent telepathic request for more power, and like the good, obedient Matriarch that she was, she had given him everything she'd got.

There was a booming thunderclap, and a storm of lightning bolts blasted into the lead robot, scattering the sizzling ruins to the winds. The blindingly bright electricity surged down the stairs, bounced off the rear wall, then reflected down the stairs below him. The effect on the robots standing on those stairs was devastating, and the arcing lightning ripped through their conductive metal, frying one after the other in a split second of phenomenal power.

The lightning surge disappeared as quickly as it had been summoned forth, and John was so shocked, the electricity on his sword winked out. He'd been so caught up in the action, he'd forgotten to tie off the maintained power in one of his mind compartments. As it happened, it was largely immaterial now anyway, as the robotic horde on the staircase had been met with total annihilation.

"It's clear," he called to the girls behind him.

They darted into the stairwell, then stood mouths agape as they surveyed the devastation he'd brought down on their robotic foes, the sharp smell of ozone in the air. "How did you..." Rachel started to mumble in awe, before he cut her off with an upraised hand.

"We can discuss it later. Let's move now, while we can!" John said, turning and leaping off the balcony at the top of the stairwell.

He activated flight mode, then hovered in the air above the fried robots. It seemed that when the lightning bolts had blasted into the floor on the level below, the electricity had charged the metallic surface, and the robot troops waiting behind had been shut down as well. They lay in crumpled heaps, twisted and contorted where they fell, with acrid smoke rising in the air from their smoking chassis.

Angling his body into the corridor ahead, using the anti-grav devices built into the vambraces and boots, he powered up the thruster on his back, and soared over the broken robots filling the corridor. There was another wide passageway outside the stairwell, and the last handful of bots here had been blasted as well. With a quick glance each way, he saw it was clear, and he landed with a metallic clang on the corridor floor. The girls landed lightly around him, broad smiles on their faces at having used flight-mode for the first time.

"Down there for the first group of survivors?" John asked Dana as she joined him.

She nodded eagerly, saying, "Yep! should be about forty metres away, on our left."

Raising their weapons once more, they set out at a careful jog, wanting to put more distance between them and their robot pursuers.

***

Irillith could feel a rising sense of dread as she surveyed the seemingly indefatigable horde of programs. They only had two firewalls left before they'd be buried under this cyber-onslaught, and she knew that with just hers and Faye's turret cannons they wouldn't be able to stop them. Her eyes widened as she just had a brainwave, and she released the turret weapon controls, then stepped out of the turret, and floated to the floor.

"What're you doing!" Faye exclaimed in fright, when Irillith's gun emplacement ceased firing.

Irillith ran over to Faye's tower, and called out to her, "Keep shooting! Don't stop, whatever happens!"

She heard the turret blazing away above her head, as the AI Sprite followed her instructions. Irillith slapped her hands against the turret wall, and as it checked her security clearance, she began to focus on creating new programs.

Faye let out a terrified squawk, and gasped, "They've broken through another one! We've only got one last firewall in place!"

"Keep shooting!" Irillith urged her tiny friend.

As the green light checked in front of her, she began hooking up the extra programs to the turret. The sound of firing intensified, and Faye gasped, "What's happening?!"