Coven's Rebellion Chapter 13 (Patreon)

Rosa

Amelia and I leapt from rooftop to rooftop, traversing greater Vienna like prowling tigers. In the distance and lit by periodic flashes of light, I could see an Austrian Ferdinand heavy mech. By the standards of historically deployed mechs, it was a small and dainty thing. Anyone who underestimated it based on such an assumption would be quickly and overwhelmingly taught the error of their ways.

Its main chassis was a bulky broadhead shape that sprouted two thick legs out the bottom and two gimballed heavy railgun turrets from the sides. The centre held its main armament, a cutting edge electron beam weapon that awed even the most intelligent SAI I knew.

Keeping an eye on it, I slid to a halt on top of a 2060’s revivalist art deco building and checked the path of the UN drop ship we were tracking. The airborne vehicle had landed not long ago, and we were now following a digital trail created by the virtual holographic software of our digital frames, not to be confused with our physical frames—the robots we currently piloted.

“Two blocks,” Amelia said as she slid in to join me, her robotic feet throwing gravel in all directions.

“Yes,” I nodded absently, still watching the large mech.

The huge machine stopped its thumping march towards the Italian combatants and heaved, splitting its entire rearward face to reveal what many would argue was a much more potent weapon than the electron beam—A swarm of agile Near Surface Attack Drones, or as most people called them N-SADs. It was swarms like those that’d turned the tide in the war against the American Republic and made the Ferdinand’s predecessors obsolete.

Actually, the Ferdinand itself was a bit of an outlier when it came to the world’s current generation of heavy mechs. Where most followed the swarm carrier doctrine that’d been so effective all those decades ago, the Austrians were still clinging to the idea that a titanic four storey tall warmachine could turn the tide of a battle with its obscenely large guns.

Whatever had caused it to disgorge its payload of drones had to be a tough customer, because it appeared the crew had decided to fire one of the rumoured to be very limited shots of its electron beam cannon. The weapon’s heat vents glowed an angry red as it prepared to fire, and with a sudden flash of light, the very atmosphere burned as a solid wall of electrons slammed into it. For a brief instant, the air along the flight path of those highly energetic particles was hotter than anything else on Earth that wasn’t within the containment chamber of a fusion reactor. At the other end of the beam, an explosion tore its way into the sky, smoke billowing up to touch the clouds.

“Fucking hell,” Amelia muttered, her hand flitting over to rest on my arm. “I am so glad I’m not in the army anymore. I hope every poor infantry grunt on both sides is in armour, because otherwise they probably all just got cooked by the damned air.”

“The temperature of the air along the path of the beam is too brief to cause anything more than a few degrees of heat in the surrounding battlespace,” I said, bringing up my thermal camera. As I’d suspected, the actual total thermal energy inflicted on the atmosphere was too little to nudge the dial in any significant manner.

“Enough rubbernecking, you two,” Desmonia’s voice interrupted over the communications channel shared between just the three of us. “Go catch those UN special operators.”

Squashing a sigh that threatened to be verbalised by the advanced comms software we used, I took off at a run again. Pistons in my legs slammed out to their maximum extent and I flew upwards into the sky.

My landing atop the next roof caused my legs to compress like a mechanical attempt to simulate the movement of jelly. Everything flexed, twisted, or retracted in ways that absorbed the impact and bounced me back to a running position. It was so smooth I made a mental note to commend the designers for their exceptional work.

Approaching the area where the UN drop ship landed, Amelia and I spread out slightly. Where was it—

“I see the ship,” my girlfriend said, placing a marker down so I could see too. “Or at least, I see its fuzz field.”

“Fuzz field?” I asked, then shrugged when I realised it was a perfectly apt description of the advanced electronic countermeasures being deployed by them.

“It's what we called the Modular Digital Sensor Obfuscation Hardware and Software Package, because nobody has time to say, MDSOHSP,” she explained with a wry grin. “We had a saying in the military—’If the desk jockeys were in charge of making the wheels on our vehicles, they'd make ‘em square and us grunts would have to shave the edges off til they were round.’ It was talking about all the stupid—”

“—Names and procedures and how you shortened them for efficiency?” I finished the sentence for her.

“Exactly” she said, beaming at me—as much as her combat frame could ‘beam’ anyway. She tapped the side of her head. “Same brain cell. Uh… where were we?”

“Deciding how to proceed with regards to these UN spec ops people,” I said, gesturing to the ‘fuzz field’ with a loving look at Amelia. She was so distractible and it was adorable.

“Right, right,” she nodded absently, and a quick glance at our shared camera feeds revealed she was zooming in on the building our targets had landed on.

It was a squat two storey tall rectangle of concrete with a few small tinted windows. It was the epitome of a nondescript small scale industrial warehouse, complete with oversized HVAC units perched on its roof. Idly, I noted the building must be at least somewhat in use, because barely visible, heat waves shimmered next to one of the HVAC vents. All in all, it looked like hundreds of thousands of similar boring industrial buildings around the world.

Betraying that otherwise excellently innocuous cover was the subtle but highly advanced security system that, unlike much of the wider area, still showed signs of drawing power.

Curiously though, it also showed signs of neglect. Trash blown in by the wind had gathered into a drift that partially blocked a door, and there were several exterior lights that were no longer functional for whatever reason. There was also a rather prominent and provocative piece of graffiti that read, ‘The boot might change, but the foot inside it is the same,’ along with a stylised image of a boot crushing someone's head into pavement.

“Rosa… can you do your scary grey goo thing on one of those cameras?” Desmonia said suddenly, making me jump. “I think gaining access to the on-site network might let us know what they're up to here.”

Looking at the nearest camera, a tiny thing with no wires visible and a tiny armature to allow it to rotate, I was dubious.

“Okay, but I'm not sure where I would plug in,” I said, but shrugged and stepped up onto the lip of the roof.

Dropping down, I allowed my suspension to silently absorb the impact, and after a quick check on multiple imaging modes, I bolted across the dilapidated concrete lot. I made it without tripping any alarms I could see or hear, and looked up at the tiny security camera. It was no bigger than the thumb on my robot frame’s hand and unlike the run-down exterior of the building, it appeared to be a robust little unit.

I still couldn't see any way for me to jack in, but maybe I just had to get my goo around it? No sense waiting, I suppose.

Unhooking from the frame on a software level, I carefully extracted my nanite sludge from the port that I'd used to connect and slithered out. When I was sure I had all of myself, I took a metaphorical breath and aerosolized.

Being a cloud was much more of a strain on the little microscopic power cells within my nanites, so I kept the flight linear and brief. In moments, I was wrapped around the camera and seeking entry into its systems.

Good god, but judging by the build quality of this thing, it had to have been expensive. Even on the scale of my nanites it was all but airtight. I only had one idea to gain entry after my examination. Forming a section of myself into a tiny blade, I sawed at the tough kevlar-wrapped cable that was inside the wall mount. With physical access to the power and fibre optic data lines, I was finally in.

“Building a network tunnel for you now,” I informed Desmonia.

“Excellent work, Rosa!” She exclaimed happily. “I see it! Oh, shit.”

Alarmed by her outburst, I prepared to back out. “”Oh shit?”

“This is a black site research lab! We're only through the first layer of defences, but already I can tell there's  some juicy stuff here—” she said, only to cut out with a growl. “They're purging it! They must be sanitising the base.”

In a concise tone, I asked, “Do you want me to brute force it?”

“Yes, but be careful. The bandwidth through the camera connection is severely limited,” she said.

I could work with that. If there was one thing my nanites could do well, it was squeeze into tight spaces.

All it took to enter my personal interpretation of cyberspace was a thought.

Darkness enveloped me, and I was confused for a moment until a lightning fast stream of bright lights rocketed past me. I followed, rushing after them, but no matter what I did, they kept accelerating away.

It didn't matter however, because we arrived at a monolithic cube that looked almost like a huge central train station. Inside, the motes of light I'd been chasing were transformed into a stream of data I could recognise. It was a frame from the camera, showing the dark warehouse lot and my frame standing unmoving against the wall. We'd better move fast. I couldn't imagine the UN spec ops crew missing my presence.

Following the frame further into the station, I passed locked door after locked door. Each had a window that allowed me to see a myriad of branching paths beyond them.

All of a sudden, a hoard of data stampeded out of one such door and rushed past towards the platform. Watching, I received glimpses of the information within the data. Test subject designations, along with clinical information focused around the nervous system.

The data was in the process of converting into motes of light when something hit me. Physically.

Consciousness seized. Pain flared. I drifted.

“Rosa!”

The voice snapped me back to consciousness like a bullet to the gut. What… what just happened?

Diagnostic reports flooded in from my nanites seconds after they reconvened my consciousness, and I saw with alarm that fourteen percent of my nanite mass had just been fried. Thankfully, it was the nanites that'd been creating the bridge to the camera, and not the core bots that housed me.

Wobbling like a newborn foal, I slithered across the ground and up the leg of my combat frame while taking stock. The camera was blackened and still wisping magic smoke— wait, the fuckers blew the circuit!

No wonder I was hurting!

Which means… I asked my nanites for a play-by-play of events, and once again found myself in awe of my new existence. As the surge flooded down the wire, my bots reacted with awe inspiring speed. Those that were making physical contact with the power wire were severed from the whole and promptly slagged themselves. Their heroic sacrifice created enough resistance that the wave-front of electricity was blunted. Beyond them, the next layer bunched together and drained their power cells, absorbing a chunk of the energy before they too were fried, but by then it was enough to save the rest of me.

In the future, I think I might only connect to the data line.

I was just reconnecting with my combat frame when Amelia landed beside me, large gun resting casually on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “It's time for us to leave, though.”