by M. D. Cooper
Chase said as the team took up positions on either side of the AHC’s entrance.
Fred chuckled.
* * * * *
No one spoke for a minute, and then Niki announced,
Irek made a strange groan-like sound over the Link.
the AI laughed.
Rika accepted the connections Niki had passed, and tapped into scan first, seeing the Fury Lance pulling away with her two cruisers accompanying it. The cruisers were taking some fire from enemy ships, but most was directed at the Fury Lance.
Dozens of vessels were firing on the ‘Lance, its stasis shields flaring brightly as beams and kinetics smashed particles against the impenetrable shield.
She tapped the comms and listened in on the Niets, and then the Seppies, surprised to hear them working together.
Well, that was always a possibility, Rika thought before making a connection to the Fury Lance.
Rika closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. OK…this is not going as well as I’d hoped. She took a moment to consider her options before replying.
The realization that she could lose this engagement hit her full on. What were they doing trying to take a system with a handful of ships?
Still…at the heart of it, this is Tanis’s plan. The Admiral wouldn’t have sent us out here to die.
The thought reassured Rika, and she tapped into the station’s comm systems. Once in, she hopped onto the Nietzschean battle network and found her way to the sixty ships her Marauder teams were breaching. The first ship she reached out to was the one Leslie’s team had boarded.
Rika couldn’t help but laugh at the confusion in Leslie’s voice.
Niki responded after a moment.
Rika felt a twinge of worry at her ability to breach the Nietzschean comm relay. A part of her wondered if the things Finaeus had done to her brain had created some sort of back channel between herself and Niki. Except the thing she’d done wasn’t something Niki had tried.
Am I accessing the same general data pool as Niki? She’d know if that was the case… Even an L0 human brain could tell the difference between organic memories and external data storage.
Right?
She pushed it from her mind as best she could and reached out to more and more of the Marauder teams until she’d brought all sixty of them together.
The data flow turned out to be more than she could manage—what, with her and Niki both sharing the same hard-Link and routing through Irek.
Rika suddenly realized she was staring right at a stack of comm NSAI nodes. She remembered one of the options for her right arm was an auxiliary data connector. After flipping through several configuration options, she found it, and the ‘skin’ on her right pinky slid back, and a second hard-Link socket appeared.
She reached out to the closest comm NSAI and plugged into one of its ports.
Rika couldn’t help but laugh as a Nietzschean ship captain called down to his engineering
room, and got a mech corporal instead.
Niki didn’t respond for a moment, then asked,
Niki laughed.
Rika finally found Chase aboard the Peerless. He was breaching the auxiliary helm control room, but he’d lost communication with Alison.
She linked them back up, routing their comms through a waste processing system aboard the dreadnought.
Rika pulled back from direct conversation with her teams and looked at the battlespace through the eyes of the station’s sensors and scan analysis NSAIs.
The Marauders now had full control of forty of the ships they’d breached, and the other twenty would be in their control, or disabled, within minutes.
She considered the remaining forty Nietzschean-controlled ships that had pulled away from the station. Niki was holding off firing on them because of their proximity to Marauder-controlled vessels, using the station’s rails to instead keep the ships further out on the move, restricting their firing solutions.
Rika wondered if she could use her abilities to breach the comms on the Nietzschean-controlled ships as well. Even if it was nothing more than a distraction, it could prove useful.
The Niets still hadn’t turned off their connections to the station nets, so she connected to their networks with ease, finding the same flawed relays and switching their hashing algorithms.
Now she had access to all their attempted communications, and was able to block anything she didn’t want to get through.
Rika wasn’t sure how, but she could tell that the AI still seemed disoriented after having new parts of his mind opened up. Ironically, she knew that the same sort of thing was happening to her, but in her case, it wasn’t disorienting at all.
It was exhilarating.
Access codes and root tokens hit Rika’s mind, and she connected to the operations center’s systems with those credentials.
Rika found the operation center’s nodes and began to feed them new information directly, throwing the room into chaos. From the messages being sent, she realized that Admiral Fels was present in the room.
She appropriated his public tokens and masqueraded as him, issuing new orders to the ships, directing them into sub-optimal vectors. Some didn’t take the partially authenticated commands, but many did.
Referencing scan data that was flowing into her mind, Rika commanded the bulk of the Nietzschean ships to fire on the ‘Lance, saving the Republic from further abuse.
Red indicators began to appear on the edges of scan as the Nietzschean ships at other stations began to undock, moving toward the battlespace surrounding Ursa Station.
Rika attempted to connect to those ships, but without pre-existing internal access, she was unable to make a privileged connection.
Niki laughed.
Moments later, a sound reached Rika’s ears, and the realization that she had a body—and that it was in a rather vulnerable physical location—flooded back into her mind.
She opened her eyes and pulled feeds from her drones. Two lightly armored Niets were trying to get past the locked-up guards at the node-chamber’s entrance.
Rika was surprised Niki hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the AI had been too focused on running the station’s defensive emplacements.
PUPPETS
STELLAR DATE: 09.20.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: SAI Node Chamber 1A
REGION: Ursa Station, Sepe System (Independent)
Rika clenched her jaw as she slipped her consciousness into the armor of the Nietzschean soldier on the right side of the node chamber’s entrance. She felt out his weapons systems, the powered limb controls, the sensors, and optics.
Crude, even compared to my Genevian mech systems. And feels like it may as well be made of stone, compared to the ISF’s tech.
She shifted her vision to the feeds from the armor, and saw that in front of her stood two Nietzschean soldiers, both in light armor. They were yelling at the frozen figures, trying to get them to move and allow access into the node chamber.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” one of the Niets was screaming while pushing at the soldier Rika had taken control of.
She was tangentially aware of the fact that the man trapped inside the armor was freaking out. He was desperately trying to move the armor, to reach out on comms, or to get it to open up and release him.
Rika felt a small pang of compassion, and triggered the armor’s sedation systems. She informed it th
at the soldier was grievously wounded and needed to be put into a medical coma.
The armor obliged, and a few seconds later, the man inside was out cold.
Not wasting any more time, Rika lifted the railgun her auxiliary body was holding, and fired it on the closest enemy—the yelling man—and cut his body in half. Then she fired on the other Niet, killing him without a second thought.
Half the soldiers in the adjacent corridors had been watching the events at the entrance to the node chamber unfold, and within seconds, they were firing on Rika. Though her soldier had the heaviest armor of any deployed nearby, the odds said that the Niets would cut him down before long.
She considered the other locked-up soldier in the entrance.
In for a chit, in for a credit, she thought, and reached into his armor, as well.
It felt like she was splitting her mind in half, and the first soldier faltered for a moment, taking a beam round from a Niet down the passage to the right. She recovered and sprayed HE rounds from her chaingun in that direction.
OK, Rika, just like you have two arms. Right and left. Their limbs are your fingers. You can do this.
She dispatched a message to a group of Nietzschean ships, ordering them to take up a position further from Ursa Station. It wouldn’t make any sense yet, but when the Seppies got her new messages, it would look like the Niets were going to attack them.
While ensuring the ships followed her orders—appearing to come from Admiral Fels, on the station—she moved her puppet soldiers forward, allowing Irek to close the node chamber’s door behind them.
She unleashed the full fury of the Nietzscheans’ weaponry on the enemies, praying it would be enough to hold them at bay until the Marauders’ work was done.
One of her soldiers took a shot in the leg that blew out the armor’s knee actuators, and then the other’s railgun took a hit that bent the barrel.
