(Starspeak)

Moy was by far the most experienced Adept Nora had ever met. Nai was both talented and skilled; she’d been an invaluable teacher alongside Caleb in her brief months on Lakandt. It wasn’t that Nai was truly inexperienced. In fact, she was probably far more experienced than Moy was in his youth. But Moy remained more than four times Nai’s age. He’d lived so damn long, he had advice for more than just the abductees.

Nearly a third of the colony were Adept children—well above the average, so they must have come here specifically to learn from him. Moy’s skills as an Adept teacher were apparently the best kept secret in the system.

“He’s not a combat Adept,” Nora said. “But I’ve still learned more about Adeptry in the last couple days than the last year combined.”

“Do you even count as a combat Adept?” Dustin said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you fight.”

“Hey, if you think you can take me, I’m always ready to put you in your place.”

“No! No fighting in my colony,” Moy said, shuffling from machine to machine in the workshop. “The last time we had a fight, I kicked everyone out of here. Did all the day’s work myself.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very harsh consequence,” Dustin frowned.

“No, it’s brilliant,” Nora grinned. “The only reason anyone besides Moy works here is to feel like they’re contributing. Kicking them out probably made them feel guilty as hell.”

“That it did,” Moy nodded sagely.

It honestly said a lot about the colonists that everyone was so eager to pitch in. Moy’s robots really could delve into the mine on their own and process all the ore rather easily. Moy was being inclusive via teaching. Not just the Adept kids, but their parents too.

The past few days, Dustin, Nora, and Jacob had gotten a firsthand look at the work rotation the two-hundred person colony operated on. Everyone took turns in the pantry because most of the meals were communal—it was too much of a logistical headache to order food for everyone to cook their own meals. Other chore rotations included cleaning and maintenance that went beyond the machines Moy used in conjunction with his robots.

The tiny mining colony was coincidentally a similar size to the Mission back on Archo, and Dustin was positive Nora had taken notes on the organization to better run things back home.

Huh. When had the Mission become home?

Dustin wasn’t sure he liked that.

…Buuuttt…home on Earth had been pretty shitty. Maybe it wasn’t that surprising. He was a lot closer to his fellow abductees than any of his own family back home.

“Looks like you’re packing up?” Moy asked, reaching for a handbook. “You’ve got all my notes, right?”

Nora gestured to her own psionic device. “Got em right here.”

“You’re going to say thank you to psionic’s inventor, aren’t you?” Moy said. “I really can’t overstate it. Psionics gave my creations second life, I swear it. Reinvigorated me too. This place didn’t run nearly so smooth five years ago.”

“I will make sure Caleb knows he has a fan,” Nora said. “Or, more accurately, Dustin probably will. He’s got more regular contact with him than I do.”

“Just so long as he knows I and my whole colony owe him a favor,” Moy said.

“Oh. Speaking of Caleb, that reminds me of something,” Dustin said. “Because—I know this is crazy, but it would just be stupid if no one brought it up. And since it seems like no one else is going to say it…You didn’t have anything to do with our abductions or the AIs did you, Moy?”

“Dustin!” Nora and Jacob both objected.

“What?” he protested. “All our evidence points to a single Adept with a specialty in robotics and using Adeptry to create specialized computer hardware; tell me that doesn’t describe [Mister] Moy here almost perfectly?”

Nora and Jacob both hesitated at that.

The odds were infinitesimally low. And there was no rational reason to suspect Moy aside from…well, genre awareness.

But they were all unlucky enough to have been abducted by honest-to-god aliens. So that kind of logic wasn’t necessarily unconvincing to them.

They glanced nervously at Moy.

But the old Farnata only laughed.

“I’m flattered you think I could be so devious,” he said. “But I think you were absent for my discussion with Nora yesterday.”

“Moy’s like me,” Nora said. “His Adeptry’s got an unconventional limit; his creations’ lifespans can’t exceed twenty-one hours.”

Nora had an unconventional range limit that prevented her from creating anything further than an inch or two from her skin, but Dustin knew Adept oddities like that existed.

Moreover, if his Adeptry had been the model for the machines that likely produced ENVY’s drones, that limit would almost certainly carry over.

“You confirmed it?” he asked, perhaps a bit sheepishly.

“[Fuck off, Dustin,]” Nora said. “If Moy created our robotic enemies, [fuck], he’s earned the win.”

“Fair enough.”

“Well if you’re departing, at least let me walk with you to your shuttle,” Moy said. “Though it’s not like you’ll have any clearance conflicts, my word carries more than a little weight around here.”

But no sooner had the three of them ventured into the colony superstructure heading toward the landing pad…

“Oh, Moy. Good, you’re here. That was really fast…” the Farnata technician remarked. “I’m tracking it as best I can, but our scopes don’t get much exercise.”

“Wait, what do you mean?” Moy asked.

“The alert,” the tech said. “I paged you.”

“I was seeing our guests out,” Moy said. “You must have just missed me at the workshop. What’s the alert?”

“Meteoroid,” the tech replied. “At least, that what it started as. But it’s not burning up.”

“Well this rock doesn’t have much of an atmosphere outside,” Moy said. “That’s not too surprising.”

“At this velocity? It should be burning up. It’s not. So it has to something heat resistant or…”

“Or?” Dustin prompted.

“Or exotic.”

“I’m going to assume it’s trajectory is one we need to worry about?” Moy said.

“I wouldn’t bother you otherwise,” the tech said nervously.

“Estimate the impact site, please.” Moy frowned.

“Maybe a hundred meters past our air barrier? It won’t hit the colony directly, but we’re going to feel it land. It’ll kick up dust like mad too.”

“That can’t be a coincidence,” Nora said.

“Hey, [Mister] Moy…” Jacob said slowly. “Your cascade is big, right?”

“I can cover half the colony,” Moy confirmed. “I am currently, actually. It’s habit.”

“So you might not notice some small stuff if you weren’t looking for it,” Jacob said. “Think you could look around for anything like this?”

Jacob materialized a facsimile of the robot mosquito ENVY liked to use.

Moy took the hollow shell, his frown deepening.

“…No, nothing,” he said. “…But…there are four robots I didn’t create that look like…this.”

The old Farnata materialized a pillbug robot the size of an orange.

Nora took one glance at the bot and visibly shifted into crisis mode.

“Get everyone underground, now,” she said.

“Some of the children created them, surely,” Moy said.

“Mystery meteor coming directly here too?” Nora asked.

“Coincidence can happen,” Moy said.

“I’m not willing to take that chance,” she replied. “Those robots we talked about? I think we brought trouble to your door.”

·····

Madeline had never felt more fear.

The robots were utterly plain. Gunmetal grey frames coated in sterile white ceramic armor. Every motion they made was simultaneously stiff and fluid in a way that provoked the most animal part of her brain.

More than aliens, more than even Aaron’s automatons, these robots were the most unnatural things she’d ever witnessed.

And fuck did they have a lot of bullets!

It was shocking how much psychological pressure there was to retreat. The robots were making no attempt to flank them. All their energy was reserved for pumping as much lead as they could in one direction.

They were firing in sets of three, exhausting their magazines, and switching shifts with another robot.

Serral wasted no time.

Two of them raised their hands calmly, even with the bullets pelting against Madeline and Vez’s shields.

Serral instructed, laying out his battle plan.

The Ballet Blocking buildplate was named exclusively to try upsetting Caleb. He’d never done ballet, but when he’d described the basic theater concept of blocking, as well as spiking the stage, someone—Madeline couldn’t remember who—had blurted out that Caleb might have experience in a tutu.

As raucous as the joke was, Blocking was definitively the most useful buildplate for non-Adepts. It was a construct born out of Caleb’s attempts to replicate his radar. But the project had fizzled out past the spatial perception stage.

But that was still a very useful stage on its own, and with some refinement, the members of the Flotilla had turned it into a group positioning and timing coordination tool.

Serral could share a hasty mockup of their basement battlefield, allied positions, enemy lines of fire, and even shift details in real time.

Not twenty seconds after the robots first opened fire, the whole lot of them, Flotilla and Vorak alike had a united battle plan.

The two armory rak took their positions atop simple crates, letting them unexpectedly peek over top of the shields instead of the sides—where the bots were concentrating their covering fire.

Serral directed.

Every one of them followed their blocking to the letter.

Three Vorak donned armor and protective riot shields, exiting cover on one side of the shield. They instantly drew extra fire, with bullets slamming into their shields. Simultaneously, the two gunners popped up and fired at targets preselected via tactile cascade.

Of the six robots shooting at them, two of them had holes punched clean through their torsos. They dropped.

There was a split second where the robots’ suppressive fire would wane. One of the shifts was reduced to just one shooter.

Madeline followed her cue, darting out.

Compared to the first Vorak to exit cover, she wore far less armor. But she made up for it in speed.

In a long hallway like this, even robots couldn’t miss her. But she didn’t stay in the hallway long enough for them to adjust their fire.

She darted ten feet further down the hall, materializing a mechanized gauntlet on the way, and punching right through the first righthand door In the empty adjoining room, she beelined for the wall, smashing directly through that too.

Others in the Vorak squad were doing the same thing with the lefthand door behind them in the hallway.

They needed to spread out their approach. Just trying to push through the narrow halls was possible, but slow. The concentrated fire from the bots could be countered by materializing sequences of shields, leapfrogging their way forward.

But the robots were trying to buy time. Everything about their strategy seemed to beg for a retreat.

So it was imperative they push now, even straight into the fire.

Madeline smashed through another wall, breaking into another hallway intersecting the one the bots were shooting from.

Four bots left in the initial group, but more had shown up, firing through the walls of other adjoining hallways.

She had to move quick.

Still wearing her gauntlet, she slammed it into the closest robot, still shooting at Serral’s position behind the shields. The bot crumpled against the wall, and the other three deigned to address the threat. They brought their guns up, but two more of them were shot by the same gunners as before, and Madeline created a gauntlet around her other fist in the same motion as her punch.

Madeline could freely toy with the size of her gauntlets. She could even play fast and loose with exactly how they actually fit her hand and arm.

In this case, she tightly grasped the weapons pattern inside her Spellbook, letting the metal grow out from her forearm in the blink of an eye, her new gauntlet reached five, ten, fifteen feet past that of her real hand, punching forward.

The bot took all of that momentum at once, being blown through the wall and the next behind it.

she called, and Serral and Vez advance with the other Vorak.

Serral directed.

Vez wondered.

Madeline said.

Serral said.

Madeline said.

Vez replied.

Madeline gave her usual stiff nod, trying to ignore the blood pounding in her ears while they set off at a jog down the dark underground hall.

the Vorak—presumably Lieutenant Zhayne—prodded.

She could make them as big as refrigerators or as small as boxing gloves. The real trick was actually carrying them. Madeline was the only Adept in the Flotilla who’d stumbled across kinetic asymmetry without having it explained first.

Her creations’ asymmetry was in the weight.

Most of the time her gauntlets weighed just a few pounds, more like foam fists than metal mayhem mittens. But at the moment of impact, the exotic metal she made them from functionally increased in weight.

It let her whip her oversized weapons around like they weren’t so oversized and still hit with all the force of a freight train.

The drawback was impacts cut both ways, even with the asymmetry. The moment a bullet struck her gauntlet, it would increase in weight for the duration of the impact. Not a long time at all, but enough to slow her down. Especially with the bots’ rate of fire.

she answered.

Madeline said.

Their approach was less than inspired. Without any side rooms to cut through, Madeline led the charge straight forward. The bots guarding the elevator laid down every bullet they could, but Madeline hunkered behind her own mechanized gauntlets. Every impact weighed them down, but she still made quicker progress than if they had carefully leapfrogged themselves forward with barricades.

Vez and Madeline both caught the robots’ strange behavior. Instead of abandoning the elevator and doing a firing retreat, they didn’t budge an inch. They still didn’t retreat, even as Madeline and Vez drew within striking distance, supported by Zhanye.

Madeline crushed two in her fists, while her two allies both impaled their targets in pairs. Ground spikes from the Vorak, and a spear from Vez.

As the robot crumpled in her gauntlet, she dematerialized her weapon, pushing her cascade through the remains. Upon destruction, she felt parts of the robot’s internals crumble into nothing. Those were the exotic parts: the processors surely.

Madeline admitted.

Serral said.

He was right. This couldn’t be allowed to drag on.

Vez said.

Madeline said.

Zhayne agreed.

Madeline said.

Vez asked.

she replied.

the Vorak warned.

Madeline said, turning her attention to Serral. Their progress toward securing the stairwell was good.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

She could practically feel Serral mull it over.

“” Vez asked, muffled behind her air mask. “”

It was a freight elevator, and the mechanical grinding of gears confirmed it. Something was coming up.

One glance over the edge of the railing confirmed her suspicion. It wasn’t a squad of bots on the way up. It was one machine, armored in elegant yet simple eggshell armor, just like all the others. Only this one stood eight feet tall.

Serral said.

Maddie told her two allies.

There was little they could do besides hazard peeks over the edge of the elevator as Madeline knelt down, curling into a ball. Designs and blueprints flowed out of her mind, following the trails written into her Spellbook. Matter followed the blueprints, knitting itself into servos, conduits, and heavy metal plates.

It was a turtle’s race.

The elevator slowly moving upward while Madeline pieced together her amor around her body.

Vez, so much to her credit, did not make any anxious cries as the robot drew closer. Two years collaborating with humans had erased any loyalty Kemon’s old crew might have had for him. They were Caleb’s Flotilla now.

Start to finish, it took Madeline thirty seconds to weave power armor out of thought.

But Zhayne the Vorak was standing slack jawed by the time she was done.

Without another word, Madeline brought her armor to life, psionic control surfaces weaving into the electronic actuators for the limbs and joints. The armor gave gentle whirs as she stepped into the elevator’s shaft, dropping right down atop it.

she said.

·····

Nora exclaimed, ducking a hail of gunfire.

Dustin had to agree. Immediately after impact, the ‘meteor’ had spat out a couple dozen unknown hostiles that made a beeline for the colony.

They’d broken inside in seconds, greeting everyone not yet sheltering in the mine with a truly hideous sight.

Someone had painted the robot’s white armor plates with spatterings of neon green and orange. A few mean streaks of magenta mixed in here and there. All at random. As if that wasn’t weird enough, every single robot had a different face crudely painted onto their head analogue. They were misshapen, some of them seemingly modified at random to have mismatched limbs, no head at all, or all sorts of strange tools welded onto their bodies.

Worst of all was how they moved though. Like zombie monkeys, hunched over at odd angles, wobbling back and forth, unable to sit still for even a millisecond.

Dustin noted, materializing a riot shield, pistol, and armor.

Jacob agreed. He was forgoing weapons, but that was only because he had the augmentations to make Captain America jealous.

Nora was quickly putting what Moy had taught her to work, materializing black starfish on her body as quickly as she could. She was so range limited, each one had to be made wrapped around her arms or torso. But as soon as they existed, they leapt off her and began following the psionic instructions she’d written into their flesh.

Moy asked from below the colony.

Nora said.

Jacob apologized.

Dustin said.

Moy said.

Nora said.

Moy informed them.

Dustin traded a look with Jacob. Twenty-four robots had come out of the fake meteor. Just like there’d been twenty-four abductees to a ship. The number was something of a theme with their abductor.

Jacob took off, following Moy’s instructions and found their first target atop the dormitory building. A pang of envy went through Dustin watching his friend leap up the building in a single bound.

The gravity is light here, he assured himself. I could do that. Probably.

Instead of breaking the bot though, he just threw it over the edge, moving on to the next targets. Two. Three. Four more bots flew over the edge of the building, all before the first on hit the ground.

Behind his riot shield, Dustin aimed a futuristic pistol. His first crack at some truly exotic weaponry had been trying to make a laser or plasma gun. It hadn’t quite worked out, but this magma pistol was a good compromise on first attempt.

It spat out molten bullets, not just melting through the bots armor, but oozing slag into every nook and cranny they had. For every robot Jacob threw off the roof, Dustin shot it mid-air.

Nora ordered.

Vaulting and bouncing like a gymnast having a field day, Jacob did as instructed. Nora moved her starfish forward in concert, trying to sniff out the robots that dropped off Moy’s cascade. Gunfire could be heard in multiple corners of the town, and Nora frowned.

she noted.

Her starfish were made out of the same inky black flesh comprising her tendril trick, but the starfish were smaller. More vulnerable to gunfire.

Dustin suggested.

Nora agreed.

Just in time too, because the robots converged on their defenses. It was up to Dustin to shoot at every robot that entered their line of sight. Nora psionically directed her starfish in droves, trying to overwhelm the bots quantity with sheer quantity of her own.

A few starfish managed to reach the bots, tangling themselves among their limbs and immediately beginning to squeeze. Metal deformed and ceramic plates cracked in seconds.

Dustin really hadn’t seen Nora fight seriously. Starfish? Those things were more like boa constrictors.

Nora protected herself by cladding her arms in coiled tendrils thick enough to catch the stray bullets that found her. If a robot made too much progress through Dustin’s line of fire, Nora’s tendril shot out flinging the robot in the direction of the nearest solid wall.

Moy counted down.

Dustin said.

Moy instructed.

Jacob said.

Dustin couldn’t. He’d left the weapons to Halax too much.

Jacob leading the way again, the three of them exploded out from the mine entrance. Jacob manhandled the closest robot, forcing its gun toward its allies. Nora grabbed robots two at a time with tendrils on both arms, flinging them into waiting throngs of starfish. Dustin didn’t have anything so flashy. Instead, he just stayed as close as he could to his friends.

As if sensing blood in the water, the remaining dozen-and-change bots shifted their positions and coordinated their fire more tightly on Dustin’s shield. Multiple bullets were hitting it every second, and he could barely hold it steady with two arms, much less keep one free to keep firing.

Dustin shouted to them.

Nora and Jacob didn’t hesitate to follow his call.

They crashed into the concentrated positions of the robots, immediately diverting all but three of them from Dustin. But those three continued firing on him.

Dustin forced himself to keep a level head. With both hands, he could keep the shield steady, but the bots were erratic and staggering from side to side. If one of them moved even a few meters further out from behind the dormitory, it would have an angle to shoot Dustin in the side.

Brain firing on cylinders, Dustin reinforced his shield, adding to it. The shield grew a spike straight down, planting itself in the colony street.

He freed up his hands just in time to recreate his pistol and blast the bot flanking his position.

Being careful not to dematerialize the whole shield, Dustin dissolved a tiny gap, matching his pistol’s muzzle. He had to fire blind, but the unexpected bullets caught the robots off guard, making them pause their onslaught for just a second.

Dustin leaned out and shot a second robot.

Unfortunately, peeking out showed him that the third robot was trying to get clever. It had approached within arm’s reach of the shield. Dustin hadn’t heard it correctly because of the ear protection that every Adept knew to create for a fight.

The robot lurched forward before he could shoot it. Dustin had the same idea though, kicking at the robot’s gun. Exactly one second was enough to tell Dustin close range was a bad idea. These robots weren’t exactly durable. But they were still machines, stronger than an unaugmented Adept like Dustin.

He wrestled with the robot, trying to keep the muzzle of its gun pointed away from him—but also pointed away from Nora and Jacob, still busy with their own robotic foes.

Dustin was losing ground through. The mechanized limbs were stronger than his, and inch by inch, the gun turned toward him.

Behind the gun, the face painted onto the robot’s head was a jagged toothy grin.

Moy had given him the correct answer the day before when he’d explained about robotic engineering.

Machines were built to specialize. You wouldn’t bother building a hand for most robots. You’d build the gun right into the arm. Unlike Dustin, who could drop his pistol at pick it back up at will, the robot couldn’t abandon it’s machine pistol. The weapon was built into the frame of the arm.

It couldn’t swap the gun to another hand. Dustin was trying to control more of the machine’s body than he needed to. For longer too.

In flash, he twisted under the robot, getting his legs to pincer the robot’s shoulder. Two legs and one arm gave him enough leverage to hold the gun-arm in place…and one hand free to rematerialize his magma pistol for the third time.

One shot melted through the robot’s neck, molten metal oozing between the cracks in the bot’s armor.

The cracks in the painted face just made it creepier.

Moy informed him.

Dustin just lay on the ground panting with three dead robots next to him. He’d come within inches of dying. Aliens. Guns. Robots. It was insane!

He’d never felt more alive.

“” Dustin asked, seeing Nora approach unharmed.

She looked around, unsure whether or not she could jinx it.

“N O T Q U I T E”

The voice was deep and scratchy like something from the rustiest pit in hell, and it came out of every single robot that was still half intact.

Panels popped off the bots’ chests, revealing small screens with number emblazoned inside.

4…

3…

They all stood frozen. The destroyed robots were scattered everywhere across the tiny colony’s streets. There was nowhere they could run.

2…

1…

Dustin’s last thought before ‘zero’ was: at least the colonists are safe below ground.

Every single robot exploded. Instead of feeling a giant fireball though, Dustin just felt a blast of air knock him off his feet. Something filled his vision too. Goo? Slime?

His first indication they’d survived was a burst of psionic pressure from Nora.

“[Godamnfuckingkid’schoiceawardsbullshit!]” she screamed. If the robot’s designer had wanted to fit the bots with proper bombs, they would all be dead.

And all three of them knew it.

The bots collective kamikaze had not vaporized them all, but rather strewn paint and glitter across the colony along with the creepily painted scraps of armor. It was a slap in the face of victory. They'd defeated every enemy and still would have been helpless to win the war.

They were alive because of a whim.

“…This wasn’t ENVY,” Jacob guessed.

“Tons of property damage, poor taste, and no sense of humor? Yeah, this has SPARK written all over it,> Dustin agreed.

Nora reported.

the old Adept replied.

·····

Unlike most of her creations, Madeline’s power armor exhibited its full weight. A thousand pounds of exotic steel crashed down onto the elite robot, and the elevator platform buckled with the impact.

It dislodged from the wall entirely, and Madeline and the robot both were on a one-way trip to the bottom of the shaft.

The elite unit was far more responsive than the dime-a-dozen models, not just larger. As they fell, Madeline felt the robot reposition itself under her. On impact, the robot landed under her, but had oriented itself to kick Madeline out of the elevator shaft immediately.

She went careening into tall factory space with more machines. Lining several racks were dormant forms of the other robots, waiting to be loaded into a machine that must add the exotic components.

There was no time to inspect anything though. The elite robot was fast. If Madeline had been caught without her armor, it would have impaled her in the first move.

A pointed weapon somewhere between a sword and a lance was built into one of its arms, while the other one seemed dedicated to a shield…except those were definitely muzzles in that shield.

A gun-shield.

The lance was the bigger threat though. The elite robot closed the distance in the blink of an eye, trying to stab through Madeline’s armor.

She ducked a shoulder into the blow, ramming the bot’s attack off course, but the lance still left a deep gouge in her armor’s pauldron.

It had been two years since Jordan defeated Madeline by targeting the armor’s psionic controls. The option wasn’t available to the bot, and even if it could have, a lot of work had gone into the design in the meantime.

Madeline exposed gun barrels in her mech’s wrist, firing without hesitation. Exotic buckshot peppered the bot. Its first response was to evade, sliding laterally far quicker than any living thing could.

The bot’s pointed legs ended in…ball bearing wheels? Not feet. They looked to be an exotic material of some kind. Whatever the case, the elite unit moved like lighting.

A scattergun had been the right choice. Individually aimed rounds would have missed far too much as Madeline swung her gun to follow.

When her enemy recognized she could keep a bead, it resorted to its shield. It was sturdy enough to withstand the wrist shotguns and give the robot an opportunity to return fire.

Heavy blasts barked out of the shield’s twin muzzles. Cascading her own armor revealed that two spikes had speared right through the armor’s outer layer. One of them was just a few inches from Madeline’s head…

Possibilities went through Madeline’s head in a flash. The spear had exotic properties capable of getting through her armor, but she was strong enough to force the robot back…

It was faster, but she was stronger.

She needed to bait in close. But that meant convincing it that a ranged battle was in her favor.

That wasn’t hard. If the elite robot wanted a shootout behind that shield, Madeline would just switch to a bigger caliber.

She dissolved the shotgun shells in the wrist gun, replacing them with armor-piercing slugs—plus some extra exotic kick.

Trading fire with the gun-shield, Madeline came out ahead.

It sank five more spikes into her armor, but all at noncritical points. She obliterated the shield completely in the same number of shots, splattering the bot with a corrosive acid when the slugs broke apart.

Yeah, that’s right. No digging in your heels. You’re going to have to float like a butterfly if you want to sting like a bee.

The bot slid laterally again, hugging the ground despite the low gravity. It zipped behind her in a split second. Her armor was designed to respond every bit as quickly as her own body, and she ducked out of the lance’s way.

Not enough to escape a long scratch going up to her head unit.

Madeline fired more slugs, knowing they would miss. The robot darted backward again, weaving back and forth in zig-zags.

When it moves ultra-fast like that, it can only go in straight lines, Madeline noted. That made sense. Even in low-G, inertia still had to be overcome.

In that case…

There was a trap to be made.

Madeline engaged the guns in both her wrists, firing en masse at the elite robot.

It sped up, trying to confuse her as she turned and turned and turned again to fire at it. Madeline needed to give it an opening, but she needed something big to sell it.

Overclocking her firerate, Madeline, swept her arms inward from both sides, trying to catch the robot in the middle. Predictably, it leapt upward into the air.

It was now or never for her big move.

Just like how they named Ballet to needle Caleb, the abductees had taken to dubbing Madeline’s armor ‘the Cyclops’ for its most potent offensive tool.

The head unit of the armor was not a head. Madeline’s head didn’t go inside it, and none of the armor’s sensory machinery or processing hardware was inside the skull either.

No, inside the head unit was a two liter supply of pressurized exotic plasma, a system to really juice up the energy, and a nozzle to aim it all. Theoretically, she could expand the two-liter supply, but that was still enough to fire the weapon for twenty continuous seconds.

With the robot unable to maneuver midair, the single round ‘eye’ of her armor glowed for a split second before unleashing a white hot plasma beam.

The elite unit could, in fact, maneuver midair.

Some kind of jet stabilizer fired from its shoulders, and the bot propelled itself back down to the ground, zipping across the floor before Madeline could swing her beam to follow it.

It hadn’t shown its top speed before, and now the robot accelerated again, coming in at an even lower angle than before. Madeline had just enough time to note her suspicion being confirmed before her enemy drove its arm into the armor’s gap, right beneath the chest plate and head-beam unit.

The hydraulic spike in the robot’s arm shot forward, spearing Madeline’s armor right through the heart.

Gotcha.

Rather significantly, it didn’t stab through Madeline’s heart.

She wasn’t upright inside the armor. Her limbs didn’t fit into the armor’s at all. The proportions were all wrong, and that design would just lower the overall integrity.

No, Madeline was curled into a ball inside her armor, just above the hips. Almost like the armor was pregnant with her inside. The nine feet of mechanized muscle surrounding her completely disguised her real position, and the robot had fallen for it completely, stabbing more than a foot above her.

The robot froze for a split second when Madeline’s armor continued moving, unable to process. One metal giant threw its arms around the other in a hug, locking into place while Madeline dematerialized the back half of her armor.

Rolling out of her enemy’s range, she was safe. Her own inoperable armor weighed the robot down, locking it in place.

Two can play at that game, she thought and materialized her mech sword via Spellbook.

That exotic lance the robot has impaled her armor with was nasty metal. She wasn’t sure exactly how it cut through solids like that, but she could approximate a similar effect in her own sword’s metal.

Her enemy was attempting to extricate itself from the armor’s clutch, but unlike most of her creations’ asymmetry, the armor defaulted to ‘heavy’. Madeline had been sure to dematerialize the power supply when she exited too, so the armor truly was dead weight now.

The robot scrambled beneath the burden, but even in the reduced gravity, it couldn’t generate enough force to lift it.

The bot was fast; it could repeatedly exert huge forces for split second intervals to move itself around, but not sustained lifting force.

Madeline aimed her sword carefully, looking to cut clean through the bot in one stroke.

There was one more trick in store for her, but she saw it coming.

She swung her massive blade, and the exact moment she was committed to the motion, the bot shifted beneath the armor, trying to protect itself with her own armor’s carcass.

Madeline dematerialized the rest of her armor when her sword was an inch away.

With nothing to shield her blow with and no time to dodge, the robot was helpless as Madeline cut it clean in half, shoulder to hip.

The two halves toppled over, lifeless. But Madeline didn’t relax. Instead, she cascaded the now lifeless machine, finding…

The exotic processor. It was already dissolving back into nothing, recouped by the production machine. If there was another frame to insert the fresh processor into, they might be seconds away from having to fight another one of the specialized robots.

she warned.

he replied.

he said.

she replied, sinking to the ground.

Damn right she had.

Serral said honestly.

Serral advised.

Madeline said.

Madeline said.

Serral said.

Trying to keep this robot factory a secret, tricking the Vorak team into staying put so they could be snuffed out conveniently, fighting tooth and nail to keep any detail about this place from being discovered?