Coven's Rebellion Chapter 30

Fluff Link. Sorry for the wait time!

Rosa

My nanites acted to save me without any prompting — unplugging from the connection ports they were using to interface with the android body. All sensory input I was receiving vanished in a flash. Even as the disorientation of such an abrupt change in self-perspective washed over me, one question began demanding an answer.

How did that thing come from the FTLN, when my body didn't even contain a node anymore? Perhaps it rode in through the information glass in my nanites? They disputed that theory, though, and instead signaled that the intrusion attempt had come from a nearby wireless connection. Where was a— ah, the connection from the FTLN interface.

I needed help, and I needed to warn the others.

“R.A.I.D.S is here. It has control of the body I was piloting,” I sent to the team.

“Not control,” Rusti said tersely over comms. “You’re just locked out. I’m doing something about it.”

Experimentally, I asked my nanites for a view outside of the body. Instantly, my simulated optic nerves began receiving data, and my sense of sight returned. It was disorienting, and if I could’ve vomited, I would have. Images and colours swam and spun into focus, until I gained a fish-eye view from the hand that my nanites still coated.

Rusti was knelt beside me, attempting to keep their body behind a desk that was only just tall enough for the job. A wire trailed from a slot in their wrist to the body I was piloting, and their eyes were glazed over. Bullets zipped past us, spraying fragments of concrete and plastic everywhere as our enemies attempted to stop whatever was happening.

I was lucky. The hulking form of a disabled enemy robot was keeping my body from being shredded by the incoming fire. I was actually in a better position than Rusti.

One bullet hit the very edge of the desk, right in front of their face, and they flinched, almost pulling the wire loose before they were finished.

“Fuck! Really missing my usual body right now,” they muttered. “This big, hairy thing is too much of a target. The novelty has thoroughly worn off.”

They weren’t wrong. If I had to use that body to walk all the way from the river to this facility, I probably would’ve ejected and attempted the trek in goo-mode.

“Got it!” they exclaimed pulling the wire out of my body. “Okay, you can reconnect. I purged R.A.I.D.S from the body. Also, I bought us a little time, even if… uh…”

I didn’t hesitate, trusting that they knew what they were talking about, and instructed my nanites to reconnect with the android body. It took a second or two until I regained control, and in that time, I asked, “What did you do?”

“So… you know how in that one monster movie, the guy says ‘let them fight’?” Rusti asked, their voice rising an octave like they might not be quite so confident in their idea. “Well… it looks like each of the digital murder-horrors are intelligent enough to trigger a response in the other. Soooo… I just sorta set the AR one free. The UN R.A.I.D.S was giving us some serious trouble, and since it was using our main node interface to invade the local facility, I kinda had to do something before it gobbled all these people up.”

My eyes grew rounder and larger with every word they spoke, until I was utterly certain they would be ejected from my synthetic skull. “You did what?”

From my position on the ground, their grin was the first thing I saw. They raised an eyebrow. “You heard me.”

Their antics were frequently amusing, and I could see how one might spin the current situation as humorous. However, I was still thinking of all the poor people in the nearby torture chamber, so the best I could manage in response was a nod. Rusti's smile fell, and they grimaced as another bullet glanced off the desk.

“Get moving,” Ame ordered, tone clipped as she rushed past me during a lull in the gunfire. “Battery is close to depleted again.”

She was right. Faster than any normal human could hope to move, I rolled sideways until I was safely behind a desk opposite Rusti. When I was vaguely safe, I clambered into a kneeling position and looked for my girlfriend just as she disappeared into the battery room.

She reemerged a moment later with a battery, but rather than rush to plug it in, she threw the delicate cylinder towards me. Again, reacting with inhuman speed, I caught the cell easily. With it safely tucked under my arm, I bolted for the server room. Bullets stitched across the now-battered metal panel beside me, while I barely kept ahead of them. How I didn’t get shot, I wasn’t sure.

Through the chaos, I was vaguely aware that May was speaking. “...getting there. Hang in there, people.”

Thankfully, I made it to the battery station right as the power was about to run down to zero percent. I tried to fumble the old one out while keeping my attention pointed out the door. I was glad I had, because I was just twisting the new power cell into place when another set of heavily armoured combat robots came charging through the main entrance.

Instinct took over, and I lunged back out of the door with a chain-blade already flying from my fingers. A momentary burst of fear ran through me when I remembered that my nanites couldn’t take much more abuse. This was going to be very unpleasant.

The blade landed with a level of accuracy that I might have been proud of under different circumstances. The beetle-like combat robots had a lot of armoured plates covering them, many of which could be moved to react to incoming threats. With Ame hitting my target from directly in front of it, the bot had shifted several plates forward, giving me an opportunity as I attacked from the side. My heavy nanite-blade slipped between two plates at its waist and severed some vital piece of internal equipment. Every moving part below that point fell limp, and the robot toppled forward to hit the floor with a loud crash.

Pain washed over me in an unrelenting wave that brought me to my knees. Instinctively, I clutched at my head, gasping while vague, hallucinatory shapes danced behind my mechanical eyelids. Except, they weren’t even behind my eyelids — it was the optical connection in my simulated consciousness that was experiencing difficulties.

The pain and visual chaos was a message. My nanites couldn’t take any more punishment. I needed to be very careful.

“Rosa!”

Amelia’s voice reached me with an alarming level of clarity, given my present condition, and I looked up… right into the incoming blade of an American Republic combat robot. There was a horrific squelching crunch, and my vision cut out. Warning lights began to flare in my vision as a diagnostic heads-up-display awakened to tell me about the damage to my android body. It was… horrifying, in a fashion that was mostly intellectual. If I had been a flesh-and-blood human, the carnage would’ve meant instant death.

Thankfully, I was not a flesh-and-blood human. Sure, the android body was headless, leaving me abruptly without sight or sound, but I wasn’t out of the fight. Lightning-quick, I dodged to the side, avoiding an inevitable and predictable follow-through from the heavy combat robot, then ducked and reached out a hand.

Cold sensation over my fingertips told me I had found the armour of the robot, and using that contact, I danced to the side again. The robots were fast and devastatingly strong, but they attacked relentlessly, and that injected a rhythm to their movements. Feeling that rhythm, I used it, dodging two more attacks. As the last attack concluded, I felt an armoured plate shift out of the way, possibly in an attempt to block incoming fire from one of my allies.

Excellent.

My fist slammed through the gap, forcing other armoured plates out of the way so that the gap was wide enough for my arm. When my fingers arrived at something that felt important, I grabbed hold of it and pulled.

The violent act flared something within me — a satisfaction. This robot’s masters had done awful things to the people we were trying to save. Beyond the empathetic horror I felt on their behalf, I found another emotion beginning to coalesce. Anger. Righteous, burning anger.

An relatively soft impact to my body told me that the robot was slumping, having lost power. Whatever component I’d removed must’ve been important. Hold on. I was missing some rather important components. Maybe I should just… take the parts I needed?

With a mental shrug, I reached up to where its sensory cluster sat behind a clear sapphire glass plate. It wouldn’t be pretty, but right now I needed function, not aesthetics.

Questing fingers found purchase, and I roughly extracted the sensors, along with their boxy armoured housing, then shoved it into the stump of my neck. My nanites, as versatile and intelligent as ever, made the connection and suddenly, I could see once more.

Chaos filled my ocular and auditory sensors, and as my awareness of the situation returned, I almost wished it hadn’t. At least sixteen combat robots were shoving their way over or through what was left of the lab, attempting to kill my comrades. Then, to make matters that much more desperate, there was a second battle raging beyond the digital veil. The UN’s younger, more advanced R.A.I.D.S machine was slowly but methodically taking apart its crude AR counterpart. The situation was desperate, and unless something changed, we would be overrun within seconds.

“We need just a bit more time, team,” Rusti called. “If anyone has a crazy hero-moment sitting in their back pocket until shit gets desperate, it’s now or never!”

“I am trying— God, fucking… fuck this thing!” Ame exploded with frustration.

The automatic rifle she’d been using flew through the air to bounce harmlessly off a combat robot that was attempting to cut her in half. For a singular, shocked moment, I thought she was giving up. I thought she’d thrown her rifle at the enemy in some last, futile gesture.

I should’ve had more faith in my girlfriend.

Throughout our infiltration of the facility, Ame had obstinately refused to discard the unwieldy anti-materiel rifle that she had slung over her back. Now, she twisted, spinning the huge weapon around her torso like some sort of oddly-shaped hoola-hoop. In that same motion, she kicked out, shoving an advancing enemy robot out of the way… allowing just enough space for the muzzle of the oversized rifle to swing into place.

Boom. Even from across the room, when she fired that weapon it felt like my android body had temporarily gained a beating heart. Shrapnel erupted from the back of her target, spraying hot chunks of metal everywhere.

With calm efficiency, she shifted from one robot to the next, punching ragged holes through their armour and innards. She fired five bullets, but those five were very specifically placed. The first one went through two robots, killing the first one instantly, and smashing the sensor cluster of the second. Her next bullets destroyed three robots near the entrance, creating a road block that temporarily halted the flood of homicidal machinery. Her final round was targeted across the room, at the bot nearest me. It entered through its armpit, and either Ame was ramping up her perception of time, or she got lucky, because her bullet hit a battery pack. The robot’s chest detonated, but the explosion was moderately contained by its armour, redirecting the shockwave and gouting flame back to destroy even more of its internal components.

“Reloading,” she said with calm urgency, fumbling for another magazine while keeping one eye on the tide of heavy robots.

Despite the temporary road block that Ame had created, there were still enemies inside the room, and they had no intention of letting her complete that reload.

Desperately, I hurled myself across the room, picking up one of the blades from a fallen bot as I passed it. My nanites might not enjoy being fashioned into a crude cutting tool, but perhaps they could help me swing this one around.

The artificial muscles in my arm strained as I launched the blade towards the robot closest to Ame. It glanced off the armour of the hulking robot with a loud clang, then raced back towards me, pulled by my nanite chains.

Using the captured blade to take the hit in the place of my nanites worked perfectly. Now, I could fight. I spun, whirling around to bring my weapon scything in towards another bot. Ame completed her reload, and soon, to our surprise, the room was momentarily free of enemies.

“Repositioning to the back,” Ame said. “Rosa, keep them away from me. Rusti, keep protecting us from those R.A.I.D.S fuckers. We’ve got this people, we can resist long enough to—”

We all saw it. Through the entryway, out in the lobby, another elevator full of combat robots was arriving. These ones had two sets of arms, the second of which had the stubby barrels of shotguns protruding from their wrists.

Our bodies might be strong and unbelievably quick, but they would be shredded by those things. It was over. One good shot on each of us would end everything. I guess they had realised that we were stealing the people they had trapped in those RUCU, and that every one that we extracted was one more RUCU they didn’t need to worry about hitting with a bullet. However many of those people we’d saved would have to be enough. It was time to figure out some way to escape…

…except that I refused to give up on even one of the prisoners. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t leave them in the hands of these evil, awful people. I would gladly go down under an onslaught of lead if it meant—

“We’ve got them! The last one has been extracted,” May suddenly cheered.

Oh. We… we did it?

Desmonia spoke urgently, almost trampling May’s victory cry with her haste. “Crew, grab those FTLN nodes and get the fuck out of there.”