Coven's Rebellion Chapter 16

Hi everyone, guess I should give an update on how I'm doing. I'm doing okay. Still extremely fragile, and the meds that are keeping me calm will eventually stop working. I'm going to try and write a bit more, though. Thanks for your patience.

Amelia

My girlfriend was a nutter. Both of our combat frames were busted to hell and back, and here she was running off to go tango with three big-ass stompy mechs. I shook my head even as I raced after her.

The woman I loved was using her nanites to enhance and bolster her failing body, so she was opening up a lead ahead of me. Even as she ran, though, she reached down and snagged a discarded phone from the street. Nanites swarmed down her arm like rioting ants, and devoured the electronics like those same insects. I had no idea why she’d done this—not that a lack of understanding Rosa was a rare thing—but then I realised she was feeding her little swarm, letting them make more of themselves.

As for the Italian mechs, well, they were rumbling along just fine, complete with streams of missiles arcing out towards the Austrian Ferdinand. They were brutal looking machines—with wide triangular upper torsos and no heads. Instead, I could see thin slitted windows that indicated the cockpit was in the torso. The whole upper chassis swivelled on a much smaller lower piece that then connected to the large, powerful legs. Out of the sides of the upper chassis, two stubby arms protruded, where the large main weapons could be found. Sprouting from their backs, a single eight-missile launcher was on the end of a vaguely sturdy articulating arm. I say vaguely sturdy, because any extra stress on that thing would cause all sorts of problems for— Actually, you know what…

Pulling to a stop, I reached back and pulled my sweet Sprocket from their magnetic holster on my back. They were such a beautiful weapon, too, and if my heart hadn’t already belonged to Jazz, I’d have kissed the railgun in my hands. Well, my loving appreciation was also hindered by one other tiny little detail—I didn’t have any lips right now.

“Now, Sprocket,” I murmured sweetly to the weapon as I pulled it up and took aim. “I know we’ve decided to just be friends, but if you can pretend— oh, I know, I know, you’re as handsome as you are pretty, dear, but I need that there mech to lose its missile rack. Yeah, that one right there, see that joint—”

Lightning, harnessed and corralled through conductive wire, surged through Sprocket, and they bucked in my hands. A whip-crack boom sounded, echoing down the street as the metal projectile jumped the distance to the target like a kid hopping over a crack on the pavement. Huh, actually, that little simile didn’t land properly. I’d say the dart actually hit like a spitball from god—fast, easy, and right on target. My old buddies would’ve been proud.

As for the other guy, well, he had a dangling problem on his hands now. The lump of metal that Sprocket had thrown through the air had smashed the mounting joint for the missile rack, and it was hanging sideways at an odd angle. Some part of it was still hangin’ on for dear life—tryin’ to be a little fuckin’ hero. Taking aim again, I turned that asshole hero into a martyr.

Slowly, the rack began to plummet towards the ground as its supporting structure failed, and that was when we all learned that the Italians weren't connecting to their missiles through the launcher, but remotely instead. The other two mechs fired their missiles no problem, and they all arced gracefully through the air like a stampede of wild horses. The missile rack I’d recently freed from its bonds instead began to pump its load directly into the ground. Rapidfire detonations erupted, engulfing the mech in a ball of fire so completely that for long seconds, nobody could see anything of it.

Its compatriots pulled to a halt, clearly alarmed by their buddy’s sudden fiery bath. From out of the billowing cloud, the Italian mech stumbled, blackened, with partially melted armour, and most of its smaller defensive weapons missing or damaged. One of its legs had a joint that was sticking—refusing to bend more than a few degrees.

“Exceptional work, my love,” Rosa said over our private connection. “Time for me to savage the wounded animal.”

Her tiny form leapt up from the street below it. Used the broken knee of the mech, she propelled herself up further, until finally she landed on top of the wide upper chassis. Kneeling, she reached for one of the many personnel hatches and tried to rip it off its hinges. Nothing happened, so she got down on all fours and— huh, clamped her body to the hull with her magnetic pads.

Then, I saw the thin stream of black nanites leave the combat frame, and I understood. Oh dear.

Without a gorgeous display of violence to watch, I began to move again—rushing to disappear into the urban environment before the mechs could—

The place where I’d fired Sprocket from exploded, and I was sent flying sideways. My battered mechanical body hit the ground like an ageing hockey player, which is to say—built for the job, but no longer all that structurally sound.

Hauling myself back to my feet, I grabbed Sprocket and dashed further between houses, bobbing and weaving so they’d lose my position. Gah, I needed to get closer though! How could I slip ol’ Sprocket’s darts through their armour at this range. If I wanted to do more than shoot exposed joints, I’d need to be getting all up in their skirts.

As I was turning onto a street that would let me close the distance, I watched Rosa’s current interior redecoration project swing an arm up suddenly. The arm had one of those cannons on the end, you know? The type that measures as a 3.4 on a seismometer or whatever.

The boom when it fired was so loud, it probably rattled my old, real bones. The screeching of steel, the belching of fire, and the Cherenkov blue that erupted out of the unfortunate Italian mech — none of that had shit to do with earthquakes. It was all violence of a more personal variety, but scaled up a couple dozen metres.

In the confusion that came from one mech blowing the guts out of another, I was able to get nice and close to the last remaining mech.

It realised its buddy was compromised, and had managed to dodge Rosa’s attempt to explode it. Of course, that was Rosa's last shot before the hijacked mech she was in started to fall apart. First an arm just flopped off the side, then a knee joint forgot how to ‘join’ and soon the mech had transformed into a pile of spare parts. Rosa must've busted all the joints or something while she was in there.

One of the surviving mech’s point defence cannons chose that moment to zero in on me, and the pavement around me began to aerosolize as bullets smashed it into a fine powder.

“Fuck!” I said, and dove for the nearest cover — a ground car.

The car got shredded, but it gave me enough time to pull Sprocket around, line up on the turret, and blast the sucker.

My excitable imagination supplied Sprocket's witty retort. “Fuck yeah! That'll teach you to call me ‘hand held’.”

“Shush, Sprocket,” I whispered, laughing at my own goofy conversation with my gun. “It has friends!”

Sure enough, those friends were all swivelling to deal with me. Ho-boy.

There weren't nothing else I could really do, besides what I did — which is take aim directly at the thin slit of ‘bullet resistant’ glass in the upper torso.

My thoughts whirred into overdrive, like a disk spinning so fast it's about to rip apart from its own centrifugal forces, and I calculated the shot. It'd be a fucking hard one, that's for sure. A material like that — it was almost as tough as the opaque armour, but it was also a lot more brittle.

I chose to hit it at the exact midpoint between three of its fastening bolts. The reinforcing in the glass would probably stop my railgun dart from penetrating, but maybe it'd break at the seams.

Sprocket bucked with a deceptively gentle hop in my arms, and the dart raced downrange. The viewport glass cracked, but the conductive dart pinwheeled away — no pen. Fuck.

What I’d give for my gravity powers from CORA right now. My robot legs worked overtime as I rushed to close the range with the last mech, right as most of its point defence zeroed in on me. The little rainstorm I’d weathered behind the car was nothing compared to the wall of bullets that I’d just involuntarily invoked. Ah, hell—

My consciousness was suddenly ripped out of my combat frame, and I fell backwards into a soft, plush chair.

Dazed, I looked around. I was in the digital combat information centre— it was where all the folks who were feeding us information and helping to coordinate the operation were doing their jobs. The CIC folks were all in these little bubble-booths, screens all around them. Some had fingers flying so fast it hurt my brain to watch them, and I realised their bubbles were running simulations at a faster speed so they could watch what happened at speeds faster than those of us operating in reality.

I heard footsteps behind me, and a massively tall woman poked her head through the door to the CIC. Fuck, but she was a mountain of a girl. Even if I hadn’t known her, the size of her would’ve been the biggest signpost ever for her previous profession. Amazon delivery SAI all looked like that — tall, gorgeous, massive — but the rumour was that they’d all decided as one to adopt the mythological image as a sort of fuck you to their old employer. Gotta say, I loved the metaphorical balls on the lot of them. Top class women.

This one, I recognised. This was May’s crush. Siyeapia.

“Hey, Amelia!” She called, and waved for me to follow.

With a shrug, I got up out of the sofa and turned to leave. Before I did, I looked back at the CIC bubbles, and caught the eye of a scrawny dude with glasses who had turned his chair to face outwards. He mimed pulling a plug, then gave an apologetic look. My lips twitched up into a wry smile, and I waved him off.

“No sweat, dude,” I mouthed. “Thanks for getting my ripcord.”

Looking relieved, he did a very sloppy little salute and turned his attention back to his screens.

Siya was already disappearing into another room when I poked my head out, so I dashed over and into— Ah, May’s crib!

“Here, here!” Siya said, gesturing for me to watch a screen from a sofa. May was in her own bubble of high speed simulation right now, and was entirely ignoring us.

On the screen was the battlefield I’d just left, seen from above. My body was laying in the street near the bottom of frame. Ho, boy, I was lucky that dude pulled me when he did. The entire street looked like it’d been churned up and— no, it looked like it’d been ploughed by all the bullets. Poor Sprocket was spewing gouts of flame almost a metre in length. Their battery pack probably caught a round.

“Rosa, I’ve got Amelia here in May’s room,” Siya said into a holographic headset. “She’s okay. The CIC folks managed to pull her before she got stuck in the buffer.”

Phew, that was a fate I was glad to have avoided. With our little coven of digital sapients, we didn’t have the luxury of drone swarms — factories ready to replace the lost bots faster than they could die. We had to rely on very small numbers and high quality. So that’s why we had our frames, but our connection to those frames was just too laggy to take full advantage of what it meant to be digital, with the fast thought processes and all that. That’s where partial habitation came in, where all the parts of a person’s simulated mind that were helpful for combat, were pushed into a small computing unit inside the bot itself.

I wasn’t the most software savvy person, so I wasn’t one hundred percent on the details, but basically, it was like the initial digitisation process. Except since one end of the equation wasn’t meat, you could freeze the whole dealio, allowing the digital person to operate with one half of their mind safe at home, and the other, in the bot.

Anyway, long story short, the CIC desk dude had seen my frame’s imminent destruction with all the clarity of his bubble setup, and had ripped me out before they had to rebuild me like a half smashed lego castle. The existential quagmire that potential outcome brought up were mind-warpingly terrifying — So, I didn’t think about them, and focused on the screen instead.

A screen where inky black goo was slithering out of the central italian mech. Rosa had apparently abandoned her frame.

Suddenly, off to the side, May swore and jerked away from her holographic screens. “What is she… how?”

Rosa’s goo formed into a lithe, sleek, and feminine robot, complete with a black cape draped over one shoulder. The body she was creating had all sorts of angles and hard edges, but the freakiest part was the face, which had four glowing red eyes. In one of her hands, she had… something. It was some sort of strange hardware, that while looking nothing like one, had the distinct vibe of being a beating heart. It trailed cables and pipes like it really had been ripped out of some giant dragon — which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t that far from the truth.

“She’s… she’s pillaging the bodyworks research and development files,” May said, alarmed, looking from her screens to the big one that was showing the drama. “I don’t know how she’s doing this. This isn’t… what even are her nanites? They started out as medical ones, for fuck’s sake!”

“They’ve been evolving, remember? Getting smarter?” I said, feeling a little proud of my terrifying techno-demon girlfriend.

“Yeah, but—” May began, but each of us fell silent when Rosa leapt.

She sailed through the air, and a protective screen of nanites began whirling around her like bees protecting a hive. The guns of the mech that had just recently shredded my body, all turned to her. The mech moved too, lumbering back and trying to turn its heavy bulk so that more guns could be brought to bear. Half a dozen rotary cannons were already howling like banshees as they dispensed leaden projectiles by the fistful.

Red hot metal and burning nanites enveloped my girlfriend as the kinetic projectiles did battle with tiny, ravenous beasts. Neither won, but that wasn’t the point. Rosa landed with a ringing clang on the last remaining mech, and that’s when I realised what she’d torn out of the last one. A plasma state capacitor. She brought it down onto the flat armoured top of the mech like she was smashing a watermelon, and jumped backwards at the same time. Heat flared so bright that the drone camera we were watching took a few seconds to dial its exposure back, but by then the ball of molten horror had already melted a hole through the top of the mech.

The heat from the ball of plasma was incredibly short lived, but that was because it’d now dispersed throughout the interior of the italian medium mech, overheating— no, toasting its internals and crew. Fuckin’ hell.

“Rosa, I love you, but you’re scary as fuck sometimes,” I said into the air, trusting that she’d hear it.

Her response was an almost sorrowful whisper. “It is okay to say it. I am a monster. A useful monster.”