Cosmosis

Vaporize

(Starspeak)

So many people were calling in, I was at my limit keeping track of everything.

Louis, Holly, the rest of the Ukro crew, along Vez were securing elevator control—if we lost our ability to move freely through the station, we were done before we started. Nora, Nerin, Donnie, Lorel, and the rest of the Jack crew were making sure the rocket bolted to the station wasn't going to accelerate our demise again; barring that, they were scalping the thing for any valuable information. Ben, Shinshay, and Jordan were tied up on the bridge taking whacks at the computers governing the station thrusters, because if we didn't solve that problem everything else was pointless. Nai was guarding them and the rest of the bridge. Dustin and Tasser had secured water and air processing for the time being. Willy and his squad on loan from the Ramstein crew were battling back bots from accessing the various access points of the utility tunnels that spanned the station. And that was just the teams that included my people specifically.

I was less immediately aware of the multiple groups of Nora's people running around. I recognized some of the names on our psionic war-table. Michelle was single-handedly defending the fallback room that almost half the station's cargo staff had evacuated to. There had been someone else I recognized too, but I'd lost track of them.

The local Vorak were even more numerous. They were falling into default security protocols which were mainly focused on preventing a potential invader from moving through the station with impunity. That was a vital task, but it meant that I or Nora needed to be beaming warnings in advance if any of our people needed to bypass them in our rush to various critical points of the station. Luckily, the requests were dropping in frequency. Squads were catching on that the humans were here to help.

Speaking of…

"<Incoming from behind: get down!>" I warned.

This squad of rak was one of the ones that had already brushed shoulders with Willy's squad, and they listened when I made my call.

Six rak ducked down behind their barricades, and my maneuvering jets blasted me right over their heads.

The robots encroaching on their position were converging in a concave. I was diving practically directly into their line of fire; I was hedging that they were aiming just above the barricades.

It left me just enough room for me to fly above their bullets without scraping the ceiling. I was jetting quickly enough that I blew past before the bots could adjust their aim. But even if it wasn't quick enough to immediately tag me, they did adjust their aim.

The rak guarding the exits to the station's main did not miss the moment to return fire of their own. I didn't stop, however, flying further inside the atrium and diving behind a steel planter.

I materialized a transparent shield to guard my face as I peeked up to confirm my suspicions.

The bots were indeed splitting their attention between me and the security rak defending the atrium's only currently unsealed exit. A select number of them were even alternating both their targets and firing positions to try making some kind of defensible ground between us.

<Do you have them?> I asked the guards, <or can I keep going?>

<We're running low on ammunition,> one of the rak said.

For a millisecond, I weighed helping them against the risk to the station if I delayed. It was impossible to know for sure, but I was guessing—hoping that I could afford to give them the relief they needed.

I burst out from behind my planter only for the bots to track me quicker than they had the first time. Throttling my jets, I tried to find a good spot to launch my attack, but the bots' sharper aim caught me off guard.

A bullet cracked the air an inch from my shoulder, and I dove for fresh cover. Peeking out to fire shots of my own confirmed what I already knew. Most of my bullets sparked off the bots technicolor armor.

Conventional firearms were hardly the best trick in my arsenal though.

Deciding I didn't need to destroy these bots in one decisive attack, I settled on softening them up first. The next time I stuck my head out, I created a kinetic bomb an inch from the nearest one's head.

Even inside the cavernous atrium, the blast bounced off the walls like thunder in a canyon, and the bot was thrown off its feet, careening into another.

That gave me the opening I needed to properly charge in.

I weakened my jets, forcing me to the ground, but I needed the mass. Materializing a riot shield on my arm, I put as much oomph into my jets as I could to launch me forward.

As soon as I came within six-feet of the toppled bot, it began shuddering, and I heard a shrill whine come from its chest.

But before it could turn itself into a conflagrating ball of shrapnel, I got a palm on its shell and it froze.

Nai's particular Adept specialty was in thermokinetics with some especially neat tricks and materials with whacky heat transfer and heat capacity. Most of the time that meant burning something to the ground or melting it to slag in the coolest way possible.

But she had some neat tricks for doing the opposite too.

One that she'd taught me was a shortcut to creating matter at ludicrously low temperatures: double digit Kelvin temperatures.

They didn't last very long, and the nature of the shortcut meant that the material dumped any heat it absorbed back into its environment as it dematerialized. But the bottom line?

I could freeze the suicide bots' bombs before they went off. I trusted Ben's knowledge of chemistry when he told me that Earth's plastic explosives could work even below negative one-hundred Fahrenheit. Nai's trick let me go about a hundred-and-fifty degrees colder for just shy of three seconds.

Even if the explosive was still reactive at that temperature, the detonator almost certainly wasn't.

Just freezing the bot destroyed its internal workings, but I still kicked it toward its friends as the timer ran out and my cold snap instantly thawed.

The bot exploded in angry red-hot gobs of metal, obliterating another two close by. I reached down to touch the other stumbled bot and froze its brain before it could go any further.

The remaining bots correctly identified me as the bigger threat and focused their attention on me. Drat. Had they realized the security rak couldn't viably push into the atrium? If the bots weren't trying to take the choke point at the door, then I was more or less fighting them all alone.

I jetted backward for space, only dissolving my shield when I'd properly broken line of sight.

Artifical gravity on this space station wasn't the normal Vorak 1.1G, but it was definitely still more than half that. My jets felt so sluggish compared to how freely I had been able to move outside the station.

I had a particular target, and if I found it, the rest of this fight would get a lot easier. Dustin and Tasser had confirmed coordinator bots. That, far more than the décor, had indicated SPARK's involvement.

SPARK and CENSOR had shown somewhat difficult to discern patterns in their behavior. They'd also both shown a penchant for mimicking some of the others' more obvious signs in the past—one of the reasons why, even if these bots looked the part, we couldn't be sure they were actually SPARK's.

But while their styles and priorities had subtle differences, their capabilities were markedly different. CENSOR had more resources, and it showed in her willingness to deploy much larger, more specialized robotic forces with much greater firepower. There was a greater variety to the kind of bots she'd fielded over the years.

SPARK, apparently, had to economize. He resorted to using cheaper, more numerous and uniform forces. When he did field specialized units, they were often a particular design that supported its forces with extra processing power.

Very broadly speaking, CENSOR's forces were stronger, and SPARK's were smarter.

When was it that I'd become more inclined to duel one of CENSOR's super-bots alone? Fighting SPARK's smarter, piecemeal, more coordinated forces just posed so much more of a threat.

His coordinator bots usually did a decent job hiding themselves, mixing among the other bots, but they usually couldn't help but carry the tactical processing hardware on their backs…

Jetting around the atrium, identifying targets…

Where was it?

It should have been nearby. It had to be. The bulky backpack hardware made the bots far more responsive and precise, but it also didn't have a long range. It varied by conditions, but surrounded by metal on every side? Their signals wouldn't reach bots more than twenty, maybe thirty meters away.

I'd exposing myself too much flying around in search. The bots were beginning to cut me off with their superior numbers.

Materializing my revolver, I'd switch between firing in short bursts and rapidly repositioning to keep them from pinning me down. It was dangerous work, because bots didn't register on psionic radar, and I didn't have the cascade to track them by footfalls.

Making the job even harder was the bots' armor. It was staggeringly high quality. More than half my shots were deflecting violently. Even when the shot deflected into another bot, most of the time it just deflected into their armor too, harmlessly.

I was modifying my ammo on the fly, adding in qualities that would hopefully counteract the armor…but so far? Full-metal jacket rounds were bouncing off. Switching to a rifle might punch through, but I could see some problems with it. For starters, I'd actually be forced to shoot slower. Rounds with more charge meant consuming more of my mass limit to make each round, and it would be more of an effort to recreate each one. And, even if I did succeed with a faster flying bullet, it wouldn't change the fact that the bots were rigged to explode, seemingly at random.

When I could afford it, I went to close range.

That way, I could destroy them efficiently within my mass limit, and cut the risk of any bot going kamikaze in a delicate spot.

I got three of them with the same cold trick as before, but there had to be twenty just in the atrium. Except…no…

Exactly twenty.

Given the ones I just scrapped, plus ones from earlier, plus the few the security folks had gotten before I arrived, I estimated we should have been at twenty-one left, assuming a starting point of thirty-two: a full four squads.

What made me stop and reevaluate was actually my own condition.

It was good. Really good, even.

But I was not so good that I could dive into the middle of twenty bots and not even take a graze.

It was important to recognize when it wasn't your own skills contributing to your survival. And in this case, as well as the bots had been coordinating to cut me off and limit my movements…they could have been better.

And in fact, with this many of them, and my only allies proving unwilling to push into the atrium, the prudent move would have been for all twenty-ish bots to zerg rush me, with overwhelming numbers.

Reviewing things, they'd actually come pretty close. But if they were serious about killing me quickly, even if it meant costing their side a few robots, they were doing it wrong. Maybe one-third of their number was being kept back for something.

Initially, those forces had seemed like they were reserved for the unsealed entrance and the Vorak that might threaten them, but now…

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I shouldn't have been able to pick off three of them like that, and now that I had, they were adjusting their formations more carefully.

They had a higher priority than killing the Adept about to kill them.

They'd been positioning themselves to keep me away from…

I could see the spot in the atrium easily, but it didn't look significant until I hid behind cover and took a few moments to examine my map of the station.

To save time, I'd only been given a detailed map of the sections of the station I was actually needed in. In all the other parts, the detail was much lower.

But earlier Dustin and Tasser had talked about the bots trying to get at water processing…and they hadn't just shot the place up.

The Atrium had the only five living trees on the station, each one sitting in huge planter, not to mention the hundreds of smaller planters decorating the room's walls and floorspace.

They had to need a lot of water too…

<Jordan,> I called, <are you available?>

<Physically? No,> she said. <I'm meditating to give Ben and Shinshay a pearl to the Siegfried and her computer's brute strength. But I'm mentally unoccupied.>

<Can you run through why the bots are targeting water machinery on the station?> I asked.

<They're targeting water?>

<Processing already,> I said, <and I think they're trying to break into the hydroponic system that feeds the atrium.>

<Uh…oh, hang on,> Jordan said.

Strictly speaking, I didn't.

'Hang on', that is.

I kept moving through the atrium, doing my best to disrupt the bots' defense of the access hatch. Part of me was tempted to order the rak defending the exits to move in, but they probably wouldn't listen to me without orders from their actual superior, and getting in contact with the right one might be more of a distraction than I could afford right now.

But even if those rak weren't going to help me, it turned out I wouldn't be alone.

<Help incoming,> Jordan told me.

I'd angling to try blowing apart their formation with another kinetic bomb, but a superior impact beat me to it.

A human dropped down with the force of a meteor. At least, the shape looked human in the millisecond before it hit the ground and exploded.

The bots were thrown in all directions, and I switched gears as quickly as I could. Capitalizing on the attack meant moving even faster than I'd already shown them I could.

What few bots that had managed to stay on their feet or remotely in firing positions still couldn't adjust their aim fast enough to stop me from blitzing forward and laying my palm on three more robot skulls.

Each one froze in an instant, the rapid change in temperature forcing microfractures and warping through their most sensitive computer hardware, including the part I couldn't cascade. And unlike the bots before, these ones didn't have the chance to initiate their self-destruct. So when my freezing trick wore off, the extra heat that got dumped in didn't set anything off.

The source of the unexpected bombardment came from above, and they were familiar—ah, the ally of Nora's I'd lost track of: Ken.

As talented as all us abductees had grown in so many areas, there were still so few of us that could truly be called 'experts' in anything. Combat was one of the few things were a select few of us could truly be considered accomplished.

Much as I liked to, my track record was hard to argue with. I'd fought some crazy battles and come out the other side.

Ken was on a very short list of people with a similar track record.

The atrium didn't have a defined ceiling, per se, and it more or less bled smoothly into the dozen decks above it with balconies overlooking the plant life. Ken leapt from one of the balconies, ready to battle bots on landing.

One of the machines recovered swiftly, swinging their weapon at him in an attempt to buy space. But Ken didn't avoid the blow, instead punching the robot in the head simultaneous with the stock of the gun clocking his head.

Ken exploded.

Again.

His form dissolved into blue and white gas, blasting outward in all directions, and hurling the robot back into the wall hard enough to dent. The machine stumbled back to its feet only for me to lay a hand on its head and kill it cold.

The real Ken jumped down from the balcony with much more care.

"<Hane,>" he called out.

<We need to get through that hatch.>

I pointed out the objective.

<I'll follow your lead,> Ken offered.

<No,> I said. <You're the one capable of disposable clones. You take point.>

"<Hah.>"

Ken was like me. We both had a particularly useful and difficult Adept trick, but not one so unique that it qualified as a real specialty. For me, it was materializing pre-compressed gasses for kinetic bombs and maneuvering jets, while for Ken, it was creating clones.

Ken was not the Century though. He could make a clone, among other tricks, but only one or two at a time. They didn't last long either, and he was forced to psionically preprogram them with a series of actions or otherwise manually instruct or control them.

Also like me, he had an awesome arsenal of secondary tricks to round out his fighting style, and it looked like they trended more toward melee combat.

Ken jumped forward as the robots backed up, reconsolidating their defense of the hatch. Ken's attack wasn't as explosive as mine, but he made up for it by being less deterrable. Where a spray of bullets might have forced me to divert and find cover, Ken charged in with more than just exotic armor to protect him.

His body was widely augmented, especially in his musculature. The one time I'd met him in the past, he'd explained that his augmentations didn't actually make him much stronger, maybe twenty or thirty percent. But in terms of durability? His muscles were literally bulletproof.

It looked awful, because the outermost layers of his skin weren't nearly as tough. But the few bullets that found their way past his clone and between his armor didn't penetrate more than a fraction of an inch.

The pain sounded awful, though.

Every hit made him yell angrily, but he didn't let them slow him in the slightest.

He threw a clone ahead on his path, and for three seconds, there were two Kens boxing with robots. But Ken's clones truly did not last long, and after three seconds? This one was spent, and it dissolved like a ghost.

I did not miss the fact that, since this clone didn't explode, that Ken clearly had some unique and creative options in weaponizing his doubles.

The moment he created a new clone gave me the perfect window to attack too. For a split second, bots were preoccupied with the sudden absence of Ken's previous clone, Ken himself, and the arrival of his new one.

I materialized a sword, jetting forward and skewering a robot through its eye socket—not all their body was covered in armor.

We were picking the bots apart more and more with each new clone Ken made, and soon we broke through. One of the remaining four bots clicked empty on their gun, and I thought it was going to charge us and explode.

But instead, that bot and its three friends all retreated hastily. Ken and I took our time pulverizing their friends before advancing.

<The ones carrying more ammo aren't exploding,> Ken noted.

<They give themselves away,> I said. <The ones that are strapped don't pick up ammo from the others.>

<What is this hatch?>

<Hydroponics,> I said. <They're up to something with the water.>

<Maybe hiking the pressure for a bomb?> Ken asked.

I paused.

That…was a startlingly real possibility.

<That wouldn't destroy the station,> I pointed out.

<Would still spread some [hell] though.>

Very true.

Ken's clones weren't conscious and autonomous like Tiv's, but you wouldn't know it by how precise and dexterous they could be in their brief lifespan. I blinked and missed the moment Ken created the clone to haul open the hatch.

A spray of bullets tore through that clone, and with no delay Ken made a new one to jump in.

With just one line of fire to maintain, even just the three bots with bullets remaining had a braindead-easy time defending the hatch. Ken made clones repeatedly, forming them from thick blue and white vapor that seemed to pour off his body.

If anyone else had been watching, they probably wouldn't have been able to see the complex psionics embedded in the vapors. That was cool. The seemingly cosmetic plumes of smoke were actually imparting the instructions and parameters the clone was about to follow.

As Ken sped up his pace of production, the clones became less human. More and more, their features were hazy blue and white whorls like silt underwater.

But if Ken was truly flagging, he showed no sign of it. He materialized a transparent shield for us to advance behind while sending each new clone charging forward.

Little by little the bots retreated down the narrow corridor. They didn't give us a single inch we didn't take.

But we did take them.

This tight corridor made it impossible for me to jet forward, but Nai had taught me to be patient in a fight. Nothing got you killed like unnecessary haste.

Ken must have learned that lesson firsthand, because I didn't need to warn him even once.

Eventually, the bots encountered trouble. Their own retreat took them to a wider chamber a few meters across—just large enough I could start flipping and jumping around.

We solved our problem before that actually happened though.

I caught a glimpse of a robot with a backpack the size of a suitcase hunched over a computer console. Just for one or two seconds, but that was enough time for me to commit.

<Ears,> I warned.

Ken gave silent confirmation, and I moved.

Reaching forward, I actually wrenched Ken's shield aside, just an inch or two, and squeezed off a shot of my own.

Having traded in my revolver, I materialized a single-shot breach-loaded pistol: a contender model. And it could fit a large bulky rifle cartridge. The kind that could probably punch clean through even quality exotic ceramic armor.

Ken winced at the gunshot going off so near to him, but my risk paid off.

The coordinator bot's head exploded, and all four of the ones we'd been pressing suddenly stalled.

They had programming of their own, and given a second or two, they would kick back into action on their own, lesser, software. But we didn't give them the chance.

Ken launched the most inhuman clone yet, almost like a wispy Disney genie than real human facsimile, and it rammed a fist right through the chest of the nearest bot.

My trick wasn't broke, so I didn't fix it. I jetted at the next bot, grabbed its head, and turned it into an icicle.

Ken's clone had been programmed to wrench the bot's gun toward another and squeeze off a burst of rounds. Was it luck or by design that one of those rounds went through the bot's eye socket and out the back of its head?

Ooo. That was something worth noticing. The bullet had lost a lot of velocity going through the bot's skull, but it had still punched right through the same armor that had deflected much heavier rounds from the other side.

This exotic ceramic was quite weak to attacks from the concave side. Useful to know for the future…

Ken himself dealt with the last robot of the four, materializing a mean-looking claw around his hand and tearing right through its torso.

We'd been correct that none of the remaining bots had been rigged to suicide, and I even had a bonus prize.

While the bot I'd killed was still frozen, I materialized a sword, lopped off its head, and cascaded its skull as best I can.

I was maintaining the heat-sucking material caking its brain. I was beginning to sweat. It was hard to keep in existence for more than a few seconds. It got agonizing to do so for a minute. But this was going to take at least two.

If I wanted to learn anything, that was.

Without explaining myself to Ken, I sat down on the spot and began prying apart the frigid skull with my sword. He just shrugged and started examining the console the coordinator bot had been working at.

The face plate came off first, and with the absence of SPARK's obnoxious painted armor, it was much easier to begin paring away at the robotics.

Eyes. Gone. Spinal cabling. Gone. Shock-absorbing mesh. Gone.

One by one I tore away components of the brain, looking for my prize.

We knew precious little about the AI's robot forces. We knew their computer components were exotic, but we didn't actually know how they were constructed, built, or programmed. Every unit we captured or destroyed had built-in safeguards to ensure the most crucial processing elements dematerialized on cue.

If you really wanted to get into the meat of Adepty, the dematerialization process threw wrench after wrench into thermochemistry. But the flipside of that? You could throw a wrench back if you know thermal science like Nai.

The method she'd taught me to super-chill objects wasn't just for fun. We had a hypothesis that the dematerialization of the bots' processors could be halted or paused if you chilled them fast enough and cold enough.

I'd cascaded a lot of bot heads over the years now, and I knew exactly what I was looking for: a blocky shape near the very middle of its skull, almost exactly twice the size of a deck of playing cards. You could locate it easily by the thick cable linking it to the cylindrical motor processor in the chest.

But we didn't want the motor processor—at least, not more than this: the brain. The real brain. The part of the bot that let it make decisions, the part behind the part its actuators were slaved to, the part that let it evaluate context and threats.

I tore away a heat channel and ripped past the plastic sheathing insulating the brain block. Even now, I was pushing my cascade into the metal shell, trying to feel what was inside, and it remained completely opaque.

It was surprisingly fragile. I thought it would be more rigid to protect from impacts, but it felt like an eggshell in my hand. There was so much to learn. If I could just manage to last long enough to take this back to the Jack…

A wave of lightheadedness came over me, and I felt my knee bend too deep to be voluntary.

"<Whoa..! You good?>" Ken asked.

"Yeah," I muttered.

There wasn't time, and we had a crisis to solve.

I had to learn what I could now, and come back to it later.

So, I crushed the little brain block in my hands exactly like an eggshell…and exactly like an eggshell, liquid oozed out.

Silvery-grey liquid dripped between the cracks, sluggish and tingly on my fingers, and my hackles went up.

Exotic liquid. Carcinogenic. Prionogenic. The potential hazards were infinite and deadly.

I dematerialized the cold rime, and the liquid warmed instantly, dematerializing not one nanosecond after it returned to temperature.

Breathe, I reminded myself. The risks of physical contact with an unknown material like that were immense, but they were also far from guaranteed.

If I turned up with mysterious poisoning symptoms in a few days? There would be little doubt as to what happened. But the much more likely outcome was that the liquid was just gross and weird.

But even if it had just killed me, it did tell us one very interesting fact.

<The robot brains don't use Earth tech,> I noted.

<Oh?> Shinshay asked.

I regretted broadcasting that, immediately. They needed to focus on the station's computer right now.

<Their processors are an exotic liquid metal,> I said, begrudgingly. <But what's important right now is saving this station.>

Turning back to Ken…

"<What exactly are we saving this station from?>" I asked.

"<A bomb is right,>" he said. "<I'm talking to Dustin on another channel. They're looking at the same thing down in water processing.>"

The screens were showing several repeated emergency overrides on pressure safeties. The station's automated safeguards were actually functioning fully, but the bots had been slowly overwhelming them be repeatedly bypassing those safeties over and over.

That was actually a relief.

Conceptualizing the station's computer as an animal? It was mighty reassuring to hear its immune system was still kicking in any capacity. It made me think there were good hopes we could refire the thrusters and actually correct the orbit if we cut out SPARK's infiltrated hardware.

The actual bypasses the bots had done looked to…hike the pressure in opposing sides on both ends of the station. In addition to cutting the thrusters, the bots looked like they wanted to set the station into an uncontrolled spin. Steam detonations on either end.

Much bigger 'boom' than any ordinance the bots could have carried.

Except…no, that wasn't true. They could have carried a nuclear weapon on board and blown us all to smithereens, and they could have done it months ago.

The timing of the bots' activation and our arrival couldn't be coincidence either.

The bots had only awakened when it looked like something might stop the station from falling. The station falling…was a bigger priority than remaining undiscovered.

So…

"<They must not want to destroy the station,>" I realized.

It was a sort-of-unspoken conclusion given everything we'd seen so far. But it had implications I was only just now having the time to imagine.

"<They specifically want it to fall,>" Ken agreed. "<Why? Why destroy a space station only a certain way?>"

<…The station isn't the target,> Dustin said, and Tasser followed right up.

<The station is going to fall on something.>