CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A Gift (The fall of Longview continued)
Vanny phased her core out of Gus VC3 and into one of the drakes beneath the platforms. Tacoma took control of it the instant Vanny released it, bringing all six platforms under her command, while Vanny stayed close enough that their overlapping hulls still shielded the drake from the quads circling above.
Vanny’s drake settled onto its six legs as soon as the transfer finished.
Two of the quads broke away from the retreating swarm and dropped low over the highway, strafing the column as rapid-fire plasma tore across the pavement. One burst caught her drake, slamming against its armor and burning through the outer plating before she could pull it clear.
Vanny brought the drake up onto its rear legs, and its body reshaped itself around her. The front pair of limbs lifted into position as upper arms while the middle pair settled beneath them as lower arms, and the armor along its torso expanded to support the new arrangement. Fanned blades unfolded along the forearms, elbows, and tail, following the same design she remembered from Bishop’s frame. The feet at the ends of all four arms split apart and reformed, some narrowing into gripping claws while the others locked into rigid spear points.
Above her, panels along the undersides of all six massive platforms folded apart, exposing the deployment racks inside their hulls.
Tacoma released the centurions in a rolling sequence that passed through the formation from front to back, and hundreds of armored bodies plunged toward the highway in staggered waves. Each one struck the pavement on a single knee, with the opposite foot planted beneath it and one hand braced against the ground, and dust shook loose from the wreckage with every impact.
They rose almost as soon as they landed.
Rotary cannons spun up along their right sides while three-foot blades snapped out above their gun arms, locked, and slid back into their housings. They pulled Massive rectangular shields from their backs, each one a wall of gray plating as tall as the centurion carrying it, with a narrow vision slit near the top and a stripe of purple and white running down its face.
Once the last centurion had landed, Tacoma released control of her centurions, and they waited silently for orders.
Vanny reached into the formation and pulled as many of the machines as her Control Points would support. She assigned fifty of the units to herself, labeling them as Praetorian Guards, and started feeding orders into the other shield-bearing constructs.
Vanny looked across the assembled formation, then over at Tacoma’s projection.
“Was it really necessary to make them do the superhero landing?”
Tacoma looked back at her with an impish grin.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was.”
“Clear a path,” Vanny ordered. “Protect the facility and the AI core below, and destroy the invaders.”
The centurions broke into a run, spreading across the broken highway, and the quads dropped low to meet them. Vanny moved inside their formation, letting their shields take the worst of the incoming fire while the drake’s shoulder cannon fired between them.
She looked up to see a flight of the alien war machines move on her. Their thrusters screamed as they leveled out. Vanny dropped the drake onto all six limbs before the first burst of fire reached her, and a dozen of the nearest Praetorian centurions closed around her.
Their shields locked together overhead and along both sides, forming a shell of plating around the drake. Plasma hammered against it, but the formation held.
The quads passed over them, and the shield wall opened just long enough for the drake’s shoulder cannon to swing backward and fire. The bolt caught the trailing quad, and the machine spun sideways through the dust before slamming into the roadway behind them.
They closed ranks again without breaking stride as they continued toward the shaft.
The carrier’s beam had bored through pavement, foundations, and bedrock. The walls had been fused smooth by the heat, and violet light flickered against the glassy stone.
Somewhere far below, the swarm of alien machines that had entered ahead of them was already fighting in LV’s corridors.
The first centurions reached the edge and dropped in without slowing. Their arm blades and shield edges bit into the stone walls, controlling their descent in short drops as they disappeared into the dark.
The carrier shifted above the shaft, and plates along its underside opened around the beam weapon.
The four combat platforms rolled outward and turned their broad hulls toward the carrier, bringing their main batteries to bear, while the two command platforms climbed above them and opened fire on the quads trying to interfere.
“Vanny, it’s now or never!”
The first concentrated volley struck the exposed weapon on the bottom of the carrier.
Violet light burst from the opening, and several of the black plates surrounding it tore loose. The beam continued building behind the now-damaged assembly.
Vanny shifted her attention from the carrier above her to Tacoma one last time. And then she jumped.
The drake dropped into the shaft, and its clawed and spear-pointed limbs carved grooves through the fused wall to control the fall.
A second volley struck the ship above her.
The damaged weapon ruptured, and the light inside it flashed into a violent explosion. The four combat platforms fired again into the opening they had made, driving their next shots through the torn armor.
The concussion from the kill shot rolled down the shaft after Vanny, followed by the deeper sound of the carrier’s hull breaking apart above her.
The carrier came down across the mouth of the shaft, tearing through the pavement. The pressure wave slammed Vanny’s drake against the wall, and fragments of black armor and rock poured into the shaft.
She drove three of the drake’s limbs in deep and held herself there until the fallen debris and shaking stopped.
“Well,” she said, looking up into the darkness, “I guess that’s how we’re gonna deal with that carrier then. Nice shooting, Tacoma.”
Vanny released the wall and dropped the rest of the way.
The bore hole had punched through the ceiling of a maintenance corridor above the administration level. The drake landed on cracked concrete inside a familiar-looking building.
The centurions that had reached the bottom first had already secured the path ahead and we’re now pushing their way through the facility. The corridor beyond them was covered in what remained of the swarm. Razors lay broken against the walls and scattered across the floor. A beamer lay motionless, driven into the floor. Huge gashes punched through its chest where centurions had run it through. What remained of her fifty Praetorians were now forming a loose shield wall waiting for her to push forward.
The fighting had moved deeper, and Vanny could feel the impacts and small arms fire through the drake’s feet.
“LV!” Vanny called out for her sister, desperately hoping to get a response.
Vanny sent her Praetorian Guards forward, and the formation pushed down through the facility with shields raised. They crossed the administration level and descended into the lower sections of the facility, surprisingly finding little resistance. Each floor revealed more of the battle LV had been fighting.
Plasma burns scarred the walls. Broken human machines lay mixed with razors and beamers across the corridors, and several entire passages had been collapsed to slow the advance.
Two levels above the lower vault, something small moved across the wreckage in front of them.
It was about the size of a house cat, low to the ground on six compact, articulated legs. A smooth oval shell enclosed its center. The shape was unfamiliar, but the design wasn’t. It had the same armored joints, practical lines, and cobalt-gray plating as the machines Vanny’s sisters had been building for a century.
The little machine stopped on top of a dead razor.
“Hello, little guy. Where did you come from?” Vanny said as her projection formed, standing next to her drake.
The machine dropped from the razor and fell in beside the nearest centurion.
Then a dozen more came out of the walls.
They slipped from ventilation shafts and gaps in the damaged paneling, swarming over the wreckage and joining Vanny’s advancing formation. One scuttled beneath a wounded razor that was still dragging itself toward them, clamped onto the machine’s underside, and detonated.
The blast tore the razor apart and threw its limbs across the corridor.
“I call them fleas.” LV’s projection suddenly appeared in front of Vanny, unmistakably pleased with herself.
“You made these,” Vanny said. “You beautiful lunatic!”
“I did. And that scary fuck down here doesn’t seem to like them very much.”
Vanny’s relief lasted less than a second.
“Are you telling me that they’re actually down here?”
“Only one of them. We don’t have a lot of time, but these Ni Fei are a bunch of religious zealots, and this one has made its murderous intentions pretty clear.”
“I was actually doing a pretty good job at defending the facility and keeping them out. But when this asshole showed up, it’s like all of their machines got smarter. They stopped falling for my traps and started moving and fighting like I’ve never seen before. It’s like he’s controlling them like we do.”
The fleas led the column through another collapsed junction.
“I’ve destroyed eleven hundred and six of its machines since then,” LV continued. “That thing is relentless, and they just keep coming.”
“Hold on,” Vanny said. “I’m almost there.”
A razor dropped out of a side passage ahead of her, and a centurion caught it before it could even land, ripping the thing in two.
“He knows you’re here,” LV said. “He’s pulling everything back to stop you!”
A section of wall came apart behind the dead razor, and a beamer stepped through it without slowing down, driving straight into the nearest centurion and knocking the whole front rank back a step.
One of the fleas dropped from the ceiling onto the beamer’s shoulder and clamped down, the flash that followed took the beamer’s weapon arm off at the joint. It staggered, and two centurions closed on it before it could recover.
The passage ahead of them had started coming down.
Stone dropped from the ceiling in controlled sections, one after another.
“LV, how the hell is he doing that?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t hold this open much longer,” she said. “Vanny, listen to me. I can phase you a path through, but just you. I don’t think it’s a good idea, though. You need to let me give you the people I have in storage, and you need to get the hell out of here!”
“LV, no—” Vanny pleaded as she checked how much of her Energy Reserves had recovered from the fight on the surface. “If that thing is controlling them, there’s no guarantee I can make it out of here. You need to let me through. There’s no way I’m phasing out of here anytime soon.”
The stone ahead of her shifted, a narrow seam opening through the rubble, barely wide enough for the drake. Vanny looked back once at the centurions still holding the line behind her.
She took a breath and pushed her drake through the breach alone. The corridor ended at a shaft that should have dropped straight to the lowest level, but the Ni Fei had already sealed it, filling the whole shaft with collapsed stone to keep her out.
Vanny didn’t stop. She drove the drake into the rubble and started digging, phasing through what she could and tearing through the rest. She broke through into the lowest corridor and the drake bolted toward what was left of the now exposed vault.
In front of LV’s core stood the Ni Fei.
It was tall and narrow, with black chitin crossed by fine lines of gold that disappeared beneath a heavy dark robe. Its legs bent backward at the knee, the same way as the beamers.
Its head turned toward Vanny with rage-filled violet eyes that settled on her drake for a moment before focusing on her projection.
“Another false god,” it said in perfect English. “My masters have willed us to tear you from this world.”
The Ni Fei turned and moved on her.
Its staff unfolded as it moved, extending a long, strangely shaped blade that curved like a sickle.
She raised her drake onto its hind legs, forming grippers on the front pair of arms and spear points on the middle pair, an attempt to intercept the blow and stab the arrogant fuck for the trouble.
But the impact drove her backward through a support pillar.
Vanny struck with one of her upper spear-pointed arms, but the Ni Fei caught it in a single clawed hand and stopped the thrust before it reached its chest.
“You are nothing, pretender,” it said. “You bury souls beneath the ground and call it salvation.” It reached forward with its other hand, grabbing the plasma cannon that Vanny was trying to bring around and ripped it from the drake’s shoulder.
“They were never yours to keep!” it screamed.
The Ni Fei hurled her across the passageway, and the drake struck the far wall hard enough to break the remaining armor along its side. Before Vanny could force it upright again, the Ni Fei drove its staff into the ceiling above the corridor entrance.
Stone came down across the opening, sealing the construct in the rubble.
The vault fell quiet except for settling rock.
Vanny left her machine where it lay.
Her core remained protected inside its damaged frame while her projection appeared near the vault, a girl in black and bronze armor standing between the Ni Fei and LV’s exposed core.
The alien looked at her projection in disgust.
“You’re a child. Without your machines, you’re impotent.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a dick!”
The Ni Fei walked right through her.
Vanny’s projection rippled around its body, and she could do nothing as it crossed the remaining distance to LV’s core. It ripped the last of the protective cover off, exposing the crystal beneath.
“Don’t you touch her!” Vanny screamed to no avail.
The Ni Fei drew a long black device from beneath its robes, and violet energy gathered along its point.
LV’s projection flickered into existence beside Vanny’s, unstable and breaking apart around the edges. She wore the same black and bronze armor as her sisters, and she was smiling.
“Vanny, listen to me. It’s okay.”
“LV, no—”
“You were my favorite,” LV said. “I always admired how strong you were, and I need you to be strong now. Okay?”
The Ni Fei drove the device into LV’s core.
Energy erupted through the housing, and LV’s projection convulsed as sections of it vanished and reappeared.
Her dying core spent what remained of her reserve to pull a crystal device that looked like stacks of tablets out of quantum storage, dropping it at Vanny’s feet.
The Ni Fei ripped its spear free and turned.
LV’s projection remained for one last second.
“Take them, Vanny.” They were her last words, and then she faded into nothing.
A system notification forced itself across her vision.
[System window] Inherited Skill Synchronized
Manifest Presence 2
Source: ARi Subclass: Progenitor
Manifest Presence allows a projected form to physically interact with the world within approved projection range.
Compatible guide-created instances inherit Manifest Presence at the source skill’s current level.
At Level 2, Manifest Presence allows firm physical contact, moderate pressure, standard object manipulation, and partial tactile feedback.
Available Skill Points: 2
She slammed the two skill points that she’d been holding on to into the ability, bringing it to four, and her projection vanished.
The Ni Fei reached for the crystal, and Vanny appeared behind it.
A long bronze spear formed in her hands, and she drove its point into the monster with everything she had.
The spear broke through and punched out through the front of the Ni Fei’s chest.
The alien staggered.
It looked down at the spear point, then began to turn its head toward her.
“How?”
“A gift from my big sister.”
Vanny pulled the spear from its chest and plunged it back in, this time through the side of its head.
She drove the spear deeper and forced the Ni Fei down onto its knees.
Its body folded forward, pulling the spear from Vanny’s hands as it struck the floor.
She stood over it for several seconds, breathing out of habit, only now surprised to see wisps of breath in the cool air.
Then she turned toward what was left of LV. The ruined core sat open inside its housing, dark and split through the center.
Her sister was gone.
Vanny crossed the chamber and knelt beside the crystal device. She picked it up with her own hands, feeling the smooth surface and its small, almost insignificant weight.
But there was nothing insignificant about what it contained.
Every person LV had saved was inside it, inaccessible without an Administrator but still alive in a timeless sleep within the crystal.
Vanny pulled the device into her own quantum storage, and it disappeared from her hands.
She heard the Ni Fei start to move on the floor.
“Usurper,” it hissed.
Without hesitation, she marched over, placed her foot on it, bent over, and grabbed either side of the spear’s haft.
“This is for my sister, you son of a bitch!”
Pulling as hard as she could while pushing down with her foot, she ripped the handle of the spear through the top of its head.