ROBOT SURPRISEPreviously on SDNW4 wrote:“We must engage them!” Commissar Tedostp roared and thumped his chest mightily. “And we will defeat them, or at least buy enough time for our comrades to come and assist us in doing so!”
“But how?” Captain Syiegel asked.
“Trust me, captain. I have a cunning plan,” Commissar Tedostp grinned viciously. “Take us to the Collector ship. When we are close, I will unveil a secret weapon that will give us a decisive edge.”
With that, the commissar pulled out his beating-stick and left the bridge. Captain Syiegel watched him leave, and then turned back to his crew. He shrugged, knowing all to well what the vicious expression on the commissar’s face entailed.
“Take us to missile range and prepare to launch all tubules at the Collector ship,” he commanded. “For Byzon! For great justice!”
Derevnya Gadyukino System
Severnaya Sector
Bragulan Star Empire
Unreal time
“Out of the way!”, Commissar Tedostp screamed at the terrified orderlies administering first aid to several burn victims and one amputee who fell victim to a jammed vacuum tube autoloader, “Where is the ideologically impure trash?!”
The orderlies looked at each other in panic. They didn’t realize at first who the Commissar was talking about, and each of them immediately thought about pointing to one of their friends in order to save their own skin. They were all guilty of some unbyzonic activity and couldn’t help but wonder what, precisely, the commissar knew. Only one of them retained the presence of mind to ask.
“What do you mean, Commissar?”, one of the orderlies said and managed to draw the attention of everybody in the room.
“I mean the foul animal who violated the sanctity of the Bragulan flesh with his unauthorized and unbyzonist cybernetizations, obviously!”, Commissar Tedostp helpfully explained, waving his beating-stick menacingly, “And what the hell are you even doing here, Crewman Nefartnyi?”
“Gastric ulcer, sir”, the question-asker replied truthfully. Robyodov Nefartnyi was part of the press-ganged vacuum tube shovellers working the autoloaders, and was sent to the infirmary after his ulcer got bad enough to present a serious threat of getting vomit on the precious machineries. He didn’t explain that the ulcer was caused by gut-wrenching fear ,satisfied instead that he’d spend the battle safely tucked away in the infirmary.
The commissar blinked, before growling something incomprehensible under his snout. His attention was quickly shifted back to the orderlies, though, as he had more important duties at hand.
“Have you gone deaf?! Where is he?!”
“I... in the meat locker, sir!”, the orderly replied with a shaking voice, his head carefully following the movements of the Commissarial beating stick.
“Open it! You, Nefartnyi!”, Tedostp pointed to the victim of gastric problems, “Get me a video camera! You two, clear out some floor space! NOW!”
Everyone present abandoned the suffering wounded and sprang into action - except Nefartnyi, who sauntered out of the infirmary glad he was sent on an errand to somewhere else, thus avoiding most of the commissar’s rage. His satisfaction was quickly ruined, though, when he heard the distinct thump of the ship’s missile launchers voiding. Suddenly, Nefartnyi decided that should the robotoids return fire, he’d rather be in the infirmary than in some expendable compartment with no medicine at hand. He picked up the pace.
When he returned with the camera - shaped like a Space RPG launcher, in an effort to ease training of bears transitioning from civilian life to glourious service in the Legions Of Liberation - the infirmary had already been converted into an impromptu movie studio, with the Commissar as the director, bellowing at the orderlies and administering stick-beatings to anyone he deemed to be working too slowly.
All of that, though, was nothing compared to the sight of Rygyvld Zybynv, the “ideologically impure trash”, guilty of defacing the grandest and most glourious of all sentient bodies with home-made prosthetics - who had been wheeled out of the meat locker on a trolley and parked right between two isotope lights in preparation for whatever the commissar had in mind. The bear was moaning softly, its horribly deformed face and many holes that used to house improvised cybernetics oozing vile fluids to the floor.
In a most unbyzonic thought, Robyodov thought the poor bugger deserved better.
“Nyet!”, the commissar shouted at him, making the bear cower in preparation for a stick-beating, “Stand over there! Connect the camera to the intercom network!”
With a sigh of relief, Robyodov snaked the camera’s two-inch cable towards a proper port in the wall mounted intercom board, and connected its hefty half-kilogram plug. He had no idea what Tedostp was planning, but again - he’d rather be near the 100 liter drums of morphine than away from them, all things considered.
He hefted the camera, used the flip-up prismatic sight to aim it at the moaning ex-cyber bear, disabled the safety and pressed the trigger.
***
Captain Syiegel scowled as the Collector Wasp-ship grew larger and larger in the telescreen. There it was, blasting the wreckage of the wrecked substation with its flayers, aiming to finish the job. Syiegel knew that Collector ships always prioritized the completion of their mission above all else, and this Wasp-ship’s mission seemed to be the destruction of the glourious People's Department of Limited Foreign Interaction and Human Affairs Relay Substation for the Broadcasting of Bragulan Ideologically Correct Educational Materials to Severely Byzonism-Challenged Puny Humans and Collectoroid Robots of Wild Space. Yet despite the damage incurred by the substation, it was still broadcasting Byzonic speeches to the Lost with its twelfth-layer redundant duodenary antennae.
While the transmissions would not go so far, because the duodenary antennae were nowhere near as long-ranged as the primary antennae, the fact that one of the substation’s still-functioning pieces was still functioning must’ve irritated the Wasp’s machine intelligence to no end. Syiegel’s scowl turned to a sour smile, at least that would distract the Wasp until it finally finished the station off, allowing them an advantage in their attack. But Collector minds could easily disengage from their primary objective to deal with any lesser-priority attackers, should they prove troublesome.
The Bragnum Force would prove to be more than just troublesome for the Collector Wasp, Syiegel was going to make sure of that. He just hoped that his gunskimmer would last as long as the substation.
The missiles that had already left the gunskimmer’s tubules arced towards the Wasp from all angles, leaving contrails of radioactive particulates as they englobulated the Collector ship. Sickly green flayer beams lashed out, cutting down as many missiles as possible, but at the last second the missiles split open to reveal even more missiles, which they launched at the Wasp with gusto. These multiple independently-targeting revengeance vehicles finished the job that their MIRV buses started, terminating around the Wasp and blossoming into thermonuclear whiteouts.
Just as the gunskimmer closed in at gun range and shelled the Wasp, firing for effect.
While the Collector ship’s shields withstood the nuclear detonations all around it with only minor bleedthroughs, the Bragulan artillery was different. The Wasp had angled its deflector shields to soak up the saturation nuking, configuring the field geometries to intensify more or less equally all around the ship. This was optimized for a multi-directional nuclear bombardment, not a concentrated barrage of mass driver rounds. The K-bolts hammered against the unconcentrated shields from one direction, striking time-on-target as the Wasp reeled from the nuking. The ship’s shield generators, already strained from the last attack, were now battered by the kinetic energy of the deep impacts. Something broke, one of the shield-walls faltered, and the acid bullets punched through the flickering force field and bored into the Wasp’s guts.
The K-bolts ripped through the Wasp’s necrodermis, and the sheer force of the impact caused the bolts to literally disintegrate somewhere in the Collector ship’s bowels. The Wasp’s auto-repair systems immediately began to heal the damage, but something was wrong, the wounds wouldn’t mend. Because the K-residue from the bolts was still there, and the acid was eating through the necrodermis - molecular corrosives breaking down the poly-alloy in an act of elemental digestion. Not just on the outer hull, but also inside the Wasp’s innards where the K-bolts had penetrated. Components started sizzling and melting, boiling into caustic slime. For the Wasp’s mind, interlinked as it was to the entire ship by nano-sensors in its very necrodermis, the sensation of the K-residue liquefying its parts was excruciating. The closest thing it could feel to pain. The necrodermis itself seared with the touch of the K-residue, and the agony continued until the acids were finally dissipated after burning away so much.
That pain led to anger, that anger led to hate...
And that hate would lead to the Bragulans’ suffering.
The cold and calculating machine intellect finally had enough of the organics. At first, it was content with merely prioritizing its mission objectives while avoiding the unnecessary mind-deaths of any intelligences, organics or not. But it had been forced to defend itself from the repeated attacks of these fleshling nuisances, these barely-sentient beings called Bragulans. Still, it’s mission objectives were clear, the destruction of the substation first and foremost, and it had reverted to its priorities after fending off the Bragulans’ initial attacks. But now, the mind had been forced to reassess its priorities. The Bragulans had harmed it, inflicted upon it a new and horrible sensation of pain. By doing this, organics threatened it and, by extension, also threatened the completion of its mission. In the rage of a machine, the mind thus deemed that the unnecessary mind-deaths of these organic intelligences was necessary, and that while Bragulans were organic, in its disdain it had deemed them to be not-intelligent as well. Thus, with the conclusions of its new assessment, the mind knew what to do.
It decided their fate in a microsecond.
Extermination.
As the Bragnum Force banked around for another strafing run, the Wasp turned with unnatural grace towards it. Its necrodermis hull had mended all wounds by then. Its flayers were charged and ready. It dodged the next salvo of K-bolts and maneuvered itself away from the gunskimmer’s aim, eventually bringing itself behind the lumbering craft. It was on, and with predatory intent the Wasp began its hunt.
Its first blow was a cascade of emerald lightning that glanced off the gunskimmer’s shields. Bleedthrough caused underlying ablatives to blacken, but nothing more. In a panic, the pursued Bragship launched a salvo of missiles, though no longer as numerous as the previous ones. The gunskimmer was running low on warheads, just as the Wasp’s mind calculated. It struck these missiles with its point-defense, surgically cutting them down while its electronic warfare suite - now familiar with Bragulan missiles’ methodologies - played havoc with their guidance systems. Still, some missiles went through, as did a withering barrage of K-bolts. But now, unlike before, the Wasp was angling its deflector shields forward and it took the combined beatings of the bolts and missiles in stride.
The Wasp was behind the Bragnum Force, and it was coming up the gunskimmer hard. The Bragship tried desperately to evade, to return fire with its K-bolts, but the mountings of some of the bolters had been melted. All their guns could fire facing forward, as they had when on the attack, but now in the defense, some of their guns could not traverse to strike the Collector ship coming from behind.
The Wasp fired its flayers again. This time, its sensors had picked up a vulnerability in the gunskimmer’s shield grid, a gap that they had attempted to cover up by extending and overlapping the coverages of several surrounding shield generators. It exploited this and concentrated its fire on that single spot with the unerring accuracy known only to a machine. The shields fractured, just as it had calculated, and before the Bragship’s contemptuously primitive vacuum tubes could recycle, the flayers struck the gunskimmer’s bare armor.
At first, the densest and topmost layers merely warped and twisted as the flayers started to strip their molecular structures. But then, as the sickly green energy suffused the matter, even the Bragsteel began to bubble and flow like candlewax, before finally evaporating outright. The flayers peeled the armor off the gunskimer’s unshielded underbelly. Then it unleashed a swarm of knife missiles, hypervelocity projectiles that stabbed the massive gunskimmer’s exposed guts like a thousand explosive pinpricks.
The Bragnum Force buckled and groaned as the knives detonated within it. The focused phased plasma blasts vaporized whole compartments, atomizing entire layers of ablatives and vegemite-treated platings before carving out the gunskimmer’s actual innards. Crews were flash-fried and their atomized remains - along that of the ship’s entrails - began to billow out into space like a plume of smoke from a pyre.
The attack ship was on fire off the shoulder of Severnaya.
***
“Fucks!” Captain Syiegel shouted. The Collector ship’s unexpected missile barrage had wrought terrible, terrible damage on the Bragnum Force. He gripped the bars of his captain chair’s roll cage as internal and external explosions rocked the ship violently. “Damage report!”
“They have set us up the bomb!” cried a panicked ensign. “We are on the way to destruction, we have no chance to survive!”
“Then we will make our time!” Syiegel roared back in defiance. Suddenly, his hammer and sickle-shaped comm badge began beeping. It was Commissar Tedostp. “Main screen turn on!”
“How are you gentlemen?” Tedospt said over the telescreen. “Patch me through to the Collector ship.”
“What you say?!” Syiegel wasn’t sure he heard what he heard.
“I have a message to the Collectors!” Tedostp explained. Was he thinking of surrendering? Impossible! It had to be a daring gambit that might save their lives. “It’s a daring gambit that might save our lives.”
“Da! Begin transmission!” Syiegel acknowledged as he patched Tedostp through. The gunskimmer’s radio dishes began beaming the transmission to the Collector ship.
“Robotoid arch-fiends!”, the Commissar bellowed mightily into the ether, “You have proven yourselves worthy adversaries to the might of Byzon! I, People’s Military Commissar Tedostp, have therefore decided that you shall receive the honor of behesting our secret weapon! A chance to surrender before you are torn apart by the greatest warrior Bragule has ever seen!”
“What in the nine vectors is he doing?”, captain Syiegel couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The Commissar continued his speechifying, while various crewmen busily sorted out the gunskimmer’s damage control efforts.
“BEHOLD! See your doom and DESPAIR!”, the Commissar pointed to the side with his beating stick.
The camera panned away from him, and focused on the form of Rygyvld Zybynv, spread on a vertical rack, as the ship’s doctor and two orderlies performed horrible and unnatural work on him.
“That mighty creature”, the Commissar’s voice called out from behind the camera, “Has survived a thousand battles throughout the nine vectors! It had recently been forced to patch its own wounds with cybernetics improvised from common equipment! Such is the might of its physiology that it not only survived the process, it successfully removed those implants so that we could fit it with more potent ones!”
The camera panned back to the Commissar, who leaned forwards, adjusted his giant hat and growled, “You have no chance. Surrender now, or we shall unleash the ultimate Bragulan upon you!”
With that, the transmission was cut off. Before captain Syiegel could break the shocked silence, Commissar Tedostp logged back onto the intercom.
“Captain! Prepare the crew for boarding!”
That was when the sheer brilliance of this plan struck the bridge crew. The Wasp outmatched them ; But it was a Collector vessel, and they were known for their propensity to Collect various strange things... and perhaps, if the robotoid murdership decided Rygyvld Zybynv was worth Collecting, it would engage the Bragnum Force directly, board them... and get into direct melee combat, where Bragulan spirits and sheer brute strength might just even the odds, and give them enough time to last until the warcruiser Today is Bragsday’s arrival.
Now, the only problem was to see if the Wasp would cooperate.
“Kapitan! The foul robotoids are moving in for another attack run!”, the borderline panicked voice of Crewman Fukeseyev seemed to indicate otherwise.
"
- PeZook
