Chương 131: Chapter 130 – Hex Core

Cole dipped his ethereal wings, bringing them down and away from the fire. The coils only gave him a few seconds of flight time, and he didn't want to be swimming to the dreadnaught. The hole in the side of the dreadnaught loomed, glowing red with hostile activity under his marking ability. Even from the air, Cole could see the repair automatons doing their work of cleaning out the torn metal and spreading fire retarding agent throughout the inside of the hole.

Flaring off his coils' wings for the last few seconds of their ability put them at an angle to split between the first and third exposed deck, smashing into a puddle of foamy firefighting agent. The shockwave from the Meteoric Leap spread out, pulverizing a handful of the fragile repair bots into scrap metal. Deadlight climbed to his feet, laughing like a madman.

"I ain't never done that shit before!" The three light orbs circling the senior Kicker moved off, intercepting a blue-blinking automaton marksman as it tried to duck through a hatch at the end of the compartment. One of the orbs thundered and the top half of the automaton flew apart as though hit point blank with a shotgun. Deadlight himself moved to cover another access, so Cole scanned for any additional threats and saw a roll-door start to rise with metallic feet under the gap.

Dropping to his stomach, Cole fired underneath the door. His rounds cut through the legs of the automaton soldiers on the other side. Metal bodies crashed to the ground. Deadlight continued fighting behind him, laughing all the while. In the corner of his eye, he spotted the bulk of the automaton transport dropping to their level and drifting close enough for Roxy and Alexa to jump across while Elliot floated over in his quad-copter configuration before changing back to the dog-bot with the paired guns.

Cole felt a charge pop, and several of the automatons trying to force themselves into the compartment instead turned on each other. They tore each other, and then themselves, to pieces. Cole looked over at clockwork Elliot, the paired guns firing into the corridor.

"You know where we're going, kid?"" Straight ahead, then down a level. I have the schematics, we just need to reach the control room." Cole nodded and pointed Roxy to the corridor.

"That way!" Roxy nodded and took point. Cole followed behind while Elliot and Alexa stayed close. Two of Deadlight's orbs ranged out ahead, smashing more of the automaton soldiers.

"Why does this place even have a control room?" asked Cole.

"Thought this ship was autonomous."" It wasn't supposed to be," said Elliot." Hexighast built the dreadnaughts to fight sea monsters and bust up monster outbreaks. Hextant took control of them when he came online and kicked out all the humans." Marksman rounds from a cross-corridor hammered into Roxy's shield, and she responded with the blue vapored spirit shells her passive put into her shotgun.

In these deadly confines, her afterburn shotgun was doing devastating damage to the bots, even if it couldn't afflict them with weeping sores before igniting.

They still gushed oil and hydraulic fluid, which proved to be plenty flammable on its own. More of the automatons attacked. Those who got close enough fell under Elliot's control and he turned them on each other, though eventually the dreadnaught switched tactics and simply tried to use them to block doorways and clog the approach to the control room. Deadlight shredded their metal bodies as if they were made of confetti, not steel." Down this way!" said Elliot, bounding down a narrow ladderway to the lower deck.

The compartment opened up into a set of chain conveyors moving large shells—undoubtedly the ones it was using to bombard the city's defenders. Elliot took them deeper into the ship, along a corridor with a reinforced security door at the other end that was closed and barred. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon." Hold on," he said.

The clockwork familiar rushed up to the door, and the old-fashioned display went to static, and then rows of symbols Cole didn't recognize. The security door groaned. The bars slid out of the way, then the door itself slid open on its tracks.

"Go," said Cole. He ducked into the room behind Roxy, scanning for threats. Several repair bots were at workstations, desperately pulling out cables and torching equipment. Not wanting to do their job of destroying the control room for them, Cole drew his pistol and took careful aim, picking apart the vandals with careful shots despite the flare of jealousy from his own rifle. The door slid shut behind them. Elliot trotted over to Alexa at the workstations.

Cole continued clearing the rest of the curved compartment, which looked to make up about a quarter of a larger circle.

"What a mess," said Alexa. She moved in behind and cleared away the scrap of one of the bots from a workstation.

"Elliot, can you still interface with this?"" Easy! Start hooking me up." Cole moved to the other side of the control room, where a set of fogged-up windows overlooked a glowing compartment. Below, a ring of server banks surrounded another of the floating, reality warping hex cores. This one was about three times the size of the one he'd seen at the LouixCorp bunker.

Coolant and ventilation hoses jutted from it at odd angles as it floated, some trailing up through the ceiling and others connected to massive pumps and piping set into the floor. One of the pipes had ruptured from the bombing run, shooting a high-pressure jet of steam that several repair bots labored to mend. The glass was hot to the touch, and Cole quickly pulled his hand away.

"Is this where all that fog was coming from?" asked Cole. The billowing cloud that had trailed and enveloped the dreadnaught must have been from the heat exchangers trying to keep the hex core cool. And Hextant was apparently made up of thousands just like it. No wonder the giant computer was melting the ice cap trying to stay functional. To the left and right the walls curved away, meeting on the other side of the ringed inner core and confirming Cole's suspicion about the core's layout.

The control room they were in comprised about a quarter of the circle. Through the opposite windows, Cole could see vague, hulking forms moving behind the glass. Alexa worked under Elliot's direction, clipping connections from the Pelican case to a control board that the dreadnaught hadn't managed to disable fully. Elliot stiffened, twisting toward one end of the compartment." Something's coming."

Twin torches pierced through the metal bulkhead, starting to draw a line across the steel near the roof of the compartment. More appeared, cutting at various angles to take apart the wall in several spots. While the bulkhead was steel, it wouldn't hold up long, and the floor vibrated with heavy footfalls on the other side. There was worse than marksmen waiting to greet them.

"They're coming through!" said Roxy, repositioning her shield.

"Elliot, take control of them!"" I can't! I can hear them, but they can't hear me. I think the dreadnaught had them disable their own receivers so I couldn't give them new orders!" Another cutter started working on the wall at the opposite end of the compartment. Deadlight twisted his gun toward it and started firing through the steel, extinguishing one of the torches for a few seconds before another replaced it.

"Give me some good news," said Cole. The overhead lights flickered, and several of the old screens in the control room began showing colorful static. The laptop speakers crackled to life from inside the Pelican case." I'm connected. But the dreadnaught's hex core is strong. It's fighting me, and Hextant's weight is behind it. I can feel him. He's desperate. I need some time to do this carefully or I'm going to get overwritten." Why would Hextant be so desperate?

But a section of the bulkhead on Roxy's side sheared away and fire began to penetrate the compartment. Cole vaulted a workstation to cover the opening, firing through at the hints of silvery skin in the smoke of burnt metal.

Deadlight's orbs fired on the other side, along with more bursts of the senior Kicker's machine gun. The air was becoming thick with gunsmoke and the acrid tang of hot metal. Eventually they were going to be taking fire from both sides. Alexa moved away from the laptop and put her microwave gun to work, firing bursts at the spot where the cutters were working to expand the gaps. Clockwork Elliot added his own firepower to the mix, hammering the bulkhead with his paired guns.

While the control room workstations themselves looked like steel desks, retro computer hardware didn't make for the best cover. Deadlight had put himself behind a steel support beam, but as soon as that side came down, he'd be on his own—and soon that bulkhead would be more holes than wall. Whatever Elliot was going to do, he was going to have to do it soon or this would be a one-way ticket.