Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 32 - Reclamation Inferno

Jemima watched the giant salamander-shaped exoskeleton sitting on the ridge of the cliff above their encampment. She had been watching for the last fifteen minutes as it just sat there completely motionless it’s camowear turned to full. Now suddenly its tail flicked up into the air, her scans detected multiple thinCasts emanating from the beast, no doubt signalling to an advancing squad.

The other members of her group were completely unaware of the salamander’s presence, but of course her protocols allowed her to override some of the game settings. Thus the salamander was completely visible to her, she could have broadcast his position to one of the others, but even if she was interested in doing so she wouldn’t as it would hamper her plans.

She was fairly sure this one was K-Rox, she had tried the little trick she was about to pull here on two other exos in this sector, however she ended up having to destroy them through lack of response.

Jemima hoped she had guessed right about the type of suit K-Rox would have gone for, in memories that weren’t quite hers, she was sure that he had displayed more tactical rather than brute force qualities.

She pondered on changing her bot to look like Amorphia;

It could be a stroke of genius, or complete folly, it will either bring him back, or send him over the edge, I have no way of knowing.

Jemima watched as the salamander took up an offensive position and issued a dozen missiles exploding in the air not seventy-five metres from her position. The incoming projectiles served as a diversion for the exojets that came zipping around the lower sides of the hill, a terrible whining issued from them as they lanced down beams of boiling plasma onto the encampment.

Jemima dropped her camouflage and waited, she had sent a file four milliseconds after the salamander had fired its missiles. She had designed the code so that it would be disguised as one of the many thousands of incoming tactical battle messages the salamander was no doubt receiving.

Along with the file she had made the tracking signal she was using on him to become visible; she waited, holding breath she did not have, then finally she saw the micromovements that told her he was about to move. She set off into the burnt and broken forest to her rear with the salamander quite literally on her tail.

He was much quicker than her, the salamander had enormous jumping power, and its six main articulated legs gave it a ground speed of almost two hundred kilometres per hour. She was more agile, however this was somewhat nullified as the trees in the forest had taken some heavy bombardment from orbit, and none stood higher than a few metres.

Jemima had surveyed the lay of the land on her way to the encampment, and was heading for a rocky clearing where she could deliver what she hoped would snap K-Rox out of Krusher9’s mind-grip.

The ground around her twisted and bubbled as the salamander’s weapons discharged in concussive whumps, causing her to buck and slide as she ran. She spotted the clearing she had been heading for, the opening was around four hundred metres to her left.

Jemima ran some quick calculations and realised that she would make it to the cliff edge exactly 752 microseconds before the salamander. She allowed herself a few dozen of those microseconds to reflect on how she enjoyed being able to think and calculate like a machine.

She was snapped out of her mini-daydream by a kinetic smart-bullet that had somehow managed to escape her attention. The salamander must have sent it out on a wide arcing loop-pattern, she had noticed the missile too late to completely avoid it. Instead, as she ran she flicked her tail down into the ground and sent a pulsed energy wave into the tortured soil. The result was a blast that spouted her up fast to her right, just as the smart-bullet exploded to her left.

Jemima had angled the blast so that it threw her the remaining ten metres through the rocky gap, she slid along the floor, her four legs folded in a line behind her, she resembled the discarded toy of a child being flung from its highchair.

She managed to gain control of her slide using two of her legs and her tail, she spun round just as the mighty salamander appeared at the top of the cliff. Jemima knew she only had a small window of opportunity to deliver her anti-mind-grip virus.

A combination of the salamander’s shielding and the game’s parameters prevented her from sending the code over the airwaves. She would need to get close enough to use her tail to deliver it straight into his main drives located on his underbelly.

Jemima looked up at the salamander’s glowing eyes, it seemed to pause momentarily as it surveyed her. Perhaps the earlier constructor code she had managed to sneak into his comms memory had done more than she expected, maybe he was already beginning to remember.

She activated her audio amplifier’s;

“K-Rox, is that you! It’s me Je- Amorphia, I’m still alive Kay!”

Jemima waited the achingly long five hundred milliseconds for her voice to carry to the salamander, it seemed to pause. It swung its giant metal head one way and then the other, as if trying to spy her with one eye at a time, even though Jemima knew it could ‘see’ her using any one of its many hundred sensors placed all over its body.

The salamander leapt towards her as it issued forth a cloud of nanomite missiles.

“Oh well, worth a try.”

She thought to herself as she sprung backwards to avoid the nanomites, while releasing a string of timed plasma mines.

“This - ”

She pondered.

“May take longer than expected.”

Previous Chapters

Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 31 - Memory Boot Initialised

Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30

Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter Links 11-20

Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter Links 1-10

Original artwork by @fr3eze

Original words by Cryptogee