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  His Wolfhound drones were at the very edge of their terrain envelopes. They all had all four of their secondary manipulator arms deployed, delicate looking snakes of metal that were usually hidden away under armor panels in the belly, giving them six legs to climb with, the four manipulator arms, and the two main ostrich legs. It was very ungainly looking and Knave was sure not all would reach the target. Along with climbers, like him, there were units with grav boosters flying up towards the Buzzer positions and units with grav chutes dropping down on the Buzzer positions. Some were being deployed by dropship, like he had been, while others were being inserted directly into the atmosphere, and some heavy units were falling all the way from low orbit.

  With so many targets and attack vectors the hope was obviously that the Buzzers would be overwhelmed. To Knave it looked more like a turkey shoot. Then he saw a proximity warning in his faceplate, followed by an impression of something large and mechanical dropping towards him.

  Was it one of his own drones, finally losing traction on the ice with its ridiculously inadequate pincers, or was it the carcass of a dead Buzzer?

  He didn't have time for a better look. He just dug his crampons and axes into the ice and squeezed himself in as close to the mountain face as he could. There was a massive impact above him, very close, then minor impacts as rock and ice debris hit his armor, with scraps of metal mixed in from the falling object. Then nothing. It had bounced past.

  Knave gingerly looked down but, even with the view in his faceplate magnification set to maximum, there was no sign of what fate had befallen the machine. Knave looked back up, planned the next stage of his ascent and kept climbing. He reached a ledge, anchored himself as best he could with one hand and aimed his mass driver upwards with the other. Symbols appeared in his faceplate warning him that accuracy would suffer if he didn't use two hands, but seeing as he needed the other to anchor himself to the cliff face, he just ignored them.

  He peered upwards and at extreme magnification he could pick out dark shapes among some structures clinging to the upper slopes. His identify friend or foe system had them all lit up red for Buzzers and he didn't see any green friendlies nearby, so he designated a target. He felt the actuators of his armor start to subtly influence his aim. It was mostly the shoulder actuator, but wrist and torso actuators were slightly shifting too. He squeezed the trigger and saw ice and rock fountain at the impact site. When he adjusted magnification back to normal he was disappointed to see that what had seemed a huge explosion of destructive force was, at normal magnification, just a small puff of ice among thousands of others, soon lost among the flurries of falling snow.

  Knave had no idea if he had hit his target, but that wasn't of vital importance, it was more a question of producing suppressing fire until the range closed, but he did know that he was at the most vulnerable point of his climb-shoot-climb-shoot routine just after he had fired off his weapon. A mass driver didn't have the same muzzle flash as a blaster but, in the moon's thick atmosphere, it was drawing a ghostly line of ionized particles that projected a very considerable distance. He had just made himself a conspicuous target and he now had to move, to keep moving, onward and upward. Knave shouldered his mass driver and climbed three handholds before plastering himself flat against the ice and rock face of Fang Mountain.

  The rock face around him, mostly above him thankfully, started to erupt into spurts of ice and rock as the enemy returned fire, some of the rocks blasted from the cliff face were easily big enough to dislodge him if they hit him. And, needless to say, a direct hit by a rod from a Buzzer's mass driver, or a bolt from a blaster, would cook his goose.

  He felt a medium size rock clang against the torso of his armor with enough force to dislodge his left foot. He quickly stamped his foot back into position, dug the crampons on his left boot back into the ice, and held on.

  He was soon surrounded by a cloud of ice crystals and rock dust, masking him almost completely to the enemy above. Incoming fire started to slacken off a bit, and it was time to climb again. As he was climbing, he pinged his drones to see how they were doing.

  He had lost one since he last checked in. Had the falling machine been his drone? Had it looked like a Wolfhound? None of the other drones had any record of what had happened to their comrade.

  They were, most of them, a little higher up the slope than he was. Their weapons were mounted on stubby, flightless 'wings' on the sides of their torso and could fire upwards if the drone just paused in its climb. The drones did not have to stop and dig themselves in just to fire a weapon the way he had to.

  He was keeping a very hands off approach to the drones. They had their target. They had mass drivers. How they got within range was up to them. He was just checking in to make sure none had chosen a ridiculous route that would silhouette them or have them suspending all their weight from vulnerable overhangs of rock. Everything seemed to be within parameters, so he dismissed the link to his drones and concentrated on his own climb. He climbed for ten more minutes, pausing to shoot twice, and then he saw something looming out of the mist and fog.

  Up ahead he saw a structure that seemed to grow from a small plateau of rock, jutting from the side of the mountain. The structure looked military, a guard post or drone hanger, or something similar.

  Knave sent off a request for an alteration in his orders so he could attack a target of opportunity. He received in return the message he had been expecting.

  Control Network Unresponsive.

  Cause.

  Enemy Interference.

  The Buzzer singing in his earphones was loud and he wasn't surprised it was drowning everything else out. He could only communicate with his drones by a daisy chain of direct laser light communication links.

  Knave sent the request to the Offline Orders of Battle system, which was just a glorified database, integrated as a subsystem of the computer within his own armor. It made strategic decisions predetermined by Control for use when communications were down. It agreed his suggested change of objectives.

  Engage Target of Opportunity.

  "I thought you might say that," Knave whispered to himself grimly.

  He pinged his drones again, damn, another one missing, they were taking a pounding. He designated the building as the new target, causing the drones to start climbing directly towards it.

  "No," he muttered, "Let's go in by the back door."

  He instructed the drones to climb above the structure and approach from further up the slope. He also told them to stop firing for now. The drones were very smart. A fuzzy instruction like 'for now' was perfect for them it constrained them but also left them some leeway to target adversaries if there was no other option or if there were no further instructions.

  ***

  Knave and his drones were within short range of the building now, and a little above it on the face of the mountain. Knave could see detail in the building, it seemed very newly constructed, with only three or four windows piercing the exterior wall, obviously Buzzer architecture. He relayed a message to his drones.

  "If this is at all well defended," he sent, "get ready to bug out. But, for now, a slow advance."

  He crept down the mountain with his drones and, about where he expected, they came under fire. It wasn't mass drivers or blasters though, it was missiles. The roof of the building had unfolded in four places, each sited near a corner of the structure, revealing four dark, circular holes. Then, a moment layer, a pop-up missile battery had slid smoothly into position at each corner.

  Luckily their position must have been within some preset minimum distance in the missiles hardware or software. The missiles couldn't come zooming directly at them. Instead, the missiles arced upwards into the air, turned round and then descended towards his position.

  "You," he said to the nearest drone, via the line-of-sight communications, "Take out the missile launchers. Everyone else, defensive fire."

  He was already pointing his mass driver skywards and pumping out rounds. The
drones around him did likewise, blasters and mass drivers filling the sky above them with blaster bolts and mass-driver rods. Knave was suddenly glad they had all gotten bunched up. The likelihood of being able to generate enough volume of fire to defeat an incoming missile was slim without a mass of guns.

  As it was, the first missile got perilously close before being detonated by their fire and dumping its load of shrapnel and explosives, great gashes were carved out of his armor, and he saw a nearby drone lose a weapons pod, torn off by a flying piece of jagged metal. The detonation of the missile filled the sky with so much shrapnel that the next missile immediately detonated a little further away, and then the next and the next, each one a little further away.

  "Okay," Knave yelled, "we can do this."

  As if in answer, he received a message from one of the drones that unpacked and scrolled across his visor.

  "Capacitors depleting fast. Situation unsustainable."

  Knave glanced at his power readout. His weapons were drawing power from the suit's giant capacitors more quickly than the power plant could replenish them.

  When his power readout reached zero, that capacitor would cut out for a half second to recharge back to minimum, and if he kept firing it would cut out again soon afterward. And the drones were designed the same way, with lousier capacitors if anything. All their guns would soon start to stutter and, if only one missile got through, they would be just a charred collection of scrap metal strewn around the side of the mountain.

  Knave took his eyes off missile targeting for a moment to look at the drone he had assigned to destroying the missile emplacements. It was scoring hit after hit. One missile battery was destroyed and the second had been forced to reduce its rate of fire. There was obviously some kind of energy shield around the building or the drone would have reduced all the missile batteries to smoking ruin by now.

  The rate of missile fire had dropped however, so he detailed one more drone to missile battery targeting.

  Just then things started happening real fast. One of the drones had a mass driver jam. A rod had caught just a little too much friction as it was accelerated down the track in the drone's nose. It dug into the side of the barrel of the weapon, the resulting explosion tore off the entire nose of the drone and sent it staggering around, spraying the hillside with blaster bolts. This mechanical failure would have meant certain doom if not for the fact that two drones concentrating on the roof was more than the building's energy shield could cope with. One missile was caught square on by a mass driver rod just as it was exiting the launcher. It detonated, blowing an enormous chunk out of the corner of the building furthest away from the slope of the mountainside.

  The missiles stopped coming. All the launchers, even the intact ones, fell silent. There were three more missiles in the air, but they were dealt with just as the drones' capacitors were reaching zero. They had survived, and could draw breath for a second.

  Knave watched his capacitor readout climb from two percent, to forty percent, to one hundred percent in a matter of seconds. It was very impressive how quickly his power came back, but it wouldn't have been quick enough if they hadn't dealt with the missiles. His supply of heavy metal to spin up mass driver rods was large, but not inexhaustible. Even if his capacitors could be designed to last forever, the ammo would have been depleted eventually. Once the mass driver fell silent, it fell silent for good, or until he found another block of heavy metal. All in all, it had been a very uncomfortable encounter, but they had survived it.

  "Good shooting team," he said.

  He was rewarded with some approving beeps and whistles, carried to him through the nasty soup of noises his communication had become because of the Buzzer interference. Then he went over to the drone with the damaged nose. He could see that the armor of the nose had been torn apart, exposing the machine's delicate interior. Some of the components inside were still glowing with the heat of the continued firing and everything was mashed and torn. There was a single eye still in place and it was turned on Knave. The machine beeped forlornly, but did not send any messages in human readable form. Knave looked to one of the other drones.

  "I want you to look after this one," he said, "Make sure it gets home. Alright?"

  The drone replied, two beeps for yes. Knave then turned towards the building.

  "Follow me," he said, "Let's go inside. I'm pretty sure its empty, otherwise one or two Buzzers would have poked their heads out of those windows and started taking potshots at us, wouldn't they?"

  The drones beeped and whistled unconvinced, but followed, with the rear brought up by the drone with the severe nose damage and the drone assigned to mind it. As they approached the building, the ground leveled out in one place until it was horizontal. This was where the building main entrance was. It was a large imposing looking structure, now that Knave had gotten right up to it.

  "Let's pop this open," Knave said.

  He leveled his mass driver at the locking mechanism of the large door and fired. He kept firing till there was a hole clear through the wall of the building in the place where the lock used to be. He lowered his mass driver and nodded to the nearest couple of drones. They walked past him, he had to spread himself against the wall to allow them past, and then they extended their general purpose arms from their belly hatches. They dug their strong metal fingers into the hole Knave had made and pulled on the door. It only took them half a minute to drag it to one side.

  On the other side of the door, was a corridor. The building was built to Buzzer dimensions and tastes, which meant two drones could walk down the corridor side by side. The two drones that had opened the door went on in, their eyes and blaster mounts swiveling to cover as much of the corridor as possible.

  "In you go," Knave yelled, "Like I said. Nobody's home.”

  Knave was next to enter followed by the rest of the drones, two by two. The drone in front of him on the left turned its torso just enough to allow a laser communications connection and sent him a question.

  "Which way, boss?"

  "Left," Knave said.

  There was no sign of occupation, and a curiously empty feel compared with human architecture. The chambers of the structure had very little furniture and the corridor walls sloped inwards at the top.

  After investigating a few rooms, Knave was starting to suspect that the structure was a scientific facility. He also noticed that very few doorways had actual doors in them. It seemed that privacy wasn't a huge concern to Buzzers. The doorways were large too, more like an archway in relation to human scale. A drone could walk through one without bothering to fold in its weapon pods or stow the communications array sprouting from its upper surface like a tuft of metal grass.

  There were also three-dimensional models of strange interlocking shapes here and there, like monumental sculptures towering over him. It was hard to tell if they were something scientific, for all he knew, they might just as easily have been works of art.

  Soon the entire ground floor had been investigated. They went upstairs, via a winding spiral ramp and saw the damage done to the upper floors by the exploding missile battery. The walls were bashed down in places and there was smoke damage and debris everywhere. Next they descended to the subterranean floors further down the spiral, below the ground floor.

  Down on these floors things started to get more cluttered. There were strange machines at each corridor intersection, and the walls were covered in readouts. Knave had no idea what any of it meant, but the symbols were so bright as they danced in their displays that they were reflected in the smooth and featureless walls of the Buzzer structure. Strangely, the interference in his radio channels disappeared. It was a weird feeling to have silence in his ears again.

  "Your communications okay?" he asked the nearest drone, tapping the side of his helmet.

  The drone nodded its body upwards and downwards, in a yes. Knave nodded and turned his attention back to the walls, but he was the only one interested. The drones weren't the slightest bit
interested in the dancing symbols, only tactical considerations ever occupied their minds, at least as far as Knave could tell.

  They went down to the second basement floor, which was decorated in the same dim light and dancing symbols combination, but something was different. Some of the symbols were unchanging. Holes were cut, here and there, through the display of dancing symbols, to expose the bare wall beneath. In these places the wall was carved with a symbol. In each place a different symbol, scratched into whatever the surface of the wall was. Knave couldn’t tell if it was rock or metal or something super advanced that just pretended to be inert wall covering. There was something about it that made him suspect it was beyond human engineering capabilities to produce.

  One of the drones stiffened, its weapons twitched. It sent a message to Knave over the now crystal clear radio channel, just a series of beeps and clicks, quickly translated into text in his face plate.

  "Did you hear that?"

  "No," Knave said, whispering now, "What was it?"

  "Movement in the next room,"

  "Okay," Knave said, "We'd better get in there before they get their heavy weaponry set up."

  "There is no evidence of heavy weaponry."

  "It was a hypothetical," Knave murmured.

  "Understood," the drone said, then, "Do we go?"

  "Follow me in," Knave said, "Back me up."

  "The human operator taking point is contraindicated."

  "I'm the boss," Knave said grimly, “and if I want to go in first I'm going to go in first."