Digital Galaxies

The interior of the airlock was dark, and I had to repeat the door opening process with the second door. The style of the doors was rather helpful for getting bundit around, circles with flat bottoms. Unlike me. My bottom was faaaar from flat and I loved it.

Bundit’s headlight cut through the darkness inside the ship to show us a staging room for the airlock. Lockers and space suits lined the walls of the room, or at least, those that weren’t just drifting aimlessly in the gloom. It looked like the crew had come through here quickly, as if they’d abandoned ship or something.

Their suits were fascinating, large but not out of the realm of what a human would potentially wear. Size wasn’t the only similarity either, they were bipedal as well, with two arms to boot. Spines looked a little more curved than ours were though, and there was a tail sleeve sticking out where you’d expect it to be, a socket on the end allowing for tools to be attached.

“Looks like our ancient friends used to look a lot like us,” Cerri commented through a private voice channel.

“I’m broadcasting?” I squeaked, twitching and sending my mech’s arms spinning.

“No, Roger is,” she replied with a quiet, amused chuckle. Oh god. Why did that little laugh sound so hot? A tingling, popping sensation rippled down my spine and into my toes, causing me to freeze neurocontrol of Bundit for a second while I collected myself.

Once my toes had stopped wiggling, I activated my own camera feed and sent it through to her, so that at least I’d know what she was looking at. “Don’t surprise me again, please,” I mumbled bashfully. “I control Bundit partially with my mind.”

“Oh, I didn’t realise,” she replied, sounding genuinely surprised. “That’s impressive.”

“I seem to have a knack for it,” I said offhandedly, already scanning my surroundings to make sure it was clear of baddies.

She was silent for a few moments, and I began to wonder if she’d let the conversation drop. Just when I was beginning to move through and into the corridor beyond, she spoke again, “It’s fascinating, really. You’ve taken to it better than many SAI.”

“It just seems really intuitive to me,” I mused, scanning my headlights over the soft white walls of the ship’s interior. Everything was covered in dust, it coated the walls, ceiling and even the random junk that floated free without gravity.

What I’d said was true though, digital space just felt natural to me, as easy as breathing or walking. I had a feeling that the shift from or to a purely digital state would be far more jarring than what I had experienced thus far. I’d had a body the whole time I was in VR after all, and I hadn’t dared shed it for a moment.

“Really?” she murmured in reply, clearly lost in thought. “Possibly you have an advantage because you are used to—“

Her sentence was cut by Warren shouting over the common channel, “I’ve got movement on sensors, a whole lot of it.”

“What the fuck, how?” Roger exclaimed as we backed into the airlock staging room again, weapons drawn.

Silence, except for the gentle patter of fingers on touch screens. “No idea,” Warren blurted urgently. “Our drones are going down fast, not getting any clean images.”

“Not getting any readings other than small heat signatures and movement,” Cerri said, working the problem now too. “If I had to guess, I’d say whatever is coming isn’t biological.”

“Oh.” I had seen enough science fiction to know where that might lead.

Roger was quick to take control of the situation, issuing orders to the group. “Alia, block the center of the door, everyone else, get yourselves positioned to shoot past her.”

I did as he asked, putting Bundit right in the middle of the door. I couldn’t block the whole thing though. The aliens who’d once built this ship were taller than us, so their doors were too, meaning that the boys could still get in beside me easily.

Our drones were all gone now, their feeds hissing static. Poor little friends. I’d worked hard on them!

“They should be on you in ten seconds, get ready!” Warren called, interrupting my mourning of the drones.

Things poured around the corner at the opposite end of the hallway, fast and uncoordinated, like a horde of zombies. The guys opened up with their weapons before we got a good look at them, but there were two things that stuck in my mind in those first few moments. They were made of machine and flesh.

The gun on Bundit’s right arm roared to life, the sound of a waterfall of steel being carried through the arm and into the pressurised cockpit, my teeth vibrating with the intensity. The weapon was your typical handheld automatic railgun, except it could never have operated in this manner. Jason and I had replaced most of the wiring with far more robust stuff, removing the battery pack in the process. Instead, it hooked directly into Bundit’s miniature fusion reactor for power. The modifications turned a fairly run of the mill assault rifle into a mech-mounted hose of death.

The strange machine-flesh creatures rushing us were torn to shreds, even the metal portions of their bodies unable to hold out against the combined hail of bullets that flew down that corridor. It was carnage, pure and simple, which didn’t at all help with figuring out what the things were meant to look like when they weren’t full of holes.

A warning blared, red and loud through Bundit’s speakers, and I had just enough time to push the guys back behind the bulkhead before I was hit with something. I flew back, right out the airlock and back into space.

What the fuck? “Turshie, did you get a scan of those things, plus what just hit me?” I asked quickly, already working on getting my wild spin under control.

An image popped up on my main display, showing one of the creatures that had just attacked us. About five feet tall when fully upright, they were indeed some sort of hybrid between organic life and machine. Core structural components were all metal, while anything that was meant to move or provide force was made of flesh. Organic hydraulics and pistons pulsed with an alien, sickening heartbeat.

What made them truly strange was the way that each was all but identical, designed to fold themselves up into a cube about a foot and a half to a side. They would then unfold into a bipedal humanoid shape, all right angles and edges, not a metal curve in sight.

“It appears that there is a larger one in there, and it shot you with an unidentified kinetic weapon,” Turshie told me while I burned hard to get back to the airlock. “I would suggest that you shoot that one first.”

“No,” I grinned, retracting the gun into its protective housing. The thing about using a mind-machine interface to pilot a mech, is that you can throw some pretty crazy ideas at the machine part and it will do the calculations to make them work.

I blasted back into the airlock just as the creatures were about to overwhelm the guys, then past them and into the corridor. My hands were already outstretched when I reached the larger metal droid thing, and I proceeded to carry it all the way through it’s friends and into the bulkhead at the end of the hallway.

It writhed under my grip, an eerie screeching making its way through the intimate contact to savage my big, sensitive ears. A scream of pain and I pulled back, mental command rushing down the arm to activate the railgun. I vaguely heard the worried voices of Cerri and the others, but I ignored it all and rammed my fist into the guts of the pinned alien horror. One hundred and twenty rounds per second tore through the internal workings of the awful thing, causing its scream of pain to switch to a gurgling dirge of death.

The work wasn’t done though, there were still so many more of those things to eradicate. 

Bundit’s left forearm opened on my command and a canister floated free, while another was ejected from its hull. I grabbed both even as the horrors tried to pry at panels and plates, swarming and chittering like a hoard of enraged bugs.

A small flame rippled free from a nozzle on the left arm, and I slammed the two canisters together, shattering them.

The explosion shook my little mech, bouncing me back into the relatively soft cushion of my dead adversary. In the exact moment of detonation, Bundit automatically pulled all limbs in, turning itself into a sphere of armour in order to protect me while our enemies burned outside.

It was over in an instant, the fire exhausting its supply of oxygen in a brief, bright moment.

Silence reigned, no ear rending screeches or the sound of futile metal limbs trying to pry at me. Safe in my Bundit ball, enemies cremated outside… or so I thought. I heard movement at the same time as my screens flickered back to life, showing many of the fucking bastards getting back up again!

“No you don’t!” I growled, although with my tiny voice it sounded less than threatening.

Bundit was definitely threatening though, and I got back to work with both hands grasping and crushing, throwing and smashing. I turned that stupid, dumb, annoying hallway into an alien cyborg blender.

It didn’t take long for their numbers to thin out, until there was only one left. “Die!” I cried, throwing the little bugger past the guys and out into the void.

Somehow, I was sweating and panting, gasping for breath as real silence filled our comms channels, the battle actually over.

Roger coughed, amusement clear in his voice when he broke the quiet, “Well, that’s a surprise. Alia the berserker.”

“Didn’t see that coming, that’s for sure,” David laughed alongside our captain. “Good job though, little Alia.”

“I feel like we need to get her more pointy, smashy, bashy things to attach to her mech,” Cerri mused warmly. “If only to make sure she survives the next wild boarding action.” My heart did a little flip at her words, I could sense her eyes sparkling with a teasing light, even if I couldn’t see it.

To everyone’s surprise, Jason spoke over the line, voice gruff and weak, “I am so ready to put all sorts of crazy weapons on that thing. That was so fucking cool!”

Standing there in the middle of the carnage, I heard my crew’s banter, congratulations and teasing… and felt fire lick its way over my cheeks. Prompted by my mental link, Bundit’s gore-soaked hands came up to cover the central sensor unit at the same time that my hands covered my face.

“Stooooop,” I whined as my embarrassment overwhelmed me.