Cataphractoi

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“So, Juny. Can I afford to upgrade your sensors enough to detect whatever this place is built out of?” I asked as I walked down the tunnel…and walked, and walked, and walked. It was quite long.

“I believe I will require some clarification! Would you like to entirely replace this drone with a Class II model, or simply the sensors? And would you prefer to purchase a Class II drone catalog or a sensor catalog of the same tier?” Juny inquired in return, which was an unusual amount of questions for someone that usually just suggested whatever she thought would fit best on the occasions when I was too lazy to search the catalogs myself.

“I’ll probably get more mileage out of the Class II drones catalog than a standalone sensors catalog,” I replied. It just felt more efficient, and it’s not like I had infinite tokens; I was already planning on spending one on new weapons, and I’d already spent another on the teleporter catalog…which meant this was the last one I could freely spend. I’d been hesitant to use it, but we really couldn’t take the risk of another surprise attack.

“Class II Utility Drones, then! An upgraded version of this drone would cost 1,750 points when compounded with the price of the catalog. That price can be reduced by approximately 300 points by only upgrading the sensors,” Juny informed me.

“That’s not much of a discount,” I pointed out dryly. Made sense though; the Eyebot that Juny was operating was essentially nothing but a sensor suite. The savings were probably from not upgrading its minimal armor and camouflage, neither of which I had reason to improve on right now. “Go for the upgrade.”

“Of course!” Juny acknowledged. I waited for a moment.

Nothing happened.

“…did you do it?” I wondered, having expected something to appear out of thin air like usual, but then I realized there probably hadn’t been a need for that. It was like how she and Dylta had been able to replace parts of the base in-situ. “Never mind. How are they working?”

“I am now capable of detecting the building materials used to construct this tunnel! They appear to have been of relatively low quality, likely intended to defend against Class I and Class 0 sensors but not Class II,” the AI reported eagerly, antennae extending and retracting.

“Do you detect any other tunnels nearby?”

“Checking. I do not! However, I may need to be closer to make a definitive statement!” she told me, much to my disappointment. That was easy enough to fix, though.

“Once we get back to base, go ahead and take the Eyebot around town just to be sure, then,” I instructed, knowing I’d forget by the time we were back.

“Of course!”

A few more minutes of walking later, we reached the end of the tunnel. There was a sliding door here, but it appeared to be unpowered, as it was just sitting mostly open. I stepped through after checking for tripwires- or lasers- and looked around, finding myself in a surprisingly well-lit room. Other than lighting, though, it was essentially bare; while there was some furniture here and there like tables, there was nothing of real substance.

“Juny, is there anything in here, or is the whole place like this?” I inquired instead of wasting my time searching room-by-room.

“The entire facility appears to have been stripped clean,” she informed me. “There does not even appear to be a generator; I believe the lights are only functioning by siphoning a small amount of power from the city’s grid.”

“Any signs of a fight?” I wondered as I idly wandered around the room, taking a close look at the furniture. It was all sleek, space-age aesthetic stuff, mostly colored in white and silver.

“None! However, I’ve located an insignia associated with the Vanguard named Reentry,” Juny replied, giving some genuinely useful information at long last.

“Great, what do we know about them?”

“Reentry was a Vanguard that initialized during the first incursion into Boone, and was instrumental in the preservation of the inner city, but a hostile relationship with the corporations owning most of Boone resulted in his refusal to assist in clearing the outer city in the aftermath. He was active for several years, but was recorded as missing following a major incursion in Winston-Salem,” Juny explained as I strolled into the next room to find more of the same.

“Missing? Not dead?” I prompted, likely exactly what Juny had been waiting for.

“Correct! He was theorized to have been devoured by the Antithesis following his death, but no confirmation was ever found,” she elaborated.

“There’s kind of a jump there between him going missing in Winston-Salem and some corpo fucks looting his secret base,” I pointed out as I experimentally tried sitting in a chair. Despite my weight in armor being much higher, it supported me without complaint.

“I am unable to determine how that eventuality came about. It is possible that he was betrayed or that a personal acquaintance merely made use of the abandoned equipment following his disappearance, but it is also possible he captured and interrogated,” Juny theorized.

“How in the world would they have pulled that off?” I asked incredulously.

“If Reentry was gravely wounded in combat while low on points, he may have been left vulnerable enough to be contained. Although he would have received his ten-point daily allowance as usual, he would have needed significant time to purchase advanced healing supplies when starting from nothing, much less equipment to aid in his escape. That’s just a possibility, of course!” Juny expanded before ending with a figurative shoulder shrug and an overly-cheery exclamation.

“For his sake, I hope he’s dead,” I muttered, loathe to imagine what he might have endured in a situation like that. “Well, it doesn’t seem like there’s much point searching the place, but I’ll give it a final search after I call in Haley.”

With that decided, I made a call back to base to request the explosives specialist’s service and then gave the base a full tour while I waited for her to arrive. It wasn’t much larger than a few thousand square meters, and while it was a shame to lose it considering the materials in was built from, the back door into a nearby valley was an unacceptable security risk. The most I found in my search was some clay tracked into the garage by vehicles that were long gone, and a quick search by Juny found that their trail became untraceable after reaching a highway.

Eventually I ran out of things to check and settled down on a table in the first room to wait for Haley. She arrived some minutes later in full combat gear, even though I just asked for her help with setting up some explosives. She practically skipped across the room and offered me a high-five that I humorously accepted.

“Sup, boss? Is this the place I get to blow up?” were the first words out of her mouth. I would say she was getting straight to business, but for her this was pleasure.

“Not quite yet,” I replied, feeling a bit bad when Haley deflated slightly. “Just destroying it now would be a waste. I’d rather string it up with explosives and rig them to blow when intruders show up.”

“Oh, I can definitely do that. What am I working with, and what’s the place made out of?” she asked, eyes sharp.

“Some kind of Class II materials I doubt we have a name for, and whatever you need to get the job done, in reverse order,” I explained. I instantly regretted it when I heard the next words out of her mouth.

“Got it, boss! I believe that, given this bunker was built by a Samurai, I will have to use a nuclear bomb to guarantee its destruction!” Haley asserted with a snappy salute that didn’t fool me in the slightest. I could see a spark in her eyes that her serious demeanor failed to hide.

“You need a nuke, or you want a nuke?” I pressed, not about to detonate a nuclear weapon so close to where I lived. Some of the confidence drained from her face.

“Uh…I sure would like to see a nuke go off,” she admitted pleadingly.

“Let me rephrase. What’s the minimum you need to collapse this place on the head of whoever is dumb enough to walk inside?” I clarified, feeling like I needed a lawyer to draw up the terms of my request.

“I need more information. Are the walls some kind of concrete? Are the supports a steel alloy or something with a higher melting point? I can use human-made materials as a baseline, but I’ll need at least some details to make a proper estimate,” Haley responded honestly, displaying her status as the resident subject-matter expert.

“Juny, you took some scans of this place, right? Can you send the specifications to her augs?” I requested of my AI partner, who bobbed up and down in response.

“Done!”

Haley didn’t say anything immediately, but she had the focused look of someone reading some virtual text displayed only for them. After some time spent reading, the demolitions expert looked back to me with the same confidence as earlier, but mixed with something I couldn’t quite name that told me whatever she was about to say was an indisputable fact.

“Looks like this building was mostly designed to protect against detection and attacks from the outside. The supports would be difficult to sever conventionally, but the interior doesn’t have any way to properly disperse pressure from an explosion on the inside, and if the doors are sealed their sturdiness would actually contain the blast until it exceeds the strength of the structure. I should be able to pull it off with about twice the usual amount of C4 in a few key locations, which would pulverize everything but the supports and cause it all to collapse around them,” Haley explained matter-of-factly…and she wasn’t even done.

“Alternatively, I can try to use shaped charges to target the supports themselves, but the amount of explosives I’d need for that would be prohibitively high, since I wouldn’t be using the properties of the material itself to compensate for lower yield. Something made with CL-20 might do the trick for an immediate demolition, but we don’t currently have access to any of the more stable variants that could be used for a long-term trap. If you’re willing to dip into Samurai-grade materials…I don’t know enough about them to make a judgement call, but I could probably work something out with Juny.”

I stared for a few moments after Haley finished her speech, though she couldn’t see my eyes through the visor. That was sure a lot of words, and I understood nearly all of them, but I wasn’t well-versed enough in explosives to understand the logic behind any of it.

“We’ll just…go with option one, I guess. We can requisition as much C4 as you need from the armory now. Think you can rig it with some type of IFF so it won’t blow up on our people, and make it so the doors automatically seal before the bombs blow? Maybe make it so nothing happens until they get close to the tunnel door?” I suggested, at least in part to sound like I was keeping up with the conversation. I was going to have to add some more broad weapons training to my lessons with Terry if I ever wanted to keep up with this sort of talk.

“Sure can! Wanna help me set the charges? I’ll walk you through it!” Haley volunteered, probably hoping to indoctrinate me in the way of explosives.

“Eh, why not?” If nothing else, it would save some of Terry’s time if I just learned this stuff from Haley.