Cherry

The amazing thing about running Jeanie around Nia was the scale of things. Plants on Nia are big. I mean they're damned big! I was never able to shake the feeling that our Arkhe and all the other robots were about the size of mice instead of being meters tall. The geology didn't help much either. Slopes tended to be extreme. Whatever tectonics were going on inside of Nia had made for some funky landscapes. It didn't do much for your confidence. First time deployed, hostile environment, feeling like a small rodent....not a good recipe for a combat engagement.

Our mission that first day was simple, one hour orientation within 5 klicks of base. We had free reign to shake down and get acclimated so long as we remained within the guard tower perimeter. I started off just walking Jeanie around.....now remember, Jeanie was only a tiny little nanobot inside of that monster of a robot. Just that whenever she integrated into a bot I started thinking of her as the whole thing.

We had our legs under us pretty quick. I took Jeanie at some pretty high speeds and the bot handled the terrain with no problem. It was amazing and a little comical how fast those legs would move. To be honest it didn't do much in the way of helping my mouse complex. Seeing something that big scurrying around was surreal.

After about 10 minutes of staying within sight of the base I turned Jeanie down a sharp draw toward an inland sea. I could see on my radar that we were dropping out of the guard tower direct fire envelope but I wasn't too concerned. You've gotta remember that I'd had plenty of experience controlling bots in combat back on Earth. Plus I didn't figure we had much of anything to worry about that close to base. Boy was I wrong.

We eased down the draw to where it widened out into a bowl shaped depression. The sides of the bowl rose up to sharp peaked hills and the floor was covered with 3 meter high vegetaion called Oryovia. I had Jeanie bring up an overlay that gave me the no-go terrain and could see our only way out was either back up the draw or over a saddle about 800 meters ahead. Over the saddle our map showed open terrain. A quick joggle to the right after passing through the saddle and we'd be on a direct, unobstructed line back to base. Only problem was if we went over that saddle we were going to be about a full kilometer outside of my assigned 5K limit. I decided to play by the rules.

I had Jeanie navigate the dense vegetation toward a spot where we could climb a slope high enough to get a direct line of sight over the saddle. We would be just inside the 5k limit. Her path took us right through the middle of the bowl. We started picking up some dense mag readings on the radar. Jeanie gave me a probability of titanium deposits and we were equipped with a probe so I had her go ahead and drop one. Mistake.


Those damned probes set up a racket like you wouldn't believe. As soon as it started thumping, the densities on radar started moving. Now Jeanie was a machine. There wasn't any hesitation on her part. Me? I'm human. For a split second I had all sorts of denials and excuses running through my head. It could be friendlies. It's inside the guns so it can't be enemy. It might be a local fauna I just wasn't briefed on. Shit. It's funny as hell what your mind will come up with to deny a bad situation.

Jeanie saved my ass. She had just enough AI at that point to throw us into a quick run toward a dense cluster of trees without my input. I only froze for a split second but by the time I came back to myself there were three flights of light missiles homing on us. Jeanie was feeding me so much data I could barely absorb it. Castel class Thelodican drones. Directions. Speeds. Ranges. Armor strengths. Sensor weaknesses. Missile payloads. Cartridge reload times....and a shit ton more.

The first flights of missiles impacted directly aft of Jeanie. Expanding dust and smoke poured past us even faster than we were running. Jeanie switched my view over to laser interpolation as we were swallowed in a brown haze.

I nudged Jeanie's direction back toward a slightly higher elevation and cycled the HE dump rounds in the two Syn-Tec issue light autocannon she was equipped with so that we'd have AP trajectory on our first shot. I had Jeanie send a priority contact report back to base. The second salvo was already incoming.

I sent Jeanie a command to target the two closest Castels and spun the upper body so that our weapons would be able to track. At the same time I gave Jeanie freedom to move us at best possible speed back to the draw . I wasn't going to stick around to fight and lose an Arkhe on my first day.

Jeanie went evasive...running a random zig zag in the general direction of the draw. It didn't matter. The Thelodicans had corrected their salvo spread to account for our ability to take sudden laterals. The rounds that hit us weren't concentrated and only a few of them impacted but it was still enough to rock Jeanie and nearly tip us. Armor chunks blew off the back two legs and the thorax armor was cratered. We lost backup actuators in one of the legs and the blast impact had derailed gear drives in an infrared targeting turret but otherwise Jeanie came out just fine. I was impressed. My old CIRP back on Earth would have been a molten heap under those impacts. These Nian bots were tough SOBs.

Our reactor had plenty of juice so Jeanie kicked on the armor repair while I primaried one of the Castels. I fired three quick bursts of AP. The Castel didn't have close to our mobility and I was a pretty good gunner. Most of my rounds hit and poked fist sized divots in his armor. I was so damned proud of myself. That lasted almost a full second. The Castel opened up with one of his cannon. One burst and we had a line of head sized craters in the armor of the cupola. It was right then that I realized just how crappy Syn-Tec guns were. I was laying on my couch in the intch cussing my ass off as I thought at Jeanie to open up the reactor and get us the hell out of there.