Maty by Aer-ki Jyr (reading books for 6 year olds .TXT) 📕

The QuipNari was inside now, temporarily safe, and she took off running through the alien corridors enroute to her next assignment with Tovi virtually showing her the way with floating orbs overlaid onto her biological vision.

When she got to her destination the wavy ceiling architecture caught her attention as the ripples of light flowed up and down the curves in a pattern than suggested information rather than decoration, but she couldn’t figure it out in the 7.2 seconds she allowed herself. For her objective was right before her.

There were 18 machines parked on the flat floor, all of which were quadruped, and Tovi’s direction was leading her to the red one third in the first row.

Kyra ran towards it and jumped halfway up, grabbing hold of the crystalline nubs on the side panels and climbing the rest of the way to the top where she had to reconfigure her hand again to plug into a much smaller port. Tovi fed her the correct access codes that he had dug up…or more precisely Nevantha had dug up the protocols and fed them to him to explore further…in order to activate the combat machine, with a rectangular panel sliding open at the base of the neck that connected to the mechanical head.

Inside was simply a cargo hold that would support the pilot. It hadn’t been designed for a biological body, but Kyra was small enough that she could fit…barely. She had to contort herself up into a fetal position in order to get low enough for the hatch to seal over her, but with her hand linking to a hardware slot inside, she let her mind disconnect from her cramped body and interface with the machine.

Suddenly she was the machine, and quadruped, well armored, with new weaponry, sensors, and movement capabilities…as well as passcodes for many of the automated defenses Tovi was starting to get online by tripping various alarms after Nevantha had left with his larger intellect. It took Kyra several minutes to process the new software and create a cross link with her own biological brain. It wasn’t a new trick she had to learn, but every unfamiliar system took time to learn and form a handshake with, and this one was so advanced she didn’t fully understand what she was bonding with. Just that the pathways were there if she could expand her consciousness into them sufficient for the processing required.

Kyra barely qualified, but the machine…known as a Kel’zat…woke up, with her realizing she wasn’t going to be driving so much as directing, for the automated programming was so advanced it behaved as if it was alive, yet there was no one inside. It was all carefully crafted software, but this software was more intelligent than her…or more precisely it had been written by those more intelligent than her…so she assumed the role of navigator and directed the Kel’zat to move towards the nearest unsecured entrance.

It lurched into an awkward run that smoothed out considerably as the machine legs that hadn’t been moved in a very long time self-lubricated enroute, darting out of the storage area and down the highway-like corridors and up ladder shafts that the quadruped climbed with ease as its feet were designed to fit onto the rungs that would be hard, if not impossible for the zerglings to climb when they got here.

On and on it ran until they finally came into contact with the enemy a few miles short of the entrance, though some of the tentacles from the surface were visible branching out down the corridor ahead, and a swarm of Zerglings were traveling down it like ants sticking to a tree branch.

Kyra identified the targets as hostiles, then just rode along as her body registered damage from the extreme maneuvering. She didn’t feel it, exactly, but the warning prompted her to look for and find a dampening mechanism to soften the jostling to what would have been an elongated cube of the Gahana version of a Craniem.

The warnings parred down, though they did not totally go away, but that was irrelevant as they were not in the critical range. Her body might get bounced around a bit, but with the dampeners she would live. The Hadarak minions would not, and the ferocity of the way the Kel’zat fought was awe inspiring. Kyra had never seen a drone move in such a natural, spontaneous way. She ran the movements through motion calculation, trying to backtrack to the parameters being used to generate them, but she could not detect an identifiable pattern. It was almost as if this Kel’zat was alive and had the ability to improvise, but that was impossible without a Core.

Nevertheless, it was effective. Shooting the Zerglings as often as stepping on and smashing them, with shield walls for containment and pushing to make sure they didn’t get past it under its legs. It had anti-biological weaponry that it used when the numbers increased to swarm levels, with swaths of energy billowing out like a cloud that melted the organic components on contact, and blanketing the floor in a river of goo that it trampled as it continued to move and smash more of them all the way up to the nearest tendril.

It melted it too, with a river rush of liquefied Hadarak running down the corridor and passing through the containment shields where it was of no threat, but with pieces sticking on the shield and being shot when otherwise.

This was a pre-programmed purge operation. Kyra knew it before even looking it up, and she was getting quite the spectator’s view as she rode along inside as the Kel’zat worked its way through the Hadarak growths all the way up to the entrance that had a small bore hole in it that was allowing the minions through. They must have cut