Lobster brunch

There were a couple of small worker ants that stupidly tried to attack the group the moment they walked inside, but Matilda just kept kicking them out of the way gently until everyone got set up.

Lily handed Gary a couple more energy cells for his rifle, which he accepted gratefully. Once everyone was set up in a rough semi-circle, Lily glanced at Scott, who nodded at her. Although he was in command, he had already mentioned that Matilda seemed to like Lily better than him, so she shrugged and yelled, "Matilda! Go ahead!"

If the Assaultron could grin, she would have. Instead, she seemed to vibrate with excitement as two short swords popped out of her hands. She spun, decapitating each ant in a showy flourish. Gary gaped, "Woah. That's not standard equipment for Marine Assaultrons, that's for sure."

"Okay, they will start swarming soon. Matilda will melee with them, so please try to avoid shooting her in the back if you can," the Mechanist said, readying his custom laser pistol.

All six Protectrons spoke out, "Roger, Roger!" which actually did nothing to make Lily, or Matilda for that matter, feel better about their accuracy.

The skittering sound of dozens, maybe hundreds of pissed-off ants actually made Lily a little afraid, 'Thank ThorAllahJesus that I never came here before leaving for Megaton.'

She remembered the Corvega factory as a pretty easy dungeon area in Fallout 3, but there were at least a hundred times the number of ants, judging from what she heard, to say nothing about their attack patterns. The enemy AI in Fallout 3 wasn't the best, and they certainly didn't actually code in the normal ant behaviour where a dead ant will agitate the hive--like what was happening now.

She saw a flicker in her peripheral vision, twisted and fired, taking the head off a worker ant that was trying to run up on them from the side. She didn't have time to feel pleased that she got the first one as everyone started opening up on a swarm of dozens and dozens of ants charging at their position from deeper into the factory. It looked like the battle of Geonosis with all the red and blue beams lashing out at the ants, except with less crazy antics from Jedi.

Matilda charged straight at the horde and leapt into the air almost ten metres, close to the high ceiling of the garage, twirling in a forward flip for three full revolutions before falling down amongst the swarm with a crash superhero-style landing.

Okay, maybe she spoke too soon because that was a very Jedi or, at the very minimum, anime character entrance to the fight for Matilda. Lily wondered if lightsabers were at all possible. She didn't think so, but she definitely could make vibroblades! Maybe electrified vibroblades!

Well, she didn't really have to worry about hitting Matilda because she doubted the lasers would penetrate the mass of ants to deal her damage. The Murder Maid would only close with masses of worker ants and would dodge and jump around the few warrior ants that were rushing us. Lily thought that Matilda's hardened steel exterior would prove too much for the warrior ant's mandibles, but she thought they probably could chew right through her joints if given the opportunity.

Well, Matilda was the best expert on wading through tons of enemies, so she wouldn't worry about her. Besides, Assaultron's processors were amongst the best protected of any combat bot, as their doctrine of deployment often called for near-suicidal attack patterns and then simply being repaired after being disabled once they achieved victory. Matilda certainly took that strategy to heart.

Lily's tri-beam could one-shot even the warrior ants if she hit them in the right place, so she started to focus on those more significant threats, taking aimed, careful shots. Sophie was blasting every ant she saw with her rapid-firing laser, and Scott was staying very near her, clearly protecting her, which Lily found cute.

She ignored a beep in her interface, as it was a low-priority alert, and she had much more pressing things to worry about. A few ants would slip past the cavalcade of fire, and Lily would often kick them right in the ocelli before blasting them in the thorax or head.

However, the fourth time she attempted to do that, a worker ant managed to grab her leg in its mandibles and bite down. Her bodysuit was designed to be armoured against primarily ballistic threats, so it didn't protect too much from knives, swords or the mandibles of a damn ant, so she grunted in pain as the bite went through her skin and muscle, delivering a painful dose of formic acid into her tissues.

She quickly shot it in its head, kicked off its now weakly spasming mandibles and hopped backwards. She subvocalized a quick command, 'Command, Set Pain level to 10%.' Feeling the sudden relief from the pain was quite nice, so she kept firing at a number of ant warriors, very glad that the swarming had started to slow down after a long minute and a half of murdering ants.

A quick glance at her calf revealed she did not have to worry; both her healing systems should handle the minor injury rather quickly. Her nanites were better at neutralizing the acid, sometimes with their own bodies, and the PHOENIX system was already slowly healing the damage to her skin and muscles.

Gary hollered, in between shooting a worker ant with a quick three-beam burst, "Hey, you okay?"

Lily chuckled, although Gary probably couldn't hear it over all the crack-crack-crack of the laser discharges. She yelled back, "Yeah, I'm fine--" she was going to say more, but an internal alert dinged in her head again. Except for this time, it was a ten-hertz sine-wave that was almost impossible to ignore and reserved for her truly important alerts.

She kept fighting but mostly on autopilot as she triggered the alert to display a low-opacity overhead display from her surveillance drone, with a segment highlighted with a bright orange box that was moving slowly towards the factory. The shitty analogue camera on the drone couldn't be zoomed, nor was digital post-processing enhancement that useful, but she didn't need an entirely clear image to identify three Super Mutants being trailed by three Centaurs, 'Fuck!'

"Three Super Mutants, unknown armament and three Centaurs fifty metres to zhe northeast approaching our position," Lily called out.

The Mechanist swore, which was quite unlike him and said, "They must have been nearby and heard the laser discharges. It is a clear, cold morning. Sound travels a long way. Lily, take Gary, the Mister Gutsy and your robots and try to either ambush them or at least keep them occupied until we can finish the swarm in here. If we turn our backs on these ants, we'll be just as dead."

While laser discharges were quieter than a rifle shot, they were still quite loud, so Lily agreed with his assessment. They must have been still asleep or at least still holed up from last night. Otherwise, her expert system would have tagged them as soon as they started moving if they were already within a kilometre of her truck.

Gary glanced at her and nodded. Lily flexed her mental spinnerets, reactivating her nascent web to once again control her Termitrons, especially the one who was lugging the minigun. That one hadn't been involved in the fight at all; in fact, none of her Termitrons were making that big of a difference. Each high-output taser shot invariably killed a worker ant in one hit, but it took almost two seconds to recharge capacitors after one discharge, so they were of strictly limited utility in a fight against hundreds of swarming insects compared to the rapid-firing Protectrons.

The Mister Gutsy chuckled, "Finally! Some real enemies!" He, too, had been holding back. His main weapon was a plasma caster, but the ammunition was a bit too dear to just use plasma bolts willy-nilly on mere ants, so he had been blasting them with his secondary laser weapon, which was kind of weak sauce.

Gary, the Mister Gutsy and Lily all walked outside, trailing her seven Termitrons, who walked past them, using their bodies to shield the ones who weren't made out of a steel alloy with a very high titanium and tungsten content. Gary turned to her, "Uh... you mentioned Super Mutants briefly. What are they, again? Besides giant?"

Lily chuckled, "Zhat's pretty much it. Giant, green skin, kind of stupid, yet always seem to have energy weapons zhat work. Basically, zhey're orcs." The Super-Mutants were about thirty metres away and seemed to be sneaking up, or at least, so they thought. "Zhey were created by a secret government research program conducted by West-Tek on the west coast, but we can talk about zhat later if you want."

Lily pinged the Gatling laser in her truck and verified it was ready, also. But she didn't traverse the gun, as Super Mutants might be quite stupid, but everything she had discovered about them indicated they had uncanny tactical instincts, and they would immediately attack her truck if they saw that. She'd have to give them something else to shoot at first.

She fished out a few frag grenades from her bag and offered two to Gary, who grinned and swiped them out of her hand like a kid who was offered his favourite candy.

Lily was still hidden behind the trailer of her truck, which she didn't particularly mind being shot up. However, it would be a little problematic if her generator inside was destroyed. The released plasma inside the trailer compartment would likely damage the other equipment, too.

Lily whispered to Gary, "Zhey're sneaking up on us, zhey zhink to surprise us. Zhey're about twenty-five metres away, behind zhat wrecked Corvega. How's your zhrowing arm?"

He just grinned and nodded. She turned to the Mister Gutsy, whispering again, "Attack, as soon as zhe grenades explode. Zhe other robots will follow your lead." For once, he didn't say anything, but he bobbed his levitation in a nod, at least aware of the tactical advantage of surprise.

She put all but one of the grenades back into her bag and carefully pulled the pin on the one in her hand, mirrored by Gary doing the same. Carefully holding the grenade and the spoon, she stood up and stepped out in front of the empty parking lot area that would serve as their battlefield. Her tactical assistant program indicated that she should hold the armed grenade for one point two seconds to ensure an airburst over the Super Mutant's heads, but she hadn't practised enough with grenades to feel comfortable with that, so she just lobbed it overhand immediately, Gary throwing it more or less at the same time.

They both ducked back behind the trailer. Then, on her surveillance drone, which Lily had already ordered descended to about fifty metres to give a better image, she saw something that flabbergasted her. Gary's grenade landed just a tad long, but still a good throw. A Super Mutant turned to look at it. However, her grenade flew true -- except for the fact that one of the Centaurs snapped it out of the air like it was a chihuahua grabbing a Pup-Peroni, 'What the fuck?'

The two grenades went off at the same time. The Centaur that ate her grenade just sort of exploded, covering the other two Centaurs and one of the Super Mutants with viscera. Gary's grenade exploded and injured the greenskin that had turned around but only pissed off the other two.

The Mister Gutsy immediately began firing plasma packets at the vehicle the mutants were hiding behind, followed by blue lightning beams from the Termitrons.

The two uninjured Super Mutants yelled a battle cry to psych themselves up and leapt from cover, and just started running at them and their robots. Both Gary and Lily stepped out of concealment behind the trailer. Lily had her tri-beam shouldered, but Gary was tossing another grenade in the path of the charging mutants.

He sort of flubbed the second throw, as the explosion barely tagged one of the mutants with some shrapnel and didn't appreciably slow them down. However, the massed lightning beams and two plasma bolts from Mister Gutsy put the mutant on the ground, although it wasn't dead and was slowly rising to its feet again. She stared at it in wonder, 'Amazing.'

As Gary shouldered his laser rifle and the others shifted targets to the second mutant, who started firing green plasma bolts from the hip while running from a plasma rifle, she raised her tri-beam rifle to put a carefully aimed coup-de-grace shot in the slowly rising Super Mutant, but before she could reach her aim-point, a tactical alert caused her to immediately push off the ground in a backwards slide over gravel, accelerating rearwards in a dodge.

A green plasma bolt sailed through the space her head was occupying just a moment ago, about a foot away from where her face was presently. The thermal bloom was so strong that she had to close her eyes, and she still got what amounted to a sunburn or first-degree burn on her face just from the near hit.

Fuck! The whole point of this exercise was to give the mutants her robots to aim at; why were they targeting her? A plasma bolt to the face was one of the few things that would probably kill her for sure in this world, as the plasma could easily navigate around the 90-degree turns in her ocular cavity and into her brain, melting it beyond all saving. Perhaps she should return to wearing visored helmets but with extreme heat-resistant treatments.

She immediately triggered both the truck-mounted Gatling laser as well as the heavy-weapon Termitron, not even spending the half second to designate a target, just letting her expert system designate the most dangerous target. It selected, unsurprisingly, the mutant that proved very accurate with its plasma rifle. Before targeting her, it had already disabled one of her Termitrons by melting one of its knees, locking that leg in place, and causing the robot to fall over.

A hail of lasers, electro-beams, armour-piercing bullets and plasma all hit the mutant almost simultaneously, and there was no surviving that. It was chewed up, the Gatling laser and minigun doing the most damage and punching numerous holes straight through its torso until it fell over sideways, dead as a doornail.

The first mutant had regained his feet and managed to get two shots off before meeting a similar fate, and she heard Gary yell, pissed off, "He fucking shot me in the foot!" And the second shot, using a tri-beam like her, hit the Mister Gutsy in the frame and must have scored a critical hit because the floating robot shut down and fell to the asphalt like a sack of potatoes.

She drilled the mutie in the head with three blue laser beams at the same time he was perforated by both of the Gatling weapons. She was tempted to tell the minigun-wielding Termitron to hold back, but these fucks seemed to be ridiculously accurate and dangerous.

She took careful steps towards the last mutant, who was walking from the wrecked car with the two Centaurs. She was walking behind one of her Termitrons, using its body to shield herself from the plasma fire this third mutant was firing sporadically, 'Two plasma rifles?! Really?!'

However, Gary's grenade must have damaged the mutant's eyes because it was inaccurate with its fire. A glob of acid from one of the two living Centaurs splashed against the Termitron's chassis she was walking behind, and she shifted targets to them as the last mutant was riddled with lasers and AP rounds.

Gary had shifted to the Centaurs, too, after dodging a slow-moving globule of super-powered digestive acid. She triggered the minigun Termitron to stand down, but both Gary and she had put down their respective horrors before even the Gatling laser turret shifted, although it still put about a dozen laser blasts into each Centaur on the ground as insurance.

Both she and Gary kept their weapons raised in a ready position, scanning for new threats while she sent a message to Sophie.

[Lilium: All threats down, out here. They were well armed, with two plasma rifles and a tri-beam. The Mister Gutsy took a beam to something important and is down; hopefully, he is repairable. Gary took a beam to his foot. Status? ]

[NANNY-45A9F: Oh, no! I hope Mister Gutsy is okay. Everything is fine in here; only a handful of ants are coming at us now. We must have killed over three hundred ants since we started. Scott asks you to check on Gary and Mister Gutsy's injuries. We don't need immediate assistance here. ]

Lily nodded and shouldered her rifle, turning to Gary. "You got shot in zhe foot, yes? Really? Let me take zhe look. I zhink we're fine. Zhey're moping up zhe few ants inside and don't need our immediate assistance."

He let out his breath in a sigh and shouldered his rifle as well before nodding. "Uh, that seemed ridiculously dangerous, Doc. They seemed smart enough to target us, rather than the robots, even though the robots presented the largest threat." Lily nodded, a bit upset with her own performance as well. She felt that her tactics were sound, given what she knew, but they just didn't work out as well as she thought they would have. She definitely shouldn't have held back with the heavy weapons, though.

"Well, zhey were quite well-armed. Usually, your average Super-Mutant just has a hunting rifle or something. Two plasma rifles and zhe tri-beam is a sign of an elite team for sure," Lily said quietly. She motioned for him to sit down and took a knee, looking at his left foot, which was still bleeding. She carefully pulled his boot off, although there was significant damage to the item of clothing.

She blinked, "Well... it shot zhe big toe off," she told him bluntly. His injuries weren't serious, however. Kind of lucky, actually. She reached into her bag and pulled out her pneumatic injector, sliding the barrel to general healing nanites and injected him twice, once in the foot and once near the neck for good measure.

He groaned, "Fuck! I barely had this toe for a week! Is it possible to like... grow me another toe or something, Doc?"

Lily snickered, "Yes, possibly. However, zhe cloning machine I took isn't set up properly for zherapeutic cloning, so you may be without zhe toe for a couple of weeks while I reassemble it and make sure I can clone just one body part at a time if I want to."

She pulled out some bandages and saline, carefully debriding the wound before wrapping it in a bandage, "It should be okay to put zhe boot back on, but perhaps we should make you zhe steel-toed shoe in future, yes?"

He groaned as he put his boot back on and then looked at Lily like she was special, "Yes, fucking, yes!" Lily chuckled and stood up, going over to the Mister Gutsy. She reached into her bag and pulled out her scanner, but the screen wouldn't turn on.

She blinked and stared at it, noticing some significant damage to the screen that looked to be... acid? She sat her bag down and looked at the front, and sure enough, the front of the bag had been eaten through. There must have been a splash from when the Termitron took that acid attack earlier.

She groaned and had the urge to scream out an obscenity but held it in as she was a classy lady. She inspected the scanner more in-depth. The damage didn't look... catastrophic. She converted it into laptop mode, and some of the LEDs were working as intended, which was a good sign.

She attempted to use her brain interface to pull up the scanner's remote desktop, and a window popped up in her vision of the normal desktop mode of the computer. She sighed in relief, converted it back to tablet mode and attempted to take a scan of the Mister Gutsy. That worked too.

So, it wasn't completely destroyed. The screen and digitizer were completely destroyed, though. She used some bandages to wipe away the damaged areas, trying to pull away any remnant acid, but it appeared there wasn't any left. Just a small amount had hit the device, but the diamond screen might be incredibly shatter-resistant, but it wasn't acid-resistant at all.

She peered at the bottom of the damaged screen and sighed. It appeared like the charge port was damaged too. She had been considering just operating the device as it was for the foreseeable future, but if she couldn't charge it anymore, she had no choice but to attempt to disassemble it and repair it in the near future.

What a disaster these damn mutants were. She would have to sit down with Gary and have a full after-action debriefing before he forgot anything, as there were too many close calls and damage. She had to at least learn something from her mistakes.

She transferred the scan to her computer and pulled up the results, humming. She focused on the area where Mister Handies kept their processor and memory, finding neither damaged. That was good. It meant that the Mister Gutsy could probably be repaired.

She spent a little while longer identifying the damage that occurred before standing up and walking over to her Termitron that had been tipped over, and sent Sophie another message.

[Lilium: Gary is fine. Mister Gutsy is repairable. No damage to his quantum processor or memory storage. He did take a hit to his mainboard, though. It shorted out several capacitors, which caused his shutdown. I can fabricate replacement capacitors and effect repairs here in the field in twenty minutes. ]

[NANNY-45A9F: Oh, that's good news! We're no longer being swarmed in here. Scott recommends we pick a few ants, cook them and have an early lunch while effecting repairs.]

Lily blinked. She had not once, ever, considered eating any of the giant ants.

[Lilium: Uh. Does giant ant taste good? Because... if not I have some other food... ]

[NANNY-45A9F: Oh, yes! Scott loves them! He says they taste a lot like lobster, if that helps you at all. We brought a bunch of butter just for this very reason! I wish I could taste them myself!]

Lily considered that. They were both arthropods, so it wasn't entirely weird that their meat would taste similar, she supposed. But she just never would have thought to try unless she was a lot hungrier than she had been since arriving in this universe.

Her Termitron wasn't really damaged very much. It looked like the knee cap melted just enough to cause the leg to lock up. None of the motivators or graphene cables were damaged.

She hummed. She could take the knee cap off and fabricate a temporary replacement out of diamond, for now. She hoped that their escapades against heavily armed energy-weapon-wielding enemies had come to a close on this adventure.

"Hey, Gary... do you like zhe lobster?" she called out to him.

He grinned, "I love lobster! Why? But it's not like any Black Beard's are still open, you know!" She recognized that reference from some advertisements she had seen. Black Beard's was this universe's equivalent of the Red Lobster chain restaurant she remembered from her past life.

Gary was exactly the kind of man who thought Red Lobster was the pinnacle of seafood and probably would have gone to some fine Italian dining at the Olive Garden. She found this very amusing, and rather than thinking less of him for this, she thought it was kind of fitting.

"Apparently, zhe giant ant meat tastes a lot like zhe lobster, no? Scott even brought a big thing of butter to melt on zhem. We're going to stand down for an early lunch while I zhe repairs to these robots. I also want to sit down with you and have zhe proper after-action report, as I already know I made a number of mistakes..." Lily told him, while mentally connecting to the fabricator inside the trailer and queuing up a half dozen small supercapacitors and a simple kneecap shield. She only had about fifty kilos left of carbon feedstock, so it was fortunate she did not have to make any serious repairs.

Plus, if the ant meat was so good, she was considering making repairs to one of the refrigerators they'd invariably find in one of the break rooms or kitchens to take away some of the largess for later. That would probably necessitate a number of kilos for repairs and to make a machine to extract CO2 from the air to act as a refrigerant gas.

He looked excited, "You know, I was wondering if that was going to be the case when I shot one outside Vault 108. I thought they'd taste more like crab, but lobster is even better. And yeah, maybe a few learning opportunities in this fight, but don't worry too much. Everyone survived; it sounds like even that Army bot survived, which is good. Those green fucks were about as tough as Power Armoured marines, just a lot stupider -- and let me tell you, that's saying something."

He had already begun policing up the weapons and ammo from the dead mutants and offered, "Plus, now we have these two plasma rifles. And I can't think any kind of biological entity, no matter how large, will do too well when shot by a number of plasma bolts. I ain't gonna jinx us, but I think we're in a better position now to take on that Queen ant."

Lily tilted her head to the side and nodded. She wasn't going to jinx them, either, so she intentionally did not consider this aspect for now.

She glanced down at her disabled Termitron. Now, how to get that kneecap off? First, she'd try to saw it off with her diamondoid stiletto, and if that didn't work, she'd have to look around the factory for a crowbar or an acetylene torch.