“Are the remote locators still working?”

  Cain looked on at this console. An entire squad of hunter-killers lost in minutes to that little girl. He could have crushed the damned thing; Cain’s hands tensed around his console. Why not waste the credits and smash it?

  Harriet, today’s security assistant looked up from her console and said,

  “Yes sir! I don’t know what happened to the AIs running the drones, but the location reporting and sensory systems are still functioning. We’re getting data back now.”

  Cain smoothed his voice to something neutral and even.

  “Good. Then send the data feeds to my terminal.”

  Mr Reynold’s map showed Cain when the two entered Boris’s Shelf. A ground-level view showed him the large ached gateway into the camp and Cain sighed.

  “Have our tac AI review these images. I want to know what kind of armor and abatement these squatters are working with.”

  He watched the live feeds while Harriet and the rest of the security staff carried out his instructions. Erie brought the remaining hunter-killers into the base with her. Cain held out hope for a moment when she did so. Their local AI were hard at work trying to circumvent whatever the enemy did to their drones.

  Stolen story; please report.

  But they failed to break her control even as she settled into the fin of the downed ship and commenced modifying the drones. One by one, they lost both the positioning and remote sensing capabilities from their drone. The final loss was their ability to connect to the equipment in the first place.

  He rose from his desk and grumbled. Relying on Reynolds and his tactical team felt like a mistake, like a foolish miscalculation that Cain would regret. As much as the cannibalistic director claimed to have overlapping goals, Cain could not dismiss the possibility the Director of Allied Agrinomics would take both the hardware and wetware from Ms Thompson.

  And Cain worried that his own presence might not be enough to stop Reynolds. His chance to head off this possibility fade when he lost connection to the hunter swarm.

  “Harriet, prep my autocar and have operations send up a full combat kit for me.”

  She poked her eyes over her display. “Do you want us to keep trying to signal the drones?”

  “Only if you think you can trigger the self-destructs remotely. Otherwise, abandon them and scrub the serials from our system as stolen in case our target does something nefarious with them.”

  “Yes sir!”

  He stepped out of the room without waiting for her reply. The requested kit arrived with his elevator to leave. Cain removed the tactical camouflage from the bag as well as a modified molecular vibro blade. Video had shown him exactly what implants Althea Thompson now possessed. He needed a weapon capable of punching through her alloys.

  For Erie and her drones, he favored his personal phased plasma pistol. Phasing increased the energy output almost twice the standard for plasma weapons. And his had been further modified to accept standard magazines and ammunition generation nodes.

  Without their parts, any drone would have serious trouble escaping him.