Frost turned around, grabbed it by the middle and picked it up off the deck, bringing it back down hard enough to dent and scrape the hardened metal floor. The machine took little visible damage, and as it was raised up to be smashed again all six of its long limbs wrapped around Frost's loading suit, crushing, cutting, trying to burst the armoured suit and kill whatever was inside.
Stephanie stopped dead, spun around, raised her rifle and tried to take aim. Frost was struggling with the machine, pulling at its silvered, oval segments, staggering as the invader cut the main sensor array on the top of the suit cleanly in half. “Dammit Frost! I can't get a shot!”
“Things all arms! Can't get my grip back! My armour's as good as done!”
It began to saw into one of the armour's arms to great effect, she could see the metal beginning to part as the plasma blade sent sparks flying in all directions. Frost's armour lurched forward suddenly, hitting the deck face first and pinning the invader as it cut straight through the knee of his suit. Everyone on the deck heard Frost cry out before he could stifle his scream.
The back hatch of the suit blew off and he hurriedly fell as much as climbed out.
Stephanie set her automatic rifle to full power and opened up on the invader trying to scurry out from under the heavy armoured munitions loading suit. Half its efforts were spent on getting out from under it while its many tools cut it apart in a dozen places just to get free. The heavy metal of the automation heated under her steady stream of gunfire. In an attempt to move the machine ripped the softened metal casing of its body open and Stephanie continued her attack. The squads with her joined in, and in the space of three seconds Frost's armoured suit and the invader trapped beneath it was completely destroyed. The lights of its many sensors and tools faded out slowly.
The deck beneath her feet rumbled and she turned around just in time to see an armoured suit flying through the air towards him, thrown by a pair of invaders working together. “Move!” she called out only too late as the armoured loader suit crashed into them. Her vacsuit took the impact of the suit's thigh, protecting her as she was thrown fifteen meters across the deck.
Two of her squad members weren't so lucky and were seriously injured as the torso of the armour crushed into them and rolled on. It narrowly missed Frost as well, passing just over his head as he crawled as quickly as he could. He had lost his foot above the ankle and crawling for the nearest secure hatch to get out of the way.
“Let the marines do their jobs, lads! Stay clear and if ye get caught by one o' those things, abandon yer armour! Anyone not in a loader get ta the emergency arms lockers an' get a rifle so you can lay down supportin' fire!”
Stephanie got to her feet, dropped her empty particle rifle cartridge, replaced it with a fresh one and took sight on the pair of intruders. They had intertwined with each other, becoming a slowly moving object that reached out with deadly speed using any one of its dozen arms. Her visor informed her that it had erected an energy shield around itself. “Fire on my target, full intensity! Hurry before the other two get through the hull!” She activated the secondary barrel and emptied her cartridge of heavy explosive rounds, hoping the explosions against the invader's shields would bring the barrier down faster.
As two of the machines arms got around another armoured suit and threw it effortlessly at the squad opposite them who reacted perfectly, dodging to the side and resuming fire the second they were out of immediate jeopardy a pair of oval pods separated from the machine, scurrying towards her men and women with blurring speed.
She opened fire on the nearest, scoring one hit before it exploded, shaking the deck and instantly incinerating two of her team members. Stephanie picked herself up off the deck and resumed fire. “Those things have some kind of automated grenades or mines, aim for them while they're still attached!”
The sprawling automation flew to pieces under the devastating firepower of thirty nine soldiers, and when the other two broke through the hull, they were ready.
Stephanie tossed three hammer grenades at the ceiling right after the nearest invader broke through the hull and they affixed right beside the new aperture. The arms hesitated to extend out into the open air beneath the second before the grenades went off and she opened fire before the smoke cleared.
The scene at the other incursion point was similar, only the grenades were ready and counting down on the deck as the invader made its appearance, trying to bend away from the explosion as it went off. They had just enough firepower left to take them out before they could injure or kill anyone else, and with no doctor aboard, no one had great expectations for the severely injured if they couldn't be treated with nanotechnology or placed in stasis in time.
“Status report.” Alice ordered as she returned to the bridge. The biological portion of her eye had been healed by regeneration medication but with few medical specialists aboard there was no hope of having her eye repaired. Instead she allowed the bridge medic to use nanobots to separate it from her optical nerve and push it out of the socket under local anaesthetic in the ready quarters. As a temporary measure she had an eye patch materialized and placed her ocular implant into a small case she pocketed. She'd have something done about it later, the patch wouldn't do. “First person to say 'yar' or 'ahoy' will be the last,” she added.
“We're three minutes from emerging from the wormhole, repair crews are already at work on the damage on the corridors and gunnery deck, we lost nine security staff in the fighting and our astronomers have found something interesting from the pure sciences department of the ship, Captain.” Agameg got out of the command seat and returned to tactical.
“They were watching that?”
“Aye, they were the first to notice our torpedoes getting hacked and they reported it to me straight away.”
“Good job, and you made the right decision to target one of the torpedoes for a sure hit instead of lessening our chances by splitting your firepower Agameg. How are our defensive systems now?”
“The rail cannons taken out by the nuke only needed a reset, and our shields can hold a full charge again,” Chief Grady's hologram reported. “Tell her the bad news, Finn.”
“Right. Our primary emitters are working right now, but there will be no way to power them back up once they've lost their charge. That whole line of circuitry and half the control interface is fried, permanently fried.” Finn reported from the engineering station on the bridge.
“There's no way to repair them?” Alice asked peevishly.
“They have to be replaced and it would take weeks to fabricate the parts we need, some just can't come from a materializer and we need to train to machine them ourselves, then we'd actually have to make the tools to do it. When I say fried, I mean fried. If you can find a single cable down there that hasn't melted under the strain once the main emitter array and everything connected to it blows, well, you're more qualified than I am,” Finn answered peevishly.
“Blows?”
“Right, I had to run the bulk of the energy through the capacitors and power cells that sit right under the array and the power can only flow in one direction; in, through then across or out from the array. Right now those capacitors have about a hundred times as much energy running across them per millisecond than they're made to carry or discharge and I had to use the larger power cells as conductors, so the connectors have fused together to make a low resistance path to get power from the reactors straight to the emitters. When that wormhole closes the emitter systems will deactivate in the wrong sequence, leaving the capacitors and power cells over charged, so they'll burn out and we'll have about twelve tons of scrap. We'll have to replace the entire assembly.”