We started on a course that took us due south. Away from the spot where the empress was supposedly sending in a bunch of tanks and ground troops to mix it up with us.

I wondered what her game was. We'd already established that the empress wasn't exactly the brightest tactician in the galaxy. It was entirely possible she was sending more of her troops in to send a message. She seemed big on sending her troops and pilots to die gloriously in the name of sending a message.

But there was something that seemed wrong about that. Something off about it. Something that didn't sit right with me.

Why expend all that effort to come into the nuclear wasteland she'd just created down here? Did she know I was in here? Could this all be about me? Could she know I was in here running a rescue mission?

I looked up. Flashes of purple and green and blue flashed all around us in the sky. It illuminated the wreckage all around us. A counterpoint to the orange and black created by the smoke and flames whipping all around us.

I looked down to the radiation readout on my HUD that told me this was the kind of environment that would very quickly kill somebody if they didn't have some sort of radiation mitigation technology on their person.

I looked up to the canopy on Arvie's mech. To the kid who was still sitting in there. I hoped she'd be okay in there, but it's not like there was much else we could do.

Besides. If she wasn't okay in a battle hardened mech then it's not like she'd be safe anywhere else in here.

"It's a good thing you took control of a mech unit with a cockpit on it," I said.

"Agreed," Arvie said. "I thought about taking one of the liviskanoid drones, but the mech units were closer and more heavily armed."

"Could you bring in any of those drone units?"

"I've already attempted to commandeer at least three of them and bring them over here before the general locked me out."

"Oh yeah? What happened to those three?" I asked.

"They were destroyed by fighters working for the empress before I could get them down here. There is a substantial swarm of imperial fighters hitting everything."

"Damn," I muttered, shaking my head.

"Exactly," Arvie said. "It doesn't help that I'm not allowed to fire on those ships unless it's clearly in self-defense. The requirement for authorization to fire is difficult to achieve when General Varis is locking me out of systems."

"Not even to save me?" I asked.

"I believe she is working on that on her own," Arvie said. "But I also believe this conveys just how paranoid the livisk are about allowing too much discretion and decision making power to a Combat Intelligence."

"Damn," I muttered again. What else was there to say?

I figured their freakout about Combat Intelligences must run pretty deep if she wasn't even willing to let Arvie loose in the name of saving my ass. I wondered if that was the source of the throughline of regret I could feel in the link.

"What kind of armaments are we talking about?" I asked.

"I have various missiles, pulse canons, and mass drivers that would allow me to be a a one-mech army. If I were unchained," Arvie said.

"But without authorization you're just a sitting duck if anyone comes at you?" I asked.

"Precisely."

I picked my way over a bit of twisted metal. Thankfully there weren't any bodies under that twisted metal. I'd seen bodies on the ground before, but it wasn't an experience I wanted to repeat if I could avoid it.

We were close enough to the center of the explosion that I figured anybody caught in it had probably been vaporized in the initial blast. Unless they were lucky enough to get into one of those shielded bomb shelters, but I didn't think there were a lot of people who'd pulled that off.

Take the population of this building and divide it by the number of shielding signatures we found flying around in that troop ship and you didn't get a very big number at all.

"So if I get into a fight here, you're telling me you won't be able to do anything to help in that fight?"

"I could put myself in between you and whoever is attacking you in the hopes that would activate my self-defense protocols," Arvie said. "But no. I wouldn't be able to actually fight the empress's forces preemptively or offensively.'

"Because they're that paranoid about letting a Combat Intelligence do its thing," I said.

"Precisely," Arvie said, "Which is very frustrating, but normally I only have the ability to advise and tell people what to do."

"Fuck that," I said, thinking about some of the Combat Intelligences we used in Terran space. Granted, none of them were nearly as sophisticated as Arvie, but still, they could do a pretty hefty chunk of damage, think faster than humans ever could, and there'd been times when they'd totally turned the tide of a battle in our favor.

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Some of the eggheads speculated that one of the reasons why humanity had been able to punch above our weight class when it came to the much larger and supposedly more powerful, at least on paper, Livisk Ascendancy was because we took advantage of smart weapons while they were more than happy to continually throw their people into the meat grinder again and again in the hopes that quantity had a quality all its own.

It was a very Soviet way of looking at warfare.

"Excuse me, William," Arvie said.

I clambered down the other side of a small hill of debris. Arvie was able to step over it in his mech.

I looked up at the thing. It looked damn impressive. Humanity had mechs like that we rode into combat. Partly because there was some terrain where it was simpler to walk around in a thing that was on two legs but still able to put out the kind of punishment that you usually got from a tracked vehicle like a tank. The other part of it was that early space warfare, particularly landings on planets, had been influenced more than a little by the works of George Lucas.

So having mechs that walked around on two and four legs were right up there with trying to make lightsabers a thing. And it turned out having a mech roaming around on two and four legs was a whole sequel trilogy of a lot easier to make happen from an engineering standpoint than figuring out a way to get plasma to stay in place and be rigid without using a workaround like the sword Harath gave me.

"You have weapons on that thing, right?" I said.

"I do," Arvie said.

"And you have the ability to use those weapons to give anybody who attacks us a bad day, right?"

"I certainly do," Arvie said.

"So then I want you to use those weapons if somebody comes at us. To defend yourself, to defend me, to defend Sera. Am I understood?"

There was another pause. I think that was my fourth one for this outing. That sent a warm and fuzzy running through me, but it didn't last for long.

"Am I to understand that you are giving me permission to override my combat protocols and go unchained?"

"Whatever you call it, yeah."

"You do understand that as the General Consort, you have the authority to do this, correct?"

"Okay. That's great," I said. "That's exactly what I was trying to do."

I had to pick my way under a beam that looked like it was big enough it might've been one of the central support beams that ran through the entire building once upon a time.

"Atomic weapons can't melt steel beams," I muttered, chuckling and shaking my head.

"What was that?" Arvie asked.

"It wasn't anything," I said. "Just another reference to some ancient idiots back on Earth. So why do you keep making a big deal out of me giving you the authority to override your combat protocols?"

"It's just not something that's ever been done," he said.

"Yeah, well, I'm going to start doing a lot of things that have never been done. Especially when the empress was stupid enough to come along and drop a nuclear weapon right on top of me."

"As long as you are certain," Arvie said.

"I'm certain," I said.

There was a momentary pause, like we're talking it was at least five Mississippis which was still the standard unit of measure for that sort of thing long after the actual polity of Mississippi was put out of its misery, but nothing else happened.

I waited, looking up at the mech.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"Were you expecting something more dramatic, William?"

"Honestly? After the big deal you made out of all this, I figured it would be something more dramatic, yeah."

"I simply disabled my combat limitation protocols. There's no change."

"Like the eyes on your mech don't suddenly turn red to let the world know you've gone evil or something?"

"What about having my combat protocol overridden would make you think I'd turned evil?"

"I don't know," I said. "I guess there was a part of me that worried if the livisk were so afraid of a Combat Intelligence having free rein to kill whatever it wanted then there might be a good reason. Like maybe there was a rise of the machines at some point in their ancient history and they were terrified you were going to launch all the nukes or something."

"Is that something that humanity is prone to worrying about?" Arvie asked.

I finally made my way out from under the support beam. It had taken the entirety of that conversation to get through. Partly because I had to pick my way around a bunch of other rubble and destruction, but mostly because that thing was just that damn big.

"Actually, it's not something that's ever happened in human space. There have been a couple of times when AI protocols actually stopped somebody from launching a nuke."

"And yet your people continue to be afraid of it happening."

"People fear what they don't understand."

"But your people made the machines that you give the combat tools to," Arvie said. "How can you make something and not understand it?"

"I mean, I'm sure the eggheads who put together all that LLM and AI shit over the years know how it works. Though I've read articles that say they don't know why the AI is doing what it does. But there are a lot of people who aren't smart enough to figure that kind of stuff out, and they're prone to panicking and voting accordingly."

"Voting," Arvie said, as though he was rolling the word around his circuits. I wondered if I should count that as getting him to pause, because he really seemed to be thinking about it. "An odd concept your people have. You claim to love liberty, and yet you are constantly voting in the same type of people who are always doing the same harmful things and giving the same power to the same unelected wealthy people over and over."

"Yeah, well, nobody ever said it was a perfect system," I grunted.

"Indeed," Arvie said, sounding more perplexed than anything.

Suddenly, a map appeared in my heads-up display. I blinked as I looked at it.

"What's that?" I asked.

"One moment," Arvie said. "Allow me to adjust the transparency."

A moment later the transparency was adjusted and I could see what was in front of me, but there was still a map overlaid. It was roughly in the shape of a building complex, but none of the buildings displayed on the map were here anymore.

Of course there weren't. They'd all been blown up. I was looking at a map of what this complex looked like before the empress sent her welcome package this way.

"What's this all about?" I asked.

"It's an overlay of how far we have to go through the old building complex before we reach the shield wall."

"And do you think we're going to be able to get through the shield wall when we get over there?" I asked.

There was another pause. Pause number six. Not that I was keeping track. Okay, so I was totally keeping track, but this time I didn't care for that pause. Because I couldn't help but think it didn't mean anything good for me or Arvie or the little girl we were trying to help.

"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer," Arvie said.

"Son of a bitch," I growled, and then I noticed something else on the northern end of the map. It was a sparkling red glow that was moving farther and farther into the building complex. It was moving slowly, but it was still coming inexorably for us.

"Arvie, what's that red glow I see up there at the top of the map?"

I knew what the answer was going to be before he even said it, but I had to know for sure.

"Oh, that?" he asked. "That's the empress's forces making their way to us."

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