Valiant

(Starspeak)

The Black Knight had abandoned any pretense of staying under the radar.

Not that it had been subtle to begin with…

It was showing how quickly it could travel now. The slow and relatively clumsy motion I'd exploited before were only really the case around solid corners and heavy enough buildings that it couldn't just charge right through them.

Now it was bounding through the city fifteen or twenty yards at a time, propelling itself further with little gas jets. It was strange seeing my own trick performed by a machine.

After finding a long boulevard that stretched between all the largest buildings in its way, the Black Knight was charging down the straightaway like a bouncing racehorse. Or maybe a freight train.

With momentum built-up like this, even Madeline's flight rotors were only barely gaining ground on it.

<I'm running out of ideas on how to stop this thing,> I admitted.

<Well, there is always your one trick…> Madeline pointed out. <Are you up to it without Nai?>

Coalescence was an insanely powerful ability, but the more I'd come to understand it, the more its limitations emerged.

Me.

I was the biggest limitation. Building a connection with potentially anyone came from one of the deepest places in my soul. But actually building a connection with someone? That didn't happen with just anyone. I had to trust them. They had to mean something to me.

Madeline definitely qualified, and as much as I suspected connecting to her in combat might backfire, I didn't see a better choice. Jordan was reachable too via her own superconstruct. Both Madeline and I held pearls offering a door into mind from anywhere in the universe.

Who was close enough that might have a chance?

Donnie? Unlikely. We'd carved out a functional professional relationship, but he and I still rubbed each other the wrong way. I got along better with Johnny, but we weren't close.

And that might have been the problem.

Being a leader for the Flotilla had meant cultivating the opposite of that closeness.

My jaw clenched as I was forced to confront the situation at hand.

<You, me, and Jordan,> I said. <No one else ready will fit.>

<I'm ready whenever,> Jordan reported. <A warning would be appreciated, but if not, I get it.>

<Take us in,> I told Madeline, and quietly, I aimed a message for just Jordan.

<I need you to check me,> I told her. <If my relationship with Madeline is affecting our Coalescence, your job is to steer me back.>

<Understood.>

Madeline's wings swept back and she dove us in. I fired up my superconnector, first building the connection to Madeline. As soon as it would hold, I let go, letting her charge ahead while our senses intertwined.

Jordan had to be added more carefully. Remote Coalescence produced extremely disruptive feedback with even tiny mistakes. That kind of disruption in battle could be fatal.

But I at least had experience reaching through the pearl.

Jordan's mind opened up to ours, and the three of our powers pooled together.

The Black Knight turned to see Madeline divebombing it. With just her wings carrying her, it seemed like suicide.

But we created her Cyclops in the blink of an eye. Suddenly wrapped in several tons of mechanized armor, the gap in weight classes shrunk just as quickly. Our first move was to slam a fist right into its facelessly smug head.

The Black Knight stumbled backward—finally, our first real impact on this thing—and we poured on the gas. Still clutching its severed arm, it quickly dropped it. It couldn't guard while it held the dead weight.

Of course, even discarding it left it one arm down compared to our Cyclops.

Fighting between machines like these wasn't typical hand-to-hand combat. The bodies in question were too durable by comparison, not to mention that it wasn't just hand-to-hand. Both machines carried heavy armaments and wore armor strong enough to deflect most brute force.

So the fight was about grappling, leverage, and transforming ordinarily inconsequential attacks into opportunities to deal real damage.

My portion of Coalescence wanted to tear off its other arm. Our prospects to wear this thing down would soar if it couldn't grab us…

Piloting our Cyclops meant Madeline taking the lead. Jordan's and my skills contributed minimally; Madeline was the only one with any real experience. Still, the raw processing power began to show. The Cyclops's hand caught the Black Knight's attempt to punch us back. Madeline leveraged the machine's arm to the side and hammered several more blows into its head.

We were trying to topple it, and the Black Knight realized. It allowed itself to fall backward, whirling at the hips again, kicking us back as it rolled.

All three of us understood a potential problem then. Coalescence sped up our thinking, but it couldn't speed up the physical weight of Madeline's trump card. We'd have to leverage other advantages.

The Black Knight rose in a predatory stance, its body language coming further to life.

"Now THAT'S interesting…"

Its synthetic voice rumbled and scraped. It would have been chilling if it hadn't sparked so many new possibilities in our combined minds. Could we mind-game a machine? We were certainly ready to find out.

Jordan wasn't physically present, so her contribution was particularly weighted toward thinking and analysis. We'd barely even thought about materializing a drone or two to give us a wider view of the whole battlefield. Among those tiny drones' capabilities was radio scanning.

The AIs' forces were constantly communicating with each other through heavily encrypted radio that we hadn't ever made progress in cracking. But even if the signals were unintelligible, they were impossible to hide too.

So, when the Black Knight trailed off its speech and paused…we noticed when the radio activity we measured cut almost in half.

Had it gone radio silent?

No. It only cut off transmitting.

Signals were still being sent, they just weren't being responded to anymore.

The Black Knight charged in, shoulder port sliding open.

My portion of Coalescence instantly went taut. The missile slammed into the Cyclops directly with Madeline inside—

Jordan's influence clamped down on my fear and impulsivity. Her mind gave a heave and forcibly dragged me back into alignment, and I made sure to let her.

Madeline, meanwhile, was more than fine. Heat tolerance was one of her armor's finer points. She sparred with Nai after all. The torpedo's detonation melted stone road underfoot, but Madeline didn't slow down in the slightest.

She resorted to firepower too. Not unlike the missing arm, Madeline also preferred an automatic shotgun built into one of the arms.

It peppered the Black Knight all across its body. Not a single round left a mark on the armor, but it was between the armor that we aimed for.

Machinery was machinery, and flinging buckshot into the moving parts at mach 2 would jam anything sooner or later.

It was our first attack that the Black Knight actually seemed keen to prevent. We only had the chance to get a short burst on target before it drastically lowered its stance, changing its profile. We marched forward, continuously shooting for its joints. We even changed the ammo as we materialized it in the chambers. From buckshot to slugs, we tied in some exotic properties.

It was a far cry from Vorpal Fire, but exotic corrosives got wild, and Coalesced we could produce some ugly ones.

We even dropped the firepower of the rounds so they wouldn't impact and deflect so forcefully.

The result were dark red bullets that flew barely faster than a paintball gun, but they stuck to the Black Knight's armor, beginning to ooze outward.

Our enemy spared a glance toward its shoulder, slowly beginning to sizzle.

"Nice," it commented. "Very nice."

We didn't have high hopes this would be decisive, but it would give us more information. All three of us picked up on the corrosive beginning to eat into the armor. Acrid fumes and wisps of steam began wafting of the armor.

Not the machinery peeking out underneath though.

That made sense, actually.

Harden the armor against common threats. Concussive force. Explosions. Reinforce the more sensitive components against specialized threats, stuff that could slip through or around armor easily. Heat. Radiation. Fluid corrosives.

Madeline's and Jordan's minds pressed forward while I raced down a rabbit hole, trying to piece together information we'd gathered.

The Black Knight was showing independence, maybe even insubordination. If we were interpreting the cut in radio contact correctly…someone in orbit might have been instructing it to stay focused on the target. But the Black Knight had elected to have fun instead, drawn into a fight with Madeline's armor.

It was impossible not to compare HUNGRY and the Black Knight. Or should it be the BLACK KNIGHT? If CENSOR really was HUNGRY's mother, then maybe the Black Knight was SPARK's creation.

Or maybe…

The idea of the Black Knight being so insubordinate that it would cut off whoever was instructing it…that didn't jive. SPARK was cutthroat about keeping his agents in line. Would SPARK give his child that much latitude? I doubted it.

But maybe the Black Knight simply wasn't a subordinate to whoever they were broadcasting too.

As satisfying as it was to see the Black Knight's armor finally have some damage, the corrosive wasn't acting nearly fast enough. Between the two mechs, there was heavy damage to our surroundings, and it was spreading too quickly.

We had an advantage in thinking, limbs, Adeptry, and flexibility. But the Black Knight still held several key edges. Namely, size and speed.

The Cyclops was every bit as bulky as the Black Knight, but it was still only as tall as HUNGRY. In terms of raw force, the Black Knight was still superior, if barely.

Unfortunately, it was emerging that its strength led to another advantage: durability. We'd begun to damage its armor, but it was dealing more than that much damage in return to Madeline's mech. A full force punch from the Cyclops would blow the Black Knight off its feet and send it sprawling, but it wouldn't dent the armor or do the damage we needed.

Meanwhile, the physical blows it rained down were denting the Cyclops's armor and frame.

Our combined Adeptry was more than capable of repairing the damage in the blink of an eye, but Coalescence didn't last forever.

Going by how long it was going to take us to wear through the Black Knight's armor? At this rate, we were the ones on a clock.

So we needed to test something.

Jordan and Madeline tapped into their more esoteric Adeptry and forged a sword. Vez's daggers had scratched it. We could work from there. Jordan understood some very spooky things about the nature of space, bending it, and warping it. Madeline understood some very cool things about equal and opposite reactions, breaking them, and preventing them.

Between the two of them, they made a sword that we hazarded could start cutting into the Black Knight in earnest.

It was exactly as long as my wingspan, a long broadsword that seemed too thin for its size, flecked with orange and green dappling down the pearl blade. The blade's appearance bled past its shape though, warping the sight of whatever background it was in front of. Looking at the blade from different angles revealed four illusory copies hovering parallel to the blade.

The Black Knight actually took a cautious step back.

Madeline clutched the weapon in her mechanized gauntlet, and just because we could, we recolored the Cyclops's hull to match the blades vibrant coloration.

"Tempting…" the Black Knight mumbled. "But I think not."

It raised its one good arm, and fired a howling white beam. Our combined minds were more than fast enough to avoid it, but our Cyclops mech wasn't.

The beam caught its shoulder, and Madeline went tumbling…and tumbling… and tumbling.

It was like some invisible force was continuously pushing on the mech.

None of us understood the effect, but Jordan at least recognized it. A tiny amount of the rubble was sliding backward along with the Cyclops, and she connected the dots.

Its bending space. It's some kind of gravity beam, altering the expression of a target's gravitational pull.

We tried halting the Cyclops's backslide by stabbing the sword into the pavement. But instead of firm purchase, the blade just carved through the ground like butter.

This was a pinch, but it was actually good news. The Black Knight was showing signs of being pressured, and we still had another advantage to leverage: arms.

Practically all our combined mass limit was tied up in the Cyclops armor—and especially the blade—but there was still a few dozen kilograms leftover…

I flew into action. Madeline and the Cyclops taking point had given me the room to catch a second wind.

Even limited to the leftover mass of Coalescence, I still had more than double what I usually had to work with, and with Madeline and Jordan both helping, I could wield my powers more finely and precisely still.

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I jetted behind the Black Knight and drew on Madeline's bag of tricks: a mech gauntlet.

There was something viscerally satisfying about upcutting the same robot that I hadn't been able to scratch minutes previously. The Black Knight was bowled over forward, and I dissolved the gauntlet the moment after the blow connected. Before the robot hit the ground, my jets carried me into position to hit it again.

If nothing else, hitting hit hard and fast kept it off balance. I wasn't doing any real damage though. I could punch it before it could rise to its feet again and again, but this thing was just unbelievably tough.

It really was like an oversized version of Demigod.

This wasn't getting us anywhere. The gravity beam's lingering effects were forcing Madeline and the Cyclops further and further away, and all that mass wasn't doing us any good as long as it was there.

So we dematerialized the Cyclops. Crucially, we left the sword untouched. Madeline caught even as she still slid further and further down the avenue, but with mass freed up, she could begin fighting the pull with her own wings.

The mass we recouped from the Cyclops went right back into making a new one, this time around me.

For a split second, the Black Knight's body language froze, stunned almost.

"Nice!" it crowed. "Like I said: very nice!"

I let Madeline pilot both my body and the mech, and we charged forward. But the Black Knight didn't miss the fact that while we'd rematerialized the mech, the sword had stayed with Madeline.

It had been a labor, even for our three minds put together. We couldn't guarantee recreating it. Maybe with several hours to practice, to make it more than improv …but not like this. Not in combat.

The Black Knight met our charge with its own, fearlessly trading blows that would bend steel and shatter concrete.

It was vigorous and enthusiastic. Between the smashing of metal on metal, the whirring of two death machines' servos, and the carnage we were inflicting on the street and surrounding buildings, we couldn't fully distinguish one sound from another. But I could have sworn this twisted machine was laughing.

Our crucial mistake came when it pump-faked with its good arm. Motioning like it was going to fire the gravity beam again, I tried to boost our Cyclops to avoid it, but instead of firing it, the Black Knight leapt forward and shoulder-checked us at the perfect moment: while both feet were off the ground.

The Cyclops with me inside flew backward, crashing into an adjacent building—a police station. The Black Knight followed the attack with rocket fired right on top of us.

No time to dodge, all we could do was get the Cyclops in the missile's line of fire, preventing the rocket from flying into and detonating deep inside the building.

The worst part was having our brains be moving so much faster than that. The problem with that play was obvious, but the machine just couldn't move quick enough to do something.

The plasma missile exploded, and the story above us collapsed. Neither the missile nor the partial building collapse harmed the Cyclops, much less me inside. But they slowed us down. Extricating the machine from the rubble took precious seconds, and Madeline was slow to fly back, still being repelled by the lingering effects of the gravity beam.

What rattled me was the dead Vorak though. Just throwing us into the police station had killed someone. Crushed under our own armor. The missile explosion had gotten at least one more.

All three of our hearts seized at the knowledge. Another downside of Coalescence. Shared emotional impact could turn into paralyzing wounds.

We'd trained to block out that kind of thing in the heat of combat, but it was so damn hard to ignore!

It bought the Black Knight all the seconds it needed. Instead of chasing us into the police station, it had knelt where it dropped its arm earlier. Picking up the severed limb, it jammed the melted metal ends together and… reattached…the arm.

What.

WHAT?

It had shrugged off Vez damage to its wrist, but this went too far. Some liquid oozed out from inside the arm's stump, and when the slagged remains of the arm were jammed in, the liquid solidified. A heartbeat later, the fingers on the formerly-severed arm twitched back to life.

"That's better," the Black Knight rumbled. "I think I like my odds again."

"[What the hell are you?]" I said. "[…Are you SPARK?]"

This time the robot really did laugh.

"Hah! You think I'm SPARK? What an interesting hypothesis. Maybe I am! I wonder if you'll live long enough to find out…"

"Well you stopped replying to your buddy in orbit," I guessed. The synthetic voice of the Cyclops made it easy to sound confident and un-interrogating. "Maybe you're just blowing off your handler…but then maybe it's just whoever's up there isn't the one in charge."

"Hah. Maybe it's a little of both," the Black Knight mused. "In any case…"

Madeline swooped in on her wings, brandishing our kaleidoscopic sword sword.

But the Black Knight was ready, whirling toward her and raising its restored gun arm. Buckshot fired out, and our only option to guard her was cancelling her dive and shielding her body with her wings.

Forced to use her wings as shields, she fell out of the sky…but not before flinging the sword straight at the Black Knight. The fact that it felt compelled to dodge the blade emboldened us, and the Cyclops lunged forward.

The blade hit the ground handle first, but we were ready to catch it. The Cyclops swung the blade at the Black Knight, forcing it to retreat. Madeline maneuvered to cut off its retreat. The Black Knight couldn't turn to shoot at her and avoid our sword too.

For a brief moment, it seemed like we'd clawed our way into an advantageous position, even despite the Black Knight restoring its arm.

It went wrong when we finally landed a blow.

Madeline's mech gauntlet struck while the robot shifted its weight, knocking it toward me. Our slash landed exactly where we aimed: at the hip, between the armor segments.

The sword cleaved apart the machinery beneath the armor…and snapped.

Kinetic Asymmetry required energy. Not unlike electricity, that energy was typically stored and then used as needed. But enough usage and eventually the stores would run dry.

The asymmetry fueling our sword's space-warping properties was an absurdly energy taxing effect. Using had tacitly involved a gamble that, whatever exotic machinery that lay protected underneath wouldn't be as durable as the armor. And it wasn't. But it was still heavy machinery made from a blend of exotic metals that didn't exist in nature.

It was still plenty durable on its own.

And even the three of us together didn't have the total energy needed to fuel the asymmetry all the way through. The blade's exotic properties faded one-third of the way through the slash.

The Black Knight was stunned still, surprised by the fact that it hadn't been cleaved in two.

"Too bad."

It punched the Cyclops clean across the avenue, sending me crashing right back into the police station. Madeline was forced back by more buckshot spray along with four more plasma missiles.

She flew, trying to avoid the heat-seekers, but her wings didn't have the same cornering power as my maneuvering jets. More hardware limitations bottlenecking Coalescence's advantages.

The Black Knight didn't pay her more thought though. Instead, it charged into the police station, intent on finishing me off.

The Cyclops was still reeling from the last hit, and with our attention on helping Madeline outrun the rockets, we were slow to repair the armor. Before it could rise again, the Black Knight fell upon it. It fired another rocket from nearly point blank. Unrelenting, it overpowered us next.

It stomped the Cyclops into the ground of the police station lobby, pummeling Madeline's mech inch by inch into the foundations. We tried to recreate the damaged mechanisms, but the Black Knight wasn't satisfied just damaging the parts.

The frame creaked as the Black Knight's gauntlets pulled at the arm in the socket. It wasn't quick. Madeline designed this thing to be tough. But the Black Knight was simply tougher. The metal tore in two, one centimeter at a time, and there would be just seconds before it pried open the torso and threatened the cockpit.

We'd been forced to move too early. Improvise too much.

Our only recourse was to dissolve the back of the mech. I tumbled to the ground, still pinned between it and the floor. All three of us were eerily calm despite how much danger we were in and how little we could do about it.

We augmented Madeline's chances to outfly the missiles chasing her with my maneuvering jets. Without the augmentations in my body, she couldn't handle the jets propelling her body…but they could propel the machinery she flew with just fine.

Meanwhile, the Black Knight tore off one of the Cyclops's legs, flinging it aside. It took its gun-arm and a mechanism sounded within it. Instead of firing buckshot, this time it fired a slug of the same kind of molten plasma that exploded from the missiles.

The gun blasted into the Cyclops's chest, hot like magma. I was inches away, but all I could do was trust that even machines could make mistakes. It pulled at our armor's breastplate, widening the gap, and firing another bark from its gun right into the deepest part of the torso.

Jordan had once terrified Madeline by materializing blood inside her mech's cockpit. We recreated that trick in reverse this time.

Materializing several gallons of fake blood and organs, we let them spill out and burn from the gaping chest wound.

Would that be enough? Would it confirm the kill more closely than that?

It seriously might have, except we weren't in this fight alone.

Gun fire peppered against the Black Knight's body to absolutely no effect other than drawing its attention. This was a police station. Half-a-dozen Vorak officers had taken up pistols, laying down continuous fire until the station's lobby and main bullpen could be evacuated further.

All-in-all, it was a disaster. The building was packed because so many nearby people had evacuated to this very station when the first alarms went out colony-wide.

The Black Knight raised its gun-arm, switching back to shotgun configuration, and mowed down every one of them. Through what remained of the Cyclops's optics, we couldn't see in detail, but it looked like even civilians evacuating behind the police were caught in the gunfire.

The Black Knight's attention drifted from the demolished Cyclops, and I took my chance. Dematerializing the whole armor, I jetted away.

"You're not done with me yet, [asshole!]" I yelled trying to draw its fire away from the cops and civilians, but the Black Knight ignored me.

No…it started to glance my way only for something else, further inside the police station to catch its eye.

Following what seemed like its line of sight, I couldn't tell who or what it was looking at. It was just a throng of aliens torn two ways, half of them desperately trying to flee the massacre, half of them frozen in the bullpen where they'd been sheltering.

One of the only Casti in the room suddenly moved, shaking himself out of freezing in place, and trying to make a break for it. They bumped into a Vorak who'd picked a different path, and they threw them down to the ground without even pausing their run.

Like a nail sticking out, the Casti got hammered down.

I let out a scream, trying to jet my bodyweight into the gun-arm, deflect its aim, anything.

But the buckshot shredded the Casti above the waist. What was a recognizable alien person one moment turned into bloody orange hamburger the next.

The Black Knight scanned the police station's interior again, confirming there weren't any more hostiles, and then returned its attention to me.

So, so much of my body wanted to shout and curse and tear at the Black Knight's head.

Instead, I fled.

It burned. If I hadn't still been benefitting from Coalescence, I wouldn't have been able to stomach the shame of it. People died, and we hadn't been able to do anything to save them. And all I could do was run away.

Losing the sword had been more costly than we'd feared. Our mass limit recovered quickly, but investing our power into the sword's special properties had involved shortcuts. The cost of those shortcuts came when the blade broke, intense recoil that would take minutes to fully recover.

Minutes we didn't have.

Madeline managed to outrun the missiles chasing her, but it had taken too long and forced her away from the fight again. Jordan was just arriving in the colony via tram. She was in range for Adeptry, but still too far to influence anything.

The Black Knight followed me out of the station, but without any of the zeal it showed earlier. It wasn't really chasing me even, more like…just watching.

It lazily shot at me, barely bothering to correct its aim while I jetted to a safe distance.

Breathe, we reminded ourselves. We hadn't lost just yet.

Taking stock of the situation…we were at a huge disadvantage. Somehow the Black Knight could repair its damage on the fly. It was more or less in the same condition it had started—no, we'd destroyed three of its eyes. It at least had blind spots. Its offensive and defensive power were incontestable though. Physically, it had still been a match for the Cyclops even with just one arm.

What we needed…was a way to pin it down. Just like it had methodically and slowly torn its way through the Cyclops armor, we needed to hold it in place and dissect it. Even if it was made of machinery and circuits, it had to have a soft-gooey center too. Somewhere inside the bot was a processor or a core of some kind. Some kind of vital component that it couldn't function without.

No machine could carry unlimited redundancies.

We needed Johnny.

His Adeptry was blunt and heavy. It was our only chance to check the Black Knight's raw power. With the right help, Johnny could pen it in.

But to crack that armor open properly, we needed better tools than Jordan's, Madeline's, and my combined improv. The sword had been a good first draft, but it was sloppy.

So instead of flying directly back toward the Black Knight, Madeline veered off, heading to join two other Adepts still moving to reinforce us.

Jordan was closest to Johnny. Without the sword or Cyclops taking up so much of our mass, we materialized a set of flight rotors for her too.

Madeline picked up two. Jordan picked up one more. The last of our viable backup would soon return from getting our casualties to safety.

I just needed to buy a little more time.

"Who are you after?" I tried.

The Black Knight gave a synthesized hum.

"How do you know I haven't already gotten them?"

"Because you're still sticking around."

"Just being polite," it mocked. "You're all trying so hard."

"You're really leaning into the whole 'soulless machine' motif, huh?" I said.

It laughed.

"You really have no idea…" it said. "Want me to clue you in?"

I grimaced. No helping it.

"Enlighten me," invoking my epithet.

"Alright…that's about the same spot you retreated to before, when your friend took the lead. Catching your breath, right?"

I frowned. It was the same rooftop. It overlooked the immediate area well, giving good sightlines up and down the avenue without exposing much if someone started shooting at this ledge.

"Against the wrong foe, being 'optimal' can be the same thing as being 'predictable'," the Black Knight warned.

Every hair on my neck stood up. This wasn't ominous advice for the future. This was mockery. Immediate scorn for having missed something right under my nose. Or, in the case of where the Black Knight was looking, right behind my back.

I was shocked out of our Coalescence.

Literally.

Every muscle in my back tightened as two metal prongs dug into my back, dumping a few thousand volts across my spine.

Something big and heavy slammed into me from behind, pinning me against the stones while I convulsed against the taser. The weight was enormous, and it yanked my arm down to expose my neck and steel plunged in.

The voltage ceased, but I felt woozy immediately. The moon spun under my feet, and it felt like all the blood was draining out of my head.

I summoned every last ounce of focus I had to throw my weight back into my attacker. I whirled onto my back, materializing a knife to try plunging into them. But my creation fizzled in my hand, only amounting to a puff of vapor.

Even if I'd succeeded, my attacker wouldn't have even blinked.

HUNGRY's armor wouldn't even have been scratched.

The robot wrestled my arm back down, pinning it under one of its knees and preparing another syringe in its free hand. Another dose of sedative went into my neck, and my vision shrunk down.

"None…of that…now…" HUNGRY said, its synthetic voice barely a whisper. "You're coming with me."

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