Heliades' third encounter with an enemy force happened almost out of the blue.
[Incoming Blackout zone!] Kusanagi warned them even as the BattleNet ARO seemed to shrink, node after node of hijacked local intelligence assets dropping out.
Aetheis saw the pattern. ~It's a sphere. Incoming enemy forces.~
[I concur] Kusanagi agreed, and pressed herself against a wall, left hand bringing the carbine around so it could re-attach to the back of her suit. Her other hand reached for the Disposable, pulling it free and thumbing off the safety. They heard the heavy thunder of footfalls. [Infantry only. No robots] an AI stated on the TacNet.
~Too bad.~ Aetheis reached for her Sequalla'shar, slowly drawing it from her holster. Her other hand gripped the Evo-90. ~Throw me one if you can~ she said to Kusanagi's back.
Kusanagi flashed a yellow "Check" signal in reply. The fall of boots closed in at pace. Then, a SneakBot shot around the corner, and got eyes on them. Some part of Kusanagi wondered if the low-slung, crab-like machine could bulge out its sensor stalks in surprise at their presence.
She sprang into action immediately. She didn't worry about the SneakBot - shooting it would have only reduced her action time as point man. Her secondary awareness assigned the 'Bot to the rest of the team, and she whirled around the corner, bringing her left arm up to fabricate a medium-profile Omnishield.
QRF. 5 people. Takashi Industries 4140 Medium Hardsuits. Heavier Joint Armor, thicker main plating. Modifications: Barrier backpack mount, judging by shoulder attachments and exoskeleton components on shoulders and hips. Heckler und Koch MBG-35. 4 kJ/e. Underbarrel Payload launcher. Tactical Laser System.
As if on cue, her visual field locked out as a bright dazzler scanned over her helmet, burning out and overloading the nano camera arrays that gave her vision through the catomic helmet. Immediately, she switched to alternate vision modes, patching the sensor fusion from the few torso-mounted visual arrays she had into the entoptic space, approximating from enhanced memory, tactical projections and active ultrasonics.
The Mercs deployed screamer sound jammers in response almost immediately, but it gave her clear vision long enough to drop into a slide, fire her pistol four times into the center mass, then slide through in between the soldiers legs with a hairsbreadth of space and place a shot from below into his abdomen plate, inside the protective envelope of the barrier, before kicking his right leg out for good measure.
The guard toppled over, and waved his arms as a biotic pull yanked him forward, sliding over the polished floor before a warp sword was planted straight through his back, flaring bright white. Distributed power cell "tissue" exploded violently as it overheated, and Aetheis stepped forward, avoiding the jet of flames that speared out of the entry wound of her strike.
Kusanagi lifted herself easily off the floor, left hand balling into a fist, and she punched into the next soldier's chest.
Her hand slammed into his kinetic barrier, and it actually hurt. Irritated, her world slowed down to a crawl by the combat augmentations, she opened her damage control parameters and jacked the values down further. With another eye, she assessed the damage control screen, a simple orange render of her left hand. Light kinetic shock damage to the joints, displacement, stress on the bones. No fatal damage, nanorepair bots already moving to repair the micro-fractures that had formed.
The return strike headed towards her face, and she turned her head, letting the armored fist slide along her cheek, taking the purposeful pain that warned her of the energy behind the strike, then locked the arm and held stiff. The man struggled, myomer pushing against myomer, but now the angle was better and her superior muscles were up to the challenge… for now. The energy drain was of some concern, as energy salvaging wasn't something they had time for.
Disabling strike.
She rammed her other arm into the throat area, preemptively hardened synthetic tissue against armor plate, then used her elbow as a base of attack to leverage the armored merc into the wall. The soldier reacted by slamming a foot into the floor, splintering the wood and trying to get an angle in, but she powered through with a push of her own. The floor gave away slightly, and she heard more cracking. Then the armor slammed into the wall, and fine plaster exploded into the air.
Raven shot past the Major and her opponent in not-quite a charge, left arm poised ready to strike with a freshly extruded omniblade, wrapped in its trigraphic warning. Her chosen target saw the attack coming, and got a single shot off - that broke against a brilliant blue-violet barrier field, before the arm struck forward like a snake, and home into the left collarbone. It wasn't perfect, but it did the job, and something vital in the chest had been hit, as the posture wavered. Raven touched off the ground, grabbed the helmet with her right hand, and pushed forward, flaring her nodes in patterns to add mass to herself.
That maneuver was potentially dangerous for someone with baseline arms, too much mass and momentum able to break one's own arm as much as the enemy helmet, but special cybernetics could take the strain when you did the strike properly. Raven did, and her mass along with the acquired momentum slammed the armored helmet into the floor, through it, and onto the concrete below. There was a sickening, loud series of cracks so rapidly together it seemed like one. Blood pooled into the darkness.
Raven looked up to have her eyes lock onto the shape of an approaching HK assault rifle, almost inside the range where she could generate a barrier field of sufficient strength and depth to deflect the rounds. The fourth merc had clearly fought biotics before, and was bringing her gun in for a quick, close-in discharge, against the head if possible. And she had timed it well. Options raced through Raven's head. Deflect the gun with a kinetic transfer. Try to jam the mass effect field generators with raw, disruptive dark energy. That one was potentially viable.
Before she could take any serious action, a Sequalla'shar sailed through the air, and into the torso of the Merc. Him stunned long enough, Raven reached out and forward, hand closing around the hilt, and she felt the resonance of dying dark energy within the hilt.
Hope I don't mess this up.
She reached and sung. The blade's core answered, and flared with disrupting, shifting plates of gravity. After a moment, Raven twisted and ripped the blade clear to the right. It passed through the body almost without resistance, glowing slack spraying over the corridor.
The fourth threat taken care off, Aetheis took care of Kusanagi's second opponent, still struggling as they were locked against the wall. The asari aimed for the armored head with her submachine gun, two-handed with a tough, low-slung stance. Kusanagi saw the blue, laser-like AR line that indicated Aetheis' aim, and forced the head away from her and into the clear with a quick punch of her left, turning into a spread hand press against the left side of the helmet.
Two bursts at close range broke the shields, and Aetheis pulled the trigger through to the second break, letting the SMG eat into the helmet until a bloody, cratered mass had replaced the faceplate and transhuman head underneath.
Kusanagi dropped her block, and the body hang there for a moment, locked inside the cavity of the wall created when the merc had been slammed there. Then he slumped gradually to the ground, until his buttplate dropped, surprisingly silent, on the floor.
The asari and the transhuman looked at each other for a moment, faceless catomic helmets hiding their faces.
The sound of Raven swinging around the Sequalla'shar around snapped them out. Raven grabbed the weapon by its flat faces, and carefully handed it back to Aetheis. "Thanks for the save."
"Dejale."
It should be "Dejale, asiyo", Raven thought, then caught herself. No.
She just nodded.
Kusanagi pointed down the corridor: "Number 5?"
"Bolted."
Her hand raised, the Major fired off a one-shot recon drone. It whirled around the corner. [Down that corridor is the stairway access to the vault level. The latest intel places Adriens and the other HVT group inside, or nearby. That means we'll be hitting prepared resistance, especially now that someone is running to warn them.]
On cue, they could gear feet tapering down a stairway.
Aetheis cracked her neck slightly. ~Good. This was a nice warm-up so far.~
[Just don't overexert yourself] Raven remarked.
~Kvavelisian commando school. Trust me, I haven't really started so far. Neither have you, considering your augments.~
Raven tipped her head in concession, edging up to the corner. Her left hand had fetched one of the more durable quarian drone disks from her leg compartment, and she launched it with a press from her open hand, switching her pistol to the left hand. She poked the barrel around the corner, scanning the corridor. [Clear so far.]
Aetheis rounded the corner, SMG up, advancing. Kusanagi's hand touched her shoulder, and Raven followed in, strafing to the left to clear the line of fire.
A trio of recon disks advanced into the room. It was a relatively small junction of corridors and another staircase, mostly marked by the fact that now the staircase went not only up, but also down. To their left and right, one door each granted entry in rooms flanking the room. Aetheis and Raven stopped short of both, and let Kusanagi come up behind them. One drone each hovered readily before the closed wood paneling.
Kusanagi opened both doors via a Spime hack in the same moment, and the disks buzzed inside. [All clear.] They moved up. Two disks approached the stairway; a single made the descent.
As it did, they spread out, covering the accessways and the stairway. Down below, two shapes were visible at the end of a corridor, the barrels of more HKs aimed at the stairway.
A single shot rang out, and the feed died. Glowing micro-fragments of a mass driver flechette cut into the staircase wall, creating small craters in flashes of light.
[Want to bet the floor is pressure-spimed?] Raven asked sarcastically.
[No bet.] Using off-lined, fibre-wired pressure sensors around vulnerable locations was an obvious counter to modern thermoptic camouflage. Bend and replicate light wavefronts, suck away thermal emissions into heatsinks and smart-patterned redistribution, cancel soundwaves using phased arrays of millions of micro-speakers - you couldn't eliminate a walking biped's momentum completely. There always remained enough that a modern piezoelectric pressure matrix would pick up on the minute pressure created by walking.
[Do we have enough time for hard infiltration?]
Something detonated outside with a loud bang, reverberating through the earth and air. Kusanagi's Egocloud automatically started calculations. Distance, transmission matter quantities, retransmission factors from phase change to phase change, back-tracking the source of the sound. The closest match was the catastrophic loss of containment on several Terajoules of power. A combat quadped most likely, destroyed by an Anti-Armor missile attack.
[No. Enemy QRF seems to be rolling in. Every second we waste...]
~Agreed. How do we take below?~
[Fast and hard, as usual.] Kusanagi slotted two fresh heatsinks into her carbine, and quickly checked the ammo block of her pistol visually. She fingered for a long tube of stacked seekers, and quickly replaced the set slotted into the over-barrel launcher of the tactical carbine. [Pack heavy.] Aetheis ejected the block in her EVO-90, and pulled a different one from a taken pouch. She checked the side for a moment, eyeing the yellow metamaterial etching, before inserting the jacketed armor-piercing rounds.
Raven handed her a flash-fabbed two-tube seeker launcher, already loaded. Aetheis nodded, and quickly attached it to the bottom.
[Keep the seekers for the main block. Biotics and tech on the two guarding the corridor.]
[I don't think those are two anymore.] Raven said. [They'll be reinforced.]
Aetheis flexed her left hand. "And bunched up in tight quarters. Their mistake." For a moment, she seemed to hold an invisible sphere, and the transhumans understood what she was likely planning.
She looked at both, then flicker her head towards the stairway. "Let's get them."
The guards below had no effective warning. The Pressure-spimes reported a sudden movement on the stairway, and two more recon disks poked their sensor bands into the corridor, sinking down from above - then the blurry shape of a thermopticaly camouflaged person was wreathed in blue, and shot down the corridor.
Under 6x Combat Acceleration, they snapped their guns up and pulled through the triggers on augmented speed; their bullets slammed home in the barrier, and then Aetheis was out of the charge, and the asari did what she had trained 250 years to do - she took what remaining coherency there was, keeping the dark energy field usable as it rippled forward and into eternity in the parallel, non-baryonic world it normally existed in, and turned it into a Slam.
The four guards on the intersection were abruptly lifted into the air, turning overhead as gravity tugged at them - Then they slammed into the ground at hundreds of gravities. One gun fired for a moment as its user held onto the trigger in death, then it fell silent.
The Phase Inhibitor field hit her like a Jackhammer, and she backpedaled. ~Phase Inhibitor. I am losing my biotics!~ The destructive waves of dark energy interference, created by the rotating eezo masses, hit her like loud soundwaves, feedback gnawing at her Shikali like nails mixed with electrical shots.
[Where is it?]
~Around the corner… I think.~
Like that, the charge was broken. Aetheis limped back, her posture painful, gun arm still raised to cover the edge. [Counter-biotics gear. They are adapting.]
Raven edged up to the corner. [The Papa-India is definitely around the corner. ...Backpack-based, judging by the field geometry.] The transhuman dismissed the field analysis app.
She glanced back.
They all heart the hiss of something opening, and around the corner, heavy feet shifted, mixed with a high voice: "-is going o-"
"Sir, we need to move you." Civilian feet mixed with combat boots, and there was a clearly audible "ra-clack" as heavy weapons were cycled.
[Adriens and HVT Group Beta.]
[Shit.] Raven pulled back from the edge. [Major, we-]
Six spherical grenades landed on the floor, and at combat acceleration, their deformation was like molasses. All three minds identified the devices in nearly the same moment. Self-guided bouncing grenades.
[Phalanx.] The Major's voice was suddenly ice-cold, robotic. No pretense of anything like emotions. Inside her mindscape, the already efficient sapient mind was summarily kicked to stand-by, and even more stripped-down combat logic took their place.
Mission priorities were defined. Maintain assets. Asset 03 not backed up, non-negotiable damage limiter. Keep in back, shield. Maintain operational capability.
Her feet dug in, arms coming up as omnitools flared brightly, heat dissipation fins unfolding like tiny feathers as the fabricators sprang into action. At her side, Raven fabricated her own omni-shield. Fabrication resources ticked down rapidly as the tool wove layer after layer of material, flakes falling out as fab detritus joined material falling out of flickering effector beams. The Phase Inhibitor was screwing with everything eezonic.
The bouncing grenades had taken flight again, and were closing in. Raven and her locked the shields edges, pressing against the wall, shadowing Aetheis behind herself. Damage prediction calculations ran. The shield would only serve as ablative armor; no way it could tank the entire blast, with eezonic coherency compromised beforehand. After that came their kinetic barriers, the armaweave suits, and the internal armoring. The last bastion was sheer redundancy.
All would very likely suffer attrition in the upcoming detonation event.
The prediction suites nailed the point of detonation to 500 milliseconds towards the maxima of probability to time. In a lose formation, all six grenades detonated at the same moment. Their grey, patterned surface flashed orange, then white, then burst apart, the smart material surrounding the explosive core burning away, letting the pure sun of hot plasmatic fury unleashed by modern n-doped nano-trope explosives expand into the environment. A moment later, filters automatically kicked in, and the sun turned into a red ball.
The omnishields started buckling, momentum transfer pushing into cybernetic arms. Nanoscopic fibres twitched and tensed as distributed nano-circuitry commanded them, pseudo-tissue soaked in electro-reactive gel hardening selectively to counteract, transfer and dampen out the shockwaves that raced through the Shells.
Then the impulse overwhelmed taxed kinetic vector fields and nanomechanical links, and the omnishield gave way. Hot hexagonal shrapnel scythed through the air, element after element breaking away like dust, picked up by the shockwave that distorted the air, and threw it into flickering personal barriers.
Barriers detested constant punishment. They were designed as snap-triggered combat shielding, fully online just for the moment it took to deflect lightweight objects and drain the kinetic energy out of those objects that couldn't be deflected. Getting hit with the equivalent of a nanoparticle sand blaster at close range, accelerated by six modern grenades and their combining shockwave, was overtaxing them quickly and depleting the capacitors that kept the projectors running.
With a flash of protest, the barrier fields decohered, and the projector arrays cycled to reboot. Now the armaweave came under assault, withstood as best as it could - but still, patches were eroded away or outright cut through by material nearly as thin as the fibres that made it up. Kusanagi's front arm suffered the worst of it, catomic patches stripped away, and the skin underneath exposed, which the last remnants of the shockwave. But the catomics suffered the worst of it, with the least mechanical integrity.
Red blood spurted from wounds, and black cybernetics now marred by sandblaster-like scratches towered in deep wounds, exposed to the open air. The left side of the helmet, turned into the blast, was partially stripped, and the skin underneath ripped away.
Kusanagi came out of the snap-flex trance. Damage alerts warbled in the AROSpace like orange and red inflammations, her arms and torso had been hit the worst, followed by the head, and kinetic trauma warnings dotted every muscle and joint.
Now, she was angry, and she saw the red of target diamonds, moving in a fresh smoke cloud that filled the interception.
Coughing reached her ears, and she mentally smirked as she re-shouldered the carbine, her native left eye looking on on targets. Somebody in there didn't use smoke-rated lung augments.
She fired. The shots hit home, and barriers flashed. Return fire scythed out of the smoke, and she side-strafed, changing her position as she fired, "drunkwalking" to confuse enemy tracking and prediction.
Then someone decided to toss another grenade, and annoyance passed through her mind.
The grenade was an old SABAT INC model, digitally smart-fused. It had an array of standard, low-resolution electro-optical sensors, four bands of antennas for RFID IFF beacon squawk-checks, and two solid-state accelerometers. The "brain" was a film of printed electronics, applied to sticky foil and glued to the inside of the casing.
Not cutting-edge anymore… and certainly not state of the art on its ECM software. Kusanagi found 12 viable exploits in the time it took the grenade to spiral out of the smoke, selected two, and executed them.
Gaining full admin access to the grenade's fuse was depressingly easy. Overriding the counter-throw safety fuse system took a single command line.
She reached out, plucked the grenade out of the air, made a single round swing of her arm and chucked it back into the smoke cloud.
Due to the sealed nature of the enemy helmets, and their encrypted coms, there was no audible reaction, but she "heard" the burst of close-range EM coms nonetheless. Then the grenade detonated, blasting the smoke away and sending a figure stumbling out of the smoke, barriers partially depleted. The Major planted a burst into the merc's head, and they dropped to the ground.
Behind her, Aetheis' head snapped up as the Phase Inhibitor field sputtered and died. Overhead, recon disks zipped by, pushing in to get eyes on. Their intel feeds were helpfully piped to all three sophonts AROs immediately.
The vault door was still open, just hinging shut. [Major] Raven shouted, seeing the opening they had.
[Get the guards.] Kusanagi broke into a dead run, helmet just now flowing back together over her head, barreling down the corridor. Her left hand snapped out, caught the corner, and stuck through the power of van-der-vaals strips, casually kicking another guard in the head. Then she was around the corner.
Aetheis took that as her cue to unleash a muffled scream. She drew her arm back, concentrating. Her hand and arm flashed with the photon field, and her armored skin began seeping dense dark energy fields, more like light turned into a fluid.
At combat acceleration, Raven witnessed the moment a tiny dot in the center of Aetheis' hand appeared, a pinprick of darkness surrounded by the warp of space-time. The biotic singularity grew explosively, and Aetheis pushed it off, chucking it on a pseudo-ballistic trajectory into the smoke. The burning particulate swirled and was sucked into the gravity well, slowly penetrating.
"Attenzione!", someone within the smoke shouted, and there was the sound of a heavy armor-on-meat impact and a loud "oompfh" as someone slammed into the floor.
Aetheis clenched her fist, and the singularity triggered. Smoke was drawn in, then heavier matter. Shadowy figures started spinning around the singularity, flailing helplessly. There was scrapping around the other end of the corridor. On their left, a door hissed as it closed down.
Raven chugged a spear of warpfire into the singularity, and the two field geometries docohered catastrophically. For a moment, the singularity flashed a sharp white that seemed to collapse down into a ring as its power increased thousandfold, sucking many things caught in its influence down into the momentary core of the altered space-time…
Detonation.
Everything sucked down was spit out in a wave of plasma, light, heat and pressure, and radiated outwards mixed with unraveling fields of gravity vectors. Flooring warped and melted, OLED panels flickered and died, and a gust of heat, smoke and ash blasted over freshly raised barrier fields. Both brought their weapons up, and pushed in, suited feet ignoring the heat created by the biotic combo.
The detonation site was warped carnage, mixed with blood. One enemy suit had been ripped apart at the torso, with the head now embedded in a far wall. Raven didn't dwell on the sight. Warp ruptures like that were messy. To their right, a second corridor lead away from the vault. They just caught sight of the last two mercs, retreating up a second stairwell. They didn't exchange fire.
Raven and Aetheis made eye contact for a moment, then turned and jogged towards the vault door, now sealed.
[Major, you inside?]
The com channel beeped a [[Stand-by]]. Raven glanced at the readout, letting it expand. She huffed. "She's definitely in, but the bandwidth is shit." She eye-clicked the transmission out of the queue, and opened another app.
"Good shielding." Aetheis let a hand glide over the gleaming vault door, eyeing the material.
"Yeah… let's stack up. Backs to the vault. Adriens' gonna start sending something our way sooner or later."
"With the problem that we are dreadfully exposed." Aetheis turned around and took a knee, aiming her SMG down the corridor.
"Definitely not an optimal position. Ares will have to take the load off our backs." At the same time, Raven typed: [Heliades-1, Status?]
The reply squeezed itself across the remaining TacLink a moment later: [Heliades, 1 is inside. Spirits are in the racks. They taste well. Stand-by.]
"She's got the package."
Aetheis breathed out. "Thank Athame. We got there just in time. He didn't erase it."
"Probably couldn't."
Aetheis nodded and keyed her major com: [All Callsigns, Heliades. Com check.]
The reply was low-bandwidth also: [Heliades, Hermes, com is 2 by 3. Enemy architecture is wobbling and we have first consolidated counterpushes. Net is down, no eyes on in your AO. Ares is drawing the heat. Status?]
[At OP Alpha. Encounter with HVT Gamma and HVT Group Beta. No engagement with HVTs. Objective NOVUM SPIRITUS present. Heliades-1 is inside, securing now, break.] Aetheis clicked the com off.
"Can she get out?"
Raven shook her head after a moment: "No. Security lockdown. The door will not disengage for at least half an hour."
[Back to you, Hermes. Heliades-1 is inside and locked; 2 and 3 preparing extract. Stand-by for status update on punch out, over.]
[Copy all that, Heliades. Seeing if we can't push assets your way, break - Heliades, enemy QRF is gathering. Estimate time is 5 minutes until hot contact. Also, be advised Beckenstein PD just got a call. Time to serious response is 10 minutes. ESWAT is scrambling a Task Force. That would be a nasty Blue-on-Blue. Windows closing. Over.]
[Check.] Raven suddenly sounded tired. "ESWAT is the last thing we need here. They're gonna come with IPS, and we're not geared to fight two airmobile lances of Mecha."
"Right." Aetheis dropped her SMG and reached out with a hand: "I need a stim."
Raven opened her leg compartment and retrieved a bent piece of black polymeer, molded to fit against the side of the neck. "There you go." She eyed the asari wearily.
Aetheis took the autoinjector without another word, and primed it with a trained press of the hand and the toggle of a key. Two extensions snapped out on both sides, deflecting towards a common center, and she pressed it against her neck.
For a moment, nothing happened. The injector used the same nerve transducer technology used in interface cabs, pain blockers and other non-invasive DNIs to disable her skin nerves around the veins, which made the only sign besides an ARO message the…
A fiery wave seemed to race through her brain as the vanguard of the biotic regeneration stim arrived. Asari were masters of biotic endurance; the separate nervous and semi-separated cardiovascular system they used to supply super-charged neurons could produce frequencies and modulations unachieved by any other baseline nervous system. Special glands and blood cells stored glucose and ASE-ATP, an asari protein complex with its attached chain of phosphor. But even asari burned out. The brain and the cortex biotis got taxed, local resources were depleted and the side effects of biotic activations showed themselves.
Altederinan was a counter-agent. Neurostimulants, mixed with bacteria-synthesized trigger agents causing hypercharged protein regeneration in specific nerve clusters. But it hurt as it worked, pushing the body back into top condition.
Part of Aetheis' commando training had been to endure the injections without stumbling or falling over, or flaring up her biotics. But it still hurt. She looked at Raven. The transhuman seemed as fresh as ever on the surface, but given how transhuman biotics were different, and here… implemented into a high-percentage synthetic body, there was no way of saying what Raven did to stay biotically fit.
"Thanks." She turned to the vault, and raised her hands, interlocking them. The asari slowly worked her muscles, inhaling and exhaling deeply. "Let's get to work."
Glossary:
ASE-ATP: Asari-Equivalent: Adenosine triphosphate - Asari use a different form of protein base in their own (phosphate-based) energy storage complexes for biochemical power supply. ASE-ATP is one, slightly informal but still used, transhuman designation of this complex.
"Break": Voice procedure term used to signify a pause in transmission during longer calls. Not necessarily required in the age of digital Voice over Digital Radio (VODR) systems, but helps with keeping track on the receivers end.
IFF: Identify Friend or Foe, a variable-mode, encrypted ID system that allows special beacons to either broadcast or reply on command with an ID code. IFF usually requires a friendly code transmission to issue a wave-off and not mark a target as an enemy.
IPS: Intermediate Power Suit: A form of superheavy, motion-slaved, partially exoskeletal Mini-Mech. Average 3 meters, up to 1.5 ton.
QRF: Quick-Reaction Force.
SABAT INC: A transhumans Arms manufacturer, heavily involved in the fabrication of second-line equipment. Recently had been attempting to overhaul its market position, with mixed results. Cheap but good is the company's overall reputation, though it enjoys a questionable reputation with many professional outfits.
"Singing": Among biotics, "singing" is a translation of the asari term "reseranee", and refers to very specific, harmonic patterns emitted onto appropriate receptor elements. This is usually used to "pump" biotic weaponry with dark energy.
SneakBot: Originally developed by Festo Biomechanics in 2033, the original SneakBot™ was a crab-sized reconnaissance robot with a special sensor suite, deployed in self-managing swarms around users. Today, the term is common to refer to any similar ground-motile recon robot, with the machines enhanced with thermoptic camouflage, active sound suppression and EM shielding.
Spimes: Distributed, independently processing sensor/controller nodes. Part of the Mesh. Decentralized networking. Part of modern "Smart World" technology and "Smart Environments".