Chapter 5 – Reboot
“Damn it, come on, hurry up!” Emi spat inside the darkness of her helmet, blinking more sweat from her eyes. She was practically boiling inside the armor, despite the fact that the emergency batteries were still running the cooling fans. She could feel the pressure of the vault door on top of her, and could feel her armor threatening to compress beneath the massive weight. The visor was on minimum power now, a faint display showing the status of the power systems as the OS reconfigured the various interlinked systems to function around the damage caused by the door’s impact.
Apparently when the massive door had impacted and slammed her against the floor, some of the outer armor had deformed around the edge of the vault door and severed some of the main power lines beneath the first inner armor layer, leaving her completely vulnerable. Emi’s fingers worked frantically inside the armor’s gauntlets, tapping at the embedded manual controls to operate the suit’s recovery functions; normally the AI would handle repairs, but one of the data lines had been severed from the processor bank as well, so the modules weren’t speaking to one another.
Though she could barely hear anything beyond her helmet, Emi was aware that someone was standing atop her, then heard what could have been shouting. A few seconds later, she thought she heard gunfire, though it was so faint she couldn’t be sure. If it was, at least it wasn’t aimed at her for once.
Despite her best efforts, the rerouting and rebalancing of the power flow were taking far too long. The armor had defensively locked itself upon impact, so her movement was extremely limited as well; even without the weight of the vault door on top of her, she would have to put all of her effort into even bending her arm at the elbow the way it was now.
She felt more movement on top of her, vaguely through the armor plating. “Someone’s fighting someone else…who is it?” The display on the visor showed more connections reestablished, and power began flowing back into the various subsystems. Her eyes widened as a thought occurred. “Becky?!” Her fingers worked faster, and she rerouted power to her visor and sensors instead of the rest of the armor.
As the visor brightened and her audio pickups began to come back online, she heard boots crunching on glass and grunts, angry shouts. Her cameras came up, she saw the ceiling, busted lights and all, and then switched her view to focus on the sounds. There was the other maid, the one with the pink hair, trying to stab someone with a knife. At first Emi didn’t recognize the woman fighting the maid, but then it clicked that she was dressed just like Becky’s idea for a costume.
“Crap!” Emi spat, an error flashing over her display as she mistyped a command and got a rejection, adding a few more precious seconds to her reboot process. Biting her lower lip, she tried to keep her attention on the task at hand, but then she heard Becky cry out in pain. By the time she’d gotten her eyes back on the video feed, she saw Becky hit the floor, and the knife-wielding maid leapt atop her, knife at Becky’s throat.
“You couldn’t adapt fast enough, Goggles. In a fight like this, you have to be ready for anything. Time to die!”
“NO!” Emi screamed inside her hemet, fingers working frantically. She’d just managed to get power back to her arms, but instead of trying to push the vault door away, she angled her arm at the maid and activated an emergency feature she hadn’t thought she’d use so soon. Latches popped open around the base of her elbow just before small explosive charges fired, and the gauntlet launched from her arm.
At the sound of the explosions, the maid whipped her head toward Emi, but by then it was too late for her to get out of the way; the high speed flying fist crashed into her masked face, sending the maid rolling across the floor, the fist itself lodging in the brick wall across the room with a puff of smoke and powder.
“Whew! Guess she wasn’t near as ready for anything as she thought!” said Becky as she picked herself up into a sitting position, her hand going to her neck. The pink-haired maid groaned, attempted to pick herself up, but collapsed, out cold, and probably with a broken jaw as a souvenir. “Shoulda thought about her own advice some more, huh?! Hey, are you okay?” Becky got her attention back on Emi, and scrambled across the glass-covered floor toward her.
Emi blew out her breath and nodded, giving Becky a thumbs up with the hand that was now uncovered, revealing only the black and gray bodysuit that she wore beneath the armor. “Still here, boiling in my own juices, but otherwise I’m just fine. Are you okay?”
“A little bloody, but nothin’ I won’t get over, I reckon,” Becky replied, her voice heavily digitized and auto-tuned coming out of the mask she wore. Becky reached out and grabbed Emi’s hand, holding it firmly while her other hand touched the armor, her goggles glittering with flashes of various code symbols and schematics. “Well, I guess we know where to change up the design; you’ve almost got it back in running shape already. Here, lemme just give it a little tweak here for ya…”
“Thanks so much,” Emi replied, relieved that her friend was okay. Emi’s repair display suddenly glitched out, but just for a moment as the processors caught up to the repair that Becky had managed with just a touch, all circuits realigning and the remaining power distributing equally through the armor. The whining sound of it powering back up filled her ears, and she adjusted the power output again. She put her still-armored hand on the vault door and pushed, using her now-working legs as well, pushing up with her knees and sliding the vault door off of her; it hit the floor with a loud metallic thud. “What happened to the little girl? You didn’t hurt her, did you?”
“Oh, not near enough,” Becky replied with a laugh, helping Emi to her feet though she really didn’t need it with the armor handling all the work. Even with Becky’s platform boots, Emi still stood at least a head taller than her. “That weren’t no little girl, darlin’. She was one mean little bitch, lemme tell ya!”
“Huh…” Emi replied, walking to the gauntlet that had embedded itself in the brick. As she pulled it free and reattached it over her exposed hand, her screen flashed with the data Becky had uncovered on the little maid. “Oh my god…you mean she’s…”
“Yup, an honest to goodness loli,” Becky said, laughing. “Well, maybe not honest, and certainly not good… She’s sleepin’ it off in the back, though. I’m real curious just who Pinkie is, too.” Becky had just started toward the gas-masked maid when Emi’s sensors registered a new threat coming around the corner.
As Emi turned toward it, she heard a woman’s voice yelling “Freeze!” That’s also when she realized that the sirens she heard hadn’t just been the alarms from her armor..
Moving right along! It seems that our heroines have managed to thwart the robbery, in more or less good shape. But how are they gonna handle the cops?
Tune in next week to find out!
Would love to hear what you think about the story so far! Comment here, or shoot me a message over on DeviantArt or just hit me up on my Discord server!
