Her Royal Majesty

Lily hadn't noticed, but Scott brought two small grills that he had constructed out of fifty-gallon steel drums and a lot of charcoal. He was dragging them out of the trailer when she went inside to pick up the small capacitors she would replace in the Mister Gutsy.

Since she was expecting to mainly be fighting, she had left her little bag of tools in the truck's cab. It would have been the intelligent thing to do to leave her precious, irreplaceable diagnostic scanner in the truck's cab as well, but she had gotten used to having it immediately at hand that she hadn't considered that despite it being a ruggedized military model it wasn't, by any means, indestructible.

Oh well, there was nothing much she could do about that now. She didn't even have the tech base yet to replace the screen, but she had been working in that direction for some time. She had been having the most success in creating displays by creating something akin to e-ink displays she remembered from Kindles and other e-book readers from her past life.

The technology was pretty simple, featuring negatively charged black pigments and positively charged white pigments suspended in a tiny transparent oil sphere, which amounted to a single pixel. By adjusting the voltage to these pixels, you could create a black, white, or grey pixel similar to the way etch-a-sketch toys worked.

Now, she would have to look into more LED or LCD-type displays, which were unknown in the Fallout universe, and seemed to entirely use cathode-ray tubes.

Well, perhaps she could fully remove the display from her tablet and then scan the display to give her some ideas. The concept of LED displays was reasonably straightforward, but she couldn't make LED pixels that small presently. She should be able to, but her experiments had failed, so she was clearly not noticing some solution.

In any case, she would have to step up research in that direction. She doubted she could replicate the screen that had a greater resolution than the human eye could see, at least at first, but perhaps she would be able to replace the screen on her scanner with something useful in six months or so. She could repair the charging port immediately, as the damage seemed minor.

That would have to be sufficient for now. Now that she had a brain interface, it wasn't as though she needed to use the display screen. The only reason it was included at all was the device was a military model designed to be used in cases of emission control where no radiation was permitted.

"I'm going to assume you know 'ow to cook zhese ants because I 'ave no idea at all," Lily told Scott as she came back around to the trailer after grabbing her toolkit from the front. She had grown up in Shanghai, New Mexico and Texas. While Shanghai was a bit famous for its seafood, including lobster, she had never seen it prepared. As for Texas and New Mexico, neither location was known for do-it-yourself lobster preparation.

Scott grinned, "Oh, absolutely! It's almost a shame we killed so many; a lot of this meat is going to go to waste."

"Well, I was considering zhat. If we could find a broke-down refrigerator or freezer in one of the break-rooms or kitchens, I could probably repair it, zhat way we could bring most of zhe meat back with us, if you didn't mind butchering a hundred ants," Lily offered with a smile. If these ants really were delicious, she felt that would be definitely worth the effort," Lily offered with a smile. She'd probably have to replace the interior walls of whatever freezer or refrigerator they found, as it was likely to be disgusting inside and not worth the time it would take to clean, but that was fine.

He nodded, "That sounds like a good idea to me. We'll be on the lookout for kitchens and break rooms, then."

Lily hummed in response and then walked over to the parking lot where the Mister Gutsy had fallen in battle. She glanced over at Gary, who was field-stripping and cleaning each of the plasma rifles, "You know 'ow to maintain zhose?" she asked, a little surprised.

He grinned, "Well, these are the Army model. The Marine and Naval versions have a slightly shorter linear accelerator and don't have this carry handle, but honestly, that is the only difference. These babies haven't seen any TLC in a long, long time. Honestly, that's reason enough to kill those two green assholes in the first place, even if they weren't trying to murder us."

She kneeled down and lifted the Mister Gutsy up, righting him so that she could more easily disassemble him. Pulling out her trusty multi-screwdriver, she made short work on the fastenings on his chassis, "Say, you know 'ow I mentioned zhe various factions zhat exist in the Wasteland?"

Gary glanced over at her and said, "Yeah, sure. Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel are the main ones. Those are pretty corny names, both of them, by the way. First, one may or may not be the remains of the Federal government, and the other is some techno-feudalists or something?"

Lily held out her hand carrying her screwdriver, and made a waffling motion, "Sort of, I guess. But, yeah, both of those factions still operate Vertibird VTOL aircraft. 'Ow the 'ell are zhey getting zhe fuel for zhose beasts? Any guesses? I don't remember petroleum being exactly easy to come by, and zhat was two hundred years ago."

He grinned widely, "Wow! Something I have the answer to that you don't! Yeah, I probably know exactly how they're fueling those birds. Gimmie a sec, and I'll enlighten you." He quickly reassembled each of the plasma rifles and sat them back down on the tarp he had been working on, and then turned to her.

"Main reason I know this is that it was a project of the Department of the Navy. As you probably already know, essentially all Naval ships bigger than a rigid-hulled inflatable dingy were all nuclear-powered. However, all the air assets were still jets. That's a problem when you basically don't have any oil left in the world," said Gary in a storyteller's tone.

Lily tilted her head to the side and nodded for him to continue, so he did. "Well, net-energy positive fusion changed everything. All of a sudden, there was plentiful energy for ideas that would have been considered ridiculous just years before. Did you know that in WW2, the krauts had a similar problem, that they couldn't get oil? Well, they used a lot of electricity and converted tons of coal into synfuel, a kind of synthetic kerosene, I guess."

Lily hummed. She already knew the answer now. She should have already thought about that possibility but hadn't. Still, she would be a good listener and let Gary finish his story since he seemed enthused.

"In any case, the Navy built a trial system involving a huge fusion reactor and equipment to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and then convert that into useful fuels. It wasn't what you'd call economical, not really, but the Navy considered it a huge success and started installing these large emplacements at every Naval Air Station and any large Naval base. It wouldn't be enough to provide a nation with enough gas, but it was supposed to be enough to provide at least this man's Navy with enough. My guess is that many of those installations are still functional. They were built underground and designed to withstand a close hundred and fifty kiloton airburst. You said the Enclave is based at Adams? Well, there is a Naval Air Station co-located at that airbase. As for the knights of the round table? Well, NAS Patuxent River isn't that far away as a Vertibird flies," he finished his tale.

"Zhat is quite interesting. You say that these installations were only installed at Naval Air Stations and Naval bases?" asked Lily curiously.

It was Gary's turn to hum as he considered the question; after a moment, he shook his head, "Nah, those were the main places. When I was retiring, there was also talk about the Air Force wanting the technology, but the Navy was for sure gonna make them pay for it. I'm pretty sure there is a fuel plant at a few places that are technically civilian but have a deep relationship with the Navy too. Newport News, for sure; I know they have one."

"Newport News Shipbuilding? Why, zhat isn't zhat far south of here, near Norfolk, yes?" asked Lily, interested.

Gary chuckled, "Why? You want your own Air Force like these other two jokers?" Lily just nodded at him, seriously. "Well, I'm not sure how realistic that is, but if you ever make an expedition to Newport News, I'd like to go along. I always liked seeing the ships fitting out." He started laughing, "Hell, bring enough of your little robots and maybe you could have your own Navy, too! Or be your own nuclear power! As Naval Station Norfolk was the Atlantic arsenal for Special Weapons, I'm sure there's a few 100KT cruise missiles around there that could use a new home."

He laughed again as she turned to continue disassembling the Mister Handy. She wondered why he was laughing when all of those were such good ideas? Sometimes she just didn't understand people. Besides, she was already a nuclear-weapon-armed warlord. It made some sense to increase her stocks. However, this would be a plan for much further into the future. After this adventure was done, she expected to hole up in her hospital for a few months and then her next target was the VSS building in DC.

She wanted the Power Armour that was there, but more importantly, she wanted the Chinese stealth armour that was there even more, as that suited her "playstyle" even more, and she had a number of ideas of how to increase the protection on it, as well. To say nothing about the VR technology itself, she planned to cart off the entire supercomputer cluster and VR pod too.

---xxxxxx---

It took longer to disassemble him than it did to repair Mister Gutsy's motherboard. He was rather fortunate the damage had been so minor, although part of that was because the Mister Gutsy featured a much more rugged and isolated electrical architecture. His quantum processor and memory modules were much more isolated from potential electrical surges and shorts; in other words, he was designed to take damage and still be repairable, which wasn't surprising for a purpose-built military bot.

She had thought that the Mister Gutsy's were just Mister Handy's with guns, but it was clear General Atomics upgraded other areas of their construction as well to suit their new role.

Lily took note of it, saving scans of the entire thing as she thought it might be a good idea to upgrade Sophie with similar changes to her motherboard architecture and peripheral connections. She'd talk to the Mechanist about it later.

She screwed him back into the standoffs and then carefully slotted all of his peripherals back into place. She had thought there would have been a lot more dust inside his compartments, but it appears Scott kept a good maintenance schedule, even though it was clear that these robots would run for hundreds of years without much preventive maintenance.

One of her robots helped her hold his exterior chassis in position while she screwed all of his fasteners back into place. She nodded to it, and it backed away and resumed its previous duties, which were guarding and exploring the first large room that they had battled in. A few ants, scouting from deeper in the factory, had been blasted in the last thirty minutes.

There wasn't an easily accessible off switch on Mister Gutsy's, which wasn't surprising. But the on switch was there; it just wouldn't function except to boot up the robot in the first place. She pressed the spring-loaded button and backed away.

The bootup process wasn't fast, as Lily judged things, but still, Mister Gutsy levitated back up into the air after about half a minute, "I can't believe that green shit got me!" He rotated to face her, "What was the damage?"

Lily smiled at him, "Just a few caps damaged, it was zhe... how you say, lucky shot?"

The Mister Gutsy digitized a sigh, "Are you sure you were in this man's Army and not the damn frogs, woman?! You're not some Quebecois terrorist trying to trick me, are you?"

"I assure you, I received zhe honourable discharge from zhe US Army, and if you were at all educated beyond which end of a plasma gun to point at zhe bad guys, you would know my accent is completely incorrect to be Canadian," Lily told him with narrowed eyes.

"Pffft! So you say!" the Mister Handy retorted, then floated off towards the Mechanist.

Gary blinked at her, "Wait, you were in the service?" He then chuckled, "To be honest, I thought you might have been Canadian, too. Not that anyone would care these days."

Lily nodded, "Yes, I 'ad to get somebody to pay for zhe higher education. My MOS was an intelligence analyst and linguist, and I only spent four years in. Zhat's why zhat Mister Gutsy calls me a staff puke; I zhink any MOS other zhan an Infantryman wouldn't quite suit 'is tastes. I don't blame 'im zhough since he's not all zhere in the 'ead." She had already verified that the terms, such as MOS, were the same in both worlds, although she didn't know if the actual designations were the same, so she didn't mention specific ones.

Gary chuckled, "I figured you for a rich bitch," he said, but with no animosity and much amusement in his tone. It was clear it was something of a compliment, as a sort of working-class solidarity.

"Well, I am one now," she replied testily. Then she did her best Ojou-sama hair flip and walked over to get some grilled and buttered ant. Gary followed her with another audible chuckle.

Lily got a big plate of ant and was pleased to see the Mechanist loaded her two kegs of beer in with his supplies. She had only drank about half of one; she had already told Scott she was giving the rest to him, in any case. So, she got a big glass of the slightly weird-tasting beer to go along with the ant, and sat down to eat.

Stopping for a moment, she hummed. Then she sent Sophie a message, along with an offer to stream the robot girl her sensorium.

[Lilium: You said you wished you could try some, yourself? Well, accept the request.]

[ *** Lilium wants to share her eXPerience with NANNY-45A9F *** ]

[NANNY-45A9F: Oh! Interesting! Wonder if this will work?]

[ *** NANNY-45A9F accepts *** ]

Lily took a bite of the ant meat, which Scott had already freed from its exoskeleton and buttered appropriately. What a gentleman.

[NANNY-45A9F: Oh, this is weird, Miss Lily. I have to stay kind of still, I think, or I might run into something. Is this... taste? I think I like it!]

Lily ate the rest of her ant before terminating the stream; although Sophie didn't much care for the taste of the beer at first, but it was something of an acquired taste after all.

It did taste quite like lobster, so she was quite pleased with it. Both Gary and Scott had two plates, too, finishing off the batch of ant that Scott had grilled. However, they both limited themselves to one glass of beer like her, which was likely wise as they still had to combat against the rest of the ants in the factory.

While eating, she sat down with Gary and talked about what they did well and what they could have improved during their fight with the Super Mutants. She thought her main mistake, aside from bringing her scanner with her, was not having the minigun Termitron open up immediately. However, they both agreed that any fight they walked away from was a good one.

"Alright, the next phase of the plan is pretty simple. We just work our way through to the other side of the factory, the robots will handle clearing rooms and small spaces that ants could be hiding. The last time I saw the queen, she was on the opposite side of the assembly line, and it seems that hasn't changed," Scott began, dusting himself off after standing back up.

Lily had fabricated two carbon-fibre carry straps for the two plasma rifles and slung one across her back, with Gary carrying the other with the Mechanist taking the tri-beam rifle that they had acquired from the other Super-Mutant. He glanced at everyone to make sure they understood before continuing, "When we do find the Queen, Lily's robots along with Matilda will rush her, presenting themselves as targets, while the three of you with plasma guns will focus-fire the Queen and the Protectrons, Sophie and I will mop up any warrior ants she has guarding herself. Questions?"

Gary hummed and then shook his head, "Seems simple enough." He also had his plasma rifle slung across his back. They wouldn't waste plasma shots on the small ants. Lily would really need to research refuelling and restarting spent microfusion cells, both for her power generation and for the use of plasma weaponry. She suspected Madison Li might be of help there, as her focus was if she recalled, mobile fusion power. It was why she had helped the Brotherhood so much in powering up Liberty Prime, in her memories.

Lily wouldn't mind some sort of technology transfer or trade with the scientist woman if it saved her the time of working down that tech tree herself. Of course, she didn't know if Dr Li knew about the hydrodynamic plasma loop method of electricity generation like her generators used, but even if she did, Lily was confident of having something to interest the woman.

"Alright, let's proceed then," the Mechanist stated calmly, and together the group re-entered the factory in the same large room. It was the end of the assembly line, where fully assembled Corvegas would drive out, which was something Gary commented on, "You'd think the motors would be near the end of the assembly line."

Scott nodded and pointed to an empty place about halfway down the line in this room, "That was the station that placed the motors in. There were four motors in crates there when I found the place, and I took all of them. I ended up trading two of them but still have two more, one of which we used to use as power for an electrical generator." He hummed, and looked at the wrecks of five Corvegas that were past the motor installation station, "I suppose there are five motors in these cars. That might be a useful activity, except that there were at least ten times as many in crates in the back."

Gary nodded, then casually shot a worker ant that had scurried up from the assembly line, along with two Protectrons. He mused aloud, "Interesting. I've always been pretty good with fixing up old cars. I may come back up here on my own dime and perhaps see if I can't put a working Corvega together with the parts of those five."

Scott nodded and looked thoughtful, "That might be a profitable use of time. There certainly will be a lot of valuable items left here that we won't be able to fit on Lily's truck, even if we would have spent a week here. I suspect it will become common knowledge that this site is safe within three to nine months. This is a well-known local death trap, so not very many people even come close. But, I would estimate you have no more than four months to make your expedition."

Gary nodded appreciatively, "Thanks for the advice."

The group was quiet the rest of the trip through the factory. Warrior ants became much more common, and the group would take a break whenever they found a lot of branching-off small rooms for the robots to explore, supervised carefully by Sophie.

"Ooh, Miss Lily. One of ze Protectrons has found ze large chest-style freezer; I'll send a couple of your robots and drag it out near your truck," Sophie piped up.

"Nice," Scott said with as much emotion as he put into anything that wasn't Sophie. It was clear he really liked ant meat!

Shortly after that, they came across the machinists' area of the factory, and Scott started directing the looting. Lily was surprised; she was expecting just regular drills, lathes and milling machines, but they appeared to be automated and robot-controlled versions of all of those and a few tools she did not even recognize. They looked like they would be useful even to her and even to Scott after she gifted him one of her DMLS printers and metal recyclers.

Her robots did all of the looting on account of the fact that they had hands and the fact that they were the least useful for protecting everyone else while the looting occurred. The group had to continually defend themselves from worker and warrior ant incursions during the looting process, although not near the rate of the first swarm. Instead of waiting at the machine equipment, they slowly pushed forward as the Termitrons began the looting process.

This seemed to please both Gary and Scott, and Gary explained, "The more she throws at us now, the less she will have in a few minutes when we actually get to her. It's always better to defeat an enemy in detail, Doc. It also shows that they're just animals, dumb. After dealing with those suspiciously tactically-minded mutants... well, this is a lot nicer."

Lily nodded. That made sense to her. She pulled up the overhead view from her drone and then used her GPS location to put a marker. They were a little over halfway through traversing the factory, and it had taken them a little over two hours, even counting the Super Mutant attack and first swarming and lunch. They were making really good time.

Waiting for her Termitrons to drag over five tons of machinery out to the front of the factory was likely going to take longer than exploring this far. Or, she thought, until they entered a very large warehouse that was off-set from the assembly line. They had to leave two Protectrons to guard the chokepoint to the Termitrons while they explored the warehouse.

"Woah! Is that a--ack!" Gary was interrupted by a small swarm of worker ants that must have inhabited the warehouse, all rushing them at once. The group fired beam after beam of light at the feral but delicious arthropods as they slowly backed out of the warehouse, rejoining the two Protectrons that then assisted them in putting down the sixty or so ants.

"Whew. That was a lot. But that's good; we wouldn't have wanted to leave that at our backs when we met Her Majesty," mentioned Gary in a wry voice as he reloaded his laser rifle. Then, he paused, "I'm down to my last energy cell here."

Scott glanced sideways at both Gary and Lily, "I am pretty low also. Let's pause here. Gary, you seemed to see something that interested you in that warehouse. Let's explore it while we send a robot back to the truck to recharge our energy cells. I brought a bank of fast chargers, so it shouldn't take too long hooked up to Lily's generator."

That sounded like a good idea to her, so she dropped all of her discharged cells into a bag that Scott handed to her, along with Gary's, before handing it to one of her Termitrons which showed up just for that purpose.

Gary nodded, "Yeah. Didn't you see that MUVS?"

They walked back into the warehouse, and Lily tilted her head to the side, "What is a MUVS?" Gary looked at her exapseratedly, "Multipurpose uhh... utility... vehicle something? It's basically a small one-manned tracked construction vehicle made by Chryslus. This one had a pair of forks on it, as a fork-loader."

Ah, there was a forklift-looking vehicle there. She hadn't really noticed it as she had already noticed the dozens of worker ants using her excellent hearing, so she was staring off into the locations they were running from. She glanced at it, "Do you think it still runs?" she asked sceptically.

Gary made a hmmm noise, "Maybe. It looks in pretty good condition. The tracks aren't made of steel but of some special material that is supposed to last damn near forever. It uses the same General Electric or General Atomics fission motors as a Corvega. Let me see if I can get her going. Can I borrow your tools, Doc?"

She had brought her bag of tools with her this time, leaving her scanner in the seat of the truck cab, just in case the Queen Ant did have some sort of weird acid attack, like in the game. One burned, twice shy, she supposed. She nodded at him, handing him the small fanny-pack-looking toolbag she often carried.

They watched him work for about fifteen minutes on various parts of the fission motor before he called out, "The battery is shot, and the fission motor needs some power to bring itself out of shut-down and into idle. Do either of you have a fission battery with you?" They both did, as they had been casually looting the factory of such small items and periodically giving them to a bot to take back to the truck.

Lily dragged one of the small three-kilo batteries out of her bag, walked over and handed it to Gary. He nodded and then asked, "Can you look over this? It's been a while since I've played with my dad's electrical kit. I want to bring the voltage of the fission battery down to twenty-four volts."

Scott had followed her over to Gary, and they both took a look at what he had built. He had used a number of resistors daisy-chained to drop the output voltage of the fission battery down to about twenty-four volts. Lily and Scott shared a glance with each other, and then both shook their head firmly at Gary.

Gary looked like a kicked puppy and even said, "Aww. What'd I get wrong?"

Scott glanced at her as if asking her to tell him, so she nodded. Scott turned around and left without a word while Lily explained, "Zhose are tiny resistors! Like what you would find in zhe radio! Zhat is the correct number and type of resistors, but zhey would burn up and probably catch fire as soon as you connected the fission battery to zhem. Especially when the fission motor drew a lot of power initially to move its control rods to idle."

Gary chuckled embarrassedly and rubbed the back of his head, "Ahaha... I see. Well, at least I remembered which value those resistors were, right?"

Lily nodded, "Yes, actually, I am impressed you were able to figure out which ohm-value you needed to drop 120 volts to 24." Gary grinned at that, "So, what is the correct solution?"

"We'll build you a simple step-down converter circuit. I suspect zhat is why Scott left, to go do zhat," Lily told him. And sure enough, Scott returned with a small converter that looked pre-built. He connected it to the fission battery and then used a very small screwdriver and his multimeter to adjust a small potentiometer on the device, which in turn adjusted the output voltage.

Nodding at the end, he handed both the battery and connected step-down converter to Gary, "Here you go. I often carry these adjustable step-down or boost converters with me for similar problems such as this. Good initial thought, though."

Lily was surprised that Scott took the time to praise Gary, but then again, if Scott was ever going to praise someone about something, it would be about electrical matters or robotics.

"Hey, thanks," said Gary and quickly removed the forklift's old battery and secured the fission battery in its old position, tying it down with some bungee cables before connecting the battery's leads to the output of the step-down converter.

Lily was surprised to see the lights on the dash light up. Gary sat in the cockpit of the machine and, with deft hands, quickly put the fission motor into standby mode. Then, he hopped out. "I think it is going to work. It will take about a half hour for the fission chain reaction to reach the proper level to operate the loader, though. If we pushed it out of standby right now after so long sitting, we'd wreck it."

Scott looked very impressed, "You seem to know a lot about small fission reactors. And cars, or car-like vehicles."

Gary nodded, "Yeah, sure do. Grew up fixing cars, and as a boatswain's mate on a carrier, we often handled maintenance on the small boat and small vehicle reactors."

Lily peered at the vehicle, her eye doing measurements. "It will fit in the back of my truck. It will be useful to load all the crap we're looting, plus then we can just take it with us." She glanced at Gary, "I'll definitely buy it from you, or you can keep it. We would have just left it here; I certainly wouldn't have thought I could get it running again." Scott paused as if thinking and then finally nodded in agreement.

She thought she could replace the forks with some construction equipment. She kind of wanted to start drilling a sub-basement level or five in her building, and it would be useful to have a vehicle to take away the fill.

Gary grinned again and nodded, "I don't think I'll need a forklift, so I'll probably sell it to you then, Doc. Or maybe I could take it in trade?" Lily blinked at him. Where she came from, that was usually a sexual proposition. She smirked, "Like what?"

"Well, you're carting off all these motors, and you're going to help me build a water tanker truck, right?" he asked, oblivious.

She nodded. To which, he continued, "Well, I think no matter what I end up doing, I'll need a utility truck, too. So, if we could build two of the same type of truck, one with a truckbed and one with a water tank?"

Well, it seems he wasn't propositioning her. A shame, perhaps. She nodded, "That's acceptable. I think I would still be in your debt in that case since you will be owed a share of these motors we're looting too, but I have a lot of other services you're not quite aware of yet, that I think you will end up wanting."

Gary looked thoughtful and just nodded.

They decided to push on instead of waiting while the forklift warmed up. By her overhead map, they were nearing the location where she suspected the Queen Ant was, and it certainly appeared that way from the enemies they faced. They were mostly giant warrior ants, now, but they would only face about four or five at a time, at most.

Scott, apparently, thought the same because he held up a hand. "Okay, the Queen is up ahead. Sophie is bringing back Lily's robots so we have a full force. Matilda, are you ready?"

The Assaultron purred, "I was built ready." Scott nodded, "Okay. Lily's robots -- except the one with the minigun -- will follow you. Just rush them, give them a distraction, and we will come in about five seconds behind you and mop them up. Lily, Mister Gutsy and Gary, switch to your plasma weapons now, and your primary target will be the Queen. You can't miss her, I assure you."

Matilda turned to Lily and asked, "Let me have two grenades." Lily blinked but brought her last two grenades out of her bag and put one in each of Matilda's manipulators. They weren't quite hands, but they were easily able enough to hold grenades and their spoons safely. She wouldn't be able to pull the pins herself, though, so Lily carefully pulled the pins on each of the grenades without being asked, which caused Matilda to digitize a sultry, "Excellent."

Lily shouldered her tri-beam and pulled out the plasma rifle, quickly checking it to make sure it was still functional. Everyone nodded at each other that they were ready, and Matilda just jogged off into the next area, followed closely behind by six of Lily's Termitrons. She heard Matilda yell, "Come out, you fat bitch!"

Lily's enhanced hearing detected a lot of skittering, as well as the scratching and thud of movement of a much larger creature. She internally tagged that location as the Queen, and they all started following Matilda. Before they even saw her, everyone heard one large boom of a fragmentation grenade going off, followed by the shrieks of many injured ants.

The Protectrons and Sophie started opening up with rapid laser fire as a small swarm of warrior ants came into view. Matilda was dodging around them, while the Termitrons were as a group protecting one another. They weren't anywhere near as agile, but they worked together to zap any ant that closed with one of their compatriots. Lily was impressed at the level of individual control Sophie was managing on her robots. The robot girl was issuing commands to each robot much faster than Lily was capable of doing and seemed to be able to focus on multiple things at once. Lily was jealous.

The Queen ant really was hard to miss. Lily and Gary trained their plasma rifles on the arthropod that was as big as her truck cab and along with Mister Gutsy, opened rapid-fire plasma bolts at her, focusing on the front end and the head, causing the massive creature to shriek in pain in ear-splitting volume. The sound of a minigun opening fire to her right joined in as Sophie directed a stream of armour-piercing rounds directly into Her Majesty's royal flank.

Another explosion caused a cloud of dust and many ant casualties. One of her Termitrons was slightly out of position and got swarmed, having its legs bit off at the joints. The warrior ants stayed on the Termitron, trying to worry at the robot's hardened steel alloy chest ineffectively before being blasted by the Protectrons.

Gary, Lily and Mister Gutsy had each now fired over a dozen plasma bolts at the Queen when the massive creature finally died, tilting over and crashing on the floor, crushing several of its subjects. At that point, the fight had gone out of the ants, and they seemed to just be berserking anything that moved, even their own compatriots. The group backed off and picked off all the rest of the living ants amidst the chaos.

Lily panted a little, slotting a fresh micro fusion cell on her plasma rifle. While that wasn't exactly a physically strenuous fight for her, all of the chaos and attempting to mentally categorize close to a hundred chaotic enemies was mentally fatiguing.

Gary mentioned, "I've seen main battle tanks go down easier than that bitch. Her exoskeleton was a bit resistant to plasma, somehow."

Scott nodded, himself a little surprised, "Yes, indeed. Although I didn't notice any acid attacks from her. She seemed to move a lot quicker than something that massive should have been able to, though. All in all, I would say that she was more dangerous than I was expecting." He paused and then said, "I still think the mass laser attacks would have worked, but we would have likely had to make a bounding retreat of it, firing as we backed up."

Lily slung her plasma rifle and brought back her tri-beam, and did a mental check on her Termitrons. The downed robot was still responding. It looked like one of the leg motivators and graphene cabling was damaged, though, but if that was the only casualty of the fight, then they did amazingly well.

Her minigun-Termitron was down to a little over a hundred rounds left, but that was the price of victory.

She thought that was the extent of the damage until Matilda walked up to her and said, "I need a new arm again." What the hell? Had she exploded one of the grenades while carrying it?! Lily thought that was exactly what happened. She sighed and nodded at the robot, who was dangling one inoperative arm from her shoulder.

She glanced at the dozens and dozens of crates. Some were labelled General Atomics, and others were labelled General Electric, but they all were useful small fission reactors. Much more than she intended to loot when she thought about coming here.

She hummed and scanned a couple of the elite warrior ants as well as the Queen ant. She remembered that in the game, you could loot Queen ant pheromones from this enemy, but Lily did not intend to climb inside a dead arthropod to get that prize. She would, however, take a number of genetic samples, though, as she did with every new organism she encountered.

And who knows? Perhaps giant ants could be domesticated. She didn't think she would try herself. On the other hand, maybe she could find the AntAgonizer before she went completely crazy and adjust her fate, turning her from a genocidal supervillain to an ant rancher.

"Let's sweep the area for survivors, then check Gary's forklift. That will save us hours loading everything in the truck. But, all in all, I'd say this scavenge operation was a success," the Mechanist said mildly.