“Can you give me a hand? The president, or vice-president or.. whatever she would be called.” I said looking for the word.

  “Acting president Captain Cofey? I am unsure of this planet's naming scheme for such things” Hook answered.

  “Right, Acting President, she told me they have their own cyber security specialists that should be working on this, so I figure our first goal is to find them and give them a way to get at the system.”I said.

  “That makes sense Captain Cofey. I imagine they would have a list of targets that need to be cleared post-haste, which would make our cyber-attacks more effective.”Hook extrapolated.

  “From what I recall it is called the Ministry of Cyber Security.” I replied.

  “Searching... I've found some threads, linking you to them now. I will secure the space port's firewalls and warn you of any breaches.” Hook stated as a string of new addresses and ports flowed into my awareness, though it felt like doors were being opened. I had both a direct awareness of the code, addresses, and port forwarding on my screens, but at the same time it was almost like I was staring at a labyrinth with a blank map.

  A Labyrinth filled with monsters.

  “I think we should be fine, The virus seems to still be following old orders rather than taking any initiative, I think killing the berzerkers in orbit changed the situation from a guy with a flamethrower running wild to a just a wildfire sweeping over the planet.” I replied.

  “A grim if apt metaphor Captain Cofey.”

  I dived into the connections the spaceport had to the rest of the network.

  I thought it would take some time but I found what I was looking for nigh instantly, as soon as I queried the network for information about this ministry I was able to discern a veritable web of connections.

  A web of connections that had been locked down to the point that I wondered if it wouldn't have been easier to sever the connection physically. In my minds eye I had turned a corner and found a massive locked door in my way.

  as I examined this impediment a code-bundle was thrown at me, so I followed it to it's source. I recognized from the robots as a breaching attempt, slowly coiled around the... traffic control system it had come from, and smothered it in it's dark corner.

  Returning my attention to the door, I thought about being subtle, I really did.

  Then I used the power of Hook's systems to obliterate the door. Like taking a sledgehammer to balsa wood.

  Almost instantly I was bombarded by streams of code coming from the Ministry, it was malware, attack code really, designed to delete and retake control of the spaceport from the virus. They had figured out where the attack I had thrown at them was coming from and they had something prepped to counter said viral attacks instantly.

  Unfortunately the only thing left here was me.

  I blocked the attacks and forced my way back through their system.

  Unlike fighting the virus I found this significantly more difficult, it was chaotic in a way the virus was not, constantly changing attacks and intrusion methods. I managed to force open a connection and sent

  STOP ATTACKING ME I'M TRYING TO HELP YOU ASSHOLES

  As clear text to as many terminals as I could reach. I added a clip of the voice recording of the conversation I had with Acting-President Ivanova talking about the Ministry Of Cyber Security and an image of my ship from one of the camera's in the spaceport, along with a little subtitle saying 'Spaceship Hook, C.O.G'.

  It took an agonizingly long time for the bombardment of kill-ware and other countermeasures to stop, probably because I was in such a high reference frame, but they did eventually after I had weathered the storm.

  WHO ARE YOU

  Came the plain text response. Someone had finally responded to my message.

  I replied the same way.

  Captain Cofey, of C.O.G. Took care of the berzerkers in orbit and came down to try to help... Your planet is fucked.

  I sent, not feeling the least bit tactful right now. Sometimes being blunt was best.

  How do we know you aren't just trying to get a virus in to take us out? This could be another trick.

  They replied.

  If I wanted to take you out I could just drop a missile on you from orbit. I've been talking to your acting-president.

  Along with the message I sent them footage from the fight in orbit, along with the full conversation I had with Acting-President Ivanova.

  I lowered my reference frame back down to normal and immediately caught a number of alerts from the port side. Two dozen aircars were zooming towards us at high velocity, they were all going different speeds actually, but they were obviously going to converge on us at the same time.

  The alerts indicated my defensive systems didn't think they could catch them all.

  I looked for and immediately found the 1MC, the circuit that connected to every PA and speaker on the ship, and shouted from them. “BRACE FOR IMPACT!” In my camera's I saw Hwang and Megan jump at my voice before dropping prone, while Rekki-Ricky and Mitch hunkered in closer to the arms they had each taken cover behind. The doctor sensibly folded down a chair, again, I do not know where from, in the medical bay and fastened a seatbelt.

  The Lieutenant was startled by my voice and didn't get a chance to brace before things got hairy.

  I sunk back into a higher reference frame and watched as the aircars surged forward. My Plasma shotguns were waiting for a closer approach but my guided plasma munition point defenses immediately began firing.

  And immediately began misfiring.

  I remember the warnings I had read but seeing them was something else.

  Instead of the contained, elegant puleses of plasma being fired out it was like a trio of comets were being spat out of the PDT turrets, and instead of unneringly guiding themselves into their targets they danced all over the place. Of the six initial shots from them only one hit.

  Thankfully the aircars were soft targets, so one shot was enough to delete said aircar.

  Along with any occupants still inside, I thought grimly to myself.

  The other shots tried to turn around but lost cohesion and detonated just past the incoming aircars.

  The guided plasma point defenses immediately fired again, though I could see they were already reaching their limits, the atmosphere of this planet wreaking havoc with their munitions.

  Again, six shots, but only one hit, there were now only twenty-two aircars surging towards us.

  I cranked my reference frame as high as it would go and called to Hook.

  “Hook, anything we can do to make this next salvo actually hit something?”

  “Pardon... Captain... The... PDT's... Were... Not... Designed... For... Atmosphere...”

  I checked my reference frame... I had managed to push my reference frame a full 10x higher than my previous maximum... that's an interesting development, but it meant that Hook was having a hard time keeping up with me.

  “Change... Plasma... Specs... To... Thinner... Standard... Projectile... No... Guidance...” I got the gist of what Hook had in mind and immediately dived into the specs of the guided plasma PDT, tearing through the code for the plasma projection aperture, and found archived specs for initial testing, no guidance involved, just a plasma projectile with as much velocity as could be managed, presumably for testing the limits of the machine. I loaded that up, and changed the targeting information to send each of the next burst into different targets, and saved the whole thing as 'atmospheric mode.'

  I input the new specs into the point defense turrets just before they fired.

  The turrets paused longer than I wanted them to, but eventually fired, six more glorious comets, only they were all flying appreciably faster and were dancing around far less as there was no laser trying to guide them.

  Six shots, five kills, we were now facing seventeen air-cars screaming towards us.

  Now though, the plasma shotguns were in range.

  I briefly looked over their specs, but while I could access them, I was receiving a stream of invective from said plasma shotguns, which had all loaded in specialized in atmosphere paramaters. At a glance they even took into account the atmospheric composition, noting that the higher oxygen in the atmosphere was likely to cause secondary fires with any missed shots, and so to limit the lower angle of their shots to avoid the ground. It also recommended to assign maintenance to the hull for resurfacing tasks post combat.

  I was rather impressed actually.

  Unfortunately their shorter range meant that they would only get two salvo's off, and the guided plasma PDT's maybe one, before impact.

  The shotgun plasma PDT's initial showing however was glorious, as they swept ten of the aircars from the air, leaving eight left

  They fired again, along with the guided plasma PDT's, despite the guided plasma PDT's throwing errors up into my display. Unfortunately the aircars were so close now that the guided plasma PDT's could not turn fast enough to target three separate air-cars with each of their shots, instead thoroughly obliterating two. The plasma shotguns had issues as well, as the aircars were no longer clustered together, and were only able to take down four of the remaining six.

  The ship came up off two of it's landing gear as the impact rocked the side of the ship, Slamming back down and sending everyone off-kilter, damaging the hull and opening up a breach at one of the impact sites.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I immediately sent an alert to Hwang and Megan, lighting up a path for them to the breach site.

  I know I had been play acting to get them to separate initially, as I hadn't thought this could actually happen... but now that it had I was glad they were ready. The camera's outside already showed robots beginning to climb the exterior of the ship towards the breach.

  I began tasking the plasma shotgun PDT's to clear off any robots near them, but they had many in built safeties that prevented them from firing into the hull, meaning that they may be able to catch a few of the robots in the thermal bloom of the blast, but they would not be able to directly hit them for fear of damaging the hull themselves. Ordinarily I would approve of such safeties, but in this moment...

  Apparently he Shotgun's agreed with me. They had actually sent me a request to override safeties, but I had a thought before I clicked okay, and went to the guided plasma PDT's, still in atmospheric mode.

  I had them aim into the swarming mass of robots and gave them orders, telling them to project three lines from their barrels through the crowd and develop an optimal 'crowd clearing' firing solution for every burst. I was in such a high reference frame that what was going to take a fraction of a second in real life was likely going to take more than an hour from my perspective, so I withdrew and took stock of the greater situation.

  Hwang and Megan were running to the breach point and would be there before the robots, so that was one issue dealt with, though I did not know if they could deal with all of the robots that could potentially pour in.

  My camera on the main airlock showed all the robots but the one I had freed were on the deck, bricked, with the one freed robot apparently standing guard over the airlock.

  And... the Ministry of Cyber Security JUST opened a data-link to me. I could tell that they were talking to me in real time. From the opening I could tell they were going to go on about clearances, but I sent them a quick message in similar to how the bots and drones communicated with me, text with a bunch of metadata to contextualize things, let them figure it out.

  UNDER ATTACK

  YOU THINK TOO SLOW

  DEAL WITH WHO IS CLEARED FOR WHAT WHEN NOT DYING!

  It would likely take them awhile to gather themselves from that, while I dived into their systems.

  It looked like they had a limited suite of information ready for me, but once I was past their outer firewalls and they were not actively defending against me it was childs play for me to penetrate the rest of their systems and plunder their data.

  Back to the Labyrinth metaphor, I had gotten past the guards and the traps, and now was in the treasure chamber.

  Which was good because they had exactly what I needed, a list of critical infrastructure linked with a list of government back doors and protocols to bring everything into manual control in the case of a massed cyber attack. It was even all packaged up in a single easy to use file. It's good to know that people actually had anticipated this, I would have wept for my species if SOMEONE hadn't.

  After that, it was all over, I took the addresses of their critical infrastructure, communications, traffic, power; which the virus had infected and was keeping online, but was causing brown and blackouts in areas that needed it most it seems, namely hospitals and homes in arctic and hothouse environments; and one by one blew past the Virus's firewalls, unleashing the Ministries little package of goodies to switch everything to manual control.

  In the Labyrinth loaded both with a map, a ring of keys, and an anachronistic flamethrower I burned my way through the walls of the Labyrinth. The metaphor was definitely breaking down in my headspace, but at this point that did not really matter.

  The Virus grew more defensive each time, apparently learning from my intrusion attempts, but I was able to rest control of the power system, sending one specific command to it before switching everything to manual, namely shutting off power to every robot charging station on the grid that I could find.

  Back with the Labyrinth metaphor, I burnt through the walls surrounding the generator, then used a key to lock... the door to it. Yeah this metaphor was dead. I mentally wiped all traces of it from my mind. I hadn't intended to get lost in said metaphor, it was as if I could actually see it, and it did help me navigate through the system, almost like I knew all the commands to navigate this cyber-space by heart, but now it was getting less and less useful as reality diverged from the little fantasy crutch my mind was using.

  Next was the traffic control system, Through which I managed to send a shutdown code to EVERY AIRCAR ON THE PLANET. A godsend seeing as I had been eyeing another swarm of aircars headed for me, right now.

  The next target was Water and Waste control, and that was a fight I lost. Not in that I could not get in, I was able to, but the virus was getting wilier and was starting to stop some of my Brute Force attacks cold. No I lost that fight because by the time I got in, the virus had decided to make it a pyyrhic victory for me.

  The water control systems had apparently been sabotaged, depriving the entire planet of running water, which was easy to understand why. Depriving a planet of water is a good way to cause a lot of people to die of dehydration, prevent water for sanitation, fire fighting, etc.

  When it realized it was losing, it forced all of the potable water and wastewater to mix, contaminating all of it, before forcing every water pump on the planet to overheat and slag itself.

  I blinked as I took in the blaring warnings of the now virus clear water management systems, and realized that a lot of people were going to die because of this.

  “Fuck...” I said to no one in particular.

  I hit a half dozen more systems on the urgent list before I turned my attention back to the ship.

  I had been working for awhile, but I was in such a high reference frame that not much real time had moved. The PDT's had worked... acceptably, of the group of one hundred robots that had been climbing the hull, barely twenty remained, squeezing themselves into the hull through the breach one at a time.

  On the inside Hwang and Megan were taking turns methodically shooting any robot that forced their way in.

  Then out of nowhere there was... a strange message that had worked its way up to me through my swarm of spider bots in the airlock. It was from the robot standing guard there.

  DANGER!

  I did a quick scan of the environment around the ship. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary... Then my eye caught something on the visual scan, and I zoomed in and enhanced.

  It was hard to see, it was like my eyes kept sliding off of it, but using a combination of active scans I was able to tell a few things.

  One, it was some kind of heavy vehicle... EXTREMELY heavy.

  Like not rated for roads heavy.

  Two it had some kind of active stealth generator. I could make out where it was... ish, but much like viewing things in the void it was for flashes every few moments.

  And three, it was charging towards us at extreme speeds.

  I tried to re-task the point defenses to open fire on the incoming vehicle, but all but one was out of arc. That one opened fire... and all it did was coat the thing in plasma fire.

  It did short out the vehicles active camo or whatever it was though.

  What fizzed into reality was in fact some kind of armored vehicle, turret and all.

  I sent an alarm to the main fabrication bay where Rekki and Mitch were stationed, telling them to evacuate, and flashing a line of lights deeper into the ship.

  Then I had a sudden realization, the virus must have identified the cable and was trying to cut it.

  Not on my watch!

  I dove back into the system's available to me and focused on clearing and fortifying as much space as I could for the Ministry of Cyber Security as I could, sending them another message.

  UNDER HEAVY ASSAULT

  DATA LINK IN DANGER

  THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT

  And sent them a suite of code that me and Hook had found particularly useful against the virus on this planet.

  I figured at this point, with much of the main infrastructure of the planet cleared, though not without losses, things would be easier for everyone to get back under control.

  I also checked and sent a recall notice to every bot charger I could...

  And got almost as many error messages back.

  The virus had burnt out most of the transmitters in the bot charger's. Probably specifically to stop this kind of thing.

  I had done all I could, now it was time to get out of dodge.

  I started spinning up the drives, the whole ship rumbling.

  I looked back at the armored vehicle, approaching in slow motion.

  The point defense shotgun had fired it's entire magazine at it, and now the eight wheeled, low slung armored car was plainly visible.

  Mostly because it was glowing red hot and various outside bits had started melting off, including the turret, which was starting to sag.

  But it was still moving at the same speed. It was zipping along at two hundred kilometers per hour.

  I checked on Rekki and Mitch, who hadn't moved despite my warning, instead just hunkering down with their guns aimed right at the door.

  Brave boys.

  I triggered the airlock door to shut, and unlike the inner door that had given me problems when I tried to open It with the exterior open, the outer door slammed shut at the moment I gave the command, sheering the data cable.

  A brief mental inquiry revealed the spider bots in the bay had not been idle this whole time, and had rewired most of the airlock.

  I locked in our atmospheric escape window and checked on Hwang and Megan. They had retreated down the corridor and there was a trail of robot bodies between them and the breach, there was currently a robot shorn of a leg dragging itself towards them down the corridor, and Megan was firing while Hwang was retreating to a position behind her.

  Engaging the thrusters I swapped to the outside, viewing the breach. More robots had joined this pack at some time, and while my point defenses had thinned them significantly, there were still MANY swarming the hull around the breach.

  We had to go.

  An alert popped up on my screen and I saw Lieutenant Kernel aiming his weapon at me.

  “Ah... there's the betrayal.” I said to no one in particular.