When he could, Shahim was sending focused sonic needles at her right ear, pounding at the drums there, racking her audio systems and the connected accelerometers that fed her onboard attitude indicators. It would not fool her tactical systems completely, but it gave him microsecond windows when he was working off more accurate information than his opponent.

She knew it too, she knew he was gaining a greater and greater advantage every moment, and she knew her skull would not withstand the punishment much longer. Every time they impacted the ground, she knew her lobe might shatter under the megaton per inch pressure Shahim was still exerting against it.

As alarms continued to blare in her head, she stopped trying to pry his hands free and let her fists go, landing terrific blows even as her options faded. He felt his body register the damage as she pounded his torso and even tried to punch his head with her powerful fists, but he could feel her skull cracking now. It would be over any moment.

He stopped trying to block her feet and fists and instead brought his legs up now to wrap them around her head and neck as well, adding their weight to the pressure his fingers were exerting.

Armed guards were finally converging on them, as if in slow motion, shouting at him and raising their guns. What was he doing? Why was he attacking the general’s daughter? Shahim was tired of all the violence but knew he had to stop them. Even as Preeti still wrenched her powerful body this way and that, he set his deployed laser to wide burn flash.

Keeping the setting low so the effect wouldn’t be permanent, he fired four flashes in quick succession, turning his head as he did so. In the ensuing confusion, the blinded soldiers clawed at their singed eyes. Preeti registered the flashes, she had not hoped for much help from the soldiers, but it had been a small probability option flashing in her tactical list. It went out. There were not many options left, she thought.

And then were none, as the rupture she had feared finally happened and Shahim’s thumb finally penetrated to the infinitely softer substrate within her head. He drove it inward, grinding his thumb around in her skull to crush her synthetic brain.

As her systems started to shut down one by one, she gave in. Her machine consciousness was fazing in and out, shuddering as parts of her mind were torn from her. Deeper within her brain, her personality overlay sent a simple message through her small onboard subspace tweeter to leap the small distance between her and Shahim.

“Why, Lord Mantil, why?”