“I can’t get a signal through, Dad. I checked the weather, and there’s a big rust storm between us and Ogden’s Hope. It’s messing with the transmissions, I think.”

“Keep trying, son,” Ottoh said. “Your mother is going to buy us some time.”

A huge boom from below—not an explosion, but the sound of metal on metal. Ottoh looked through the ocular again, to see that a cluster of four Nihil had gathered around the front door to the house. They were positioned as if they were holding something, all four gripping it together, but the ocular’s heat setting couldn’t pick out the object. A battering ram made of cold durasteel, he guessed.

“They’re trying to break down the door,” Ottoh said.

Another boom.

“Now, Erika!” Ottoh said.

His wife pressed a control on her datapad.

Outside, Ottoh could see their four delving droids coming up out of sleep mode in the droid pen not far from the main house. Their outlines through the ocular were green and yellow—they put out a different kind of heat than the Nihil—but all were clearly visible.

The machines left the pen and moved quickly, accelerating through the yard. The delving droids were industrial machines, loud and powerful, designed to punch holes into hard ground and remove the resulting rubble. There was no way for them to move stealthily, even though the gas presumably still circulating outside probably gave them a little cover. The quartet of droids split—two heading for the group at the front door, and the rest toward the speeder.

Ottoh took a moment to appreciate the skill in what his wife was doing—simultaneously overriding the autonomous functions of four droids, taking control and making them operate in ways they were not designed to work, running them fast, guiding them via feeds from their monitor circuits on a tiny datapad display. All that complexity to manage, and each droid was moving in a straight line, unerring, right toward their targets.

“Good, Erika…you’re doing it!”

“Don’t…talk to me…right now…” she said, her voice tight with concentration.

Blaster bolts, hot white through the ocular, began zipping out from both sets of Nihil—the four at the front door and another six clustered around their speeder. The raiders had noticed the approaching droids…no surprise there.

The machines were tough, built to withstand high impacts and temperatures, but they weren’t impervious. One of the droids stopped moving, then another.

“Faster, Erika! They’re knocking them down!”

His wife didn’t answer, just flicked him a momentary glance. Ottoh understood. She was running the droids from her datapad. She knew when they became inoperative right away—she didn’t need his updates. He knew that—he’d known it when he spoke. He just wanted to…do something.