Her plan had been to try to scramble the signals the Titans were exchanging, or, should the situation become dire enough that she had to fight the Machine Army, it would disrupt their interlinked communication across the 15.9 million kilometer square network, allowing her to portion off sections for elimination.

Now the Bakunawa Zero was hovering, while Dragon brought the other two vessels around. Defiant was in the air, forcefields rippling around his Uther craft to answer the incoming attacks from the Custodian Titan. Through the craft’s internals, all cooling was being redirected to a central chamber that ran from nose to tail, better facilitating dense atomic construction. Quarks were consolidated into atoms at precise locations, atoms with extra neutrons locked into strict configurations…

It was delicate work, Defiant managing every step of the process. At the same time, his craft was being pummeled, driven through the air by heavy impacts. He piloted it by thought, drawing near to a skyscraper that hadn’t yet fallen.

Defiant was not much of a talker, preferring to keep his messages short and sweet. That he was especially curt in his message to her was saying something—a message consisting of 9 bytes in a language he’d written.

She drew the Vibria around, aimed, and fired at the Uther. The Vibria had a railgun that fired seeds of nanotech, but that didn’t matter. He needed the impact. It hit the forcefield that was anchored to the shield generator in the nose, and made the Uther rotate, nose going up.

Defiant steered the ship into the skyscraper, roof and ceiling of the floor he was plowing through scraping against the craft. Critical systems lost. Cameras, power draw, cooling.

The Custodian Titan hit the building, and concrete caved in, cracking, shattering, and bending in the shape of a handprint as large as the Uther was from end to end. Ten more handprints followed.

Back in the lobby of the Wardens’ headquarters, she was so still she could be mistaken for a statue. That was worse than picking either of the options of appearing too above it all or being seen as deceptive. If she was seen as a robot, that would be problematic. She shifted position, smiled and nodded a greeting at one of the younger Wardens.

The Uther turned, now scraping through the building with either side of the craft, liberally tearing through the ceiling before he made his exit out the side.

Heavy weapons locked, loaded… fresh nanotech seed loaded into the Vibria’s rail.

The Marduk Nine fired on Cinereal, a ‘breath’ of liquid that seemed to resist gravity, traveling half a mile before it started to dip. The fluid was milk white, but was as bright as if it was in direct sunlight, regardless of outside sources and factors.

She terminated the stream with a spark from the power core.