The Reclaimers pushed the Cougaroids back through the drifting sand dunes of the lobby, the tide of battle finally turning in their favor. One female remained, cornered and snarling, her golden eyes blazing with defiance. Instead of letting her flee, the party closed in cautiously, hoping to take her alive for interrogation.
That was their mistake.
The female threw back her head and unleashed a spine-tingling hiss that tore through the ruined hall like a siren from the ship’s ancient emergency systems. The sound echoed, multiplied, and took root. The fleeing males froze mid-stride. Then, as one, they turned — eyes wild with primal loyalty — and charged back into the fight with renewed savagery.
Two males and three females returned in force, slamming into the Reclaimers’ already broken formation like a second wave of teeth and claws.
The fight was brutal, but the party’s superior firepower and mutant abilities eventually prevailed. The last Cougaroid fell. The Reclaimers stood panting amid the carnage, blood and ozone thick in the air, taking grim stock of their wounds.
They ascended via the empty elevator shaft in the northeastern quadrant, the ancient walls of the shaft groaning under the weight as the crew made its way upward. On the second floor they emerged into the Grand Plaza Ruins — eighty-five square meters of whistling vents that sounded like distant roars, shattered glass crunching underfoot and reflecting the orange dunes through gaping holes in the outer walls. At the center, a thick black rad-mist roiled like living smoke, clinging to anything it touched with malignant hunger.
They had barely begun to scan the chamber when the debris itself came alive.
Seven mechanical trap guardians — junk bots cobbled together from centuries of accumulated wreckage — stirred from their piles of scrap. These were not true Warden service droids. Long ago, when the hydroponic deck first began to fail, a desperate maintenance AI had attempted to keep the systems running by repurposing broken cleaning drones, security units, and construction mechs into makeshift guardians. Over generations, the machines had devolved into something far more feral: patchwork horrors driven by fragmented code and raw survival instinct.
The Charger came first — a grey, ape-like brute of durasteel plating that moved with terrifying speed. It slammed into Steve Austin, metal claws raking deep. When Henry struck back, the bot answered with a vicious counter-blow that nearly took his arm off. The Bruiser followed, a squat, beige monstrosity with one massive power-fist arm, swinging twice for every blow the others landed. In the shadows, the Sniper — a hermit-like overseer bot — delivered precise, deadly shots from its AR-50 that punched through armor and flesh with clinical efficiency.
Worse still was the NRD, a small floating repair drone that darted in and out of the fray, its repair rod spewing clouds of nanobots that knitted the other machines back together almost as fast as the Reclaimers could damage them.
The fight quickly turned desperate.
The party was forced into one of the old lounge areas, using waist-high barricades as meager cover while the black rad-mist crept closer, searing lungs and skin. Lasers glanced harmlessly off durasteel plating. D’Can’Tr’s mental paralysis washed over the machines with no effect. Sheik charged the Bruiser with his vibro-beak, only to be smashed aside like a broken doll. Steve was driven to the ground again and again. Henry’s radiated eyes burned bright, but even his life-leech struggled against cold machinery.
For long, terrifying minutes the battle was a bloody stalemate. The Charger’s relentless counter-attacks and the Bruiser’s crushing fists wore them down. Every time they gained ground, the NRD would flicker in, bathe the bots in repairing nanites, and undo their hard-won progress.
Turkey Plissken, surprisingly focused, kept his eyes on the floating drone. He and L’Uomo Prime finally brought it down in a coordinated burst of fire and phase disruption. With the healer gone, the tide slowly turned.
The characters converged on the Sniper’s shadowed position. Just as the bot attempted to flee, a devastating shot from Steve blew it apart in a shower of sparks and shrapnel. They recovered its potent AR-50 from the wreckage. With the sniper eliminated, the remaining Charger and Bruiser were methodically dismantled in a final, exhausting surge of violence.
When the last bot fell still, the Grand Plaza fell into an uneasy silence broken only by the whistling vents and the ragged breathing of the survivors.
Among the scrap they found four lithium battery cells, each humming with a strange radioactive aura. The cells didn’t merely power devices — their controlled low-level emission created a localized stabilizing field that actively interfered with higher-energy radiation, effectively shielding the user from the worst effects of the deck’s ambient rad-storms while the cell lasted.
They used what little remained of their medkit, but the supplies were pitifully inadequate. Many wounds would have to heal the hard way.
Now they had to finish clearing the plaza and find another route to the third floor — all while the black rad-mist continued to drift closer, hungry and patient, as though the Black Monolith itself was beginning to take notice of the intruders in its belly.
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