Chapter Fifty-Eight - Knight Takes Moon

"People still play chess? That game's ancient! Why would anyone still want to play that?"

--Live Streamer MonMonMan, 2034

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The hours were crawling by, and if the fate of the entre world wasn't at stake, and if I wasn't making points hand over fist, I might have fucked off already to do something more entertaining.

As it was, Gros Baton and I were in our sixth game of chess. The kid had bought a holographic chess set for like, three points or something.

It hovered between us, the board currently a bit of a mess as our pieces were locked trying to contest the middle. He was winning, of course, but if he made about... six major mistakes in a row, there was a tiny chance that I'd make it through.

His pieces looked like tiny mediaeval people. His knights looked like knights and his bishops like bishops. His pawns were teeny-tiny napoleonic soldiers with itty-bitty muskets.

"Pawn to E5," he said, and one of his lil soldiers struck one of my knights with the fun end of his bayonet.

My pieces were cats. My king and queen were lions, my knights were bobcats in platemail, my bishops were leopards with little pope-hats, and my towers were small towers with lazy tigers sleeping atop them. My pawns were plain old house cats. What few I had left.

"Ah, fuck," I muttered. That move had opened up the middle, once that pawn of his died his queen would be right up in my king's grill.

And then my phone rang. Or the phone app on my Augs went off, at least. I jumped, and blinked at the names calling me. The Keiretsu and the Nightwatchmen calling me at the same time?

I glanced up at the Phobos monitor before I hit reply. Gros Baton and I had smashed two more shells into the moon. An electron suppression bomb, which had done... something? It left a large hole bored through the moon and made the radiation sensors the Keiretsu have go absolutely haywire. And right after that, a black hole bomb. That one had been less impressive than I'd hoped. It went off before the moon and gave it the bad suck. Lots of dust and smaller debris was ripped off the surface of Phobos where the bomb went off.

It looked like a good quarter of the moon had been power washed by the time the bomb went all supernova and blasted that end of the moon until it looked like something Lucy had started to cook and promptly forgot about.

Pretty okay results, all in all. We were up to ten percent, which was a good sign, I figured.

"Yo," I said as I answered the call. I made the universal 'I'm on a call' gesture with thumb and pinkie so that Gros Baton would know that I wasn't just surrendering.

"Ah, Miss Stray Cat?" Doctor Weber said. "Good! It's a pleasure to speak with you again. I heard that you were currently operating the Big Gun's... Big Gun, and so I thought it would be a good time for a conference."

"Yeah, sure," I said. "Sup? And uh, hi to you too Susan."

"Greetings, Stray Cat," the calmer Japanese man said. "Your team has been doing impressive work."

"Aww, thanks! Your drones are pretty kick-ass too," I said. I'd been seeing them coming in on the Phobos monitor. It looked like the Keiretsu had kicked up production pretty steadily, because the number of drones rushing over was increasing every hour.

They were actually kinda neat? They looked like balls, mostly, with manoeuvring thrusters poking out all over the place and then whatever kind of gun or whatever they had stuck out of the end. Some of them were linked up to get to Phobos, often tied to a larger booster that would disconnect then fly on over to the moon where they blew up satisfyingly before the drones started to go around and do their own things.

"Thank you," Susan said. "We didn't call to trade compliments, however."

"Indeed. The situation is more dire than we expected," Radikal said. "Our current projections suggest that Phobos will be within the red zone in forty-eight hours."

"What's the red zone?" I asked. "Beyond the obvious that it's something we don't want."

"The red zone is what we're calling the area of space where an unbroken Phobos will absolutely be able to annihilate life on Earth. Even if Phobos is rendered into pieces no bigger than a car, within the Red zone it would still kill us all."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Oh," I said. "And how close are we to the, uh, orange zone?"

"We're in it," Susan said.

"Well, fuck," I said. I sat up a little straighter. "So, I'm assuming we have a solution to all of this?"

"We do," Radikal said. "Continue as we have. The rate of demolition is somewhat exponential. The Keiretsu drones should be reaching the kind of critical numbers within the next twenty-four hours where they'll theoretically be able to excise the antithesis near the moon's surface. The next use of the Teslakollisionsgenerator should significantly weaken the moon's structural integrity."

"Cool, cool," I said. "And that'll be enough?"

"It should be. Current calculations show that Phobos should begin dispersal six hours before entering the red zone. At which point our task becomes to further spread the remaining mass out as much as we can so that its entry into Earth's atmosphere is minimally disruptive."

"Anything we can do to help on our end?" I asked.

"Your current push has been quite positive, I would suggest you continue," Radikal said. "Though, if you have any exotic weaponry that might slow the moon down, it would be quite welcome. Otherwise, anything that weakens its integrity should be prioritised."

I leaned over and looked at the shells behind us. "I think I might have something for that. Was gonna load something else first, but we might as well try it? It's called a Full Stop? And it's a sort of spatially locked thingy that we can leave in Phobos' path. I don't think it'll stop the moon dead, but it might slow it down."

"Hmm, that would depend on the size of it, but I can imagine such a thing causing some significant damage," Radikal said. "I almost wish we had attempted a different approach than the Teslakollisionsgenerator, one that would allow for more flexibility."

"Yeah," I said, because what else could I say?

"In any case, fire that device. The Teslakollisionsgenerator is warming up now and should be ready for another strike within the hour. This time we're aiming for the opposite of the usual compaction method."

"You're gonna make the moon uncompact?" I asked. "Like, spread apart?"

He laughed. "Exactly! Before the larger wave of drones arrive and risk being battered by the moon's expansion. Hopefully this will expose the hives within the moon so that they might be eliminated."

"Is that even a problem at this point?" I asked.

Susan huffed. "Obviously. Though I can see your reasoning in thinking otherwise."

"Yeah, lots of reasoning going on here," I said. "But explain it to me anyway."

He was silent for a moment, and I think that the language barrier saved me a little. "The antithesis within Phobos is a higher-tier model wrapped around a large hive. Were it to crash on Earth, it would survive."

"Damn," I said. "So we want it dead before it gets around, but we're breaking the whole moon up anyway, so it's kind of a moot point, no?"

"Not quite," Radikal said, and he really sounded like someone who'd earned his doctorate as he 'um actually'd' me. "The issue with the antithesis currently inhabiting Phobos is that it allows the moon to adapt. The wings we saw earlier, the production of small fliers dedicated to eliminating keiretsu drones, and now there's evidence of organic cooling systems below the moon's surface as well as organic reinforcements threaded throughout the structure. According to all of our calculations, Phobos should have been cracked and destroyed by now. The antithesis is holding it together, and more importantly, encouraging the moon to repair itself."

"Repair itself?" I asked.

"It's producing a cement-like compound and filling gaps," he said.

Ah, well, fuck. "Okay, that does make things more complicated. Will your drones be able to kill it?"

"They will do what they can," Susan said.

"Alright then. Let me and Gros Baton here load up the next shell, then we'll see about spreading that moon out like... uh..." I froze. None of the metaphors I could think of when it came to spreading things were PG 13. "Anyway, yeah," I settled on.

"Thank you, Stray Cat," Radikal said. "If we do happen to fail, it will comfort me to know that I was at least able to work with such talented people."

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