Chapter Seventy - I Just Want The Sky On Fire

"You know that saying, 'there's always a bigger fish?' well, it ain't true. Eventually you hit whales and there's nothing bigger.

But with the Antithesis? The Anathema? Yeah, with them, there really is always a bigger fish."

--Back Grounder, during Samucon panel interview, 2038

***

I never considered it before, but the sky being on fire really was quite pretty. I think it was the red and oranges contrasting well with all of the deep blues. Then there were suddenly long streaks ripping through the boiling balls of fire above. Tiny black forms that unfurled into massive antithesis forms.

I zoomed into one of them, trying to take in as many details as I could. It looked like a model... twenty-two? Those big pterodactyl looking ones. I remember almost getting messed up by one when I was a brand new baby samurai.

This one's body looked a little larger, and its wings were stubbier and covered in strange ridges. Feathers? Meat flaps? I wasn't sure from so far away. It could be anything. Maybe some sort of biological thing that allowed the bastards to fly their way through space?

They were followed by more. Aliens dipping through the screen of fire that Gomorrah had put up. Some were smoking and charred, but plenty more seemed fine.

"They're low enough now," Crackshot said.

"Low enough for wha--" I began.

I was interrupted by the jack-hammer thumping of massive guns. I looked over, and the gun emplacement I'd bought was opening fire along with a few others. A round sent up every second, alternating between barrels one after the other.

I tilted my neck back again to see what that was amounting to.

The rounds were... not smart, but they had some guidance to them. I wasn't surprised when the alien I'd marked out earlier had a face-to-shell meeting that ended with a small explosion that turned it into so much scrap biomatter.

"Looks like things are going alright," I said. There were a lot of shells going up now, not just my gun, but from a few dozen others. Machine guns picked up the fire, as well as a few missile launchers and flak cannons.

Unfortunately, there was also a lot of sky to shoot at. Blanketing the entire sky would be a whole ordeal. I squinted as more black specs started to appear above. Guns turned, and tracking software picked out ranges, trajectories, and planted rounds into stranglers, but there were more and more of them, and after a solid two or three minutes of non-stop firing, I was starting to notice when the criss-crossing lines of tracer rounds were targeting aliens that were much lower to the ground.

I almost jumped out of my skin when a corpse splattered to the ground a dozen metres away. It was smoking and riddled with holes, its body looking like it had passed through a strainer and then got the shit kicked out of it, but it was recognizably a model twenty-two... or a quarter of a model twenty-two at this rate.

More bits of aliens were starting to rain down around us, as well as tiny bits of shrapnel. Gros Baton was the first to dart into cover, crouching down under my mech as a chunk of metal pinged off its side.

I ran over to join him, and Crackshot moved over to the entrance of the bunker. "We're going to have some of this for a while," he said in a shout. "We can't afford to be hiding when they finally make it close!"

"You think they'll make it close?" I asked.

"Don't be overconfident, yeah?"

That was a fair point. Assuming that we had enough to take them all out was asking for them to swoop in and wreck a few guns, then things would slowly tilt the other way and we'd be dealing with angry flying aliens all over the place.

"Hey, get to cover," I said to Gros Baton. "I'm hopping into the mech."

"Correct!" he said with a little salut, then he zipped out towards the bunker with his coat pulled up over his head, as if he was avoiding some rain.

I ducked to the side and sent the right order to my mech's computer. It lowered itself down with the front popping itself open to make room. I grabbed on, pulling myself up and into the cockpit. It took some reshuffling once within to tuck my coat away but soon enough I was in the seat and plugging myself in properly.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

There was that familiar moment of disorientation as my augs' many screens were shuffled away and replaced by all of the system messages and alerts and the usual heaps of quick-glance information I needed to operate my mech.

My feet settled into place on the pedals and I wiggled my fingers loose before grabbing onto the controls.

My ammo counters all read full. My targeting system was pinging off of debris and bits of aliens above as they came into range, and the mech's comms system was sifting through heaps of reports from across the country and from two dozen PMCs and governmental agencies, not to mention the Family and some smaller samurai groups.

"Alright," I muttered mostly to myself. "I'm ready to kill shit."

Killable things are on their way.

"Hell yeah," I said.

Myalis was, as usual, spot on. The aliens raining down from above soon grew from one or two quick-moving stranglers to a full on rain of bodies. The AA guns around the compound started to twitch, more rockets went screaming up, and now when they detonated it was close enough to kick up dust off the ground.

Gomorrah's fire-based explosives were going off less than a kilometre above, and that was close enough to warm the ground up. The humid patches left by the last bit of rain started to steam, and I saw soldiers ducking for cover between the blasts.

The rest of the AA continued to shoot through the fireball, and for good reason, as aliens continued to tumble through.

"North east sector!" someone cried over the comms. The mech's systems had picked it up and flagged it as high-priority. "We've got--fuck!"

I aligned myself with the gun, then turned to face north. There, on the far end of the camp. A large model was climbing up over the dirt and sandbag wall surrounding the camp. A few soldiers were backing away from it, sparks going off as they emptied their rifles in the general direction of the antithesis.

It was a big bastard, as tall as my mech when it stood on its wings, with a long, narrow face that had something approaching a beak. It stabbed down and just barely missed skewering a soldier who had leapt back and out of the way.

Smaller models were hopping off of its sides and back. Model ones? They seemed a bit thinner than the usual bird-like models I saw, but also much ganglier, with longer wings and bodies.

I didn't waste any time locking my Gatling guns on the big fuck and opening up. The twin Brrrrrs of my guns roaring was soon accompanied by the musical tinkle of hot brass cases clinking off the ground.

The bigger alien stumbled back, my guns punching several hundred holes across its chest and wings and ripping into its head.

Just to be sure, I lined up a shot with one of my bigger guns and my index twitched over the trigger. A single 105mm shell punched a hole through the alien's middle large enough to crawl through.

It slammed down onto the ground, very dead.

I turned, scanning for more, and it didn't take long for me to find stuff to shoot. The antithesis were mostly getting their shit kicked in by all of the AA installations we had around the area, but a few, because of blind luck or because they were just that tough, were making it past all of the defences.

They mostly came sweeping down with punctured wings, covered in scorch marks, and often with missing limbs from close-calls.

I took it upon myself to finish them off. It was impressive what a 105mm high-explosive shell could do to ruin some alien fuck's afternoon.

"Haha! Bienvenue sur Terre, mother fuckers!" Gros Baton was shouting as he shot a pair of large LMGs upwards. I don't think he was aiming so much as just... shooting a whole lot in the general direction of the aliens. It was working, though, and I think his enthusiasm was encouraging the nearby soldiers too.

Yeah, we had this shit in the bag.

Big target incoming.

Big target? I looked ahead, then blinked as something huge burst through the wall of fire Gomorrah had going above us. It was still a solid couple of kilometres away, but it was so massive that it felt closer. An alien large enough to swallow a city bus whole, its body covered in gaping, bleeding holes and licks of fire, but its wings still beat, and it was still coming down right on us.

"Ah, okay then," I said.

Maybe 105mm wasn't enough after all?

***