Chapter Sixty-Nine - Nice

"If you don't want to be diagnosed with pyromania, just... burn the therapist."

--Attributed to Gomorrah, unconfirmed, 2057

***

For all that Gomorrah wanted me to show up at the crack of dawn, and for all that I showed up... past that. There were still several hours to wait before anything actually happened.

I ended up sitting over with the others in the main space next to the Big Gun's little command bunker. It was comfortable enough, and I got to chat with Gros Baton and Crackshot. The kid and I mostly double-teamed Crackshot, teasing him about his relationship with Emoscythe.

From the way he spoke about it, my favourite cowboy was entirely whipped by his hotter, older mistress, and he was loving every second of it. He had a goofy smile on, even as we poked fun at him, and the blush that stretched across his nose and made his ears glow was quite cute.

I mean, he was still a disgusting boy, but I could see what Emoscythe saw in him. That kind of honest and entirely earnest charm was endearing.

It was a solid two or three hours after I arrived at the camp before an alarm went off. All three of us jumped in our seats and glanced around. The alarm was one of those old-school wailing sirens. It made the kind of noise that was more appropriate for a horror movie than anything else. It screamed, and with it, the soldiers around the camp started running.

"Sounds like shit's about to go down," I said.

"Yeah," Crackshot said. "Bet we'll be filled in eventually." He reached up and adjusted his hat, then he pulled his rifle off the ground behind him where he'd left it while we chatted. It looked more or less the same as I remembered, though maybe the barrel was a little shinier, and there was a sticker of a chibi-fied Emoscythe stuck onto the stock.

"Ah, criss," Gros baton said. "Ca commence, hein?"

"Yup," I said. I moved outside, then tilted my head way back and took in the sky. Those rockets earlier, the ones that cleared things out and made the sky as clear as I'd ever seen it, were well worth whatever they'd cost.

The sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at, but there were now teeny-tiny speckles of something darker above. I squinted. My fleshy eye couldn't see shit, but my better one twisted my vision, and it felt like I was looking through a digitally stabilised telescope for a moment before my vision narrowed and zoomed way in.

Those tiny flecks and lines I could see weren't solid. They were... beams or something flashing out in the dark of space. It was hard to make anything out past the dome of blue overhead. "That has to be the orbital defences," I said.

"Looks like it," Crackshot said. He tugged his hat on lower to shield his eyes from the sun, at least a little. "I recon space is a good ways up there. Even coming down pretty fast we'll have a while before the aliens are close enough to shoot."

"Maybe they'll all die first?" Gros Baton asked.

"Doubt it," I said. "We're not that lucky."

Turns out, I was unfortunately right. The siren went off after a minute, and then the entire temporary base was left in a state of high tension. The soldiers I could see were either fiddling with their weapons or keeping their eyes on the sky.

I checked the group chat, and some of the others were complaining about the sudden alarm. Hedgehog and Gomorrah were posting updates though.

Gomorrah: AT spotted in close orbit.

Gomorrah: Moon bases have launched interceptors towards the AT swarm

Gomorrah: Intercept in ten.

Hedgehog: Army sats have a lock-on. They're sending telemetry down.

They were nearding out in the chat, trying to see who could post the most incomprehensible military jargon. I mostly glazed past those and focused on the bits that were helpful to read.

Gomorrah: AT are 8,000 of KM out.

Gomorrah: They'll be in our out-range in five minutes.

"Five minutes," I said as I closed the chat up. "Time to grab a drink."

"I don't know, it'd feel weird to grab a drink while waiting for the sky to fall down on our heads," Crackshot said. "Weather's nice for it, though. This is ideal bar-b-que weather."

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"I think Gomorrah's feeling the same way," I said with a grin.

I went back into the Big Gun's command room and fetched my helmet and coat. I probably shouldn't have left without them, but when we were just sitting around it felt weird to be fully kitted out. I sent a message to my mech as well, calling it back to more or less where we were.

The mech stomped its way over, then sat down nearby. Gros Baton used that as an excuse to lean against the mech's front while still keeping an eye on the sky.

I did the same. I couldn't pick anything out with the naked eye, but there were plenty of little black specs when I zoomed in closer. They were spreading out now. It almost looked like... dropping milk-substitute into a cup of coffee or something. The small specs were spreading out, growing... more?

Nah, that wasn't quite right. It was more likely that there were just more of them coming close enough to be seen.

I checked the chat again, just in case there was something interesting that popped up onto it.

Hedgehog: AT count coming in. 24,452,485 individual targets.

Fuck me, that was a lot of aliens. To be fair, the vast, vast majority of that was going to be made up of chaff, and as I looked into it some more, it turned out that 'individual targets' meant more... stuff. Some of that stuff was angry aliens, some of the stuff was just debris. Bits of blown up aliens and probably some chunks of Phobos and drones that the swarm had rammed through and carried with them.

Basically, anything larger than a basketball and heading in an Earthly-direction was flagged as a 'target' and regardless of anything else, it would either be watched as it melted through the atmosphere, or we'd have to shoot at it afterwards.

The chaff was providing some good protection for the wider swarm though. There were some targeting AI things trying to specifically ping off the actual aliens that kept getting false-positives.

I continued to stare at the sky until the swarm finally hit the upper atmosphere. Then it really started to put on a show.

Warning about the incoming apocalypse might have been ignored before, but what we were seeing now would be much harder to dismiss.

The sky was filled with raining fire.

Tiny specs of darkness came down with their own personal fireballs. Streaks filled the sky as objects coming in far too quickly melted and left nothing but blurry lines across the sky. It was a meteor shower of burning alien corpses.

Unfortunately, some of those aliens were making it through.

Hedgehog: Visuals on surviving AT.

He sent images. A few dozen that loaded in an instant. Distant shapes, unfurling wings, monsters taking flight in an atmosphere for the very first time. The systems calculating their trajectories went nuts for a moment as they mostly just tumbles in the thin upper atmosphere.

Debris continued to shoot down around and past the falling antithesis, some narrowly missing the larger monsters.

Some of that debris opened up into more of them, or into entire flights of smaller models that twisted and tumbled through the air on stubby wings.

I twisted my head left and right, trying to work out the cricks that were starting to form when some nearby AA guns fired.

There were several earth-shaking booms, and I was able to barely follow the smoking streaks rising up far, far into the sky above. The shells climbed up until they were even with the aliens, then burst into what looked like tiny little splotches from the ground, but they must have been massive way up there.

Gomorrah: Firing.

Her HIMARS-like launcher opened up, a volley of hissing missiles rocketing out of skywards-pointed racks then angling upwards slowly. Those were easier to follow, the rockets fast, but not nearly as quick as a shell.

The rockets had some guidance to them, because they split up and spread out. I saw others on the horizon, growing upwards like the stem of massive growing flowers.

Then they reached their apex and bloomed. Flowers made of rolling fire.

"This shit's making me feel poetic-like." I said as I continued to stare at the sky.

"We'll see if you still feel that way once they start landing," Crackshot said.

"I think so. Killing shit makes me feel artsy," I said.

***