Chapter Twenty-Seven - Onwards

“Yeah, they can be pretty weird.”

Professor Besters, after class interview, 2048

***

I pinched the tip of my tongue between my teeth. Lucy always mocked me when I did that while concentrating, but I had a full-face helmet on, no one could tell.

I pinched an eye shut, lined up the end of the barrel over the model three, then squeezed the trigger.

My bullcat thumped back into my shoulder and the shot I took flew off into the distance.

I shifted my grip on the front of the gun a little. Maybe if I leaned into the gun a bit more? I aligned the hovering red dot over the alien and kept my breathing calm. I was more careful as I tugged the trigger this time.

The shot tore apart a chunk of asphalt in front of the alien, spraying it with a ricochet of gravelly chunks that had it flinching back.

It, of course, started to run at a bit of a zig-zag after that. “Fucker,” I muttered.

I was losing patience a little. My finger stretched out and flicked the Bullcat from semi to full-auto.

I hovered the sight over the alien, then tugged the trigger back. “Dodge this,” I swore.

A torrent of buckshot roared out of the Bullcat, ripping apart the road, flying off into the distance, and by the time the gun clicked empty, a few of those had winged the model three.

It flopped onto the ground, injured enough that it couldn’t keep running at me.

I nodded as I stood up and checked the highway for more aliens. Other than the piles of unmoving corpses, there wasn’t much to see. Nothing running at us. It had been maybe an hour since the wave ended, and since then only stranglers came down the road .

The first wave of aliens had been decimated.

The second ran into the next row of bombs and traps, and the crossfire from the civilans behind our barricade.

The third made it past those and into the blender that Jolly Monarch’s drones created.

It was rather nice, seeing all those aliens get mulched. All in a day’s work, though.

“It’s still alive,” Jolly Monarch said as he walked over.

He was the last person, myself excluded, left near the barricade.

I looked at the model three. It was struggling towards us still, gripping the ground and pulling itself along with scrapping tugs that left a smear of its blood behind. “It’ll bleed out,” I said.

“You wasted more points in ammo than you earned there.”

I shrugged a shoulder. “It’s aiming practice.”

“I suppose practice doesn’t hurt,” he said. “Did you intend to stay here for much longer?”

“I don’t know. How’s the evacuation going?” I asked. I’d been sticking around the barricade for a while, only occasionally running off to patch a hole or to fuck up some cleverer aliens. The militia volunteers had packed up an hour ago and drove off, leaving just me and Jolly Monarch’s pawns at the front line. Not that there had been much to worry about.

“Well enough. We started with the streets nearest this edge of the city and we’re about halfway down. Another six to twelve hours and it’ll be clear,” he said. “Volunteers are going door-to-door to help people, and we have patrols moving all over to keep things safe.”

“Alright,” I said. “You going to stick around here?”

He nodded. “I will. I’m not much of a front-line fighter. Defensive battles are more to my liking. And I never planned on moving even this far from the city-centre. If you want, you can head over to where the action’s a bit hotter.”

“Yeah, this has been a bit anemic after the initial bombing,” I said. I still glanced over at my point total.

Current Point Total:

6874

Much better than what I had upon arrival, and pretty decent considering the number of points I’d spent on bombs and the like.

“Yeah, I think I wouldn’t mind heading out. Still plenty of daylight to burn. You sure you’re good with staying here?”

“I’m certain,” Jolly Monarch said. He grinned. “Head on out, I’ll keep the area safe. Besides, as long as you’re killing xenos, you’ll make the job lighter for me.”

“Alright,” I said. “Keep safe old guy.” I shouldered my gun and started off towards my hovercycle while Jolly Monarch had what looked like an existential crisis at being called old.

I hopped onto my hoverbike, then turned it on with a flick of my eye across the right menu. The bike hummed beneath me before it gently rose up into the air. I didn’t point myself in any one direction. I had to know where I was going first.

The Family’s map came back up, and I winced at the huge washes of orange splashed across it.

The antithesis had been busy, and it looked as though they were starting to converge. The bigger blobs were running into each other now, so the map wasn’t just dots of antithesis presence, but larger coils of it. There were more red spots too, and a lot more pins on the map looking for attention.

Stolen story; please report.

“I don’t even know where to start,” I said.

By the looks of it, the small wave we stopped here today was barely a drop in the bucket. The incursion was growing nearly exponentially, and so far we’d just been plugging the smaller holes it left.

This one seems interesting.

One of the pins glowed for a moment. A moving pin. Focusing on it brought up a menu with some more context. A large supply shipment was moving across an orange-zone. The only road it could take had spots of red on its edges. A single samurai was already on the scene, but they had asked for more assistance. Grasshopper? The chick with the weird armour that liked hanging off the ceiling?

I searched for Gomorrah’s pin, and found her on the edge of the city, doing a patrol with some mercenaries along the path of a future wall to clear out any possible antithesis in the area. The space was orange-green at best.

She was probably fine, then.

“Yeah, why not,” I said. I aligned the front of my hoverbike with the distant convoy, then shot off in that direction.

The world slipping by under me was strangely empty. Little towns were abandoned, streets were devoid of cars. A few places were burning down, with firefighters and mercs congregating around the fires with flying tankers and gunships to protect those.

I imagined that it was only going to get worse if the antithesis claimed all of this land for itself.

I flew up a way to make it easier to spot the convoy. According to the map, it was still a bit away from the next dangerous zone. It would be a good time to catch up to it.

For some reason I was expecting a row of semi-trailers, maybe with a couple of buses or something.

Instead, the convoy was taking up both sides of the highway and was hundreds of vehicles long, mostly wider self-driving trucks, but there were a few old-school human piloted trucks in there as well. The front and sides of the convoy were being escorted by some mercs in light armoured vehicles, manned turrets on the back scanning the environment for trouble.

I shot over the convoy and started to turn, going wide so that I could take the whole thing in. It had to be four, maybe five kilometres long. How much shit were they carrying? Apparently, a crapton.

You received a ping from below. No message, just a radar tap. Highlighting the location now.

The very front of the convoy was dominated by a large mobile base. A truck on eight huge wheels, with a cannon on the front and gun nests on the sides. It was tall too, high enough off the ground that the lower tier models wouldn’t be able to jump up onto it without assistance.

A single figure was standing on the roof, head tilted up to see me coming.

I slowed over the mobile base, matched speeds with it, then hopped off the side of my bike and landed without a thump on the roof. “Hey,” I said with a wave. I flicked through my hoverbike’s menus and set it into a holding pattern far above where it would be out of the way.

“Hello, Stray Cat,” Grasshopper said. “Are you looking for a place to take a cat nap?”

I chuckled. “Not quite. Figured you might need a hand, so here I am. I can run off to the next fire, if you don’t need the help.”

The woman tilted her head to the side, a strangely insectile gesture, especially with her beige and brown armour with its chitinous design.

“I could use the help,” Grasshopper said. She turned and stared out towards the road ahead. I noticed a large gun laying on the roof to the side. Though calling it large was a bit of an understatement. It was longer than I was tall and looked like it could belong on a tank. “You like cats?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Do you know how humans think that babies are ugly?”

I had no fucking clue how to reply to that. “I guess? They’re a bit ugly. Never really saw them as cute, but I, uh, don’t consider babies a problem, I guess.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “The plan is to shoot the aliens.” She flopped forwards, falling down flat onto the roof and cradelling the back of her gun. Little parts of her armour clicked and shifted, moving her over closer to the front of the vehicle.

“Right,” I said.

“I like cats,” she said. “But I wonder. Do cats think that kittens are ugly the same way we think babies are?”

I worked my jaw for a bit while I considered if it was too late to go work with someone more sane.

***