Stray Cat Strut - 5Chapter 57

Chapter Fifty-Seven – The Okay Before the Oof“When samurai work together, it’ll either lead to greater success, or a lot more chaos. The personalities of various samurai tend to be quite different, and they also tend to share some commonalities. Those commonalities often include a distrust of others and of authority, and that makes it complicated for them to work together if there’s a direct and clear hierarchy in place.

Not that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen again. We’re just stubborn sometimes.”

–Laserjack, on samurai-samurai relations, 2054

***

Things were going… alright. I was a little tired after running around all over the place putting out fires, but it seemed that, at least for now, the city would hold up.

And just as I was thinking that, I got a call from Gomorrah.

“Hey,” I said as I answered. I was still at the mall, having just finished up a… I supposed it was a presentation, with Lucy. I didn’t have concrete plans on where to go next.

“Hello,” Gomorrah said. “I’m on the lake-side of the city, by the walls. Things are getting a little… uncomfortable over here. I think we could use your help.”

I nodded. “Sure, I’m on my way. Just send me your coords and I’ll be there in ten, faster if you think it’s an emergency.”

“We can afford to wait ten minutes,” Gomorrah said. “Things aren’t that dire yet. But yes, I’d appreciate having you here.”

I nodded, cut the call, then sent a text to Jessica. The sexbot had become Lucy’s secretary of sorts. At least as an android she was quick to reply to texts and such, much faster than a person, even if she lacked some social graces sometimes. She replied instantly to my request and said that a car would be waiting for me outside.

Pretty handy, that.

I checked my gear as I headed out. I had my armour on, and it was reading all green on my HUD. Its batteries were down to 89% but I figured that was a non-issue for now. My railguns were down a few rounds, so I got Myalis to top them up, just in case. Then I checked on my laser pointer. It was currently full of… flechette rounds. Yeah, that would work for now.

I had a couple of grenades on my belt. Resonators, garrots, one of those black hole bombs for a tight situation. My handgun was strapped to my thigh and full of ammo, and I had my coat on top of everything.

I checked that my helmet was on correctly as I walked out of the mall, then found the car that was going to bring me out to the front.

It was one of those econocars, a tiny little electric thing that ran off of a lawnmower engine and that had a top speed that was in the double digits. The inside had room for two if they were willing to get comfy with each other.

I wanted to complain, but then that would waste time, and then I’d need to find another way over and… “Hey, didn’t I order my bike down to here?” I asked.

Some time ago, yes.

“Then where the hell is it?”

It has been hovering around the edge of the city for a few hours. I’ve been using it as aerial surveillance.

I frowned. Then sighed and just climbed into the car. “Get it down here,” I told Myalis before looking at my driver. He was some guy about my age, freckle-faced and sweaty behind the wheel, which he held with a death grip. Yes, I could have waited for the bike. That would be a minute or two of waiting, and this car was already here. “Punch it,” I told him.

He did, and we… more or less accelerated ahead.

I regretted not taking the bike. This little coffin car could barely hit highway minimum speeds, and that was when it had a long time to accelerate up to those speeds. We didn’t have room for that in the stop-and-start Downtown area.

“You know, you can just gun it,” I said.

“That’s against the law, ma’am,” my driver said.

I frowned. Ma’am? I didn’t mind it from the soldier-types since it was just respectful, but come on, he was treating me like I was some geriatric old biddy. “Just punch it,” I said. “Not like anyone’s going to stop you, and traffic’s dead.”

I’ll turn off the traffic cameras at the right moments.

We made it to the front line wall in… not excellent time, but it was faster than I would have made it on foot. I squeezed myself out of the car, then hoped that no one had noticed me arriving in such an uncool ride. I didn’t care that much about my image, but there were lines that even I didn’t want to cross. It didn’t help that my driver had decided to park next to Gomorrah’s Fury.

If the Fury was a person, it would be one of those super muscular pornstar sorts. The kind of person that you looked at and just knew that they fucked.

I walked on past it, my little map pointing out where Gomorrah was. And also the other samurai. Arm-a-Geddon was with her, and so was Sprout. The only one missing was Manic, and I knew that she was still busy doing a grocery run.

Gomorrah was talking to the other two, all three of them sequestered in what looked like a temporary guard shack of sorts just a few metres away from the front line.

The militia’s big mobile base was parked nearby, and I figured that Intel-Chan was in there too, doing their thing. The place was certainly busy, with plenty of volunteers moving gear around, militia gathered in squads, and less-organised kitten squads grouped up and looking aimless.

“Hey,” I said as I got closer to the other samurai. “What’s up?”

“Hello,” Gomorrah said again. “Good timing, things haven’t gotten desperate yet, but I think we’re going to have to do something soon.”

“Hey, kitty cat,” Arm-a-Geddon said. He fired off some finger guns my way, and I decided to ignore him.

Sprout just nodded at me, then reached out and rather awkwardly lowered Arm-a-Geddon’s hands. “Hello.”

I used the time we were spending on the introductions to check out the overall situation. The walls had been tested all along their length through the night and early morning. Just probing attacks from the aliens. Nothing too hard to push back. That started to change over the last half hour or so. The aliens had started to concentrate their pushes along two spots.

“Okay,” I said. “Looks like they’re getting serious.”

“More serious, yes,” Gomorrah said. “I’m getting a lot more activity from the lake too. The temperature rose three degrees overnight. Which isn’t normal in the least, and it’s only been rising faster since. There’s some activity on the shore. Smaller models coming out of the water and running towards the city, but I think most of the movement is underground right now.”

“Fuck,” I said with feeling. “What about the other hives?”

“Nothing from them,” Gomorrah said. “Atyacus gives us a seventy-percent chance of having cleared them with our nanomachine attacks and that last big fire. We haven’t seen anything from them, so I’m going to assume we don’t need to dedicate too much to worrying about them.”

I nodded along. That was good. So our worry was now entirely about the underlake hive, which was basically sending more and more aliens our way.

“Do you have a plan already, or should we just dry the lake up and boil the fuckers?” I asked.

“That’s plan B,” Gomorrah said. “It’s… somewhat extreme. I got some climate prediction software after what we did in New Montreal. If we burn off the entire lake’s water supply, it’ll… be pretty bad for the environment.”

“God, I can’t imagine,” Sprout said. “Boiling the entire lake would just destroy any bit of its ecosystem left intact. There would be no saving it once the antithesis are removed.”

“Okay, so that’s plan B, fine,” I said. “What’s plan A?

I noticed that a lot of people around us were starting to move differently, and the frequent retort of gunfire from around the wall picked up. It sounded like the aliens were testing us again.

“Plan A is to hold out until an expert arrives,” Gomorrah said. “But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do something at the same time. I think we should create a firewall.”

“Like on a computer?” I asked. “Did you pick the term because it has fire in it?”

“I was being a little more literal,” Gomorrah said. “I have some explosives that can spray liquid fire around an area for an extended period of time. I want to create a wall between the antithesis and the city.”

“That’s a stalling action,” I said. The aliens on the other side would just have more time to group up and grow stronger.

“There’s more,” Sprout said. “I have some new seeds I want to spread. They’ll need some time to grow, but once they do, they can turn the lost part of the city into a deathtrap for the antithesis.”

“Alright,” I said. “Sounds easy enough. Gom, you need help with those bombs? I’ve got a few that might help with that wall of yours.”

***