Stray Cat Strut - 5Chapter 59

Chapter Fifty-Nine – Enjoying the View

“Why? Because this piece of shit runs off the same trash software some guy made in his mother’s basement in the fucking eighties! That’s why!”

–About modern printers, 2057

***

It’s going to have to be a custom job for each one.

I frowned, but it made sense.

I had three cars sitting before me and five armoured vans. The cars were all sharp angles and boxy frames. They looked like they could move fast and punch through reinforced walls with ease. The kind of overly manly design language that got the little knobs of cops around the world all hard.

Having the Fury parked nearby kinda ripped the wind out of their sails, however. These things were at best armed with piddly little turreted autocannons designed to punch cars out of the air. They might have been police pursuit vehicles, but they weren’t rated to do much against the antithesis.

The five vans parked behind them were a bit better. I noticed three distinct models there, but they all followed more or less the same design language. Rounded fronts as a slight concession to aerodynamics and a big bulky box of a body with side-opened doors. Three of them had side-mounted turrets with the guns missing. A few techs were installing them in a hurry, though.

Yeah, those would do.

“Alright,” I said. There was a gathering of pilots and volunteers from the militia nearby. “We’re going to arm up the vans with something to drop bombs. You’re going to need someone inside to reload the bomb dropping thing, but it should be able to drop them on the right spot.”

I was half talking to these guys and half to Myalis. I didn’t want to have to trust some bozo with dropping bombs. You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to give someone with no training access to exotic explosives.

Clearing my throat, I gestured to the three pursuit vehicles. “We can add a cheap laser turret onto these. It’ll make them a bit better in the air. That autocannon looks like it’s enough to take out some of the earlier double-digit aliens without too much trouble.”

Franny was arriving soon, and it wouldn’t be too hard to divert three of those turrets over. Plus it would save me a few points.

I walked over to each van in turn and scanned their interiors with my augs to give Myalis a good idea of the amount of space we were dealing with. Then I ordered up the bomb-dropping mechanism for each. They were a hundred and twenty points each, which… I wasn’t sure if that was a ripoff or not. Each was relatively large, able to fit into the door and block it completely, with a sort of deployable tube thing on the side to actually drop the bombs from.

Of course, I left the installation to the nearby techs, just scanning the interiors for Myalis and ordering the shit was enough work for me.

“Will you be riding along with them?” Intel-chan asked. We had a voice channel up and running at all times now. The other nearby samurai were on it, but we’d split things up into individual channels so that we wouldn’t be bothering each other with constant chatter. There was a ‘loud’ channel where everyone would hear anything said, but that was more for emergencies.

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll go with Gomorrah. The Fury is a much nicer ride and we’ll want to see what we can of the shoreline from the air. That’ll be a lot easier with the Fury than in one of these cheap things.”

“Fair enough. We’ve got as many volunteers as we need already, and a few more besides,” Intel-chan said.

I nodded along. That much was pretty clear already. The area had picked up in activity, there were a lot more people standing around or trying to look busy than before.

I was a little worried about the friction between the militia and the kittens, but so far it wasn’t all that bad. The kittens seemed to lean more towards the… I guess ‘casual’ side of things, especially whenever the militia were around. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the militia were walking with an even stiffer rod up their asses whenever they passed the kittens.

Typical monkey ‘my group’s better than yours’ behaviour, basically. Kind of weird seeing it from a distance, usually I’d be there strutting with the rest of them.

Alright, the bombers were being set up… we still needed ammo for them to drop, which meant that I had to find Gomorrah.

Fortunately, she wasn’t that hard to find. Less fortunately, she was standing next to a familiar hover car, hands moving with uncertainty while Franny was bent over double to squeeze into the hovercar and remove folded up laser turrets that looked like they were fresh off the presses.

I debated heading over or not for a moment before giving in and just walking to stand next to Gomorrah. “Enjoying the view?” I asked as we watched Franny unfold herself from the car. It looked like one of the turrets had gotten stuck at the bottom there.

Gomorrah straightened, then turned her featureless mask towards me. “… I know that denying that I was looking would be pointless, but could you pretend that you didn’t notice anyway?”

I grinned, then shrugged. “Sure. But you know, maybe she’d appreciate knowing that you were?” I stepped towards Franny and gave her a little wave. “Hey, how’d the trip over go?”

“Not bad,” the redhead said. She brushed a few stray locks out of her face. “I might have to delay the next trip, though. The New Montreal police didn’t want me flying out of their airspace and they barely bought my story about delivering supplies to here. Same when I crossed the border. And there’s a lot of flying aliens in the air going around in flocks and hitting random vehicles. It’s really not safe, except for in big circles around most cities.”

“Shit,” I said. “We should have given you something to get the law off your back.”

“The Family actually stepped in,” she said. “So it wasn’t all that bad. And there’s a few apps that’ll tell you where the biggest sightings of fliers were. It was worth the credits to get them, I think.”

Of course, someone was monetizing that. “Well, glad you’re here. If you want, Lucy’s over at the mall. She can find you a place to stay. She’ll definitely put you to work, though.”

Franny shrugged. “I’m not averse to a little hard work. Next batch of turrets should be ready in about twelve hours though. We got the kittens working on loading up the machine. Rac sourced a bunch of supplies too.”

There was a bit of warm pride in my chest at hearing that. My kittens were doing good work. Not that they were really mine, but whatever. I’d take credit for basically raising them as long as they were doing good.

The moment they fucked up, I’d pretend I had nothing to do with it, of course.

“Hey, can you set aside three turrets for the interceptors? We’re going to be using them to keep the bombers safe,” I said. “Ah, speaking of which. Gom, as much as I’d love to see your bumbling attempts at flirting, do you think you can put it off for a little bit? We need to discuss bombs.”

Gomorrah’s shoulders moved in a way that suggested she was sighing. Was it because she was sad that she wouldn’t get to flirt, or was it something else? “Yeah, that’s fine,” she said. “Franny, you probably should go see Lucy. I think she could use the help. Cat here keeps giving her more work.”

“Hey,” I complained.

Wait, was that true? Was I overworking Lucy? Fuck, I wasn’t even paying her, was I?

How much was a person like Lucy worth? Organising an impromptu army, putting down dissidents, arranging to feed an entire city, and running a PR campaign at the same time…

Double fuck, I wasn’t making enough money to afford her at all, was I?

“So, I was thinking of keeping it simple. Longer lasting firebombs. Atyacus has a few chemicals that will burn for days at a time. They’re not as powerful as some liquids I have, but the duration is important here.”

“I think I can get Myalis to give me resonators that’ll keep going for a long time and that’ll be tough enough to endure the drop,” I said. “I guess we’re going to mostly aim for duration, then?”

“The problem is the spread, in that case. Even if our bombs overlap where they land, they’ll only cover a relatively small area. It’ll take thousands of them to create a complete barrier,” Gomorrah said.

“Tricky,” I said.

Mostly, I was still thinking of how to pay Lucy back. Would foot rubs count?

***