Stray Cat Strut - 5Chapter 63

Chapter Sixty-Three – Mechcatular Nyanzerfaust Activate

“Knowledge download tech was seen as a massive step forwards in the early 2030s. It allowed someone, anyone, to instantly become an expert in a specific field. Things like learning a new instrument or a new language in an instant is fantastic, and all it costs is a small fortune, but sometimes that price is worth it. A thousand hours spent learning Spanish, or thirty-thousand USD? What’s worth more to you? Tons of people signed on and got those early operations, and initially everything was fine.

Then the downsides started to show up.

What happens when your brain suddenly has a lot of new data with no concrete memories to go with it?

It starts to make things up to fill the gaps. People imagined, and believed, in entire false backstories that didn’t mesh with reality just to match the knowledge they now had.

Then you had what we started to call PBS, or personality bleed syndrome, which is still barely understood, and yet can lead to all sorts of new and terrifying mental issues.”

–Doctor Lopez, McRill neurosurgeon in an podcast interview, 2037

***

I jumped back, all four legs spreading wide even as they opened up and the jet engines mounted into them fired.

It wasn’t enough thrust to lift me up, but it was enough, combined with a backwards leap, to send me flying off the pier. I landed roughly on all fours, claws digging furrows into asphalt until the mech came to a full stop.

I paused then.

All of that had been reflex. Like twirling my arm to stop myself from falling after catching my foot in a carpet or something. It was all done without thinking. And that would be fine, usually, only it wasn’t my body that I’d moved, but the warmech’s.

I ran over every action I’d just taken. There had been several inputs on the two joysticks, and I’d pressed it on the foot pedals a few times too. Fuck, I hadn’t even known that this cockpit had foot pedals a moment ago. “Myalis, this is some weird shit,” I said.

It can take a moment for newly uploaded knowledge to begin to feel natural. If you dislike the feeling, then we can always focus more on training modules in the future. Several vanguard have suggested a strong dislike of memory downloads in the past.

“Yeah, I can see why,” I said. It didn’t feel wrong, but it sure as shit didn’t feel right either.

A tool then, neutral depending on how it was used.

For something like this, needing to learn something right then and there with no time to practice or do things right, that was acceptable, I supposed, but it still felt off.

If I had learned how to move this mecha myself, would I have moved the way I had just then? How much of me was there in my actions if they were actions downloaded from some file or something.

I didn’t like it, basically.

Well, no, that wasn’t entirely truthful. I didn’t like the mind fuckery bit. But piloting a multi-ton warmech so well that I was practically dancing between explosions? That was fucking awesome.

My thumb flicked across a little wheel mounted on a joystick and with a three-button prompt, the shoulder of the warmech unfolded and a pair of multi-barrelled Gatling guns locked into place. My vision split into three, two of the new screens allowing me to aim and lock the guns on the pier ahead.

When the smoke cleared, it revealed a large model eighteen ripping its way out of the wooden pier. Smaller models were using it to rush out of the water in droves.

I locked both guns on the massive monster, felt two triggers pop out of the joysticks under my index, and I pulled.

There was an impossibly loud pair of Brrrts and the entire mech had to take a small step back to compensate for the recoil. I only fired for half a second, but my ammo counter had dropped by three hundred rounds.

The smoke cleared, and the big model eighteen was still clearly alive. A lot of the smaller aliens around it, however, were paste.

“What does this fire?” I asked.

10mm rounds. Very small and economical, but not nearly as impactful as larger rounds. You’re firing a mixture of armour piercing, hollow point, and ultra-heavy rounds, as well as phosphorus tracer rounds.

I stepped to the side and fired at the crowd of aliens again, sweeping the fire from left to right quickly. That was enough to saw one of the big alien’s legs right off and it ripped apart any of the smaller ones hanging around it.

I could live with this.

The pier fell apart entirely as the model eighteen finally died. The posts on the edge broke apart, and a chunk of the walkway next to the pier was ripped back and dragged into the water with a heavy splash.

I started to pace along the shore, shoulder-mounted guns sliding back into place while I got used to the strangely flowy motions of the warmech. It wasn’t like riding in a car. There was too much up-and-down motion for that as the mech walked, but it wasn’t as jarring as I might have feared.

I scrolled through the weapon options I had while I was at it.

Two 105mm cannons on the sides with some slight amount of manoeuvrability. They were in the cat’s ribs, more or less, so when they deployed I could aim them forwards and down. The railgun basically fired out of the cat’s open mouth, but its barrel ran along the entire length of the body with… with the gas release in the rear.

Fucking Myalis.

There were some warnings about heat management there too. The cockpit would warm up after every shot. I’d live with it.

The claws and teeth on this thing were similar to my sword in that they were basically double-sided portals with sharp edges. There was a similar set-up in the tail.

And I discovered a set of deployable mortars in the cat’s back, six chubby barrels that could unfold and launch basic grenades on parabolic arcs with a burst of compressed air.

Basically, I had about as many guns as a modern tank, but I could move faster and claw shit to death, which made me objectively cooler.

My ruminations on how awesome I was came to an end as the shore crumbled away even more and a large leg grabbed onto the edge and pulled.

A model twenty-two rose from the depth, water washing off of its massive frame. Its downwards tilted face–a little too human looking, if dull–came into view as its four front legs clambered up onto the shore. More models were clinging to it, using the bigger monster as a living ramp to come onto the shore, though it was doing a good job of creating a more normal ramp already just thanks to its sheer bulk crumbling the waterside apart.

I shifted, brought my mech low, then opened its mouth.

If the antithesis were going to line themselves up for me, then I wasn’t going to complain. I had a whole lot of points to make up for.

The railgun charged in a split second, and I felt every hair in my body standing on end while I aimed the entire warmech’s body at the biggest alien in the bunch.

Then I pulled the trigger, and before I could register what happened to the alien, I felt the temperature in the cockpit jump up a dozen degrees all at once.

It immediately started to cool down, but still. Damn.

The alien got pretty hot too.

I watched as it floundered, a hole large enough to crawl through punched right through its massive frame.

The model twenty-two stumbled, then its eyes turned towards me and it let out a long, low note, like someone imitating a fog-horn with one nose plugged, only at actual fog-horn levels.

The other antithesis started to rush forwards, and the sides of the model twenty-two opened up to vomit out dozens of smaller models all over the ground.

It trampled on a few of those as it continued to move.

“How in the fuck is that still alive?” I asked.

Decentralised nervous system, mostly. It’s essentially a mobile hive, after all. Try your cannons. The first two rounds are high explosive. They should help to carve into the model twenty-two.

My cannons slid out of the warmech’s sides and I barely had to aim before opening fire. Surprisingly, the kick from these was easier to handle than the kick from the Gatling guns. It was just a question of shifting the mech’s weight down a little after every shot as opposed to fighting back against constant recoil.

I fired a round from each cannon, this time paying a lot more attention to the hit itself.

Both rounds punched into the mass of the model twenty-two, then almost immediately exploded, sending fire and plant guts and shrapnel flying.

The model twenty-two, now missing three of its six limbs and a good chunk of its body, crashed to the ground.

“Nice,” I said as I checked my ammo. The cannons were magazine fed, with each internal magazine holding five rounds of high explosive armour-piercing gyro-stabilised discarding anti-personnel bullshit. “What even are these rounds?” I asked.

They’re twenty-five points each. The primary sabot is surrounded by plastic-coated balls of cesium that disperse in a tight cone ahead of where you fire, ensuring that even if the main projectile misses, the target will still be peppered with supersonic projectiles that will immediately ignite.

I watched as the number of aliens ripping themselves out of the water kept growing, even if a number of them were on fire.

“I hope that’ll be enough,” I said.

***