(Rewritten) Ch. 109 – Action

"Ma'am, we've seen a fiftyfold rise in online traffic after the Road Rash initiative. Projections calculate an increase of profit from donations to the Department for Orphans of at least three hundred percent, and we've received…'donations' exceeding twenty-eight million credits from corporations requesting referrals to Road Rash."

"Excellent."

"It also appears that Road Rash's educational efforts have reduced accidental pregnancies amongst our teenage orphans by almost ninety percent."

"Has that improved our profit?"

"Negligibly, Ma'am."

"Irrelevant."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Have we been able to reach Deus Ex? Has she shown any interest?"

– Recorded snipped of a conversation between the CEO of ChildProtect Corporation and her assistant, July 2056

***

"Ready, Tinea?" Leah's disembodied voice floated through the living spaces of Daddy-Long-Legs.

I quickly gobbled down the rest of a tasty nuts and chocolate bar, checked if everything—including myself—was properly pinned down for the third time, and then replied, "Yup. Do it!"

My hair floated around my cheeks for a second as I went weightless, and then gravity returned when the abdomen of the spider mech halted a meter above the grass. There was some crunching below us and some scraping. I gazed through the eyes of our Scout's Quartet outside, and watched as the cannon's gimbal extended a pair of hydraulic, shock-absorbing spades against the ground. The muzzle traversed a few more centimeters, and then paused.

Two of the Quartet were running just ahead of a wave of almost three thousand Antithesis of various models two kilometers away, and heading straight towards us. They'd altered their course to chase us down, probably guided by the racket of our electrolaser banks frying the Ones circling in the air above us. Dozens of wannabe-pigeons cooked every second.

Instead of fleeing the aliens, we'd decided to set up for a fight—our travels had just taken us through a large, open space where the old highway had broken in two, split by an old earthquake. Grass had reclaimed much of the asphalt on either side of the crevice.

Where the woods usually butted up right against the road, this place was too stoney for any but the scraggliest growths, and Leah had a rough circle several kilometers across to maneuver in. She'd placed the mech roughly five hundred meters from the edge of that circle, with almost all the open space at her back.

Leah wanted to use tactics she was already familiar with. She planned to draw the entire horde into a huge whirlpool and whittle them down as they chased her in endless circles. It had worked for her pod, and she thought it was the perfect strategy for this location, too.

"Firing!" Leah shouted.

A dull thump went through the walker's frame and I sensed the fringes of the shockwaves reach back from the muzzle and tickle the spider's skin with the hot-cold nails of alternating compression and decompression. The trees in front of us got minced, and the gimbal's spades dug into the ground and splashed water and mud against Daddy-Long-Legs' underside.

The entire mech twitched. That…was probably Leah jerking in surprise. I wondered if the spider was ticklish?

We were watching the feed of the forward drones, waiting for the impact of the shell. The mech still groaned a little as it swung back and forth on its legs from the remaining recoil that hadn't gone through the struts. Leah drew a breath and held it. I could almost feel her palpable eagerness and a giggle hopped and skipped across my diaphragm. But before it could jump through my throat, a huge gout of earth and alien body parts erupted some two thousand meters ahead of us, and Leah cheered and yelled, "Hit!"

Our points counter jumped back up to 1522, and then continued counting every One cooked by the artificial lightning of Leah's Mk 2 Electrolasers.

Laughing at the excitement of her voice, I asked, "Good job, Leah. Another one?"

"Yeah! Gotta wait like six seconds for the gantry to reload the cannon."

With a clunk, the drone bay opened up and Big Brother lifted free. It looked filthy from its trip across the swamp next to the splashing spider, and probably stank as horribly, too.

Urgh. That thing's got too many openings and detaching panels. It's gonna be hell to clean.

Leah guided the thing around to Daddy-Long-Legs undercarriage and linked its sensors to me. I found several scanners and other tools to check on the integrity of equipment and materiel. Leah and Ypsi analyzed the gimbal they'd mounted the cannon to, while the robotic gantry removed one of three shells from the gimbal and loaded it into the cannon's breech with efficient motions.

"Hmm…" Leah hummed, "looks like we'll only get limited use out of it, huh?"

Yup! There's stress all over! It's not gonna last long.

"Oh well. At least the gimbal's taking the damage, and not the spider."

Yeah. It's working like we planned!

"Yes." I could hear the smile in Leah's voice. "What do you think, Ypsi? A few dozen shots, maybe?"

It'll be best to ditch it after this battle, definitely. Buy a replacement that was actually meant for the Hatchet.

"Hatchet?" I asked.

"Ah," Leah laughed, "that's the proper Warforge Technologies designation for this model of the walking scouts."

"Oh." I facepalmed. It probably should've been obvious that Daddy-Long-Legs was a nickname. Leah giggled at me and I kind of wanted to deploy my tail for tickle-revenge, but I figured I'd better let her concentrate.

So, I went through our feeds instead. The Antithesis had been whipped into a frenzy by the exploding shell. I saw several of the Threes ping off of the scraggly trees as they raced along.

The larger variants, Fives, Sixes, several fast Fourteens, and even a few of the model Fifteens—winged, alien grasshoppers the size of cars, with legs designed to catapult spinning wheels of venomous shrapnel—just splintered any of the trunks they ran through.

The trees out here looked even worse than those inside the swamp. But perhaps that was to be expected, I thought. The ecological collapse was killing our planet anyway, but the flora of the swamp had been modified by a samurai to be extra tough and to deal with the toxins he'd put there.

Focus. Let's see. "Tynea?" I asked as Leah lined up the next shot.

Yes?

"I'm going to buy the wings soon, along with Class II Medical Utilities and that surgery kit thing that'll make them grow faster. I'll also want a new primary if I'm gonna be supporting Leah's mech in combat."

Understood. What kind of budget did you imagine?

"What does the Medical Utilities upgrade cost?"

Three hundred points and a token.

"Firing!" Leah yelled again.

Another shudder went through the walker. I watched as it flexed on its legs and wondered if Leah would even be able to fire the cannon on the move, considering that it had to let those spades dig into the ground to manage the recoil. Or maybe the momentum would actually help? Hmm.

I knocked a knuckle against my skull. Focus. Three hundred points.

"That's…cheap. A lot cheaper than I was expecting."

That line of catalogs is a bit of an exception, yes. It has proven rather critical, and we can balance the point costs elsewhere, such as the prices of the more luxurious mods within.

The shell's impact caught a Fourteen in the side as it swerved around a boulder, and ripped it in half. The rear segments merely twitched and bled the smashed and burned remains of Threes, but the front segments continued staggering onwards. Resilient buggers.

2242 points. I'd give Leah another round or two before I bought the wings, so we'd have more of a buffer. Especially since I might not become relevant in this fight.

"Do you do that with other tech trees, too?"

We could, but there's little reason to, most times.

"I…see. Um. Two thousand for the wings, another thousand for the upgrade and surgery-booster thing…and another thousand for the jump jets? That's four thousand."

A thousand points for the jump jets will give you a lot of options. Would you prefer miniaturized ones, or more powerful ones? Extra functions, such as the ability to inject weaponized aerosols to be spread in your wake?

Oh, right. A thousand points was actually a lot, huh? Maybe I didn't need that. Or maybe I did, if they were going to be the majority of my mobility for the immediate future?

"I'll need to see the Daddy-Long-Legs in combat, I think, before I can make any informed decisions. Let's table that for now. The new gun, too."

Understood.

"Firing! Whoo!" Leah cheered as the third whump went through the tank. "Woulda done this earlier, if I realized how fun it was!"

Laughing, I replied, "Addicting, isn't it? The boom."

"We better not let any of the kids near it," Leah said, snorting. "Okay, they're crossing about a quarter mile every minute-and-a-half. I'm gonna start using the seventy-fives, too."

Machinery whirred above and to the sides as the indoor magazines of the howitzers' hardpoints rotated. They were transparent, roughly circular, and held twelve rounds each. High-explosive fragmentation shells, currently.

The big brothers of my 40mm frag grenades, as smart, with far more range.

"Gotcha, Leah. I'll guide them, if you'd like."

"Mm-hm!"

I grinned. Leah was definitely having fun.

Combat Command, my second bud, connected to each of the chambered rounds and plotted high trajectories that would let the shells fall from the sky and—

Something heavy impacted the spider from below, threw us to the right, and then jerked us to the left. Metal screamed as my silk belts jerked me around and I yelled against the burning pain wracking my sensilla from smashing into the wall. I cradled my head and my legs came up.

The whole spider shook and nausea squeezed my stomach as we tumbled sideways with an ugly, crunching sound. I wanted to puke.

Leah shrieked, piercing and acute, and the fear and pain in her voice chilled me to the bone. It dragged a sinking, sucking feeling through my chest, my hands shook, and I couldn't breathe. My mouth went dry as I tried to speak. The frissons weren't coming to propel me. I wasn't the one being hurt.

But Ypsilon's mature voice thundered through the air: "Leah! Calm down! I've already disconnected the sensations! It's not your body! MOVE!"

The spider jerked, and my arm hit the edge of the cot as we suddenly went back upright and dashed to the side. We began moving backwards, but there was a noticeable, regular lurch every other step.

Leah's pained shrieking had calmed to a crying, and it broke my heart. Tears blurred my eyes. I wanted to hug her. My tail had wound itself around Leah's pod, but she didn't seem aware of it.

"Leah?" I asked, with a tremble in my voice.

As if on command, her crying got louder and she called my name, over and over. We were still moving, and the spider was still stumbling in a fixed pattern.

"Leah, hold on, I'm right here. I'll be right there, Leah."

I frantically cut the silk securing me to the cot and extricated myself all while trying to sooth her. It all felt like empty platitudes 'cause I wasn't there already.

At least I felt the walker's gait smooth out a little as Leah reacted to my voice. Finally free, I knelt down in front of her pod, patting the hatch.

"Come on, Leah, open up. I'm right here."

"Tinea," Leah cried as the two doors winged open. "My leg! It took my leg!"

She was a mess. Tears and snot ran down her face and she looked so, so small in her creche. I crowded in and covered her, and she buried herself into my bosom as I hugged her and squeezed her.

Calmed by the physical contact and that Leah wasn't gone in her head, I forced myself to breathe deeply and focused on assessing the situation.

I looked through the eyes of our drones and what I saw had my mind go ice-cold. Battle-trance, I realized. An old companion, a trained one. The thing that had made me more than a grunt in the clan. I preferred the bloodlust.

Thousands of aliens were pouring out of the final line of trees behind us, and where we'd stood just seconds ago, was a giant hole in the ground above which stood an Antithesis that could run down houses and topple towers.

Four massive legs supported a long, heavily armored body. Our 150mm cannon and its gimbal hung impaled on a pair of massive tusks.

In its alien lamprey-fucked-cthulhu maw, it held one of Daddy-Long-Legs'...legs.

We don't have a weapon that can kill that thing.

***