(Rewritten) Ch. 118 – A Sunday Drive, Tinea Style

Dawn's early redWe bury our DeadNoon's marching guideWe match bugs' stride

Dusken fading skyWe fight and die

Night's stale breadWe count blood shed

Bleak tomorrowSuffuse our marrow

May They Choke On It

– The Forsaken Soldier's Motto, reconstructed by internet enthusiasts. It's ascribed to the Vengeance PMC, a legendary private military thought to have been set up and staffed by those who'd lost everything to the Antithesis in 2028. Some suspect the Vengeance PMC continues to exist, but to most it is no more than an urban myth, with there being no spokesperson, and no official website or server—yet the rumors endure, decade by decade.

***

A queer flash of hilarity chased itself through my system as I saw through the eyes of my drones as I, my grenade, and my shield, dropped from the sky in perfect tandem.

I'm just missing a steaming cup of tea to nonchalantly sip from, I chortled to myself.

But since the Aspis was a little more…ideally shaped for higher descent rates than I was, I quickly grabbed it before it discovered independence, and covered my torso and head against the storm of quills from the army of aliens on the ground.

I smacked the grenade from the top, smashing the fuze and spiking the smooth egg straight down. Rolling myself into a ball and covering my face and ears, I wrapped my tail around my antennae until I couldn't hear the plinks of the Fives' quills colliding with the burnished metal, and tucked myself against the Death Knell's cushions.

Something pecked the back of my neck and dragged sharp talons across my skin, but the little alien wasn't nearly strong enough to damage my Vanguard-enhanced epidermis. I ignored it and clenched all my muscles and limbs tight with anticipation.

A wall crashed into my shield from below. A pulse of compressed air moving fast as sound shoved at me. It crept around the disc's edge and tried to dig between my palms covering my face. It tore at my tail's fur with ferocious violence and singed a few unprotected sensilla with painful flashes of heat and pressure that hitched up the heat in my spine and made me whine into my hands.

I was flung up and away, accompanied by the crumpling of bones of the far more fragile fake pigeons around me. My lips split in a savage grin as I stretched my limbs again and angled my body.

I took in the battlefield with wide eyes, absorbing a snapshot of everything. The single-digits were all over the legs of her spider. It was like she was churning butter with how they pressed in, jumping to bash themselves against Daddy-Long-Legs' torso and trying to bite the mech. They were far too weak—and much too light—to do any real damage, but their mass added up and they were slowing her down to a crawl.

I could hear Leah's fast breath in my ears, panic simmering beneath the surface. She was holding on, working to keep from getting overwhelmed.

Worry warred with the supercharged joy fizzing through me from all the action.

The bigger aliens will catch up like this. They will be able to puncture her armor. And worse.

I twisted my head and immediately found the two empty spots hunting Leah. They were gaining, closing in.

A One was in my face and I slapped it away. Its wings snapped against my palm. The weak, singular sound of its bones breaking echoed in my ears. I paid no attention.

Combat Command catapulted two dozen high-explosive missiles and plotted arcs for them to dive into the alien…mosh pit. A cloud of burnt kerosene obscured my view as their engines ignited, until I dropped out from underneath it.

I was coming a little close to getting skewered by quills again. I giggled drunkenly, anxiety mixing with stress, adrenaline, and the joy of seeing twenty-four detonations tearing into three hundred aliens.

Leah's legs went from churning butter to blending it, stomping on murderous aliens and impaling them on mechanical claws. She screamed victoriously and pounced ahead with everything seven legs could give. The Twenty-Ones lost ground and I smiled, breathing a little easier.

Could probably measure my stress levels by the distance between them and Leah. The thought sent a hazy, askew sort of mirth through me. The battle rode me. I was slipping. Slowly, but steadily. I recognized the symptoms of too much, of deep exhaustion. My brain was foggy, but my body felt amazing.

So I grinned maniacally, and pushed, and kept going. I'm a samurai, now. Break old limits.

Mission Control prepared a firing mission of hundreds of rockets more, a rain of death to forge a road for Leah.

Time to go!

Half-remembered dreams of flying and swimming through the air tinged my thoughts, made me angle the Aspis just so, and guided me as I set my new wing arms in a configuration that would send me forward on a ballistic arc.

Excitement bubbled in my lungs and I'd swear my tail was shivering with it as I hit the jump jets.

"FUCK ME!" I yelled, and laughed as a pulse of physical enthusiasm yanked at my lower spine and dragged the rest of me along.

These jets didn't hiss all quiet and elegant like the engines of the Raptor's Dance. No, they projected a total dedication to kinetic force and claimed velocity with a challenging roar. A demand against the world, not a gentle whisper of promised cooperation.

My membranes snapped shut over my eyes as the air tore at me with rippling fingers. Tynea placed a ground speed indicator at the bottom of my vision. I shot a glance at it and cheered in my mind.

I was going at three hundred kilometers an hour, surfing along atop the Aspis, and the constant pling of the Myriad's magnetic launchers launching missiles filled my mind with the anticipation of raining death.

Wait. Uh. That's not a lot of plings.

– Mission Failed. –

Uuuh…

I'd shot past Leah in no time at all. Only a fraction of the planned ordnance had had time to eject. I watched a small mass of explosions flower in front of Leah. It barely won her any space.

Oops?

The jump jets sputtered out and indicated a fifteen second recharge period. I was sailing fast across the tops of trees, on a long, ballistic arc.

Um.

Three seconds had passed and I was about two hundred meters too far, and I had no gas left in the tanks to get back. I giggled uncomfortably. I'd fucked up and the realization clashed with the joy of flying.

Oops: Electric Boogaloo?

At least the Javelins above the injured Twenty-One were still keeping station and dodging the unwelcome attention from the flying aliens.

"Um, Tinea?" Leah asked me. Incredulous laughter in her voice, but also tension. The Antithesis were pressing her from all sides, again.

"Um, Tynea?" I asked Tynea. Sheepishly. "How fast can I go and open the parachute safely?"

As long as you aren't supersonic, she said calmly, it'll configure itself according to your current velocity.

"Oh, good," I mumbled.

I took a deep breath. Then I smacked myself with one hand and woke myself up again. Pushed my brain into gear.

Leah first. I'm safe, she's not.

I nudged Combat Command to send more aerial support Leah's way. Combat Command immediately rodgered me—punishing pun intended—and released everything I had. Mission Control jumped on it and planned Standoff minefields, banks of confusing chaff, and analyzed the terrain for ideal spots for nasty acid traps.

The Myriad started coughing up missile after missile, each dropping a few meters before their motors ignited and they shot off towards Leah on blinding jets of fire.

I forced myself to relax a little. Leah would have the help she needed. I focused on deploying the airfoil, and my new supercalculator supplied the most optimal stance for my body. The Second Wind itself dumped its planned configuration into my Quanta for me to prepare for.

Huh! That's different!

Split-seconds later, a pair of tiny stubby wings formed a trapezoid, caught the air with a decisive snap, and jerked me up a few meters along a new trajectory. Very short lines attached the thin, inflated frame to my wing arms, and the whole thing barely had two square meters' worth of surface area.

"Somehow I'd expected a big canopy far above my head, not a sorta-jetsuit."

You're far too fast for such a large airfoil. You'd be doing involuntary loopings at these velocities, Tinea.

I snorted at the mental picture, even as I carefully bent joints and tugged steering lines to warp the wings enough to bank around. My antennae picked up on the additional drag and turbulence, and my flight-brain went to work on the data. It felt like it finally came awake, satisfied with being fed interesting fare.

Interesting. It must've been conserving energy.

Additional panels were released from the pack to increase lift as I lost airspeed to drag, or folded away as I motored along on a few jump jets. Enough to generate a decent clip while letting the others recharge for a sprint.

A sense of freedom filled my veins and I grinned joyfully. It relaxed something deep inside of me to just be moving and anyway, how fucking cool is flying?!

I checked on Leah and found her breathing easy, with a smile playing across her lips. She was enjoying her own version of freedom, too. I bobbed along happily as Leah's speeding mech pounded away at the masses of smaller Antithesis and took potshots at the bigger double-digit models creeping across the battlefield.

Mission Control's new fireplan used all of the more esoteric missile options I had to secure a somewhat winding corridor for Leah to flee through and build a greater lead against the Twenty-Ones. I saw efficient use of chaff to confuse and napalm to connect the burning patches Leah had created earlier with her own rounds.

That's really smart. If she's not moving in straight lines, they can't predict her. And it's not like a spider's gotta slow down for corners.

I continued analyzing the situation for any gaps in our capabilities I could plug with a new primary.

Leah's got sustained fire with her cannons, and the large one-oh-five where they don't suffice. I got huge volumes of rockets to murder a small battle field…at least of single-digits. Um. Need faster production on the missiles, maybe? The Myriad's kinda slow for this battle… And Class II missile blueprints might be necessary, too.

Five hundred high-explosive missiles created a long trail of kerosene exhaust beneath me, and for once, I saw them build their glittering carpet of death from above, ready to clean out Leah's escape corridor. It was a surreal feeling, to deliver so much throw-weight with so little effort on my part. I was just cruising, stringing along Ones, getting closer to Leah's anti-air cover, and letting the Quanta and the Myriad do their thing.

I grinned when the wave of rockets began diving. From above, it was like a half-thousand payloads of energetic chemicals threw up figurative hands and yelled Fuck it! as they all exploded and created a long, wide line of flash-cooked, twitching plant life. Small fires sizzled away, devouring the remains, and raising wisps of stinky smoke into the sky.

More aliens came and pressed into the open space, but Leah focused her guns on keeping the path clear ahead of herself. She gave me a thumbs-up through our call and worked her seven legs into a proper run through the corridor.

And I didn't have to do anything to make it happen but sit pretty. Hang pretty. Whatever.

I quirked my eyebrows and giggled to myself.

Is this the samurai version of a sunday drive? So mellow.

But then reality called, and it used Tynea's voice.

Ones incoming, Tinea.

"Aw," I answered as I glanced around. Indeed, the humongous cloud of alien pigeons—large enough that its tip was hidden within the low base of the dirty-gray clouds—was reaching for me with several thick tentacles of whirling black wings. "Thanks, though."

I shifted my weight to alter my angle and sped up a little to keep away from the flying weeds trying to catch me. Most of the canopy retracted, the suspension lines reeled me in, and the wings thinned and reduced their angle of attack. I lost a little lift and a whole lot of drag to go faster.

Hmm. We've got a truly ridiculous mass of weak aliens. Both above and below. Way too much for our current loadout. And that's just a fraction of the huge wave…

I probably could've bought a gun with a really high fire-rate and deep magazines and mowed down the lot of them. But that sounded like a lot of weight in bullets to lug around in the air.

I don't think I'm the right platform for that. Oh but I do have the Class II small arms ammunition catalog…

I chewed my lips as I considered the issue. My point counter glowed a steady green and read 21988 points. Leah's cannons exploded more aliens, and the counter jumped above twenty-three thousand while I was looking.

"Hey, Leah?"

"Yeah?"

"We're kinda running up against the problem of not having enough guns. Wanna buy a second Daddy-Long-Legs? An autonomous one to accompany you with more dakka? Lots more. Something that'll allow you and me to focus on taking the strong ones apart and just ignore the, uh, masses of trash? If you use smaller calibers on the new guns, I could provide them with Class II cartridges."

Leah tilted her head and pursed her lips. I kind of wanted to ask Tynea for a teleport so I could nibble on them. But I figured there'd be time for that later, so I turned my attention to her eyes instead. I could almost hear the gears rattling behind them.

"The Hatchet was kinda meant to run in packs anyway."

"Huh. What a coincidence."

"Hmm?" Leah raised her eyebrows at me in confusion.

I highlighted the Twenty-Ones for her. Or rather, the one, and two empty spaces in the middle of the dense army of single-digits. Leah was moving too fast for them to keep up, but I was still keeping track of all of them. Didn't wanna lose the invisible fuckers, after all.

"Twenty-Ones. Pack hunters. Already took one down. I was contemplating how to kill the rest without murdering the local climate—they're stupidly tough for their size and agility. There's only this tiny pack here, as far as I can tell. But, uh. I figure we'll start seeing them a lot more regularly in the coming months. For as long as the Global Incursion continues."

That said, I gave Combat Command the go-ahead, and she finally let the hypersonic penetrators shed their shells. We watched as ten suprapulse jets stitched solidified rays through the air.

Only two penetrated the blinded Twenty-One. The other eight had been placed such that they tested its armor at a variety of angles, and they'd all bounced off or even shattered. The plasmatic lines disintegrated, leaving bloodied pits and terrible cracks in the plates of ultradense bone. The last two Javelins had targeted the eye sockets directly and gone through them to rattle around inside the skull. They'd utterly pureed its brain.

The Twenty-One twitched and slowly collapsed.

I mentally noted that as their second weakness.

Leah swore. "Holy fuck, that's insane. I didn't think the armor of the weaker Twenties could actually hold up against those, not with how they tore through the Fourteens."

"Yeah. I guess the Javelins are still only Class I. I did some hacky stuff with shrapnel earlier and created a storm of hypersonic projectiles. They just barely got through its armor in a few places and lost so much energy in the process that they didn't kill."

I sent Leah a picture of the Twenty-One I'd eviscerated earlier.

"But their bellies are soft. Softish. I'm not sure handguns would go through them, but samurai landmines would do, I think, even at Class I," I said, nudging Mission Control to set up penetrator kills on the remaining Twenty-Ones.

But Leah twisted her mech around and kept running backwards. I saw a round being unloaded from the one-oh-five, and a new one replacing it. The muzzle twitched towards the first Twenty-One and Daddy-Long-Legs raised his rear to let the cannon depress sufficiently.

Uh. I guess that's an option too, I thought and called off my own solution.

Monochrome fangs rode on black lightning and speared the world with unnatural clarity. Soft, furry paws petted and soothed my tension, and an unreal rainbow of a mirage sacrificed itself to absorb the cannon's recoil. My brain tied off synaptic ends to let me remember what the laws of physics forgot, and Leah adjusted her aim for the other Twenty-One and fired again.

I was a bit confused. The first one was still alive. There was a new trench just in front of it. Had Leah missed?

"Um?" I started, but two explosions interrupted me. The dual trenches erupted just as the invisible aliens crossed them. Gouts of earth and dust were thrown into the air. I spotted bits of torn plant matter here and there. It was kind of difficult to tell what was just grass and other greenery and what was Antithesis.

Leah grinned at me with a double thumbs-up.

"I figured I'd do it Tinea Style. Landmines work fine."

I blinked and giggled. I did have a thing for gimmicky tactics.

"I guess they work, indeed."

***