(Rewritten) Ch. 119 – Tumbleweed

"Do y'all fucking think we don't need no toilet paper? Huh? Think it grows on trees?!"

"Well, akshually, Mister Road Rash, it—"

"Don't you fucking start."

– Road Rash, while holding the middle management of GreenPaperAlternatives LLC at gunpoint after they blackmailed an entire megabuilding to pay double their toilet paper subscription, July 2050

***

I glanced back to check on the aerial model One tentacle monster. It had amputated itself, and now I had a loose tentacle of a few thousand plant-based government drones after me. The Sentinel on my tail let me pick away at them, dozens at a time, but really, I wasn't even putting a dent in their numbers.

Um.

My fingers tapped at the metal disc of the Death's Knell. The shield wasn't very heavy, but huge. Lugging it around and pressing it against my chest was getting a bit annoying. Funnily enough, it actually provided a little lift if I angled it right, but still, having no free arms kinda sucked. And the thing was actually too big to fit through the airlock, so I couldn't stow it inside the spider either.

I yawned hard.

Hmm. Discard it, again? Two hundred points…

I barely finished yawning, and a second nearly broke my jaws.

Uff. Focus. My eyes went back to the flock.

"Leah? Dakka time. You were talking about Hatchets running in packs?"

Leah was sprinting along the old highway and I was keeping her dome of controlled lightning beams between myself and the Ones. They'd wrap around it soon, though, and my Myriad was a little low on missiles at the moment.

"Yeah, having a few different loadouts working together turns these guys from annoying knives in the dark into hungry chainsaw serial killers. I want one that can hose down the battlefield, and one that can shape it. A combat engineer, basically. We've got the points, if barely."

"Go for it! Dakka first!"

"What kinda dakka, though?"

I rubbed my nose with one palm and breathed deeply to oxygenate my brain against the tiredness. "Tynea, what kinda calibers do we have access to from the Class II catalog?"

Zero-point-one millimeters to twenty millimeters.

"One-tenth millimeter? What kinda projectiles are that small? No, nevermind. Less questions, more killing."

Speaking of which, I'd suggest the 12.7 mm caliber for high-volume applications. That size offers the best efficiency of mass per point.

"Aren't the twenties Leah's lowest caliber on her turrets? The ones for the Hatchet, I mean."

She could buy a catalog for emplaced machine guns.

"We've got the points for it," said Leah. "Gimme a moment."

The flock of airborne floral pests had gone beyond saturating Leah's bank of electrolasers. There were so many of them now that they'd stopped trying to keep clear of her anti-air and were just pushing through even as they got cooked. The artificial lightning wasn't keeping up.

Don't really have a moment, do we?

I tried to think, but the ups-and-downs of the last…twenty-four hours? Yeah, it was four in the morning. A full day and night since that nightmare had interrupted my sleep, and all the stress of the last twenty-four hours was creeping on my brain, samurai-enhanced body or not. I sighed and swallowed another booster that refreshed my brain with its minty tingle fizzing along my nerves.

Forcefully re-energized, I considered the situation again. The Myriad was producing more high-explosive fragmentation missiles, but slowly. The mere handful ready would do little.

Shit. Myriad's really an all-or-nothing-volley kinda weapon with so many enemies. Ripfeather rounds, maybe? They'd chew through these assholes. But…no trees to lean against up here. I'd get tossed about with every shot…

Fuck it. I got the new gyroscope-organ for a reason.

"Tynea, a mag of Ripfeathers, please! At twenty millimeters!"

Ready. You may want to grab the magazine with both hands. You may also wish to retract your parachute before use. These will be…ferocious.

"Heh," I giggled. "That sounds ballis—I mean, fantastic."

Tynea sighed dramatically into my brain and my grin widened.

I reached out with both hands, pretending to grab a bigly box of uncertain proportions, and ended up with a rather heavy drum magazine much more compact than I'd expected. The first cartridge peeked out at the top, and it was considerably more bulky than its 13 mm cousins. The patterned grenade itself was twice as long as the stubby ones of the smaller variant, and the propellant load promised a whole lot more kick.

Need to be careful I don't yeet myself into the trees or something with the recoil…

My aviation brain automatically increased the thrust of my jump jets and I let the airfoil carry me higher while I fed the magazine to the Sentinel. As always, it sucked up all the rounds in one go, along with the steel of the magazine itself for recycling. It didn't bother with forming and coating brass balls though, and just folded the steel into hexagonal rods.

Nice and compact. And, oh, isn't this the perfect opportunity for the spray?

I pointed the gun at the swarm and let the short barrel accelerate the fragments of the honeycomb downrange, laughing as the action of expelling a stream of mass backwards ticked up my accelerometer.

Science, bitch!

The tiny railgun's sensorium showed a bunch of Ones getting their wings shattered and their bodies broken, but I figured I was a little too far away. The rods weren't terribly aerodynamic and the electromagnetic rails just didn't have all that much force anyway.

But, I thought and smiled, I've climbed a few dozen meters. Plenty of space to go tumbling.

The Second Wind packed up the canopy in a flash and my new arms regained their freedom. I stretched them again, marveling at the strange feedback of unfamiliar limbs, and wondered if that was how deaf people felt with their first aural implants.

Oh, wait, that's what it was like for Leah when she first got in the pod, wasn't it? She spent minutes just walking around and testing stuff, too…

My second brain was yammering away at me like a beeping altimeter as I started dropping like a rock, but a few quick bursts from my jets tossed me up into the sky again and flipped me around onto my back. My legs were pointed at the huge swarm of alien poultry.

I lined up my tail, and mindful of Tynea's warning about the 20 mm Ripfeathers' recoil, clamped the Sentinel with both feet.

"Wanna bet?" Leah asked.

"Bet what?"

Leah chuckled and said, "Your rotations per second after firing that gun."

"Really?" I laughed, "What's your guess?"

"One."

"Yo, that's actually pretty fast, but I think I can beat that. What do I get if I do?"

"Uh…" Leah sounded a little unsure, suddenly. "I…didn't really think that far ahead. Um. Oh! I've got a nice idea for a fun date. Once we're back in New Montreal."

"Hmmm?~" I giggled happily. That did sound interesting. "Alright, Leah. I'll take that bet," I said.

Curling up as close to my center of mass as I could with the shield, I stretched my tail all the way to give the gun maximum leverage. Grinning, I lined up the Sentinel's muzzle and clenched all my muscles as hard as I could as I finally pulled the virtual trigger.

The shock of the recoil numbed my tail. It went through my entire spine like a whip and left my back feeling a little fuzzy. It probably would've busted my spine, if it weren't enhanced. I could feel my body and even my brain get dragged round and round, and hollered and laughed madly as the line between earth and sky flashed through my vision like a broken attitude indicator.

But I wasn't dizzy at all. Tucked into a ball I tumbled through the air, and my new sense for the planet's mass kept me coordinated. When the Sentinel signalled readiness again, I let my Quanta handle aim and trigger, and just cheered my ass off when the next kick tossed me up again and spun me even faster. Leah's snorting, infectious laughter, interspersed with her 75mm grenades going off, rang in my ears and tickled my diaphragm.

I kept going for another round and heard my tail lash through the air. The fourth time I hit the trigger, the numbing buzz in my spine was getting into my pelvis and the vibrations of my tail cutting through the air were audible in my voice.

"Okay, okay, Miss Pinball, slow down!" Leah was giggling, trying to control herself. "That counts, that counts! You might've broken six rotations per second there. You'll definitely get your date."

"Yes!" I shouted, comically punching the air like a superhero and sending Leah into another fit when my shield hit me in the face.

"Come back and join me, you goof. I've got the loadouts for the Dakka and the Sapper sorted. Want to supply them with some Class II ammunition? That'll be cheaper than Ypsi filling up the magazines from, like, ten meters away."

I gently rubbed my nose and scrunched it carefully as I studied the mass of Ones I'd fired the Ripfeathers at. They were in complete disarray. Bits and pieces of shredded alien covered the live ones, and more than a few were missing part of their wings and losing height, only to get grilled by Leah's electrolasers.

The larger grenades had come with heavier razor flies, and the tornado they'd formed had greatly benefited from the increased energy behind them. A greenish, bloody mist was settling onto the battlefield.

Leah had already moved beyond the zone though, and remained clean. I nodded, engaged my jump jets, and unfolded a thin, streamlined canopy that would allow me to travel reasonably fast to catch up again.

"Coming. What kinda payload do you want?"

A packet from Leah pinged my Quanta. It specified several different types of ammunition.

"The 12.7 mm ones," she said and highlighted the relevant line, "are gonna be the ones we use to hose down everything. We want them to be as cheap and compact as possible, so they won't be cartridges. Just magnetically launched steel pellets with some Class II high-explosive in them. They'll beat my old twenty mils for damage, yet go like suppressive fire from a machine gun."

Then three more lines highlighted.

"And these are the 20 mm ones. We'll try to use them sparingly. They're the Dakka's main armament and we want some flexibility there. We'll use cartridges so they'll have more punch to them."

The first line had shaped charge warheads designed to penetrate a target with a stream of superheated metal, backed up by magnetic Class II technology powerful enough to keep the molten stream coherent and to accelerate it beyond what an explosion is capable of.

Quasi-railguns integrated into the warhead itself, huh? I guess that's Class II for real.

My eyebrows rose as I saw the next entry. These shells were tiny fission bombs, but they used a familiar technology to contain the atomic blast. Oh, are these, like, the precursors to my Sol projectile? And they're only one point per shell, unlike the one hundred I paid for that one.

And the last item was also familiar tech; rounds that could spatially lock themselves and would not be moved by any mass pressing against them. The Class II variant was considerably stronger, of course, and came with additional capabilities, like a guidance system, the ability to network to share the load…

And they can move after deploying. And we can fire hundreds of them against a single target if we need to.

Uh.

We could…kidnap that Twenty-Eight? Does Leah have…plans?

Then my points counter distracted me from my musings on samurai-versus-Antithesis bondage as it dropped from above forty thousand points to two thousand. It just started counting up again as Leah's cannons kept blasting, though.

Leah had spawned her two new Daddy-Long-Legs. The one on her left was a twin of her original mech, except that the abdomen was a little smaller and flatter. It also had big lettering shimmering along the sides that read "Dakka".

"Oh, I didn't realize you were being literal with that name, Leah."

"Good name though, yeah?"

"Yup," I replied with a virtual thumbs-up.

The new Hatchet had machine guns everywhere, and two larger rotary cannons in a dual mount on top of its torso, in the same position as Leah's one-oh-five.

"If we want to, I can integrate missile tubes into its abdomen. They'd be quite powerful, but expensive. But I kept the space free for more ammunition, for now."

"Gotcha."

The second mech was a little larger than either of them, and its lettering read "Sapper". Four heavy-looking drones rested in the cage that made up its abdomen, and the thorax's front was a solid, strong wedge, with big, whippy, mechanical tentacles.

Those are powerful enough to break trees, or to drill into most terrestrial Antithesis units and tear them to bits, Tynea informed me.

"Huh."

The Sapper will usually use them and the drones to prepare the terrain for its warband. It also has a foam cannon installed behind the faceplates that can build arches, or large floating pontoons to travel on. The drones have hover engines powerful enough to support bridges or drive boats, and can install auxiliary turbines to such structures if that's not enough. All of this almost as fast as the warband can travel.

"Huh," I said again.

That was some impressive mobility. And I wondered if maybe that's why they were tolerated in the tanky, gunny Warforge Technology catalog? Can't beat light units that reliable and self-sufficient.

Leah's voice interrupted my thoughts. "Tinea, hurry up, please. We need the ammo and I'm seeing some weird patterns in the clouds. I think something big's in there."

My eyes jumped skyward and between my antennae, my Quanta, and my new avionics, I deciphered several sets of suspicious vortexes.

Big, indeed.

"Uh."

***