(Rewritten) Ch. 138 – Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier

"Would you like me to park my warmechs up your ass, five deep?"

– Leah chasing leads in Paris

***

I'm a hussar, I'm a Hun, I'm a wretched EnglishmanRouting Bonaparte at WaterlooI'm a dragoon on a dun, I'm a Cossack on the runI'm a horse soldier, timeless through and through

I softly hummed along with that old cavalry song playing in the background of my enhanced mind as I watched recordings of Leah commanding her mechs during our most recent, most largest battle. My feet wagged fore and back behind me, keeping slow time with the rhythm of mechanical spider legs stabbing across the battlefield.

I's with Custer and the 7th in '76 or '77Scalped at Little Bighorn by the SiouxAnd the pain and devastation of a once proud warrior nationThis I know 'cause I was riding with them too

Leah'd decided to take a nap. Or rather, a proper, samurai-medicated, two hours of sleep to rest up. Her body was heated with an accelerated metabolism. A mild fever, artificially stoked and carefully controlled by nanites to stretch two hours of real time to eight subjective. She'd even had to take some nourishing pills, energy for a brain ferociously digesting dreams in deep sleep.

I'd promised to do some evaluation meanwhile; the next battle was only going to be larger and more dangerous.

So: I'd taken a deep breath and dug up old memories on how to do after action reports.

Memories that I didn't necessarily want to relive.

Leah had noticed the tension building in me and dragged me on top of her, even as she was already falling asleep. I'd fallen in love all over again, but still, it had taken a few moments of praying that Leah's actions would never lose their magic before I'd managed to pick up my brains and wrangle them into productivity.

And I drank mare's blood on the run when I rode with the Great KhanOn the frozen Mongol steppe while at his heightAs a White Guard, as a Red Guard, as the Tsar's own palace horse guardWhen Romanov was murdered in the night

And so, high-fidelity phantasms of three Hatchets churning single-digit units pinged across my visual nerves. They were, along with the lively acapella, distracting me nicely from the unhappy, cloying unease that came with exhuming old expertise—and the frankly unwanted memories of the circumstances in which I'd gained it.

I sighed quietly as I watched the mechs mince scores of Antithesis by the second. Samurai cavalry, indeed.

The first thing to do for a good report was just watching recordings, comparing the remembered to reality, and taking notes. Which I merely had to dictate into a text field via the Quanta. While settled comfortably atop my girlfriend's statuesque body, one of her warm machine hands tucked beneath the root of my tail, and her other resting against the side of my ribcage after it'd slipped off my back.

Leah snored very softly, in the back of her throat. Her eyes were moving quickly, tracking dreams. I kept humming along.

Hurray for non-disturbingity of sleepy luvsies! Hurray for lullabies!

And I knew Saladin and rode his swift ArabiansHarassing doomed crusaders on their heavy draftsAnd yet I rode the Percheron against the circling SaracenOnce again against myself I was cast

Lullabies! Yes! Totally!

I jiggled slightly from repressed giggles. Leah didn't wake. I wasn't sure if that was lucky or unlucky for her.

Anyway.

She had become a real terror to the Antithesis. The amount of gunfire her warband could put out was inspiring and even matched that of some PMCs. Tynea ran a point graph on the right side, income versus expenses.

All the numbers were going up.

I'm a hussar, I'm a Hun, I'm a wretched EnglishmanRouting Bonaparte at WaterlooI'm a dragoon on a dun, I'm a Cossack on the runI'm a horse soldier, timeless through and through

But the warband's real strength was incredible mobility, not its firepower. If Leah wanted to go up against a larger force, or one with more dangerous units, especially when she didn't have as much space to maneuver, she'd need at least an additional two Dakkas and another one-oh-five. Even with my aerial support—I'd already had to dig her out against just a few thousand Antithesis, after all.

There were several times that number heading for us, with far more artillery grasshoppers.

As I kept studying the Hatchets and their presence on the battlefield, I gained more and more certainty that they were meant to maneuver free of interference. They could deal with some amount of enemy attention, but I got the sense that the Warforge Technologies designers had planned for something bigger to keep hostiles occupied while the Hatchets would take advantage and ambush them in inconvenient moments to force…fractures in enemy strategies.

For one, these spider mechs didn't have much in the way of crowd control. No banks of fog-launchers, no sonic repellers, no effective way of locking down zones. Even the Sapper's gear was about preserving the warband's mobility, rather than creating fortifications.

I did suppose that for-purpose ammunition could stand in for specialized devices. Or perhaps there were variations of the Hatchet that did nothing but zone control. Additionally, some of the Dakka's ammunition bunkers would usually hold cruise missiles instead for a big bang.

Missiles were expensive though, far more than grenades or even bombs.

The green line zigged upwards in the graph, and the red line zagged downwards…and the lines were a lot closer than I liked. We'd barely made points in that battle.

Well I've worn the Mounties' crimson, if you're silent and you'll listenYou'll know that it was with them that I stoodWhen Mayerthorpe, she cried, as her four horsemen diedGunned down in scarlet, cold as blood

Leah suddenly shifted beneath me. Beads of sweat appeared on her brow and anxiety tainted the lines of her face. Her hands clenched, only to go dead and collapse like the limbs of a puppet with her strings cut. As if they'd shut down.

She moaned, then went silent while her lips continued forming unintelligible words.

My own anxiety answered hers, rattling around in my chest like an echo. I wasn't sure what to do. Should I wake her up from her nightmares? Or was I supposed to let her…process them? Did she need the nightmares in the long run?

"Tynea?"

There was just a sliver of a microsecond before she answered me.

"Don't disturb her. It's best that she not be awoken, or she'd be stuck remembering the dream."

"Ah. …Okay. Thank you."

"Sure, Tinea." There was a sense of released tensions in Tynea's transmission. A counterpoint to the one in me, or the one making Leah's shoulders draw in. It helped, and it inspired an alternative.

I's the 'furstest with the mostest' when I fought for Bedford ForrestSuffered General Wilson's Union raidMine was not to reason why, mine was but to do and dieAt Crimea with the charging light brigade

I drew my tail up my back in a silent, gentle rolling motion, like those snakes in the desert that moved with minimal contact or disturbance to the scorching sand. And when I'd placed the top of it above Leah's lips, I commanded my bionites to transfer a few beads of my samurai-sponsored breast milk to the spinneret's nozzle.

In less than a second, the first drop splashed against her upper lip and released a wave of that sweet, motherly scent beneath her nose. My antennae shivered with the intensity of it, and the memory of tasting it on Leah's lips.

The aroma symbolized the growth of our intimacy to me. Both physically, but especially emotionally, during those first twenty or so hours where I'd…nursed Leah back to health.

But it did what I wanted it to, and Leah instantly settled down. Her eyebrows unscrunched and a twitch against the outside of my thigh told me that she'd reconnected to her new limbs. I let another drop fall between her lips, to ward away worse dreams with the familiar taste. She instinctively swallowed it and buried her nose in my hair.

Happy that Leah had relaxed and returned to her quiet snoring with a last murmur, I also recentered my focus on the recordings and analysis.

On hire from Swiss or Sweden, be me Christian, be me heathenThe devil to the sabre I shall putWith a crack flanking maneuver, I'm an uhlan alles uberStriking terror into regiment of foot

There was the moment that I called the ball of water into being, the absorbed explosions from the kamikaze model Ones, followed by the donning of the Chrysaora Plenum with a telling, robotic efficiency. There was no human at the wheel of my body. Watching it, fragmented images of a simulation in which Tynea introduced the Chrysaora and her sister, the Auxiliant, rose in my memory.

Then something else had happened, something really rather painful. I couldn't put my finger on it at all. That was probably the something that Tynea wanted to talk about, the sealed package still sitting in my Quanta's memory banks.

The anxiety that came with the thought of unpacking it felt faded. Disarmed by the Memory Seal pill, I guessed.

I knew my days were numbered when o'er the trenches lumberedMore modern machinations de la guerreNo match for rapid fire or the steel birds of the skyWith a final rear guard action I retreatNo match for tangled wire or the armored engine's whineReluctant I retire and take my leave

Looking at the timer, I decided to finish the recording first, and jotted down my evaluations. It was almost done anyway, with the cataclysmic rain of explosive ordnance from my blooming skirt that cleared out the battlefield in one go.

I had a feeling that top-of-the-line Class II meant that I could literally carpet an entire city with bombs, if I wanted to afford the point cost.

Which we'd indeed drained at a prodigious pace—all the usual ammunition aside, material had gone into the final attack by not-me as quickly as the Antithesis were getting killed—the lines on the graph almost overlapped each other. What profit we saw came mostly from bombs being more efficient than missiles, really.

The Dakka and the Sapper, with their individual weaponry and equipment, had cost around forty thousand points. I'd bought the Chrysaora, which went for almost twenty thousand. The Auxiliant would cost roughly as much, and we only had about twenty thousand points left, after a battle that was worth about a hundred thousand.

…The next battle was going to be a shitload of points, huh? Much larger.

But Dolores would be there too, and we didn't yet know how many kills she wanted, or how strong she was, exactly.

Today I ride with special forces on those wily Afghan horsesDostum's Northern Alliance give their thanksAnd no matter defeat or victory, in battle it occurs to meThat we may see a swelling in our ranks

"Tynea, wanna share the list of kills and purchases?"

"Certainly. I'll tally the kills first:"

Kills:

"Model Sevens?!" I asked Tynea, rather alarmed by the huge presence of the alien zombie-making, brain-hijacking maggots.

"They are very common passengers of large Antithesis hordes. They cost little biomass to grow, and every single one may very well…steer several thousand times their worth back to the nearest nest. As such, the Antithesis like using them a lot."

I nearly jumped up to check the spiders to see if we'd dragged any along, but then I remembered the firestorm robot-me had engendered, which had even engulfed the mechs. Intentionally or not, I was hardly going to do a better job of disinfecting the mechs than that.

"None left? On us or our equipment, I mean?"

"No. The Hatchet's sensors have no trouble detecting the worms. There aren't any around."

I sighed in relief. Then I almost facepalmed as I remembered Dolores's scan during our approach. If any Sevens had survived and stuck around, she'd have noticed them, too.

Pacified, I read on.

Reward total: 95552 points, 5 tokens (3 Tinea, 2 Leah)

"Huh. That's a lower total than the sum. Why's that? Especially considering the ten percent collaboration bonus."

"That's because a large number of your kills are attributed to Leah's Dakka, which counts as a drone. The degree of separation reduces the point reward for each kill."

"That's new."

"Yes, it hadn't applied previously. Leah was always piloting the death-dealing machine. She did receive a small penalty during her fight with her model Twenty-Two, where she first used her Big Brother drone."

"I see. Well, that's something to think about. No swarm tactics, I guess?"

"No, at least not usually. There are some Vanguard that make them work, but it is a difficult thing since the Protectors don't want those to get out of hand. Either the Antithesis adapt and the swarms fail while wasting a massive amount of local resources, or they succeed to such a degree that they wipe out the planet while wasting a massive amount of local resources."

"…I suppose I can see it. Can't win against the Antithesis with cheap measures, and a swarm's kind of the definition of cheapness multiplied by n. And if we tried to fix that with quality plus numbers, then we might as well be the Antithesis ourselves."

"That is an astute summary of the problem."

"The extra tokens?"

"One for each of you for your first large battle."

"Oh, nice. Will we get more for the horde coming?"

"Possibly. It depends on your performance and the models present in the horde. Here are your combined purchases. I've taken the liberty of only listing the major ones, such as the Chrysaora Plenum."

Unlocked (Tinea):

Total cost: 2250 pts, 1 token

Purchased (Tinea):

Total cost: 18900 pts

Unlocked (Leah):

Total cost: 300 pts

Purchased (Leah):

Total cost: 31900

Total cost: 79049Remaining points: 19993 combined

That was actually impressive. The vast majority of our points had gone directly into more gear, and however wasteful our ad-hoc purchases of ammunition clearly were, that was a massively impressive list of death dealing devices.

But, I thought, enough of that. Time to sort through the psychological bullshit.

I'm a hussar, I'm a Hun, I'm a wretched EnglishmanRouting Bonaparte at WaterlooI'm a dragoon on a dun, I'm a Cossack on the runI'm a horse soldier, timeless through and through

***