Chapter 149 – The Deus Ex Machina Protocol, Act II

"The initiation phase is followed by the propagation phase. The fracture spreads, and the snowpack begins to slide. Gravity increases acceleration and weight builds momentum. Well-placed barriers can catch a young avalanche before it has a chance to accumulate more mass."

– "Poor Jimmy." Jenny's voice is solemn and a little wobbly as she drags her toy animals down the pillow-avalanche mountain. The moose is fine, he's huge and the documentary-man said he lives in the snow anyway. The bunny didn't make it. "It's okay," she whispers, wrapping it in a tissue. "You were too small to stop it."

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Breathless joy painted a wide-eyed smile across my face as I twisted hips and legs to counterbalance the recoil of the fifth shell's firing. My organic avionic system was fully awake and ferociously devouring numbers and nutrients alike. Hyperactivity burned in my brain and the adrenaline of combat had torn down the walls of metabolically efficient homeostasis.

Battle.

I was alive and here for it.

Eight seconds of fuel.

My finger stayed on the trigger as I wrestled the recoil to get the cannon pointed back inside the firing solution's cone of validity.

The ready indicator flipped to green, and the firing pin instantly smacked and zapped the sixth and last shell's primer. I giggled somewhere in the back of my brain as the stung round fled the barrel and followed its five siblings.

Seven seconds.

I was so absorbed in the six bright lines drawing the arching, twenty kilometer long trajectories across my optics, that I almost failed to kill the engines and unfold my parachute to save on fuel.

As I sailed along, the shells shed velocity and their efficient low-velocity sustainers kicked, giving them the legs they'd need to cover that much distance. The first one entered Baie-Comeau's area of jamming and dropped from communication. Auxiliant kept visual track of its tracer trail, and its ETA countdown continued ticking uninterrupted.

Towards the trajectory's end, just when it looked as though the round would fall short, it passed the threshold for the terminal sprint. Its booster lit up so bright it shone like a tiny star, even to the naked eye twenty kilometers away. The guidance skewed its path in a violent arch low to the ground, and then upwards into the beast's flank to take advantage of the thinner bone plates underneath its armored skirt.

With no target to aim their aggression at, the smaller aliens scattered in all directions from the shell's sonic lash, but the big brute—sensory organs presumably hardened against shockwaves—only flinched from the impact itself. An exploding plume of icy fog shot fingers of lightning up my spine and primed my brain for the gratification of more violence.

The next three shells struck in rhythmic one-second succession, each one slewing on wider and wilder trajectories to hit the alien pangolin-slash-T-Rex's side as it turned towards me.

I couldn't tell if it was able to see me, so far away and up in the sky, or if it understood that I'd shot it. Probably, it just knew what direction the attacks were coming from.

Either way, as pain visibly wracked it from the double thermal shock to its bone plates—I giggled madly as I was reminded of visits to the dentist with their damned cold probes—and the explosion of the shaped charge sent it stumbling sideways into its packmates, it only made the fifth shell's job of lining up its Javelin payload easier.

One split second converted itself into a hundred thousand arcseconds, and beautiful, deadly, murderous geometry lanced a ray of white starfire through the beast's belly.

I sighed like a maiden in love as the plasmatic length shattered like glass and left a gaping wound of burnt and broken flesh dribbling green juices.

It took only a few more moments for the sixth and final shell, the one with the high-explosive grenade, to adjust its course for the awkward angle in which the alien's recoiling had placed the injured plating. As the sustainer carried it past the little herd of pangolin-slash-vegetable-T-Rexes, its guidance flipped the shell on its head, and with a last impulse from its booster, the warhead shoved itself through the entry hole and into the wet innards of alien gut.

The resulting detonation sent me into a coughing fit of laughing hilarity as the alien explosively inflated to twice its size. Whatever exactly got ruptured I didn't know, but its tongue popped out, grotesquely swollen and obstructing its breathing like a balloon. The Twenty-Three lay there, twitching, dying.

Its packmates left it for dead as they began to cross the horde's direction of travel, bulling through the lesser models in their way. My fighting brain noticed the emerging chaos and automatically ran hot drawing up plans for similar attacks to manipulate the behavior of the larger models across the entire battlefield.

But Sonde knocked on my consciousness with a sense of urgency, and her childish eagerness to show me something she'd noticed dislodged my mania in a hurry. It spoke to that mommy-soft part of me I'd somehow grown during my chrysalis.

With fingers made of impatience (and the adroitness with which she conveyed that the impatience was hers, even if borrowed from me, caught me by surprise. Really, she was growing way too fast, whatever that meant for an entity made of self-organizing data living in a universe composed of souped-up Tinea brain) she pushed a data packet at me from within the Quanta.

More pokes of impatience to unpack it already. I just had to giggle.

But I acquiesced and studied Sonde's discovery. Within the sensory streams of my perception, she'd caught a specific detail I'd missed while I'd assassinated the Twenty-Three—my subconscious hadn't considered this detail relevant to what my conscious awareness had been focused on. But Sonde, being a very analytical creature by her very nature, didn't just discern this little detail, but also effortlessly referenced it with a memory of mine from an early Antithesis documentary I'd watched…more than a decade ago.

From the neck of each of the Twenty-Threes, fine bundles of green string stretched across the horde towards the lumbering, cancerine form of a Twenty-Two mobile hive.

With the related memory attached, I didn't even have to search my mind's recesses to remember that these threads served to let a model Seventeen coordinate entire herds via implanted brain worms—the knowledge was right there. Sonde's ability to handle information rapidly and in such detail really was a game changer.

Even more interestingly, she'd noticed that the explosions and jostling had broken the threads attached to the Twenty-Threes, which meant they'd reverted to their default behavior. Which apparently included running down any threat with extreme prejudice, to the detriment of anything in front of them.

They utterly trampled the single digit models in their way as they broke through and past the edge of their herd and were very much messing up the neat, unnatural order the Seventeen had imposed around itself.

"Hmm…" I grumbled to myself and scratched my chin with all the air of a seasoned brood…er? Broodist? as I looked around the greater horde and saw similar islands of imposed order everywhere, with groups of specific unit types holding formations in specific, repeated ratios.

"I do believe I know what to do next."

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Leah stared slackjawed at the mind-bogglingly gigantic column of water slowly climbing the heavens. It was still growing. It was majestic as fuck and holy shit, she'd never felt so threatened by fog.

"What the fuck?" she whispered.

That'll all cool quite rapidly, Ypsilon murmured somewhere along her aural nerve bundles. That's way too much moisture for local atmospheric conditions…which means rainfall of deadly severity in minutes or less.

It was the evacuation sirens kicking up a riot in the village that finally ended her stupor.

"Shit. Uh…" Leah stammered for a moment.

Could her Hatchets fight in the coming torrents? Would they even survive them? The people. Hella storm coming. They needed safe. Did she need to buy different fighting equipment for the changing weather? Tinea! Could she fly in that? Oh no, the rain would mess with her skyfire stuff! Could the Ones even stay in the sky once the waters came to wash everything away? Maybe Tinea's jets would let her outmaneuver them?

Too many thoughts clamoring for attention. She took a page from Tinea's book and smacked herself in the cheek. Somehow, it helped her pick one out of the chaos.

The villagers would be fine. She could already hear their bunkers sealing tight.

Next.

With a start, she realized that she'd completely forgotten about the tremor readings for a bit, and actually, that was okay considering that she had to move anyway.

Next.

Points…almost 200k, and climbing rapidly. A touch less than she was supposed to wait for, but it was enough to get started a little early and buy something sturdier.

Next.

Tinea. Leah peered upwards through her Daddy-Long-Legs's sensors again, this time in the other direction. There was Tinea, but the girl seemed preoccupied with something on the ground. She probably hadn't quite noticed the weather going batshit crazy right behind her.

Leah pinged her.

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A ping reached me like a tap on the shoulder and shook me out of my planning spree. Leah was looking at me with an expression of incredulity, like I'd missed something awfully obvious.

It didn't even take me a split second to realize what—my sense of mass insisted on there being an awful lot of it in the wrong direction, and my antennae were somehow convinced there was an ocean's worth of wet in the sky, too.

It just so happened that I'd subconsciously thought certain other things were more important. But…I wasn't sure if the weather that kind of moisture preceded even had a name. Torrential rainfall seemed awfully quaint by comparison.

I turned around.

The fucking river was fucking boiling. It was boiling faster than its waters could flow to fill the void, so there was a massive, fuck-off huge bowl forming in the far distance, where the water turned into steam.

Dervish stood in the middle of it, tossing me a wide grin and a thumbs-up when she saw me looking.

Part of me wanted to respond with a single-digit rating. On both hands.

When I didn't react, she pouted and crossed her arms.

I waved the majestic middle after all. Twice even.

She grinned.

The water fell.

I got wet.

Fuck.

⁂

Leah watched the sky fall as she and her other two mechs ran for the hills—literally. They were rocky through and through, and flat enough not to turn into landslides. She wondered distractedly if that kind of flooding would see them stripped bare of all soil and vegetation, too.

Her girlfriend had just disappeared in the blackness of all that water coming down, and that much moisture unfortunately broke their radio-based connection.

No worries, Leah! Ypsi soothed her. Tinea's totally okay!

"Yeah, I know." She couldn't talk to her, but the mechs did have instruments operating on bands unobstructed by water, and those detected the little lady's overworked thrusters steering her on a course that would lead her right towards Leah.

But really, that was an awful lot of river with entirely too much potential energy coming from entirely the wrong direction. And from what she could see, Dervish wasn't done feeding it, either.

Leah would've preferred to transfer to a heavier mech before the water hit, but given the choice between the Hatchet's mobility to reach secure ground and the risk of the heavier mechs getting buried beneath rivers of mud and other debris, she'd chosen the former and invested some points into stormproof equipment for the scouts instead.

Newly attached pods with rope winches shot the sci-fi equivalent of industrial tent pegs a dozen meters in all directions, new auxiliary launchers checked the readiness of interceptors designed to deflect or break apart any storm-flung object dangerous enough to damage them, and her spiders' legs, all twenty-three of them, shot stakes a meter deep into the rock, where they discharged fast-curing foam to anchor themselves.

The first squall heralding the flash floods hit with the crashing of water bombs against sheet metal roofing.

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