Chapter 163 – Air Quality Nuisance

Olfactory fatigue, also known as odor fatigue, odor habituation, olfactory adaptation, or noseblindness, is the temporary, normal inability to distinguish a particular odor after a prolonged exposure to that airborne compound.

Sufficient concentrations of certain compounds, such as hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), will blind on the first inhalation, seem safe on the second due to the sudden nose blindness, and kill unnoticed by the third.

– Excerpt from a lecture on industrial chemical safety in 2022, preserved in the digital archives of the non-profit Organizatio Historiae Digitalizatae, 2057

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Leah's spiders continued their reconnaissance by fire, but never marked a hit. At least we knew where the thing wasn't.

I ducked low inside one of the many gouges Leah's earlier fighting had torn in the ground, and waited a few more seconds until the Second Wind had finished converting reaction mass into whatever energies it used for thrust.

My antennae twitched left and right as Sonde dug into my field of electromagnetic perception and inadvertently dragged my attention around all the little bits I'd usually ignore. From the Quanta, she maintained a lively exchange of data with the Sim Cell, using its free processing power for faster analysis.

We'd figure out how to leverage the sensitivity of my bigly feather dusters sooner or later.

"Tin-tin, the guns aren't getting me anywhere. I'll start up the vapor generators and go with something caustic. You'll want some distance, methinks."

Leah's voice reached across space itself, unusually tinny due to our limited nonwaveform bandwidth. A cute avatar of her mimed her words in the corner of my screen; locally simulated, it was a cheap way to preserve capacity for Sonde's project.

We could've used the radio just fine at this distance, but…we didn't know what the alien creature was capable of tracking. Electromagnetic emissions were easy to catch and even triangulate, if the thing was smart enough. Quantum effects, not so much.

"Uh," I replied intelligently, and hopped an easy ten meters backwards. Then I climbed on top of a rock—I figured the vapor would be heavier than air, and therefore I'd want to be on high ground. "What kinda caustic?"

"Dunno. Ypsi calls it…uh, 'volatile amines'? But even nastier, apparently."

I already rated vomit, just from the imagination. Nastier?! It was an effort of will to keep the burrito down and I wasn't even smelling the nasty yet. Oh god. Please, don't let it be 'yet'.

"Tinea?" Her face was the picture of confusion.

"Yeah," I forced out, "before you start, can you send me Daddy-Long-Legs, please? And whatever you do, do not leave your mech before the rain's done washing everything away, after." I would have to put myself out of my misery if she were to absorb any of the coming stank and render herself unhuggable.

"...Sure?" The Sapper and Daddy-Long-Legs switched places guarding the Sim Cell, and then the fortress of Implacables parted at the back to let the smaller mech through. I dashed towards its airlock and dove inside.

I made doubly sure the thing was shut tight.

"Okay, you can…start now, Leah." I grimaced, regretting the words even as I spoke them.

The moment the Implacable's knees began spewing their gas—oily, disgusting, pus yellow and rot brown; intentionally so, for amines were naturally colorless—my hands automatically wandered up to the roots of my antennae and slowly, carefully dragged down the sensilla so they'd lie flat against the stem. Reduce the surface area.

It wasn't enough to protect my rather vivid imagination from the rancid, fishy smell. My eyes watered in sympathy. That shit was deadly to anything with a nose. I didn't just have a nose. I had super sensitive antennae.

"Gods, please let this airlock be properly airtight," I whimpered to myself. "At least the seals are silicone."

My eyes shot towards the air lock's rim. "They are, aren't they?" I whispered in a panic.

Yes, Tinea, my AI answered wryly, they'll hold just fine. But—and that new undercurrent of care in her tone that I wasn't yet used to did catch my attention—you might want some kind of insulator for your antennae before you leave again, anyway.

Whining, I nodded.

Two rectangular boxes clattered to the ground in front of me, each one worth five points and as long as my antennae. That was, about as long as my arms. Some kind of plastic clip stuck out from the uncapped ends.

Pull on the clip, but slowly. Don't let your fingers touch anything but the clips—not your antennae, either.

Of course, the moment she said that, the things all but bounced forwards and sniffed all over the boxes. They thought it was play time, apparently, not battle time.

What ensued was an awkward dance on one leg of keeping one antenna contained with my injured tail—pained wincing included—and one arm stretched out as far as I could with my head tilted in the other direction. That gave me barely enough reach to keep the tip of my free antenna away from the item I carefully slipped free from its container.

I dropped the empty box and studiously ignored the snorting laughter coming from the Implacable still spraying stinky gasses. The insidious stuff was slowly spreading across the ground in an uneven circle, pooling in every depression. Shudders ran down my back—I felt like I was looking at the Plague Lands in Australia.

From the clip hung a fluffy noodle that was a close copy of my brushers, just foamier. A long, jelly-filled tube, slitted on one side from tip to end, with fluffy-thick artificial sensilla sticking out to either side.

Attach the clips to the mufflers you're already wearing. The tube will sheath the stem, and the foam will adhere to your sensilla. It'll feel a little weird, but they do insulate very nicely.

Fortunately, following Tynea's commands was a lot easier with one hand finally free to pinch the unruly fluffer, and in no time at all, the click of the clip reverberated up my sensilla. Remind me of one of those headscratchers that made your scalp tingle, that did.

The hollow tube adhered to my antenna's stem, its jelly soaked the sensilla's roots with a really mild metallic tang, and its foamy extremities enveloped the sensilla themselves.

"Oh?" I found my sense of smell entirely deadened, and my ability to sense my surroundings through reverberations grew fuzzy, but the electric fields emitted from Daddy-Long-Legs's wiring became a lot more noticeable.

I thought you might like that. A minor change to the scent deadener's molecular structure improves its ability to conduct electricity and thereby boosts the available surface area of your sensory organs.

"Yep, I shall make use of that. How long do these last?" I asked as I attached the second deadener.

Provided that you don't get them damaged, eight to ten hours in this weather.

"Understood. Gimme a face mask with chemfilters, please. A disposable one, for a point or two." I genuinely considered ordering a full-body condom, and reconsidered leaving the vehicle entirely, but I was in fact needed—and the entire purpose of condoms was to contain ejaculate, which, for better or worse, clashed with my propensity to eject large amounts of deadly stuff in combat.

My hyperintelligent shopfront complied, and so equipped did I have to wait only a few more minutes while Leah's noxious nose-blaster continued contaminating the planet.

If I didn't love her so much, I'd already have demanded the attention of management.

Daddy-Long-Legs eventually moved his bulbous butt above a rock sticking out of the sea of nasty gas and released the now-unused piloting pod with the sneaky double Sol rounds. I stayed crouched on the pod, both to let it carry me off the rock without having to suffer the touch of the vapor—resistant Battle Skin or not, I hated even the thought of risking that level of irritant getting anywhere sensitive—and to let the pod's presence seem innocent.

Wait. Sol rounds. Gas. Explosions.

"Uh…" I mumbled across the comms.

Double wait. Electric alien. Gas. Sparks. My core tensed and my muscles almost cramped as my entire body condensed on itself, ready to fling itself up and away.

It was only the complete absence of electromagnetic spikes against my senses that allowed me to stay still long enough to remember that my jetpack's thrust itself would set off the gas. It was also long enough for me to realize that it wouldn't be an explosion so much as a conflagration—much tamer, and something I could outpace at full burn seeing how the exhaust would push the flammable aerosol away.

Somehow, a tiny part of me was quite disappointed as I settled back on my haunches with no explosions or fireballs to show for it.

I distracted myself from the letdown by checking on Sonde, who was breaking apart the sensory stream from my antennae like one of her logic puzzles and searching for patterns that might give away the monster again. She showed an ever growing proficiency with her tools made of dynamic algorithms and borrowed emotions—it took me a moment to realize that she was manipulating data both metaphorically through math and algorithms, as well as physically by wiring and rewiring the advanced neuron clusters in the Quanta's memory banks. Like converting the format of a file to make it accessible for a different set of tools, only far more complicated 'cause biology—both of my ol' human cortex and the alien Quanta.

I didn't think I'd ever be capable of that level of sophistication, which was probably why the Quanta augmentation was designed with brain butlers in mind. In mind, hah.

Between Sonde using my enhanced senses for electricity, the Sim Cell's partially unfurled sensor wing, and lastly, my nudging everyone to pay special attention to any particularly large dips in the ground beyond the stinkcircle where a big creature might be able to hide inside, it took us only a few more seconds to find traces of a signature roving slowly around Leah's mechs in jittery, random jumps—noise in the signal.

It was enough to determine that it wasn't going to go for the obvious trap we'd laid, and Leah decided to take advantage and fully deployed the wing again. It would either give us a clearer picture, or it would be too tempting a target for the thing not to engage.

Goose bumps shivered across my nape just a split second before the monstrous alien would have stepped around the camped mechs far enough to come into direct line of sight to me. Instinct triggered by something I didn't have time to figure out pushed me down into the extreme dilation of the Quanta, despite the risk of another schism.

The calm currents of flatlined emotions rose around my awareness. The chaos of intuition turned into the simplified clarity of focused curiosity, maintained by the biological supercomputer in my head at a velocity of 3600 seconds per second.

Isolating the issue that had goosed my instincts suddenly came as easy as breathing:

My antennae, both of them, were directly pointed at the creature; a dead giveaway that I knew exactly where it was. And because the things—as alien to my natural physiology as my wings—had many of the reflexes they needed to function integrated not into my brain, but directly into their own structure, I lacked any conscious ability to correct their behavior beyond the most bruteforced triggering of their hiding reflex.

Mission Control devised a barebones plan to salvage the situation and filed an update with the Sim Cell's strategic computers. Combat Command sent an override to the pod I was sitting on to begin unfolding its rifles early, while Logistics queried Chrysaora to produce a pair of Carrier missiles with EMP warheads. I hammered enough force through my legs in one instant to strain my tendons and tear muscles, to fling myself upwards violently. So hard that the pod preferred to let its armored belly whomp into the ground, instead of risking damage to its legs' joints.

Ignoring the hot sting of fresh injury inside my barely-healed leg, I focused entirely on the hidden alien instead. The very moment it first twitched from my sudden appearance into its line of sight, I gassed my thrusters; angled to push the resulting wall of fire towards it; a conflagration used merely to hide the wicked pair of the pod's recoilless rifles turning in its direction, loaded to unleash a class of violence found only in the heart of stars.

The amount of subjective minutes it took for the situation to come to fruition was long enough that, even so deeply submerged in the Quanta, I had time to dig out the ghost of giddy anticipation from beneath the heavy waters of clinical numbness.

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