Chapter 168 – Long Story Short

Incoming artillery has the right of way.

– Obviosity.

⁂

Dolores waited for us just north of Baie-Comeau, in a large, suspiciously flat depression between the hills along the river's coast, a scattering of mutilated Antithesis corpses of a dozen varieties around her.

Otherwise, everything was quiet. I could almost feel the gazes of unseen Nines tracking me through the air, however, and let the Sim Cell know to set the Hatchets on patrol immediately.

According to Dolores, there had once been an aluminium smeltery here, taking advantage of easy river shipping. The place had been picked clean decades ago, but the flat concrete flooring remained, presumably busted and overgrown beneath the muck from the flooding. We'd have to do something about that, but I could already picture a basic production setup.

There was no way Dolores hadn't sensed them long before they crested the nearest hill, but I still noticed her cocking an eyebrow at the sheer presence of the two Implacables bearing down on her.

Here Comes War, was the message imprinted in predatory lines and relentless weight.

I circled the area one last time and tossed a few missile-mounted Whisperseed 3D-Printers around to start building a web of picket sensors, and finally came in for a serene landing near Leah's spiders.

The Moving Castle lowered its boarding ramp just as I touched down, and my statuesque girlfriend joined me before we walked over to meet Dolores. She had a new, quietly whining bangle around her wrist, looking like a modified ball bearing. The hum reminded me of a toy jet's turbine and my Quanta's processing speed let me see the fanblades that had replaced the balls. A hairdryer without the dryer? It was a rather…weird accessory. Not particularly pretty either, and, as far as I could see, not terribly useful.

But before I got to ask, Dervish opened her mouth. Leah jerked her arm up to point at her, and the bangle's whine rose to a scream as it blasted icy wind ahead. It whirled the jet of water from Leah's finger into a dense cloud of snow that sprayed the Class III samurai in the face.

I couldn't help but giggle at the beatific look of absolute satisfaction Leah wore. When she muttered, "I gotta do this more often," I, like the good wingwoman I was, used both hands to cover her mouth so her victim wouldn't be tipped off.

Then I all but melted against her when her arms came around to cradle me. I hoped I'd never lose the wonder I still felt at the turn of events that injected so much sudden happiness into my life.

Dolores—who'd finally wiped all the snow off her face—said, "Strange weather we're having today, huh?"

I slowly looked around ourselves. Mud everywhere, flood damages, felled trees, runnels broken into the ground by fast-flowing water.

The picture of cluelessness, I turned back to Dolores and said, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Uh-huh?" came the arch reply.

"Uh-huh," said I, nodding my pretty little head off.

"Money plox," said Leah.

"Say please," said our sugar mommy, who was so used to slang she'd forgotten the meanings of some.

"I did," answered the redhead.

Fuck, she's right, implied the half-bent finger made from timeless metals.

Fwump went the new twin kiloton Implacables loaded with printer drones and hundreds of massive plug-tanks full of manufacturing materials as they teleported in, courtesy of Dervish's points.

⁂

I watched Dervish dash off into the distance, after she was done sponsoring our varied purchases.

Additional materials, some immobile-but-cheap Class I robotics fabrication gantries to build an army of basic Hatchets and Res Mechanica Repentis scavenging crawlers, and several kinetic emplacements atop the nearby hills to defend the place. She was holding her scythe and being pushed along, faster and faster, by winds like a jetstream targeted square at her back.

If you didn't know her, you'd see the oriental version of a warrior monk. Cowled robe weighted with pendulum blades, a fast, controlled gait that maintained a certain dignity. Elegant simplicity with just a touch of tasteful ornateness around the accents. A mirage from the desert.

Beautiful, perhaps even holy.

I saw a defensively-minded homebody hellbent on her hobby; cosplaying understated transcendence while protecting her chosen territory.

Oh, well. It did take a particular sort of person to survive combat and look for more, and a Vanguard's opportunities only let those traits shine all the brighter in whatever form they came.

Turning around, I witnessed Leah's new printing drones melt holes into the freshly exposed concrete before neutralizing the acids again and following up with reinforced concrete extruded to form a large circle of light bunkers for the fabricators.

They'd be strong enough to endure the attention of a dive-bombing Eleven or a Twenty-Two ramming its bloated hive body into it. A Thirty-Three or something digging in from underneath would get through, but the Whisperseed's tremor-sensing worms should catch that early enough for us to do something about.

We figured that was good enough for something that would only have to last a week or two, until Dolores was done with her clean-up tour.

In the middle of the bunkers' circle, a final, more robust gantry was pouring Gravity Juice through an activation grate and into a series of depressions shaped to hold hull pieces of a Hatchet—turns out that modulated gravity was a fine method to 'clamp' work pieces to the work surfaces, and the Gravity Juice, once dried, was much less messy in automation than leaky clamp hydraulics, and far more reliable than vacuum systems.

The strange collection of gravity spikes felt weird to my perception of mass. If I didn't have so many other senses to rely on, it might've even been nausea-inducing. Instead I just had to suppress the occasional twitch that made me want to brace against that direction, as if I was standing on an invisible and extremely uneven slope.

I'll have to make sure that any proper base we'll build will have its production center far enough away for the uneven gravity to be unfelt, I thought.

Then the sensation of the mass distribution changed noticeably when a drone walked between one of the Gravity Juice pits and myself. My eyes all but nailed themselves to it, so attention-grabbing it was.

I realized that it might be catching my attention so well because my mass-sensing didn't have to deal with much of an influx of information, at least compared to, say, my eyes. The picture was, on average, real simple: Earth down. Moon there. Feet on hill.

The local disturbances from the Juice were having such a strong effect because nothing much was competing with them.

That gave me an idea.

"Tynea?"

Yes?

"Why did that drone have the disruptive effect on the Gravity Juice's, well…gravity? Or is it 'cause steel is conductive?"

Its proximity, actually. The Gravity Juice itself is very agnostic as far as materials or magnetism go, to retain usefulness as a construction material out in space. It works off of proximity instead. Had the drone been further from the pits and nearer yourself, you wouldn't have noticed the difference. Closer, and it would've had an even greater effect.

"Hmm…"

Now, wouldn't that make for an interesting tripwire?

Everyone knew about cameras. Pressure plates were common too, as well as capacitance sensors. Disruptible light beams.

But…disruptible gravity sensors?

That was new. Entirely.

Entirely new things were entirely unpredictable, and such got even the consummate, and therefore dangerous, professional caught.

⁂

Our slap-dash fabrication center was coming along quickly and would begin putting together new Hatchets soon, presumably one squad of four per hour. If everything worked as Leah had planned.

Each squad would carry twenty salvaging ants, five per Hatchet abdomen, to recycle any wrecks—which we were expecting, considering that the Hatchets would be particularly cheap productions and lack the true punch they'd need to take out a pack of Twenty-Ones.

Those were still out there, along with fuck-if-I-knew-how-many Nines and whatever additional surprises the still-active hives to the north were siccing at us. Leah's army of ants had already run into a fresh subterranean hive that had gone straight to growing Twenty-Ones. The robotic crawlers were nearly obliterated, until the Sim Cell demonstrated a new level of brilliance when it let the damaged but still functioning units play dead until the alien response had been satisfied and left; and then let the swarm of scavengers reconstitute itself from the pieces.

Much weakened in numbers, it had still been large enough to sabotage the nest's remaining Twenty-One growth pods before the patrol had returned. The aliens had been a lot more thorough the second time around, and inevitably, the Sim Cell was forced to report a total loss of the robotic ants.

But they'd accomplished their objective, and that was a win.

By then, I'd long taken off again and had been flying sweeping arcs around the base, along the coast and miles inland, dropping more Whisperseed micro-sinteries to rebuild our watch net, and fertilizering any Antithesis in sight. Mostly Threes and Fours, occasionally small groups consolidated by a stray Six, often with Fives in tow, whose quills were no threat to me fifty meters up.

Fifteens, the artillery grasshoppers, were quite rare and typically lacked the kind of support that would've made them a real menace, but their mere presence did speak loudly of slowly ramping Antithesis presence nearby.

I…was a bit surprised that Dervish's catastrophe of a storm hadn't kept things quiet for longer, but then the Antithesis wouldn't be the threat they were if they really got slowed down by a bit of extreme weather, would they?

⁂

The first Hatchet finally rolled off the line. Or, should I say, it unsquatted from the gravity pits that had held the formerly disparate parts of its chassis.

A set of five scavenger ants ran up to it and loaded themselves into a tiny, downward-facing compartment in its abdomen. They could be dropped in a hurry to deal with anything unwelcome that got under the Hatchet's feet, or to handle any task that the Hatchet itself was a little too big for. Or to salvage any combat wrecks, of course.

The Hatchet was very barebones—ugly, gray, unfinished aluminum lacking any shine. The worth of the materials used in its construction summed to a little less than five thousand points, and it showed in the complete lack of Warforge dressing. No molecularly complex hydrophobic blackbody paint, just loads of exposed seams where the chassis's pieces had been welded together.

The weaponry on this one was a stripped-down copy of the Dakka's twin gatling turrets; it still had two gimbals so it could engage in two directions simultaneously, but each one held only a single autocannon. It did have the Daddy-Long-Legs's crown of electrolasers to deal with projectile attacks and to ward off Ones, though.

Since each squad would have two of these economy class Dakkas, they'd be well defended aerially, we figured.

One per squad would be mounted with a one-oh-five, but we'd stick to easily and independently produced Class I ammunition even for those bigger cannons. If something truly problematic showed up, either Leah or myself would have to get…personal.

And for the final member of each squad, Leah decided to get a minelayer and combat engineer. They were reminiscent of her lost Sapper, but again, stripped down. They could clear a path through the woods just fine, but they wouldn't be wrestling any Thirty-Threes, ever. Its primary purpose was indeed to mine the crap out of any regularly traveled paths, but with a set of combat construction drones and some raw materials, it had enough tools to keep the squad mobile even across terrible terrain.

⁂

Dervish's dot moved rapidly across the Family app's maps, never pausing more than a few seconds in any one spot. She left a trail of markers behind her, and when I clicked one, I was presented with the information on the state she'd left a nest in, and when she intended to come by again for a more thorough cleanup.

She was more concerned with stemming the steady flow of aliens from across the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of empty country immediately north of Baie-Comeau, than actually rooting out the nests entirely. That would be the work of years to come.

Maybe something to remember for Leah and myself, if we needed to farm points again?

Our own efforts were of a similar nature. The idea of entering the confines of a nest underground gave me the shivers; I didn't have the toughness to stand up to a Twenty-One's claws if I couldn't just catapult myself up and away, and Leah's Implacables would sooner dig a nest out entirely than fit inside.

Even the Hatchets were much too big, and the crawlers weren't designed to hunt down all the little rootlets of a nest it would regrow from, neither. So, much like Dervish, we just sabotaged any nests we located, placed more sensors nearby, marked them on the maps, and moved on.

⁂

Eight hours after we'd begun setting up the new fabrication base, I watched the third squad of Hatchets moving out far below, directed remotely by the Sim Cell.

It had surprised us when it had decided to replace the big gun in the squad with a second minelayer-slash-engineer, but a look at the data it was working with revealed suspicions of another thicket of Nines.

Apparently, it was going to emulate my battle earlier and lay concentric spirals of mines around the entire thing, and then send in the two Dakka-wannabes to rile up the knife-wielding vegetable octopi by hosing them down with volume-of-fire. Then, once the battle was over, it would use the Res Mechanica Repentis to salvage any unexploded mines and redeploy them.

Elsewhere, the Sim Cell used free ants to move my Whisperseed sensor-fabricators so they could seed new areas, entirely without needing any prompting. Similar instances of automated thinking outside the box, to find efficient solutions with what was available, were playing out across the battlefield.

Really, the strategic center was showing a lot of initiative. Enough that I could all but feel Leah getting hibbelig in her crash couch. She was seeing things go to plan without requiring our presence, and—I wasn't sure if I should be surprised or not—didn't seem interested in further exploring the power her Implacables gave her personally.

There wasn't anything holding us anymore.

Smiling, I signaled Dervish to pay us one last visit.

It was time to wheedle a few more provisions out of her for our own future, and to say our goodbyes.

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