(Rewritten) Ch. 38 – Leah’s Alive!

"Infrastructure is artificial. It grows brittle and breaks down, it burns out, it takes a whole lot of effort to keep going. Entropy is a never-satisfied beast, and it's a whole lot more voracious than the Antithesis. Technology kind of has a problem with not being self-healing. Your car can't eat vegetables and regrow the carburetor.

Humanity invests more than ten percent of its output into maintaining things, and they're still falling apart.

I have no clue how to solve that, but—"

– Excerpt from a blog discussing economics, shortly before it was taken over by eco terrorists in a recruiting drive for suicide bombers

***

Leah and I separated slightly, each of us stationing ourselves behind sturdy-looking trunks not too damaged by the toxic air, and on a synchronized count, we leaned out and nailed a Four in the braincase each. The things' skulls, half-hidden in the nest of tentacles, weren't sturdy enough to bounce my flechette, and the increased weight of Leah's subsonic 9mm delivered a nasty punch, too.

"Threes next, they're faster!" I ordered as the rest of the aliens started tearing our way.

The faster firing rate of my Sentinel allowed me to kill two, and Leah took out the third model Three before they'd even crossed half the distance to us. But we still had to deal with another four Fours.

Two bore down on me, moving much faster than I'd expected as they slung themselves through the brush and trees by their tentacles. I jumped backwards, chased by the ominous splinter-cracking of trees too frail to bear the weight of these oversized apes, before I turned around and started running in a circle to keep them out of tentacle's reach.

Shit! Leah's not gonna be able to move!

I looked to Leah and saw that she'd already killed one of the two Fours attacking her, but I nearly stumbled as my heart froze when the second pinned her against a tree and started whaling on her while she struggled to get the Foxteeth pointed at its head.

Relief shot through my chest as the Overall's armor panels hardened beneath the blows, but it was also making it difficult for her to move. She bent her arm in fits and starts between restrictions, and I heard her grunts and frustrated swears over the call.

I couldn't aim for the head, it had buried itself against Leah to pin her against the tree while the tentacles whaled at her, so I frantically came up with another solution.

Once more I yelled at her, "Gonna hose it down!" while I commanded the Sentinel to load some Spray, took aim, and pulled the trigger.

I kept running as I watched the hail of a thousand brass balls shred through tentacles at their softer and highly flexible base, sharp knife-tips flicking away and getting stuck wherever they thunked into trees or the ground. My rounds didn't have the energy to penetrate the armored skin of the alien, so they bounced off in all directions, several of them even hitting Leah, who visibly flinched and swore in surprise, but who was well protected by her armor.

With some of the tentacles gone, Leah finally had the space to nail the thing in the head and drop it.

"Leah!"

"What!"

"Two left!"

I used my antennae to keep sight of the Fours behind me, taking full advantage of the combat maneuvering I'd learned in my dreams, carefully dodging every lunge and dash. I wasn't able to get a clean shot past their whirlwind tentacles and just stayed close enough that they'd stick to chasing me, but eventually one of them still broke off towards Leah. Luckily, it gave me a very nice line against its sunken braincase, the back of it revealed when its tentacles reached for her. Leah aimed, too, but I was much faster and put a hole through its brain.

The other Four was still chasing me, and while I worked to set up a kill, Leah turned the tables instead, first with an unlikely bullet through a knee that caused it to stumble and catch itself with its tentacles, and then a second that cratered its unprotected skull. I shuddered from the squelchy sounds of shockwaves liquifying its brain, transmitted at great fidelity through my sensitive antennae

It crashed with tangled limbs and tore open the ground as it slid to a violent stop in a soggy ditch.

I slowed and realized that I was breathing pretty heavily—way heavier than I should after what was only really seconds of exertion, and I knew that I could move a lot faster if I really went at it.

The combat stress, probably. I wasn't as used to fighting as I had once been, a long time ago. Not a cold blooded veteran anymore. Killing Antithesis was still a lot less…stressful than my childhood, though.

I wrenched my thoughts to other topics.

Blessedly non-sweaty despite running so hard, I listened to every sound around us, tuned to catch any stragglers to the fight, or if we'd been detected by any other units nearby. But all was calm, even to the spy cam. The closest movement was over a hundred meters away, meandering past us. A group of twelve Threes.

Satisfied, I returned to Leah, who was looking a little down and depressed. I made some questioning noises at her and leaned into her to shake her out of her funk.

She glanced down at me and asked quietly, "Hey, when do you think is a good time for me to call home? It just really hit me that I could die here and the little ones have no idea where I am or what's up with me. I want to at least…let them know I'm still fine."

Acknowledging once again that Leah cared quite deeply about her children, I nodded and said, "I think you should try now. We don't have a lot of time and we need to keep moving, but there's no reason why you can't take a minute to call them."

"Mmm. Give me a few, Tinea," she replied, as she let her cheek rest atop my head, squishing my antennae to the side. I wiggled them until they lay more comfortably draped past my shoulders.

I leaned into her and let myself relax while I used the spy cam to scout all around us, methodically checking through every bit of foliage so I wouldn't miss any lone xenos. Just beyond that perimeter, I found a Four climbing one of the few massive trees to hide itself among the sickly leaves, holding very still as it hung from the thickest branch.

I made a mental note to look up more.

***

Leah closed her eyes and let her arms fall around Tinea, basking in the warm breath that caressed her throat, and the closeness she offered, and forced a little peppiness into her thoughts against the gloomy worries. She reconnected to the uplink, and Ypsi helped her by synchronizing all the contacts she'd been using prior to being kidnapped.

She let Ypsi update her profile picture with the new eye, and made sure the avatar the kids would see didn't show any of the dirt on her, and generally looked nice and fresh and perfectly fine.

Leah, um, Ypsi mumbled a bit apologetically, calls are going to be a bit difficult. The internet is working very hard today! The big invasion is making everybody want to talk at the same time. But I can force your call through, if you like!

"Oh, that would be nice, but can you, like, check what and who you shove aside for me? I don't want any important emergencies to get silenced. If there's somebody who's talking to their family, don't interrupt them either. I don't care about the corpos though."

I can do that, Leah! There is a board meeting happening right now, between the top executives of Trash'R'Us Inc. They're discussing who to pin the blame on for a chemical accident in a dumping facility. They cut financial corners when it was built and that caused it, but they don't care. The candidate is a widower with two children, because he's 'replaceable middle management'.

"Oh yeah, fuck 'em. And, will you keep an eye on everybody in that meeting, please? Let's make sure they can't compare stories."

Okay!

Finally, Leah sent a ping to literally everybody she knew and cared about or was responsible for, and waited if any would join what was probably going to be a rather busy group call.

Oh shit. "Ypsi! Do you think anybody might be tracking the people I just pinged?!"

No worries, Leah! I checked and found nothing!

Leah wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Could've been the hint they needed to catch their own kidnappers…which was probably why nobody was spying. But at least nobody was going to get hurt because of any carelessness on Leah's part, either.

Most of these pings never even reached, and Leah couldn't help but worry if they were okay. Maybe they were stuffed into a bunker somewhere? Or the infrastructure was still down from the incursion. A few pings dropped in and out, until Ypsi stabilized the bandwidth Leah was hogging.

Within seconds five familiar faces answered, three little ones stuck face-first to the camera, waving excitedly and yelling all at once. "Leah! Where are you?!" "Come back home!" "Lee!"

Leah grinned, made her avatar wave back, and muted everybody but herself for a second. "Hey y'all. Sorry, gotta go fast, I'm between fights. I'm alive, I've got somebody who's helping me, and I'll introduce her to you as soon as we're back. That might take a few more days, we're several hundred miles to the north. How are you all?"

"What are you fighting?!" "Lee!" (Dang, the smallest one with her grasping fists was so cute!) "Jenny broke her arm!"

"Oh no! What happened?"

"She tripped down the stairs and hurt herself. Sister Lana took her to the hos…hostitel?"

"Hospital."

"Hospotal!"

"Almost!"

"Hihi! But Jenny came back the same day! Her whole arm is stuck in plastic now. It was really ugly, so we all made it pretty! Everybody wrote their names on it. Lana wrote mine for me! She said next year she'll teach me how to do it myself!"

"Oh, that's exciting! Make sure to say thank you, alright? And you're all okay?"

"Yeeep! We're all okay. Andi keeps crying, though. Come back soon!"

Aw. Andi, the littlest one, stretched her hands out towards the screen again, with wet eyes.

"I'll come visit you soon, Andi. Just a few more sleeps, okay?" Leah said gently.

"Mmm. Lee. Huggie."

"Yup, huggies, Andi."

"Mmm!"

Leah had to smile as the happiness and adorableness filled her up inside. There was nothing so precious as her littles.

"Bye, Andi, Sam, Jora. I gotta talk to the adults for a moment, and then I need to keep moving if I ever want to come home again."

"Okay! Bye, Leah!" "Bye bye!" "Lee!" Three tiny hands waved happy and sad waves that Leah returned with as bright a smile as she could muster, and then she closed their part of the call.

Leah took a good look at the two adults, who looked at each other, until Sun asked the unspoken question. "Is this connection secure?"

"Ypsi?"

Yes! No one's listening in! And I'm keeping the call from being recorded, too.

"Okay, we're good," Leah said. "What's been happening?"

Sun answered, "We're…fine. The children are well, too. Nice and safe from the incursions. New Montreal has a pretty big wall going up and the mood is surprisingly positive, all things considered.

"But Jem went to check on you when you didn't show, and was able to detect damage from tampering on your door. You weren't there. We had a feeling that you didn't go…willingly, but we didn't know where to look, or what to do about it. We closed up your place and kept an eye on it, but nothing else happened. Or showed. We're pretty sure nobody here blabbed about you being a samurai, either. We figured that you might be able to use your samurai tech to lift any evidence from your place, maybe?"

"Yeah, was gonna. I and another new samurai, we got kidnapped. Probably by a corporation. They're the only ones I can see being both greedy and stupid enough, and have the resources to steal a samurai. We got free, but we still don't know who was it. Stay safe, don't go alone, and immediately alert me if something seems…fucky. Ypsi will make sure you can reach me without delay, as long as we still have a connection to the internet."

Okay!

"Alright Leah, but, new samurai?"

"Tinea. Good girl, she helped. A lot. She's way more proactive about murdering aliens, though," she said with a chuckle. "I'll introduce you once we make it back."

Sun smiled at the obvious humor in Leah's tone.

But time didn't wait for nobody, and Sun needed to end the call. "Jem and I gotta go see to the kids. I'll trust you to come back safe, wherever you are, okay?"

"Sure thing. We're in that big crater. North north-east, and like seven hundred miles. Or was it kilometers? Something like that. Anyway, it'll take us a while to get back. Lots of aliens moving south that we can kill, but we gotta go slow and careful."

"Good luck."

Leah smiled at the two, and shut down the call completely. They'd let the others know if it mattered. They weren't dumb enough to share the news with untrustworthy people, either.

She squeezed Tinea and opened up the bottom half of her visor. Breathing in the dusty smell of her hair, she took another look at the video of the spy cam that Tinea was currently controlling. Nothing.

They had a few more moments before they needed to move again, and Leah had questions to ask of herself.

***

Sun - female, 28, Asian Canadian, romantic partner of Jem, colleague to Leah and fellow caretaker of children. Bounces between multiple orphanages, daycares, and schools.

Jem - male, 27, African Canadian, romantic partner of Sun, colleague to Leah and fellow caretaker of children. Bounces between multiple orphanages, daycares, and schools.

Sister Lana - female, 24, Russian Canadian, primary caretaker at orphanage "Saint Viktor" in New Montreal

Jenny - female, 6, British, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", honorary big sister of Andi

Andi - female, 4, Canadian, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", calls Leah "Lee"

Sam - male, 6, African North American, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", 'boyfriend' of Jora

Jora - female, 6, Scandinavian Canadian, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", 'girlfriend' of Sam