(Rewritten) Ch. 44 – Like Fish in a Barrel; Or: A Need for Sleep

“You know, the brain’s actually really fucked up. It’s an absolute master at survival, but that’s…not necessarily a good thing.

You gotta realize how easy it’ll mess itself up to adapt to threats and survive being exposed to them. It gets used to the pain, and at that point, well, it’ll make you stick around what causes that pain.

Cause you see, you know how to survive that now, don’t you? So, obviously that’s safer than risking new threats you aren’t familiar with.

Do you see the bent in the brain, there? No? It’s assuming that there’s only threats.

Real fucked up.”

– Road Rash, talking to his Twitch chat, non-sequitur after being asked about his love life

***

I’d hidden myself in the trench, and watched as the Antithesis broke through the treeline opposite of me.

They surged right for the jar in the center, one big blob squished into a queue of aliens according to which unit caught the scent of food first.

Ah, I’d fucked up the placement of the grenades some. I should’ve placed them in concentric circles around the slop, not spread them out evenly across the clearing.

Hmm, it shouldn’t be an issue, ultimately. I’d just have to wait until the group began to disperse a little.

“Leah, get your grenades ready? I want to make sure we kill the Sixes and Fours with them, at least. I’m going to trigger the burrowed ones as soon as the coverage is better.”

“Okay. I’ll start tossing once we see which ones survived?”

“Uh, yeah. Tynea, Ypsi, could you, like, mark for us which ones to throw at, so we don’t double up?”

Certainly.

Ypsi sent a Leah-style thumbs-up, but with little-girl hands. The corners of my lips kicked up. That AI was entirely too good at being cute.

The invasive plants snuffled at the jar, until a Four picked it up with a tentacle and accidentally spilled it across a Three, which ran in circles like a dog chasing its own tail, trying to lick the juice off of its rear. It should’ve been comical, but the uncanny nature of the beasts just made it look weird and, well, alien.

They began to split up in small squads, slowly spreading around the clearing, and an insistent background humm kicked up.

The slow and steady changes in amplitude and frequencies ebbed and flowed, creating almost hypnotic harmonies that brushed across my sensilla. I pinched myself to focus, and after a few seconds, I located the source. The Sixes were working together to create audible commands for all the other units present. The squads ordered themselves better, and instead of forming randomly rambling pockets of density, the entire group began to search the clearing in a very uneven grid pattern.

It didn’t take long for the small clearing to be mostly covered, but I held back with the ex-, uh, implosions, because neither of the Six were in sure range of any. They stood a little away from the center, and too far apart to get hit by the grenade beneath it, but not far enough to be in range of the next ones.

Hmm. Should I just go for it, and trust that we would be able to catch them with thrown grenades? Didn’t wanna rely on our piddly darts—

One of the Fours was moving towards one of the Sixes, and it held in its tentacles a grenade. A few Threes trailed after it, and looking from where they came, I found that indeed, they’d dug out one of them, loose earth flung away to form a small crater.

Huh. Oh, the Four had almost reached the Six. I grinned at the situation, happy to take advantage. I looked around, but found no other squad excavating a second delivery for the second Six. It looked like I had my chance to do the most damage, and I didn’t want to lose it for unlikely perfection.

“Heads up, Leah!” I finally activated all the mines, and extremely unruly, deformed spheres of glassy void ripped reality across the entire glade, swallowing most of the Antithesis. Even to my antennae, it was like black holes of nothingness just replaced the world in those places. No energies, no currents, no vibrations reached me.

Black razors flickered out and bisected a few more, and through the spy drones, I witnessed the entire front half of that one Six with the “present” just disappear. Its rear half flopped to the ground and didn’t move anymore.

The heavy smell of cut grass reached me. That might be a bit of a problem… There was so much of it, so concentrated, that it’d gain the attention of every other Antithesis within several hundred meters, at least.

What to do, what to do? Hmm. Ah well, let’s just finish this first.

The other Six lost a hindleg to one of those fissures. It was otherwise unharmed, but hobbled and lacking in mobility, while also surrounded by several Fours, made it an easy target for Leah, who used her new robotic arm to toss a grenade right into their middle.

I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of so much, uh, salad getting shredded so thoroughly.

All across the tiny battlefield, the void bubbles collapsed, and the raw amount of destruction left behind, heralded a momentous lull. There was no screaming, no breathing, no rustling but for the trees. Nothing moved.

Then, Tynea broke the silence: I’ll mark the outlines of all surviving units, if you’d like?

“Oh yeah, go for it. And share with Leah, please.”

I will.

Red, yellow, green, and white wireframes populated my vision, with the closest ones color-coded red, and the furthest, white.

The scratchy tickle-rasp of Leah’s gun-muffle reached me, and one of the yellows dropped to fade out.

“Tynea, can you please make the frames blink, if they’re moving towards either of us? And play an alarm bell or something if they get closer than five meters. How many are left?”

Eight Fours, and seventeen Threes. The Sixes are both dead.

Okay, that was doable, especially since the Antithesis hadn’t located us yet, though a few were starting to react to Leah’s firing. They were clearly confused, unable to pinpoint the silent projectiles.

I guessed they couldn’t match the sensitivity of my antennae.

But they were getting very restless, with the penetrating smell of alien death drenching the air so thoroughly. They’d start running very soon, I thought. Would they just go off in random directions, or would they form a pack?

“Leah, can I leave the Fours to you? Your bullets do more damage.”

“Sure!”

I finally picked my target, a Three that had oriented itself in my direction, popped up over the lip of the trench I was kneeling in, and just as it sighted me, I pulled the trigger and felt the smooth recoil of a 13mm dart being accelerated via, uh. Electromagnetism? Alien electromagnetism tech, anyway.

Its left eye went splat as the single flechette ruptured it on the way through to mulch the brain, where it would release its nanite payload.

Another model right next to it spun around when the first one dropped, and sniffed at it. I watched as it bunched its legs to sprint, and shot it in the side of the head, before it could sling itself away. That told me what my ammunition could do against the armored skull of a Three, and I was glad to find that it had no issues penetrating it.

When I tried the same against the head of a Four, though, my shot simply glanced off of the top of it and ricocheted into the woods behind it. The blow was still a stunner, so I let the Sentinel guide the next round through an eye, and it had no trouble with the thin bone at the back of its orbit.

I returned to shooting the smaller aliens, as Leah’s voice whispered through my aug. “They’re starting to see you. Still a lot of Threes left. What’s your plan?”

“I’ll start moving as soon as I’ve really got their attention. I’ll make ‘em stay in the clearing, that way they’re easy targets, what with all the craters around and in the way.”

“Do you think other aliens will come for us? With all this plant stink around.”

“Yes, but let’s take care of these first. The rain might obscure the scent fast enough, too.”

“Okay.”

It took only a few more seconds for Leah to kill the remaining few Fours, and I got another five Three kills, leaving us with ten, when they finally spotted me and charged my way.

I jumped out of my trench and ran sideways, setting off around the perimeter of the glade, as Leah kept plugging away at the planty beasts chasing me.

“Tinea, is this supposed to be this easy?”

I hurdled a low branch without slowing down. “How do you mean?”

“Well, we’re not exactly at risk here. I feel like…where the hell am I? Why… Why isn’t reality what my expectations tell me it should be? Why is this so, I don’t know? Easy?”

I let her concern percolate through my hindbrain as I focused on evading a few Threes in front of me, slowly corralling them with tightening circles around the clearing, leaving the killing mostly to Leah, while I made sure I didn’t trip stupidly.

Eventually though, I arrived at an answer for Leah.

“Well, how many Antithesis were here, before we started fighting?”

“Around forty?”

“And how many samurai are here?”

“Oh. Two.”

“Yup. How many are needed for this fight?”

“Well, none really. This is the kind of thing a small group of random people armed with machine guns or maybe even just rifles could’ve handled, if they didn’t panic.”

“Yeah. This fight should be as easy as it is. There’s more to talk about, stuff I’d love to learn about you, like how you did as a samurai before we met, or what you did. But let’s do that when we’re actually safe?”

“Okay. Yes, anyway, that made sense of things. I feel…a little more real now, so it’s fine?”

“Right, mission accomplished?”

“Mission accomplished.” There was a smile in her voice and I could almost smell the stress flow out of her. I hopped past and over the uneven grenade craters in the ground, letting Leah pick off Three after Three as they darted after me, jumped into, out of, or even across them and each other. They were learning and adapting to the terrain, but not as quickly as they were dying.

Before long, we’d finished off the remaining planty monster plants, and I had a moment to think about Leah, again. It seemed like that short talk had broken her out of some…mental obstacles? I’d have to see if my impression was correct, but she seemed free of some worries. Or at least, free of some kind of, uh, dissonance, I guessed.

If it did, if that would tide her over and let her stay in one piece until she got home, I’d be so fucking thankful that she managed to express herself.

“I think we’re done? Wanna help me get off the tree?”

“Coming!”

“Tynea, are there any nearby Antithesis heading for us? And how long until the rain actually hits?”

There is a group moving such that they’ll cut you off if you try to move back to the facility for shelter. It’s fairly small, one model Four and six model Three. It’ll begin to rain in about five minutes.

“Oh, uh. Could be an advantage? Hard to track us through the rain.”

I arrived at Leah’s tree, jumped up, and she climbed onto my back, where she sort of tied her legs and arms around me, so they wouldn’t get in my way or get hooked on anything on the way down, as I carefully dropped from branch to bough.

“Leah, we’ll get wet soon. Or wetter, anyway— ”That’s what she said.” —Shush, you. Do we still want to go into hiding from the storm?”

“I’d say so. We still don’t have the gear to fight in the middle of a storm, and I don’t feel like getting soaked. This overall isn’t actually waterproof. Samurai medicine or not, I can still catch a cold that would cost points to cure.”

“Right. Uh, Tynea, can I get sick, actually?”

Not from weather-related loss of temperature. Your skin is designed to insulate you at altitude, and against excessive winds. Your bionites would be effective against viruses, infections, and other such causes, but they aren’t preventative. You would still use energy in fighting them off.

“I see. So, we crawl back under the sheets and hibernate until the sun’s out again?”

The thought of rest surprised me with sudden tiredness, and I yawned hard. Yeah, I hadn’t actually slept properly since waking from my chrysalis, aside from a short nap. My new body had kept me going well enough that I didn’t even notice my need for sleep.

“Yup, let’s go back. My cocoon.”

Back on the ground, Leah untangled herself from me and we started walking next to each other.

There’d be one last, hopefully quick, fight, a walk through the rain, and then sleep.

…

I didn’t look forward to the nightmares.

***