(Rewritten) Ch. 65 – Xenocide Act IV; Hi Fourteen

"Slide aside, make room in your grave, and whisper, whisper unto them, 'There is room for you!'"

– Paraphrased from First Contact, Ralts Bloodthorne

***

AI-I's voice sounded through my head.

– Attention, threats inbound! –

I snapped to…attention. Dammit.

Focus.

– Threats: –– Model One: 50 –– Model Three: 261 –– Model Four: 53 –– Model Five: 5 –– Model Six: 5 –– Model Fourteen: 2 –

Wait, what? Fourteen? Shit. Where'd they come from? We had nothing that could stop those. They'd run us right over.

I yelled for Leah over comms.

"Yeah?" She'd picked up on my tension and I saw it stiffen her shoulders.

"Fourteens incoming! Along with a bunch of other stuff!"

I copied the list and shoved it at Leah through our call. Her eyes narrowed as she studied it.

"Tinea, I'm gonna get myself a gun. How long until they get here?"

Uh. "Tynea?"

The flying units will be in weapons' range in roughly ten seconds. The Fourteens in forty to ninety seconds. The largest mass of Threes and Fours in two minutes.

Leah's eyes widened, this time. So did mine.

My antennae shot straight up and carefully teased the air. There. Too far away to smell without great focus, but a large amount of stinking mud, churned by passing bodies, hung indeed at the limits of my perception.

Part of me was already queuing up hundreds of high-explosive missiles, and three dozen Javelins.

What else did I need? Ammo. Twenty mils, forty mils. Javelins would penetrate a Fourteen, probably, but it'd take a lot more than that to kill something that outsized busses.

Bombs? …Maybe. They grew more segments the longer they lived, constantly feeding, even while running. Well armored. It'd take more than one bomb. Anti-tank mines? If I place them wrong, if they miss… This isn't how they're supposed to be used!

They were heavy troop transports. Fuck. We'd see more aliens from inside the things. That meant the list of contacts was wrong already.

I looked at Leah. A hot flash of fear ran through me.

"SHIT! Leah!" She didn't hear me.

"Leah!"

She twitched, whirled towards me.

"Don't let the Fourteens hit you! You're armored wrong!"

Indecision on her face.

Ping!– 12 Javelins complete! –

A great crashing drew close, splintering timber. They were coming.

Shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Think!

I jumped at the pole, grabbed all the pheromone pockets from the dispenser. Five. It'll have to do.

Heavy thump from Leah's direction. A glance revealed a…cannon? Old thing, from before the two thousands. Wheeled anti-tank cannon. Better than mines. She was loading a single shell the size of my arm and half again, struggling against its weight. I jumped to help, rammed it home.

She'd positioned the egg next to her, turrets up and out, aggressively pointed. The pod was open for her to escape to safety at a moment's notice.

Ah. Smart. Didn't need armor, needed stopping power. Smart, smart.

Last glance around the clearing. The turrets needed manual loading. Would have to solve that soon.

A wave of Ones crested treetops a hundred meters away, nearly silent even to my antennae. Too far away for the turbulence to reach me as anything but an indistinct swirl.

The forest crashing gained in volume, and I could sense great, blocky shapes push towards us, fuzzy and smeared from the distance. A little further away still, a great flood of indistinct Threes and Fours followed the Fourteens.

The clinical part of me got busy marking targets. Clusters of Ones for high-explosive, Threes and Fours for 40mm fragmentation shells.

Staccato plinks launched missiles into the air all around me even as my feet were pounding the ground, running at an angle towards the incoming Antithesis.

A window popped up, showing Leah sighting the cannon, aiming where the right-side Fourteen would breach the trees. Tynea's voice read out estimations of time-to-fire, thirty down to fifteen seconds. Lines painted the artillery shell's trajectory across my vision, and the expected shock-wake. I went a little further left.

"Tynea! Scout's Quartet! Gimme them one by one!"

You are thirty points short.

My frag-shells went off somewhere ahead.

Here you go.

The first orb smacked into my hand, and I glued one of the pheromone bags to it.

"Bait them with these!"

Understood.

The drone hopped off my hand, hit my knee while I was still running, and shot straight into the forest, bouncing off of trunks.

Next drone. Glue the bag, toss it. Two drones pinballing between trees. Three and four drones, laying trails of distracting eat-me pheromones across the Antithesis' path, closing in to play catch-me with a horde of slavering aliens.

Ping!– 36 Javelins complete! –

My gaze shot towards the other Fourteen where I caught glimpses between the trees. I marked it for every single one of my penetrators, spread them in three rough circles wherever I could see.

I got a particularly useful picture of its tiny face and a mean growl escaped me. I'd frontally fracture the fricking frond-fucker.

– Advice: Trees in the way, idiot. Wait for it to break into the clearing. –

AI-I was a smartass. The darts would go through the trees easy.

…But the missiles that set the course wouldn't. I'd get an uneven firing solution.

Fine. It'd probably be good enough. But I could be a good girl and show patience.

Bright flashes and sonic booms shook the canopy as my mini missiles murdered most of the aerial swarm. The turrets got busy mopping up the remaining Ones.

"Tynea, we'll need to stock up all the guns. More magazines of everything, please! High-capacity mags of 7.62 for the turrets. Dumb-fire nanite payloads." Those would be enough for the Threes and Fours.

A list popped up in my HUD, the number at the bottom blinking red.

Purchased:

Total cost: 62Remaining points: -52

Even as I glanced at it, the blinking number ticked closer to zero.

The Fourteen had caught sight of me and changed its course. It was going to try and run me over.

It was a big motherfucker.

Large as a bus, and almost as long. The thing was feeding on anything biomass as it ran, and it would grow more segments, grow longer, forever. Until it died.

It had no weapons except momentum, weight, and sharp, nasty centipede legs. I did not want to get run over.

Dark-green, heavy armor, and many, many eyes at the front. Pincers, small mouth-hole. The proportions of its face were…squirmy. Just really, really squicky.

I backed up as it broke past the final tree. Its legs chainsawed the trunk and the leading edges of the second segment rammed through the ill wood. The tree gave up, and with a painful crack, snapped off to flip backwards and crash to the ground a few meters away.

Thirty-six missiles flashed to life all around me, and exactly twenty meters from the xenobotanical transport, they broke open like shells, revealing beautifully deadly flechettes made of a material beyond modern knowledge, driven by tiny alien engines that could accelerate a miniature piece of pointy stick beyond the supersonic in the time it took an electric pulse to cross from one synapse to the next.

Fast as lightning, dense metal darts pushed and compressed green flesh, and the sudden vacuum sucked superheated gasses through the seared holes in the meat. The fleshy tubes rebounded and clapped shut again just as the plasma began to expand and cool, pressing energized atoms back into each other until everything exploded spectacularly, mulching plant meat along the pinpricks, tearing and burning tunnels the width of several fists through the entire body of the beast.

But the Fourteen wasn't stopping.

It didn't even notice the mass it had lost, the holes in its body. A few of the legs were twitching, one of the segments just a little out of sync, but it wasn't slowing down.

Twenty meters away from me, a barrel with a bore thicker than my arm screamed damnation at the other Fourteen with a blast that rocked me, pushed against me like I'd run into a wall, and obscured everything around it with a curtain of kicked-up mud and mist, grass sheared from the ground, and clods of earth tumbling through the air.

That Fourteen…did not keep moving.

The kinetic energy of the shell had taken it from below, lifted its front segments off the floor, and did not give it the escape of merely passing through. It had sunk meters past the shattered armor, where finally the fuze burned down and the explosive load had cooked off, removing the second segment entirely. It crushed the head from behind, turned it into nothing but a bowl of pasted flesh until it popped clean off and sailed across the clearing like a grisly frisbee.

From the rearmost segment, the broken bodies of more Fives and Sixes spilled, and torn model Threes rained where they had been catapulted from the exploding Fourteen.

Well fucking alright, then. I knew what I had to do, now, didn't I?

I kept running, drawing my Fourteen in a circle, tossing grenades at it as I went.

The high-explosive ones didn't do anything, its armor too thick, but they did scrape off the little aliens clinging to its back.

The dimensional shunt ones did better, but they only managed to tear holes half a meter deep into it, removing a few legs and some of the armor.

But they couldn't kill it. We needed to get at its insides.

– Advice: If you keep removing armor, the fuze of the cannon's shell won't have enough hard material to trigger against. Obviously. –

Nurgh.

I looked to Leah, who was maneuvering a new shell into her cannon. The things were way heavy, but her cybernetic limbs at least let her use weird levering motions that didn't put harmful strain on her biological parts.

A slow process, but she was getting it done.

Couldn't exactly help her if I didn't want the Fourteen to trample all over the cannon, either.

So instead, I guided the thing in a circle that took it across the mouth of the gun, just in front of its dead brother.

The first time around, Leah wasn't ready yet, still wrestling the shell.

I kept running, confused when the Fourteen suddenly slowed down to what I'd call a brisk walk.

Tynea's warning voice spoke into my mind:

The units within the model Fourteen are beginning to unmount. These are likely Fives and Sixes. The mass of Threes and Fours is going to catch up and hit you in five seconds.

Ah, shit. My remaining missiles might not be enough against all of that, even if I had a lot of them.

Slightly out of breath, I panted, "Forty mils! Guided concussive!"

I grabbed the magazine out of the air, whacked it with my tail, and set up four trajectories at Fives that were turning towards Leah.

A mental check told me I had pre-built components for five hundred high explosive missiles ready to go.

Fuck it, as good a time to test their effectiveness as any.

I willed AI-I to use her superior time perception to set up a good mission plan for every last missile, and she got right on it, working with Tynea in the back of my mind. I sensed information flow back and forth, like half-seen thoughts and pictures that I remembered dreaming.

My HUD flashed green, the words 'STRIKE READY' lay across my vision, and I gave the go, even as I raised my rifle and began to take potshots of HSRP goodness at more Fives.

Smoke trails rose up around me thick and fast, hundreds, hundreds of rocket motors tainting the air so badly I reflexively kicked the shielding up to solidity…with plenty of smoke already inside.

So instead, coughing my heart out, I darted sideways, escaping the smoke as fast as I was creating it.

Fucking shit fucking Tynea fuck!

"Tyn—!" Couldn't get a word past the hacking coughs.

"Tynea!"

I'm very sorry. I shall change the composition of the fuel to something less…smokey. It'll increase the price per missile slightly, however.

"..."

Uncomfortable heavy scratching in the back of my throat with every breath decided it.

"Yeah, do it. I can make up the points if I'm actually able to shoot and kill Antithesis instead of running around trying to not die from smog."

After a solid ten seconds of continuous launching, I noted Leah swiveling the cannon at the slowing Fourteen, and the sky above us was filled with a carpet of glittering stars. It reminded me of those documentaries of clouds of tiny fireflies emerging in the evenings.

Seeing this vision, I kind of rather wished they hadn't gone extinct.

They were as pretty as they were deadly.

***