Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Twenty-Eight - What Newton’s Good For

“It’s only been twenty-four hours since the start of the world’s first global incursion, and already the signs that we were not as prepared as we could have been are showing. I’d like to take a moment to remember Buenos Aires. Those poor souls didn’t deserve to have a kaiju walk up to their shores this morning.”

-- Family wide communication, 2057

***

I knelt down to one knee as a chill wind whipped around me and hooked onto my jacket to throw it open. The area around the highway was cleared of any obstacles, no trees or forests or even much of a hillside to cut the wind. That wasn’t always going to be the case. There was a forest out ahead, with big old pines turning the sides of the roads into a dark pit where I couldn’t see anything mean lurking.

“Why are we moving so slowly?” I asked.

The mobile base truck we were on was moving at a zippy ten, maybe fifteen kilometres an hour. I was pretty sure I could outrun it with little difficulty.

Grasshopper turned her head around so that she could stare up at me. There was no way her neck was normal if she could turn her head that much. Her face mask split apart, the big globes over her eyes sliding back so that I could see her staring right into my eyes.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, right when I was about to break the silence, she spoke up. “Baby elephants,” she said before her head spun back around and her mask reset itself.

“What?”

Grasshopper sighed. “Baby, elephants.” She waited for another moment, then shook her head as if I was the dumb one here. “Herds with weaker members must move at the fastest pace of the slowest and weakest member so that the combined force of the entire herd can be brought to bear upon any aggressor.”

“Oh, right,” I said. We were moving slowly because some of the trucks behind us couldn’t keep up otherwise. That made sense. “Baby fucking elephants,” I muttered.

“I see one,” Grasshopper said. Then she started to dance.

It was one of the weirdest fucking things I’d ever seen, someone wearing armour that had far to many limbs on it, swaying from side to side like an excited puppy while laying flat on their stomach.

“So... shoot it?”

“Oh, yes, I will,” Grasshopper said. “Do you want to see? I like seeing the aliens die. It makes me happy.”

I looked out ahead. The forest was still a good kilometre away, maybe a bit more. I wasn’t a great judge of range. I couldn’t see anything alive over there, but then the scope on her rifle was longer than my forearm. “Sure?”

A ping to my augs later, and I had a small screen open in the edge of my vision. I had it grow larger.

It was the forest, but zoomed in. A single model four was climbing up a tree with some difficulty, the smaller branches not entirely strong enough to hold its weight, but it was making its way up the tree nonetheless.

Then the screen flickered and a dozen red outlines appeared, then a dozen more. Antithesis, a few hundred of them, if I had to guess, all scurrying about in the underbrush.

“Want me to leave some for you?” Grasshopper asked. She sounded almost shy about it.

“Nah, you go ahead,” I said. “I’m more of a spray and pray kind of gal, at this range I’m useless.”

“Okay then,” she said.

All along the length of her gun, the little tripods holding it up hissed, and the barrel shifted around with tiny, minute motions.

“There are many ways to kill,” Grasshopper said.

I was about to ask if that was a question when her gun barked. The sound made my teeth rattle, and I swore the mobile base shook a bit with the recoil.

In the screen occupying my vision, three of the antithesis that happened to be lined up disappeared.

“The most ancient, and most effective,” Grasshopper continued. “Is the meeting of two opposing objects. Upon meeting, these two opposing objects will exert a force against each other. Newton’s Second Law.”

She fired again, and this time two aliens were wiped out. The antithesis were starting to catch on that they were under attack and were moving around in what almost looked like panic.

A large model five shifted, then started charging out of the forest in our direction. All the little model threes started to group up behind it.

“Newton’s Second law states that force is what is required to change the velocity of an object. By exerting sufficient force onto an object, then allowing that object to impact another, that force can, in part, be translated to the second object. This object is what I designate as the target.”

She fired again and the model five’s upper half was turned into a gaping hole big enough that I could have crawled through it. The bits of its body flying out the back brained a few of the model threes behind it too.

“Time for a pop quiz!” Grasshopper said. She flicked something on the side of her gun, then shifted left and right almost mechanically. “Pop, pop, pop!”

Every “pop” came with a much weaker bark from her gun, and in the distance a pair of aliens died with a bang each. She never fired unless there were at least two of them lined up.

”Do you like math?”

“What?” I asked. “Uh, math? Not really, no.”

“Oh,” Grasshopper said. I couldn’t hear any judgement there. She fired a few more times, thinning out the herd. “I like math. Numbers are non judgemental. I like violence too, but there’s a certain level of societal stigma around the application of great and sudden violence. But math? No one minds if you like math. Oh! I like animals too.”

“Bugs too, I bet,” I said.

She stopped firing. “How did you know that?” she asked.

“Your... name is Grasshopper?”

“That tracks,” she replied before she continued to kill off the aliens. “At this current rate, this group will be dead two hundred metres before reaching the front of the caravan. Problem. There’s a second group coming in from the south, and a third moving in from the forest to the west. My speciality will allow me to remove any of the larger threats with little issue, but I’m not good at swarms.”

I glanced to our left, then squinted. There was definitely something moving in the field that way, the grass was shifting a lot as what looked like a small wave spread out to hit the entire caravan. They were a good way out still, though.

The other forest she was talking about was across the street from the one she’d been sniping antithesis from.

I stood up, careful to compensate for the wind and the slight rocking motion of the mobile base underfoot. Glancing back, I took in the convoy as a whole. It was too damned big to cover from one place. Sure, there were some trucks with guns on them, and the mobile base itself was bristling with guns, but I couldn’t imagine the convoy holding out once the aliens were waving through it.

“Okay, here’s the plan. It’s a shit plan, so feel free to interject with better ideas, alright?”

Grasshopper stopped firing, moved back and up onto her knees, then kneeled there with her hands on her lap and head tilted up to look at me. “I’m listening.”

“Uh. Yeah, I’m going to drop a few catbots around here. They’re mecha cats, they have guns, so... yeah. Then I’m gonna place some cheap laser turrets onto the roofs of a few of the trucks back there. And once that’s done, I’m going to fly over the bigger pockets of the wave and drop bombs on it.”

“Are the mecha cats warm and huggable?”

“No,” I said.

“That seems like a terrible waste of points. But I won’t tell you how to live. I can work around your plan. I’ll keep removing the greatest threats as they appear.”

“Cool, you do that. Keep your coms open. You can ping me if something comes up.” I glanced at my map while my hoverbike lowered itself down to my level. We were still a long way from the city, and at the speed we were moving, it would take us a while to get to the outskirts.

The area around the city was still mostly green though. We were only going to have to defend the convoy for most of the way there, which was brilliant.

We were about to dip into an entire zone that was nothing but orange and red though. A few kilometres of antithesis infested hell that we’d need to cross with nothing but two samurai and a few bottom-of-the-barrel defences.

The more I looked at the situation, the uglier it looked.

My hoverbike came down and I leapt up onto it. “Okay, see you around, Grasshopper. Call me if you need me.”

“Good luck, Stray Cat,” was her reply. “Show these aliens what Newton’s good for.”

***