Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Twenty-Six - Breach, Load, Charge

“Plans never survive first contact with the enemy.

If that’s true, then the best trick is to have no plan at all.”

--Longbow, about the Navajo Nation Incursion 2051

***

“Shit,” Jolly Monarch said.

I don’t like putting people into little boxes, but I’m human, so sue me. The little box I put Jolly Monarch in didn’t include suddenly swearing aloud.

I snapped my head around towards the older samurai. “What?” I asked.

He glanced off to his right somewhere. “We have a breach. I’ve got two pawns working on it, but I think they might be outnumbered in the next few minutes.”

“Did the wave split off?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Another smaller group, maybe. They’re pouring out of a drainage ditch on the other side of our barricade. That’s closer to the civilians than I’d like.”

I stood up, glanced down the highway and at all the carnage there, then started heading back. “Gimme your video feed, I bet Myalis can set the bombs off without me here. I’ll go kill the xenos and plug the hole.”

“Thank you,” he said. He snapped his fingers, and I flinched as a drone burst into existence next to him. It was either moving really fast, or it had teleported in. Either way, it caused a burst of air to wash off of it as it appeared. “My knight will escort you. Come back quickly if you can.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

The knight drone buzzed out ahead of me, floating on three disks that hummed as they cut through the air. Other than the three disks, the drone looked like a teardrop, longer than I was tall, and nearly as bulky on the big end. No visible guns, or anything else really, just a smooth white material with a marble-ish finish to it.

It looked expensive though, and had lots of glowy bits, so I imagined it was a pretty good weapons platform.

I jogged after it with the occasional glance back to the road where the bulk of the fighting was going down. “Myalis, will you be able to take care of the bombs?”

I’ve contacted Jolly Monarch’s AI already. I am piggybacking over his pawn drone sensors. There won’t be any issues when it comes to well-timed detonations.

“Cool,” I said. “Those drones worth anything? They don’t look that fancy.”

They are versatile. More so than any drone you’ve purchased before. Destroying one would be a hassle, even for higher-tiered antithesis, and they can self-repair. Some of his pawn drones have been active for multiple years.

That was actually kind of impressive. I didn’t know how long my own gear would last, not with the number of explosions going on in close proximity to me, or the number of monsters trying to eat me, or people shooting at me. I figured that most samurai switched gear out pretty regularly.

The knight drone sped down the highway leading deeper into the city, then around a curving off-ramp that dipped lower than the road and closer to the homes and businesses we were protecting.

There were plenty of vans and cars parked along the road here, with volunteers milling around them with the tense posture of people expecting to get swarmed by monsters at any moment. Three quarters of them were armed, but I wasn’t sure how long they’d endure in front of a proper wave of antithesis without cover.

I noticed a few of those same volunteers running just down the road, and the crack-pop of gunfire told me that we were getting closer to wherever the xenos had broken through.

I took in the scene as I rounded a curve.

The road turned to the left, leading deeper into the city. On one side was one of those sound-blocking walls, on the other, a small patch of scraggly greenery leading up to the road with a pipe jutting out of the hillside over a muddy ditch.

The metal grating at the end of the pipe was torn off, and half a dozen antithesis littered the ground around it.

Even as we arrived, another jumped out of the pipe, landed on the corpse of one of its pals, then got filled with lead as a pawn drone and a couple of civilians fired at it.

“What’s the plan?” I asked as I got closer.

No one answered, and I realised that the person in charge of figuring out a plan in this case was me.

“Fuck.”

This was going to be a problem. I could get Myalis to find a map of the pipe network. It was a storm drain, it wasn’t going to be as complex as the sewers in New Montreal. Still, scouring the entire thing for aliens would take a while, and during that time, the antithesis would be able to exit from anywhere in the city.

We were stopping one wave, sure, but this was going to get right past our little barricade, and it only took a dozen model threes to wreck someone’s afternoon.

I nodded. “Myalis, I need to get in touch with someone from the family. Can you send a ping to Laserjack?”

Sent.

“Cool, thanks,” I said as I shouldered my bullcat and walked over to the pipe. The interior was dark, but I had weird echolocation ears and they did some bullshit that let me ‘see’ into the dark by listening to it. My cybernetic eye had low-light vision, but that wasn’t as cool.

It was enough that I knew to pull the trigger a moment before a model four reached out for me with a pair of tentacles.

I stepped to the side as one of those tentacles flopped to the ground, then fired into the pipe twice more to make a point.

“I need to fuck up all the aliens in there,” I muttered. “Without destroying the entire damned thing... Myalis, can I get an extra large nanite bomb? Something a bit faster-acting?”

Certainly. You’re gaining points at a decent rate at the moment, you should be able to afford many such explosives.

“Nice,” I said. “We’ll need something to seal the tunnel too.”

An expanding foam? It’s nonlethal to the antithesis, but it will prevent them from breaking out.

I nodded. “That’ll do it,” I said.

Myalis summoned a large cylindrical bomb, with some 80s movies glowing liquid inside them and a large display on one side with a timer. The nanite bomb, I figured.

The knight drone hovered behind me and parts of its surface slid open to disgorge some spotlights which lit up the inside of the pipe.

Then my shoulder-mounted railguns fired and took out the aliens lurking in the dark.

I climbed up into the pipe and walked in, bomb in one hand, shotgun in the other, with the strap acting as a third point of contact. Walking in a ways, I paused next to the first intersection, kicked aside a model three’s corpse, then placed the bomb down and set the timer to a minute thirty.

“Easy as operating a microwave, these things,” I said. I pressed start, then waddled my way out of the pipe.

Myalis summoned a small, round grenade. I pulled the pin and rolled it in until it bumped against the body of the tentacle monster bleeding a few metres in.

Laserjack called me just as the grenade went off and the pipe started to fill with off-white goop that expanded up and out. “Stray Cat?” he asked.

“Hey, Laserjack,” I said as I started back to the road. The muddy ground made it kind of tricky, and I didn’t want to faceplant in front of a bunch of strangers. A few of them had to be filming, because if you weren’t filming something that could kill you, then were you even human? “I’m over next to Jolly Monarch, we’re defending some shithole little city, but we’ve got antithesis pouring around our blockade through the storm drains.”

“I see. That sounds unfortunately plausible. They can be like rats,” he said.

“Yeah, that tracks. Look, I just dropped a nanite bomb into the storm drain, and I’m going to bully some volunteers into plugging all the exits with these goop grenades, but that probably won’t stop all of the xenos. There’s a fuckload of houses here, and they look occupied.”

“You want the area evacuated?” he asked.

“Don’t know if I have the authority to tell normal folk to leave their homes,” I said.

“You’re still new. You’ll discover that no one has more authority than a samurai running away from something.”

I frowned. “Don’t like the implication that I’m running from something, but I get what you mean. Look, can the Family or whatever get this area evacuated before the locals get turned into fertiliser?”

“We’re on it already. Can you keep the antithesis out of the city for another few hours?”

I paused as an incursion siren went off, a loud, undulating wail that was impossible to ignore. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do what I can. I got a lot of points to make up for, and there doesn’t seem to be a lack of willing targets around here.”

***