Chapter Eighty-Two - Xenocide Act VI; The Raptor's Dance

"Blackened blood swirled by passing winds, my left blade shimmers in the silvery moonlight and takes another head.

Arcs of nigh-invisible death mark the swing of my right blade, as it reaps alien pests unwelcome to my eyes."

– Klingentanz, a German samurai popular for her grace in combat

 

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My left foot glides forward and my hips follow, until the toes of my right foot barely touch the ground, leg extended.

A long swipe leads into a stab lead by my right hand, and the spear, propelled at the rear with my left, lunges forward, as does my right foot.

A clenching thought sets the anchor, and a virtual muscle revs the rocket motors so that the spear hangs next to me, flat in the air, just above hip-height, angled away at the rear.

My right hand pushes down on its shaft and my feet leave the ground and rise high behind me, even as my chest slides forward, supported by my right arm. Another mental directive sends the javelin's distant blade slewing below me, pushing against my left hand, pushing me just a little higher.

For just an instant I settle there, suspended on a rising arc, my torso pushing down on the spear through my right arm, my feet hitting the apex just a little higher than my head.

Then my hips rotate as I cross my legs at the ankles with pointed toes, and my right hand clutches the spear close to its tip at my breast. 

The left hand extends past my hip and angles the rear engines outward, fingers tight around the far handle.

As my feet begin to drop, the haft between my hands nearly doubles in girth and the javelin contracts in a flash to place the engines near my hands.

– Engaging. –

AI-I lets the far motors blast to feed the falling backward rotation, and I brace against the spear as it sends me spinning in a diagonal whirl around my center of mass just below my navel. My tail counter-rotates with the weight of the plasma torch and Sentinel at its end, aiding the motion with little twists and kinks along the way.

With a grin I wrestle my legs to follow the spear's rear tip as it extends again, and by the time I am upside-down vertical, I finish aligning myself along its length with my ankles wrapping around the shaft and my right hand shoving the front blade towards the ground.

I sense the anchor's mass at its original location three meters away, the tether charged with the distance I built during the aerial maneuver.

Next to the edge of the blade lies the shredded corpse of a Five, and with an imagined twitch, I recall the stored mass and energy.

The handles vibrate in my hands as the load collides with the tang of the front blade and shoves the tip sideways into the alien body, even as the rocket engines above my feet ram their exhaust against the humid air and force my entire body to shift right along.

The Five offers no resistance as the monomolecular edge of the crystalline blade scythes right through, and the forward-facing motors ignite to keep me airborne.

A fast pulse of opposite thrusters inverts my position again, and I land amidst the floating glitter of the discarded crystal layer.

…

Metal striking against metal tore me from my immersion, and I spun around to see Leah leaning against her pod with an impressed moue on her face, clapping with her prosthetic hands.

"I won't lie, Tinea, I thought guns were your thing. Where'd that come from?", she asked, waving vaguely at me.

Giggling, I replied, "Guns are most certainly my thing. I used javelins back in my first fight, but mostly as bomb delivery devices. Didn't know how to use them as, you know, javelins. Complete failure at straight tossing."

"Oh? How'd you become so adept then?"

"Dream learning, like I got for the flying. I've been thinking about getting more lessons for my silk weaving, actually." I waved my spinneret around. "There's gotta be more useful stuff to do with this."

Leah tilted her head, curiosity playing across her face.

"What's that learning stuff like? I'm gonna have to learn how to pilot the tank, too."

"Um… Ever had a dream where you were aware you were dreaming?"

"A lucid dream?"

"Yeah!"

"Sure."

"Right, so it's kinda like a mix of a lucid dream, and a Dive. You can control the dream like a simulation during a Dive, but it feels as real as any dream."

I paused and thought a little about how the dreams differed from the full-body virtual reality technology of a Dive, which also happened to be based on alien tech and had been sold to Earth corporations by some of the earliest samurai.

"The physics are more immediate, none of it seems missing, there's no fake sensations to fool your brain into thinking it's real—it just is. Well, there are no other people around, I guess."

There are options for shared dreaming, or even connection to the internet. They're not suggested for learning as efficiency unfortunately tends to suffer with more people involved, but it can be done.

Dream together, huh? I could think of a few fun things to do…

"Anyway, I bought dream training for spears, and," I grinned brightly, "I just got to try it out for the first time. It's fun."

Leah laughed and said, "I saw that. Very acrobatic." She tilted her head the other way. "Do you figure it's gonna be useful in combat?"

"Um…" I blew up my cheeks. "I'd need a lot more points invested into it, to be honest. It won't be useless exactly, but compared to my missiles or guided bullets and grenades… I'd probably need a spear worth a thousand points to reach the same efficacy, and that's only 'cause I've already invested ten thousand into my body."

"I see. Why the spear, then?"

I smiled at her, and the metal in my hands flowed to shift the handle up to roughly a third from the top, and six slots of various sizes opened up. Two beyond the handle, and four below it. "Because it can also carry bombs. It's basically my version of your cannon."

"Oh, so it's like a bomber drone?"

"Kind of? It doesn't have any cameras or anything, but I can use other drones to guide it."

There are sensor pods you could slot into the bays. They're often scattered around an area to build a more permanent spy net.

"Or that, I guess. Anyway." I hefted the Raptor's Dance. "It's a good melee weapon, but it actually does a lot more than that for me."

You could also choose to upgrade your esoteric explosives to Class II, if you wished to take full advantage of the javelin.

"I'll do that if I need it. There's plenty of interesting upgrades and I don't have a lot of tokens, do I?"

Only the one, I'm afraid.

"Right. We'll use it when we actually need it."

Understood.

"Alright…" I looked around myself. "Yeah, just the lure to pack away, now. Also, I figure we just dispose of the quads. You've got your pod, and I've got my legs. Do you want to keep that sledgehammer?" I pointed at the thing dangling from one of the robotic arms attached to the underside of the pod's stowage.

Leah shook her head. "Nah. Get rid of it. Can't see a use for it, it wasn't expensive, was it?"

"No, just a point. It's a nice hammer, I guess." I said, chuckling, thinking of the things samurai often sold to turn points into money.

"Twenty-five thousand credits, huh?" The same math clearly turned the gears behind Leah's eyes.

"Yep."

"Trash it." Leah ordered.

"Aye-aye, ma'am!" I saluted with a cheeky grin and started to walk past Leah, only to bounce when Leah swatted my bum.

I smirked smugly after continuing past her. Yes, girl, I saw your eyes wander to the jiggle. Sooner or later, I'll have my fun with you. Promise.

The pod let me grab the hammer, and I moved to the two ATVs to place it in the storage compartment beneath the seat of one.

After a quick check all around, I moved them a few steps away from the lure, and Tynea teleported them away.

 

Cost	x	Item
5	2	Garbage Disposal
10		Total
3083		Combined Remaining Points

 

"Alright, thanks Tynea. Now's just the lure left, and…"

May I suggest that you reinstate the emergency funds again? Possibly even adjusted to your improved resources. There are also several dozen Antithesis fragments within six hundred meters large enough to spawn new nests.

"Yeah, those are what I got the nanite tank for. Take care of them please."

I had my bionites, which had proven quite effective, and I'd be able to share them more easily with Leah. Still, particularly grievous injuries might require particularly expensive treatments…

Hmm. I wasn't sure an emergency fund of just a few hundred would be of any help for that kind of thing.

But it'd still be smart to have a smaller fund for Leah—or actually, "Leah?"

"Yeah?"

"Have you considered getting some sort of permanent medical nanite factory installed? Or even bionites, like mine?"

"Yeah! But since I'm gonna be inside the pod, I figure that's a little bit of a luxury right now. I'll wait until we have Daddy Long-Legs."

Uh…

"Daddy Long-Legs?"

She giggled. "The scout tank I'm going to buy for ten-k."

"And… I'm guessing it has very long legs?"

"Yup. Hella long legs. You'll see."

"I guess I will, huh? No spoilers?" I made puppy dog eyes at Leah, until she laughed and shook a finger at me.

"Nope. No spoilers, you'll have to wait like a good little girl."

"Fiiine. Meany."

I would have to practice my puppy dog eyes. Kitty cat eyes?

I think those were something different.

I'd have to practice those too, yes.

"Anyway. Emergency funds. I got my bionites, and I can share them with you, but I figure we should put five hundred aside for medical stuff and ammunition anyway."

"Okay. Five hundred. Each or combined?"

"Combined, at least for now."

At Leah's nod, I saw the counter drop to 2583, and it turned green again.

Alright… Almost done.

After grabbing and stowing the lure, I let Tynea launch the missiles. She'd queued up fifty of them, several being the new Long Hands, which could carry variable payloads up to several kilometers away with their much increased fuel capacity, unlike the shorter Carrier version.

I jogged a circle around the clearing, partly to burn down the nearby corpses by spraying a mixture of napalm and oxygen from the plug-tanks past the igniting flame of my cutting torch, and partly to stay out of the stinky exhaust from the cheapo kerosene, and watched a variety of drone feeds to see the deliveries across every battlefield we'd created so far.

The loads were large enough that they could consume all the organic matter in circles roughly ten meters across, and Tynea had placed each impact such that the nanites would destroy entire clusters of bodies where the payloads from bullets and grenades weren't enough.

I came to a stop next to Leah, and put my hands on my hips, glancing across the cratered glade.

"Well, I'd say we're done here. On to the mobile hives? And then the facility, after which we'll let Tynea stuff all her drones into those caves and call orbitals on the underground nest there."

"Yup." She gave me a thumbs-up.

There should be two model Twenty-Two. I'm 99.94% certain that the third large grouping did not gain members unseen.

"Hmmm…" Leah let the sound draw out, her voice rising a little at the end. "Do you think we should split up for these guys? We're quite a lot more deadly than even just six hours ago."

"Uh. Maybe? Tynea?"

Either of you could deliver the damage required for a kill, and you've both got good protection. You will be facing mostly single digit models, as the Twenty-Two is simply too slow to be dangerous to mobile combatants. As such, splitting up would be the faster strategy, with no, or nearly no, increase in danger.

"I guess that's that, then? We split up. Oh, do we lose the ten percent bonus, though?"

Yes, though you will also finish twice as fast.

And Leah was getting antsy to go home. Fair enough.

I caught her eye and asked, "How fast does your pod go?"

"Well, Ypsi says it'll go about twice as fast as the quads, but the cannon will complicate travel between the trees. I'm gonna drop it off somewhere it can ambush the Twenty-Two once I've drawn it out. I suspect I'll mostly go as fast as we did getting here, 'cause I need to maneuver the thing."

"Alright." I studied our map, thinking about how we might best approach the situation. "So, there's one thing I think we should keep in mind. The underground hive built Fourteens, and possibly these Twenty-Twos, since we don't know where they came from. That means there might be other double digits waiting somewhere Tynea hasn't been able to see them yet."

"Right."

"I really think it'd be best if you don't risk leaving your pod for anything. Not until we're back together, at least. Like, not even to pee."

"They've got sensitive noses, yeah. Sure."

"Yeah. So, since I'm faster, I'll take the further one?" The first model Twenty-Two was about fifteen hundred meters away, and the second one two thousand. I could probably run faster than Leah's pod even if it weren't weighed down by the cannon.

"Sounds good."

Leah looked at me. Silence fell, and for once it was awkward.

Splitting up… That wasn't something we did anymore. It took only two or three days of being together, but somehow, the mere thought of it scratched my heart with anxiety.

Urgh. I bit my lip.

I went over to Leah and buried my face in her chest and squeezed her hard enough to almost bruise.

I could feel my tension mirrored in her muscles as she hugged me back, and yeah, she actually shook slightly.

Was this…too early?

Maybe we should stick together after all.

Should we? Was this, like, an important moment to practice independence?

Fuck. 

 

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