Chapter Fifty-Five - Xenocide Act I; Preparation

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Wings…

Later. Don’t count your chicken nuggets before they’re served.

Big battle ahead of us. Hmm.

We’d want to prepare first.

“Tynea, do you need more drones, at this point? I’d prefer to focus on gear that we’ll actually keep as much as possible.”

“We’re controlling one hundred and twenty-eight drones. I would prefer to have another eighty, but they’re not absolutely necessary. Ypsilon and I should be able to locate the nest with the current number, but we cannot promise that we will find all of it.”

I sat back on the quad, thinking about it. We had three hundred and forty-two points. Leah at the very least would need to stay mobile, so she’d need a turret for her ATV, with a gun. I could move faster on my feet, just not for very long. Yeah, I’d make sure to engage in a calm and controlled manner, get the most out of my metabolism.

Okay. “Leah?”

“Yeah?”

“Wanna gear up? Turret for your ATV.”

“And you?”

“Ah, I’ll be fine a little longer. I’m going to use my body’s strength for this battle, not the ATV, so I don’t need a turret. I’m fast enough, after all. Although, I probably can’t really run interference for you this time. No leading aliens on a chase. I’ll just fight to kill, straight-up.”

She tilted her head at that, but nodded anyway. “So you wanna make it a running battle, with me on my ATV, too?”

“Yeah. And you’ll need a turret for that, right? Not a good idea to try and drive one-handed in the forest, I think.” I said wryly.

She grinned. “But why? I’m sure nothing will go wrong.”

Leah got off her quad to my chuckling, and studied the rack. Then she looked at me and said, “Give me a couple minutes, I have some ideas I want to check out.”

“Mhm. How many points are you planning to use for this?”

“Well, almost all of them? I’ll try to leave twenty for emergencies, but it is going to be expensive.”

Yeah. Couldn’t really help that. Automated turret, plus weapon? And it had to be light enough not to hinder the ATV…

“Alright. I think it’s okay to use all the points if you have to. We can just get a few easy kills before we really engage the big horde to rebuild the buffer.”

She nodded at me, and I left her to her thoughts, as I turned to my own vehicle.

I would take this first battle on foot, and maybe the ones after, too. But with my limited capacity, that wasn’t going to last. I’d need to travel eventually, and fight from the ATV, too. Which meant I needed a turret myself.

Or did I? Leah only had two arms, but I had a tail, too. Hmm. No reason not to put weapons on it, right? And actually, no reason not to also have turrets. Yeah.

If I was going to have a turret behind me, it would have to be designed in a way to accommodate my tail. Maybe smaller turrets to the side instead, leaving the space immediately behind my back free entirely?

I hated the idea of not being able to carry any baggage ever, because I didn’t want my tail to be obstructed. Better to learn to deal with it and figure out what to do with the tail if things were tight…

Focus. That doesn’t matter right now. And combat’s different from free travel. And the ATV’s temporary anyway.

Okay. Weapon on my tail first, something that I can both manually aim, but also something that can shoot at stuff behind me when I’m busy with other stuff, like driving a quad bike.

More than one weapon, even, my tail was pretty long after all, and strong. The biggest issue would be my light weight. I’d have to be careful not to unbalance myself…

Right, I’d solve the issue with the turrets once I got a feel for how tail weapons worked. That made the most sense.

A glance told me that Leah was still busy deliberating.

Hmm, what else did we need? Ammo? I still had twenty rounds of the twenty mil, and a fresh reload of the darts. Leah…also had nearly a magazine left over. We’d make enough points with those for more ammunition, so she could use them up right now, if she needed to.

“Tin-Tin!” Ah, was she done?

The, what did she call it? Cozyname? What a cute idea, seriously! Anyway, it ushered a smile onto my lips and joy into my heart, as I turned to her. A happiness I saw mirrored on her face when she noticed.

“What’s up?” I said, beaming at her. There was that soft look in her eyes again, and this time, she initiated the hug, which of course, I had to squeeze her for.

She sent me a ping with her aug, a message that included three display models. It was an attachment for her ATV that looked like a…rollbar? It actually was a rollbar, one that reached a little higher than her head, and was fixed to the quad in multiple places.

But unlike a mere rollbar, this one had rails attached underneath where they’d take no damage during an actual rollover, and also didn’t get in the way of any fleshy bits.

The second showed the turret, how it attached to the rail system that would allow it to travel wherever it had the best firing lines from, even frontwards if it stationed itself above her head. It wasn’t very large, in fact, I thought she could easily have three of these on her ATV, depending on the size of the weapons.

Speaking of which, the third file contained multiple models. Weapons all, the cheapest of which was marked as the actual purchase. It followed the Warforge aesthetics, but notably, it had several unoccupied slots all over it. The other models appeared to be…upgrades of this base model? From those, It looked like some of those slots on the base model would accept an additional barrel, probably sensors, some kind of launch-battery? A swarm of micro-missiles, or something similar?

The base model about matched the size of the turret, and it looked like it could be used like a normal firearm, too. It, and its upgrades, were all kinetics, probably to take advantage of my catalog, and it looked like all of them even had variable smoothbore barrels similar to the one mounted to her main weapon.

Hmm. Couldn’t she just give that one to the turret? 

Ah, no. The turret didn’t have the right grip, and the weapon didn’t have that threaded slot the other models showed… Bigger turret with a human-hand-style grabber, maybe, if she could save points on the weapon?

Oh! The turret’s base was actually two parts! The arm itself terminated in the same connector as her robotic arm! Oooh. Leah was planning ahead, wasn’t she? If we ditched the ATV, she’d already have a replacement for the crappy Class 0 arm. More than one, even, with a better harness.

Ah, yes, that grippy base held onto the rail…carriage? It also had several smaller arms that folded themselves into the sides of the main arm. These would probably reload the installed weapon. Okay, that made sense.

I gave Leah a Leah-style thumbs-up and said, “I like it! Looks solid.”

Her lips curled in satisfaction, and she confirmed the purchase.

 

Cost	x	Item
30	1	Class 0 Rollcage, customized
145	1	Class I ‘Patron’ Warforge Technologies Modular Autonomous Emplacement, magazine-based kinetic
90	1	Class I Mark II ‘Hatred’ Warforged Modular Smoothbore, base
35	1	Class I Mark II ‘Wrath’ Warforge Technologies Sensorium Module
20	1	13mm High Explosive Cartridges, Magazine of 200
302		Total
22		Combined Remaining Points

 

“Done.” She turned to her ATV and watched as Ypsi warped the rollcage directly onto the ATV.

Leah gave it a few solid jerks to make sure it was properly fastened, and waited for three items to appear on its rack. The first was the rail carriage thing, which grabbed onto the rail by itself as soon as she held it close enough, and took a trip around the cage to calibrate itself to its travel limits.

The second item was the arm, and she lifted it to the rig on the rail and let it attach itself, where it settled itself in a folded-away position.

That left the weapon, with a module already installed. It was a scope with some extra camera lenses and other stuff to see with, the whole thing decorated with golden filigree and white highlights that, you guessed it, exuded white mist.

The turret automatically engaged itself with the weapon via that threaded slot I’d seen in the models, while two of the smaller hands worked in concert to unload and reslot the magazine, presumably to test function and calibration.

And then everything was still. Leah turned to me, hands on her hip, and said, “Ready!”

“Neat! let’s go try it out, then!”

Ten minutes later, we came to a stop some one hundred meters away from the mass of Antithesis that Tynea had described. She’d been collecting more video data on them along the way and was evaluating it in real time.

Multiple facts stood out:

One, they’d heard us coming, and even knew where we were. So far, the big uglies were keeping the little uglies tightly grouped around themselves, but every few seconds, a model One would dive-bomb us, or a model Three would try to jump us, only for Leah’s turret to shred them in split-seconds. It had taken up position at the top of the roll bar, and swiveled wherever the sensors of the weapon picked out a target.

Two, there were an awful lot of Fives. Those nasty, toxic, quilled fiends. They were the most directly dangerous Antithesis present, and there were nineteen of them.

Three, there were twelve Sixes, and they were being pretty loud for Antithesis. I was able to hear them from twice our current distance, which told me that they were corralling all nearby Antithesis to themselves and the reason for the mass gatherings. I suspected I’d find similar at the other locations. They might not be the most dangerous here individually, but they were controlling the smaller units, which served to make those deadlier.

Four, points! We hadn’t even begun the fight yet, already were we racking up the points.

Well, okay. A Three every ten seconds does stack up, but it isn’t amazing either. Still, we were buying frag grenades, assuming that they’d be more efficient weapons on the move than trying to hit anything with our guns. Leah had her turret take care of her weapon, but I’d have to stop-and-go to use mine.

I also had both of us stock up on extra magazines for the active-reactive defenses in preparation for the Fives.

Leah asked, “Do we want to prioritize the quill-throwing bastards? Pump them full of twenty mil before they can make themselves our problem.”

I nodded decisively. “Yeah, I’m going to go for them with my opening shots…if we’re the ones taking them, anyway. Might be a little, uh, hard to sneak up on nearly two hundred Antithesis…”

Actually…

“Hey Leah, do you want to wait here, maybe? I can probably dash in really fast, take a few of the big ones out, and run back here with the horde in tow. If you wait, ready to move, you could kind of grab their attention and just drop grenades as you let them chase you. I’d split off, try to make them lose sight of me in the trees, and then hit the big ones again from the side. Rinse-repeat, until either I run out of breath and get on my own ATV to join you, or we kill all the Fives and Sixes. In which case I’ll also use my ATV, I think.”

“Sounds like a plan. Wanna station your ATV further away, then? Somewhere it won’t actually be buried in the horde.”

“Right. I’ll be a few minutes, then.”

She waved with a smile, and I kicked off, back towards where we came from and a little sideways. I heard the occasional gunshots from Leah’s direction as she continued to kill Ones and Threes, and hurried along until I found a nice little hill with a tight copse of trees, between which the tan quad mostly disappeared from view.

From there, I hotfooted it past Leah, whom I gave a high-five as I ran by, and dashed another hundred or so meters. I stopped just before I got line of sight on the aliens, to let my skin and hair adapt to the colors around me, making me harder to spot. Then I carefully slunk another meter forward, and got a direct view of the mass of aliens.

This close, the constant drone of the Sixes was getting a little exhausting. They weren’t varying their pitch at all, and I assumed that I was hearing an unchanging summons, as evidenced by the squads and single units constantly trickling in to join the larger congregation.

And there, quills a wetly shimmering green, were the Fives. Ugly armored monstrosities covered in neurotoxin, so much of it and so concentrated it was pricking at my antennae from a hundred meters away.

A kind of sick hatred rose in me at the sight of them.

Oh, mere twenty mil murder wasn’t going to do it for them, or for me, no no.

I wanted something real nasty. Something even bigger.

 

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