Chapter Fifty-Four - Rider’s High

“I think there’s two different kinds of samurai. You know, there’s those that decide the fight’s not for them, and they retire. Or maybe they’re the ones that clean up after an incursion. But anyway, they, you know, live mostly normal lives.

Then there’s the rest of us. We’ve all got a few screws loose. Adrenaline junkies, benign sociopaths, idiots drunk on violence, all kinds of ‘paths barely on the right side of doing wrong, with that strange mix of respect for accountability, and complete and utter chaos. Well, or other weird stuff, like compulsive behaviors.

We might be a lil’ bit prone to certain kinds of addictions, I guess. Not so much the drugs, though that does happen. More the extreme sports, or violence, kinda deal.”

– Helljump, third generation Vanguard

 

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Leah returned my grin, and hopped onto her own bike, hitting the ignition and revving her engine in lieu of an answer.

The duet of throaty growls plucked at my sensilla, dumping feel-happy chemicals in my brain, and I barely stopped myself from just haring off in a random direction.

Impatience wiggled through me as I sent a mental question to Tynea. “Which way?”

An arrow pointing roughly north appeared at the top of my HUD, and I launched a new mental tab to plot the path for my quad. I connected Tynea to it, and she highlighted it in different shades of colors. Green where the ground was flat, red where it looked like I might lose traction, orange in between.

One hundred eighty meters to the first group of Antithesis. Twelve Threes, two Fours.

A distance meter measuring…meters… A meter-meter! It set itself to ‘180m’, next to the arrow.

Leah’s voice added itself to the call. “Ready to roll?”

A thrill shivered in my belly, and I yelled “Let’s go!” at her.

I let the engine howl to the sound of Leah’s laughter, and leaned heavily into the corner as I gunned it hard enough to break traction on the rear wheels, forcing the ATV to snap in the direction of the arrow.

My rifle swung around with the motion, and its stock almost slapped me in the face. Hurriedly I just glued it solidly to my back, barely taking the time to make sure I could reach everything with my tail to undo the glue easily.

Hands back on the bar, I rushed past Leah, heading for a break in the trees and noticed two drones hovering above head height with a few more further in, streaming data to my cerebral augment, which constantly updated the pathing, adding danger signs, giving my training maximum grip on the situation, like a co-driver reading me pace notes, but better, faster.

Every second that passed as I rode let me get to know the bike better, adding nuance to my understanding of it, let me exploit its characteristics.

The handlebar shuddered beneath my grip as my right wheels bounced up and off a knot of roots, and again as my left wheels echoed them a split second later against a small boulder. The momentum whipped me left to right, and the right front wheel bit hard past the mud into solid ground, violently slewing the vehicles to the left as I scraped past a tree, only for me to ram the other tires into the ground to dodge the next.

I slung dirt everywhere with abandon as I wrestled and grappled the quad along the course set by Tynea, heedless of the noise I was making or even whether Leah was keeping up.

Four wheels ground down the bark of fallen trees as I climbed them, ramping off over and over, wherever my control-conditioning took me to.

After what felt like seconds, and must’ve been even less, I arrived at the limits of a field of storm damage, with lots of felled trees. The sight of dozens of sickly trees all ripped from the ground and laid out flat in the same direction arrested my attention and calmed me down a little, forcing the high to recede a smidge.

Tinea, it would be good to stop here. The Antithesis did hear you coming, and will be in range in thirty seconds. Leah will catch up to you momentarily.

I could hear her bike motoring through mud and across breaking foliage not far behind me, and I caught easy glimpses of her form between the trees. She didn’t drive as recklessly as I had, but I could tell she knew how to handle her bike just fine. She used her weight where I had used my strength, and always selected a path that set her up for the next maneuver.

A discrete alarm ping against my mind accompanied Tynea’s voice, as she warned me of the incoming aliens again.

I unslung my rifle and checked it over and readied for the plant monsters just as Leah arrived and hopped off her bike to join me. The drones that had accompanied us zipped off ahead to provide visuals in a bigger area. Tynea created a new minimap for me, with the positions of ourselves, the Antithesis, and their scouts highlighted.

Ten Threes with two Fours, and another eight Threes separated from the group in all directions.

I grinned at not having to be quiet anymore.

“Leah! Welcome to the front lines. Is your muffler turned off?”

“Yep. By the way, you forgot these.”

In her hands were two fuzzy ovals. Crap. My ear protectors. I facepalmed.

“Uh, thanks.” I said, giving Leah a grateful look, who just smiled and bumped my shoulder.

Ten Seconds.

I hurriedly let the muffs attach over my ears and shook my head to make sure they sat properly. Wonder how they stuck to my skin? Didn’t feel like glue, nor did they use any vacuum. That would’ve changed my hearing… Something about the rim cushion, maybe?

Focus.

The Fours were traveling in the trees again, catapulting themselves from branch to branch, or in this case, from the last branch out into the open. Right in front of our guns. I whisked my antennae backwards and closed up the sensilla to reduce their sensitivity—I really was getting good at that, wasn’t I? Although maybe the spray made that unnecessary, with the painkilling aspect to it? Eh, practice is practice.

Focus, damn you.

Mentally slapping myself to attention, I didn’t bother with the guidance. I just plucked the one heading for me with a round of HSRP from the air with a body shot. 

Its chest blew up, pieces of black plant fiber flung away in a grisly halo. The front legs weren’t connected to the rest of it anymore and were dashed against the fallen trunks below. The blast wrecked most of its momentum and unbalanced it, causing it to spin wildly for a few moments before it crashed into the ground, smashing a Three that was jumping from log to log, trying to get to us.

Head still attached, the Four lasted a few more seconds, and its tentacles continued to whip around itself, cleanly bisecting a second Three before it finally stilled. The halved Three kept crawling forward, and I plugged it in the head with a dart.

Leah killed the other Four at the same time, using a twenty mil round. It flopped out of her barrel with an anemic thump, ignited its jets centimeters above the ground, and then launched itself into the skull of the alien from below, making it flip backwards head over heel while the projectile itself was still whining away within, boring deeper into its body. It was a bit like watching a balloon with extra tentacles flailing about as it shot chaotically across the ground and played pinball with the nearby Threes.

The remainder of my high mixed itself with the grotesque comedy of this situation, and a mad grimace of a smile spread across my face as the Sentinel queued up driving trajectories like a crossword puzzle.

In less than five seconds, the ability of the gyrojet twenties to penetrate multiple smaller targets in a row, while changing directions in flight or even more so by skipping off the ground, had utterly decimated the group of Threes. Between ourselves, we’d fired only six of the twenty mil, one HSRP, and only four of the scouting Threes remained. Leah picked those off with the Foxteeth as they trickled in, almost lazily. Yeah. Things had changed. She was in her element, now.

Hmm. Bodies. They could form new nests if we just left them…

I switched my Sentinel over to the darts, and planted one in each corpse. The nanites would destroy them, and we could keep moving.

After initiating a group call, I asked Tynea, “Have you got a bigger group for us?”

Not yet, but I believe the Antithesis in this area are beginning to consolidate. It would be good if we had more drones to search with, our coverage is ridiculously spotty, so far.

Right, good point. Points. My counter showed two hundred and forty. Leah nodded, too.

“Leave us, uh, forty points, but get yourself as many drones as you can for the remainder. Um, no box, just the drones, please.”

We already had to clean up the facility and gather our trash, I had no desire to add the entire crater to that…

A steady stream of drones plopped out of thin air in front of me, each one catching itself before they hit the ground, buzzing off into the trees in an even spread of directions.

When the stream petered out, Tynea said, That was another sixty-six drones. You have forty-two points left.

Ah, yes. A very auspicious number, certainly.

Leah saw my grin, and poked at me with a, “Nerd!”

I looked at her and teased right back. “Takes one to know one~”

The amusement in her eyes belied the toothy grin she returned, and in that moment, I really wanted to kiss her.

I caught the desire, reigned it back in, and sat on it. Recognized the potent mixture of emotions, action, and the high still riding my brain, what it all did to me, and guided my attention back to the task on hand, just as I mirrored the mental action with physical action and sat in the saddle.

Fully in control of myself once more, I smiled at Leah and said, “Let’s go?”

Following suit, she hopped onto her own bike, and we once more followed our AIs’ guidance towards the next set of aliens.

The next several groups were all very small squads, between two and fifteen units. Mostly we didn’t even dismount, and instead we just halted within hearing range, and waited with our weapons up and ready to shoot the moment we glimpsed their slinking shapes through the trees.

I mostly stuck to the darts, simply because they had the power to kill the Threes, and they’d get rid of the bodies at the same time. Leah eventually followed suit, but really, the twenties were just…so much fun. Chaotic malice unleashed.

“Tinea, Leah, they’re finally grouping up. The closest gathering has nearly a hundred members of a variety of models, and there are even bigger concentrations a few kilometers away, towards the west. The patterns of their movements are leading to the conclusion that that is where the nest must be.”

Nice. No more slow drip feed of points, no more circumspect movement. No more wasting time on barely any gain. This was going to be more than a thousand points in one go…and then again and again, after, until we’d exhausted the place.

I was gonna get my wings today, wasn't I?!

 

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