Chapter Fifty-Seven - Xenocide Act I; Desperate Rush

“Carpe diem!

Just…don’t pluck too hard. Don’t want the universe to unravel.”

– Printed on a fridge magnet

 

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I leapt from the tree and caught myself on the lower branches of another, taking advantage of their solid surface to kick off into a hard sprint towards the leading edge of the chase, where Leah would be.

She was moving in a very wide circle that would eventually pass my own ATV, about a quarter of it complete.

I ran parallel to the Antithesis, and caught frequent glimpses of them between the trees as their claws dug into the mud and their tentacles shifted from outgrowth to outgrowth. Every few seconds, one or another type of grenade Leah had dropped would blow up, catching a few units and scattering them in a bloody plume.

Tinea.

The small screen that gave me a bird’s eye view of Leah replaced itself with another and grew bigger, showing a large gash in the ground, about three meters deep and five wide. Rain water and mud had accumulated at the bottom.

Leah will need to cross this trench in approximately one minute. She would have to slow down to prevent a crash, and then carefully climb the opposite bank. Any detours to more suitable places would take even longer and allow the Antithesis to catch up anyway. If you hurry, you should be able to get there several seconds ahead of her and prepare something.

“Show me the way!”

New colors overlaid my vision, painting a path ahead and slightly to the right, inside Leah’s course. Very similar to the one I’d used while driving the quad.

Blinking red means jump, blue is land here, green is sprint, yellow means use hands to swing around. Don’t slow down. You will need oxygen halfway there at the latest.

“Buy it!”

Signal when ready to receive. It’s a dissolving pill to place under your tongue. Breathe through your nose until it is gone. One point.

Not yet. Several corners ahead required my hands. I was almost to the half-way point, breath ragged, spots popping in my vision. Needed air.

The path altered itself. I followed. 

Faster, Tinea. You’re falling behind Leah.

A hoarse scream broke from my throat.

One more corner. There, long straight. I forced myself into a faster sprint, rocketing across twenty-five meters in a single second. I was going nearly one hundred kilometers an hour, beyond the limits of even my new body.

Too breathless to speak, I stretched a hollow fist out. Felt something appear in it.

Smacked it past my lips hard enough to hurt, caught it under my tongue. It tingled.

Held my open mouth shut with my hand as I desperately sucked in air. A flow of prickly mint joined the stream from under my tongue. Hit my lungs.

A flash of heat and cold crashed through me, tore the haze from my eyes. The spots disappeared, and I was suddenly back at the front of my brain.

There, the trench. Five seconds ahead of Leah. She was only thirty meters away, crawling, compared to me.

I yelled, “That foam!”

A gun fell out of the sky in front of me and I caught it by reflex. Bright orange, not for fighting.

Canister attached from underneath. Foam.

I pointed it at the rout in the ground and started spraying. A wave of heat brushed across my front as a stream as thick as my arm touched the opposite side, sizzling where the rain hit it. The foam flashed red for a moment and swelled to match my torso, almost too fast for me to keep up with spraying. It turned ash gray and hardened into a non-porous pebbly stone so light it didn’t break off to tumble. 

Two seconds.

I whipped the gun back and forth from edge to edge, painting an arch as I jumped down into the trench.

Leah was here. The bridge was wide enough, but it wasn’t supported properly. I slid underneath it, splashing through the muddy water, to hold it up from below.

Applied too much strength, heard it rip from the earth on the nearer side. Bad leverage.

Leah wobbled badly. I bucked her over the rest of the trench, felt her hit the ground five meters past the edge. On her wheels.

She gunned the engine, shouted at me on the call. “Run! They’re close!”

I jumped out of the ditch with the stone thing above my head, wound up and tossed it at the closest Three, ten meters away.

The foam-ash-stone was bigger than I was, but so light. It slowed down in the air from its own drag before it even hit anything.

The aliens didn’t realize and dodged hard to the side, bowling over their cohort. 

Uncanny chaos. I giggled as I threw two of my shunt grenades in there, for extra seasoning.

I spun around and dashed after Leah, looking for a good spot to disappear again, towards the outside, where I’d find the remaining Fives and Sixes.

A glance at the map told me we were almost halfway to my ATV. I’d have to keep an eye on that, make sure I made it with time to spare. I wouldn’t be much faster than Leah on it.

There, a particularly thick patch of trees. They wouldn’t really be able to see me past it.

“I’m off again, Leah!”

She saluted me with her horn and I broke away grinning, bouncing from trunk to trunk and taking corners without having to rely on slippery mud for grip.

I slowed down slightly as the last of the oxygen pill fell apart under my tongue and dissolved away.

Ten meters to my side, Antithesis broke through the trees. These were mostly Threes and Fours in loose clusters. The dense knot of aliens that I was tracking with the help of Tynea’s drones would arrive in a few moments more.

I hopped up into a tree again, one that had several storm-broken branches in its crown that would allow me to shoot upwards without care.

A few more seconds gave me time to load another magazine of xeno-busting shells. 

I picked off a few Fours with HSRP rounds, until finally, a pair of Fives appeared.

I disappeared the two fuckers with prejudice, reloaded another four shells to a total of an unwieldy six, and got almost bored waiting for the actual throng of ambulatory plant matter to arrive.

Really. Couldn’t they at least show some consideration for my efforts here, and line up properly? Hmph. I would have to speak to the manager.

Oh lucky me, there were three of them right there. Fat, juicy, stacked Sixes, stomping along like hippos, all clustered up with dozens of small fry.

I launched three fragmentation shells, accidentally killed a model One on the way up—actually, why were there so few of those?—and enjoyed the carnage on the ground as pieces of organic Antithesis armor added their own form of shrapnel to the storm of mutilation.

Adding up the numbers quickly, I had to kill…five more Fives, and…also five more Sixes. Three forty millimeter rounds still loaded.

Huh, where were the remaining Sixes and Fives?

“Tynea, did the group split up, or something?”

No, not at all. However, the movement patterns of the present Antithesis are changing. They’re lacking the proximity and guidance of the Sixes and are beginning to spread out more. They’ll soon create individual streams that cover more ground naturally.

Shit, that meant a lower density of points. Uh…

“Can you pin-point where that change first occurred?”

Certainly.

My map zoomed out, and a ping pulsed along the long curve we’d taken, a few hundred meters behind the aliens.

“Please search that place with your drones, see if you can figure out what happened.”

I will do so.

“Okay, thanks. I guess I’ll go and get my ATV now, looks like the rest of this is going to be a bit of a slog…”

Leah was two thirds of the way to my vehicle, which meant I only had to haul ass, not break the sound barrier. I swallowed another one of those energy boosters and let the pleasure of gooey goodness wash through me, before I used the fork I was sitting in as a starting block and sprint-jump-hopped my way through the forest.

Five missing Fives…what were they doing? Was it a problem? We did have active defenses… Ah, shit.

I called Leah with a thought again, who picked up almost instantly.

“What?”

“Missing Fives. Don’t know where they are, where they’re moving. You should be fine if they attack, but your ATV might not.”

“Okay. No worries, I have a plan should the thing fail. For you, too.”

“Great, I’ll be there in a few.”

“I’m having Ypsi scout out your ATV to make sure it’s safe and all.”

“Oh! Thanks! Good idea. Is it?”

“Safe? Yeah, so far. No movement nearby. By the way, did you notice how there’s no birds nearby?”

“You mean the model Ones? Yeah, there aren’t enough of them, are there?”

“No, there aren’t. But I have no clue what they might be doing.”

“Mmm. We’ll keep our eyes open. Maybe they’ve just gone to join the big swarm or something.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be passing your quad in three minutes.”

“And I’ll be there in two. No worries!”

“Good.” There was a lovely smile in her voice. “See you in a second!”

“Yes,” I answered, “see you in a second.”

I kept running, increasingly out of breath again, but drawing close to that copse that concealed my ATV, when Tynea’s voice rang through my mind.

Tinea, I’ve located the missing Antithesis.

“Where are they?”

They entered a smallish cave system. I was able to send a drone some ways in before it was destroyed, and found no trace of an existing nest. I’m uncertain if there is a small one hidden being fed the missing units for biomass to spread itself, or if the missing units are spawning a new one. Either way, it would be best to kill it as soon as possible, before it gains a lot of strength.

Hmm, many thoughts. There may be a number of dangerous units to kill underground, in tight surroundings. They may no longer exist, meaning fewer points. But if there was a nest, that’d be worth a lot of points in turn. Might be a nest and dangerous models.

Fuck, Leah’s armor was still crap for close quarters. Either she’d need to upgrade, or we’d have to split up again.

Or we ignored the nest… No, that didn’t sit right with me.

How many of the two or three hundred aliens did we have left to kill? They’d had a constant influx of additional units, too.

According to the map, the new size of the group…was about equal to the original size. Two to three hundred live targets, but they were increasingly splitting up. That was no good, hard to kill them fast enough like that.

I tossed a glance at my counter. One thousand three hundred, marked as our combined value. We had the points for a solution.

“Tynea! I need something to lure all the aliens to one spot!”

Large area audio-scent lure, fifty points. It’s fragile, needs to be protected if you want it to last past the first wave.

Leah and her turret would help there. Time to coordinate. And I needed to be able to stand my ground, too.

I arrived at my ATV and saddled up as I called Leah again.

“Tinea?”

“Hey. The Antithesis are splitting up, and some are probably forming at least one new nest in a cave nearby. I want to lure the rest of them back together in one spot, and we’ll need your turret and a bunch of other stuff to kill them all in a proper standoff. Are you okay with me preparing something? It’ll take at least a few minutes, I think.”

“Go ahead, and tell me where. I’m gonna circle close-by so we can help each other.”

“Will do. You’re gonna need actual armor soon, too.”

“For the cave?”

“For the cave.”

“Yeah. Ah, we need to decide. Gear, or flight?”

“... Gear. This time. We have vehicles. We’re utterly reliant on them for fast point gains, without more gear.”

“Agreed. I’ll see what I can do for armor. How many points do you need to set up?”

“Um…half. Yeah, I need two new weapons, and explosives. Five hundred, at least, the more the better, and we’re still killing Antithesis, right? You use the other half. Want to split the three hundred for reserves?”

“Sure. Let me know where to go, alright?”

“Yes, I’ll have Tynea share the coordinates with you soon. See you there.” I sent Leah a thumbs-up in her own style, which she returned with a grin.

“See you there.”

 

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