Chapter Forty-One - How to Sniff

“One foot in front of the other. One step after the other. Come on, you can do it!”

– Shingle Bells, rescuing a small group of elderly people who had too much fun at a party

 

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A glance at the map told me that we were about four hundred meters out from the facility now. We’d…really barely covered any ground so far, and this crater was very large.

Hmm. Was that to our advantage? Would the hordes of Antithesis at the edge just not pay attention to the little gnats scurrying around until it was too late and the gnats had become xeno-mulching blenders?

Where were they heading anyways? Was there a place we’d have to protect from them? Oh, that would be bad. I’d been thinking about calling in large-scale bombardment in a pinch, but if they were heading to somewhere close enough, waiting too long might not only make that bombardment unethical, but also damn whichever town or burg was nearby, to destruction by alien jaws. No way were the two of us going to just stop that many plant monsters on our own and protect anything or anyone simultaneously.

I pulled up the samurai app, located the red blotchy swarm to our east, and checked along its south heading. There were a few farmsteads here and there, as well as a bunch of very large mechanized tree farms, but none of these looked like they were going to be targeted. The swarm was moving parallel to the highway. If it kept to it, it would eventually smash through several settlements along the St. Lawrence River, and reach the megacities of Quebec and New Montreal.

Further, the swarm was still growing. It was already long enough that it would take it another day just to pass our area. I suspected that it would pick up hundreds of thousands more, before it made it to the megacities, potentially crossing the million mark more than once.

Some fiddling let me contact support for the “Family”, which I knew was the local sort-of-but-not-really-authority for samurai. They’d be responsible for connecting individual requests of bombardments with the relevant trigger-pullers.

I sent a text message:

> Tinea: <<location marker>> Swarm; my intentions are to kill as many as I can over the next few days. Please keep an eye on the swarm and kill it if it threatens to get too close to settlements.

> Automated Reply: Set priority please: Low - no danger within 24h; Medium - engage ASAP; High - immediate action

Well shit. I couldn’t be sure, right? Or could I? Hmm. The swarm wasn’t heading directly for any particular place with people. The closest steads and farms were all a minimum of fifty kilometers outside the aliens’ projected path.

Yeah. I wouldn’t be asking them to merely keep an eye on things in the first place, if I thought something was going to happen today.

> Tinea: Priority Low

> Automated Reply: Thank you. Your request has been entered and will be reviewed within 12 hours.

Alright, that should be done due diligence.

Time to check how ambushable we were.

We moved a little less than a hundred meters eastwards, and perhaps five minutes later, came to a halt peeking out behind a new pair of trees, looking up.

The Four dangled upside down, and from what I could see and smell or taste, the vents on its back were closed. No seepage of paranoia-inducing gas, though some particles of it clung to the alien all the same.

Wait.

That meant that I should be able to detect any Four from as much as two dozen meters away, right? At least if they had used their gas yet. Along with any other Antithesis that had been exposed to it recently enough for the molecules not to have fallen apart yet.

I so had to get myself some sniffs of more xenos, so I’d recognize them anywhere. So far, I’d know a Four. A Six didn’t seem to have a particularly distinct smell, but it caused slight tremors I could pick up on, as did a Five—which also had the nerve agent slowly evaporate off of their quills.

Ah, but freshly born Fours that were solitary and hadn’t produced any gas or agent yet, they might not be detectable to my olfactory senses…

Did the hives themselves smell of anything?

Oh, If I could track those down, wouldn’t I basically be able to make entire areas safe for mostly free? None of that specialized equipment Tynea implied I’d need, if I already had it attached to me…

Focus.

Useful thoughts, but not helpful. Not right now.

Back to the topic. Ambush the ambush.

I ‘whispered’ to Leah via the aug, “Any visual filters that let you see the thing easily?”

“Its temperature is equal to the surroundings, and it doesn’t give off any ultra-violett lighting itself, but the hard armor plates do reflect it nicely, better than any of the bark or foliage around. During the day at least.”

“Gotcha. Hmm. Yeah, about the same for me. No temperature differential, and aside from the fact that it reflects light a little differently from any other plant stuff, I can only really see it so easily because I know it’s there.”

“So, visuals are a no-go?”

“I think so? At least if they’re mixed in with the leaves like that. I can smell-taste this one easily though.”

Leah looked over at me and grinned at my questing antennae, which obviously made them rotate towards her. Ugh. I really, really couldn’t keep the direction of my thoughts secret, could I?

“Wanna try out your new gun?”

Leah looked at her gun for a moment, then sighted, and pulled the trigger without much fanfare.

The reaction of the muffler rammed rude fingers through my sensilla, shoved a crackling frisson down my spine. Even Leah shuddered. This wasn’t the uncomfortable void-feedback of the Foxteeth, this was the rules of physics taking revenge on us who dared impose our will on them. I almost puked from the overstimulation and suffered a short, but severe headache.

The Four lost its grip on the tree and crashed through a few scraggly twigs until it broke itself on the ground, where the plant matter around the bullet hole already began to blacken and fall apart slowly. The nanites.

So much to unpack.

Leah…didn’t seem so excited by her Vanguard stuff? Like, she had no trouble buying it or accepting it from me, and even played around with it, but she also didn’t derive enjoyment from…using it? Was that normal? Or, did it have something to do with being kidnapped because she was a samurai?

And that muffler wasn’t gonna work so close to me. We’d have to split up at least a dozen meters. That thing hit so hard it could make me falter and stumble if I wasn’t prepared for it. Would I get used to it with exposure, though? At least enough to fight through without too much strain?

Hmm.

Easier to just get a less janky solution, longterm. Or, actually…

“Tynea, would a more advanced version of that muffler still fuck with me so bad?”

No, the Mark II version of the inverter outperforms it considerably for less spill, and the Mark III also confines the crash-dissonance to its area of effect. Forgive me please, I calculated that it would not harm you, but I did not think you would have such a powerful reaction to it. Even a little distance will lessen the effect greatly—its strength is inversely quadratic to its range. Remove yourself twice as far and you will only have to bear a quarter of its power, roughly speaking.

“Okay. Don’t worry about it, as long as we have a solution, I’ll be fine. A warning would have been nice, though.”

I will endeavor to improve my prediction algorithms to that end.

I nodded my acceptance, and moved on to checking our surroundings again. Another idea popped up, and I checked the ex-communications drone’s settings to find what I was looking for: An automatic motion detector I could use to record the movements of anything it caught, with a connection to an alarm icon on my HUD.

Tinea, I’ve scrubbed through the recordings of the drone since its release. There should be another two model Fours hiding within one hundred and one hundred and fifty meters respectively.

Two spots on my minimap gained highlights fairly close nearby, and two small screens played the recordings.

The closer one was almost an hour old, and the other only about five minutes.

“Leah, we’ve got another two potential ambushes, and I don’t know if there are others. Ready to keep going?”

“Sure.”

“Alright. Let’s stay a little apart. That muffler on your gun is hard to bear, but apparently it’ll be less of an issue if I’m just a ways away. “

“Was it painful?” She asked, looking worriedly at me, uncharacteristically wide eyes flitting back and forth between my antennae and my face.

I reassured her with a quick squeeze. “Not so much painful, as painfully uncomfortable. Like the worst feedback ever.”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll be more careful about firing, then.” Leah was looking down at her firearm’s silencing gadget.

“Well, as long as I have a little distance, it won’t be a problem. There are better versions of that thing we should be able to afford soon, anyway.

“Okay. Yeah. Good to go.” She looked back up at me, gripping her weapon tightly.

“Relax. Seriously, I’m not in pain or anything. It doesn’t cause me injury, I’m not hurt.”

“Yeah. It’s just…It feels wrong, after you saved me, and stuff. I didn’t even notice until you said something.”

“And it’s still not your fault. It started as a miscalculation by our AIs, and it’ll end as a learning experience. I’m okay with how things are going, alright?”

“... Alright.” 

It didn’t quite seem like I’d guessed at the correct issue. But…we had to keep moving.

“Alright. Let’s go kill Antithesis, and not get ambushed, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Leah did look a little better, though.

Still, I was surprised by her strong reaction to something that had been beyond her control. If anything, I should’ve recognized that the more powerful discharge of a rifle would require more work from the muffler to counteract.

But it seemed that somehow, something about that situation messed with Leah. Something that I wasn’t sure should go unspoken, but we also didn’t have the time or space to deal with.

A solitary raindrop bumped into my sensilla, and I looked up to see darker clouds covering the horizon, ponderously moving our way.

“Well, shit. Leah, I think it’s gonna get wet in, like, half an hour or so? Tynea?”

The first drizzle will hit in a few minutes, but the actual rain, in roughly thirty. There is a thunderstorm building a little further out. It’s also moving this way, and will arrive in perhaps an hour and a half.

Leah tilted her head, and said, “I don’t think we’re making points fast enough to get a fighting vehicle in that time, to be honest. We’re buying too much stuff along the way.”

“Hmm, yeah. Let’s go take out one or two more groups, and then get some rest? We could use a few moments to talk and plan stuff anyway.”

She looked at me questioningly, but in the end just nodded, and we kept moving.

Within minutes, I began to taste greater concentrations of mustiness in the air, and tried to get a sense for what it’d be like to sense anything through actual rain.

The few drops that splashed across my antennae just rolled along, picking up dust and cleaning me off. It was a nice feeling, like a micro massage. I’d gathered lots of dirt without realizing, and apparently the design of the sensilla and stems included hydrophobia, which meant I was receiving a natural shower.

Oh, I’d have to think about antennae hygiene! That was a new one, and it had me strangely excited. Huh. They were extremely sensitive to touch. I could barely stand touching them just to hold them still, how’d I brush them down? Or did I just wash them? That seemed to work nicely with the rain, after all, and it wasn’t so intense. It really felt rather nice.

Hmm. The drops did seem to leave behind streaks of chemical contamination though. Not very much, due to the hydrophobic nature of my sensilla, but I could detect acids where the drops struck and rolled off.

Oh, would the rain wash away any traces of gasses I could use to sniff out ambushing Fours? Well, that might be a problem. Or would the humidity end up depositing them on my antennae? If that actually happened, wouldn’t that mean…that I was already right below one? 

Uff. So much I needed to discover to understand. What an experience. This antennae stuff was so much, but also so frigging epic! Best purchase ever.

Uh, except for boobs.

Nah, antennae. 

But boobs… Dang it. This…this was something that could incite a war between me and I, wasn’t it?

I think the conundrum showed, because Leah giggled at me, after staring at my face for a few minutes. I decided that deserved tickle-revenge.

Which I’d have to save up, because I needed her out of the Sleeve before I could do that.

I opened a new text window in my HUD, named it ‘Tickle Time’ and added a tally.

Yes, I was fully prepared. For anything!

Fast movement caught the corner of my eye.

 

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