Chapter Forty-Three - Sweet Lures

“There’s always another way to use your tools. Maybe they’re even productive.”

– Road Rash, during his stream, while using a fragmentation mine as a bottle opener

 

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Tinea, there’s a large group of Antithesis heading your way. I believe they’ve picked up signs of your presence. At your current speed, you will meet them at the same time as the hiding Four.

“Large?”

Two Sixes, twelve Fours, and thirty Threes.

“Oh shit, that’s a lot. Show me?”

Tynea threw up a new video, displaying said group winding through sickly trees, roughly two hundred meters out. They were moving fairly slowly, the smaller units sticking closely to the large Sixes, with several Threes ranging further out and sniffing for tracks.

“Leah?” I came to a stop and shared the visuals with her, watching as she bit her lips as she steered the drone this way and that, to get a better look.

After a few seconds, she spoke up. “I guess we can outrun them? But they’d just follow the tracks, right?”

“Yeah. Well, until it starts raining, anyway. But I don’t think running for the next half hour is a good idea, we’ll just attract more and more aliens. Or even bump into another large group.”

“Mmm.” She nodded. “That, and I promised myself that I’d start making points properly…”

I considered that for a moment, and nodded as well. “I want to actually take them on. We’ve got enough to set up a bit of an ambush ourselves and kill the fuckers. Honestly, a few grenades would do it, and really, we just need to be careful about making noise. I’ve got some that suck stuff in, rather than explode.”

“Okay, that sounds like it’ll work. Let’s do it.”

And with her affirmation, we did do it.

Leah and I retraced our steps a little, until we came to a good spot just past a small clearing. There were a few natural trenches, deep enough that I could kneel in them and only have my head above ground. Leah was a little larger and had to actually sit and get her bum dirty, to achieve the same effect.

I bought both of us three Mark I shunt grenades each, with the warning to stay a good ten meters away from them when they went off, and another ten modified ones, for four points each, that we could set off remotely. These I buried in shallow holes several meters apart throughout the clearing, and I placed one of the slop jars in the center, with the lid off, just to make sure the aliens would actually move onto open ground, rather than stick to the trees around it.

Shaking the dirt and mud off my hands, I glanced at the counter. Three points left. Enough for either one additional grenade, or some ammunition.

Ah. Our lives actually depended on our ability to make a kill with what we had prepared—not enough points for new equipment, and we weren’t going to find any new guns lying around out here.

No, wait. I could just pick up Leah, and run for breathing room. Maybe. Yeah, even if all of this plan failed and we somehow got nothing for it, we could, uh, stage a fighting retreat and kill a few of the Threes, which would give us enough points to start chipping away at the whole group.

At that point, we’d likely find ourselves facing a growing horde as that probably wouldn’t be a quiet affair, but we could do it and come out on top. But it’d be risky.

Yup, I’d rather not.

“How long?”

Perhaps ten minutes. They may start charging sooner, if something gives you away and rouses them. Look out for model Ones.

Oh, right. We hadn’t seen any for a while, and I’d forgotten about them. A quick look up and around didn’t show any, though.

“Leah? I want to see if I can do something else to make sure the xenos run into our trap. Tynea warns me of aerial scouts, though. Can you help keep an eye out?”

She looked around, and her gaze settled on the largest and healthiest tree at the border of the glade. “Do you think you could jump me up there?”, she asked, pointing up at a solid-looking fork in its branches, already walking that way.

I caught up to her, and waited for her to get on my back. I hopped around a little to see if she held on properly, and then I catapulted both of us up from one bough to another, until we finally arrived at the fork she’d indicated.

She got off of me with a bit of an exhilarated and out-of-breath smile, and said, “We gotta do that more often. It’s hilarious.”

Giggling from her expression, I replied, “You’re a samurai. It’s just a question of murdering lots of aliens until you can do it yourself.” Not that I’d ever say no. “Alright, Leah. Does this spot work?”

She sat down in the fork, and peered out between the healthier-than-average leaves. With a nod, she replied, “Yeah, this works.”

After a last look around myself that didn’t reveal anything new close enough to bother us, I dropped down and ran over to the jar, turning to where the aliens would arrive in a few minutes.

The jar would get them to actually enter the glade, but I wanted more certainty than that, and more reach for the lure. 

I had an idea that I wanted to try, a bit of a fallback to a previous method I’d used. Lots of strings of silk, spread into a huge triangle that would terminate at the jar.

But I didn’t think just random silk would do, I needed to actually turn them into a scent lure.

I spun a bit of string and tried to soak it in the jar, but quickly realized that would take too long. Trying to fiddle several hundred meters of it through the jar wasn’t feasible, and anything else would result in a single messy splotch, rather than useful lines of lure.

So…breastmilk? That had a scent. It positively reeked of nutrients to my antennae. Silk soaked with a little of it would be very effective. I hoped.

Hmm. I’d draw the two sides of the funnel first. If Antithesis stumbled across those, if the lure worked at all, that itself might already be enough to lead them towards the jar and grenades. Then I’d fill in the triangle with more drag lines, to make sure.

I attached the end of my first millimeter-thin rope to the ground right next to the jar, and walked several meters backwards, where I touched it to my nipple after activating the stilling functions. The silk absorbed the drop of milk as easily as the drizzle, swelling slightly. 

I needed to speed this up, if I wanted to get it all done in time.

I turned around, and lifted my tail above my shoulder, like a gantry. From there I fed the string past my breast with one hand, and held it out sideways with my other, recognizing that I didn’t need to glue the string to the forest floor - I could just drag it from tree to tree as I ran along, letting the fibroin absorb another drop of milk every step.

Yeah, that made things much easier.

I ran ahead for maybe ten seconds, covering a hundred meters easily. Tynea threw a diagram onto my minimap, with red lines where she suggested I stuck my silk lures, and a green line for the one I already had.

I dashed over to the other corner, and threaded another line back to the jar, to complete the funnel. Tynea let that side of the diagram turn green.

A quick check showed me that I had about six minutes. Enough for at least four more lines, easily.

I sprinted back and forth, the motions of filling out the triangle strangely reminiscent of my filling out the panels of Leah’s new top, earlier.

Remembering that, made me think about her a little more. She was behaving a little…strangely. She seemed to be deteriorating, from what I could tell?

When I first met her, she was excessively exhausted, and she’d had to recover from her injuries. I’d provided for her, literally and figuratively, and it seemed to stabilize her. She’d teased me freely, and seemed emotionally warm and secure. Free, in a way. But over the last few hours, with every fight, I detected more and more uncertainty and fear instead.

Was it just the unusual situation we found ourselves in, or was she slowly crashing from everything coming at her at once?

Did she have issues with fighting itself, or would she be fine facing Antithesis, if the stress didn’t…what, wake memories? 

If I wasn’t mistaken, things took a rapid turn for the worse just after she’d gotten pinned by the Four against the tree. That seemed to shake her badly, enough that I had to actually get her out of a funk. She’d basically asked me for permission to call her people, instead of just stating that she was going to do it right then.

That…wasn’t normal. Not for an adult. Nor did I associate that sort of mental helplessness with her.

Hmm. What could I do about it right now? Leah didn’t have the luxury of just not fighting—she needed the points to keep herself and those she cared for, safe. I’d be willing to sponsor her, so to say, but she wouldn’t just accept that, I didn’t think. Maybe if she was fully healed and mentally refreshed? She might be open to that as a solution, if she had full access to all her faculties and could make logical choices without leaving herself feeling indebted.

But for now, it seemed to me that she needed to fight, for personal reasons, and for resources.

So…what could I do to help her destress and center herself?

I’d continue to be physically warm and initiate lots of contact. Leah loved hugs as much as I did. I could totally see her cuddling her ‘littles’ in a big pile, (and I so wanted to be a part of that!).

And verbally, I’d pick her up and give her new thoughts, constructive thoughts, to focus on. But ultimately?

Ultimately she needed a therapist, which I sure wasn’t. 

Not just any therapist either. One who knew Vanguards and all the complications that came with that.

Right, Leah should be open to that idea. From what I remembered, she’d mentioned learning how to deal with the grief of losing her sister in her childhood. That she’d had help.

So, it shouldn’t be a contentious suggestion to make. If she even needed me to…

Well, enough of that. I wasn’t gonna work a miracle for Leah. I’d just do what I could, and keep in mind that maybe we couldn’t afford to stay out here and fight for much longer, mentally speaking, and while I myself didn’t have any issues in that sense, I didn’t want to send Leah home alone.

So. 

Would I get any points for calling in a bombardment? For being the spotter, basically? Maybe that was something I could hash out with whatever samurai did the artillery strikes?

If that was a thing, then it would be enough for Leah and I to get a fast fighting vehicle from which we could do the spotting, and just go home after.

Yeah, that might work. We’d leave a lot of points lying around, but Leah’s wellbeing was more important than that. Points we could farm another time, from the look of things…

I finished up all the scented silk strings, with not a lot of time or milk to spare. Tynea had painted a red blob on my minimap, letting me track the location of the alien group we’d ambush momentarily, and if they got any closer, they’d catch sight of me through the trees.

On the way to Leah’s tree, I called her through my aug. “Leah, I’m done, and they’re almost here. They should be hitting my funnel in just a few seconds, and maybe they’ll start charging immediately? No idea. Do you want to stay in the tree, or do you want to use the trench?”

I leapt up to Leah in a single jump, and waited as she considered the choice. She’d have an easier time of staying safe in the tree, but even if she’d gotten fairly used to moving around with the fake plasticky proprioception of the Sleeve, she was still much clumsier than her usual self.

Oh. Did that have an effect on her too? If she didn’t feel like herself, that might just be multiplying the stress… Should I suggest full cybernetic replacements for her limbs as soon as we had a few hundred? And was a vehicle for her to fight from more important? Perhaps that was a decision Leah had to make herself. Something to bring up later.

Focus.

She turned to me, and answered my question. “I’ll stay up here. I think it’ll be easier to stop them from climbing after me, than it would be for me to run from them. Plus, if you stay on the ground, you can get out of range of my gun’s muffling.”

“Alright, that works for me.”

Tinea, the Antithesis have detected your silk lures.

The video feed of the group showed them rush right to the start of the funnel, and the small horde of Threes began tracking along and between the lines, giving me an interesting view of the dynamics of Antithesis teamwork.

The moment they’d ‘dialed in’ on the first line, half the entire group split off and wandered away at an angle, until they came across the next string. There, the process repeated itself, until eventually four Threes arrived at the outermost string on one side, where again, two split and ranged further out, all while they were all slowly but surely following the funnel.

When they didn’t find anything at about the same distance as they’d found the other lines at, the outermost scouts turned back and rejoined their brethren.

The same spiel played out on the other side of the original group, just with fewer members.

Eventually, all the groups balanced themselves, with a focus on reinforcing the Sixes on either side of the middle, but the tightening angle of the strings meant that, eventually, the large group reformed itself. Just in time to catch the smell of the food jar.

The entire blob of Antithesis started forward.

 

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