Chapter Sixty-Three - Xenocide Act III; Campfire Stories

“So, uh. Ever plan on doing one thing, and kinda, um, accidentally, wind up doing another entirely?

I’m sure this’ll work, though.”

– Anonymous Author

 

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The first Antithesis will arrive in two minutes. The lure is overpowering the Sixes nearby, and their gatherings are beginning to split up and are heading for you in increasing numbers.

“Good. Let’s give ‘em all a toasty welcome.”

Hmm. I touched the forcefield emitting pendant on my forehead. It was powerful, a real lifesaver, but…limited in reach. Extremely so. 

“Tynea, a question. How many points would it take to come back from having my body completely smashed, throat and down?”

That…is a very difficult question to answer with any certainty. There is as dizzying a variety of injuries sufficient to render your body non-viable, as there are solutions to such.

Solutions… I guess I could end up a tin can brain-case, if I lost everything but my head.

“What would it cost if I wanted to always return to my state before the injury, and I didn’t lose most of my body, it just got too smushed, like when I jumped off that roof?”

A shadow of a memory shivered through me, half-remembered pain that my brain had mostly deleted to protect itself.

Even that does not narrow down the options to a useful degree. Do you require an immediate return to your previous state, or would you accept a full-body prosthetic for the duration it takes to recover the entirety of your biological functions? Do you wish to remain seamlessly combat-capable, do you mind being evacuated, or neither?

“I…see. Yeah, that would change from case to case, right? Okay. While I’m with Leah, I wouldn’t want to leave her alone on a battlefield that basically managed to kill me. But if I were alone, I’d be fine with getting removed. I think. Unless I were protecting somebody. Yeah, I can see why you’re asking.”

Yes, it is quite difficult to plan recovery ahead of the injury that would require it. Many Vanguard solve this by using technologies that substitute for critical functions, even including remote-controlled clone bodies.

“Oh, that’s… How does that even work? Wouldn’t the clones still have, you know, their own brain?”

Yes, but not a fully featured one. Important elements of the brain are never grown, and are instead replaced with devices that allow networking with the original. Such a body cannot, and never has, qualified as a ‘person’. They host the thoughts of the original, essentially.

Okay, so that didn’t quite sound as fucked up as I thought, but still… 

Maybe if you’ve faced death often enough, you stop caring about a little bit of squickyness, huh?

Back to the topic.

“I think my expectations for whatever measures preserve me would be that I remain combat-capable and present, that I may recover my body eventually, and…that I can continue to interact with people, I guess.”

ETA, thirty seconds. 

That still leaves open questions, such as the nature of the interaction, but there are some options that you may find suitable.

One of these would be to have a specialized life-support device accompany you. It could be installed in a drone, for example. Most of the time that drone would simply serve as another weapons platform, not unlike Leah’s Warforge Technologies Universal Piloting Pod. It could carry a chamber into which your head would be teleported at a time of critical failure. The drone would serve as your body until your biological one had regrown. 

A major advantage of this method would be the upgradeability of the drone, customized capabilities, and that the point investment’s usefulness is not limited to only the moment of death. A few hundred to a few thousand points of initial expenditure, depending on the loadout of the drone. Much quicker recovery if you unlocked Class II Medical Utilities for a token and three hundred points, and bought from it a relevant item for around two hundred points.

A generally far more expensive option might be the ability to teleport. Sensors could detect danger and help you initiate a short-range teleport to escape harm without removing you from the battlefield. Teleports are very energy-intensive, and devices that aren’t single-use, extremely costly. You do have access to a single-use teleporter that I could trigger when I sense danger to you, but it requires that the destination is set before-hand. That one costs a thousand points. Multi-use technologies are much more expensive, and are typically only found among the older Vanguard generations.

Huh. That life-support chamber thing did sound reasonable. An add-on to whatever fighting vehicle Leah was going to buy, maybe? I…guess I didn’t really need the thing just yet. Maybe when we were fighting the swarm, but right now, not enough danger to even get through my skin, nevermind my regenerative abilities.

My thoughts were interrupted by a squad of Threes rushing from the treeline. Four of them, and our three turrets cored their brains between one step and the next. I didn’t even have time to so much as twitch a finger.

I glanced at Leah with a wry smile, and pinged her for a call. “Remember when we had to be careful with single units yesterday?”

“Yup.” She chuckled. I saw how the mist of her shroud made contact with her lips, slipped into her mouth to rest against her tongue. Was it, uh, lip-reading her? Like a microphone, but more physical? Cool! I mentally pinched myself to pay attention again when she continued. “You know, I did fight a little during the first incursion in New Montreal. Not much, just a few dozen units altogether. But it took me days to kill as many as we have just today alone, in a few hours.”

“Oh?”

The next group of Antithesis arrived. More Threes, and two Fours. They sniffed the air…and dropped dead again, before they even had time to process anything. But that reminded me, and I retrieved two pheromone pouches from the lure.

Leah continued talking, as she watched me.

“Mhm. Made a bit of a mistake with my investments though… I didn’t focus on weapons, I guess. Got better augs, an eye to replace one I lost to some shrapnel from a collapsing building, lots of food for the orphans hiding in a shelter. Could’ve done so much more of that if I’d been smarter about, you know, killing aliens with points.”

“I can see that…” I gave one to her. “These bags will make us smell like intruders, and the lure has some stuff that makes it smell like a nest under attack. Helps with keeping the Antithesis off of it, since it’s not exactly armored.”

“Ah, smart. One way to secure stuff.”

“Yeah. As long as the buggers don’t get wise, anyway.”

She nodded, and we just sort of sat there, sideways on our ATVs waiting for the situation to require our intervention, for the turrets to need reloading, whatever.

Leah tilted her head and asked me, “Somehow this never came up, but wanna know how I became a Vanguard?”

“Oh, sure!” 

Wow, we really hadn’t known each other for very long, actually. I marveled at the sense of closeness between Leah and myself, despite there being so many things we yet had to learn about each other. Just… So much happened in such a short time, that it felt like we’d been on top of the other for years.

I had to chuckle to myself. Big huge blaring horn going off above our heads, xenos attacking in groups of five to ten every few seconds, and here we were, chilling on our quads like nothing was up, Leah inviting me to tell me about her life.

She looked up, a thoughtful look on her face, and I wondered for a moment how she could even hear anything with that noise. But then I saw that she was using the same ear protector thingies that I used, with that active noise cancellation. And much like me, she’d taken the active protection out of her helmet and fixed it to her waist, when she’d discarded the helmet for her suit. Unlike me, she didn’t need any silk for that, instead the goopy thing just partially swallowed it up.

“So you know how I take care of a few different orphan groups, right?”

“Yeah. Not the details though. Like, what do you do with them?”

“Right. I’m not their primary caretaker, but I play with them, give some education, try to help them figure out who they wanna be. I just visit the groups one-by-one, and occasionally I take a few kids out of the city for a weekend of camping in the woods. 

“You know, if you go with a small group and you know the right people, you can ferry them for almost free. It’s a real cheap way to get them out and about. Anyway, about three months ago, I was on such an excursion again. Just three children, their caretaker, and me, eating dinner around a campfire.”

Leah leaned back, laughing. “I’d just gotten up, about to walk to the piss house, when five Threes surprised us.”

“Oh no.”

She looked at me, grinning, “No worries, it wasn’t really an issue as it turned out. We were camping right next to a really tall tree with loads of branches. The kids and the other adult crawled right up there, but I kinda knew the Threes would either figure out how to follow them, or they’d end up felling the tree. Or wait for a Four to come by or something. The fuckers share intel somehow, right?”

Yeah, they would. Antithesis weren’t conventionally sapient, but they were intelligent enough to problem-solve. And they had ways to talk to each other…

My warning ring pinged, and showed a considerably larger group heading for us. At least three dozen members… Still a couple minutes out, though.

Yay, more story time!

“So, what did you do?”

“Well, we did have a gun. But the thing was in my backpack, way down at the bottom. Never had to actually shoot anything, you know? My entire life, not once. Barely kept it maintained and did some occasional training on the firing range. But I wasn’t used to it, wasn’t used to having one, wasn’t used to needing one. So what did I do? I grabbed the climbing pick. You know, the sort you usually use on ice? They’re pretty nice for trees, too.

“Anyway, I grabbed the thing, and rushed right at the aliens before I could even think about it. Surprised them pretty good, too. They weren’t nicely grouped up, so I could spike their skulls one after the other. The first four died instantly. A single shot to each and they slid right off the pick again.”

I was captivated.

“But I fucked up on the last one. I really needed to pee, you see. So I clenched so hard it jostled me, and instead of piercing its brain, I just glanced off the head.”

“Oh no. What happened? Did it hurt you? Did you get it?”

Leah laughed and kept talking.

“I’d caught it in the ears instead. Hard enough to crack its skull and destroy its hearing, but it was still going. The fucker was fast, too. Guess what, it lost sight of me, and since it couldn’t hear me either, what do you think it did?”

Uh… “Chase its tail?”

She snorted and said, “Might as well have. But no, it tried to track me by scent. Thing is, my scent was leading it in a circle around our camp. With me running after it. I had to pee. I repeat, I had to pee badly.”

“Noooo…” Did she…pee herself? Oh no.

Leah smacked me in the leg. “I know what you’re thinking, and no, I didn’t. No, I kept chasing it for five fucking circles around the camp before I caught on, and I had to pee the entire way and got angrier and angrier. The children learned a lot of new cuss words that day. It had a teddy bear stuck in its teeth, too. Fucking imagine having a stuffy wave at you enthusiastically, while you’re trying to hold it in, sprinting after a fucker that should by all rights be trying to maul you. Lasted until it banged off a tree trying to jump me where I’d hid for the ambush, and there I could finally kill it. Never ran for the toilet as fast, either… And that's where I finally became a samurai.”

I fought hard to hold back the giggles, and Leah figured that was no good. I tried to hop off the ATV and run when she leaned over, but she’d caught me by the waist and dragged me onto her lap before I knew it.

Her fingers tickled me in the waist and on my belly until I fought free, heaving for breath, hair mussy and hands on my knees.

I looked up at Leah just in time to see a pair of Sixes breach the trees behind her, a whole bunch of Threes and Fours accompanying them.

I banked the hilarity for the moment, took Leah in one hand and grabbed my gun with the other.

Hmm. But maybe that was a good way to manage any stress build-up, huh? Share stories. Talk about our lives. Tickle each other and laugh.

I nodded. Yup. I was going to make that a thing. 

Especially the last one. I had to get even after all. Indeed, another tally for Tickle Time! I was up to three now.

I eyed the Sixes and asked Leah, “Hey Leah, wanna let me kill the big ones? I got something special for the occasion.”

 

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