Ch. 35 - Leah Can’t Catch A Break

"It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt."

– Road Rash, beating the crap out of a pair of robbers while livestreaming

 

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Blinding hexagons of fire flared in front of my head and chest, and seared themselves into my retinas. Pressure waves collided with each other and rammed into the walls, strong enough that a shock bucked against antennae through their coverings. Several ash-smeared hexagons clattered to the floor at my feet with a metallic rattle. They were all the size of my palm.

I jerked away from the unfamiliar things and dropped low with a panicked heartbeat, but nothing happened. I tried to blink away the shadowy imprints of the hexagons still occluding my vision. My finger automatically dug into the rifle's divot, and the different sensation reminded me that I was Tinea, not a boy stuck on the battlefield. That lifted my mind above the rush of adrenaline, until I noticed the slight electric buzz at the back of my eyes. The bionites, they were healing my vision, and the hexagon negatives were already fading.

The counter for the active defense horseshoe was blinking in the corner of my display. It was five lower than I remembered.

Shit. The hexagon things, the active defense, they'd blocked five projectiles. They'd exploded. 

I jerked around with a painful thump of my heart. Leah.

Leah was okay. Shocked, with her natural eye red and irritated into tears, but she was still holding her gun, acquiring the last Four. Dragging in a relieved breath, I turned back to the front.

The Five had taken out most of the doorway. My sticky ropes had smacked themselves across the wall to one side when their anchor points on the other were obliterated. They'd inadvertently saved us from a bunch of concrete shrapnel.

Since I wasn't dead, wasn't even injured, and the Antithesis still needed to die, I kept moving sideways until I could finally see it properly.

It was a large creature, smaller than the Six had been, by about a head. It stood on four tree-trunk legs with swamp-colored, plate-armored flesh, large enough to stomp on me. If I let it. 

I got only a momentary look at damp green quills covering its head and back, pointed in my direction, when they suddenly flashed towards me and I saw several of the black hexagons appear for a split second, just before they went off like mines and sent shattered quill fragments tumbling through the air.

It was already preparing a third set of quills, and that counter in the corner had me crapping my pants as I read only six plates remaining. I wasn't going to block a full salvo again.

I sighted and pulled the trigger in a hurry. The whip-crack whine of the HSRP cartridge rattled around the room as the Five's head sagged when everything supporting it vacated existence.

Thank fuck those bullets do collateral damage so well. Both the Fives and Sixes were real behemoths, large and muscled enough to wreck structures. Knowledge of their biology paid off, though—the only thing they didn't have redundancies for were the brain, but it was too big for dinky little normal bullets to stop them. Yet removing their necks worked just fine.

Nice shooting, said Tynea.

Still breathing heavily from all the excitement, I nodded and took in the scene, making sure there were no more aliens around. The thirteen explosions had pretty much wrecked the room in front of me. My silken traps had been thrown every which way, sticking in tumbles wherever they'd landed, the floor was pitted with quill fragments sticking out here and there, and the walls around the doorway had clusters of holes in them.

The quills worried me. They were famously painful to touch, and their shards did rather stick up from the floor, sharp like broken glass. "Tynea? Are the quills still dangerous?"

The wet-looking ones are covered in an extremely debilitating and painful neurotoxin.

"How bad?"

A single hit may leave you defenseless. If you did not have ways to automatically dispatch enemies, you would be killed only seconds later. That venom is why the Five is so dangerous to inexperienced Vanguard. An awful number die during their first encounter with one.

Yeah. If I didn't have the defenses I did, I would be dead. I think. 

Shit, Leah, too.

The thought of leaving her alone again, here of all places, really made me queasy.

I turned to her, and quickly moved closer. She had her helmet off and looked woozy, tilting this way and that as she hugged the stairs, looking up at me with a sort of disoriented look, and muttering a litany of curses and grumbles. She was still trying to acquire targets with her Hummingbird.

There was blood trickling from her ears.

Ah, crap, the explosions. They'd probably blown out her ear drums. But why hadn't the helmet protected her?

A single quill stuck out of it, right at eye level. Deep enough to have broken the displays inside, leaving her blind. She'd probably ripped her helmet off her head to see again, only for my second set of explosions to go bang in arm's reach.

"Leah?"

She didn't react. Yeah, her ears are blown. And she has no more protection for her head. If the helmet just barely stopped those quills, I wasn't going to bet on her overall doing any better.

And worse, with the loud explosions and the Antithesis death smell intensifying with the new corpses, the next group might already be approaching.

I tore off my antenna mufflers and focused outside, and on the spy cam data. 

They were only seconds away.

"Tynea! Shunt grenade!"

It popped into existence in front of me, I caught it, activated it, and chucked it a few meters outside. It's chaotic void-sphere appeared, and my counter jumped a few points.

"Firebomb! Long burn time!"

A larger package spawned, and I aimed my throw right into the doorway, where it promptly lit up and created a curtain of flames.

Finally, I picked up Leah and raced for temporary safety below, where I took a look at her injuries.

There wasn't a lot of blood, but it was still flowing out of her ears in small rivulets.

Should I get her nanites, or did we have the time for another breastfeeding? How many points do we have anyway? My counter gave me seventy-seven points, and I was still in the red emergency funds. Hmm.

"Tynea, how long would it take my bionites to heal her eardrums?"

A few seconds if only the membranes are damaged. A minute if there's damage to the bones, too. Leah still has bionites from your previous session, so she should not need further supply. Ypsilon already took control.

"Okay." …New protection, then.

I took her helmet in hand and studied it a little closer. The spike had actually fully penetrated, the smallest tip of it poking through. 

"How deep does the injury need to be for the toxin to work on humans?"

As long as it breaches the skin, the damage is done. A small amount will already cause pain that's been described as 'hellish'. It's a torture one just cannot ignore, enough so to stun a person even in combat and flush with adrenaline.

Leah was lucky not to have nicked herself on it, then. She would've been safe with me around, but I really didn't want her to go through more pain anymore.

She needed a new helmet, or something like my horseshoe. Or both.

I sent her the suggestion via text, but wobbling about and disoriented as she was, she had trouble focusing. I got back some garbled reply that basically read "yesn't" and just gave up on it for the moment, in favor of a proper good hug.

The fire was still going strong, up above, and I got a few points that indicated more than one plant alien had been careless. They weren't going to get through it in the short term, but I really couldn't trust that the situation wasn't already changing further outside. With the air currents so disturbed by the heat, I had only a blurry and unreliable picture of the space above, nevermind the blocked connection to our uplink or drone.

But I could smell their stink from all the way down here. I was going to have to go and figure out what sort of new aliens we'd be facing very soon. 

After sending Leah a text message that I'd be scouting, I watched for a moment as she moved her jaws like she was trying to pop her ears before she gave me a dizzied nod, and ran up the stairs again.

I was really getting a workout in this place, wasn't I?

Back on the ground floor, I carefully led the way with my rifle, creeping up so I could gaze above the final step. The entrance was still on fire, along with most of that wall, and I could see the burnt corpses of several Antithesis that had pushed right through. I thought there was more motion outside, but I had difficulty telling any details, and I couldn't connect to the uplink or the drone either. Whatever fuel fed the fire, it messed with my reception.

So I moved over to the walls instead, and touched my antennae to them. The crackling of fire filled my senses as I sensed the vibrations of bursting air pockets inside the concrete. Snapping stone and groaning tension. But I also heard the sniffing of Antithesis crawling around the building, and felt none of the rumbling steps of a Six or a Five. It seemed the biggest unit might've been a Four.

I called Tynea via the Quanta. "I need bullets that can go through these walls and kill them. Don't need guidance, I don't think. Actually, could I even use any, with the wall blocking the Sentinel's sight?"

Your cerebral augment would require an upgrade to interface directly with the projectiles. That would allow you to use your antennae to provide tracking data. Alternatively, you could buy a weapon that is capable of indirect fire based off of audio, which you could send via your augmentation.

Cheap weapon, or permanent upgrade? Whatever. I didn't need either, right now.

"I can hit them from here myself. They're pretty close to the walls and not moving fast."

Understood. I'll supply you with a magazine of dumb-fire penetrators.

 

Purchased:

• 2 pts x 1; 7.62x39mm 'Hole Punch' Penetrator, magazine of 30

Total cost: 2
Remaining points: 70

 

"How will I use them?"

Touch the Sentinel's barrel to the wall before firing. The cartridges are a two-stage design. The front load squirts itself into the wall and forms a conductive duct that acts as an extension to your Sentinel's electric rail. A single flechette is accelerated through the duct and kills the target. 

I was about to dismount the samurai-tech sidearm from my gun, but the little tumor of moving plates and ammo-stores slid forward and reconfigured itself until its barrel extended just beyond the rifle's. Now the entire thing's balance was way off, but I wasn't bothered with my new alien-sponsored strength.

"Okay, ready for the mag, Tynea," I sent and held my hand out, palm up. A black magazine dropped into it, and I held it against the Sentinel's top and let it consume the projectiles.

I switched over to the new ammunition type with a mental command of "Penetrator!" and prepared to, literally, stitch the first alien a new hole.

 

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