Chapter Fifty-Eight – Knight Takes Moon

Chapter Fifty-Eight – Knight Takes Moon

“People still play chess? That game’s ancient! Why would anyone still want to play that?”

–Live Streamer MonMonMan, 2034

***

The hours were crawling by, and if the fate of the entre world wasn’t at stake, and if I wasn’t making points hand over fist, I might have fucked off already to do something more entertaining.

As it was, Gros Baton and I were in our sixth game of chess. The kid had bought a holographic chess set for like, three points or something.

It hovered between us, the board currently a bit of a mess as our pieces were locked trying to contest the middle. He was winning, of course, but if he made about… six major mistakes in a row, there was a tiny chance that I’d make it through.

His pieces looked like tiny mediaeval people. His knights looked like knights and his bishops like bishops. His pawns were teeny-tiny napoleonic soldiers with itty-bitty muskets.

“Pawn to E5,” he said, and one of his lil soldiers struck one of my knights with the fun end of his bayonet.

My pieces were cats. My king and queen were lions, my knights were bobcats in platemail, my bishops were leopards with little pope-hats, and my towers were small towers with lazy tigers sleeping atop them. My pawns were plain old house cats. What few I had left.

“Ah, fuck,” I muttered. That move had opened up the middle, once that pawn of his died his queen would be right up in my king’s grill.

And then my phone rang. Or the phone app on my Augs went off, at least. I jumped, and blinked at the names calling me. The Keiretsu and the Nightwatchmen calling me at the same time?

I glanced up at the Phobos monitor before I hit reply. Gros Baton and I had smashed two more shells into the moon. An electron suppression bomb, which had done… something? It left a large hole bored through the moon and made the radiation sensors the Keiretsu have go absolutely haywire. And right after that, a black hole bomb. That one had been less impressive than I’d hoped. It went off before the moon and gave it the bad suck. Lots of dust and smaller debris was ripped off the surface of Phobos where the bomb went off.

It looked like a good quarter of the moon had been power washed by the time the bomb went all supernova and blasted that end of the moon until it looked like something Lucy had started to cook and promptly forgot about.

Pretty okay results, all in all. We were up to ten percent, which was a good sign, I figured.

“Yo,” I said as I answered the call. I made the universal ‘I’m on a call’ gesture with thumb and pinkie so that Gros Baton would know that I wasn’t just surrendering.

“Ah, Miss Stray Cat?” Doctor Weber said. “Good! It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. I heard that you were currently operating the Big Gun’s… Big Gun, and so I thought it would be a good time for a conference.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Sup? And uh, hi to you too Susan.”

“Greetings, Stray Cat,” the calmer Japanese man said. “Your team has been doing impressive work.”

“Aww, thanks! Your drones are pretty kick-ass too,” I said. I’d been seeing them coming in on the Phobos monitor. It looked like the Keiretsu had kicked up production pretty steadily, because the number of drones rushing over was increasing every hour.

They were actually kinda neat? They looked like balls, mostly, with manoeuvring thrusters poking out all over the place and then whatever kind of gun or whatever they had stuck out of the end. Some of them were linked up to get to Phobos, often tied to a larger booster that would disconnect then fly on over to the moon where they blew up satisfyingly before the drones started to go around and do their own things.

“Thank you,” Susan said. “We didn’t call to trade compliments, however.”

“Indeed. The situation is more dire than we expected,” Radikal said. “Our current projections suggest that Phobos will be within the red zone in forty-eight hours.”

“What’s the red zone?” I asked. “Beyond the obvious that it’s something we don’t want.”

“The red zone is what we’re calling the area of space where an unbroken Phobos will absolutely be able to annihilate life on Earth. Even if Phobos is rendered into pieces no bigger than a car, within the Red zone it would still kill us all.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Oh,” I said. “And how close are we to the, uh, orange zone?”

“We’re in it,” Susan said.