Chapter Fifty – Emoscythe

Chapter Fifty – Emoscythe

“Things have gone to shit, as expected, but New Montreal’s not doing too bad.

The Corporate State of Ontario’s fucked. Quebec city has started full on drafting, and Manitoba is… actually, nothing’s changed there. It’s still a hellscape.”

–Real Canadian News, 2057 live broadcast

***

When Myalis suggested a Flak Cat Cannon, I had a mental image of what would appear when I bought it.

That mental image was all wrong.

The Flak Cat Cannon was a biggish device, maybe the size of my hoverbike, with a large base that had four legs and a barrel that stretched out above it. It looked pretty normal. Sleek and futuristic, but normal. The CAT R Cool decals on the side were a given, of course. What really threw me off were the three mecha cats that came with the cannon.

They were wearing little camo army helmets (I realized that the camo was just cat silhouettes in different shades of green that overlapped each other) and hi-vis vests. The cats climbed onto the cannon and started to man it right away. Two of them worked the controls while a third fit a shell into the gun’s breech.

“Myalis, is this some sort of joke?” I asked.

I find it funny.

“You’re the worst,” I said.

The cannon is entirely functional. I even managed to reduce the price so that it packs more of a punch than it should for its point-cost. And the mechanised cats operating it can defend themselves as well, giving it some much needed point-defence.

I was going to argue some more when the cannon fired.

Some of the nearest windows burst apart, glass raining down from on high as a ball of grey dust appeared a hundred metres above. A few seconds later the tinkle of glass was joined by metallic clinks as shrapnel tumbled out of the sky along with some antithesis chunks.

The cats scrambled to move the gun around a few degrees and it fired a second time, the shell exploding in the middle of a flock of aliens which were shredded apart by the expanding cloud of shrapnel.

“Well, at least it’s working,” I said.

With the acid grenades and resonators occupying every entrance into this stretch of road, the only aliens making it close looked like shit. Their skin was burned and their bones half melted. It only took a few railgun rounds pumped through them to take them down for good.

“ETA on that transport?” I asked.

One minute, twelve seconds. It’s a Vanguard’s vessel. You won’t have to worry about the safety of the passengers, not against lower-tier threats.

That was a relief.

I pulled up the regional map and scanned it while I waited. The wave wasn’t broken. Far from it. It looked like it had met a few pockets of resistance here and there and had flowed around those. On meeting the main defences where the wall was meant to be, the horde couldn’t continue. So instead it was spreading out and back, a few small tendrils sneaking back into the city.

Those would be trouble. They’d probably start looking for survivors and those too slow to evacuate, or they’d set up hives right on the edge of New Montreal. We didn’t need aliens growing right on our doorstep.

I searched for the pin that marked Gomorrah’s position and found it somewhere to the north of me, closer in towards the wall. The area around her was orange and green, with fewer aliens around.

The area I was in was mostly orange too.

I zoomed back out, then took in the city as a whole. The blockage bridging the gap in the wall kept New Montreal safe. The other side of it was entirely green. Orange and red tendrils reached out to that border, but it looked as though they were holding firm.

The city beyond the wall was a mess of oranges with an equal number of green swatches and red ones.

“Is it just me or are they moving slower?” I asked.

It’s likely that the antithesis, or at least those capable of thinking that well, have realized that they don’t have the strength to reach what they consider to be the biggest threat.

“That’s good, right?”