Chapter Fifty-Nine – Enjoying the View

Chapter Fifty-Nine – Enjoying the View

“Why? Because this piece of shit runs off the same trash software some guy made in his mother’s basement in the fucking eighties! That’s why!”

–About modern printers, 2057

***

It’s going to have to be a custom job for each one.

I frowned, but it made sense.

I had three cars sitting before me and five armoured vans. The cars were all sharp angles and boxy frames. They looked like they could move fast and punch through reinforced walls with ease. The kind of overly manly design language that got the little knobs of cops around the world all hard.

Having the Fury parked nearby kinda ripped the wind out of their sails, however. These things were at best armed with piddly little turreted autocannons designed to punch cars out of the air. They might have been police pursuit vehicles, but they weren’t rated to do much against the antithesis.

The five vans parked behind them were a bit better. I noticed three distinct models there, but they all followed more or less the same design language. Rounded fronts as a slight concession to aerodynamics and a big bulky box of a body with side-opened doors. Three of them had side-mounted turrets with the guns missing. A few techs were installing them in a hurry, though.

Yeah, those would do.

“Alright,” I said. There was a gathering of pilots and volunteers from the militia nearby. “We’re going to arm up the vans with something to drop bombs. You’re going to need someone inside to reload the bomb dropping thing, but it should be able to drop them on the right spot.”

I was half talking to these guys and half to Myalis. I didn’t want to have to trust some bozo with dropping bombs. You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to give someone with no training access to exotic explosives.

Clearing my throat, I gestured to the three pursuit vehicles. “We can add a cheap laser turret onto these. It’ll make them a bit better in the air. That autocannon looks like it’s enough to take out some of the earlier double-digit aliens without too much trouble.”

Franny was arriving soon, and it wouldn’t be too hard to divert three of those turrets over. Plus it would save me a few points.

I walked over to each van in turn and scanned their interiors with my augs to give Myalis a good idea of the amount of space we were dealing with. Then I ordered up the bomb-dropping mechanism for each. They were a hundred and twenty points each, which… I wasn’t sure if that was a ripoff or not. Each was relatively large, able to fit into the door and block it completely, with a sort of deployable tube thing on the side to actually drop the bombs from.

Of course, I left the installation to the nearby techs, just scanning the interiors for Myalis and ordering the shit was enough work for me.

“Will you be riding along with them?” Intel-chan asked. We had a voice channel up and running at all times now. The other nearby samurai were on it, but we’d split things up into individual channels so that we wouldn’t be bothering each other with constant chatter. There was a ‘loud’ channel where everyone would hear anything said, but that was more for emergencies.

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll go with Gomorrah. The Fury is a much nicer ride and we’ll want to see what we can of the shoreline from the air. That’ll be a lot easier with the Fury than in one of these cheap things.”

“Fair enough. We’ve got as many volunteers as we need already, and a few more besides,” Intel-chan said.

I nodded along. That much was pretty clear already. The area had picked up in activity, there were a lot more people standing around or trying to look busy than before.

I was a little worried about the friction between the militia and the kittens, but so far it wasn’t all that bad. The kittens seemed to lean more towards the… I guess ‘casual’ side of things, especially whenever the militia were around. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the militia were walking with an even stiffer rod up their asses whenever they passed the kittens.

Typical monkey ‘my group’s better than yours’ behaviour, basically. Kind of weird seeing it from a distance, usually I’d be there strutting with the rest of them.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Alright, the bombers were being set up… we still needed ammo for them to drop, which meant that I had to find Gomorrah.

Fortunately, she wasn’t that hard to find. Less fortunately, she was standing next to a familiar hover car, hands moving with uncertainty while Franny was bent over double to squeeze into the hovercar and remove folded up laser turrets that looked like they were fresh off the presses.