Chapter Forty-Nine – For Shying Out Loud

Chapter Forty-Nine – For Shying Out Loud

“Those immigrants, are they any better than the alien invaders? They come to our lands, despoil us and our wealth, and spit on the traditions and values of or forefathers! They are a plague upon all good people!

No better, I say! They are no better than the aliens themselves!”

–Speech at a Mississippi rally, three minutes before an active Antithesis hive cancelled the event, 2036

***

“Um,” Shy said, which from her was basically the equivalent of a whole sentence.

“Yeah?” I asked. We were heading to the kitchen. Well, I was heading to the kitchen. Shy was tagging along, hands together and eyes darting around as if she was in a hive looking for the next alien about to try to eat her head… which was actually a fair amount of caution to have. The brats living here could be worse than some Antithesis.

“Where is, ah, Samurai Tankette?”

“No clue,” I said. “Deus Ex left me a note thing with her address. I know it’s in New Montreal, so probably not that far. I’m grabbing a snack for the road. Want something? We’ve got every kind of soda.”

“Thank you?”

She watched as I opened the fridge, then found two energy drinks for the road. I was enjoying being able to consume twenty-times my daily allotment of caffeine without having to worry about what would happen to my liver three years down the line.

Shy glanced in the fridge, then slowly pointed to one of the cans.

I grabbed a six-pack, and shoved them into her arms. “Dinner is served,” I said. “Alright, let’s go! I’ve just got to tell Lucy that I’m heading out, so she knows to call me if shit goes haywire here. You can go down and wait, if you want.”

“No, it’s… okay,” she said.

I think she regretted that five minutes later, because I spent four of those five minutes kissing Lucy goodbye.

Honestly, if it wasn’t for Shy showing up, I might have put off the whole plan for this evening and just… stayed there to keep on kissing Lucy, but needs must.

Shy and I rode the elevator down, then got into the Bastion. I did a quick system’s check, mostly because I’d been skipping it a lot and that wasn’t a clever thing to do too often, especially with anything that could move this fast in the air. I trusted Myalis and her Protector tech with my life, but that didn’t mean it didn’t require some amount of maintenance and could just be ignored.

Everything turned up green enough for my liking, so we took off, and I punched in Tankette’s address into the onboard navigational system. Tankette, as it turned out, lived way off on the far northern shore of New Montreal. Not too far away from the school, though it was still a five minute flight from there.

Her neighborhood was an area filled with fat, low apartment complexes.

It was probably not a bad spot to live, actually. It was just outside of the New Montreal walls, but a smaller, lower wall protected the area. There were nicer homes on the edges as well, with actual lawns and shit behind their own, more private set of walls, but Tankette’s address pointed us towards one of the rather plain apartment blocks.

It was one of fifty near-identical buildings. From above, the only difference was the occasional roof garden or the placement of a few AC units, otherwise, it was just more of the same building next to copies of itself.

As the Bastion lowered itself, I was able to guess which one was Tankette’s home.

There was a tank parked out front.

It wasn’t the cute little thing she’d been riding around in during the whole Big Gun thing either. This tank was a full-on main battle tank. It had small, armoured turrets on each corner, four sets of tracks, and a bigger turret squatting in the middle with a gun that looked like it might be able to punch a hole even in the Bastion.

The apartment building looked pretty normal otherwise, though. I was sure that she wasn’t allowed to park that there, yet there it was, blocking a good chunk of the road.

I found a spot a little further back to park the Bastion in, then set up some commands for the ship to take off and fly circles around the block for a while, at least until recalled.

It was one thing to piss off some admin at the school. It was a whole other thing to piss off a samurai friend’s neighbours by being too big of a cunt.

“Alright!” I said as I hopped out of the seat. “Let’s see how Tankette is feeling about unexpected guests.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Y-you didn’t tell her?” Shy asked.

“What we’d be showing up? Nah. Why would I?” I asked.

The look of horror on Shy’s face was actually kind of cute, in a morbid sort of way.