Chapter Forty-One – Hive Five!

Chapter Forty-One – Hive Five!

“We’ve had a 70% increase in the number of school shootings this year…

Which is FANTASTIC news!”

–KiddieArmour Co. Internal Memo, 2037

***

Gros Baton slowly lowered his styrofoam bowl, then glanced past me to Rac. “T’avais pas envie de me dire qu’elle allait venir ici?”

Rac snorted. “Nah, I thought it being a surprise would be funnier. As… repayment, for that surprise the other day.”

Gros Baton stared for just a moment before rolling his eyes. “Bitch,” he said, but somehow, even with his little accent, it came out as mostly endearing. “Hello, Chat Errant,” he said.

“Hi! Bonjour, I’m Nya!” Nya said.

“Salut,” Gros Baton said, even as he backed up from Nya who slinked over and loomed above him. She leaned forwards, and for a moment I thought she might give the boy a peck. Instead, she sniffed at the top of his bowl, then slipped it out of his grasp. “‘Ey! That’s my poutine!”

“Oh! Nya heard of this,” she said. She raised a hand, plucked a pair of (very obviously) cat-themed chopsticks out of the air, and then dug in. “Hmm… this tastes like… potatoes and heart problems.”

“Potatoes are a vegetable,” Gros Baton said.

“Keep telling yourself that,” I said before taking a look at the camp again. It was a pretty nice set-up. Very… manish, though. Several tables had been dropped to their sides, with like, office supplies stacked up on the far side to make for quick barricades. In a few other spots, there were more purpose-built barricades. These were made from metal plates that hooked into the ground and rose up to about my lower waist. A matching plate always hung from the ceiling, leaving a slit to see out of.

There were a few turrets around. Little deployable box turrets, with what looked like drum-fed assault-rifles held in gimbal arms with a sensor suit slapped onto the side. They looked well-engineered, so probably Protector-tech or very high end corporate stuff.

Actually, no logos, so definitely Protector-bought stuff.

The barricades had walls of spines on the outside, like the ass-end of a porcupine, so no guess who bought those.

“Is Hedgehog around?” I asked before sidling over to a couch that looked like it had been stolen out of like, a bank lobby or something. It wasn’t comfortable.

“Ouien, he’s a few floors down,” Grow Baton said. “Are you ‘ere to steal all our kills?”

“Nah,” I said. “Just doing the rounds, checking in on everyone,” I said. “Do you know Deus Ex?” I asked.

“From the cartoon?” he asked.

I stared at him. “Huh?”

“He means that one samurai TV show, for kids,” Rac said. “The one with a bunch of anime-versions of popular samurai. Which he should know are mostly workers. You can’t go pointing at them and telling them that you know them from a fucking cartoon, you moron.”

“Tabarnak, laisse faire. Pis, ce Deus Ex, what does she want with me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Well, not quite. Did you know that there are samurai in charge of different cities?”

“Yup!” Nya said. She extended the empty bowl to Gros Baton and he stared at it for a moment, rolled his eyes again, then muttered something in French. A moment later there were four more bowls on a little tray decorated in.. sticks? “Oh! Good boy!”

“Ah, thanks,” Gros Baton said past a blush.

I shook my head, but took the bowl that was offered to me. I wasn’t gonna let Lucy know, but this shit hit different. “Thanks,” I said. “So, you’ve found a sort of goldmine in here, huh?”

“Something like that,” Gros Baton said. “‘Edge’og and I’s AI think that there’s an ‘ive in the bottom floors.”

“In the basement levels?” I asked, sitting up a smidge. If a hive was down there, then it was basically loose in the city. That meant access to a lot of major arteries, and more importantly, a million minor ones. Water and electricity was piped through the sublevels of most mega buildings, and that shit lead everywhere.

“Nah,” Gros Baton said with a shake of his head. “We checked. We even left some sensors and things down there, in case. And we sealed off the first floor after clearing it out, so if the aliens want to make it to the city, they need to break down through the first floor.”

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Okay,” I said. “So, they’re pinched between floor one and here?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We think it’s just a small hive. It, uh, ran out of food.”

I blinked at that. “It’s starving? Is that even possible?”

“Nya’s seen it happen,” Nya said. “Not often though. If there’s heat, then it can eat that, and keep growing, but the aliens need to eat something. They can’t make mass out of nothing!”

“Alright,” I said. “So… what, there’s just not much food in this building?”