Chapter Forty-Seven – Safe, Not Sound

Chapter Forty-Seven – Safe, Not Sound

“We are here today to lay a good person to rest.

I’m sorry, big bro. Your dream’s not going to die with you, alright? I promise.”

–Longbow, at the funeral of the samurai Sprocket Rocket, 2048

***

I ran to a stop on the edge of a rooftop. Some boring rectangle of a building, with nothing to make it stand out except an odd number of AC units on the rooftop. Behind me, on the road I’d just jumped over, were a couple of hundred aliens currently enjoying some acid rain coupled with a sprinkling of more traditional explosives.

The property damage I was leaving behind was going to cost billions, I suspected.

Grasshopper’s tally probably wasn’t going to be far behind.

Looking down at the street below, I could make out entire chunks of concrete missing, some looking like they’d been punched right off the walls. Other areas had a sprinkling of bullet holes punching into the buildings, the roads, and through the corpses of dozens and dozens of antithesis.

It was a charnel house down there. Aliens laying in heaps, having fallen where they ran. Not as much blood as I might have expected. Each alien that was dead had a hole poking right through their skull, usually between the eyes.

I imagined that all of those holes in the walls were created after a round went through some alien’s brain.

“Which way?” I asked.

Myalis’ reply was to create a red circle which hovered over everything off to my left. There were more bodies that way, not that the bodies would remain there forever. The antithesis were starting to poke into the road from the sides, some of them moving with a bit more caution, others running in while their skin sizzled under the effects of my acid.

I tossed a pair of acid bombs up and over the road. They’d dissolve the bodies, maybe keep some of the aliens from following.

Running along the rooftops, I traced the path that Grasshopper had left. At some point she ran into an apartment building. Judging by the semi-circle of bodies piled up by the entrance, she had stayed there for a while.

Some of the bodies were shoved aside on one side. I squinted, then zoomed in with my cybernetic eye. Lots of footprints in that spot. Easy to make out since they’d stepped through a puddle of antithesis blood-stuff.

“Was she with a group of civvies?” I asked.

Unknown. It’s possible though. Let me verify… yes. Grasshopper received a report that a civilian safehouse was in this area and wasn’t going to be able to withstand an artillery assault.

“Oh,” I said. I listened for a bit. There was a non-stop thumping in the background, with the occasional whistle to punctuate it. The constant bombardment was mostly on the further edges of the city though, and it was easy to dismiss it as a sort of horrific background noise. “Are they going to bomb this position?”

Eventually, yes. Currently the area is marked as a do-not-fire zone. You should be safe.

That was nice. I didn’t feel like getting crushed twice in one day.

I picked up the pace. Grasshopper wasn’t far. She wasn’t moving either, not according to Myalis, and I was growing increasingly worried that whatever injury she had, it wasn’t just a bruise and a papercut.

I came around a corner, then slowed to a stop as I took in the scene. Half a dozen model fives, all splattered around and very dead. Next to them, with half of its body shoved into the back of some office, was a bigger, nastier looking alien. “What’s that?” I asked.

That’s a model fourteen. It’s a transportation unit. Fast-moving and well-armoured. Not necessarily effective at being offensive, but it is capable of carrying other models across the ground fairly rapidly. It never stops growing, adding new segments whenever it has consumed enough biomass.

The alien was about the length of a bus, its entire body made of segments of greenish flesh covered in thick carapace and filled with sharp legs beneath. A few holes the size of my torso were missing from some of its segments, but it looked like it took quite a few of those to kill it.

I jumped off the edge of the building, jump jets activating to slow down my fall before I hit the ground with a heavy thump and bent knees. I ran around the model fourteen, just in case it wasn’t as dead as it looked. “Resonator,” I asked.

Myalis delivered, and I flicked the grenade on and tossed it underhand beneath the model fourteen’s corpse. If it wasn’t entirely dead, then that might melt off the rest of it. I didn’t envy Grasshopper having to deal with that thing.

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“I didn’t think we’d see models that big so soon,” I said.

It has been long enough that models above ten should be appearing, though in limited numbers.