Chapter Nineteen – Vital Defensive Preparation

Chapter Nineteen – Vital Defensive Preparation

“I like the ship.

Plus, I bet that in private, Gomorrah’s totally the dom. I mean, have you seen the amount of faux-leather in her outfit?”

–ShipBattles Forum post by user Youralis, 2057

***

My plan had three basic steps, and of course I ran into trouble before the first one was out.

“Fuck,” I said succinctly.

Myalis had continued to direct my drones through the hive tunnels, and that meant that with each passing minute we had a better picture of where the hive was. The good news was that few of the branching tunnels were under Downtown. Not none, but few, which was the second best option there.

Then Myalis, being the helpful little AI she was, kindly pointed out a big glaring issue that I hadn’t considered.

If we wanted to spread the alien-eating nanogoop to as many aliens as possible, then we’d need to insert it in a few spots, and the best of those were all hard to reach. She overlaid a few locations in the tunnel network where we could do the insertion, but they weren’t all close at hand.

“Okay,” I said. My first thought was finding suicidal volunteers to head out and drop the packages off, but there were other, better options. “We send out drones. Same cat drones that we’re using already, but with the bombs attached to them. Is that doable?” I asked.

Of course. The cats will also be able to reach the locations that I’ve designated as ideal spreading points with relative ease. Though this will take time in any case, and there are few locations to insert them from. The hole in the basement of the museum is one of three locations I’ve found so far, and it’s the most convenient.

I nodded along. It wasn’t central or anything, but… yeah. Time to delegate. “Get me the General,” I asked while I paced along the length of the food court. I didn’t care if anyone saw me, really. Manic was still around, cleaning her nails out with a guitar pick. Sprout and Gomorrah had run off to prepare the defences and Johnny–Arm-a-Geddon, that was, had run off to… I didn’t know, try to get laid maybe?

A line opened up on my augs with a boring image of the general’s face as the only indicator of who I was talking to. “Stray Cat?” he asked.

“You got any militia people with honking big testicles, General?” I asked.

He chuckled. “I might have a few. What needs doing?”

“I need a very precious cargo driven to a specific location and delivered to a specific hole. And no, this isn’t any sort of innuendo. I need people to deliver a load of drones to the museum, specifically the basement where there’s access to the antithesis’ tunnel network.”

“Is this going to be the sort of mission where we only ask for volunteers?” he asked.

I swallowed. “I hope it’s not that bad but… maybe ask anyway. We don’t want cowards on this one. Give them your best gear too, and maybe I can throw in a few bonuses. Uh, while I have you on the line, where would be the best place to dump off a heap of Samurai-grade weapons?”

“Mall, second floor, we’ve taken over a row of shops there,” he said. “I’ll have someone meet you.”

“Alright. Will you be able to distribute things quickly?”

“We’ll try. No promises when it comes to the civilians though, they might decide to run and hide.” There was no contempt there, just a matter-of-factness to everything that made it sound terribly truthful. Some civilians would run, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

“Thanks, General. We’ll deal with that when the time comes, I guess. Getting as many people ready to receive the horde as we can is more important for now.”

With that done, I started to make my way across the mall. Of course, my pacing meant that I’d ended up as far from the nearest escalator bank as I could be without stepping outside. That was fine, it gave me time to get my next call out of the way.

Lucy answered on the third ring, and the first thing I heard was her breathing. Her breathing which was hard and laboured. “Uh,” I said. “Hey… what’re you up to?” I asked.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

She laughed between pants. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Desperately,” I said. “You know, you can set your augs to record whatever it is you’re doing in first person…”

“Oh?” she asked, the teasing note in her voice was impossible to miss. “Would you, ah, like that?”