Chapter Seventy-Four – I Have The Shy Ground

Chapter Seventy-Four – I Have The Shy Ground

“That’s NOT how recoil works. Hell, that’s not how physics works.

No, I don’t care that you’re a samurai or whatever. While you’re human, in this universe, you obey the laws of physics, dammit!”

–Professor K. Dick, Psysics dept. MIT, 2033

***

I tried to be somewhat subtle as I moved through the woods. Shy was ahead of me, and she caught on soon enough that my mech was on the wider side of things. That meant that she mostly picked out a route with fewer trees, or at least more room between them whenever possible.

I was still crashing through the woods, rustling branches and breaking young trees with loud snaps. There was subtle, then there was multi-ton mecha subtle.

There was really only so much that could be done at the end of the day.

Shy half-turned, and I could only just make her out from the very slight shimmer in the air where she stood. Her camo was good, but it still warped a little when contrasted against a complex surface, like fallen trees and piles of leaves.

She raised a hand out from beneath her poncho, a finger raised in a ‘one-moment’ kind of gesture. I paused, lowering my mech down a little so that I wasn’t poking out of the canopy as much.

A flight of Model Ones swooped by overhead. Little raven-like heads tilting this way and that as their too-many-eyes scanned the woods.

Looking past them, into the wider sky above, I could make out distant tracer shots still leaving marks across the sky. There was the occasional ‘pop’ and ‘bang’ of flak bursts going off. Sometimes I could hear the whistle of a rocket reaching up into the atmosphere. Those would be accompanies by a small spark, like a tiny second sun for just a moment as something was fucked up way out above the atmosphere.

The number of aliens coming down from above seemed to be slowing down? Maybe? I wasn’t sure. The amount of shots going up certainly seemed to have dwindled a fair bit.

Shy gestured me forwards, and I followed. The flock of Model Ones had moved on. It seemed as if they were patrolling the area for a bit before heading off towards the south west a little. The same direction as the Big Gun.

I had to get back there sooner rather than later if I wanted to help.

Shy led me around in a wide arc, and I realized that we were slowly heading back towards a roadway, one with an old stone bridge over a small creek. There were some things discarded on the roadside.

One of those things looked a lot like a gun. A big one. Shy ran over to it, then knelt down while swishing her poncho out so that it covered most of the gun. I could still see part of her though, hands quickly moving over the blocky receiver, checking it over for damage and pulling back the bolt.

“What’s that gun?” I asked.

Shy glanced up to me, then back down. I almost caught her saying something before her AI filled me in. “Lady Shy has two specialities. Stealth, which keeps her hidden and discrete, and her weapon speciality is shotguns.”

“Shotguns?” I asked. That thing was longer than I was tall. “That’s a shotgun?”

Shy looked up to me and spoke for the first time that I could actually hear. “Punt gun.”

What the fuck was a punt gun? Shy answered by reaching down to a small case on the floor and carefully flipping the lid with the end of a boot. It revealed space for three shells, but two were missing. The third was about as big around as my wrist. Shy picked it up with both hands, then opened a slot on the side of her gun and shoved the shell in.

She cocked the gun by pulling out a small lever from the side. Then sitting down on the ground, she tugged back with her entire body, like a rower upping back on a paddle.

The gun clunked.

She stood up, patted down her pants, then lifted up the entire gun, seemingly with little difficulty. “How much does that thing weigh?” I asked.

“Lady Shy’s rifle weighs eight kilograms. It’s mostly made of aluminium and titanium to keep its weight down.”

“And that fires one fuck-big slug?” I asked.

Shy shook her head. I actually got a second word out of her. “Birdshot.”

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She took down a Model Thirty-One with birdshot? That was ballsy.

“What do you usually use? When you’re not punt gunning things?”

Shy reached into her poncho and pulled out a smaller gun. Smaller, as in only as long as her forearm, but it had a barrel large enough to fit a few fingers in. “Four gauge,” she said. The gun had a weird stock, but I didn’t have time to examine it before she disappeared it back under her poncho.