Chapter Seventy – I Just Want The Sky On Fire

Chapter Seventy – I Just Want The Sky On Fire

“You know that saying, ‘there’s always a bigger fish?’ well, it ain’t true. Eventually you hit whales and there’s nothing bigger.

But with the Antithesis? The Anathema? Yeah, with them, there really is always a bigger fish.”

–Back Grounder, during Samucon panel interview, 2038

***

I never considered it before, but the sky being on fire really was quite pretty. I think it was the red and oranges contrasting well with all of the deep blues. Then there were suddenly long streaks ripping through the boiling balls of fire above. Tiny black forms that unfurled into massive antithesis forms.

I zoomed into one of them, trying to take in as many details as I could. It looked like a model… twenty-two? Those big pterodactyl looking ones. I remember almost getting messed up by one when I was a brand new baby samurai.

This one’s body looked a little larger, and its wings were stubbier and covered in strange ridges. Feathers? Meat flaps? I wasn’t sure from so far away. It could be anything. Maybe some sort of biological thing that allowed the bastards to fly their way through space?

They were followed by more. Aliens dipping through the screen of fire that Gomorrah had put up. Some were smoking and charred, but plenty more seemed fine.

“They’re low enough now,” Crackshot said.

“Low enough for wha–” I began.

I was interrupted by the jack-hammer thumping of massive guns. I looked over, and the gun emplacement I’d bought was opening fire along with a few others. A round sent up every second, alternating between barrels one after the other.

I tilted my neck back again to see what that was amounting to.

The rounds were… not smart, but they had some guidance to them. I wasn’t surprised when the alien I’d marked out earlier had a face-to-shell meeting that ended with a small explosion that turned it into so much scrap biomatter.

“Looks like things are going alright,” I said. There were a lot of shells going up now, not just my gun, but from a few dozen others. Machine guns picked up the fire, as well as a few missile launchers and flak cannons.

Unfortunately, there was also a lot of sky to shoot at. Blanketing the entire sky would be a whole ordeal. I squinted as more black specs started to appear above. Guns turned, and tracking software picked out ranges, trajectories, and planted rounds into stranglers, but there were more and more of them, and after a solid two or three minutes of non-stop firing, I was starting to notice when the criss-crossing lines of tracer rounds were targeting aliens that were much lower to the ground.

I almost jumped out of my skin when a corpse splattered to the ground a dozen metres away. It was smoking and riddled with holes, its body looking like it had passed through a strainer and then got the shit kicked out of it, but it was recognizably a model twenty-two… or a quarter of a model twenty-two at this rate.

More bits of aliens were starting to rain down around us, as well as tiny bits of shrapnel. Gros Baton was the first to dart into cover, crouching down under my mech as a chunk of metal pinged off its side.

I ran over to join him, and Crackshot moved over to the entrance of the bunker. “We’re going to have some of this for a while,” he said in a shout. “We can’t afford to be hiding when they finally make it close!”

“You think they’ll make it close?” I asked.

“Don’t be overconfident, yeah?”

That was a fair point. Assuming that we had enough to take them all out was asking for them to swoop in and wreck a few guns, then things would slowly tilt the other way and we’d be dealing with angry flying aliens all over the place.

“Hey, get to cover,” I said to Gros Baton. “I’m hopping into the mech.”

“Correct!” he said with a little salut, then he zipped out towards the bunker with his coat pulled up over his head, as if he was avoiding some rain.

I ducked to the side and sent the right order to my mech’s computer. It lowered itself down with the front popping itself open to make room. I grabbed on, pulling myself up and into the cockpit. It took some reshuffling once within to tuck my coat away but soon enough I was in the seat and plugging myself in properly.

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There was that familiar moment of disorientation as my augs’ many screens were shuffled away and replaced by all of the system messages and alerts and the usual heaps of quick-glance information I needed to operate my mech.