Chapter Sixteen – Making Lots of Little Problems

Chapter Sixteen – Making Lots of Little Problems

“It’s true that the antithesis are essentially plants, without a centralised hive-mind, or even a coherent structure of command. They are true aliens, unlike nearly anything that we’ve ever seen on Earth.

But don’t discount their cunning.”

-Professor Christie, Lecture on the Mysteries of the Antithesis, 2029

***

I lowered my Laser Pointer, placed the red dot in the sight over the model ten, then tapped the trigger to release a trio of rounds with a hush-like whisper and a faint kick to my shoulder.

The water around the aliens splashed up and I stepped back a bit not to get hit by it. The rounds I fired pierced through the water and rammed into the little alien, two of the three finding their mark and ripping it up.

“Okay,” I said. “This is fucky.”

“Is this normal?” Manic asked. She flicked a rock into the hole with the tip of her boot. It splashed next to the corpse which gently floated up and away from the root.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I admitted. This was very strange. The root seemed to go on for a while. In fact… I knelt down and lowered myself over the hole, following the path bored into the ground. I couldn’t see far, not with the lighting being as poor as it was and with my vision obscured by murky water, but it was pretty obvious that the tunnel went on for quite a ways. Onwards, and deeper too. “Myalis, what am I looking at?”

It looks like an artery root from an antithesis hive. They are frequently grown along tunnels dug out by model eights and, of course, guarded by model tens. These will frequently link two sections of a hive together.

“There’s an entire heap of bad implications there,” I muttered as I stood back up. “We’re going to need to call Gomorrah about this.”

“I want to know where the root’s leading to,” Manic said.

“Trouble,” I answered.

She scoffed, but didn’t press. I think we both knew I was right. Now, that begged the question, why was there a root like this underground? Or… no, that was a stupid question. Higher-tier samurai than me had been smashing hives all over. This one was probably a lot harder to discover, hidden as it was underground and under a layer of water. It was beneath the city, too. I bet a cursory glance would just suggest that it was some piping or something normal instead of a giant alien problem.

I rang up Gomorrah, and she picked up within a few seconds. She was breathing hard on the other end of the line. “Hey,” I said.

“Hello,” she replied. “What is it?”

“Nothing super urgent, are you alright on your end?” I asked. She was breathing pretty hard. Was she in a running fight?

“Just burning some xenos,” she said.

Ah. Well. That explained the heavy breathing then. I wasn’t sure if Franny was a lucky girl or not. “Okay then. You find the hive?”

“No, actually. Atyacus pointed us to a place but there was nothing there. It was strange. My IR systems said the place was hot too, but nothing.”

“Did you check underground?” I asked.

“No? There was a parking garage, but nothing in it.”

I looked down the hole again. “Yeah, well, we found something neat over here. I’m with Manic, and while sniffing around we found this fuck-huge hole with a large root in it and a model ten. No signs of a proper hive, just a recently bored hole and the root. Myalis says it might be like, a connection between two hive parts.”

“Huh,” Gomorrah said. “And we were right on top of it? That might explain why these model threes ran to our position, actually. I thought it was strange.”

“A lot of them?”

“No, just a few,” she said.