Chapter Sixty-Four – Climate Change Via Mass Destruction

Chapter Sixty-Four – Climate Change Via Mass Destruction

“The average samurai will do as much good for the environment as harm. They’ll occasionally decide to ruin an entire corporation on a whim, often the same corporations responsible for massive environmental disasters (see: BP 2029) and they might provide the tools, expertise, or simple willingness to fix ecological issues.

By that same token, they will often cause massive disasters while attempting to eliminate their adversaries (see: The Lake Huron Incident 2032).

–An Environmental Analysis of the Impact of Out-of-Context Actors, 2036

***

The Fury spun around in a tight circle as it lowered itself to ground level. A few PMCs glanced our way, but we were doing samurai stuff and they mostly knew to mind their own when two samurai were on the warpath.

Also, they’d probably just witnessed the pair of us kill a thousand-odd aliens each, which I imagined was a decent way of instilling a sort of primal respect in someone.

“Are you going to ditch the armour?” Gomorrah asked.

I thought about it for about a second. “I’d rather not. Think I can ride on the hood?”

“That would be exceptionally stupid, but I won’t stop you,” Gomorrah said. “Try not to scratch the paint though.” She opened the driver’s side door and slid into the car. I hesitated for a second before raising a leg and climbing onto the hood. The muscle-car-like shape of the Fury was coming in handy since it was all sharp, aggressive angles.

“Right, this’ll make it easier to fling bombs off the side,” I said. I was feeling… dubiously confident in my lack of any sort of plan.

Did you decide what kind of bomb you want to use?

Myalis’ question wasn’t too terrible. “We’ll start with those acid cloud ones I think, right Gom?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” she agreed. “I asked Atyacus for ideas for explosives, since those are generally your area of expertise, and he found something interesting. Heat bombs.”

“Heat bombs? Is that an acronym?” I asked.

It could be.

Gomorrah probably didn’t hear that last comment. “No. They literally create heat. Lots and lots of heat in a small area. It’s not exactly fast-acting, which is probably for the best. We want to burn the aliens away, not blow them up.”

“I mean, I pretty explicitly want to blow them up,” I pointed out as I tried to find better footing on the hood. This wasn’t going to work. “Myalis, I need magnets or something.”

“We don’t want to send bits of antithesis flying all over,” Gomorrah said. “This will kill everything without sending anything flying. It’ll create some wind, of course, and… likely burn the entire region down, but no explosions.”

Myalis helpfully summoned a pair of foot-shaped pads in a box. I placed them onto the hood, then put my feet over them and they clamped on. Suddenly, my feet were locked in place.

“How hot are we talking here? I don’t need numbers, just… use something my pea-brain can understand.”

“Have you ever used an oven?” Gomorrah asked after a moment’s pause.

I glanced back towards her, but the Fury didn’t actually have a windshield. “Yeah, sure. I’ve seen them before.”

“What about an air fryer?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. They had some in the nicer convenience stores to warm shit up.

“Well, those operate at a couple of hundred degrees at most. But the idea is similar here. Only this device pulls its warmth from the sun.”

I gestured vaguely towards the sky. “That sun? The warm ball of fire that we can feel way over here, very, very far away from it?”

Technically, not that sun, no. A much larger, less volatile sun.

“Yes?” Gomorrah said.

“Are we going to explode the entire city?”

“No,” she replied. “It’s entirely non-explosive. It’s pure heat and nothing but heat. No fire, no blast, no shockwave. Just a gentle rise in temperature until we shut off the device remotely.”

“How gentle? We do need to kill the fuckers, you know?”