Chapter Sixty-Seven – Exploring New Holes with Your Favorite Nun

Chapter Sixty-Seven – Exploring New Holes with Your Favorite Nun

“Okay, so you know how slave labour is all sorts of illegal, right?”

“What? No, that’ll just get idiots with too much time up the ladder. Nah, but when someone who did volunteer gets promoted, you make a big show of it. I’m telling you, about one fifth of our employee work hours last year were entirely volunteer work. You can even use it as a tax write-off!”

–Overheard conversation at the AE New Montreal Head Office

***

Cause Player didn’t complain about how cramped the rear seats of the Fury were. That was great.

He did complain about just about everything else though. “Slow down!“

“I’m hardly going fast,” Gomorrah said.

“It’s relative!” he said as trees whipped by on either side.

“We’re barely going one hundred,” Gomorrah complained.

“That’s really fast when you’re only feet off the ground!”

I snorted. “Who uses feet? For measuring shit, I mean.”

“I’d use liters for that,” Gomorrah whispered.

It took me a second, but when I caught on I cackled.

“The road! The road!” Cause Player shouted.

Gomorrah looked ahead, twitched us out of the path of a tree, then turned to stare at Cause Player. “I didn’t learn to drive yesterday, you know?”

“Wait, I vaguely recall you telling me you didn’t know how to drive?”

“That was three days ago.”

I looked out ahead, at all the trees whipping by. “Um, now I’m a little concerned too,” I admitted.

Cause Player said something that was probably rude, but Gomorrah chose that moment to yank us up, spin Fury around, then come to a very quick hover on a flat patch of ground.

The forest was cleared for a ways, leaving plenty of room for the huge machines that were parked around the mine entrance, which was wider than most of the houses in Black Bear and twice as tall.

The Fury slid to a stop and hovered a metre off the ground, front facing the mine entrance. The entrance, and about a dozen Antithesis.

“Huh,” Gomorrah said.

She flicked something, and a large gun unfolded from the car’s hood.

The Fury’s soundproofing proved its worth. I didn’t even hear the machine gun going off. Soon, the few Model Threes and Fours lingering around were turned into so much pulp that they were hard to tell apart from a pile of roadside slush.

“This is your stop,” Gomorrah said. “We even cleared the landing zone.”

“Thank you,” Cause Player said. “I think… I’ll figure out how to get back on my own.”

“Suit yourself.”

I leaned to the side to see him open the backdoor. He looked stange, all tucked in with his heavy armour, knees almost at his chest. It was good that his guns were the teleport-y sort. “Stay warm,” I said. “And if shit goes crooked, give us a call.”

“I will,” he said. “You do the same.” With that, he squeezed out of the car and crashed into the ground, boot-first. Heavy metal started to fill the air as he strode forwards, and a large gun materialized into his arms.

“Really want one of those,” I said.

“The music?” Gomottah asked as the door closed.

“The magic gun thing,” I said.

She nodded. “It’s neat.”

Gomorrah drove forwards, then angled us up and over the rocky hillside into which the mines dove.

I have the survey information from the headquarters. It seems as if they sent information that doesn’t entirely match the seismographic information obtained from the orbital strike. Either the company is lying, their information is out of date, or they are incompetent. I suspect it’s a little bit of all three.

“Did you check around for any signs that they’re lying on purpose?” I asked.

None that I could see, but there are some employees who have a history of bending the truth to better pad out the bottom line.

Well, that wasn’t unexpected. “Whatever. We’ll figure it out once we’re down there. If the place is active, we’ll want to deploy quickly.”

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“Rockets in the entrance?”