Chapter Sixty-Three – Gold Star #2

Chapter Sixty-Three – Gold Star #2

“The Pop Feminism movement of the 2010s could be argued to have accomplished something for the average woman… though it wasn’t much.

The Super-Pop Feminism movement of the 2040s, however, reintroduced militarism and violence to the mix, to great success!”

–A History of Feminism, 2054

***

It took an hour before we finally left, and I took none of the blame for that.

To be fair, it was kind of fun.

Lucy came down with leftovers, and then we sat around, ate, talked shit, and sampled some of Grasshopper’s home cooking, which turned out to be pretty decent. Too much spice, though. I think Grasshopper’s idea of a ‘pinch’ was more of a fistful. Her chili was spicy enough to make my eyes water.

I still ate two bowls of it though. I think it was real meat… or maybe some sort of substitute that tasted close enough.

Anyway. Post-eating required a bathroom break, and then, finally, we were ready to take off.

I slumped my way over to the control seat for the Bastion and then flicked things on. Everything came back green, so I closed the doors after making sure everyone was onboard, then carefully took off.

Princess snuck into the cabin then, eyes darting around to take in all the knobs and dials and little screens with cool looking readouts. “Whoa!” she said. “It’s like the cockpit of a fighter jet.”

“Mhm,” I agreed. “Maybe more like one of those huge bombers? I think fighter jet pilots aren’t able to just stand up when they want to.”

“You know what all of these things mean?” she asked with a gesture to the dozens of dials and readouts around me.

“Enough so that we won’t crash,” I said.

I checked the radar, then jacked into the ship’s cameras. Grasshopper’s little flying ship was coming out of the parking garage behind us, but it was far faster and soon zipped by and started to fly big circles ahead.

I locked in the coords to a space a couple of kilometres away from the first hive location, then unbuckled myself. “Alright,” I said to Princess. “Back-back. We’re going to the loading bays to talk over the plan.”

Probably should have done it over lunch, but here we were.

I gathered the others over as well. There was a neat projector tool in the mechanical bay that could display stuff for me. So I booted it up and drag-and-dropped a map of the New Montreal countryside into it.

“Alright everyone,” I said.

“Everynyan,” Nya repeated.

I chose to ignore her. We had Princess and Knight to one side, Shy near the back, and Nya to my other side. “First… is Grasshopper patched in?”

“I am!” Grasshopper’s voice came over the ship’s PA. “I can see and hear you! Go on!”

“Cool. So, what we have here is the location of every suspected Antithesis hive within fifteen kilometres of New Montreal. Some are a bit past that. This is data gathered from the army, some corps, satellite footage… people who like to speculate on the internet, and from eyewitness reports. Today, we’re going to be hitting these points here.”

I dragged another image onto the map, and it appeared in an instant. Dozens of dots, spread out around the city, with thin red lines linking them all together. “Wha! That’s a lot of hives,” Nya said.

“Is it?” I asked.

She nodded quickly. “The last time Nya saw this many was when there was a huge ocean incursion near Tokyo. That was years ago!”

“Well, once we’re done today, we’ll hopefully trim the numbers down a little. This mission has two goals… three goals.”

“What are they?” Princess asked.

“First, destroying hives for the sake of destroying hives. If we let them grow out of control they’ll become a problem later, and we have enough problems as it is.”

Everyone nodded at that. It was a pretty sensible thing to do, and… kind of our job, as Samurai.

“Second, points. I’m not greedy for them or anything, but having more in the bank never hurts. That’ll go double for Princess and Shy who are still getting basic gear going. Hell, I fit with that too. I’ve got this big brute of a ship, but I’m still gearing up in other spaces.”