Chapter Thirty-Five – Death Flags

Chapter Thirty-Five – Death Flags

“Samurai die. Just got to pick the most dramatic moment.”

–The late Silverhound’s final words before the detonation of a low-yield nuclear charge in the centre of the Syrian Level Four incursion of 2034

***

“We need you to help with the AA system,” Simmons said.

I raised an eyebrow at him, but the man didn’t so much as blink. In the end, I broke eye contact first and looked over to where some of his security guys were rebuilding the barricade I’d just passed.

“Didn’t you have some IT guys that could get the anti-air back on?” I asked.

“I did. We sent two of them up. They’re dead.”

I felt my nose scrunching in distaste. “Are there more xenos on the upper floors?” I asked.

“There are more xenos period. Model Ones have started to flock around. If we leave now, we won’t just be dealing with a few larger fliers, but entire flocks of those little shits,” he said. “If we can get the AA to work, it’ll at least serve as a distraction.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and pulled me to the side just as a few survivors moved past with some wheels that look like they’d been torn off the undercarriage of a hovercar.

The older man reached into one of the pockets of his vest and pulled out a small phone, one of the fancy sorts with a holoprojector. He fiddled with it for a moment, then projected a 3D map of New Montreal.

He pointed to one building, a bit shorter than those around it, but still respectably tall. “That’s us,” he said. Then he pointed to something about ten blocks down, where the buildings started to lose some of their height. “I sent some of my boys up with rangefinders. This is more or less where the front lines are set up. If we move straight South we’ll be moving over the army in about fifteen blocks. It’s not too far, a kilometer, maybe one and a half.”

“How big is the incursion?” I asked.

Based on the time since its start, the landing point of the main Antithesis bodies and the position of the armed forces on that map, my simulation suggests a five kilometer wide circle.

I touched my ear with my hand. “So, five klicks in diameter, that’s, uh, thirty kilometers square?”

… My Vanguard is bad at math. This is rather shameful. The surface of a circle can be calculated by taking pi, and multiplying it by the radius squared.

“I don’t need to know how to do the math,” I said. “I need the answer.”

The AI sighed in my head.

It’s approximately twenty kilometers square. Since you don’t seem to care about the math, I suppose big round numbers will have to do. Would you accept multiples of five, or should I stick to multiples of ten for you?

I rolled my eye. “Okay, so it’s pretty big, but not that huge yet, and we’re not in the dead centre.” I rubbed at my neck. “We get the AA on, we distract the local beasties, then we make a run for it, and hope that we can cover a couple of klicks without turning into xeno chow.”

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“The terrain complicates things a little,” Simmons said. “We can’t make a straight-line dash to the nearest military position. But we can probably make it there in under two, maybe three minutes of flight time. There’s little traffic out there.”

So far, the plan was okay. There was just one very big, very glaring problem with it. “So when I turn on the AA, they’re on for good, right?”

“That’s right.”