Chapter Thirty-Three – The Art of Being Fashionably Late

Chapter Thirty-Three – The Art of Being Fashionably Late

“Arriving early is so gauche. You either arrive on the tick you’re supposed to, proving that you are a professional with a masterful control over your own time, or you arrive when you arrive, usually some ten to fifteen minutes later, letting the other party know that your time is valuable.”

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“Did you still wanna come?” I asked Rac. We were stepping out of the gym and into the great outdoors. Well, the lower outdoors, I’d parked my bike near the ground level, between two megabuildings. There wasn’t much sunlight down here, and the locals were… more interesting than usual.

Still, they’d given my bike a wide berth, probably because I’d parked it on the roadside and all of the corpo-owned self-driving delivery cars were making a point of going around and slowing down on passing it.

Also, my bike looked awesome and I trusted it not to be stealable. There were some serious perks to being a samurai that didn’t get included in all of the interviews and shit.

I mean, some downsides outweighed it all, like the crushing realization that if I fucked up the entire planet might look like one of those watermelons in a video where someone irresponsible was given access to anti-materiel guns.

“I guess I’ll come with you,” Rac said. She’d taken long enough to answer that I almost jumped when she spoke.

“Oh, cool, yeah,” I said. “Come on, I’ll present you to this boy, he’s… cute, I guess?”

“You guess?” Rac asked. “Wait. No, don’t play match-maker with me. Lucy tried already.”

“She did? And you’re not happily married already?” I asked.

Rac made a face, and I laughed as I got on the bike. A few minutes later we were riding up and through the city’s skyline. I turned us northwards, then took off towards Saint-Jérome. I set the bike to auto-pilot while I made a call. I didn’t need to be distracted and run headlong into a building today.

The line rang once before it was picked up on the other side. I had the option to turn it into a video call, but didn’t because I wasn’t some old zoomer. “Miss Stray Cat?” Lieutenant Moreau asked.

“Yo, LT,” I said. “I’m heading to Saint-Jérome right now. Need to chat with the brass. Think you could arrange a meeting for me?”

“Of course. With all of the officer corps?”

“Everyone worth having, the topic will probably end up classified.”

“I… see, I think I can arrange that. And the other samurai here?” he asked.

“Get them in on it too if they’re around,” I said. “Are they around?”

“Yes ma’am,” he replied. “Princess and Knight have been assisting in the city with clean up, Crackshot and Hedgehog have taken to hunting smaller pockets of antithesis–I suspect that they have an ongoing bet–and Miss Tankette has been, uh, raising morale with the troops.”

I paused for a moment. “Can you go over that last one?” I asked, carefully.

“Pardon? Oh, she’s been working in the canteen. The food she’s serving is non-regulation, but… well, none of the officers have the heart to stop her, or the authority, or the good sense to put an end to something everyone is enjoying. It might well lead to a riot.”

“Ah, yes, okay,” I said. “What about my new little French friend?”

“The as yet unnamed samurai has been assisting with the cleanup around his township. Did you want me to pass an invitation to him as well?”

“Sure,” I said. “Tell him he can ride the mech back. On top.”

“I’ll relay that to him. Was that all?”

“Yeah. HQ in the same place?”

“No ma’am, we’ve relocated to the Saint-Jérome hospital. The building was previously evacuated, but it’s centralised, close to the civilians, and relatively secure.”

“Alright, see you there in… call it half an hour?” That’d give him time to sort things out. And it meant that we had a bit of time to get there. Too much, actually. I hung up and half-turned to address Rac. “What kind of fast-food you like?”

“Anything?” Rac said. “I’m not a picky eater.”

Figured as much. Rac came from the same school of ‘wait, we have food?’ as I did when it came to tastes.

Anything is what we got. I flew down to the nearest automated fast food place with a drive-through and only winced a little when the price came in for our order. Still, it was more of a habit wince than something actually painful. I’d grown somewhat rich recently. A few burgers and fries and some sides wasn’t going to sink me too badly.

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I regretted getting a bike instead of something a little more comfortable, since eating while sitting in tandem was less than ideal, and there was no protection from the weather, so I had to set us to hover under one of those huge billboards tilted back at a 45 degree angle to better splash the cars zipping above.

It was, of course, raining.