Chapter Twelve – Be Libre, Not Happy

Chapter Twelve – Be Libre, Not Happy

“This year’s Competitive Racism contest is brought to you by… McDonalds!

I’m Lovin’ It!'”

–Start of show sponsor reel for the 2051 Olympics

***

I stepped out of the Bastion to Fortunate Son shouting about how the lead singer wasn’t a senator’s son. There was probably some level of irony there, but I was a bit too preoccupied with piloting a multi-ton mecha to really deep dive that at the moment.

The MEOW was the mech of choice for the moment. It was tankier, and even if it didn’t pack quite as much of a punch, there didn’t seem to be that much alien resistance on the ground. The main gun atop the Bastion barked, and a 105mm hello reached out to some poor Antithesis coming down a hill in the distance.

I moved to the right and then commanded the Nyanzerfaust off to the left, which left plenty of room for the others in the middle.

Hedgehog, Princess and Knight ran over towards the trenches a bit behind us, keeping their heads low to stay out of trouble. They were greeted by cheers and whistles, which I took as a good sign.

Shy… disappeared.

It took me a moment to find her already way out ahead, hitting the aliens from an oblique angle. Well, as long as she knew what she was doing.

I settled the mech I was in into a wide stance, shoulders braced and legs far apart, then I switched my attention to the main gun and started to look for targets to blow up. It wasn’t too hard to find some, the Antithesis were coming down in pretty steady numbers.

Surprisingly, the quality of them was… lacking? There were a few double-digit models near the back, but the vast majority of what I was seeing were lower-tiered models. Threes, mostly. The dog-like aliens were common as dirt, so that wasn’t surprising, but seeing them make up so much of the enemy force was… maybe a little unusual?

I wasn’t a xenobiologist though, my job right then and there was to blow aliens up, so that’s what I got up to. I did notice when Hedgehog joined in. He had set up a machine on the back line that looked a bit like an angled wall filled with holes on a sort of metal base that he could turn. It made more sense when the machine opened up and those little holes each spat out a rocket that arced up and then came down with so many little explosions across the alien front that it sounded like popcorn going off.

Princess and Knight were chatting with someone that looked like they might be a samurai, judging by the armour while occasionally plinking shots towards any of the aliens that got closer, and Shy was… moving around in a constant explosion of shotgun blasts that threw her around and let her hit aliens from weird angles before disappearing.

I sat back for a moment and looked over the tactical map that the Bastion had created with our little fly-by.

The number of aliens was big, probably enough to overwhelm that position, but… maybe not? I mean, yeah, it would, but unless they ran out of ammo and common sense, they’d have plenty of time to get to cover and enter the wall.

Which begged the question, why were they out here like this in the first place?

I paused even more when I noticed that the Antithesis weren’t charging in quite as much. In fact, it looked like they were sending in fewer and fewer models our way. I flicked on the comms to our shared channel. “Hey, Shy, am I nuts or are the bastards holding back?”

It took a while for Shy to reply. She sounded a pinch winded when she did. “You’re not, ah, nuts. They’re not pushing with all of their numbers. I see a lot of them further back as well.”

“That’s weird, right?”

“Maybe? The Antithesis don’t always just throw themselves at a problem if they can’t get through.”

“I guess,” I muttered. I didn’t like it when the enemy wasn’t a mindless moron, it made my job a lot harder. I picked off some of the closer aliens, then watched as a second volley of rockets from Hedgehog crashed into the countryside, each one evenly dispersed. That wiped out a good number of the remaining Antithesis. Those that were left were way out in the distance.

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I zoomed in, the range-finder on my mech’s scopes painting them as being about two kilometres out. Too damned far for an easy shot. I could still do it, because even if my own aim was ass, I could still swap to high-explosive, and HE rounds had a way of making up for bad aim with enthusiasm.

Still, I held off on it for the moment. The aliens were scattering. I didn’t miss the fact that a lot of them slid into burrows in the ground or ran off into some sparsely covered forests and disappeared into the shrubbery.