Chapter Twenty-Eight – What Newton’s Good For

Chapter Twenty-Eight – What Newton’s Good For

“It’s only been twenty-four hours since the start of the world’s first global incursion, and already the signs that we were not as prepared as we could have been are showing. I’d like to take a moment to remember Buenos Aires. Those poor souls didn’t deserve to have a kaiju walk up to their shores this morning.”

— Family wide communication, 2057

***

I knelt down to one knee as a chill wind whipped around me and hooked onto my jacket to throw it open. The area around the highway was cleared of any obstacles, no trees or forests or even much of a hillside to cut the wind. That wasn’t always going to be the case. There was a forest out ahead, with big old pines turning the sides of the roads into a dark pit where I couldn’t see anything mean lurking.

“Why are we moving so slowly?” I asked.

The mobile base truck we were on was moving at a zippy ten, maybe fifteen kilometres an hour. I was pretty sure I could outrun it with little difficulty.

Grasshopper turned her head around so that she could stare up at me. There was no way her neck was normal if she could turn her head that much. Her face mask split apart, the big globes over her eyes sliding back so that I could see her staring right into my eyes.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, right when I was about to break the silence, she spoke up. “Baby elephants,” she said before her head spun back around and her mask reset itself.

“What?”

Grasshopper sighed. “Baby, elephants.” She waited for another moment, then shook her head as if I was the dumb one here. “Herds with weaker members must move at the fastest pace of the slowest and weakest member so that the combined force of the entire herd can be brought to bear upon any aggressor.”

“Oh, right,” I said. We were moving slowly because some of the trucks behind us couldn’t keep up otherwise. That made sense. “Baby fucking elephants,” I muttered.

“I see one,” Grasshopper said. Then she started to dance.

It was one of the weirdest fucking things I’d ever seen, someone wearing armour that had far to many limbs on it, swaying from side to side like an excited puppy while laying flat on their stomach.

“So… shoot it?”

“Oh, yes, I will,” Grasshopper said. “Do you want to see? I like seeing the aliens die. It makes me happy.”

I looked out ahead. The forest was still a good kilometre away, maybe a bit more. I wasn’t a great judge of range. I couldn’t see anything alive over there, but then the scope on her rifle was longer than my forearm. “Sure?”

A ping to my augs later, and I had a small screen open in the edge of my vision. I had it grow larger.

It was the forest, but zoomed in. A single model four was climbing up a tree with some difficulty, the smaller branches not entirely strong enough to hold its weight, but it was making its way up the tree nonetheless.

Then the screen flickered and a dozen red outlines appeared, then a dozen more. Antithesis, a few hundred of them, if I had to guess, all scurrying about in the underbrush.

“Want me to leave some for you?” Grasshopper asked. She sounded almost shy about it.

“Nah, you go ahead,” I said. “I’m more of a spray and pray kind of gal, at this range I’m useless.”

“Okay then,” she said.

All along the length of her gun, the little tripods holding it up hissed, and the barrel shifted around with tiny, minute motions.

“There are many ways to kill,” Grasshopper said.

I was about to ask if that was a question when her gun barked. The sound made my teeth rattle, and I swore the mobile base shook a bit with the recoil.

In the screen occupying my vision, three of the antithesis that happened to be lined up disappeared.

“The most ancient, and most effective,” Grasshopper continued. “Is the meeting of two opposing objects. Upon meeting, these two opposing objects will exert a force against each other. Newton’s Second Law.”