Chapter Twenty-Four – Holding On

Chapter Twenty-Four – Holding On

“Syncore is one of the strangest evolutions in musical history.

This, of course, became immensely lucrative for a certain genre of artists who discovered ways to create literally addictive music.”

–Synesthesia Core, a History, 2042

***

I dropped Lucy off at the mall after directing her to Second Lieutenant Smart who seemed appropriately overwhelmed.

“Here,” I said as a box appeared next to me. A cat drone started to unfold itself from within. I’d told Myalis to give me something with all of the bells and whistles to keep Lucy safe and what she provided was the size of a bengal tiger with enough armaments to make a modern main battle tank blush.

“That’s a big kitty,” Lucy said as she stared at the drone. Its head came up to her chest, and even though its weaponry was hidden, there was no hiding the fact that it was a high-tech bit of samurai gear.

“It’ll keep you safe,” I said. “Just in case. Plus it’s big and intimidating.”

“Are you saying I can’t intimidate people on my own?” she asked.

I grinned. “As intimidating as you are in the bedroom, no, I don’t think you’re quite as scary as you’d like to think you are.”

She pouted, which was very cute, so I took a quick picture with my eye-aug for posterity. “Fine. I guess we both need to get to work, then?”

“Yeah. I’ll see about keeping this city safer, you see about keeping it sane.”

We parted with a last, not-so-quick kiss that left my head humming happily. Then, unfortunately, it was back to work for me.

“Did I miss anything?” I asked Gomorrah once I got her back on the line. I was exiting the mall for what had to be the tenth time today.

The nun scoffed. “Not much. The General and some of his guys found a second entrance point into the hive network, about a block past our outer perimeter. We’re finding more and more of those. At this rate our defences are going to be a revolving door.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “We can start by dumping more nanomachine drones in those nearer entrances.”

“That’s fair. There’s a militia transport heading to the mall, can you hand over more of those drones of yours with a fresh payload? The more we seed at the start, the better things will go,” Gomorrrah said.

“I can do that, yeah,” I said. I shielded my eyes from the sun–which was wholly unnecessary– and glanced up at a militia-marked transport which was descending onto the road.

“I’ve been talking to Atyacus, and we had an idea,” Gomorrah said.

“I’m all ears,” I replied.

“When we start to attack the hive it might be a subtle attack, with the nanomachines propagating and chewing away at vitals, but they will notice eventually and we expect the hives to retaliate. What if we also prepare a second, immediate attack? The hives are all underwater from what I’ve seen. The water will make certain options complicated, but it does make others easier. I’m talking about setting up explosives and firebombs at key junctions to block them off entirely. A fluorine fire melting anything that approaches an intersection leading to the exit will definitely slow the antithesis down.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “We’ll have to be careful though. We don’t want big explosions that’ll knock the whole city down.”

“Fire isn’t that explosive,” she said.

I snorted. “Yeah, but we can’t use anything like that heat-bomb we used in New Montreal. Maybe… hey, does sound travel well in water?”

“Yes and no, waves travel further but most sound will be distorted. What are you thinking?”

It was probably because I’d seen Manic at work and her tech made me think of it, but I’d been using resonator grenades almost for as long as I was a samurai. They were… not exactly fast, but they were fairly effective at weakening the enemy without harming any nearby allies.

“I have an idea. Let’s fill the hive with resonator bombs. They’ll vibrate the antithesis to the point that they’ll fall apart, and it might be even better with water around. The longer they spend in the tunnels, the faster they’ll fall apart. The nanomachines eating them up will only help.”