Chapter Twenty-Six – Breach, Load, Charge

Chapter Twenty-Six – Breach, Load, Charge

“Plans never survive first contact with the enemy.

If that’s true, then the best trick is to have no plan at all.”

–Longbow, about the Navajo Nation Incursion 2051

***

“Shit,” Jolly Monarch said.

I don’t like putting people into little boxes, but I’m human, so sue me. The little box I put Jolly Monarch in didn’t include suddenly swearing aloud.

I snapped my head around towards the older samurai. “What?” I asked.

He glanced off to his right somewhere. “We have a breach. I’ve got two pawns working on it, but I think they might be outnumbered in the next few minutes.”

“Did the wave split off?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Another smaller group, maybe. They’re pouring out of a drainage ditch on the other side of our barricade. That’s closer to the civilians than I’d like.”

I stood up, glanced down the highway and at all the carnage there, then started heading back. “Gimme your video feed, I bet Myalis can set the bombs off without me here. I’ll go kill the xenos and plug the hole.”

“Thank you,” he said. He snapped his fingers, and I flinched as a drone burst into existence next to him. It was either moving really fast, or it had teleported in. Either way, it caused a burst of air to wash off of it as it appeared. “My knight will escort you. Come back quickly if you can.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

The knight drone buzzed out ahead of me, floating on three disks that hummed as they cut through the air. Other than the three disks, the drone looked like a teardrop, longer than I was tall, and nearly as bulky on the big end. No visible guns, or anything else really, just a smooth white material with a marble-ish finish to it.

It looked expensive though, and had lots of glowy bits, so I imagined it was a pretty good weapons platform.

I jogged after it with the occasional glance back to the road where the bulk of the fighting was going down. “Myalis, will you be able to take care of the bombs?”

I’ve contacted Jolly Monarch’s AI already. I am piggybacking over his pawn drone sensors. There won’t be any issues when it comes to well-timed detonations.

“Cool,” I said. “Those drones worth anything? They don’t look that fancy.”

They are versatile. More so than any drone you’ve purchased before. Destroying one would be a hassle, even for higher-tiered antithesis, and they can self-repair. Some of his pawn drones have been active for multiple years.

That was actually kind of impressive. I didn’t know how long my own gear would last, not with the number of explosions going on in close proximity to me, or the number of monsters trying to eat me, or people shooting at me. I figured that most samurai switched gear out pretty regularly.

The knight drone sped down the highway leading deeper into the city, then around a curving off-ramp that dipped lower than the road and closer to the homes and businesses we were protecting.

There were plenty of vans and cars parked along the road here, with volunteers milling around them with the tense posture of people expecting to get swarmed by monsters at any moment. Three quarters of them were armed, but I wasn’t sure how long they’d endure in front of a proper wave of antithesis without cover.

I noticed a few of those same volunteers running just down the road, and the crack-pop of gunfire told me that we were getting closer to wherever the xenos had broken through.

I took in the scene as I rounded a curve.

The road turned to the left, leading deeper into the city. On one side was one of those sound-blocking walls, on the other, a small patch of scraggly greenery leading up to the road with a pipe jutting out of the hillside over a muddy ditch.

The metal grating at the end of the pipe was torn off, and half a dozen antithesis littered the ground around it.

Even as we arrived, another jumped out of the pipe, landed on the corpse of one of its pals, then got filled with lead as a pawn drone and a couple of civilians fired at it.

“What’s the plan?” I asked as I got closer.

No one answered, and I realised that the person in charge of figuring out a plan in this case was me.