Chapter Twenty-Three – Cat Themed Tower Defence

Chapter Twenty-Three – Cat Themed Tower Defence

“The changes happened slowly. So slow that even though all the scientists were screaming about it for years, we still failed to notice them. A winter without snow, a complete lack of any insects outside, a few days where the weather was so wild that we barely recognized it?

It all paled next to the distractions we could afford ourselves.”

–Excerpt from, On the Big Change, 2026

***

“No, really,” I asked. “Why’d you come over?”

“Gomorrah explained to Franny what you were up to, and she explained it to me,” Lucy said as she reluctantly stepped out of our hug. “So I thought I should come over and discuss the ecological and environmental impacts of unleashing a bunch of nanomachines to mulch aliens stuck underneath the city.”

I stared. “You’re messing with me, right?”

She grinned. “Maybe?”

I hugged her again. “You’re such an idiot,” I said.

“And yet I still managed to catch you with my evil ways,” she murmured. Lucy placed another peck on my cheek.

“Who’s watching over the kittens?”

“Daniel is,” she said. “Not the best of choices, but hey, they have everything they need and most of them are plugged into one feed or another. They don’t cause too much trouble when they’ve got their bread and circuses. Need help with anything here?”

“Around here?” I asked. Did I need Lucy’s help with anything? What could Lucy help with in the first place? She was great with the kittens, but I wasn’t sure if babysitting skills would really… actually, no, those skills would absolutely come in handy. “Hey, how would you like to be put in charge of an army?” I asked.

“That sounds fun!” She said, “Do I get a cool title? Admiral Lucy?”

“It’s an army, I think that would make you a general,” I pointed out.

“As long as I get one of those nice uniforms with all the medals on my chest. I want to look like a third-world dictator’s right hand woman.”

I laughed, then nodded to Franny who was coming over. “Right, let me give the two of you the rundown. It’s not super complicated yet, but it’s about to be. Also, hi Franny.”

“Hello, Cat,” Franny said with a nod. It struck me just how much like Gomorrah she was sometimes. Sure, she was a hot redhead with authority issues as opposed to a hot blonde with pyromania issues, but a lot of their mannerisms were the same. Maybe it was a byproduct of being raised close to each other?

But then Lucy and I were plenty different and we were raised in the same shithole.

“So, what’s the situation? Delilah is keeping me up to date a little, but I don’t exactly have a full picture,” Franny said.

“Things are just about to get interesting,” I said. “We’ve launched an attack against the hives, but most of the hives… or just the one big hive I guess, is underground. They’ve dug out these long tunnels across the entire city. They’re full of water right now, which isn’t a problem for the aliens.”

“It wouldn’t be, the xenos are from space, being underwater is probably a lot more hospitable than vacuum,” Franny said.

I nodded along as if I knew what she meant. “Yeah. So, we sent down nanomachines to start eating away at them. They’ll all start at the same time, which means that the hive will get a nasty wake-up call. And we’re expecting it to react like anyone would when you wake up to a million little things trying to eat you all at once.”

“Oh, like when we had that bedbug infestation,” Lucy said.

I nodded. Of all the insects not to go extinct, bedbugs just had to stay on the list. Mosquitos too, of course. “Exactly like that. We’re about to wake the fuckers up in the shittiest way possible and I bet they won’t be happy about it. That’s why we’re working on arming the civvies and getting defences up, including the turrets you brought.”

“And how’s that going?” Franny asked.

“Terribly,” I said. “The locals have actually been helpful. Got a bunch of volunteers geared up for a fight, but against anything in big enough numbers or any really strong models we’re basically screwed.”

Lucy frowned, and if it wasn’t so cute it might have been intimidating. “And what are we doing about that?”

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“Honestly, I don’t know what to do about it. In New Montreal we had the army and a bunch of strong samurai to back us up.”