Interlude – Crisis Mode One

Interlude – Crisis Mode One

She woke up with a start, her alarm going off in her augs and blaring music in her head. It was a new song every day. A new song to add to the growing list of music that she didn’t want to hear again.

Groaning, she pressed her hands over her eyes and shifted. She’d ended up curled up as she slept, a small, tight ball with her knees up and back curved. Now that she was awake… more or less, she stretched out, blankets falling away and cold are grasping at her exposed skin.

It was six. She’d gone to bed early yesterday. It was one of those rare moments where she had some time to herself, and she’d chosen to spend it in luxury. A shower, then nine hours of uninterrupted sleep, her first long rest in a couple of weeks.

“I feel awful,” she said as she sat on the edge of her bed. It was a lumpy thing, military surplus. Her room wasn’t anything special either, she was sequestered to a corner of the militia headquarters. An officer’s room, but that didn’t mean much.

It’s just the lack of sleep and exhaustion getting to you. You should consider taking on a lighter load for a day or two. Changing your alimentation to something a little better couldn’t hurt.

“Hmm,” she muttered. “How many points am I at?”

With the daily allowance having come in, you’re sitting at seven thousand six hundred and twenty points.

“Good amount,” she said. It had been earned, though. The Antithesis had been testing them day and night for the last three days. It had been… what, a week and a half since their last big push, and that one was followed by the same sort of probing attacks.

The aliens were nothing if not predictable… some of the time. She worried that they were just predictable enough that they’d fall into expecting a pattern from them, then they’d break it and all hell would break loose.

I do have some good news. It might be enough to improve your morale.

“I’d take some good news,” she said.

Samurai Stray Cat has replied to your correspondence.

“Oh, that was fast,” she said. She didn’t know what kind of relation Crylin had with any of the other Protector AI. It seemed like there were things she couldn’t ask, especially when it came to other samurai. If she could, she’d ask what was wrong in the head of some of them. “Can I see what she said?”

The message was sitting in her inbox. Kind of old-fashioned, but maybe that Stray Cat woman was just that way.

Hi,

–Stray Cat

She read the message, then re-read it from the start, dissecting everything as she did. Two days. The message was sent yesterday, so that was tomorrow. Already, she could feel a bit of weight pulling off her shoulders. Two to four samurai. That would double or triple the number in Quebec at the moment. That they were new didn’t matter, it was that much more firepower.

The brigade of soldiers was nice, but she wasn’t sure how much help that would be. Already they had five or six times as many militiamen on the wall as soldiers, and the line was blurring every day. Bringing in fresh troops couldn’t hurt, though.

A samurai could hold a large chunk of a wall for a while. It would mean a massive flood of points, a quick escalation of power… until it wasn’t enough and they died and then a whole section of the wall was left undefended.

That was a rough lesson to learn. Worse, the enemy adapted. Libre might have been an ass, but the man was clever. He had them rotating positions and tactics whenever something went down. Every time the Antithesis pulled out a new trick, he had them preparing to counter it if it happened again and she knew that he’d taken some steps to prepare for tricks they hadn’t tried yet.

She didn’t like him, but he was good at keeping things going with basically nothing at hand.

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A week and a half ago, the Antithesis had made another push for the wall, but it had seemed smaller, weaker than usual. There had been more of them, then.