Chapter Fifty-Three - Palace

“Samurai are incredible. But they are not infallible.”

-Two-Slices, June 2023

***

Deus Ex somehow chose not to act like the little laser gremlin that she was, and waited outside for Lucy and I to come and greet her. Maybe it was a courtesy thing. Or maybe samurai didn’t step into each other’s bases without permission because of... common sense or something.

That might make sense, actually.

I opened the front door and held it open behind me for Lucy and the Dumbass that Myalis was currently controlling. Across from me, on the wide surface of the landing area that took up a chunk of our floor, was Deus Ex, the girl sitting on one of her twin laser... hover... things.

“Yo!” I said.

Deus blinked. “Oh, hey,” she said. “New place?”

“Yup, bought it yesterday,” I said.

She nodded. “Nice. I have work for you.”

I crossed my arms. “You know, most people work up to their requests. Maybe a bit of small-talk? Some questions about the family? Polite shit.”

“Do either of us care about that?” she asked.

“Well, no, but it’d be nice to pretend.”

Lucy waved. “Hi Deus Ex!”

“Hello,” Deus Ex said. “Fine, I guess we can do the small talk stuff. I need a bit of a breather. And I guess the work’s not until tonight anyway.”

“What work?” I asked.

Lucy poked me. “You literally just agreed to do small talk first. Come on Deus! We have vending machines left over. We can grab you something to drink. What do you like?”

“Ah, um, anything, I guess?” Deus Ex said.

I eyed the girl for a moment. She wasn’t being as rambunctious as usual. Then again, last time I saw her she didn’t have bags under her eyes either. “Have you been sleeping?” I asked.

“Not since the New Montreal incursion started, no,” she admitted. “I’m running on stims. Or I was, they’re wearing off. I took a cleansing solution to wash them out. I should be fine by tomorrow.”

“You need sleep,” I said.

“I do,” she agreed. “But until the work is all done, I really can’t afford it.”

Shaking my head, I moved over to the door and held it open again for everyone to file back into the museum. Deus Ex paused past the lobby and looked around with obvious confusion. “Is that a scale-model of an Antithesis?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said. “We, uh, don’t know if anyone will be picking that up, actually. I think all the valuable displays are long gone though.”

“So you bought an entire museum. That’s actually a rather unique home for a Vanguard,” Deus Ex said. “I’m sure you could make a lot just charging for tours.”

“Ah, actually, we’re converting it to a normal home. Well, normal-ish. An orphanage,” I said. “You’ve seen some weird homes?”

The girl nodded. “A couple of samurai live in bunkers dug into mountains. One that I met on the west-coast lives in the Pacific. Really deep under water. The Antithesis incursions have landed in the ocean before. Those tend to be nastier than urban fights. Lots of biological stuff for the aliens to eat, and you need to fight in three dimensions a lot more.”

“Nasty,” I said. “I’d rather avoid that, thanks.” I didn’t exactly have a fear of drowning, but I did hold my breath any time a character was underwater in a movie or game. I couldn’t imagine fighting underwater, even if Myalis had... okay, she definitely had something to allow me to breathe water.

“It’s not bad.” She looked around again. “You own the whole building?”

“Just this floor,” I said. “And that bit outside, and some passages that are kinda on this floor, and kinda on the floor below. It’s a little strange, on account of that museum part being lower than the rest.”

“That’s not bad. I’d suggest buying out the lower floors sooner or later. Probably not a priority yet. A whole building must be fairly expensive.”

“You don’t own the place where you live?” I asked.

She blinked. “Oh, no, I do.”

“Which city is it in?” Lucy asked.

“It’s in space,” Deus Ex said with the casual ease of someone saying ‘it's in the next town over.’ “Technically it’s in low-orbit. It brushes Earth’s atmosphere, so re-entry isn’t that bad.”

“Wait, you live in fucking space?” I said. No one told me that space was an option.

She nodded. “It’s fairly safe. Some antithesis can get to it, but most humans can’t. No one can really spy on my house, and I’d see anyone trying to mess with me coming long before they could do anything. Well, I suppose there are faster-than-light weapons that could hurt my house, but those are usually my speciality.”

I was feeling a bit... I don’t know what the term was exactly. What guys feel when they discover that some chad has a bigger car, a cute girlfriend, and a nicer house than they do. I wanted a space palace... Well, maybe later.

We moved over to the little cafeteria area, Deus Ex sitting down while Lucy grabbed the Dumbass and brought it before the vending machines to threaten some drinks out of it. I sat across from the littlest samurai. “So, you mentioned a job?”

“Not a job. Work. Being a Vanguard is a job. What we do is work,” she said.

“Oh-kay,” I said. “So what’s the work?”

Lucy returned with the front of her shirt turned up to form a pouch which she’d filled with ice-cold drinks. She set them on the table, then flopped down next to me. “Ah, that was annoying. Now my belly’s all cold too.”

I grinned and tugged her unto one leg so that I could better rub her stomach. To treasure its warmth, of course.

Deus Ex rolled her eyes as she picked out the drink with the most caffeine and sugar from the bunch and popped the tab. “During the last incursion, the one that hit New Montreal, we had some difficulty tracking the landing area for most of the antithesis pods,” she began.

“Don’t samurai have great equipment for that?” Lucy asked.

“We do, but it’s a bit scattered. It really depends on the city. New Montreal was last hit, uh, I don't know, a decade ago? The system currently in place was built right after that. It’s not as good as it could be.”

“Alright,” I said. “So you don’t know where every bit of alien goop landed.”

“Not all of them, no. Those that fell from high-orbit are easy to track. We have overlapping scans of them coming down and can extrapolate from there. Then those in lower orbits were mostly visible from hover car dash-cams and street sonar. So we know where they went too. But it took a while for someone to decide to look into all the footage to make sure we weren’t missing anything.”

“And you missed something?” I asked.

She nodded. “There are samurai that don’t like high-risk work. They tend to come in after an incursion to help with the clean-up stuff. It means killing a few aliens and clearing the sewers and the area around a hive, usually with drones and stuff. They’re useful Vanguards, but they grow really slowly.”

“But it’s safe,” I guessed.

“Yeah,” Deus Ex said. “I don’t like that kind of work. It’s not rewarding enough. Maybe half the Vanguard out there become that sort. Anyway, one of them tracked a bit of antithesis debris to--actually, can I use your drone?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

Myalis hopped onto the table with cat-like grace. “What do you wish to display?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s your AI. Nice. Ah, these maps, and this file, as well as this,” Deus Ex said. “Thank you.”

“She’s more polite to Myalis than to you,” Lucy mock-whispered.

“The AI deserves it,” Deus Ex said. It stung all the more since she delivered it as a plain fact.

Myalis projected a holographic image of the Earth, then moved in on North America and finally the area we were in. Little black dots hovered in the air, and I recognized antithesis pods. They were falling slowly towards the city below.

“That’s a reconstruction made from hundreds of recordings,” Deus Ex said. “Look at this piece.”

One pod burst apart when a line of AA fire moved past it. Not through it though. From the wreckage came something that looked fleshy and that sprouted wings, and that then turned blurry.

“Bad angle?” I asked.

“No. Organic ECM. A stealth antithesis. Maybe a new model. Lower active combat threat rating, but in this scenario more of a long-term threat. It glided all the way over to... here.”

The map shifted, showing a red dotted trajectory that went north, shifting here and there so that it was never quite a straight line until, finally, it hit near a small town.

“That’s Black Bear. It’s a mining town with a population of about three thousand in what used to be the Mastigouche nature reserve. And about three hours ago, all contact with the town was lost. We think there’s a small stealth hive growing near there, and we need someone to go blow it up.”

***