Chapter Forty-Seven - Safe, Not Sound

“We are here today to lay a good person to rest.

It’s... it’s something I’ve heard before. They always say that the person who died was a good person. It’s usually a load of bullshit. Not today though.

Sprocket Rocket was a good person. A real fucking hero. Sure, he was... he was a bit nuts, and he was a reckless kind of guy. But fuck if he wasn’t spectacular. So many people owe their lives to him. I... I might too.

I’m sorry, big bro. Your dream’s not going to die with you, alright? I promise.”

--Longbow, at the funeral of the samurai Sprocket Rocket, 2048

***

I ran to a stop on the edge of a rooftop. Some boring rectangle of a building, with nothing to make it stand out except an odd number of AC units on the rooftop. Behind me, on the road I’d just jumped over, were a couple of hundred aliens currently enjoying some acid rain coupled with a sprinkling of more traditional explosives.

The property damage I was leaving behind was going to cost billions, I suspected.

Grasshopper’s tally probably wasn’t going to be far behind.

Looking down at the street below, I could make out entire chunks of concrete missing, some looking like they’d been punched right off the walls. Other areas had a sprinkling of bullet holes punching into the buildings, the roads, and through the corpses of dozens and dozens of antithesis.

It was a charnel house down there. Aliens laying in heaps, having fallen where they ran. Not as much blood as I might have expected. Each alien that was dead had a hole poking right through their skull, usually between the eyes.

I imagined that all of those holes in the walls were created after a round went through some alien’s brain.

“Which way?” I asked.

Myalis’ reply was to create a red circle which hovered over everything off to my left. There were more bodies that way, not that the bodies would remain there forever. The antithesis were starting to poke into the road from the sides, some of them moving with a bit more caution, others running in while their skin sizzled under the effects of my acid.

I tossed a pair of acid bombs up and over the road. They’d dissolve the bodies, maybe keep some of the aliens from following.

Running along the rooftops, I traced the path that Grasshopper had left. At some point she ran into an apartment building. Judging by the semi-circle of bodies piled up by the entrance, she had stayed there for a while.

Some of the bodies were shoved aside on one side. I squinted, then zoomed in with my cybernetic eye. Lots of footprints in that spot. Easy to make out since they’d stepped through a puddle of antithesis blood-stuff.

“Was she with a group of civvies?” I asked.

Unknown. It’s possible though. Let me verify... yes. Grasshopper received a report that a civilian safehouse was in this area and wasn’t going to be able to withstand an artillery assault.

“Oh,” I said. I listened for a bit. There was a non-stop thumping in the background, with the occasional whistle to punctuate it. The constant bombardment was mostly on the further edges of the city though, and it was easy to dismiss it as a sort of horrific background noise. “Are they going to bomb this position?”

Eventually, yes. Currently the area is marked as a do-not-fire zone. You should be safe.

That was nice. I didn’t feel like getting crushed twice in one day.

I picked up the pace. Grasshopper wasn’t far. She wasn’t moving either, not according to Myalis, and I was growing increasingly worried that whatever injury she had, it wasn’t just a bruise and a papercut.

I came around a corner, then slowed to a stop as I took in the scene. Half a dozen model fives, all splattered around and very dead. Next to them, with half of its body shoved into the back of some office, was a bigger, nastier looking alien. “What’s that?” I asked.

That’s a model fourteen. It’s a transportation unit. Fast-moving and well-armoured. Not necessarily effective at being offensive, but it is capable of carrying other models across the ground fairly rapidly. It never stops growing, adding new segments whenever it has consumed enough biomass.

The alien was about the length of a bus, its entire body made of segments of greenish flesh covered in thick carapace and filled with sharp legs beneath. A few holes the size of my torso were missing from some of its segments, but it looked like it took quite a few of those to kill it.

I jumped off the edge of the building, jump jets activating to slow down my fall before I hit the ground with a heavy thump and bent knees. I ran around the model fourteen, just in case it wasn’t as dead as it looked. “Resonator,” I asked.

Myalis delivered, and I flicked the grenade on and tossed it underhand beneath the model fourteen’s corpse. If it wasn’t entirely dead, then that might melt off the rest of it. I didn’t envy Grasshopper having to deal with that thing.

“I didn’t think we’d see models that big so soon,” I said.

It has been long enough that models above ten should be appearing, though in limited numbers.

Limited numbers was good. Now if we could just limit those numbers to zero or below, then everything would be just fine. The model fourteen looked armoured enough that I wasn’t sure the average artillery shell would take it out.

I squeezed past the centipede’s head--an ugly thing, with a tiny mouth and far too many eyes that looked like they were squeezed out of the big armoured plates on its ‘face’--and into the office proper.

More dead aliens. Model threes and fours, most of them with those perfect holes between their eyes, but a few were just blasted full of holes pretty much at random. It was the kind of shooting I’d do, which worried me even more.

I walked a bit faster. Grasshopper was close.

I came around a corner and found her pressed up against the fallen wall of a cubical. She was sitting on the ground, arms laying by her side, her green suit covered in black-red blood. A rifle was discarded off to the right, and the arms of her suit held a few handguns which pointed at me for a moment before lowering themselves.

She wasn’t moving.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. I ran over to her, jumped over the body of some unimportant alien, then landed at a crouch by her side. “Myalis, tell me she’s alive,” I said.

I’m registering a heartbeat from her suit. Her AI is still active. Her brain is still oxygenated and functional, though her vitals are decreasing. Blood loss, as well as shock. She has some internal modifications that are compensating for the biological organs that aren’t functioning.

“Med kit, now,” I said.

A box appeared by my side. The same set that I’d used on Racoon a while ago, though this one seemed a bit bigger. I tore it open, found the right tubes and pulled them over to Grasshopper. I hesitated. Where was I going to stick them?

I’ll ask her AI to open parts of her armour.

Grasshopper’s armour unfolded around her face and upper chest. It jammed around the middle, where it was obvious something had struck her.

I didn’t waste any more time, pressing the tubes in close before backing off as the machine got to work. “I need cat mechs. Give me like, six of them. Secure the area around here.”

Six boxes appeared and robotic cats unfolded themselves from inside them and immediately started to patrol the room, some of them moved outside and out of the range of my hearing. That’d keep any of the smaller aliens at bay for a bit.

“How is she?” I asked. I pulled Grasshopper back so that she was laying down flat instead of up against the wall. The arms sticking out of the back of her armour helped a little, repositioning themselves to make it easier.

She’s unlikely to die at the moment, though her injuries will make combat difficult. Do you want me to call for additional assistance?

I considered it for just a moment. “Yeah, do so. We need to get her out of the front lines. She can recover better without having to worry about some alien popping out of nowhere to eat her. Probably somewhere a little less dirty too.”

Myalis brought up a scan of Grasshopper’s body. It looked like all of her veins and muscles and bones, with more and more details being filled in as the nanomachines I was pumping into her travelled across her body and catalogued her injuries. It looked like one leg was broken at the shin and her knee on that same leg was fucked. There were a few ribs that weren’t in the right spot too. Lots of internal fuckery around her abdomen.

“What hit her?” I asked.

The model fourteen. A moment of inattention or hesitation and she was struck hard enough to be injured. Her armour fortunately took the worst of the damage.

I looked around. There were a few little healing pack things on the ground that weren’t mine. Had she been trying to heal herself while laid out here? “She’s tough,” I said. “She’ll make it.”

“Yeah,” Grasshopper agreed.

“Hey!” I gasped before leaning in closer. “You’re awake?”

“A little,” she said. “That was unpleasant. Is that you, Stray Cat?”

I nodded, then realized her eyes were screwed shut. “Yeah, it’s me. Lemme get you some pain killers. Something to get you back onto your feet.”

“I’ll be peachy,” she said. “I like that word. It’s tasty.” She gasped. “Cat! The people. Go check on the people. They’re behind me. I sent them away. Had to keep them safe. Please!”

Her eyes opened, and she locked onto me, pleading.

I nodded. “Alright,” I said. “Myalis, turrets. I don’t want anything nasty interrupting her healing.”

Then I ran off, because helping people was something I could do better than waiting around for a friend to get better.

***