Chapter Sixty-Four - Climate Change Via Mass Destruction

“The average samurai will do as much good for the environment as harm. They’ll occasionally decide to ruin an entire corporation on a whim, often the same corporations responsible for massive environmental disasters (see: BP 2029) and they might provide the tools, expertise, or simple willingness to fix ecological issues.

By that same token, they will often cause massive disasters while attempting to eliminate their adversaries (see: The Lake Huron Incident 2032).

--An Environmental Analysis of the Impact of Out-of-Context Actors, 2036

***

The Fury spun around in a tight circle as it lowered itself to ground level. A few PMCs glanced our way, but we were doing samurai stuff and they mostly knew to mind their own when two samurai were on the warpath.

Also, they’d probably just witnessed the pair of us kill a thousand-odd aliens each, which I imagined was a decent way of instilling a sort of primal respect in someone.

“Are you going to ditch the armour?” Gomorrah asked.

I thought about it for about a second. “I’d rather not. Think I can ride on the hood?”

“That would be exceptionally stupid, but I won’t stop you,” Gomorrah said. “Try not to scratch the paint though.” She opened the driver’s side door and slid into the car. I hesitated for a second before raising a leg and climbing onto the hood. The muscle-car-like shape of the Fury was coming in handy since it was all sharp, aggressive angles.

“Right, this’ll make it easier to fling bombs off the side,” I said. I was feeling... dubiously confident in my lack of any sort of plan.

Did you decide what kind of bomb you want to use?

Myalis’ question wasn’t too terrible. “We’ll start with those acid cloud ones I think, right Gom?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” she agreed. “I asked Atyacus for ideas for explosives, since those are generally your area of expertise, and he found something interesting. Heat bombs.”

“Heat bombs? Is that an acronym?” I asked.

It could be.

Gomorrah probably didn’t hear that last comment. “No. They literally create heat. Lots and lots of heat in a small area. It’s not exactly fast-acting, which is probably for the best. We want to burn the aliens away, not blow them up.”

“I mean, I pretty explicitly want to blow them up,” I pointed out as I tried to find better footing on the hood. This wasn’t going to work. “Myalis, I need magnets or something.”

“We don’t want to send bits of antithesis flying all over,” Gomorrah said. “This will kill everything without sending anything flying. It’ll create some wind, of course, and... likely burn the entire region down, but no explosions.”

Myalis helpfully summoned a pair of foot-shaped pads in a box. I placed them onto the hood, then put my feet over them and they clamped on. Suddenly, my feet were locked in place.

“How hot are we talking here? I don't need numbers, just... use something my pea-brain can understand.”

“Have you ever used an oven?” Gomorrah asked after a moment’s pause.

I glanced back towards her, but the Fury didn’t actually have a windshield. “Yeah, sure. I’ve seen them before.”

“What about an air fryer?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. They had some in the nicer convenience stores to warm shit up.

“Well, those operate at a couple of hundred degrees at most. But the idea is similar here. Only this device pulls its warmth from the sun.”

I gestured vaguely towards the sky. “That sun? The warm ball of fire that we can feel way over here, very, very far away from it?”

Technically, not that sun, no. A much larger, less volatile sun.

“Yes?” Gomorrah said.

“Are we going to explode the entire city?”

“No,” she replied. “It’s entirely non-explosive. It’s pure heat and nothing but heat. No fire, no blast, no shockwave. Just a gentle rise in temperature until we shut off the device remotely.”

“How gentle? We do need to kill the fuckers, you know?”

“It’ll start at boiling and increase until everything melts or lights on fire. Possibly both. I like the idea. A lot.”

“Okay then,” I said, surrendering any objections. Let it never be said that I wasn’t a great friend. I was willing to support Gomorrah with her weird kink shit in her time of need, and if that didn’t make me a good friend, then nothing would. “Let’s melt us some aliens then. We should start with the acid bombs though.”

I yelped as the Fury jumped up, my knees almost buckled at the sudden movement, but I managed to not make a complete idiot of myself by spreading my arms out to the sides and locking my knees in place.

The car tilted a bit before sweeping out over the battlefield. “Right, Myalis, acid bombs,” I said.

Certainly.

Myalis provided, as she always did. No boxes, probably since we weren’t in a position where I could open a box up to use it anyway. I underhanded the bomb to the side and grinned as it exploded with a satisfying blam and started to spread a growing cloud of green-tinted gas that quickly swept down onto the no-man’s land and the buildings on the edge of the gap.

Gomorrah moved us to the side where there wasn’t as much cover and I flung out a second bomb, then a third as we moved down the line.

The gas was pooling on the ground below, most of it keeping at about waist-height.

The few aliens still trying to run across the gap met with a wall of permeating acidic fog that would burn their flesh off and likely ruin their insides. I just hoped it made the job of the people that remained at the barricades easier.

I was in a decent mood until I noticed the number of PMCs pulling out. Laserjack’s shit about them needing to rest was all nice and good, but it didn’t stop me from wanting to stomp down there and smack some commanders around while calling them cowards.

I put it off. If I didn’t have anything better to do later, then maybe I’d trample over some law and order and blow some sense into whomever was in charge of those PMCs. Or I’d just explode them. I wasn’t really homicidal, but things would depend a lot on my mood later.

“Last one?” Gomorrah asked as we swung to the far end of the gap.

“Looks like it,” I said. I flicked the last of the gas bombs over the side and watched it sail down towards the ground. It burst apart a dozen metres above and started to spread its payload around. “I can’t imagine that shit’s good for anyone’s health.”

It very much isn’t. Nor is it necessarily good for the environment.

“Well... I didn’t think I’d be causing any ecological disasters today, but I guess that’s part of fighting the antithesis, isn’t it?”

Don’t worry. The impact of a few tons of powerful acids seeping into the water table will be nothing compared to the environmental impact of the exotic weaponry Gomorrah has suggested.

“How very comforting,” I muttered.

“Are you ready?” Gomorrah asked.

I nodded, then fixed my centre of gravity a little lower to make the flight easier. It wasn’t too bad. My feet being pinned to the hood and my armour preventing me from being shifted around too much made the ride... almost comfortable. It was like surfing. Only I’d never been surfing before, so I wasn’t sure if the comparison actually worked.

“The biggest congregation of aliens is... about here,” Gomorrah said. We slowed down fairly gently, maybe three kilometres from the wall, just over the edge of the now-ruined city clinging to the edge of New Montreal. “I think we can safely drop the bomb here.”

I nodded along. “Want to summon it, or should I?”

Technically, it’s me who’s summoning it. Also, it’s not technically a summon at all.

With a slight whump of displaced air, a large boxy machine appeared next to me, then crunched down onto the hood. The Fury tipped to the side until Gomorrah corrected for it. “My paint!” she said.

“Calm down,” I shot back as I took in the device. The damned thing was the size of a fridge, with dozens of those vents that could fold open all along the sides. It was all bare steel, thick as hell and unpainted. “You can probably afford three new cars after today. Now how the hell does this work?”

The temperature parameters are set. You just need to drop it down to ground level.

“Does it have a parachute?” I asked.

Yes.

“Oh.” I shrugged, then grabbed the device from the sides. “Keep the car even,” I said before shutting off the magnets holding me in place. With those off, I was able to lift the boxy machine with a grunt of effort, then I stomped to the side of the car and with a hard shove, tossed the bomb off the edge.

A trio of chutes cracked open and the sorta-bomb started to gently fall towards the ground.

“That was easy,” I said. Then the Fury started to waver under me and I scrambled to get back to the magnets. “What the hell?”

“I think it’s just turbulence,” Gomorrah said. “From... maybe rising hot air?”

I wasn’t an expert, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t a good thing.

***