Chapter Forty-Seven - Cover

“We don’t usually think of plants, with a few exceptions, as having day or night cycles, but the sunflower is a beautiful example of a plant that lives and thrives by sunlight!”

--Flowers and You! 2014 (Pre-Antithesis) Edition

***

I ran out of the front of the building like a cat whose tail caught fire, dragging Jennifer the sexbot behind me and following on Manic’s rear as the older woman ran flat out. She only slowed down a little bit to fire her bass cannon at a few lingering aliens, warding them off enough for us to keep moving right across the middle of the intersection.

Behind us, I heard the building’s floor cave outwards as the model eighteen ripped after us.

I shot a glance over my shoulder, then noticed with dismay that despite a lot of slices across its toughened skin and a lot of very sticky goop stuck to it, the alien was still coming, and it still had that rocket jutting out of its face like the world’s lamest unicorn horn.

“Get to cover!” I shouted.

Manic leapt over a cement guardrail and I jumped after her. Jennifer flopped right after me, her legs clanking against the cement edge in a way that made me glad that she probably didn’t have nerve endings. “Ow,” she intoned.

“Farther!” I said as I shot past.

My shoulder mounted guns fired a few rounds at stray aliens, and I kept moving towards the nearest bit of cover I could see. A large bus, toppled onto its side near the far end of the intersection.

I was panting by the time I made it to the bus and flung Jennifer around it. Then I turned and checked on Manic, but she was only a step or two behind.

The model eighteen was in the process of ripping its way out of the front of the building.

“What now?” Manic asked.

“Boom,” I said.

I pulled the trigger on the detonator, and instantly regretted not being behind cover myself as a bomb designed to take out the structure of a large building went off less than a hundred metres away.

I was thrown back onto my ass and the entire bus scraped along the ground while Manic stumbled away from it.

The model eighteen was thrown back into the building, the blast originating from its face doing a number on it.

Once the echoing retort of the bomb’s detonation faded away, I sat up, then looked around. The explosion had ripped a crater into the side of the apartment building’s entrance, though there was now so much dust and smoke that it was hard to tell what was going on behind the smoke.

“I think that did it,” I said. We could get behind some more appropriate cover for the full detonation. We were very much in danger-close when it came to taking down an entire building, and I’d much rather be further out, especially since I suspected that this detonation wouldn’t be one of those nice, tight ones where everything just collapsed straight down.

“You think?” Manic asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I didn’t get a kill confirmation,” Manic said.

“Ah... fuck,” I said.

Glass and stone were tossed aside by the entrance and a model eighteen without a head started to claw its way out of the debris covering it.

“Okay, well fuck it then,” I said as I kipped up to my feet and grabbed Jennifer’s hand again. “Come on!” I shouted.

There were no protests as I led our party of three across the street and into the nearest building, this one as a sort of bank with a nice open lobby. I spotted the counters at the far end, with their bullet-proof glass and heavy reinforcements, then fired my railguns into one of the smaller glass panels, shattering it instantly.

Manic jumped in ahead of me just as what I imagined was a battery-powered automated security system went off with a screaming whine.

Then I grabbed Jennifer by the hips and tossed her up onto the counter. “Go!” I said.

She went over, then crouched down on the other side where I soon joined her.

“What’s the plan?” Manic asked.

“Boom,” I said.

“You just did that one!”

“It’s my only good trick!” I shot back. Then I detonated the bombs in the basement of the building across the street.

Whatever protests Manic had about my planning abilities were entirely drowned out by the earth rumbling underfoot and a few thousand kilos of loose dust ramming themselves into the lobby. Pebbles clattered against bulletproof glass, and what few exterior windows weren’t broken yet shattered.

I winced and covered my head as the explosion just continued and continued, a terrible roar so loud that any one individual sound was entirely drowned out in all of it.

Eventually it did stop, and then I had to wipe a thin layer of dust off my visor to be able to see anything.

Jennifer was now covered in whitish dust and was blinking rapidly, and Manic wasn’t much better. “Wow,” she said. “That was loud, even for me.”

“Heh,” I said. “Did that work?”

“That was a model eighteen?” she asked. “One confirmed kill there.”

I glanced over the counter top. Somehow a large chunk of cement had ended up in the lobby, about as big as one of those mini cars with several metres of rebar sticking out the back.

“Yeah, that did it,” I said. “I think we’re going to need to head back though.”

“You don’t feel like blowing up more buildings?”

“I like it better when I can actually see the explosion. Being this close to it is a thrill, but it’s not as fun,” I admitted.

Manic shook her head. “You’re not entirely sane.”

“I think that’s a requirement for the job,” I said as I got up fully. “But yeah, there was a fuck-huge tunnel under the building leading towards the lake. I think the antithesis are using it to feed more aliens into the city. We might have blocked that one off, but I bet there’s more.”

“So, why not stay out here and plug the gaps.”

“That’s like shoving your fingers in the hole at the bottom of the boat while a dozen more pop up,” I said.

Manic stared. “Is that cartoon logic?”

“I learned everything I know from cartoons.”

I believe you’re correct. The tunnel you saw was likely only one branch of a larger tunnel system. If you want to stop the arrival of more antithesis from those tunnels, you’ll either have to plug each one, or go to their starting point and destroy the hive feeding them.

I nodded along, then checked on Jennifer. “You okay?” I asked. “There’s a lot of dust in the air.”

“I am fine,” the bot said. “I don’t need to breathe, just to breed... forgive me, that is a pre-programmed line.”

“Right,” I said. I’d be using that one around Lucy next time she got in a choke-y mood. “Anyway, let’s head back? Unless you want to stick around here, Manic?”

“Nah,” she said. “I’m starving.”

That was a fair enough reason to head back, I guessed. Maybe I could use a snack myself. I took a moment to check on a map of the city--newly updated to remove two buildings from Burrlington’s skyline--and reoriented myself towards Downtown. We were about six blocks away, which meant that they sure as hell would have noticed a building or two disappearing.

I’d probably done a lot to terrify the locals, actually.

I hoped we wouldn’t encounter too many people whose homes we just knocked down, because I was ready for a lot, but not some kind of awkward ‘you blew up my home’ conversation.

As we stepped out, I glanced up and noticed that the sky was darkening a little behind the ever present pall of thick clouds above. It wasn’t night yet, but it was getting to be late in the afternoon. “When does the sun set today?” I asked.

“Around eight,” Manic said.

I glanced at her, and she shrugged. “My clock app tells me when the sun rises and sets. I’m usually a bit of a night owl.”

“Can’t sleep?” I asked.

“Everyone knows the best rocking’s done at night.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. There might have been a time when the night was the place for less scrupulous people, but I had the impression that time was past. Back in New Montreal, at least, we relied a lot more on artificial light for stuff than we did sunlight, and that made the difference between night and day more of an academic one.

Out here though, in this little town, the difference was... well, night and day. Less light pollution, less infrastructure.

Once night fell, it was going to get dark for real, and I had a strong suspicion that the antithesis wouldn’t let us get away with a solid eight hours of peaceful sleep.

***