Chapter Seventy-One - Chlorine Trifluoride

“Don’t use explosives in enclosed spaces.

Especially when you’re in those spaces.”

--Someone with common sense.

***

I wiggled my head around to make sure my helmet was on snug. It slipped down a little more, and then held on tight. Good enough. “Alright, so, just give me like, half an hour? We can still chat in the meantime, I think we don’t need to worry about signals and such.”

“Very well,” Gomorrah said. “Do avoid setting any bombs off until we’re ready. You’ll probably just kill yourself if you do.”

“I’ll try not to,” I said. “I really want to use fuel-air bombs, but we might settle for some nanite bombs, or bombs that melt aliens.”

“I don’t see why we couldn’t mix it up.”

I nodded. “DDT on steroids or something,” I said. I paused, looked at my mecha cats, then down the darkened tunnel I would be travelling down all on my own. I wasn’t actually concerned for myself, but I did kind of feel bad about leaving Gomorrah behind. “The cats will keep you company, alright?”

“Of course.”

“And if I bite the bullet, you take care of my kittens for me, okay?”

The nun placed her hands on her hips, her flamethrower left to dangle by her side. “You have no business being so fatalistic,” she said.

I grinned as I stepped up and wrapped her in a quick hug.

I wasn’t a hugger, no matter what Lucy accused me of, but... well, it felt nice. “See you in a bit, nun-girl.”

Firing off a sloppy salute, I took off into the darkness. My coat’s invisibility wrapped around me, then my cloak came on and I flipped my hood up onto my head.

I kept up a light jog, just fast enough to get my heart beating, but not so much that I’d exhaust myself. “Okay, let’s talk bombs,” I said.

I have two suggestions. First, seeing as how both yourself and Gomorrah are fond of large explosions and copious amounts of fire, an aerosolized agent might be a decent solution to clear out a majority of the mines.

“So like, a gas that burns and hovers in the air?” I asked.

Essentially, yes. There are many variations available, but I would suggest a rather stable one, one unlikely to be immediately detected by the Antithesis and one that will only ignite under very specific conditions.

“So I don’t accidentally blow myself up, that’s always great.”

I would suggest aerosolized chlorine trifluoride. Bonded with a chemical agent that stabilizes it until either introduced to extreme heat, or minute amounts of hydrogen fluoride, which is a by-product of the chlorine trifluoride reaction.

I frowned. “So it won’t go off until introduced to some chemical that it produces when it’s already going off?”

Hence creating a chain reaction, yes.

“Does it burn good?”

Yes. Chlorine trifluoride burns... good.

“Cool. So what was the other option?” I asked. I wasn’t super smart, but I knew that setting off a big flaming explosion in the tight quarters of a tunnel I was in was a bad idea. There were ways to make it safe... safe-ish, and I intended to use those if I could.

The other options are slower-acting. Either an aerosolized acidic compound, pushed deeper into the mines to try and burn out the hive, or a more precise use of nanites designed to break apart Antithesis matter.

“That sounds handy. But slow.”

It would be considerably slower than merely burning everything, yes.

I passed the piles of burned bodies that Gomorrah and I had created, then reached into my jacket and hesitated. Handgun or grenade launcher? I was trying to be stealthy... and I also had room in my underslung sheath.

“Need a handgun, something subtle.”

I’ve been eagerly awaiting for an opportunity to present this particular weapon to you. It’s a weapon that is entirely silent. It’s from both your stealth catalogue and Sunwatcher catalogues, as opposed to any of your weapon catalogues.

I slowed my jog down to a quick walk, then slowed down some more when I reached the curve where I’d first met some aliens. I didn’t want to come around and meet another group head-on, not if I could avoid it. Couldn’t hear any of them though.

The weapons system is called the Claw. It’s not technically a gun, but rather a range-finder and teleportation system.

“How does it kill things?” I asked.

Within the weapon is a magazine filled with spring-loaded rods, each with ten blades held in place by a trigger. On deploying, these blades open up, and the entire rod rotates around its own axis until all of the kinetic energy within is spent.

“Alright,” I said. Myalis decided to send me a neat image, of a silver cylinder that went from looking like a nice pen to turning into a spinning ball of knives for a couple of seconds. “Very stealthy,” I said.

The Claw system teleports one of these rods into the target you are aiming at.

“Oh,” I said. I watched as the video changed to what looked like an MRI of one of those rods going off inside a cow. It didn’t seem to do more than chip away at bone. For anything else, it acted like an industrial blender set on smoothie mode. “Yeah,” I said. “And it’s noiseless?”

The vacuum created by teleporting the rod is funnelled out of the Claw after each shot, it’s the loudest noise created by the weapon, and it’s no louder than your breathing.

“Does it look like a cat?” I asked.

It can be made to not look like a cat, if you insist.

“I think I do. How much is it?”

Two hundred and fifty points.

I winced at the price, but then... “What am I at?”

Current Point Total:

2741

“Oh,” I said. That changed things a little. “Sure then.”

New Purchase: Claw, Range-Finding and Teleportation System

Points Reduced from... 2741 to... 2491

The gun came in a little box. It was significantly smaller than my Trench Maker, and not much of a gun at all. It had a handle, ergonomic and rubber-y, with a trigger, but that’s about where it ended. The entire thing just looked like a box with a pair of lenses on the end and a recessed tube on the bottom. There was a knob next to where my thumb naturally fit.

It was surprisingly heavy though.

My augs connected to it, and I noticed a new reticule appearing on the ground where the not-gun was aimed. It had a ‘depth’ meter next to it. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that turning the knob up and down changed the depth.

“Neat,” I said. “Let’s find something to blend real fast.”

I found a crack in the wall around the next bend, a hole that looked like it had been melted out of the stone, with large, obvious claw-marks scrabbling at the stone.

“Think they’re down there?” I asked.

The hole is rather small.

I eyed it up. It was a bit of a squeeze. If I went in there, I’d have a bitch of a time moving around. And if some alien came down the other way...

That, and it was smaller than some of the models Gomorrah and I had cooked. They couldn’t have come from here.

“Bomb,” I said.

Chlorine trifluoride?

“Yeah.”

The canister was roughly energy-drink sized, made of some silvery metal and with little legs at its base. I set it down, then pressed the one button atop it.

The bomb synched up with my augmentations a moment later, labelled as ‘bomb one.’ So, I could activate it at range? Made sense.

I continued down the main tunnel, trying to shake off distracting thoughts and focus on the path ahead. Couldn’t help but imagine that Gomorrah was bored back where I’d left her, but she was a big girl, she’d figure it out.

Something shuffled ahead, and I stopped mid-step.

There were lumps, here and there on the ground, unmoving. I couldn’t see them, not well. I figured they were rocks or something, but then one shuffled forwards, pulling itself along on one leg.

An Antithesis? One that was obviously very much injured.

The streaks across the ground, barely visible as more darkness against the dark, had to have been from dragged aliens.

I didn’t know they could retreat.

Raising my Claw up, I shifted it around until the reticule sat atop the alien, then I adjusted the depth. Five centimetres seemed to be the max.

I fired.

The not-gun shifted a bit, losing some weight a moment before it sort of just... inhaled.

The Antithesis slumped.

“Well,” I muttered. “I guess it is a stealth weapon.”

***