Chapter Sixty-Three - Burning

“I miss the good old days. You know, when one game in ten was still single player, without live-service microtransactions and gacha mechanics. What’s the last time a good game came out that wasn’t made for mobile?”

--4channel forums, 2032

***

I thought that maybe knowing I was going to die would depress me a bit more than it did.

In reality, all I felt was a little cold.

Lucy would be sad. The kittens too. Some of them, at least.

The acid cloud was slowly dissipating. The wind, fortunately, was pushing it back and away from us. The acidic goop covering the ground wasn’t moving though. A few fallen aliens were sinking into it. Or maybe melting into it would be more appropriate.

The front was quiet for the moment. There was still shooting way off to the side, but it was less active than it had been before.

I glanced over and took note of Jolly Monarch’s Rooks, the big mecha still standing guard over the majority of the gap. “I need me one of those,” I said as I stared at the bristling array of firepower sticking out of the tower.

You can almost afford one now.

I snorted. “Maybe later.” A big walking mech would be pretty fucking cool. I couldn’t see any use for it beyond defending this kind of place, but it would be undeniably cool. Myalis--and Lucy--would insist that it look like a giant cat. I could live with that.

I shook my head, clearing my mind a bit. I was supposed to be thinking of my impending demise, not giant robots.

Glancing around, I searched for Gomorrah, then froze up when I couldn’t see her. My blood chilled. Had she retreated? A few PMCs were still running back. Others were defying orders and staying by the front. Had Gomorrah decided that she had enough?

Then I spotted her a little ways to the back, standing next to a tank and seemingly unaware that she was in its path.

She was bent over, hunched. Had she been hurt or was she changing out her gear? I jogged towards her, skipping over a barricade that stopped at hip-height. I slowed down from a jog to a calmer walk as I came closer.

Gomorrah’s mask was off, which was unusual. She had placed her mask atop the tracks of the tank and was looking off in another direction. “I know... yes, I know that too,” she said. She was frustrated, obviously, and talked to someone. “I don’t know, Franny, it’s not looking too great down here... no, I can’t go back. It’s my duty, to God and the people behind me. I won’t retreat. But-- Franny, shut up!”

I stopped a ways away. I’d never heard Gomorrah quite so raw before.

She took a deep breath. “I think I love you,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t... I’ll talk to you later. No. Bye.” She swallowed, then in a lower tone, addressed someone else. “Atyacus, send her to voicemail when she calls, please? Or, no, tell her that I’m busy. Please?”

Gomorrah turned, then froze on seeing me.

I raised my hands in surrender and pretended not to see any wetness or confusion in her eyes.

She slipped her mask on, then cleared her throat. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “What’s the plan?” I wasn’t going to push. She sounded conflicted and, yeah, I’d been there once. Confessing was hard. Though, well, maybe I had it easy with Lucy.

Gomorrah stared ahead of us, towards the ruins of the city. “I have a plan. It’s a bad one.”

“Those are the only plans I take part in,” I said.

“Good. Want to toss out more of those acid bombs? We could create a sort of barrier to prevent the horde from reaching the wall, retreating PMCs or no. Then we fly over the acid and nuke the plants back into their constituent atoms.”

“That sounds great to me, but I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to use nukes within....” I glanced over my shoulder towards New Montreal. The city towered above and behind me. “About two kilometres from the edge of the city.”

“Not nukes then,” Gomorrah said.

I hummed, then flicked through my contacts until I landed on Laserjack. He replied nearly as soon as I tapped send. “Stray Cat? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that it feels like we’ve been told to sit tight and wait to die. Do I sound like the type of girl who dies? So fuck that. Going to blow shit up, drop some literal acid on the aliens and generally make myself a nuisance with Gomorrah. We’ve got stacks of points to burn over here, you know.”

There was a second-long pause. “Okay. Try to avoid any attacks that might damage the protected part of the city, or at least the defences that remain.”

“You’re real nonchalant about this,” I said, pulling out one of my fancy words.

“You’re samurai, there’s no such thing as hopeless as long as one of us is drawing breath. The horde’s been thinned considerably already and we’ve moved more heavy equipment around, we could be able to close up the wall within the next two hours. Things aren’t as desperate as they seem.”

“Oh. Then why tell people to retreat?”

“Because we’re going to need people rested. Things are still pretty bad; and they’re going to get a whole lot worse. We need to start destroying hives all over. We have dozens of confirmed locations in New Montreal’s vicinity alone. Thousands across the continent. We’ve lost contact with some smaller cities already. Truth is, New Montreal is doing really well right now.”

“Well shit,” I said.

“We had a lot of additional troops in the city because of the earlier incursion. A good quarter of Canada’s clean up crews were moved to New Montreal in the last... you don’t need to know all of this. If you and Gomorrah want to take up the job of wiping out the last of the wave, then go ahead, and thank you.”

The line went dead and I shook my head. What a weirdo. “Okay, I guess that counts as enough permission for me. Myalis, any idea what kind of fuckery we’ll be dealing with?”

More models in ten-to-twenty range, certainly. Possibly early hive structures.

Gomorrah must have been clued in to what Myalis was saying. “Anything we should worry about if we fly over the area and bomb it from above?”

Atyacus was the one to reply, over the comms, though I suspected that Gomorrah heard her own AI in her head the way I heard Myalis in mine.

After observing the area from several camera emplacements overlooking the city, I have noticed fewer flying models than you would usually find in an incursion of this size. Unfortunately, while I have some hypothesis as to why, I lack sufficient data to make a proper analysis.

Myalis added her own two credits a moment later.

That may change. Model twos and other flying models tend to be lighter than their ground-bound equivalents. Their creation rate within a fully grown hive with sufficient biomass is quite rapid.

“So let’s bomb them before the skies become inhospitable,” I said. “We’re taking the Fury?”

“We could jetpack over, but... yes, I’d rather take my car. It’ll be safer than just being out there without protection. Though... I don’t know if you’ll fit.”

I glanced down at myself and my rather imposing armour. She was probably right, unless I was willing to stuff myself into the back seats sideways, there was no way I’d fit. “I can ditch the armour for now. We’ll be mostly safe, right? Or I can hang off the roof top.”

“That sounds incredibly reckless.”

“I have jump jets, if I fall I probably won’t die,” I pointed out. “Besides, someone needs to drop the bombs. Speaking of which, do you think we should combo things again? Your fire, my weird explosives?”

Gomorrah nodded. “Oh yes, I could genuinely go for that right now.”

It was a little weird that Gomorrah could ‘go for’ a massive pyromaniacal streak the same way someone else might ‘go for’ a few drinks, but I wasn’t going to poke. My favourite nun needed a bit of a break. If that required lighting entire blocks of aliens on fire then so be it.

Gomorrah called the Fury over and we hurried up to wait.

It wasn’t entirely lost time though. We had entire combined catalogues to pour over, picking and choosing the kind of personal hell we were about to unleash upon the aliens who had dared inconvenience us.

It was going to be great!

***