Chapter Fifty-Eight - Final Hours

“For long-ranged travel, the aircraft is still the best option, but as time progresses and hovercraft become more common, we are seeing a harsh decrease in commercial flights, especially more localised ones.

A clever traveller can hop from city to city using different hovercar services for relatively cheap, and since the distance covered by a hovercar is significantly greater than that covered by a traditional car, we’re starting to see the entire airline economy crumpling.

Which is why we want to push for more luxury-based aeroplane accommodations. Let’s jack up the price and make airline travel something for the rich and influential and those who wish they were both.”

--Beta Airlines internal memo, 2031

***

Gomorrah volunteered the Fury to deliver her explosive payload, and I was totally okay with the idea that we’d be dropping stuff onto the aliens from the relative safety of the air.

But that would only cover a little bit, and I didn’t want Gomorrah to be alone up there.

“Alright,” I said while we were all still in the planning... shed. “Gomorrah, you get the Fury up in the air. I’ll see if the militia has any hover cars. I can probably give them something to drop bombs with, and we can load them up with enough munitions to cover everything. I know you can just go up and keep dropping things, but I’m worried that you’ll just be one vehicle alone in the air.”

Gomorrah shrugged. “It’s a fair worry. I’ll be closer to the water, and there might be larger antithesis that can fly in the lake. They might come out if they see the Fury dropping bombs along the shore.”

“Right, exactly,” I said. “I wish we had more AA guns down here too.”

“Franny will be here in twenty minutes with another load of turrets from your place,” Gomorrah said.

“Really? That’s not bad,” I said.

“She brought some in last night as well. I got the militia to install them across the city. They’re not exactly strong, you know?”

“Yeah, but they can take out the weaker aliens without too much of a fuss, and they don’t need a person controlling them to work,” I argued.

More turrets would be nice, in any case. We could get them up on all of the buildings on this side of downtown. I wasn’t sure if their range was enough to really help during bombing runs or anything, but they’d certainly help if a flying car returned with some aliens on its ass. “I’ll chat with Intel-chan, get things organised. Sprout, do you need to be there to spread your, uh, seeds?”

“That’d be ideal,” he said. “But I think anyone could manage if you train them just a little.”

“Cool. Do you want to go out with Arm-a-Geddon here? Both of you working together should be able to stay alive.”

I noted that he still had that gun I’d given him a bit ago. Arm-a-Geddon had upgraded himself a bit. New arms, again, this time with what looked like several guns built into his forearms that I imagined could spring out of them.

Not my kind of thing, but whatever. I bet it made him a bit tankier, and we might need that.

“We’ll arrange a few squads, then. Maybe mix the militia folk with some of the kittens. They should be easier to get volunteers from to learn some, uh, advanced front-line gardening,” I said.

Sprout nodded, and since he seemed pretty happy with that, I nodded myself. “Good. Gomorrah, can you help with the bombs and such? I’ll get in touch with Intel-chan right now. Oh, and can you direct Franny once she arrives?”

“When did you want to put our plan into motion?” Gomorrah asked. “Because it sounds like you have a lot of prep-work to do.”

I considered it for a moment, then looked at the time. “Call it... two PM, on the dot. That gives us just a bit over an hour to get everything ready.”

“I can work with that,” Gomorrah said. Sprout looked a bit nervous, but he had an hour to get over those nerves.

In the meantime, I stepped out and headed towards the wall. Just because I had a lot of calls to make didn’t mean that I couldn’t help on the wall a little.

I made two calls at the same time. One to Intel-chan, who’d get me in touch with all of the militia, and another to Jennifer. Neither call had time to ring once before they picked up.

“Ohio, Neko-sama.”

“Hello, sexy.”

There was a long pause, then Intel-chan spoke up. “Miss Stray Cat. Who is that?”

“That’s Jennifer,” I said and I pushed the two boxes that had popped up with the images of the people I was talking to towards the side. Intel-chan’s little vtuber avatar squeezed in next to Jennifer’s... also an avatar, probably. “She’s Lucy’s sexy robot secretary. Don’t fall in love. Also, why did you call me sexy?” That last was directed to Jennifer herself.

“It’s what Miss Lucy calls you in our internal notes,” she said. “Also, I thought it was funny.”

“Huh,” I said. “Right, Maybe don’t? Anyway, I need volunteers, maybe kittens, maybe not. People who know a bit about gardening and who aren’t afraid of being eaten alive by homicidal aliens.”

“Finding people with gardening-related skills will be difficult,” she said.

“And not the other part?” I asked.

“Not really. Humans tend to have a strange relationship with fear until such a time as the fear-causing thing is already too close to be avoided. Where do you need these people? How many volunteers do you need?”

“We’re going to send groups out past the wall to plant some stuff Sprout has cooked up. I don’t want this to be a suicide mission, so we’ll be sending them out in squads. Maybe one armoured vehicle each, with enough armed folk to keep our gardeners safe? So yeah, however many squads like that you two can arrange, that’s how many volunteers we’ll need.”

“I think we can supply some technicals,” Intel-chan said. “We have a number of cars free right now.”

“Good. Now, on the subject of cars. Does the militia have any sort of armoured flying vehicle?”

Intel-chan’s avatar bobbed its head. “Yup! We have three pursuit VTOLs, and five heavy lift vans for troop transportation. We also have a number of police cruisers on loan. They have turreted weapons, but they’re not designed to kill organics.”

“That might do. Bring them over here. We’re going to turn them into bombers,” I said.

Intel-chan clapped. “Oh, nice. You’re going to get a ton of volunteers for that.”

Yeah, that tracked. Giving a bunch of people access to heavy-ordnance and telling them to drop it onto the heads of the pesky aliens below was always going to be popular. “Just get the cars over here, I’ll figure out a way to set them up to drop bombs. And remind our new bomber pilots that this shit’s dangerous, we don’t have good AA.”

“Noted,” Intel-chan said. “Still gonna get lots of volunteers. Expect the cars within the hour.”

“Make it faster than that, we’re starting the bombing runs at two PM.”

“Oh, that’s soon, I’ll have everyone hurry up, then,” they said.

“When do you need the gardeners?” Jennifer asked.

I shook my head. “Ideally they should be here already, but we can’t have that. So just get them over as quickly as possible.” There were some scaffolds set up on the inner side of the wall, with ladders slanted at an angle to act as OSHA-violating steps so that people could carry stuff to the top of the barricade.

A few heavier-looking machine guns were set up there already, rattling away as they sprayed at what I hoped was a horde of aliens. I ran up the ladder, tail swaying automatically to keep me balanced, then I climbed up another level to see over the top of the barricade.

There were heaps of alien bodies strewn across an otherwise empty street, with more aliens charging down from around the corner. There were lots of them, but it was far from one of those endless tides like I’d seen in New Montreal before. This was more of an endless trickle of lower-tiered models.

It was more than what they’d been seeing the day before, however, and that was concerning all on its own. We had three guns firing nearly non-stop up here, with pauses only happening when they needed to reload or change belts.

Eventually we’d run out of ammo. Maybe before the aliens ran out of bodies.

I wasn’t liking the math here.

I flung a couple of grenades ahead. Just a few plain old resonators, to help melt the bodies that were piling up before they could turn into makeshift barricades. I made a note to leave some better nades behind too, in case bigger, meaner aliens started to show up. Even some in the early double-digit range could really mess things up.

Meh, we’d be fine. We just had to hold out for a little while longer. I was feeling pretty good about our odds.

***