Chapter Sixty - A Unique Combat Doctrine

“Samurai have a wide array of fighting styles and doctrines. Ranging from long-distance destruction of targets, to close-up melee fighting. The styles are as varied as the Samurai themselves, and their little AI partners seem to only encourage this diversity.

It’s exceptionally rare that two top-tier Samurai will have combat abilities that are even remotely similar.

And that makes them a nightmare to fight. You can train people to take down one Samurai, but only that one. The next might be using gravity weapons instead of drone armies, or perhaps they’ve focused on biological weaponry, or they fight in close-quarters while also using alien predictive software to avoid being shot.

It’s one of the many, many reasons why trying to use the army to subdue a rogue Samurai is a terrible idea.”

--Major Huygens, in a brief before Operation Feudal, May 2027

***

The doors opened with a squeal of metal grinding against metal. I could only imagine what it sounded like to those caught within the shelter.

To my surprise, I didn’t find a sea of terrified people waiting for me, but instead a large empty room. It was a dozen meters long and wide, with cement walls all around that had shoulder-height windows cut into them. There were openings for people too, of course, and that’s where I saw the first of the survivors.

They looked... grumpy.

The first few to come out from hiding were bigger men in rough-cloth uniforms. Some had old rifles, others large wrenches. They looked at me as if I was a two-bit hooker, then thought better of it on seeing the gun held casually by my side and the drones moving about around me.

“You Stray Cat?” One of them asked.

“Yup,” I said. “We can’t evacuate everyone here at once, not yet.” Their grumpiness moved up a notch. “I’ll need truck drivers and whomever has a gun and knows how to use it, as well as some folks with good arms.”

“What?” The man I chose to name grumpiest asked.

“We don’t have enough transports for everyone here,” I said. “So we’re stealing some.”

“What’ch’a stealing?”

“Trucks,” I explained. “We’re stealing a whole fuckload of trucks. I need help emptying them out so that we can carry people out of here. We have maybe ten minutes before the worst of the waves hit this area.”

One of them, slimmer and lankier, pointed back into the shelter. “We could stay here.”

“No. You can’t.” I saw him about to protest. It was surprising how kitten-like some adult expressions were. “Because I said so.”

“That’s not a--”

“Because I said so, and because I have a fuck-huge cannon,” I added.

That, surprisingly, worked.

Some of them ran back to look for more volunteers while a group of them, ten or so in all, followed me back out onto the street. The moment we were out I shoved my floating gun to the side and let it hover ominously next to the entrance leading to the shelter. My Dumbasses ran ahead of me and were the first to meet with Monroe as he jogged over. “Ma’am.”

“We have volunteers,” I said.

“That’s... good,” he said.

“Did you do what I asked?” I asked.

Monroe managed to look uncomfortable despite all of his armour making his body language hard to read. “You didn’t actually leave us with any orders, ma’am. We passed around the guns and then set up the cars to protect the area. We also marked out trucks that we could potentially move over to here.”

“Uh,” I said. “Well, good work. We’re going to steal a fuckload more trucks. So if you could help organize that, it would be nice. Myalis can unlock them... or the Dumbasses can?”

They can.

“Right, they can. So they’ll be with you for that.” I snapped a finger at the nearest drone and all three of them turned to face me as if they were listening. “You get that? You’re going to help Monroe here crack the locks on some trucks.” The drone bobbed up and down and I decided to believe that that meant that they understood.

“What about you, ma’am?”

I licked my lips and looked back towards the shelter. A few more volunteers were coming out already. I had to believe that things would handle themselves without me there to threaten people the entire time.

If everything went well, then people would come out of the shelters, first to set up the trucks, and then to fill them up. After that, a mad dash towards the hospital where we’d hopefully meet up with a much bigger convoy.

That was if things went well. If they didn’t, then we’d get swarmed by an unending tide of aliens while halfway into the loading process. People would panic as they were wont to do, and a lot of people would die.

I could do something about that last one.

“I’m going to be heading that way,” I said as I pointed towards the centre of the incursion. “I’ll set up a nice warm greeting for all the aliens coming this way. Buy you guys some time.”

Monroe nodded. “Understood. Thank you, ma’am.” He saluted me, then moved right on towards the volunteers behind me and started rapid-firing questions and pointing them this way and that. I suddenly felt rather outclassed.

Monroe was just a guy, but he had his shit together.

“Right well, I’ll be... over there,” I said to no one before I started off towards what I hoped was the direction the monsters would come from.

Do you actually have a plan?

“Yup,” I said. “I’m going over that way, and I’m going to mine the shit out of the entire road.”

Wonderful! And once the Antithesis set off every mine?

“Ah, then I’m going to have to start shooting them a lot, I guess.”

I see. Do try to remain inconspicuous.

I grinned. “That much I can do. Cloak on!” My cloak turned invisible around me, and I pulled it closed over my chest so that I became little more than a pair of boots and hands floating in the air with a very large crossbow.

Screaming the command phrase to turn invisible is so counter-productive that I don’t know where to begin chastising you for it.

“Oh, shush,” I said. “It’s not like anyone’s around to hear it.” I began to weave between cars at a decent jog. Not too fast that I was out of breath, but a good clip nonetheless. “What kind of bombs should we be using for this? No more thermobarics by the way. I’d like to keep what’s left of my face untoasted.”

You have some area-denial options, but I’m afraid that if you use too many, the smarter Antithesis will merely circumvent the entire street. It might be best to use simpler, but still destructive. A combination of Hyper-Adhesive Foam and a Resonator might be best.

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

The foam spreads out over a large area around its point of detonation, and tends to be ignored by most of the less intelligent models until they find themselves stuck in it. With enough time and effort they can remove themselves. The Resonator would then have time to work, while being nearly impossible to destroy by passing Antithesis unless they use the bodies of their comrades to reach it. Also, the property damage would be light compared to using high-explosives. And if one of them goes undetonated, you won’t be responsible for killing any of the clean-up crews after the incursion is cleared.

I sighed. “That’s fair, not as fun as big explosions, but okay.”

Reaching the next intersection over, I paused as I took in the three paths the aliens could be coming from. It was a lot of road to cover, with all sorts of stalled vehicles and crap blocking lines of sight.

“I won’t be able to cover all of this,” I realized.

Then perhaps you don’t need to. You have short-term use auto turret emplacements available for twenty points using your Auxiliary Weapon Utilities catalogue.

“At that price... I’ll need to give it a gun myself and it can’t reload?”

It can reload a simple weapon. Assuming you purchase some ammunition for it.

I sighed. “Of course. Did I ever tell you that sometimes your solution to everything is predictable?”

I could spice things up.

“Please don’t,” I said. Her idea of spicing things up probably involved me being humiliated.

I surveyed the street again, this time with an eye for places where I could place small auto-turrets so that they’d mess up the optimal number of alien baddies.

I didn’t know how much time I had left, exactly, but I figured I could make the aliens passing through the area regret ever being born. Or hatched, or whatever.

Point was, I was going to mess someone’s day up. And for once, it wasn’t my own.