Chapter Sixty-Seven - Late

“The best thing to happen to sports was the dissolving of most major sporting leagues and associations. It occurred rather suddenly in the late 2020s and into the early 2030s, but interest in sports had been waning for some time before that.

What replaced them were more extreme and audience-friendly forms of entertainment. No-bars or barriers--sports where every player is a perfect machine, pushing what humanity can do the same way racing cars were tuned to near perfection in their own sport.”

--Sports in the 21st century, a biography of an art, 2041

***

I returned to Downtown Burlington at my own pace. Which meant, pretty damned quickly, all told.

Mostly that was because my new warmech, even with a few dents in it, could top out at seventy kilometres an hour on a straightaway, and it wasn’t like I had to deal with any traffic on the dead streets.

I had half my attention split on my damage readouts and on the internal repairs of the mech. It had a pretty in-depth self-repair system. Nothing too fancy. It wasn’t like it had nanomachines or anything over the top like that. But every system did have multiple levels of redundancy, and the mech was slowly testing out the systems that had been shut down, seeing what they could take now that the fighting was over.

“How much is it gonna cost to get this thing back up to functional?” I asked.

Not nearly as much as the initial price. Though, there are multiple ways to repair the Mechcatular Nyanzerfaust. The simplest and least cost-effective would be to buy all the missing parts as new, with a small surcharge to have them appear on the vehicle itself. The much more affordable option would be to simply return to your New Montreal fabricator and build the damaged parts there. Seeing as how you don’t have the complex education needed to repair the system yourself, or replace its parts, I’d suggest buying a repair drone for a few hundred points and allow it to effect the repairs itself.

“Sounds slow,” I said.

I believe that you will be afforded that time soon enough.

Frowning, I poked at my friendly AI. “What’s that mean?”

Even though you are not officially a member of the Family, they have been treating you as one to some degree. According to their internal protocols, after the last 48 hours--which they would classify as mid-high on their stress charts, you would be afforded five days of obligatory rest.

“Obligatory rest?” I asked. “That sounds like a terrible deal. I don’t wanna obligatory anything. Besides, I’m still good to go.”

The rest period is to give the vanguard time to destress and heal from any injuries. Prolonged periods of high-stress can lead to mental fatigue, cumulative stress injuries, and a whole host of other issues. But you are correct. You are still capable of continuing.

I... wasn’t expecting Myalis to agree to the last part. “Thanks, I guess?”

You are, and this is said with all due fondness, very much abnormal, Catherine. Your brain is wired wrong in the most entertaining way. I almost want to see you trying to take five days off, just to see the panic of inaction settle in, but that would be cruel and unusual and surprisingly unhealthy.

Sitting on my ass for five days would drive me a little mad. Lucy too, because as much as I didn’t want to, I’d totally drag her into the madness too. “Yeah, I can kinda see that. So we tell the Family to piss off?”

I would actually suggest taking them up on their offer. The lake and oceans specialised vanguard is arriving shortly, and the current reinforcements include a number of low-tier vanguard, similar to those you found in Burlington on arriving. In any case, you accomplished what you set out to accomplish. The city is, in a way, saved. Passing on the torch wouldn’t be harmful at this point, and it would allow you to shift your focus closer to home.

I thought about it as I continued to run towards the city.

Maybe she wasn’t so wrong about it. What did I still have to do here? Hell, why had I come here in the first place?

Some of it was wanting to help, but I wouldn’t have wanted that at all if Gomorrah hadn’t dragged me into it. Now that I was here, I felt responsible for this city, but it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t home.

Home was back in New Montreal, where I was sure I’d find plenty of problems waiting for me.

Still, I’d... done good, hadn’t I? Whipped the locals up, got Lucy to help, fucked up in a few new and creative ways, but still managed to keep things from imploding on themselves. Killed a whole lot of aliens.

Yeah, I’d done alright.

Maybe I would head back home for a day or two. Chill out in my little pool, then come back once the place was on fire because some moron bungled the whole thing up.

There was another consideration. Lucy. Heck, Gomorrah too, and to a degree Franny as well.

As long as I didn’t stop myself, none of them would be able to stop either. I got the sense that Gomorrah especially would try to match me beat for beat. Lucy was obstinate enough that if she needed a break, she’d get one no matter what, but she’d still push herself to keep up for a while, and she was still healing, no matter what Myalis said about their miraculous medication.

Yeah, I was gonna take a nice, quiet couple of days off.

I made up my mind at about the same time as I reached the city walls.

I saw eyes widen and picked up a few panicked calls as I jumped to the top of the wall, crumpling a small section of it, then leapt down on the other side.

There was a jet parked nearby, and I paused a bit as I took it in. It wasn’t a little fighter thing, but a big chunky cargo plane, but its wings were turned back. One of those fancy vertical takeoff planes? It looked like they were unloading shit from the plane.

I didn’t recognize the uniform of the new soldiers.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

The reinforcements you requested.

Oh, yeah, that made some sense. I walked my mech over, keeping it low and slow so that I had time to take in the scene.

There were a good hundred or so people in navy-blue uniforms with armoured cuirasses, arms, and kneepads moving around. They were better equipped than the local militia and it showed. I wasn’t sure if it was samurai tech though. Probably not.

Then I noticed a small group looking my way, four figures dressed in wildly different styles. I recognized one of them though, a younger man in what looked like jeans and a faintly glowing chest piece covered by a long leather coat. He had a long wooden rifle slung over his back and a tipped back cowboy hat that looked like something had chewed on it.

Crackshot Cowboy, from New Montreal.

Which made the others around him samurai as well. I glanced over the other three. Two girls, another guy. One of the girls was tiny. Not young, just really small, with an outsized backpack and what looked like flame-throwers? The white costume and glowing neon snowflakes on her outfit suggested the opposite.

The other woman was dressed like an old school racecar driver. I didn’t see any weapons on them, but her helmet was clearly some samurai-grade shit, and the suit looked too good to be commercial.

The last was a really tall guy in a leotard with mechanical bunny ears stuck to his head and disgustingly hairy legs, and I really didn’t feel like inspecting him too closely.

I wasn’t an expert at shit all, but something told me this bunch was entirely made up of new samurai. “They didn’t send the cream, did they?”

I suspect that Burlington’s going to be used as a safer location for new Family-related Vanguard to train.

Well, that made some sense.

I crouched my warmech down, then opened the cockpit. Something scraped, but the top of the mech opened up all the same and I yoinked my connection out from the side of my head with a swipe, then resisted the urge to vomit all over the cockpit.

There’s a shut-down process for a reason, Catherine.

I went from being the machine, or at least having it in my brain, to not in a split second, and it felt... weird, like disconnecting my prosthetic arm, but all over and all at once.

But I had noobs to show up, so I fought past it, then stood up atop my mech.

I hadn’t realised from within just how battered it looked. There were dents all over, and several hundred litres of plant blood painted on its exterior. I checked on the missing Gatling gun and held back a wince. That was going to cost something to replace.

But for now, I had to get started on making a good first impression.

“You’re fucking late,” I said.

***