Chapter Fifty-Six - Country Cat, City Cat

"Keep the chatter to a minimum, we don't need to embarrass ourselves in front of the Samurai. You don't see them goofing around, do you?"

--Lieutenant Moreau, 2057

***

I reached the edge of the forest, then I realised that I hadn't connected to the team coms. Fortunately, while I was an absent-minded moron at times, Myalis was on the ball.

Yes, I did grab a connection to the intra-team communication network. It's hard not to. The encryption is extremely basic. I suspect that they want to make it easy for other organisations to tap into their lines.

Why would they... actually, that kind of made sense. You wouldn't want a creative civilian with the right augs to pop onto your lines, but letting the local PMCs know that you were there wasn't a bad move, not for a team that specialised in taking out aliens. It was probably easy to listen in because they wanted others to know they were around.

Or something like that. Maybe they'd just cheaped out on encryption stuff. I hadn't noticed a mesh-runner on the team, which made sense if they were mostly fighting aliens.

Linking you now.

I heard a faint static-y hiss that was easy to ignore. Then a few sniffles and light coughs that weren't so easy to miss. It seemed as if the entire group was on one shared channel. The soldiers were keeping to themselves, not speaking up, and their mics seemed like they were at least designed not to pick up breathing, but still, every cleared throat was loud and clear.

I opened a tab on my augs and fiddled with the volume. I didn't want to miss an alien sneaking up on me because I was distracted by Jenkins with the sore throat.

"This is Stray Cat, I'm on the edge of the forest. Uh, over."

"Read you, Stray Cat," someone replied. A small text box at the edge of my vision read that as Lieutenant Moreau. "We're catching up now. Anything to report?"

I looked around me. The forest was real... forest-y; more so than that zoo Lucy and I had visited. There were bushes all over, fallen branches blocking off otherwise passable parts of the woods, and the terrain went from flat agricultural land to a bumpy mess.

"Looks like shit, but no aliens, over."

There were a few restrained chuckles on the line, some that turned into coughs. I had the impression that this bunch wasn't used to joking around. They were all very serious about their work. That was probably fair. I imagined that those that didn't take it seriously became a pension cheque for their family rather quickly.

"We're moving in. If you want to move ahead and scout, we'd appreciate it," Moreau said.

"Moving ahead," I said. I shouldered my gun and slipped into the brush. My invisibility would be useful here, of course, but I quickly discovered that being unseen didn't mean that I wouldn't be noticed. The ground was covered in a layer of broken branches and piled on leaves. Every step came with a crack and shuffle that my boots could only do so much to muffle. Worse, there were bushes all over, and they kept brushing against my coat with a faint rustle.

The wind coming in from the flatter fields around the forest helped a little. It made trees sway faintly and created a fair bit of noise to camouflage my own motions, but that would only go so far.

It was actually frustrating how out of place I felt here. I was a city girl, I wasn't made for woods and shit.

I at least tried not to make too much noise as I skulked through the forest. I had to move in a zig-zag, avoiding trees and bushes, and sometimes I had to stumble over fallen branches. After a dozen metres, I realised that I'd been turned around. Not entirely. I could still see the edge of the woods and I could make out the shadowy forms of the soldiers and Gomorrah coming up towards the edge of the forest, but I was no longer travelling in the direction I intended.

"Myalis, I need a small map up on my hud. And a compass," I muttered.

Adding that now.

I got both. A small semi-transparent map in the corner of my vision, as well as a compass running as a band across the top. I turned my head left and right, and the compass followed. We'd entered from almost due south, so I had to go north to get deeper in. Nice and easy.

I continued on my way in, realigning myself as I went. The map had a few dots where the soldiers were, so I was able to keep track.

"Hey Lt. Moreau, I'm not seeing any xenos yet," I said. "Lots of plant life still."

"Our satellite images suggest that they haven't hit this part of the woods yet," the lieutenant said.

"Just keep moving," Gomorrah said. "We'll see where they reached."

I shrugged and kept moving, and some three dozen metres later, I discovered that she was right.

There were fewer bushes and large plants here, not because the trees blocked the sun, or because the ground was rockier, but because they'd all been ripped out.

Trails of shredded plants and loose dirt flowed back and away from where I stood, marking the places where the bushes had passed, and I could easily make out the holes in the ground where the bushes had been.

"Shit," I said as I knelt down next to one hole and touched it.

"Stray Cat? Anything to report?" the lieutenant asked. He'd overheard that.

"Found a spot some... twenty-five metres ahead of your group. Bunch of bushes were ripped out of the ground and dragged away, heading more or less north. A bit east."

"Noted. That'll be the antithesis grabbing biological matter for the hive."

"Right," I said. I'd never really seen an area like this before, but it made some sense. The aliens ate pretty much anything organic back at their hive. Dragging things back only made sense, then. Given enough time, I was sure they'd come back for the roots and grass and all of the smaller plant-life that they missed.

Maybe it was a good thing that most grasses and bushes and such were going extinct. It meant fewer things for the aliens to feed on.

I stood back up and continued, but only for a little bit before I stopped again.

There was something that my vision caught, a faint glimmer in the air.

If my augs and eyes were normal, I'd have dismissed it as a glitch, but I had good shit, and Myalis didn't give me glitchy gear. I narrowed my eyes and scanned the forest ahead, then I moved up and down a little. I probably looked stupid, doing half-squats in a forest, but it worked.

I caught that glimmer again, and now that I was looking for it, it was easier to find. It was a wire. A thin thread that cut across the space between two trees. I noticed a few more above, and some at ground level. Hell, I noticed one snapped around my lower leg.

"What am I looking at, Myalis?"

Without closer inspection, it's impossible to say, however, I predict with over eighty percent certainty that these are the webs left by model sevens. Communication strands. They can also serve as tripwires.

"LT, hold," I said.

"Holding," the lieutenant said. I noticed the dots on the map coming to a stop and I imagined the soldiers tensing up behind me.

"Found some wires. Look like spiderwebs, hard as fuck to spot."

"Prep for ambush!" the lieutenant snapped in a low hiss, and I saw the dots regrouping into a rough circle in a hurry. I heard them too. So far, they'd been moving so quietly that I could only barely make out the occasional snap of a branch, now they were hustling to get into formation.

I raised my gun too and waited with baited breath.

Nothing showed up, though.

"Huh... maybe that was a dud?" I asked.

"That's possible, if there isn't a mo--"

I stopped listening to what the lieutenant was saying as I jumped aside.

Something large and spikey crashed through the branches above and then came rushing down. I think it would have missed me if I stayed still, but I jumped aside anyway.

The large ball of spikes thumped into the ground, then burst apart, scattering dozens of long spines across the forest.

I covered my head and felt a few pinpricks stabbing into my suit and into the less armoured joints between. "Fuck," I said as I looked up.

It was an artillery ball, flung by a model fifteen with surprising accuracy.

"I think we've been spotted," I said unnecessarily.

"Good," Gomorrah said. I heard a whoosh, and when I looked back to where the soldiers were, I could finally see the orange glow of a light in their midst. The pilot light on Gomorrah's flamethrower. "I'm not one for all of this stealth business," she said.

***