“You think the enemy weapons were…some kind of message?” Selene asked skeptically.
“I think it’s possible, but I might just be paranoid,” I replied, understanding why she was looking at me funny. It did sound crazy. I raised two fingers. “Assuming it was a mind game, I think there’s two possibilities: one, that those were the absolute best they had and someone wanted us to know they could hurt us, or two, they have even better equipment and are hoping to make us underestimate them.”
“Gifting us their best equipment to intimidate us would require our enemies to be mind-bogglingly stupid,” Alana pointed out. I nodded.
“I agree. They have to be smart enough to know we’ll only get stronger with time, so a threat like that has a time limit. But they could just be using that method to buy time. I don’t think it’s likely, though, which brings us to the second option, that they want us to assume this was a crack hit team armed even better than the first one and that they would have sent the best this time knowing the last attempt failed,” I explained.
“You’re missing two possibilities,” my mom pointed out. Selene looked at her, then at me, then at Alana.
“Okay, I’ve been wondering for a while now, but who is this and why is she here?” the militia captain asked. Up until now meetings had been restricted to she, Alana, and myself. I had sort of assumed she already knew who my mother is and didn’t think to introduce her.
“Oh, this is my mom,” I said. “Mom, I think you already knew who Captain Lafayette- Selene- is?”
“Yep, I heard from Alana,” mom replied. Selene only looked even more confused.
“You brought your mother to a meeting?” she asked, incredulously. “Please tell me she at least has some kind of relevant experience.”
I grimaced, but a quick look at my mom told me she was looking forward to making me answer this question myself and wouldn’t be coming to my rescue. The fact was that she did, but the reason why was embarrassing. It should have embarrassed her to admit, but she didn’t know the definition of shame, leaving me to shoulder that burden alone.
“She’s…a pro gamer,” I admitted.
“A…gamer.” Selene repeated, looking at me as if she was reevaluating my intelligence. To be fair, I was too. She looked back to Alana as if asking for help.
“I trust Erica not to bring her here without a good reason, but…” Alana said with a shrug, gesturing for me to explain. I was already fed up, so I tossed the question to my mother, glaring at her until she explained herself.
“To be specific I’m a professional virtual reality first-person shooter player. I don’t know if you’ve kept up with gaming in the last twenty years, but ever since Samurai started releasing tech to the public gaming has taken a lot of strides forward in realism. Games can be crazy realistic these days, from accurate physics to the environments,” she expounded. While Selene hadn’t quite gotten it yet, Alana had caught on.
“Are you saying you studied real-world tactics and strategy and applied them to your games?” she asked.
“Yep! That’s essentially the meta these days. Games have gotten so incredibly detailed that you can move your entire body like it’s your real one, and when you combine that with a robust physics engine and hardware released by Samurai, there’s a lot you can do tactically that would work in real life…and vice-versa,” mom elaborated.
“I’ll admit I’m a bit skeptical, but I’ll withhold judgement for now,” Alana granted.
“Let’s hear it then. What’s the gamer got to contribute to a strategy meeting?” Selene asked my mother directly. She grinned.
“Well, my daughter had some good points, but she left out the possibility it was a legitimate mistake,” mom pointed out.
“Generally it’s a bad idea to assume the enemy is stupid,” Alana replied. But mom’s confidence hadn’t wavered. “But you knew that, so…are you suggesting it was a deliberate mistake?”
“100 points to Alana!” mom cheered. “From what I understand you’ve been concerned about a mole in your ranks- but about your enemy? Everyone knows how bad of an idea it is to mess with a Samurai, and there’s no amount of loyalty or fear that could guarantee everyone in the enemy organization is up for it.”
“I see where you’re going with it now,” Selene responded, nodding. “You’re saying they’ve got a traitor; someone that thinks they can get amnesty if they can prove they sabotaged their allies.”
“It’s worth considering…we should look into it if we ever get access to their computer systems,” Alana acknowledged. “There’ll likely be evidence Juny or Dylta can spot.”
“If it exists, I’ll find it!” Juny volunteered.
“Doesn’t sound like there’s much else we can do about this at the moment, so I’ll take my leave now,” Selene announced as she stood. “Let me know if you learn anything else.”
“Will do,” Alana replied, watching Selene leave the room.
“With that out of the way…” mom said, looking at me more seriously than before. “Juny was kind enough to give me a full account of your mission.
“Traitor,” I accused, staring down the Eyebot hovering over my shoulder.
“She asked quite nicely, so I saw no reason to refuse!” Juny replied innocently.
“Was there something strange about it…?” Alana asked.
“Mm, not really, but I decided I’ve been on vacation long enough and I might as well make myself useful around here. So why not give my dear daughter feedback on her field tactics?”
“You realize all the personnel here are local militia or ex-military, right?” I asked her while covering my eyes with one hand.
“But none of them are in a position to receive reports from you and review them, right?” Uncovering my eyes, I looked at mom to see a look on her face suggesting she thought she’d won.
“She has a point,” Alana granted. Clearly I wasn’t getting out of this.
“Fine. Did I mess something up?” I asked, surrendering.
“Let’s start from the beginning. Using drones to clear out the Antithesis hiding in the town was a good idea- it compensated for the lack of manpower, saved you time, and kept actual soldiers from having to do the dangerous door-to-door search,” mom began. “You also did a good job setting up the battlefield for clearing the hive, but some of the preparations you made could have been better.”
“What do you mean?” I queried with a frown.
“Well, first, I think you took the Model Thirteens too lightly. Only deploying a single trap for each body was risky- what if one of them missed? You had no backup for that and sent your heavy machinegun home early,” mom critiqued with a sharp look on her face. “For that matter, what if there had been one of the big stealth models present? You didn’t prepare for that at all.”
“Juny was handling the timing, and I upgraded my sensors to Class II, so I was pretty confident there weren’t any,” I answered simply.
“Did you check with Juny about that first?” she countered.
“…no?” I replied, losing confidence. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I suppose I must have just assumed on some level that with the upgrade nothing I’d encountered so far would be able to hide from me anymore.
“Exactly. So let’s ask now: Juny, would you have seen a Model Twenty-One or Thirty-Three coming?” mom asked my AI, who answered without hesitation despite being my AI.
“A Model Twenty-One would have been no problem, but a Thirty-Three would be difficult to detect even with Class II sensors!” Juny reported. On the sidelines, Alana was suppressing a smile.
“Wait, why didn’t you mention that?” I demanded.
“I judged the odds of encountering a Thirty-Three in a hive of that size to be essentially nonexistent, and even if you had, simply remaining more alert would not have been sufficient to detect it before it attacked,” Juny explained.
“But essentially nonexistent doesn’t mean impossible,” mom insisted. “What if one showed up from a more distant hive?”
“That would also be quite unlikely- Antithesis do not typically coordinate between hives and a Model Thirty-Three would not have abandoned its original hive,” Juny riposted. Maybe she was on my side after all.
“If you’re that sure I suppose I shouldn’t argue with the incredibly advanced Samurai AI,” my mom conceded. “But moving on from that- what about your weapons? Did you prepare anything for fighting heavier models ahead of time?”
“Actually, yes,” I replied. “But I had armored vehicles like tanks in mind when I bought it. It would be effective against something like a Twenty-Three, but Thirteens are close to my size. It was overkill and the collateral damage would have been high.”
“What about your other weapons, then? Have you upgraded them at all?” she pressed on, apparently accepting my first argument.
“I didn’t have enough tokens to go around, so I prioritized a heavier option,” I admitted. “But now that you mention it I suppose there’s probably room to upgrade them without going up a class…the SMGs and the shotgun I bought pretty early on.”
“Good, so you caught that one yourself,” mom said with a satisfied nod. “I think the only other problem I see is that you’re still not taking full advantage of the drones you have access to.”
“I’m not? I started buying them right away this time and made sure to have some watch my back like you said.” Granted, I could have had the first set guard me from the start, but I was certain at the time there was nothing capable of stopping me. Next time I’d probably proceed with more caution even then.
“But you didn’t bring any with you from here,” mom pointed out.
“Well, yeah, because we don’t have enough space for them on the gunships,” I replied, honing in on the issue with that idea. “I couldn’t increase the space without compromising on their other functions, and I didn’t have the points for a dropship.”
“…did it ever occur to you to buy one with money?” mom asked, nonplussed. Admittedly I had not, but…
“I’m a Samurai, the job doesn’t exactly pay on its own,” I told her dryly.
“If you’d mentioned you wanted one I would have suggested it, but…we could just buy some relatively harmless templates and auction them off to corpos,” Alana cut in. Now that I thought of it, wasn’t that more or less how she bought the building and gunships? “We didn’t need the extra lifting capacity just for our troops, so I wasn’t considering getting anything like that just yet.
“Or you could have struck a deal with a manufacturer to get a dropship directly, but yeah,” mom agreed.
“…y’know, we do have two perfectly good dropships now. APCs technically, but they’re hovercraft, so it’s kind of the same thing,” I noted, referring to the captured corpo vehicles.
“The hugely outdated ones rigged to hell and back with explosives and viruses?” Alana asked rhetorically. “I suppose we could, but it would be a lot of work to modernize them.”
“All the parts we would need are Class 0- human tech. We could feed the dropships to the fabber and have it reassemble them with the new parts,” I suggested, starting to like the idea more and more. “A large troop transport is expensive so I was expecting it to be a while before I could get one, but this would be a pretty good stopgap, at least for shipping drones from the fabber to the battlefield.”
“It’s that kind thinking I was hoping to encourage!” mom cheered enthusiastically, earning a chuckle from Alana.
Mom knows best!
Hah! I was about to post the same thing.
Listen to your Mother, young Samurai! She is nearly always right!
TFTC
I’m so happy to have mom in on this and she is giving the perfect advice to get the ideas flowing to use the items on hand. She also shared the practical data on the situation and the corporations operation including things I wasn’t even thinking of. She is becoming my favorite character and I’m starting to want to see her in an actual fight.
🍪➡️