Chapter Nineteen - Excuse My French

"The French Language is under seige!

Culture is more important than corporate profits!"

Translation from 'The Free Frenchman' newspaper article, 2032

***

Saint-Colomban of Medicorp was more of a shithole than aerial photography had suggested.

Getting to the town wasn't all that bad. There was a road from Saint-Jérome all the way over, and it was pretty much cleared of any obstacles. There was one minivan, turned onto its side with a model three ripping someone's days-old remains out of it, but otherwise the route over was quiet.

Seeing antithesis roaming around did mean that shit was still kind of fucky, though. "How long is it going to take to clear this area out?" I asked.

It depends on the amount of effort put into the task. It's very possible that it may take decades. There are some Vanguard who specialise in rooting out infections, but there are only a limited number of those. The current world-wide incursion is a result of not properly sanitising or containing previous incursions.

Right, that made sense. Unlike normal incursions, this one was all over and all at once. Old hives coming alive after probably growing real slowly for years and hiding away where they wouldn't be noticed.

If we didn't clean up after all of this, then there would just be more of those the next time this kind of incursion happened.

My bet was that there would be a huge push to clean, then the bills would come in and the embezzlement, effort-to-reward ratio, and the lack of urgency would eventually do the whole project in.

It wouldn't even be a question of shooting the right politicians to get it moving. Just plain old human nature in action.

"Fuck humans are stupid," I muttered.

Certainly not a top-percentile species. But you're not so bad. You're kind of cute. Like a child that's barely able to care for itself, but stretched out across an entire race.

"Okay, ouch," I said. "Not wrong, but still, that hurt. Humanity can't be the only awful race around, right?"

No, honestly, you're genuinely not so bad. Very middling in many ways. Physically, humanity is definitely in the lower percentiles, but you're relatively intelligent, have a capacity for empathy, and are moderately adaptable.
Just what a girl wanted to hear, that she was moderately adaptable!

We came into the town limits of Saint-Colomban. I knew because there was a rusty old sign by the side of the road next to a long-defunct tollbooth that read Welcome to Saint-Colomban of Medicorp! / Bienvenus à Saint-Colomban de Medicorp!

I slowed my mech down as I approached the town some more. There was a wall around it. Not a real, proper wall, but a wall made of cars flipped onto their sides. Some of them had... something hanging off the sides on brackets. "What are those?" I asked.

Judging from the serial numbers, those are lithium batteries. They seemed to be acting as an explosive deterrent for anything trying to scale the wall.

Clever, I supposed. There was some barbed wire on top as well, and the line of cars stretched out to the left and right for some ways, wrapping around the centre of the town.

I was pretty sure it covered most of the town, actually, because there were all of twenty buildings here.

Oh, sure, the average civilian probably lived in one of the ancient farm houses I'd crossed, or in one of the mobile homes strung along the road, but the town itself was just a collection of a couple dozen more important buildings all squeezed in around a four-way intersection.

I was spotted, of course, because I wasn't trying to be stealthy. I saw some distant figures pointing at my mech, and there were a few screams as I leapt over their wall.

Some two-bit eighty-year-old looking farmer jumped out of a seat nearby, spun his big old shotgun around and fired it point-blank into my mech's side.

I blinked, then carefully checked the damage readouts. "Huh, nothing," I muttered.

It was buckshot.

Well, that tracked. I turned the mech's head his way, and he stumbled back, falling into his seat again while clutching his gun. I couldn't decide between being annoyed, pissed, or just feeling bad for the guy. I settled on leaving him be when there was some noise out ahead.

Saint-Columban's intersection had a building on every corner. A mall on one, across from that a large trucker's gas station, then a pair of bigger buildings. One was an old medical clinic, the Medicorp logo rusting on its side. The building across from that looked like a townhall of some sort.

Most of the people coming out to see what was going on were coming from the old Medicorp place.

It looked like they'd turned it into living space for the locals. There were tents and mobile homes in the back, and now that I was looking, old-man-shoots-first who had pinged me with his shotty wasn't alone. There was a ring of guys sitting on the inner side of their wall.

One guy stood out, he was walking in the middle of the pack. Or rather, the pack was harassing the poor fucker. A few old ladies, some beer-bellied guys that had that strut that people who thought they were in charge had. He looked one pinched cheek away from going ballistic.

His gear was newbie samurai-chic. Cool jacket, some pants with a few holsters worked into them, what looked like an armoured undersuit. He had some sort of two-pronged rifle thing slung over his back. Definitely not normie tech.

"Looks like we've found the local," I muttered as I walked my mech over and pulled the tabs to open the cockpit.

The mech's head swung open and I stood up with it. From up there it was easy to look down on the newbie and his entourage.

"Laisse-moi tranquille, câlisse," he snapped at the people around him.

I blinked before my aug's, or Myalis' auto-translate kicked in and displayed a line of text on the bottom edge of my vision. Probably Myalis, because the translation seemed more... intent-based than literal. Leave me alone, for fuck's sake.

One of the chubbies next to the newbie patted him on the back. "Tu sais qu'on est juste là pour t'aider, petit gars." You know we're just here to help you, little guy.

Little guy (god, that'd be a terrible samurai name, the poor fuck) shook the hand away and walked closer to the mech.

The entourage didn't get the memo and stepped up after him. "Hey," I said. "I'm here to talk. Do you need this whole bunch with you?"

He frowned for a moment before shaking his head. "Non, j'suis bien tout seul." No, I'm fine alone.

"Hé, p'tit gars, on est là, t'as besoin de nous, hein?" one of the guys said. Hey, lil guy, we're here, you need us don't you?

I cleared my throat. I didn't have a great idea of what was going on here, but I had an inkling. The locals were being overbearing fucks. They didn't seem to get how samurai operated most of the time. And Little Guy here was too shy to shoot them about it.

"My French is a little rusty," I said. "But how do you put this... Décalisse or I'll décalisse you... uh... tabarnak?"

The village idiots looked at me a little gobsmacked. Then they took in the very large mech covered in very large guns and decided that the better part of valour was not getting fucked up. They backed off, though I noticed that they still lingered some two dozen metres off. Not close enough to overhear, but...

"Your fanclub is annoying," I said.

"C'est pas un fan club, c'est un tas de vieux envahissants qui pensent que j'suis le nouveau Jésus. Ils me cassent les pieds depuis q'tout a dérapé." It's not a fanclub, it's a bunch of overbearing old people that think I'm the new Jesus. They've been riding my ass ever since shit went sideways.

He looked at me, then gave me one of those guy nods, with the whole chin thrust.

"Pis, t'es qui et tu fais quoi ici? T'es un samouraï, correct?" So, who are you, and what're you doing here? You're a samurai, right?

Fuck, I was regretting not paying more attention to the Frenchies around the city when I was younger. There were a lot of them around, and they were probably the second biggest group in the city, but I didn't run in the same circles most of the time. They were more common out east.

"Yeah, I'm a samurai," I said. "I'm Stray Cat, the one coming in behind me is Gomorrah. We heard that you were here and wanted to make sure you were managing. The army's sending some folk over to help, but they'll only be arriving tomorrow afternoon."

"Ah, bien, thank fuck," he said with the strongest accent I'd heard in a while.

***