Chapter Thirty-Four - Knife Edge

“The profit balance is a knife’s edge where you need to be able to deliver a product of a certain quality while paying the smallest amount possible. That means avoiding normal contractors and instead finding people who actually care enough about your product that they’ll work harder, longer, and better for less.

Once you’ve found these people, you need to exploit them for all they’re worth.”

-The Employer’s Guide to Employees, sixth edition, 2050

***

The hole in the basement was hard to miss. The wall was all cinderblock, and the aliens had punched through it, sending chunks of the cement blocks scattering across the floor, as well as ripping up a few of the novelty motivational posters stuck to the wall.

“Hang in there.” I read from a poster next to the alien-filled pit. “Yeah, alright.”

The nice thing about having all the aliens coming through a single hole small enough that I would have to bend over double to fit through was that even my shit aim was good enough to wipe them out in droves.

My Laser Pointer clicked empty, and I stepped to the side, then gestured into the hole. “Hey, shoot anything that moves in there, would you?” I asked Sprout. “I’m gonna figure out how to plug this thing in the meantime.”

“Ah, sure,” he said. Dropping to one knee, he aimed into the hole, then fired. He wasn’t going all-out like I did, but instead taking careful, aimed shots.

Well, whatever. “Hey, Myalis, we’ve got options here?”

We do! Also, did you want to split the points that Vanguard Sprout is earning right now? He is using your equipment.

“Huh? Nah, let him take all the points he’s earning. He’ll need them.” The 55-55 split was nice and all, but 100 was bigger than 55 last I checked, and Sprout was behind in points-earned. I was fine with losing out on some change if it meant getting him up to speed a little. “Now, the hole?”

Same as last time? Resonators and a foam plug for the exit?

“Yeah, I guess.” The antithesis coming out of here were chewed up by our nanomachines, so it wasn’t all bad to block the hole and let them wait. “Call it a permanent temporary solution, then,” I said.

Gomorrah was probably going to burn the entire building down anyway, so it wasn’t that big a deal. The only concern was having model sevens spawning within the city and spreading outwards.

But as insidious and nasty as a zombie threat was, the threat of being flooded over was bigger and more worrisome still. Or maybe I was just biassed.

I waited until Sprout clicked empty, then I flung in some grenades, tossing them as deep into the hole as I could. Most were resonators, but I made sure to include a single, more traditional concussive grenade in the lot.

Sprout squawked as a wash of dust and hot air blasted out of the hole, and I laughed as I dropped a last resonator right next to the entrance then set off a foam bomb that immediately started to expand. “Come on. Myalis can reload your gun automatically for you. As long as you’re spending round killing shit for us I don’t mind footing that bill.”

“Uh, thanks?” he said.

I patted him on the shoulder, then gestured to the stairs. “Let’s get going. There will be other disasters to figure out by now, I bet.”

“Okay?”

It didn’t take long that we were stepping out of the office building and into... huh, the sun was further along than I’d thought. Time was passing us by, and so far, no big disasters. Maybe the plan with the nanomachines had worked out better than I’d hoped?

Then I got a call from Manic. “Hello?” I asked.

“What the fuck is going on at River Heights?” she opened with.

“What do you mean?” I asked as I glanced around. The militia guys were keeping some distance from the office space. Probably worried about zombie worms. “I was taking care of something else, what’s going on?”

“Fuckloads of smoke,” she said. “I’m not heading over there. There’s plenty of shit to kill here, but you might want to keep an eye on it, oh fearless leader.”

“I’m gonna hope that it’s Gomorrah’s fault, somehow,” I said.

“Nah, the nun’s in the other direction. Lots of smoke that way too, but it’s mostly coming from outside of the barricades. I moved past there. That bitch has entire streets covered in fire, you know?”

“Yeah, she does that.”

“Wild.”

I nodded, unable to disagree. But hey, Gomorrah’s tactics worked, so it wasn’t that big a deal, was it? “I’ll check out River Heights. You sit pretty.”

“Always. You know, there’s a pattern to this. They come in, I blast them back, then they come back twenty minutes later, but there’s more of them.”

“We can’t have pushed back that many waves,” I said.

“Three’s enough for a pattern when you’re looking for one,” Manic said. “There’s a music to this, and I think the alien fucks are about to start rocking out hard.”

I had no idea what that meant, but I figured it wasn’t a good thing. “I’ll come back to you in a minute or two. Need to figure out what’s going on in River Heights.”

“Let them burn,” she said before cutting the line.

I sighed. “Sprout, can you make your way back to near the front lines? Plant more of your stuff where you think it’ll be useful. We might have a fight on our hands soon.”

“I can do that,” he said with a nod.

“Cool.” I dismissed him and opened a channel to Intel-chan. “What’s going on in River Heights?” I asked.

“Oh, hi!” Intel-chan said. “Not much. Miss Baker said that they’ll be ready to evacuate fully by tomorrow morning.”

“T-tomorrow morning?” I repeated. “They won’t be alive by then. What’s with all the smoke?”

“First defensive line broke, so the militia in the area backed up to the second. Part of normal procedures is to burn everything behind them as they move. It means less biomass for the aliens and nothing for scavengers to steal once the milita’s not there.”

And all of that didn’t matter because the people they were defending weren’t moving. “One sec, I’m getting Baker on the line,” I growled.

The call rang five times, each note pushing my mood lower and lower until I was pacing anxiously across the front of the office. Some of the militia who’d stayed behind were eyeing me strangely.

“Hello?” Miss Baker said.

“Why the fuck haven’t people evacuated from River Heights yet?” I asked.

“We’ve planned the evacuation for tomorrow morning, when it’ll be most conve--”

“I’m going to bomb the entire area in an hour. If your rich fucks don’t want to eat high explosive shells for dinner then tell them to get their pampered asses the fuck out of there post-haste because I’ve got no fucks to give but plenty of munitions to make up for it.”

Then I cut her off.

“Sugoi,” Intel-chan said. “Scary.”

“Think they’ll actually start moving their asses?” I asked.

“Le mao,” Intel-chan said. “No way. They’ll call your bluff for sure. You might be a bad bitch, neco-mmander, but everyone knows you wouldn’t actually blow up civilians for fun.”

I grit my teeth. “Fuck.” At what point could I wash my hands and just let people die from their own stupidity? Where was the cutoff between having done enough and not doing enough?

I needed a manual on how to handle this shit. Not that I’d actually read it. “Myalis, give me your best estimates of what’s going to go down in the next hour.”

From the looks of it, Manic might be correct. The expected flood of antithesis never occurred. So a lot of the biomass within the hive is still within the hive. And while the nanomachines will continue to rip them apart, there are ways that they might be able to counteract some of that pressure. Notably by sending out injured units to die while holding back fresher ones.

“Okay,” I said. “Smart, I guess.”

Unusually so, yes. You can either expect this back and forth to continue for some time as the hive purges itself of nanomachines, or the hive might correctly identify the local human area as the source of the threat and destroy it.

“Ah,” I said. “So we’re fucked.”

I’m sure you’ll manage! I have faith that you’ll muddle through somehow, and that the muddling will be immensely entertaining for me.

“You’re awful,” I said. But she wasn’t wrong. I didn’t have time to give in to any sort of anxiety, not when I could be doing something. “Come on, let’s get back to the front lines. I want to be there when the shit hits the fan.”

Let’s go, then.

And with that, I jumped back behind that shitty pickup that I guess had become my unofficial ride through this shitty city.

***