Chapter Sixty-One - With Great Cats Comes Great Responsibility

"Not all samurai are capable of command. It's a common myth, and something seen in plenty of media, but whatever selection process exists for samurai, it doesn't select them based on their ability to lead.

Still, every so often one of them will step up and do a good enough job of it that it's worth noting."

--"On Samurai and the Role of Leader" Extract, the Family Internal Press, 2049

***

I exited the bathroom and discovered that Lucy wasn't alone in bed. She had company.

Company in the form of a large robotic cat, the one I'd bought for her in Burlington. It was laying like a sphynx on the bed, head turned towards the doorway and eyes slowly scanning the room.

"Isn't that thing cold?" I asked, keeping my voice low so that I wouldn't wake Lucy up.

It's capable of regulating its temperature for stealth purposes. At the moment, the unit is overheating itself to give off a comforting amount of warmth. It's part of its bodyguarding routines.

That explained why Lucy had one leg over the cat's back and her face pressed into its flank.

I walked over to the bed, tugged the blankets free a little, then covered Lucy properly. She didn't even stop her quiet snoring as I tucked her in and pressed a quick kiss to her forehead. "Keep her warm," I advised the cat mech, and it nodded its big head.

I had to get ready, which meant putting on my undersuit, something which immediately proved somewhat difficult.

The two processes I'd just started left me feeling... tingly. It wasn't super noticeable if I wasn't looking for it, but my skin was itchy in a few random spots, as if I had the start of an allergic reaction. That, and my nerves were already being rewired, but it wasn't entirely even.

I closed a hand, only to feel like some fingers responded slightly faster than others. It was off but just in a small way. I wasn't even sure if I wasn't just imagining it.

The nervous system upgrade will settle soon enough. Given six or so hours, the upgrade will have spread across your entire nervous system. The remaining time will be spent on the installation of reinforcements and adjustments. Until then, you might feel slightly uncalibrated in your actions.

"Good to know," I muttered as I scratched my side. Yeah, there was definitely an itch. I slipped the skinsuit on anyway, pulling it on tight and bouncing on the spot to make sure the leg portion was tugged all the way up.

Next was my power armour. That was far easier to get on, all I had to do was step into it, and the armour folded itself around me and locked into place.

I tilted my head left and right, making sure my neck was loose, then shifted the arms a little before I twisted my waist around back and forth. Everything felt alright. If anything, that slight delay in motion with the suit might normalise any of the weirdness from the nerve upgrades.

"Okay," I muttered. "I think I'm ready."

I slipped out of the room, popped into my armoury, picked up my Laser Pointer, Trenchmaker, and a handful of grenades, then made my way to the elevator. But not before pausing to scratch Catkiller on the head and to nod to Chonkers, the spy drone-cat who was loafing in the middle of the corridor, right where someone might trip over it.

I rode the elevator down to the garage, then stepped up to my mech.

I wanted to repair it on my own, but needs must, so I'd left the Repair Drone to the task. It looked decent, from the outside.

The experience wasn't lost, because I at least knew enough, now, to tell that it looked decent as I climbed into the mech's cockpit and closed it up behind me.

I linked up to the mecha's system, then checked the diagnostics. It all came back green, which was... better than I could realistically manage on my own.

"Alright. Let's get moving," I said.

I stepped out into the main part of the garage, and found two construction drones waiting for me with a hastily-assembled system of scaffolds. I stepped the mech into the scaffolds, then felt a moment of weightlessness as the construction drones rose up and pulled the mech up along with them.

It was a bit kludged, but it would do for the moment. I'd look into buying a dedicated transportation... thing, later. Maybe a small moving-van-sized car that was decently fast and roomy? But then I'd never be able to get a really big mech.

That was something to consider. Maybe a flatbed?

The construction drones weren't smart-smart, but with Myalis at the helm they turned and pulled out of the garage. I felt a faint twinge of vertigo as the mech's very good sensor suite--fed directly into my brain--told me exactly how high up I was at the moment.

The drones flew onwards, making a straight path out of the city.

I had very little to actually do, in that moment, so I pulled up my private little chatroom with Gomorrah and pinged her. "Hey, are you up?" I asked.

"I have been for an hour," Gomorrah said. "I'm at the forward base. The same one we met earlier. We're waiting for you to show up."

"Right, I'm on my way. ETA, uh, call it twenty minutes?"

"The operation's launching at six AM," Gomorrah said.

"And it's... not six AM yet," I pointed out.

"Cat, it's five fifty-nine."

I refused to acknowledge that. I wasn't late, I was just a little unearly was all. "I'll be there soon enough," I said.

And I was. Flying over the scene, I could make out a long convoy headed by some tanks and APCs, with a couple of mobile bases in the middle and middle-rear. The back of the convoy had more tanks, but also a few dozen large supply trucks and a lot of pretty normal looking vans and all-black city buses.

I noticed a familiar car following one of the mobile bases. The Fury looked entirely misplaced in the middle of a line of tanks and army vehicles, but I knew it probably packed more of a punch than the entire front line of tanks.

My construction drones scooted ahead, and then I was unceremoniously dropped from a few metres up way ahead of the formation.

I walked the mech out of the scaffolding, then watched the drones pick it up and fly off.

With a mental touch, I opened the canopy of the mech, then pushed myself up to standing. It was less about being able to see things for myself than it was for morale.

I wasn't a genius when it came to that kind of thing, but I figured... well, if I was some poor fuck in army greens at the moment, seeing a massive cat-shaped warmech with a samurai standing casually on it would give me a serious boost when it came to morale.

The front row of tanks squeezed into the side as they passed, and a few of their crew sticking their heads out of opened hatches waved my way.

I waved back, then jumped down from my mech and walked across the road in time to jump into one of the slow-moving mobile bases. The mech closed up behind me, then leapt into the formation to saunter along next to the Fury.

I found Gomorrah in the mobile base's main room, arms crossed and impassive mask turned down to stare at one of those needlessly fancy holographic maps that command-types probably had wet-dreams about.

"Yo," I said.

"Good to see you joining us," Gomorrah said. "I hope you had some good rest. It's going to be a long campaign."

"Campaign?" I asked. "I thought this was a day-long thing?"

"Days long, more like," she replied before looking up to me. My comms crackled for a second before she spoke directly into my ear, the others in the room kept out of the loop. "We're waiting for news from Mars. But I heard some hints that it's not all good."

"Ah, fuck. What does that mean for us? End of the world?"

"Not that bad, I don't think. Just that we might have to clear out the still-active hives without the help of big names and high-tier samurai. It's not going to be a walk in the park."

"We'll manage, right?" I asked.

"We'll either manage, or it really will be an end of the world situation. Better to act and do something about it than wallow and sit around until we're all alien food. Did you have a good time at home?"

"I barely got any time at home," I said.

Gomorrah nodded. "Sorry about that. So... do you want to take over all of this?" She gestured to the map and the room, with its many commanders watching us have a conversation they weren't part of.

"What? This is your gig, no?"

"I hate every minute of it. You're better at this."

"Fuck no," I said.

I had this sinking feeling that my 'fuck no' sounded a bit like a 'yeah, sure' to Gomorrah.

***