Chapter One Hundred Twenty - Risk of Rain

A cute virtual avatar smiles at the camera. She's wearing a fluffy, shimmery-white coat, has big, soft moth wings folded away on her back, and a very samurai-tech gun slung around her torso.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the weather forecast! I'm Auxiliant, the Battlepoet's Class II primary weapon!"

The digital girl smiles adorably, waves at the camera, and does a cute curtsey. Then she folds her hands in front of her tummy and gives the camera a more serious look.

"Today we've got some rough weather ahead, I'm afraid. The category 6 hurricane Svetlana has found new inroads into ex-Canadian territory. The dense grouping of Antithesis nests here," Auxiliant points at two large, highlighted sections of the map, far to the south and east of New Montreal and Quebec City, near the shores of the North Atlantic, "and here, expel enough heat and moisture to transform the storm and carry on towards our two cities."

The pretty, adorable, and very polite girl turns back to the camera and smiles.

"We will have to expect heavy interference on the electromagnetic bands from their spores. If possible, please secure landline communication devices before the storm hits! I'm sure our Vanguards will do what they can to reduce the effect of the Antithesis' spores on us."

Auxiliant waves her rainbow antennae happily.

"I'll go visit my friend Ypsi now. Goodbye, everyone, and come see my next broadcast this weekend!"

– Weather broadcast by Auxiliant, the Class II AI of one of Tinea's Class II primary weapons, early 2058

 

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I looked up, into the clouds above us. Somehow they felt…denser than those further away. Heavier. More impenetrable.

And then I realized why.

There was a huge wash of something that blanketed my sense of energy fields. The clouds felt like an opaque, oppressively solid mass, rather than the slowly whirling streams of positive and negative charges they were elsewhere.

"Well, that's not good," I murmured to Leah. "Think you can help us see?"

Leah remained silent for a few moments, thinking hard. Then she grinned at me and shot me a thumbs-up.

"Yup. Gotta set up the Dakka first, though, to protect me. I'll need to stop moving for a moment."

My eyes flashed across the battlefield as I sought out any suspicious blank spots moving in her direction. I found none. There were several Fourteens charging at Leah, but they weren't too close, and anyway, she'd started using them as fodder. The Fifteens would be in range soonish… But Leah had defenses against their projectiles. And we'd taken out a whole bunch of the nearby Ones, so I was mostly free to move as I needed to.

Finally, I did have fifty high-explosive frag rockets ready to go.

"Okay. Do you need me to be inside with you?"

"Ummm… Ypsi?"

A second window opened itself in our group call, and Ypsi's virtual avatar appeared. She was an incredibly cute black-haired little girl sitting on her knees in the Japanese style. She wore a long and flowy, red Kimono, patterned with pastel pink cherry blossoms.

Very stereotypical Japanese, but so insanely adorable with her back straight, hands primly laid on her lap. She tried to keep still. But actually she was fidgeting just a little and blushing shyly.

I smiled so hard my facial muscles might've strained themselves.

"No! But, um, you might not want to be flying when Leah does her thing! And maybe it'd be safest to be at least one hundred meters away from the muzzle of her cannon!"

"Okay, Ypsi," I replied, "I'll keep that in mind. I'm coming in for the reload, now."

"The Dakka's ready for you."

I shot Leah a smile, and then focused on executing a hard and fast dive that would take me below the quickly gathering Ones. Knowledge streamed into my mind and informed me about the feasibility of my planned action and how to proceed. When to burn hard in reverse so that I'd stop directly above the Dakka and drop.

How much gas I'd have to fly away again.

Or hop into Daddy-Long-Legs? That'd be the cheapest… And I did have a good go with the wings already. Hmm. Yeah, that'll finally let me get rid of the Skitterway on my shoulders, too.

Having two organic supercomputers inside my body made the experience of crunching hard numbers a surreal kind of experience. I sensed the massive amounts of data streaming back and forth between the Quanta and my new aviating brain. Way too much and way too fast for good old Tinea to comprehend any of it. I'd have to let my attention sink into the Quanta to do so.

Should I just upgrade my entire brain? Maybe. Thought for later.

I set off, letting the Second Wind fold away the canopy again. I dove several dozen feet to gain speed, then let the jets carry me in a long, shallow curve against gravity. Two-thirds of the way to Leah my engines cut out, and the powered trajectory turned into a smooth, very fast ballistic one.

The three spiders were still running along at a good clip, and I used that to my advantage. I approached the next corner in Leah's corridor, so that I'd be lined up with the Dakka from the rear. It rounded that corner, and with only ten meters left, the Second Wind let a small drogue chute snap open behind me that jerked me upright, while my wing arms curled around to the front and used their jets to slow me down enough until my velocity matched that of the spider.

I touched down softly on bent knees and grinned when Leah cheered and clapped applause. Giggling with joy from my first successful landing, I hurried to grab onto the edge of an open magazine before I'd be dragged off the Daka by the chute. It took just a second for it to be reeled back in.

"I'll have Ypsi send Tynea the details on what ammo goes where, okay?"

"Sure!"

While Tynea highlighted each magazine's hatch as I clambered around on top of the running mech and let her spawn rivers of pellets and cartridges to flow into the compartments, I thought about upgrading from the Myriad. I thought about what to do with the current one, and since I was already at it, what I might do with the Aspis, since it was too large to be stowed inside Daddy-Long-Legs' abdomen.

The Dakka and Sapper shifted to Leah's rear, whose continuous 75 mm cannon fire refilled our points and kept the aliens from swamping us. I absentmindedly tossed up three of the five jet-powered UAVs to give us vision from above in my place. They gave Leah a better idea of where to place her shells to take advantage of all the chaff, acid, and landmines I'd deposited on my way over. It was delightful chaos that kept us mostly safe and moving.

My eyes wandered across the Fourteens charging towards us. They were still two or three hundred meters away, and it looked like they'd be nicely lined up between Leah's one-oh-five and the Twenty-Eight.

I noticed the smaller aliens clinging to the alien transports and my lips split in a grin as I had a somewhat hilarious idea.

"Tynea, gimme a drone with wings please. It should equip and use the Aspis and the Myriad, have a gun or two that can use my Class II ammunition, and I'd like to let Leah's spider tow it on a line."

…

I could just picture her raised eyebrows.

Very well. I shall have to adapt a suitable design from your Class I Basic Drones catalog. May I unlock Class I Basic Flight Systems for fifty points, and sponsor Leah to unlock Class I Warforge Technologies Addons: Power Armor and Emplaced Smartguns, one hundred ninety-five points total?

"We're surrounded by points. Points are throwing themselves at us. Go ahead!" I smiled at Leah's giggling at my commentary. It soothed me to see her relaxed enough to enjoy humor despite all the pain and terror at the start of this battle.

Then, please allow me to present 'The Drag'!

I mumbled something along the lines of, "Unimaginative name," while the drone appeared a few meters above Daddy-Long-Legs—and immediately began to fall. A line shot out from its underside and clamped itself to Leah's hull with a magnetic clank. The dragline—hue hue, funny pun—snapped taut, and the drone got jerked along and gained lift to rise several meters.

It floated on long, elegant wings attached to the lower back of a black-and-gold puppet with vaguely humanoid lines. It had a stylized head attached to a pair of shoulders, and sleek arms with human proportions, but shapes reminiscent of bird wings. Its legs were a suggestion of human proportions and contours.

My eyes narrowed. It did look suspiciously like me. Hint at me.

If I was a sleek puppet of metal, with a glider's mechanical wings instead of four moth-wings-to-be and a tail.

I pursed my lips. "What's with the name, Tynea? And why does it look so much like me?"

It flexed its wings and reeled itself in a little, and dipped towards me as Tynea answered breezily, Any resemblance of The Drag to real persons or places is entirely coincidental. Please hand The Drag your shield and your Myriad. Would you like to replenish the plug-tanks first, perhaps? The Drag does have landing gear stowed away, by the way, with which it can settle atop the Hatchet. Of course, The Drag is also entirely capable of launching itself with the line, like a catapult.

Leah was suppressing giggles and snorts. I could see her shoulders shaking.

Fine. It was kind of funny. I'd still have to think of appropriate…revenge, however. Definitely. What's a good burn for a super-AI? Hmm…

"Sure, let's refill the Myriad first. And let's make sure it's always got a good volley ready to go between battles, yeah?" I also nudged Logistics with the thought and got an affirmative. We wouldn't be going into battle unprepared, anymore.

I got busy swapping out empty plug-tanks while ruminating on that, and admitted that I probably really should've gotten some sleep before we'd left the facility for good. I'd…kind of avoided it after that nightmare, but…that really wasn't smart. Even with samurai food and booster pills to keep me fresh. The mental exhaustion had me making stupid mistakes, like thinking it'd be better to build suitable payloads once I knew what situation we were going to face, instead of just having a generalized loadout ready to go.

"Hey, Tynea?"

Yes?

"If you catch me behaving in an obviously unhealthy manner, please don't hesitate to nag me about that? I shouldn't be dodging sleep, for example."

Certainly. I will offer advice, if you'd like.

"Mm." I nodded. "I would."

Understood, Tinea.

The flying doll angled up and away after I'd handed over the Aspis and the Myriad, and given it the two javelins to carry along. It also had two 20 mm smart guns integrated in its shoulders, fed from magazine stores in its chest, which I'd loaded up with Class II versions of the HSRP rounds. These didn't disintegrate and came in clusters, of which each individual projectile had its own hypersonic motor and guidance.

Nasty fuckers, I thought. I should probably rename the doll to Flying Murder Cactus, or something.

With a final pat of the Dakka's chassis, I launched towards Leah's spider and let my jump jets fling me into its airlock just as the sixteen machine guns began roaring and went to work clearing out the battlefield and the sky, too.

Leah opened her eyes and smiled brightly at me as I popped into view, and my heart danced with so much joy and giddiness that tears pricked my eyes. I quickly divested myself of the spider surgeon by gluing it to the wall, and then hopped into Leah's arms.

She stroked my hair and giggled as I rubbed my cheeks against hers, and welcomed me with soft kisses that I wanted to melt into. But I hadn't forgotten the ominous vortexes hinting at something large in the clouds above, so I pulled back with a smile, rested my chin on her bust, and watched as she did her thing.

Leah let the Dakka take point with its many barrels spitting bullets and crouched so low that the Daddy-Long-Legs' entire underside lay flat against the ground. Her cannon elevated on its mount until it pointed skyward, and then she fired a single booming round.

There was no esoteric recoil management. No monochrome tinging of the world, no fuzzy dispersion of the shockwave from the muzzle. The recoil shook the entire frame of the mech, and heavy bass vibrations slammed through us. My teeth rattled and I bounced on the floor. The cloud of shattered rainbows around my antennae sparked and swelled as it absorbed the sonic assault.

Leah's hair became a beautiful mess. I gently combed it with my fingers and straightened it out while I gave her a questioning tilt of my head.

Her hands traced the bases of my new arms, tickling me into shivers and smiles, and explored the changes to my body as she answered, "Can't use the recoil systems when I'm firing upwards. The mirage can't be touching any part of Daddy-Long-Legs when it hits terrain and disintegrates, or it'll cause some really bad feedback loops, apparently. But the chassis is made to transfer most of the shove from the cannon into the ground in situations like these."

I nodded and hummed my understanding. Then she pointed upwards just as a second detonation flashed brightly in the sky.

Whatever shell she'd thrown, it was massively energetic. It shoved the entire cloud layer aside for several hundred meters around itself and the Ones circling above us were smashed into the ground like hail. Our point counter jumped fifteen thousand points in an instant.

And exposed to our eyes were a dozen gigantic, four-winged pterodactyls knocked around by the blast, wildly flapping humongous, tattered wings until they stopped tumbling. They'd been injured in the explosion. I saw rivulets of blood falling from their dog-like faces and ears, and a few even had their necks broken with their skulls whipping around uselessly.

Those didn't die, though, they just wavered through the air as if they were drunk, completely disoriented. Some of them had horrific injuries in their bellies, raining Threes and Fours whose bodies broke against the ground, pancaked and torn to pieces from the impact.

"Model Elevens," I said, "they're bigger than our mechs, Leah."

One of the healthier ones looked down and immediately started diving for us, right into the massed fire of the Dakka as its weapons snapped upright. The machine guns' pellets cracked against its hardened scales and tore out small craters with each explosion. That did nothing to stop it.

"Um, Leah?" I asked.

If that thing hit us, we'd get pancaked.

I nudged the Myriad to prepare a few of the remaining Javelin penetrators. They probably weren't going to do much, but maybe I could make it turn away at least? Long enough for the damage to accumulate and kill it.

But then the one-oh-five twitched, and another sky-shattering blast utterly deleted the monster.

Leah grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.

"Big gun, big boom, good."

 

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