Chapter Thirty-Six - Punchy Punchy Hole

“Surprise, motherfucker!”

– Y’all know where this is from

 

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I spent a few moments tracking the Four on the other side of the wall, less than a meter away.

I wasn’t able to see it, but I could tell where each of its six legs impacted the floor. I could track its tentacles on the wall, and guess at the location of its head.

My antennae were sensitive enough to detect the trace amounts of hallucinogenic gas making it through the wall. The Four was certainly in attack mode, actively spewing its gas.

With care, I gently placed the barrel of the Sentinel against the wall, avoided causing any tremors that the Antithesis’s tentacles might pick up, and then I squeezed the trigger.

It was very quiet. I could hear the impact of the projectile against the wall, and a crunch as it expanded or molded itself into a tube, followed by a tiny whistling whirr as the dart, well, darted across the gap and buried itself unceremoniously inside the Four.

The loudest part of it all was the thump as the alien slumped to the floor, dead, with its tentacles settling around it.

On to the next.

I was playing a strange game of chicken shoot, where I hunted down a dozen Threes through the vibrations in the floor and walls, as well as any sounds they made when scraping against something.

Sometimes I’d very lightly knock against the wall, just enough for the beast directly outside to hear it. It would freeze for a moment to locate the sound, which was exactly what I needed to place my shot reliably, when I couldn’t do so from their light-footed movements.

Eventually, I sensed no more movement. I wasn’t able to say whether another group was closing in, but at least for the moment, we were safe.

I sent Leah a message to join me, while I connected my antennae to the floor again, and watched as the fire slowly ran out of fuel and died down. Good thing concrete doesn’t burn so easy. What remained of the blackened doorway was slightly warped from the heat, but it hadn’t been hot enough for the metal to actually melt. Just the paint on it, really.

Leah came up to me and nuzzled herself into my hair as she hugged me from the side. After a moment, she spoke with a quiet voice, “Thanks Tinea. Again. I’m usually the one who does the protecting, but here you are, saving my ass again. Thanks.”

I turned to her, reached up, and pressed a soft kiss to the corner of her eye. This was what I wanted to be a girl for. “Don’t worry about it, Leah. You’re still injured. It’s frankly amazing that you’re able to move at all, considering. I’m confident you’ll return the favor in time. Soon, even, considering how many aliens we’re stuck with. Besides, I’m about as in love with you as I can be, as little as I know you. I really, really don’t want to lose you.” I caressed the side of her face with fingertips, as I watched that adorable blush traveling across her cheeks and into the tip of her ears. She hid her face in my neck, and I’d never seen anything as cute. It made my heart melt all over the inside of my chest, and I couldn’t help but cuddle her hard.

After a moment, Leah straightened up again, and cleared her throat. “How many points have we got? I should probably replace this thing. I don’t fancy my chances if a single attack did so much damage to it,” she said as she held up my old helmet, with the quill stuck through it.

“Yeah. How were the points split?”

As you’d requested, half-half, with the bonus going to Leah. You’re at a combined total of one hundred and eighty-five points.

“That should be enough for decent protection, at least. The overall…isn’t great after all, but it’ll keep you alive, for now. Should we get something like my reactive protection for you?”

“Yeah. Another helmet that can cover the rest of me with those exploding things? It seemed to work fine for you.”

“Wanna try for another combination? Your Warforged stuff, and my Esoteric Defense Systems?”

“Warforge Technologies is the brand name. And yea, that sounds pretty powerful.”

“Tynea, what have we got?”

I would suggest measures based on magazines. They have the advantage of being cheap up-front, with most of their running costs coming from the replacement of those magazines over time. As a slight upgrade to your system, Leah’s new helmet could accept two magazines at once, and the cartridges could accept different payloads. One magazine of twenty basic reactive explosives identical to the ones you’re already using, and another that could be set up depending on her needs as she discovers them.

“Sounds good to me? Say, my current magazine is down to six of those hexagon mines. Can I fill it back up somehow?”

Certainly. For now, I’d recommend just reloading with the other magazine, and filling that one up with the six of this one as they are used.

I guess that made sense. That would take the least amount of effort. I switched them out, and glued the old mag to the horseshoe just above my tail, where it’d be out of the way.

“If I run low on this mag, too, please immediately buy me a new one. I don’t wanna get stuck in combat with two mostly empty ones.”

Certainly, Tinea. There was that soft gentleness in her voice again. I’d kind of missed it, to be honest. It seemed like my recent changes had her recalibrating herself. How long would that take? Hours more? Days? Longer?

“Okay, let’s send your recommendation to Leah and Ypsi. She’ll have better passive armor than I do. Actually, I should probably add my silk to your armor, Leah.” 

Leah nodded at that and took another few moments of timeout. Eventually she turned to me with a simultaneous ping against my aug. I accepted it and was shown a sleek black helmet, with some very elegant golden filigree drawn along the side, in a mixed pattern of stylized hair and feathers. The mask was…a bit scary. It managed an unsettling balance between being personal and a mask, digging into your psyche and making you feel judged somehow. It wasn’t exactly human, yet it was most definitely human. It had empty eye holes, with white vapor misting from them, traveling up to the crown of the helmet, where it formed a crest along the top, reminiscent of, but sleeker than those antique Roman or Greek helmets.

It looked very Warforge, I guessed, from the aesthetics I’d seen so far between her cyber-eye and this thing. Blackbody bodies in either graceful alien arches, or unsettling not-quite-human shapes, golden filigree, capped with that white vapor misting as highlights.

Scary, intimidatingly beautiful, and somehow understated badass. I have no fucking clue how the understated part managed to fit in, but it did.

“That’d be one hundred and fifty points. It can protect my entire body with those teleporting plates, and has some basic options for expansion further down the line, but mostly it’s a temporary solution that should last me until we can get a whole setup. Is that okay?”

“Go for it, Leah.”

She gave me a thumbs-up and waited for the box to appear. Hers wasn’t the bland off-white plastic I got, but followed the same colors of the Warforge catalog, just a little less…refined?

When she noticed me looking, she flushed a little and said, “Sorry, forgot to ask Ypsi to not customize the boxes.”

When I tilted my head in confusion, she explained, “It costs an extra point to get custom delivery.”

“Oh! Yeah, let’s not do that for now. But yup, I feel you. Definitely gonna look into that myself. Later.” My newly discovered vanity needed feeding, after all.

With another smile, she finally slipped on the helmet and I watched as it turned itself on, with the mist appearing and making it look terribly dangerous.

Hmm. Could that mist actually be weaponized? That’s an idea. I sent it as a text to Leah, who read it with a waggle. Maybe something for when we had more points to play around with.

I still preferred to see Leah’s face, though, so I asked Tynea to repeat what they did earlier and make the faceplate see through for me, until I could find Leah's eyes again and smile at her, who mirrored it right back at me.

Yep, that immediately made me feel happy.

I was such an addict, already.

“Okay, silk. I’ll just start creating sticky patches of silk that I’ll then cover with non-sticky silk patches.”

Leah lifted her arms and I got to work, as fast as I could. I followed the outline of the overall’s hexagon and simply added strong silk hexagons above them, until Leah was all white up to her chin.

“What about the helmet?”

It has sensors across its surface, covering those up would hinder it from working properly. Further, it is of a tougher material than your silk, already.

Leah gave me a thumbs-up, and said, “I guess we’re ready to go, again? Um. What are your bionite levels? Got enough in reserve?”

“Yeah,” I answered, with a glance at my chest with a mild blush. “I’ve got enough. They’ll keep producing more, anyway.”

I knew that we should hurry, that the longer we spent inside the facility, the less predictable the situation outside would become, but I really, really wanted another hug’n’squeeze, and Leah was perfectly willing to provide.

This time it was me who shoved her face into a bosom, and I most definitely was going to have a repeat of that.

Once I let go, I looked up at Leah, who patted my hair with a soft grin that made me melt all over again.

Yeah. I’d die to protect her. But I wouldn’t die, ‘cause I didn’t want to cause her pain.

“Tynea, are there some sorta fail-saves we can use, if the situation gets too dangerous for us? Something that’ll get us out no matter what?”

Yes, there are a lot of methods to secure yourselves, but they’re currently out of your reach. There is a single-use teleportation device that can be worn like jewelry, which requires a previously set point. It costs around a thousand points, but acts extremely quickly. I could pluck you out of a danger before you had the time to even recognize it, for example.

Other methods involve the creation of surrogate bodies, clones, drones, or simply being so deadly that everything around you dies before it can kill you. The list is nearly endless.

Okay, that kind of stuff was going to have a pretty high priority, but we still needed to get out, first, and that would cost us points, too.

With determination, I grabbed Leah’s free hand, and started walking us towards the door, rifle and Sentinel in the other.

“Tinea, we should probably bring along some of the food before we leave. Or even if we use points for that instead, we’ll want to destroy anything we leave behind.” I stopped.

“Oh, yeah. That sounds like a—uh, actually, maybe not? What do you think our kidnappers would do, if they came back here in a few days or weeks, and found that all the resources for Antithesis had been systematically destroyed?”

“They’d probably go into hiding, and it might be impossible to follow them back to their origins, I guess? It’d be obvious that somebody skillful was here. It’d spook any kidnapper.”

“Yeah, but we can’t not do anything either… This is a prime spot for a hive to nest. If that happens, they won’t even try to land, I think. Or they’d get eaten before we had a chance to track them.”

Leah was pretty unhappy with that realization. Shit, we might have to… Well, fuck. I had no idea.

From how careful they’d been about not leaving anything we could use to track them, if they so much as got spooked the next time they visited, they’d be gone for good, and break any link or clue to finding those actually responsible. They wouldn’t even lead us back to wherever they came from, probably.

We had to stop hives from growing here, while also not making those countermeasures noticeable.

Hmm. Alien tech might have something…which would cost more points. 

God damnit.

We couldn’t stay, we couldn’t leave. Fuck’s sake.

 

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