Stray Cat Strut - Epilogue

Epilogue

Delilah stood on the edge of a field. To her left were rows upon rows of flowers. Small, red things with black centres. Her hand trailed down to her side and she gently pinched one of them. She imagined that it was soft, but her gloved hands hid any such thing from her.

Behind was a clearing. A wide space hidden by a raised hillside where cars and transports were parked. The media was here, because of course they were, but they were being polite. Professional. Somber. 

It was raining.

That was almost always the case, but it felt especially appropriate now. Rain, and a biting, humid cold that clawed at her exposed face.

She’d worn a habit today, one she’d bought from Atyacus for the occasion. Black on black, a white coif and a short bandeau, and a long veil that masked her hair and cut into her peripheral vision, turning the world into a dark-sided tunnel.

It was fine. She pulled her hand away from the unfelt flowers and glanced up.

There were other samurai here. There were a lot of other samurai here. A full quarter of the Vanguard who had participated had shown up. Some members of the German and Asian groups, the Nachtwächternetzwerk and the Keiretsu, had come as well.

Officers, from the various PMCs who had assisted and from the army, politicians, some people who had been on the front lines and who were here for their own reasons. It was a busy place at the moment.

She wasn’t with them. Instead she was here, off and away from the main group, enjoying a field of poppies that hadn’t been here just hours ago. A gift from one of the samurai who understood more about symbolism and meaning than Delilah herself did, but she could understand the thrust of their actions, and appreciated it all the same.

Sevens losses, amongst the Vanguard.

Seven dead samurai. 

More than was lost in most minor incursions. More lost in a single day than humanity had lost since... well, last week, when the global incursion began in earnest.

The rate of attrition was terrifying. 

Normal people had died as well. By the thousands. Some of those flying models had crashed into small towns and poorly prepared cities. A vault, designed to shelter thousands from ordinary incursions, had been crashed into and collapsed. Even now they were pulling survivors from the wreckage and cataloguing those who didn’t.

Delila took a deep breath, then flicked her eyes to the side. A menu came up, showing her the time, weather, and a few other necessities.

“She’s late,” she muttered.

As per usual.

She huffed, very slightly. Her friend... her best friend--as terrible as that particular thought was, what with Franny being... more than friends--was perhaps the least punctual person Delilha had ever had the misfortune of meeting.

“She’d be late to her own funeral,” Delilah said. She tilted her head back a little, letting some of the drizzling rain smatter across her lips and cheeks.

Myalis suggests that Vanguard Stray Cat is on her way. ETA two minutes. 

“Thank you,” Delilah said. She wasn’t sure what kind of relationship Atyacus and Myalis had, but she sometimes had the impression that there was a level of... respect there. From Atyacus to Myalis. Did the AI have superiors? A hierarchy? She didn’t think so. 

Delilah folded her hands into her sleeves and watched the poppy field sway as she just let her mind... not think too much. It was something she used to do a lot, usually while working on some chores. Dishes, sweeping, anything that didn’t require any thinking.

She supposed that she should have been praying, but she wasn’t in that kind of mood at the moment.

She was pulled out of her thoughts at the sound of an approaching rumble. Another large hover vehicle coming in? There had been a number of those. From people visiting the site, to Samurai landing nearby. Fortunately, the space they’d chosen was quite large, and where there wasn’t a proper parking space, there was plenty of room.

Delilah glanced up at the incoming vehicle, then she did a slight double-take.

It had cat ears.

Or at least, the impression of ears in the way that forward section’d metal plates were laid out. Subtle, but also very much not. The hovercraft was larger. Far larger than most she’d seen outside of mass inter-city bulk transports. 

It came in low and fast, then did a half-spin, tilting up onto its side so that its thrusters slowed it down enough that it could come to a safe landing over the field next to several news vans. Large mechanical legs folded out from beneath the mech, and it came down onto them with a series of hissing clunks.

Delilah started walking over. By the time she arrived, the large ship was fully parked, and she could see some vague movement behind the thick panes of glass in the cockpit at the front.

It took a few long seconds before one of the doors--it was a large bay door, with a stenciled ‘3’ on it. The 3 had cat ears--started to open.

Catherine stood within, with Lucy next to her.

The girls were both in dresses. Somber black ones, though Catherine was still wearing combat boots and clearly had a handgun strapped to her thigh. And her skirt was a little short, but Delilah decided to look past that. 

“Hello,” she said.

“Hey,” Cat replied as she clunked her way down the ramp. “You look the way you usually do when I’m late.”

“I wonder why,” Delilah said, her voice flat.

Cat grinned, unrepentant and amused with herself. “So, uh, funerals. Lucy told me I had to dress up for it, but I think she just wanted me in a skirt.”

Lucy smiled smugly next to the idiot. “Hi Delilah,” she said sweetly. “Nice to see you again.”

“Hi Lucy,” Delilah replied. How did such a sweet young woman end up with such an idiot? Truly, god worked in mysterious ways. “We should head up the hill. Things are going to start soon.”

“Right,” Cat said. She stretched up onto the balls of her feet, then fell back onto her heels. She always had this tendency to stretch this way and that. It was strange, as if she couldn’t just stay still until she grew serious. 

Delilah nodded, then allowed herself to fall into some small talk as they made their way over. Yes, Franny was fine, and she was at home. Yes, she was fine with Catherine adding to the parking garage. Maybe her Fury would need repairs one day, so it was a nice addition. No, she didn’t think Catherine’s new mobile mech-deployment platform was too much. Though yes, it was big.

They made their way around the hill and up. Someone had carved steps into the ground, and there were thin stone plates atop each step now. Marble, at a guess. That hadn’t been there earlier, but she couldn’t guess which samurai was responsible.

On reaching the top of the hill, Delilah noticed Catherine’s cocky smile slowly dwindle.

There were seats laid out in rows with a few corridors between them. Room enough for a couple of hundred people, and a lot of that seating was taken up.

Politicians, media, army offices and samurai were mingling. The samurai--some of them--stood out on account of their unique gear and clothes, but a lot of them had dressed up, or down, to better fit the mood. Black was uncommonly common at the moment. 

Before and above them was the cenotaph. 

The memorial stone was a massive thing, bought by a west-coast samurai called The Dirty Earth Man. Despite that samurai’s name, the cenotaph itself was... pretty.

At its centre was a black stone obelisk. It rose twenty five metres high, about a metre and a half wide and thick, with a tapered top that had some sort of metallic cap above it that gleamed a deep bronze.

Names were carved into the surface, each one no taller than a finger width. There were thousands. 

Next to the obelisk were two forms. They were vaguely humanoid, but abstracted. Each made of pure white stone and carved so that they appeared to hug the obelisk with one hand while their other arm held out a shield and a sword, each of bronze. 

“That’s a lot of names,” Catherine said.

“A lot of people died,” Delilah replied. It was trite, but it was also the truth.

“Fuck,” Cat muttered. “We could have done better, huh?”

Delilah was tempted to nod, to twist the knife, but... well, that wouldn’t be fair. “Maybe. But I don’t think you should look down on what we accomplished. We destroyed Phobos. We warned people. We set up defences. Think of it less as people dying, and more as people we saved.”

Lucy patted Catherine on the shoulder. “You did good,” she said.

Catherine frowned. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Delilah glanced at the time again. “Let’s find a seat,” she suggested.

They made their way through the rows of chairs towards the front. There were a few seats free at the very front. Unsurprisingly, the people there were familiar. The Saint-JEEEErome team. Princess was in a more sombre dress than usual, and next to her Knight was in a black pantsuit. Crackshot was still in jeans, but he’d worn a nice button up, at least.

Hedgehog was in a military uniform with any identification stripped off, and next to him was Tankette in a very humble grey dress. 

Delilah took a spot next to her, and Catherine and Lucy gathered up on her other side.

There were some hellos and greetings traded, and some samurai from the row behind them reached out to give their greetings too. There was a man called ToeJam, a samurai that she wasn’t familiar with, who walked over to thank Catherine in a low, hushed voice before moving back.

The event started in full a few minutes after they arrived. A man in a dark suit walked up to the podium set up before the cenotaph. He adjusted his tie, then cleared his throat, and then... launched into an uninspired speech.

The man was from the Family, and while his job was important, Delilah couldn’t help but feel like he lacked the gravitas necessary to make a good showing here. 

The media ate it up, of course, though they did so silently. Corporate journos and a few influencers were crowding the very back of the space. She imagined that a few of them were tempted to make a scene, but... well, there were too many samurai here to make that worthwhile.

So many of that sort wanted to go out with a bang, but death-by-samurai wasn’t the way to do that. It was far too likely that a samurai would just erase all traces of their existence out of spite, so they behaved.

The man asked for a minute of silence, and everyone bowed their heads and waited.

At the end of that, he asked the crowd if anyone had anything to say.

Delilah was surprised to see Emoscythe step up and onto the small raised dais that served as a base for the obelisk.

“Hello,” the darkly-dressed samurai said. Delilah was impressed to note that she wasn’t wearing her usual samurai garb. It was something close, of course, a variation on gothic fashion, only this was far more subdued, more... respectful, maybe? She wasn’t sure how someone conveyed that with clothes alone, but here it was.

The woman seemed to take a moment to gather her thoughts, a moment that everyone willingly gave her.

“For those of you whose hearts have been blackened by the events that brought us here, today, know that your suffering isn’t a lonely one,” she started. “We stand beneath a crying sky, in a sea of ashes. This sky is ours once more, as it was once before, but only through the sacrifice of blood and lives. We are still here. We are still breathing. We are still mourning.”

Delilah found herself swallowing. There was a lot more emotion there than in the platitudes of the Family’s man.

“The cost of life is heavy. Heavier than steel and grief. It’s the weight of absence that you feel now, dragging you down. There are those who should be here with us now, and who aren’t. They were innocents, they were fighters, they were heroes, they were normal people whom we failed to protect.”

She half-turned, glancing up at the obelisk. 

“This will be here to remember them by, but it’s just a symbol. If you truly want to honour the dead, then live as if they meant something. Our friends, families, and heroes should be more than names carved in stone. They should be what makes us take the actions that will allow us to have a future where we can look into the stars without fear.”

She nodded to the crowd. 

“Thank you.”

Emoscythe stepped off the stage and came to take a seat by Crackshot.

Delilah nodded to her. That had been better than the rehearsed, likely AI-generated speech that the Family’s man had made.

He politely asked if anyone else had anything to add.

No one said anything for a few long seconds, then Cat sighed.

“You don’t have to,” Lucy muttered.

“Feel like I kinda do,” Cat said before she stood up. Delilah almost reached out to tug her back. Catherine was... well, she was a lot of things. It was complicated. She was most of all not the ideal public speaker.

But she still had a bit of a gift to her, the ability to inspire despite her sheer crassness. 

Cat walked up to the podium and glared at the mic, then she looked up and scanned the crowd. Delilah had been with Catherine for long enough to read her expression, even past the mask she wore. She was a little nervous now, but was drowning it in...

Whatever the crazy gay woman version of machismo was.

“Yeah, I’m not great at this kind of thing,” she began. “Honestly, Emoscythe said it better than I can, but... but sometimes something’s lost when you’re trying to be pretty about it.”

She reached up, running her flesh hand over the edge where her cybernetic arm started. The scarred skin was all gone now, but Delilah could remember the red, welted flesh that she’d had there recently.

“We lost a lot of people. Too many. I’m not even talking about the samurai. We’re... kinda fucked to say it, but we’re made to die, aren’t we? We fight it. We fight against the way we’re all inevitably going to die, but that doesn’t mean we’ll ever win. I’m talking more about the normal people.”

Cat nodded, and it felt like she was finally finding her stride.

“I don’t care much for the cowards. But I care a lot more for those that fought back. Fuck dying, but you’re going to anyway, right? But out there, there’s people that picked up guns and knives and... wrenches and sticks. They saw that they weren’t gonna make it, and they decided to spit in death’s face and give the aliens a final fuck you before they went down. Those are the people we fight for. I hope that those kinds of people make up a lot of the names on that rock behind me.”

She shifted, glanced back, then dismissed the cenotaph. 

“The city, the world, is held together with duct tape, spit, and spite. I’ve seen it. Sometimes I’m not sure if the worse enemy we have is the Antithesis or each other. But I don’t think it matters, because we’re still here. We’re still fighting. We don’t owe the people who died a bunch of crying. We don’t owe them pretty speeches. We owe them working together. We owe them pulling ourselves up and fighting. For ourselves, for our loved ones, for a future that isn’t shit, where people don’t die by the thousands, and there we don’t need to make hard choices about who lives and who doesn’t!”

Cat blinked rapidly. There were tears in her eyes.

“So... yeah. We’ll keep fighting. Not because we’re heroes, but because we can. We’re gonna die anyway, and given the choice, I’d want to go down fighting.”

Cat nodded, then stepped off the stage.

Delilah closed her eyes. She’d only have a moment to think before she’d have to interact with Ctherine again, a moment to think about how her best friend might just be the nexus for something that she wasn’t sure anyone would be able to control, because the people sitting in rows upon rows behind her? They were cheering.

Catherine might be an irredeemable moron, at times, but she had the animalistic charisma of a cult leader, and a drive for war that might send them all spiralling into something dark. Glorious, but dark. And every urge in Delilah’s body wanted her to be there, burning humanity’s enemy at the front.

***