Stray Cat Strut - 63 to 65!

Chapter Sixty-Three - Cat Called

“The history of telemarketing stretches all the way back to the early days of the Bell telephone, where only the eccentric and rich could afford a phone of their own and therefore they made for great targets for sales pitches and cold calls.

As history progressed, the phone became an ubiquitous part of human society. It’s no surprise that ads vectored in throught that medium continue to be popular to this day.”

--On Advertising, 2nd ed. 2049

***

Gomorrah was not happy with me.

I could tell, because she very pointedly removed her facemask so that I could get an unobstructed view of her glare. Also, the first thing she said when she arrived was “I’m not happy with you.”

“Did you get a lot of calls?” I asked.

“I had to get an answering machine catalogue,” Gomorrah said. “Your little prank has cost me fifty points.”

“Oops?” I said. I wasn’t actually remorseful, but I could pretend to be guilty like the best of them. “But hey, some of those calls are good, right?”

She sighed, but nodded. It had been a couple of hours since my broadcast. Most of us here were just chilling around the Big Gun, cheering whenever it went off and taking in the occasional update from Gros Baton about the progress around Phobos.

Things were actually looking up on that front. Phobos had been fucked up pretty hard, and it wasn’t being allowed to recover at all. The constant swarm of drones were leaving their mark. Death by ten million cuts was still death, and we were helping by ramming the moon with the occasional miniature black hole or web of monofilament. 

The points we were earning helped too, though it wasn’t all that much all things considered. A nice, steady trickle every fifty-odd minutes.

I’d seen some images of the moon. It was fully split now, and some of the bigger chunks didn’t even have tentacles keeping them together. Keiretsu drones with large thrusters were pushing the bits apart. It looked like they were moving at a snail’s pace, but that didn’t matter. It would be enough for those chunks to miss Earth entirely.

A one degree change so far out meant a whole lot to us down here. 

The next use of the Teslacollider would probably be the finishing blow. We’d crush what was left of Phobos, and then all that would remain was the clean-up.

So, in a way, we’d won. 

Woo.

Hurrah.

All that jazz. 

Actually, sarcasm aside, the mood was pretty upbeat. Princess and Knight were prattling along to Emoscythe. Tankette was taking care of a food tent nearby, wielding a ladle like a king might a sceptre. Crackshot and Hedgehog were close to the entrance of the Big Gun’s control room, close enough for Gros Baton to join in on their conversation.

I had listened in for a bit, and... it was really disgusting the kinds of things guys would start talking about when there wasn’t a woman around. Not that I would start flinging stones from my glass house or anything.

The area was starting to fill up as well. The idea of keeping the Big Gun secret had flown out the window with my broadcast. There was too much background stuff. Some geoguesser would spot two trees and know the exact coordinates down to the centimetre. It was only a matter of time.

So if secrecy was out the window, then the best protection came from numbers, and that meant a huge influx of troops.

Major Tinwhistle’s engineers had gotten back to work, setting up barracks and defences. The ground was being reinforced and extra concrete was being poured out into moulds for barricades. 

The order of the day was AA. The incoming swarm was made up of fliers. Gunning them down before they hit the ground or even got close was our best bet for keeping the Big Gun and the area around it safe.

“We received some calls from several local samurai,” Gomorrah said. “And several from some that aren’t as local. I’ve gotten offers from some less-close samurai as well. Dreamer and Teddy from Calgary, Grey Goo, Myriad, Bloodhound, Magpie, Zenovir, Hard Rain, GroundWire, Speed Demon, Cassy the Clown and several others from Big Top, Gaea, Legion...the list goes on. I’ve also gotten some... unhappily-worded messages from the Family saying that they’ll be willing to assist us with the logistics.”

“Logistics?” I asked. “What sort? Are we going to be spreading people out?”

“Ideally, yes. It looks like this will be the epi-centre of the... pseudo-incursion, but antithesis will be landing all across this hemisphere.” Gomorrah reached up and rubbed her nose. “It’s a lot. We need to cover a huge area. There might be a few samurai that can do that, but they’re not around, so scattering as many samurai as possible makes sense.”

“Alright,” I said with a nod. “And the Family’s taking charge of that?” 

“They are. And I’m looking over every one of their choices now. They’re annoyed that we didn’t give them a proper head’s up and forty-eight hours of lead-time before dropping that announcement.”

Well, at least she was saying ‘we’ and implicating herself in the whole mess. “They do understand that forty-eight hours is too late, right?”

“Does logic and common sense ever stop you from being irritated by something?” she asked.

I didn’t have to think about it for long. “No,” I admitted. “That’s a fair point. But you’d think they’d be better. Plus it’s like, a whole-ass company. We’re talking about them like they’re one person.”

“Sometimes it’s just like that,” Gomorrah said, and she didn’t elaborate any before sending me a message. I opened it without checking. If Gomorrah was sending me viruses and shit then I would be in a rough shape already. 

It opened to a map of our hemisphere, centred more or less on where the Big Gun was located. There were pins all across it in an array of colours with little icons next to them indicating who was where. 

There was a grasshopper for Grasshopper, a tank for Tankette, a crown for Princess and so on. We were all squished in so close together that there was some serious overlap in the icons. 

There were also, I noticed, ‘ghost’ icons. Those were sometimes linked to a more solid copy of the same. “Are these location markers?” I asked. The ghost icons and the rest were scattered across a wide area. Most of the northern end of the country and a lot beyond as well. Even some over the bigger lakes and out in the ocean.

“That’s where the Family wants people. Each location forms the meeting point of a set of three equilateral triangles. So we’ll be equally distant from each other except for a few areas of high importance, like right here.”

“Makes sense,” I said. Then I took in the scale of things. “How many points are there on here?”

“Not including the areas of greater importance? A hundred and twelve.”

“That’s not a lot of points,” I said. Not for the amount of area we had to cover, which was massive.

“We don’t have a lot of samurai,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. Right, this was all-hands on deck in a big way. Then the map updated and I noticed the triangles getting very slightly smaller, and some icons already hovering over their designated locations were being asked to move inwards. “Did we just get more?” I asked.

“This is with the current crop of volunteers,” Gomorrah said. “And then, only those that are explicitly working with the Family. I’m, or rather Atyacus, is working to keep in contact with those that called me directly who aren’t affiliated and who don’t want to be. That’s only a dozen or so  samurai, so far.”

“Makes sense. I’d be more willing to call someone directly than deal with a corp I don’t trust in their shoes.”

“Yes, it turns out that your fumbling around actually had some benefits.” 

“As planned,” I said.

Gomorrah crossed her arms. “No. Not as planned. I refuse to believe that. In fact, I know otherwise. If anything, this is me looking very hard for a silver lining to your goofing up.”

I laughed. “Sorry,” I said. “So, are we stationed right here?”

“This is where it might be worse,” Gomorrah said.

“And where we’ll make the most points for defending,” I said. “And where we literally have an army and no one civilian-like around for kilometres. We can afford to go all out.” 

“And we’ll need to,” Gomorra said. “What have you prepared so far?”

“Uh,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “You have spent the last two hours or so preparing, right, Catherine?”

“How upset would you be if I did nothing but fuck around and chat instead?” I asked.

“Not upset. Disappointed.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, that’s no fun. But it’s also the truth, so at least you know that I’m honest with you?”

“You’re nothing but a pest, Catherine,” she said. “We need AA set up, and soon. I’m thinking several larger guns. We need the ability to strike at small, distant targets. These enemies will have come through the atmosphere, so they’ll either be weakened, or they’re so tough that it didn’t slow them down and that’ll mean a whole other level of problem.”

I nodded. She was right, we were dealing with mid-twenties enemies here, probably. These weren’t model ones with a few burnt up feathers. They’d be genuine threats. “I’m sure we can get something going that’ll give them all a proper Earthly welcome.”

She nodded. “Good. Then we need to get ready to deal with those that survived the landing and any hives they might awaken on the way down.”

“We’re not finishing this tonight, are we?”

***

Chapter Sixty-Four

Orbital defences article?

***

“Hey, boss, what’s the plan?” Gros Baton asked, leaning lazily against the doorframe of the Big Gun’s command room. His call had caught the attention of the others.

I looked around. We were all here, it seemed, with one extra, even in the form of Emoscythe. Tankette was still making her way over while wiping her hands on a small tank-patterned towelette. She was close enough to hear, though.

A quick check of my augs showed me that we were a few minutes shy of six in the evening. When had the time flown? Also, had I skipped lunch? I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten anything since that poutine earlier, and that was like, overnight. 

Right, people were expecting shit from me, and I couldn’t just sit here and bitch about being hungry, even if I really wanted to. “Alright boys, girls and Grasshopper,” I said.

Grasshopper giggled, so I figured that one had landed.

“We’ve got more news, which sucks because I’m tired of this constant cycle of having to deliver news, then something weird happening, then having to deliver more news again right after. It’s a boring circle. Fortunately, the boring circle will be busted up soon. The Family has their panties all knotted up, but I think they’re getting their shit together too. They’re laying out a grid of samurai to keep an eye on the skies and knock the aliens down.”

“A grid?” Hedgehog asked. “What kind, and what are our numbers?”

I checked the thing Gomorrah had sent me. “We’re up to a hundred and forty-eight samurai volunteering, which is pretty decent. The spacing is... awful. We’re covering the entire hemisphere, which means a lot of space between points on the grid. The bigger cities mostly have locals staying in them to keep them safe, and they usually have their own AA so there’s that.”

“There are hardly all that many cities in this hemisphere,” Crackshot said. “I reckon NM’s the biggest here, then Quebec to the east and a few more south of us, but the north is wide open. The west has some pretty big gaps too.”

“It’s a problem, yeah,” I agreed. “The nice thing is that no one sane lives in the north, so fuck it. If the aliens crash there, that’s on them. They can eat snow or whatever.”

“They’ll need to be taken care of,” Grasshopper said. “Just because a problem isn’t right in front of you doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The antithesis will have to be dealt with, even if they’re not landing right on top of us.”

“Well, that’s where we’re lucky,” I said. “Because they definitely are landing right on top of us. Got the projections from our German pals. They did the maths and we’re right smack-dab in the centre of the shitshow, and it’s probably safe to say that this is where most of the aliens will be coming. We have almost a day before it’s raining plants.”

“So what’s the plan?” Gros Baton asked. He pointedly looked up to the sky, where it was a bit overcast. “Tire le ciel?”

“If Phobos is already fucked, we can probably use the Big Gun a few times to shoot into the swarm,” I said. “Does Earth have any orbital defences?”

“A few, yes,” Gomorrah said. “There are some stations in orbit that belong to various samurai. You’ll recall Deus Ex’s station.”

“That’s the kind of thing I was thinking about, yeah,” I said. I could still remember just... going into space on one of Deus Ex’s planes and arriving at her station. I was pretty sure it was in low Earth orbit, not space, but I was also sure that I was the last person that should be discussing the difference between one and the other. “Her station had guns on it, right?”

“She’s taken it to Mars,” Gomorrah said.

“Wow, top-tier samurai are amazing,” Princess said.

“Yeah, it’s a whole other thing,” I agreed. “And Deus Ex isn’t the only samurai with a station, right? There has to be more? And if they left them behind, then that might knock some aliens out before they hit the atmo.”

“I wouldn’t gamble on a few stations being enough,” Hedgehog said. “Though this entire incursion and the Phobos situation might be the last kick that the governments and corps need to start building real orbital defences. They’ve been talking about it for thirty years.”

“Budget issues?” I asked.

He nodded. “That and public perception. Some people said that the orbital stations would be used for mind-control and I don’t think the smarter people out there had the time or patience to correct the idiot majority.”

“Ah, that’s rough,” I said. It always sucked when the conspiracy theorists got in the way of progress. And it sucked extra hard when they turned out to be right. “So were there really mind control systems that were gonna be put on those orbital stations?”

Hedgehog gave me an unamused look. “They were to assist with advertising. They’re not mind control.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Anyway, setting that aside. I think that whatever we have in orbit can help, but it’s unlikely to be anywhere near enough to completely stop us from being attacked on the ground. I’m not even sure if any AA we buy will be enough.”

“To add to that,” Grasshopper said. “It’s very probable that on entering the atmosphere, the antithesis will scatter signal pheromones. That might well trigger any still-dormant hives into awakening, but the last global incursion might have actually saved us there.”

“How so?” I asked.

She gestured vaguely around us. “Because most hives were already awakened by similar means.”

Which meant that they were already attacking or had been wiped out. The Phobos antithesis wouldn’t find too many locals to help them, but just because we’d wiped out a number didn’t mean that we’d taken them all out. This entire expedition had started as a way to go out and cull more and there was no lack of the fuckers around.

“Okay, so we’re going to have to shoot them down, then probably deal with a local surge or something?” I asked.

“That sounds accurate,” Gomorrah said. “Since we have time to prepare for it, we might be able to gain additional support from New Montreal to defend this area.”

“More troops?” I asked.

She nodded. “And artillery. We’re within range of the bigger pieces in the city, and well within range of any of the missile launch systems.”

“Right,” I said. “So primary focus is anti-air to knock the fuckers out, and then ground defences second?”

That seemed reasonable enough. The discussion turned towards just how much air defence we wanted. We’d all been earning a fair few points, and this next fight would earn us a few more, but the pool wasn’t infinite.

In the end, Hedgehog and Emoscythe ended up being the ones leading that discussion. They both had more experience than the rest of us, one in military matters, the other with direct combat experience against the antithesis. 

The plan was simple. Fill the air with so much high-velocity lead that we wouldn’t even be able to see the plants before they came crashing down. Missiles were okay too. 

Soon enough, we were all buying up some AA for ourselves. There were plenty of catalogues that had something capable of shooting into the air, and for those that didn’t have the inclination, we were all up to sharing.

Tankette bought a large rack that fit onto her tankette, then she got a set of multi-barreled guns on a turret that hovered on top of that. Princess and Crackshot combined some of their catalogues into a sort of... very pretty boxy building with a single barrel sticking out of the top. 

Grasshopper and Emoscythe both got their own small buildings, towers that were very much opposites. Squat and rounded for Grasshopper, with a sort of boffer gun atop it, and tall and angular and dark for Emoscythe. I was pretty sure that Emoscythe had done that on purpose, tailoring her design to... uncompliment Grasshopper’s so much that it wrapped around to matching.

Gomorrah just bought a large missile launching system. She said it was like a HIMARS and I pretended that I knew what that meant.

Gros baton supplied a heap of ammo for the rather plain-looking installation that Hedgehog bought and dropped by the command centre of the Big Gun.

The others spread their things out a fair bit, placing them around the Big Gun but not all clumped together.

It left me with a spot of my own... which I now had to figure out how to fill.

***

Chapter Sixty-Five

***

“So, what’re my options when it comes to AA?” I asked.

Presuming from context that you mean Anti-Air and not Alcoholics Anonymous, or automotive insurance, then we do have quite a few options. In fact, you have options for all three.

“Wait, all three?” I asked. I was off on my own, feeling a little awkward for being away from all the others, but it wasn’t all that bad. I’d be rejoining them in a minute or five. 

Indeed. Technically, as a vanguard, you could subscribe to any number of insurance services . The companies offering them make the information about their low premium Samurai tier policies as easy to find as possible. As for the alcohol, I have substances that are so addictive that you’d never have time to be addicted to alcohol to begin with.

“You are far less reassuring than you ought to be sometimes,” I said.

I find it amusing.

“You think you’re so cute,” I muttered. 

I’m adorable. Now, shall we talk anti-air options? You have fifty-one thousand, one hundred and seventeen points at the moment, which is a very respectable amount of buying power.

I glanced over to the others. They were mostly crowded around Tankette’s updated tank with a few further out. Crackshot and Emoscythe were sitting in a rather nice wrought-iron bench that had definitely not been there minutes ago. 

“That’s... a lot of points. Shit, I’m close to the big leagues, aren’t I?”

No. You’re still some ways away from that. However, you certainly are edging your way out of the more beginner tiers. Now, what kind of budget are you looking at?

I rubbed my chin for a moment, then nodded. “I think two thousand or so? I know I have a lot more I could splurge here, but that doesn’t feel right for a one-and-done kind of event. I’ll want something that I can move back to our home and slap onto the roof. So it needs to look pretty intimidating? As for weapon-types... maybe something that fires larger rounds so that I can load it full of explosives?”

That’s a clever idea. How about a Mark Six Heavenly Striking Tiger Automated Anti-Air Platform? It would come up to a thousand nine hundred and fifty points. A few shy of your stated limit. The system is autonomous, with very competent long-ranged tracking capabilities, and it’s designed to fire 30mm shells.

Those were some chunky bullets. “Will they go far enough?” I asked. “Ideally we can hit them while they’re still, like, nearly in space?”

That complicates things slightly. But I could have the barrels reinforced, add a water-cooling system, and elongate the receiver to compensate for those additions. It’ll allow you to fire the same projectile but with a larger propellant charge. You might still want specialty shells to reach that far up, whereas lower targets can be taken out with more traditional rounds. All that would increase the cost by two hundred points.

That was a smidge over my initial budget, but not by so much that I’d mind. The gun was probably going to earn that point cost back, and then some. “Alright, do it,” I said.

Not so fast. This gun is rather large. Placing it right in front of you wouldn’t mean that it can’t be moved, but it might be best to lay it down in its final intended position.

Ah, that made a heap of sense. Myalis was pretty good with the deliveries of stuff. She’d never dropped anything on my toes before and I’d come to trust her with that kind of thing. “Lemme ask Hedgehog where he wants it, he seems like the one to ask.” It was him or Emoscythe, but she was being cute with Crackshot and I wasn’t gonna cockblock my guy.

Hedgehog was happy to help. He explained the rough idea of the current layout, going on about overlapping fields of fire and combined arms and firing intervals. He didn’t want our flak to mess up our missile fire, and there were issues with several of our things interfering with our targeting. 

The army had more balloons they were putting up, there with powerful sensors strapped to the top pointing into the sky to better identify incoming fliers, and we were going to piggyback off of that a little.

The army also had its own AA. A mix of rather simple ‘big gun that shoots up’ and surface-to-air missiles specifically designed to track and hit antithesis.

The army had a lot of gear for taking out swarms of model ones, even far from a base or a fixed location. They were a minor threat on their own, but in big enough swarms they were definitely a problem. They also had some weapons platforms for bigger fliers. But what they didn’t have was weaponry designed to take a flying antithesis out from over a dozen kilometres away. 

The strange truth was that warfare had become a much closer game in the last few decades. Range was still king, but when the enemy always rushed to come to you, it made things much easier overall.

Since the thing I was aiming to buy had decent range and seemed like it wouldn’t have great traversal, Hedgehog insisted that I place it more or less in the middle of the camp forming up around the Big Gun.

He called over one of Major Tinwhistle’s assistants, some sergeant engineer who bobbed his head in understanding, then literally took off running. Ten minutes later we had dudes digging a hole then filling it with cement and rebar and basically setting down a platform for my AA gun to sit on.

It only took a few minutes for it to set. It was some sort of quick-drying cement, and the engineers were attacking it with what were basically industrial hair-dryers to get it to set even faster.

The engineers placed some large metal plates over the whole thing, then backed off and kind of just lingered there. It looked like they wanted to be the first ones to take a peek at my new toy, which was fair, I supposed. 

“Alright, I’m ready,” I told Myalis.

New Purchase:  Mark Six Heavenly Striking Tiger Automated Anti-Air Platform

Points Reduced To: 48,967

The gun appeared with barely a whisper. Myalis had obviously calculated it so that it arrived with no space between its feet and the metal plates the engineers had set down.

It was pretty big, the size of an old school SUV, with four long barrels covered in metal shrouds sticking out of the business end of it. 

Of course, all four shrouds were shaped like pouncing tigers, with the barrels sticking out of their mouths, and the boxy remainder of the gun had my familiar neon cat logo slapped onto the sides. 

There was a space in the rear that someone could easily walk into, with access to several ammo hoppers that were currently filled with 30mm shells with cases longer than my forearm.

The turret spun around, then aimed straight up, the moment so quick and sudden that I jumped in surprise. 

“Looks good,” I said. “If a bit gaudy. What’s up with the name? It sounds like some Chinese web novel’s protagonist.”

“You’ve read a novel?” Hedgehog asked. 

“I mean, I’ve seen ads,” I said with a shrug.

The name fits the naming rules.

“What naming rules?” I asked.

The ones I made up.

I narrowed my eyes at nothing in particular. I could almost feel Myalis laughing in the back of my mind. “For someone so smart, your sense of humour is weak.” She didn’t rise to that bait and left me stewing in silence with my new super AA gun.

Tilting my head back, I looked up and into the sky. It was a little overcast, but it seemed as though the clouds were lifting in a few spots, enough to see the sky, at least. It was just dark enough to make out some stars past the incredible light pollution put out by New Montreal.

No aliens, though. Not that I’d probably be able to see them until they hit our atmosphere. Still, it was strangely unnerving to look up, feel so tiny, and yet know that death might be raining down on me at any moment.

I shook my head and pushed those thoughts away before turning around and marching off to meet the others. We’d chat a little more, then I wanted to head back home for the night. 

The world might end tomorrow, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t spend today with Lucy and the kittens.

Besides, I was learning not to hinge too much on ‘mights.’ I was a samurai; defeating the odds with superior firepower was what I was meant to do.

***