[TnL] Chapter 169 – The Fragile Smile

Chapter 169 – The Fragile Smile

The ocean knows my solemn creed,
To guard, to break, to not concede,
I sail through ghosts of blackened years,
With quiet pride that conquers fears.

– Bunker Hill, Essex-class Carrier, decommissioned in 1947. A pair of Kamikaze attacks had damaged her severely in 1945 and caused more than 600 casualties. After repairs and before her decommissioning, her final duty was to bring service members home from the Pacific. She never saw active service again.

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Dolores wasn't usually one to appreciate philosophical conundrums. She preferred the simple down-to-earth stuff, really. 

Even so, she had to admit it was funny that the question of whether she was above or below Mach 1 would be answered differently depending on the observer. 

Her Whirling Charge macro used the variety of Class III gadgets installed in her body to hasten her steps to an absurd degree—most of all her Twisting Nature Wide-Area Gas Recombinator, which nudged the temperature up ahead of her and thus pushed the speed of sound a little higher. It didn't take much: every ten degrees bought her another six meters per second before she'd be running through air as hard as concrete. 

The trick was heating the air far enough ahead that it would have time to settle into its less dense, slippier equilibrium by the time she passed through. Easier said than done when traveling at roughly eight hundred miles per hour, but made possible by her God's Domain Mass-Field Regulator, which simply grabbed much of the unsettled air, removed it, and channeled it into a jetstream against her back.

A sharp spike of Antithesis pheromone concentration at a spot several hundred meters to the side snagged the attention of her macro's spectrometers, which tripped its homing function. Dervish's gadgets expended enough energy to power the average city for a day to simulate an acceptable outcome, alter the local atmospheric conditions accordingly, and all but shoot her body down a new angle like a railcannon. Her Fleeting Stability Gravity Hook made it look elegant and effortless.

Shame her friends had already logged off—Yasmin would've totally gone gaga for the moment.

The hole-in-the-ground she found barely even qualified as a nest. A pair of large rocks leaned against each other and created a protected hollow into which a Three had crawled and taken root. 

She could still see its misshapen body against the backwall, limbs and head stretched and melded into roots. The nesting berries the alien had once carried in its ribcage had burst forth from its guts and flowered into growth pods, with fresh plant embryos inside each of them.

Before the young model Tens tending to the new hive could so much as jump her, Dervish summoned a tiny skin-stripping sandstorm laden with pyrophoric dust inside the space. The xenic quasi-apes went up in fire, along with their nest. 

She turned heel to leave within seconds. The great plates of rock soon cracked from water boiling inside their faults, but Dolores had already marked the spot and traveled miles by the time they properly crumbled to bury the hollow.

Just a few more minutes. She could already see the rocky outcrops of home. They were looking a little…bald after the strom, the acid-eaten damage in the rock from decades of poisonous industry more obvious than ever, but she supposed she preferred that to seeing them overrun with Antithesis and xenoformed.

This was easier to fix once more, at any rate.

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Dervish detoured a little on the way home, to watch a squad of Leah's Hatchets in action. 

She rather liked what she saw—the mechanical beasts took no prisoners, constantly traveling between detected groupings of the aliens and wiping them out from as much range as the terrain allowed. 

Then they'd move in, clean up anything they'd missed, case the place, mark suspected nests for destruction before trapping entrances with proximity mines and moving on to the next objective. 

Occasionally, indirect fire from kilometers away rained on unsuspecting double-digits before they could threaten the walking scouts.

Reconnaissance with teeth enough to gore the enemy. They were very capable all-terrain vehicles too—heavy enough to dig their limbs past the flood's mud, light enough to jump the gaps between some of the rocky outcroppings. It let them show up from directions even the Antithesis with their alien instincts didn't tend to check.

Despite that, they were of surprisingly simple construction. Her scanners, shamelessly yoinking their engineering, found no parts she wouldn't be able to reproduce if she needed to—which she didn't, she held no reservations about buying them and their factory from the redhead.

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The cracking thunder of gunfire greeted Dolores as she emerged onto the small plateau from between two hills. The wall of sound reflected from the hills around and created a rolling echo that made it seem like an entire artillery battalion had gone guns free. 

Leah's big, stompy warmechs were stationed away from the—presumably—more fragile elements of the factory and lobbed shells beyond the horizon; the indirect fire support for the Hatchets she'd witnessed earlier.

Dolores's eyes went up into the sky and tracked the Battlepoet as she dove hard and fast into the lull between cannon blasts. Fabric wings on her back flicked open for a few seconds and bled speed like airbrakes. Just before hitting the ground she rotated her wing arms and, like a quick-launch VTOL drone, arrested her attitude on angled jets between the legs of Leah's mech. 

The tiny samurai finally set down the very same moment that a boarding ramp lowered Leah to the floor, who wore her Heavy Metal persona: face occluded by a misting veil pierced only by the neon glare of a slit pupil, guarded to one side by a heavily armored hoverdrone bearing a pair of recoilless autocannons, and to the other by a strange flesh abomination poured into a medical bodysleeve with dainty fuck-your-guts claws.

A fresh blast of cannon fire shattered the moment just as Dervish opened her mouth to poke some fun. The shockwave stroked across the colorful dampening field protecting Tinea's antennae, and Leah's suit did interesting things with internal fluid dynamics to turn the waves of sound against themselves. 

It looked a bit like hands stroking down her body.

Hot. Dolores's brows rose…but the very same moment she tried to comment on that, the other mech fired its cannon.

She narrowed her eyes. It seemed the two weren't quite done making their displeasure known.

Perhaps she shouldn't hold it against them. Dolores had long forgotten what it was like to have to scramble to deal with unwelcome surprises, and as much as storms weren't going to take out a pair of Class II samurais…they couldn't just ignore them the way she could, either. 

Or so she surmised, from the steel-eyed caution hiding behind the brunette's affected innocence at the suspicious timing of those cannon blasts. They were merely pulling her leg, but the tiny freak of battle was entirely ready to retaliate if Dolores decided to escalate. Even her underclocked social scripts could see that they were using pointed humor to deliver a message.

She took it to heart. She would have to display more thoughtfulness if she wanted to be considered a friend rather than trouble.

Having their plans thwarted by the surprise monsoon will have been a proper annoyance—luckily, the material consequences of that were going to be much easier to handle than the social ones.

"Like what you've done with the place," she finally said, just as another warbot strolled off the production line and joined two of its brothers waiting for the squad to fill. "Could use some greenery, but I'll handle that myself."

Leah hitched a thumb at the mechs and replied, "they're still effective right now, but unless you quell the area and get rid of the more stimulated nests, they'll barely be scouts in two or three days. Hatchets can't really take any Twenties in a fight—Twenty-Ones are the reasonable limit, and that's only for the ones with a mine layer. Or large-caliber Class II ammunition."

"Scouts are great too," Dervish said, "and they'll do fine as roving rangers once things have calmed."

"I gave the squads an uplink each, and they have the Family app's API. They could call for some Rods from God to take out any nests, if you wanted."

Dolores snorted. "The day a Class III samurai needs to call in another samurai's orbital bombardment is the day she retires. But fine, I'll take everything off your hands. I imagine you called 'cause wanna get going?"

"Yep," agreed the redhead's mouth and the brunette's eyes.

"Need more gear on the way home? Got more points than I have uses for and I owe you."

"Oh?"

"Tokens are the bottleneck, unless you're into technologies that require lotsa upkeep."

"Huh…" Leah looked around herself, and Dervish smiled.

"Yeah, I would advise that you extend your manufacturing at home, if you intend to keep using mechs. They get hellishly expensive on points, especially in an army. Your girlfriend will have a much easier time, even if her gear winds up consuming more energy in a minute than your entire army in a day. Cheaper to produce, or something."

The tall girl turned back towards her, and she had a certain look in her eyes. That primal spark. A fledgling one, but it was there. Dervish chuckled to herself—looked like the newbie had gotten herself blooded. A little bit, at least.

There was a very good chance that Heavy Metal was going to be a household name some day.

⁂

Despite all the excitement of the last two days, Dolores found it a little…hard to smile as she watched the two younger samurai disappear down the coast. 

They were loaded up with a literal million's worth in the form of a double squad of custom Hatchets running the head and rear of the convoy, an extra pair of Implacables carrying enough raw material in plug-tanks to build a city, the construction drones to see it done, and some of the deadliest ammunition those two would ever see, just in case.

Eight Hatchets in total, and four Implacables. They'd left her the two she'd bought earlier, said they'd be useful to repair her new base, or even move it if some alien dug underneath the concrete.

Heh. As if she'd fail to notice if the Antithesis so much as tried.

It had been nice to have backup again. To fight not alone, even if, strictly speaking, she could've taken care of this incursion entirely on her own. She'd gotten to make new acquaintances. 

But she'd also kinda…cracked the foundations of new friendship in her clumsiness, if she was entirely honest with herself. She wasn't sure if the reparations she'd tried to pay had helped. The uncertainty…it didn't feel good.

Maybe it'd be alright, some day. They'd been very much enamoured with the prettier, nature-restoring side of her powers, too. Maybe she could offer something nice from her gardens?

…Once she'd fixed those. There was devastation all around her, and it was strangely poetic, wasn't it?

They'd left in good spirits, though. As far as she could tell, it was more that they were looking forward to getting home, and less that they were glad to be away.

That had to count for something.

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