[TnL] Chapter 162 – I Am So Very Far From Being Blind

"Hoool' up!" Road Rash exclaims as he grabs the jumpy civilian by his blue collar ruff. "If my memory does not fail me, I may have put a mine around that corner."

– Road Rash, evacuating civilians during the global incursion of 2057

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"I didn't put a bed in 'cause I thought you could suspend a new cocoon from those," Leah said, pointing up and around at a ring of anchoring loops on the ceiling, another a third down the curved walls, and the last one around the edges of the floor. "But, um…I didn't exactly foresee that you'd lose your tail."

She kinda went green there, which wasn't at all what I wanted to see.

I jumped her, throwing my arms around her neck and distracting her with a series of kisses across her face. She stumbled backwards into the wall from my momentum. 

My diversionary tactics proved successful when I finally got her snorting in amusement, so I leaned back and caught her eyes. I wasn't in pain, wasn't suffering fear or stress from the injuries, and I let it show in my smile and open gaze.

"I'll figure something out, Leah. No worries."

She nodded, sheepishly enough to make me laugh, to hook my legs around her waist, and to muss her hair with both hands. When she caught my wrists and gave me an unimpressed eyebrow, I only smiled impishly. Even rumpled, she was a vision of beauty. Enough to make my poet's heart twinge.

Fuck me. Not literally—or at least not at this moment—but holy fuck, I was so fucking gone. I had a feeling there were going to be a lot of silly little poems cheesy enough to make even a composed Leah blush.

For the moment, though, I was satisfied and wanted to get on with things. The weather would break sooner or later, and we had little reason not to be ready when it did. 

I was already feeling a particular kind of itch—the sort that spoke of impending battle.

Leah decided to go and get us some food prepared. I stayed and ordered a cheap-but-comfy mattress from Tynea that fit snugly between a wall and the new piloting pod—an upgraded version of the old pod, big enough that Leah wouldn't need to disengage her prosthetics, and capable of fielding mortars of its own—and called it a day. 

Literally a day; that's how long it would take for my tail to regrow and I'd be able to print a new cocoon. I figured we'd be back to fighting before then, though. We wanted to go home too badly to sit still—point and token farming for Leah's orphanage notwithstanding. At least we could leave the cleanup to Dervish once we were done protecting her little village while she hunted the larger nests across the province.

I ducked into the kitchen, hidden behind the final hatch and large enough to take up all the room the tiny head, one compartment over, didn't. Leah was already there, shoving ingredients into an automated cooking unit. Lots of energy dense stuff full of carbs to stave off exhaustion.

We probably should've gone for a proper nap to recharge, but the nervousness riding me would've made that impossible. It was rubbing off on Leah, too. She was moving quickly, like somebody ticking off items on a list, and I was already going through the specifications of the Implacables to get a better idea of what they were capable of or how I might support them in combat.

Very suddenly, my mind stilled. I couldn't have pointed at anything in particular that tipped me off. Maybe my sensitive antennae picked up on something. Maybe the sensors on our network caught a signal only my subconscious knew to pay attention to.

Whatever it was, it set me off. I moved.

Sonde went hyperactive, trying to see whatever my hind brain had. The cooker-slash-microwave dinged behind me before I'd gone three steps. Leah stopped me at the hatch, grabbed a burrito thing full of thick meat and sauced salad from the machine and shoved it at me. 

I stuffed it down my throat even as I was rushing into the bathing compartment where I'd taken off my gear, earlier. The Chrysaora, standing ready on its skirt of panels, jumped up to hug my hips the moment I stepped into it; its energy streamers released to waft across the floor or spark against the metal armatures. 

I shoved one arm through the tech-jacket of the Auxiliant, and it automatically nestled itself around my shoulders. I was greeted by the weapon platform's humming and hovering half just outside the hatch; the small AI installed in it had decided to assume the more compact Universal Soldier configuration. 

Even as I grabbed it and let the feeding tube snake up my arm to connect to the jacket's material stores and fabricators, I noted that the flying weapon's display had switched back to the battlefield awareness mode from the sniper's ballistics.

It wasn't showing enemy action. Yet.

Nonetheless, the little conveyor quickly filled with general purpose rounds and the gun signaled firing readiness.

Could use a teleportation upgrade instead, I thought. But that'd be an expensive upgrade. A glance at my points counter told me we only had a few thousand at the moment. Another time.

I exited the warstrider already flying and the boarding ramp snapped shut behind me. Within seconds, my jetpack had carried me up onto the Implacable's abdomen.

Its technological antennae waved in the sharp winds, gimbaled banks of recessed mortars pointed high into the darkness, and the 30 mm secondaries still pointed at their last kills from their knee-mounted, armored hardpoints.

The rain continued to fall in dense sheets, too thick for my eyes to penetrate, enhanced as they were to see across a larger spectrum and in low light. So I stilled, crouched low and focused entirely on the sensory stream from my antennae.

Sonde worked through all the data from Leah's network, trying to find anomalies.

A drop of water splattered nine meters to my left. A second one, two meters closer, did too. A third wobbled sideways, just a little out of joint. 

An invisible line was tracing towards my temple.

Faster than conscious thought, my hand flung a familiar canister of neon-bright sticky fluid and I slid down the opposite side of the Implacable, carried tight against its rain-slicked skin by my thrusters.

The invisible line missed me by centimeters, disrupting another two drops just in front of my nose. There was a sheen on it, like from a wet wire reflecting a glint of weak light.

I realized it wasn't my eyes I saw the sheen with. Sonde went into a bit of a tizzy in my head, connecting dots and trying to confirm suspicions.

Then the canister exploded, painting that entire side of the Implacable yellow and orange, along with several meters of straight wire floating in the air. It went right through where my head had been just a heartbeat ago.

Cameras and guns reoriented in the same moment that the wire snapped back into the darkness, twenty, thirty meters away. For just an instant, the luminescent marking fluid revealed a fleshy tube, a trunk, into which the wire was retracting. Teeth scraped the sticky liquid off the wire, but the stained teeth disappeared behind invisible lips. The creature simply vanished, and the hail of bullets trailing the wire hit nothing.

The firing pattern switched to test the area around the partial sighting. Probing fire shattering rock and tree. Nothing.

I slowly climbed back up to my perch and watched as the Sim Cell braced itself against the wind as it spread its great sensor wings.

Where would it strike next?

I'd already dodged once, even against an ambush. The Sim Cell's delicate sensorics were a much easier target. But I was the live one, and I'd reacted much faster than any machine here. I'd think I was the most dangerous thing present.

Is it smart enough to reason?

If it was, and it had come out to fight, then it'd probably be one of the Thirties.

Dangerous.

It might have other means more capable of nailing me. I crouched lower.

Leah finally got in her pod and moments later, the mech moved below me. The tension snapped and my head whipped around, a nasty grin on my face.

There. That fizzle-sheen. My antennae tracked another wire as it shot from the dark. Not aimed for me, this time, it wrapped around the base joint of one of the Sim Cell's sensor wings and tugged hard enough to force the walker to take a step.

Sonde succeeded in isolating the signature and dumped it in the network. The Sim Cell happily crunched the data and narrowed its electromagnetic searching bands for better resolution.

A second and third wire lit up across the sensors, questing for the same wing. They all led back to the same spot in space. The Sim Cell updated the network with its findings, and highlighted a many-legged shape the size of houses in the darkness. It had good stealth, but the rain water interfered just a little bit. Just enough to create very weak electromagnetic emissions.

"Such fine ones," I murmured to myself. So fine it set me on edge, because I'd have never known what to look for exactly even as my subconscious rang the alarm bell. Paranoia-inducing.

"Gotcha," Leah murmured as she commanded every gun to point at the still-invisible thing.

I exploded upwards to get out of the muzzle blasts just as Leah opened up, my mind already occupied with finding other hidden aliens.

They were going to be close. Had to be. 

No way's wire-tongue alone. If it were, it would be much stronger. It's gotta be a distraction.

The Second Wind dinged a warning in my ears. Logistics read it out for me:

– Reaction mass at 50%! –

"Tynea?" I asked through the Quanta, fifty meters up and still climbing. The first half had lasted me a long while, but I didn't have my parachute in this weather. That would hurt efficiency.

"You'll be fine for some minutes."

Another four wires entangled the Sim Cell's wing despite the gunfire smashing into the indistinct monster. Sudden lightning strikes thundered down the wires and ran bright tongues across the wing's fine mesh, melting huge holes into it. Flashboiled water exploded outward and instant condensation mugged me as it rose.

I escaped the new cloud quickly, but by the time I did, the wing was already nothing but a slagged mess. Cut wires—intact and in good condition—draped from the destroyed device. The alien had preferred stealth over recovering the reusable metallics.

Shit. 

It was a smart one. It had instantly deduced that those wings might see it easier than I could, so it had preferred taking out my support instead of taking an uncertain shot at me. I'd bet anything it would attack the other wing next, but Leah had already undeployed it and moved the Sim Cell into the shadow of her other machines.

Joke's on you. I am so very far from blind. I nudged Sonde to try and help me use my antennae better, to see if I could do what the Sim Cell's could even if mine had a much smaller surface area.

Leah had placed her mechs such that there was only one direction the second wing could be easily attacked from. Would it risk it? It will, won't it? It did weather the volley just fine.

Leah was already loading a variety of armor piercing rounds. High-explosive ones, kinetic ones, and—borrowing from my own Class II ammunition catalog—she'd even ordered an expensive, long-range reload of a pair of sneaky Sol rounds into the quasi-recoilless rifles of her old piloting pod, which was just waiting to drop from Daddy-Long-Leg's belly.

I let myself fall on the opposite side of Leah's impromptu fortress, away from where I suspected the alien was waiting. The Second Wind needed a moment to consume some of the reaction mass to recharge its capacitors, and I would hate getting caught half lame.

Wonder how my wings will deal with weather like this? The sun had to be coming up, but it didn't make much of a difference. Gloomy weather stayed gloomy. This is insane. Dervish has gotta be done soon.

Planes and turbines actually did better with a bit of water in the air. Gave them more mass to push against. I thought the propulsion type I was going for might do better, too, unless the size difference broke the math.

Myself aside, nothing moved. The alien was biding its time. Waiting for friends, maybe?

The Second Wind had finished converting its fuel and I jumped back onto Leah's Implacable. 

Build a pattern. This is the mech I like to land on. I can be relied on to move to this one.

Right up until breaking the pattern would net me a kill. Heh.

My girlfriend sat very tense in her pod, but it wasn't the anxious kind of tense. She seemed to do a lot better with so much armor around her, and somehow, she trusted I knew what I was doing enough not to freak out about me being out in the open.

I didn't know why. But I was glad for it. 

Another little puzzle. I smiled.

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