--Green Pax Executive during an interview 2049
***
I switched back to the half-empty magazine of Hyper Compression rounds, and watched the two large models with their struggles. A scan of the horizon and a check with Tara showed that these were the last capital class in the area.
All the M-5 turned on their airborne ally, and soon the needles had ripped large holes in its wings. I held back my fire on the Fives since they were helping kill the bigger aliens for now. The Twelve crashed to the ground and was swarmed by more of the small fry, making quick work of the larger beast. On the other side, the rampaging M-14 had triggered a response from the other aliens, who turned on the large alien in self-defense.
[“There’s something really wrong about that,”] Ginny said.
[“I thought it fitting to turn them against themselves.”] Corie said, and her neo-evil laugh filled the conference. [“Meheheah.”]
[“Are you sure you’re not evil?”] Kaitlyn asked.
[“I’ve never denied the possibility.”]
[“I hate to seem mercenary,”] I cut in, [“but I am here to make points. Will I get any credit for these kills?”]
[“The antithesis become your agents when influenced this way. You’ll get full credit for both of them and most of the points from whatever the Model Fourteen takes out. Otherwise they would be a net negative.”]
[“I imagine those are expensive rounds?”] Ginny asked.
[“Very,”] My AI, as usual, dodged the question when talking points with my non-Samurai friends.
--A full mag of Rampage, ten shots, is a hundred and fifty points. Kill Me is cheaper at one hundred points for twelve shots.
[“It’s good crowd control, though,”] Tara said. [“An area effect of that would tie up a lot of Anti’s, leaving you time, or could spread out an incoming horde.”]
The last capital class alien, the rampaging Fourteen, had regained its senses and was no longer attacking the small fry around it. Said small fry, however, continued to attack the M-14 who was coated in the blood, and thus pheromones, of dead antithesis. This marked the large alien an enemy of the hive and a valid target. But the smaller aliens couldn’t penetrate its heavy armor. The fray slowly moved closer as the M-14 pushed towards us step by step.
The melees around the Fourteen and Twelve only made up a small part of the swarm, however, and the rest continued to rush the line of troopers. I used the last of the Hyper Compression rounds on any clumps of Fives that formed. When that emptied out, I switched back to the used mag of High Explosive. I spread my fire between taking shots at the M-14 to break open its armor and clearing out any M-6’s remaining. A rocket flew out from down the line, impacting the M-14 in a spot that I’d weakened, and the large alien crumpled to the ground and soon stopped moving.
Between myself and the company’s sharpshooters, we’d exterminated the Fives, and the remaining Fours had learned not to become vulnerable by climbing the walls. Eventually, the captain called for a rolling wave of frag grenades, clearing out the last of the small fry in the quarry. A few more shots rang out before silence fell at the captain’s command.
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The troopers organized into teams for cleanup operations. Here and there, a shot would ring out when a trooper found a disabled antithesis that had refused to die. I stayed at the top of the quarry and watched while the troopers approached one of the large centipedal corpses, the first that I’d killed.
A thought teased at the edge of my mind, but no matter how I pushed it, it wouldn’t form. The feeling annoyed me and wouldn’t let me go, like having a word caught on the tip of my tongue. Something felt off with the body, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
--Yes. You can see that in the infrared; they’ll be cooling.
With night starting to fall, several of the troopers had broken out flashlights to aid in their checks. One of them flashed over the M-14’s corpse and leaned over to check under the loosened carapace. I set my visor to thermal and scanned the troubling model again. A number of hot spots ran down each side of the body that was otherwise cooling down. Worried, I checked the other M-14s. The one that had been coming up the flank had the same strange hotspots, but the last one was cooling much more evenly. Alarms started going off inside my head.
“Captain,” I said in the leadership channel, interrupting some report on supply. “The troopers checking out the Model Fourteens should be careful. There’s live antithesis still inside two of them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They never unloaded the models they carried. While the transport is dead, there’s hotspots along the sides in infrared. Sometimes the passengers can force their way out long after the carrier has died.”
“Decurion, pull those men back. Xenovir, can you see to their disposal?”
“I’m on it,” I replied.
--Your Longknives should be able to pierce the carapace and can be used to deliver the same corrosive you used on the Model Twelve.
--No, the metal is hardened against that. Some of the more esoteric models have a highly reactive blood analog.
“While I’m thinking of it, Captain, I’ll buy some foggers to clean up the antithesis bodies so your troops can save on the little pills.”
“That would be appreciated. For a large battle like this, I’d drop a KU109 drone to do the cleanup. Probably will anyway since it will allow remote monitoring in case of a flare-up later on.”
I spent the next hour working my way along each of the M-14s, stopping at each hotspot, poking a small hole into it, and squirting in a little corrosive. The butchery was boring. Move three steps, stab, add corrosive, rinse, and repeat. I amused myself by answering questions Kaitlyn passed on from my viewers.
Eventually, the cleanup was complete. Two stronger foggers spread their enzyme over the battlefield, and we all walked down the road to the west a little. While I had been injecting aliens and deflecting too personal questions, Tara had taken both Albatross in search of the main antithesis force. It wasn’t hard to find, having stopped in the middle of the town, less than a kilometer north of where we’d originally been assigned to defend.
Antithesis often slowed down at night, if not going fully somnolent, due to their plant heritage and the need for a chlorophyll-related reaction as an energy base. They could be roused, but only as a response to an attack, and almost never started any aggression during the night. In the videos from one drone, I noted some unusual activity on the hills opposite the gap, where a large group of antithesis were still active.
Captain Carlson stared at the MRE in his hands while I walked up and sat next to him. I peeked over his shoulder and read the label: spaghetti with meat sauce. “Vegan?” I asked.
"My grandma's Italian. And it's a common and very typical MRE." He shook his head mournfully.
I handed him a steaming hot plate of spaghetti, complete with utensils. “Be warned, you may never look at Grandma’s the same,” I said as I pulled a second plate out of the air and started in on my own dinner. “How are you equipped for night vision?”
The man actually looked back and forth between the two meals before dropping the ration back into his bag and digging in. “Mmmm, that is good,” he said and took a minute to savor the taste before answering. “Not good. A couple in each squad, for the marksmen. And four or five more we rotate around for night watch. One or two may have their own personal ones. We’re sent against antithesis most of the time, so night missions aren’t common. Why?”
I shared with him the video from the Albatross. “What do you make of this?”
“That’s weird. Where is that? And is it…can I send this on to higher?”