Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Seventy-Six - A Giggle and a Rocket

"The UFO craze started a little before the Cold War took off, and it mostly concentrated around the United States. Unsurprising, as at the time, the US armed forces were testing several devices that seemed alien to the lay person, and rumours of extraterrestrial sightings only masked the presence of these planes and drones.

UFO sighting became a strange hobby for the crackpot and the conspiracy theorist, until the early 2020s, when there was a sudden and powerful resurgence, one that the armies and intelligence networks of the world looked at with growing concern.

Then we met aliens, and they weren't peaceful little green men."

--UAPs and UFOs, the Declassifying, 2035

***

I checked up on the newbies, just to be sure, but they really didn't need the help.

The team had grouped up atop one of the defensive structures around the Big Gun compound and were pretty much just having a blast messing up the antithesis whenever they came into range.

Someone had given Princess a rocket launcher. Gros Baton was helping her load it up between shots, then she'd stand up on the wall and fire it out in the general direction of aliens that needed blowing up. The rocket was guided, which was the only reason it hit anything.

It was a little concerning, hearing her giggle so much between shots. I think she mostly liked the way that the backblast made her poofy princess dress whip out around her.

Hedgehog had picked up some new gear. His spikey armour looked different, more LED lighting, sharper spikes, and Knight was... just kinda chilling with her sword on her lap, waiting for the aliens to get within stabbing range.

Yeah, they didn't need my help, so I pulled back and checked on that Family-curated map of local samurai. It looked like a few of the dots had moved around a little. Some tightening in around cities, some dispersing out and away a little. I bet it was a real pain in the ass to herd this many samurai.

"Hey, Myalis, any areas where shit's going wrong?" I asked. There was a sort of heatmap overlay available, but I couldn't make sense of the lava lamp of colours blobbing around it. There were comments and expert analysis as well, but it was coached in the sort of technical jargon that would take me a while to parse through.

Indeed. This area here, within ten minute's flight of your current location, has been flagged as high-risk.

A widening red circle appeared over the map. North west of the Big Gun's location. Mont-Tremblant? It was a bit past that, actually, but not by too terribly much. The map showed three greyed-out icons. "Why are these greyed out?" I asked. Most of the other samurai icons were bright and easy to spot, except in places like where I stood, where too many of them crowded into one spot and they were all shrunk to fit.

The Family was using some generic icons for a lot of samurai, but some of them, of us, had custom logos. The three in the area looked like... a toe, a knight piece from a chess set, and a red dot with an L in it.

The three Vanguard in this area have failed to report in. Two are confirmed dead.

"What the fuck," I muttered. "Two of the three Gomorrah mentioned as dead are here?"

No. When she spoke earlier, all three of these Vanguard were alive and well.

So, in the space of... what, ten minutes? Three samurai had died. I licked my lips and zoomed in on the map a little. They'd been relatively close to each other, all arrayed out atop the more mountainous range in that area. Probably for good visibility.

"What took them down?" I asked. This could be the aliens, or it could be some corpo fucks that saw and opportunity and jumped on it.

I opened a second, third and fourth screen in my augs and quickly typed in the samurai's names. There was a wiki that kept track of things, pictures, debut dates, armaments, shit like that. At a glance, Cavalier and Track Pad Lad weren't too impressive.

Cavalier was a newer samurai, a guy that started after the global incursion, so on par with the newbies. Track Pad Lad had been around for a couple of years, but his thing was tech stuff. A sort of hacker samurai? His profile showed him very present online, but not so much in any recent incursions.

So not a super strong samurai either.

ToeJam! was different. A tall, gangly looking sort of guy, dressed like a suit from the eighties. Lots of augmentations though, but they were subtle. Dude had been a samurai for a year and a bit, but he was all over the place. Incursions in the states, one in Brazil, one in Columbia. He was pretty popular in his little niche, and seemed like the kind of guy that got into trouble and then exploded himself out of it.

He was the only one not confirmed dead.

There have been few concrete reports. The Family seems curious as well, of course. A squad of elite family troopers are on their way to investigate now.

Myalis highlighted a small trip of moving dots flying across the map from New Montreal. No samurai, so probably just a rapid response team of some sort?

"I'm going to link up with them. Can you let the Family know? If it's corpo fuckery, then we'll blow some heads off. If it's the antithesis... then we'll know when we get closer, I guess." The aliens were rarely anything approaching subtle.

Message sent. It seems like you won't be alone. A Vanguard is heading to investigate as well.

"Who?" I asked.

Myalis zoomed my map out and added a line going from the south of New Montreal out towards Mont-Tremblant. The samurai's icon looked like a little shield thing.

Their name is Invincible.

"Well, that'll help," I muttered.

There wasn't any point in lingering around. The team sent by the Family was halfway there already, and they were moving pretty fast. So I checked the carrier again and took off upwards, then out.

The AA around the Big Gun site hadn't exactly gone quiet, but it was now only taking potshots at a few lingering aliens above. The swarm was spread out, but it looked like we were just dealing with the tail end of it now. Which made the dead samurai all the more suspicious.

We were so close to what I'd call a total victory, so how had these three gone and messed themselves up?

I checked over what I could on the way over. The Family had good records of where alien bits had crashed, because it only made sense to track as much of that as possible. Mont-Tremblant wasn't far, not when you were coming from space and that kind of distance meant nothing, so aliens aiming for the Big Gun who were only a couple of degrees off sometimes veered towards Mont-Tremblant. More veered towards New Montreal, probably because they could see the city from orbit.

In any case, the Family's tracker showed a few coming in close. There was a whole little city up on that hill, with its own defences and such. The samurai there had been taking out fliers that came too low since the sky started to fall.

There were records of aliens tumbling down around the area, and... that's all I really had to work with.

I was sure given a few hours I might be able to figure something out, but I also had a cheat that I could use. "Myalis, do we have any clues as to what actually went down?"

Are you just asking me because you're too lazy to look yourself?

"I'm not," I said indignantly. "I'm asking because you're able to figure this shit out in seconds while it'll take me hours, and we don't have hours before we arrive."

Hmm, I suppose that's fair. Let's see... the distribution of Antithesis in the area matches projections. It's probable that the threat that took out the vanguard in the region was Antithesis borne.

So, another alien fuck. Got it. I could handle that.

I ended up encountering the Family agents halfway. They were riding in a quad-copter. It was an armoured box, with heavy-duty landing gear and a few small turrets mounted to the sides and bottoms of short, stubby winglets. The kind of thing that was probably significantly more expensive on fuel than the average hover car, but it was also armoured and a whole lot faster.

There were three of them, flying in a tight formation, so I moved around and placed myself at the rear of their flying-V and enjoyed the turbulence of their backdraft.

Fortunately, it didn't take long to make it to Mont-Tremblant.

The small mountain-top city wasn't much to look at. A few skyscrapers, some resorts for the rich, and some artificial snow-covered hills for people still into skiing all year round.

There was also a lot of smoke. Craters dotted the area, and several buildings were on fire.

It looked like the local samurai hadn't gone quietly.

That left me with a bad feeling in my gut. Something bad had gone down here while all of our attention was elsewhere, and I was going to have to find out what.

***