Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Sixteen - Making Lots of Little Problems

“It’s true that the antithesis are essentially plants, without a centralised hive-mind, or even a coherent structure of command. They are true aliens, unlike nearly anything that we’ve ever seen on Earth.

But don’t discount their cunning.”

-Professor Christie, Lecture on the Mysteries of the Antithesis, 2029

***

I lowered my Laser Pointer, placed the red dot in the sight over the model ten, then tapped the trigger to release a trio of rounds with a hush-like whisper and a faint kick to my shoulder.

The water around the aliens splashed up and I stepped back a bit not to get hit by it. The rounds I fired pierced through the water and rammed into the little alien, two of the three finding their mark and ripping it up.

“Okay,” I said. “This is fucky.”

“Is this normal?” Manic asked. She flicked a rock into the hole with the tip of her boot. It splashed next to the corpse which gently floated up and away from the root.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I admitted. This was very strange. The root seemed to go on for a while. In fact... I knelt down and lowered myself over the hole, following the path bored into the ground. I couldn’t see far, not with the lighting being as poor as it was and with my vision obscured by murky water, but it was pretty obvious that the tunnel went on for quite a ways. Onwards, and deeper too. “Myalis, what am I looking at?”

It looks like an artery root from an antithesis hive. They are frequently grown along tunnels dug out by model eights and, of course, guarded by model tens. These will frequently link two sections of a hive together.

“There’s an entire heap of bad implications there,” I muttered as I stood back up. “We’re going to need to call Gomorrah about this.”

“I want to know where the root’s leading to,” Manic said.

“Trouble,” I answered.

She scoffed, but didn’t press. I think we both knew I was right. Now, that begged the question, why was there a root like this underground? Or... no, that was a stupid question. Higher-tier samurai than me had been smashing hives all over. This one was probably a lot harder to discover, hidden as it was underground and under a layer of water. It was beneath the city, too. I bet a cursory glance would just suggest that it was some piping or something normal instead of a giant alien problem.

I rang up Gomorrah, and she picked up within a few seconds. She was breathing hard on the other end of the line. “Hey,” I said.

“Hello,” she replied. “What is it?”

“Nothing super urgent, are you alright on your end?” I asked. She was breathing pretty hard. Was she in a running fight?

“Just burning some xenos,” she said.

Ah. Well. That explained the heavy breathing then. I wasn’t sure if Franny was a lucky girl or not. “Okay then. You find the hive?”

“No, actually. Atyacus pointed us to a place but there was nothing there. It was strange. My IR systems said the place was hot too, but nothing.”

“Did you check underground?” I asked.

“No? There was a parking garage, but nothing in it.”

I looked down the hole again. “Yeah, well, we found something neat over here. I’m with Manic, and while sniffing around we found this fuck-huge hole with a large root in it and a model ten. No signs of a proper hive, just a recently bored hole and the root. Myalis says it might be like, a connection between two hive parts.”

“Huh,” Gomorrah said. “And we were right on top of it? That might explain why these model threes ran to our position, actually. I thought it was strange.”

“A lot of them?”

“No, just a few,” she said.

I looked at the root. It was about as big around as my torso, with gnarled skin and what looked like veins across its surface. “Yeah, no, something’s fucky. This root here looks chunky enough. However much resources the hive put into growing this could have made a hundred model threes, I bet.”

Gomorrah was quiet for a moment. “That’s the last of the easy ones here. And it doesn’t look like there’s anything else. I think you might be right. Did you want to hit the hive from your end and we’ll find out what we can here?”

I considered what to do for a moment. “Actually, I think I want more information first. Might just scout the root network out and then go from there. Can you hold off on burninating things for a little bit?”

“I’ve had my fill for the moment, though it wasn’t quite as satisfying as I would have wished.”

“That’s nice. Manic and I will check things out. You cool down for a bit,” I said before cutting out. I stretched my back until my spine popped, then gestured to the hole. “Okay. So we either buy scuba gear and go down there, hope we don’t run out of air or get ambushed underwater, or worse, get stuck, or, and bear with me here, we toss in something AI-controlled and let that figure out where the root leads.”

Manic chuckled darkly. “You’re really living up to the cat stereotype if you’re worried about getting wet.”

“I prefer getting wet under the right circumstances, and this ain’t it,” I shot back.

“You’re a real freak, huh?”

I nodded. I was proud of it too. “Alright, Myalis, I need something small that can swim through that crap and figure out what’s what.”

I can offer a pair of small semi-autonomous drones for twenty points each. Or, if you want something a little more versatile, stealth drones for a hundred points apiece. They’re armed with a self-destruct mechanism and a number of stealth capabilities.

Stealth would be preferable. We didn’t know what we’d be running into down there, and I’d rather it not know that we were around until we chose to let it know.

I ordered up two drones, and they appeared in a set of boxes next to me. I pulled the top off one of them, revealing that I should have asked Myalis to be a little more specific.

When she’d said stealth drones, I had a mental image of a small thing that hovered invisibly, maybe covered in cameras or something. What I found was a small robotic cat wearing a tiny set of scuba gear. I reached in, plucking the cat out by the nape of its neck. It weighed no more than a real cat, but looked to be cold to the touch.

“What?” Manic asked.

“No,” I replied, even if it didn’t make much sense. Then I flicked the cat into the hole where it landed with a splash and sank right down. The second drone joined it a moment later, and I kicked the boxes out of the way.

Myalis opened a pair of screens over my augmented eye’s vision, one from each of the cat drones. So far, there wasn’t much to look at but light-corrected footage of two dark tunnels.

“Are you getting that?” I asked Manic.

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” she said. “Not much to see so far.”

“Let them swim out for a bit,” I suggested. I imagined that whatever these hives were hiding it wouldn’t be sitting just a few metres away.

One of the cats reached a fork in the tunnel and I cursed. The root split two ways, one was clearly larger than the other though. That was bad news in any case. The antithesis had to have a whole network of these things.

Myalis directed the cat to follow the thicker root, and I watched with growing anxiety as it continued to swim along next to more and more offshoots and side tunnels. At one point the drone stopped as a pair of model tens scampered by, seemingly unbothered by the water around them.

The roots eventually turned downwards, and I tightened my fists as I watched them lead into a much larger space. An underground cavern of sorts, with large sections dug out from the walls and the ground. Model eights, the big worm-like ones, were hard at work enlarging the space.

They weren’t the only aliens around. The roots covered nearly every surface, and there were hundreds of pods lumped together like grapes on a massive stem, each with an unborn alien within.

Those didn’t concern me as much as the really large, really disturbing pods taking up the centre of the room, each one as large as a semi-trailer.

“That’s going to be a problem,” I said.

Then the other cat reached a second chamber, and I closed my eyes. There were more than one of them.

We were sitting on top of a massive hive, one filled with every sort of antithesis in the books, and I was willing to bet they were just looking for an excuse to pop up and make my life complicated.

***

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