Stray Cat Strut - Volume Nine - Interlude - Crisis Mode Two (Patreon)

Interlude - Crisis Mode Two

Libre seemed to think that everything was going well, and Cecilia was very much of the opinion that they were a hair’s breadth away from being chewed on.

“We need more ammo at station six!” she shouted our the constant din of gunfire even as she scampered along the inside of one of their exterior trenches. She turned, then sighed as she saw two militia members stumbling over with a crate of 7.62 between them. They fell, spilling the end of a bullet chain onto the ground, but they were quick to pick it back up... along with some mud and detritus that she was sure was going to clog something up down the line.

The militia was... good, but not ideal. A few of them had some amount of prior training, but the majority of them were either volunteers or people that saw the amount they’d be paid for militia work and jumped on the opportunity for free food, decent pay, and work that they could have pride in.

It meant that some of them were professionals who’d taken the job out of pride and others were people that were living on the streets and didn’t mind trading work for a warm meal and a cot somewhere. The quality varied a lot.

She wondered if Libre was taking that into account in his grand plan. Probably not. Genius the man may be, he had blind spots the size of mega-buildings.

“Injured!” someone called out. “Medic!”

Crisis Mode looked up, head snapping in the direction of the call. Medics were in short supply. Sometimes, she was it. 

The battlefield, such as it was, was according to Libre, a ‘forward low-attraction position.’ She didn’t know what that meant in the grand game of strategy he was playing. In practical terms, it meant that they’d gone out in the middle of the night and had dug out trenches that had been collapsed a week ago with some tractors that had shovels on their backs before they set down mobile defences. 

The goal was something about pulling Antithesis attention in this direction, but only to a certain degree. 

She didn’t get it, exactly. It wasn’t her thing, thinking like the enemy. 

Crisis Mode jumped out of the back of a trench, boots crunching on loose gravel before she ran, back low, bag held at her side. The battlefield, such as it was, was covered in foot-long spikes. They’d rebuffed a lot of spine-slingers a few hours ago, but the aliens had had the time to spray the area with plenty of their natural weapons.

She found the wounded being dragged backwards into one of the connecting trenches. These had tin roofs overhead, with LEDs inside to provide cold white light that was brighter than whatever sunshine they got... actually, they had plenty of light. 

It was a disturbingly pretty day. The sky was a bright, searing blue, the clouds fat and slow and separated by plenty of room. Even the air was crisp, when it didn’t stink of freshly cut grass and gunpowder. 

“Ma’am! You’re here, we have an injured!” someone said.

She could see that. A young man, on the ground, face covered in sweat and teeth grit. She crashed onto her kneepads next to him. “Hold his arms back,” she ordered. 

Once, she’d been polite and nice about this kind of thing. Since, she’d discovered that rude and direct worked a lot better.

Two militia men put their weight into stretching the injured out. She grimaced at what she said. Large wound, entrance at the front, next to the calf, exit out the back. His militia-issued fatigues were blown out. 

Gunshot? “Did he shoot himself?” she asked.

“Accidental discharge,” someone said. “Uh, not his own?”

“Dammit,” she muttered. About one in five of their injuries were stupid things like this.

Her bag was opened, she grabbed a pen-like device and flicked the top off, then she stabbed it into the man’s leg, above the wound. It took all of three seconds for him to slump and start breathing out, much calmer.

“Keep him down,” she warned. Protector painkillers kicked ass. He cold probably run a marathon at the moment. Or hop it? Whatever.

She pulled out bandages, then a small device that she ran over the leg. The feed was the same as an MRIs, fed directly into her augs. She saw bones and veins and meat and muscle, colour-coded for convenience and spun around every which way. 

Gruesome, but no bullet fragments were left, and the wound had somehow passed between his fibular and posterior tibial arteries. Lucky. The healing would suck, but that was a problem for later.

She shoved muscles back into place as best she could, then injuected him with a nanorepair solution. Even as it started to stitch things back together, she cut off the fatigues at the knee with a knife then wrapped the leg in bandages.

Two minutes, maybe three, and she was done and covered in more blood than most people saw in a year. 

“Bring him back to the wall and get him to the med-wing,” she ordered. By then, someone had come over with a hover-stretcher. They loaded him on while the man joked and laughed, a little delirious, but he’d live. 

She took a step back before grabbing the water flask at her hip. It was important to stay hydrated, but she mostly used it to rinse her hands off after tossing the gloves she’d been wearing onto the ground. She hated that latex-y smell that slung to her hands after wearing gloves, but didn’t want to waste points on something as stupid as disposable gloves. 

“How’s the situation overall, Crylin?”

Moderate. Within expectations. Libre has put out a bulletin warning of an incoming surge of Antithesis within the next ten to twenty minutes. He suggested a type B approach.

In his lingo, that meant that they were to hunker down and draw the fight out for as long as possible, never pushing into the enemy and instead hanging back and only attacking as they came.

She looked up as artillery whistled overhead and crashed into the fields a couple of kilometres away. So, they’d spotted another approaching wave? Libre was right, again.

That kind of frustrated her, but... yeah, she needed him to be right, sometimes.

Running back to the trench, she slowly moved her head up over the edge, then cursed. The artillery was doing something, sure, but it was never enough.

Quebec had plenty of batteries, but they rarely, if ever, used them all. And they never touched the ground-to-ground missiles either. Libre was saving them for some reason that she couldn’t fathom, and he didn’t want to spook the city by having it seem like they needed every gun blasting all at once.

She switched her medic bag around, then brought her rifle up on its sling and checked it over real quick while walking over to a brace in the wall where she could shoot from. People moved out of her way. She was obvious in her mostly-white armour, which was nice, it gave her a bit of respect, and some room to maneuver on the battlefield.

She took up a spot, then aimed downsights. There was crawling out in the woods, greenish and brown figures leaping over fallen trees and scaling abandoned barricades.

One of the machine guns down the line opened up, then another. Soon tracer-fire was painting lines across the air towards the incoming wave.

An antithesis jumped out and practically sat in her crosshair for her. She squeezed the trigger, and a tight burst rumbled into her shoulder. The beast went down, and her heartrate barely shifted.

That’s how it was for the next twenty minutes or so. The only appreciable pause was to pull back and reload, or check in on the situation overall. 

Then someone called out for help, and she was off, running along the trenches again. “When we get a proper break, I need to up-gear,” she said.

Noted! You are sitting on a nice stockpile of points now.

“No point in wasting them,” she muttered. 

One of the machine gun nests had been hit by Antithesis artillery. One of those exploding spine balls. Three men down, one dead, the other two run through by a few spines. She focused on the living, but cursed internally the entire time. 

There were model fifteens close enough to hit the trenches? They needed to take those down, fast, before they covered the trenches in spines. But... where was the artillery? 

She tapped the side of her helmet. “Wall, this is Crisis Mode, where is my god-damned artillery?"

There was a second’s pause before a reply came through. “Ma’am, Libre’s orders,” someone said.

Was he trying to get them all killed? “Why?”

“We have aerial incoming, ma’am.”

What?

And then she heard it. At first she thought it might be some music from one of the militia, they sometimes made the mistake of playing music from old smart phones, but this was growing louder. 

Very loud, in fact.

And then she heard the hissing passage of a dozen rockets overhead, followed soon after by the blaring sounds of Wagner’s Ride of Valkyries.

A huge ship hummed by, wind blasting down from it. It had a dozen guns on its belly and sides that were roaring as they spat lines of tracer fire into the woods ahead. More rockets followed, and she felt the ground skip underfoot as they exploded out in the distance. 

“Oh,” she said. 

They were here.

***