Stray Cat Strut - Volume Nine - Chapter Fifteen  (Patreon)

Chapter Fifteen 

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What in the fuck was I supposed to do about this moron?

A big part of me wanted to walk over and punch him in the teeth, then demand more explaining, but like... okay, sure, his dumb choices had probably led a few militia folk to die, but I’d made the conscious choice to stay in my warm bed at home instead of go out and save some small village somewhere... just about every day since I’d become a samurai. 

If we counted inaction or stupidity as a valid excuse for teeth punching, then I’d be in dire need of a dentist. 

“Hey, Crisis,” I said, keeping my voice low. It still carried in the empty room, but whatever. “In your opinion, has he been doing an alright job?”

Crisis Mode stood straighter, and I noticed her hands both reached up to fiddle with the little medic pouches on her suit. “Um,” she began.

“Am I being judged now?” Libre asked. He wiped his face clean, then stood there with a rather grim look on his face. 

“A little, yeah,” I admitted. “Sorry, buddy, but it sounds like you kind of went off the deep end.”

His jaw worked, but he didn’t say anything for a moment, then he nodded slightly. “My actions may, I suppose, be read in an uncharitable light. But I’d like to point out that while I was and still am on a quest for revenge, I still did my best with regards to the overall tactical position of the forces at my disposal. We have managed to keep the Antithesis from breaching the walls for well over a week with little to no outside support. And... I haven’t yet elaborated on the overall political situation.”

“Political situation?” Gomorrah asked.

“Sec,” I said. “Crisi?” I really wanted to hear what she had to say. 

Crisis Mode licked her lips, then sighed. “He’s a dick.” Libre flinched at the pronouncement. “But I don’t think he did that badly? He’s right that we didn’t have much. And his choices and orders weren’t all bad. Actually, no, they were usually really good. He’d have us bombard an area that they were tunneling through, or put up defences just before they attacked, or move a lot of people to a new part of the wall just before a push. It’s like he always knows what the Antithesis are about to do before they do it, and then puts people in place so that they’re, uh, in place.”

So he was as decent as he said? Or could come up with a competent plan or two. There had to be protocols for a siege against the Antithesis, right? Maybe I could give Professor Rogers a poke about it?

Still, what mattered more was that Crisis Mode wasn’t pissed off enough at the guy to pull a gun. That was a pretty good sign, probably.

“Great, you managed to be competent enough not to make enemies,” Hedgehog said. From the low, simmering scowl he wore, he wasn’t pleased with Libre either. “Let’s skip back to the important parts. Do you have a plan for the next few days, the next week? The number of enemies won’t go down because of wishful thinking.”

Libre nodded, then reset the hologram tank to a view of the city and its surroundings. He started to explain things, both with gestures and with glowing markers on the map beneath his feet. Known hive and nest locations, places where the Antithesis had been storing food, places where larger numbers of them were resting. 

He had a damned goldmine of intel. Sometimes it was down to the individual number of aliens in any given spot, often he had drawn out the probable locations of communication lines between different sections of the hive.

If I didn’t come in thinking he was a bit of an ass already, I might have been impressed... no, that wasn’t fair to him, I was a little impressed.

His strategy so far was mostly reliant on small long-range strikes against key Antithesis positions. Sometimes to blow them up, but more often than not to draw them out. 

By more or less cutting off the ways the Antithesis communicated with itself and by poking them in the face here and there with artillery strikes and drones and sometimes sending out troops outside of the walls, he was able to basically keep the aliens coming, but in smaller, more controlled numbers from predictable directions.

It was kind of genius, even if it was simple on the surface. In practice, he had to keep a lot of moving parts going at the same time.

With us here, that would change, of course.

Juno’s people would bring a lot of firepower and a lot of flexibility, plus we now had a good reason to ask for reinforcements.

Then there was me and the others, Gomorrah, Hedgehog, Shy and Princess. That was a fair amount of samurai firepower. 

Libre had been holding on through a siege with a long-term plan that mostly relied on... kind of awful gear and underwhelming personnel, but it was working so far.

Until it wouldn’t.

“I predict that, given no surprises that aren’t accounted for, this siege will last nine more days,” Libre said.

“And then what, you win?” I asked.

He shook his head. “At which time the walls will be breached and the Antithesis will be in the city in full. I was planning on starting a full evacuation in about five days.”

“We were going to lose?” Crisis Mode asked.

Libre shrugged, then gestured to the river. “They’re burrowing here, and here. Two long tunnels about a metre and a half below the river floor, heading towards the wall. Another group is pushing from here, a tunnel underground but not under the river. This one will reach the wall in a week. And there have been fewer flying models. If the Antithesis hold to previous patterns seen on other worlds, that means that they’re amassing a larger force for a strong aerial assault. I predict several tens of thousands of model ones with a couple of hundred model elevens, and some other flying support.”

Damn.

“Five days is long enough to put a dent in them,” I said.

“Certainly. The thing with the Antithesis is that they’re generally ruled by their stomachs. Given time, they become more efficient at harvesting. They’ll grow out their own means of collecting energy from the sun and geothermals and running water. They’ll scrub the environment for nutrients and they can farm. If you leave them entirely alone, they’ll only go out to hunt for easy biomass and to eliminate threats. That’s why they’re not constantly trying to scale the wall through nothing but sheer force.”

“You have a plan, I take it?” Gomorrah asked. “Other than surrender and escape?”

“Prepare things so that we stall them as much as possible and cost the Antithesis a maximum amount of biomass for every step they take past the walls,” Libre said. “That’s the best I can do.”

“I still don’t get the lack of calls for reinforcements,” I said. “Or the weird media blackout.”

“Politics,” he said.

Gomorrah crossed her arms, going all stern-nun mode. “That fails to explain things adequately.”

Libre rubbed at his chin, then gestured vaguely to one side. I realized he was motioning towards the city itself. “I need the militia in order to function. And that in turn means the need for a dozen other groups of interest. Quebec is run by a few corporations and perhaps a dozen people, and I don’t have the time to subvert them.”

I blinked. “Have you tried shooting at least one of them on TV?” I asked.

He stared. “No?”

“Might want to get on that, then. People in positions of power want to stay in positions of power, and they’re often pretty scared of being shot in the face. It’s also rather... Gom, what’s the word for when hurting someone makes you feel nice?”

“Cathartic?”

“That’s the one,” I said with a snap. “It’s healing for the soul. Shooting politicians is like... warm soup when it’s cold out.”

“I... had not considered taking violent action in that way,” Libre said. “It would be very destabilizing, and I’m already struggling to handle things without any additional disruptions.”

“Eh, we can take care of it, don’t worry,” I said.

From the look of him, I think he was a little worried.

Well, too bad for him. He might be a cool tactician or whatever, but we weren’t here to play games, we were here to kick up a fuss and blow up problems.

***