Chapter Sixty-Four

I mean... I put art at the start of all the Black Apron chapters, and folks seem to like it?

***

Shy flew into the garage moving so quickly that she almost scraped the ceiling as her car spun and came in for a rough landing. She was out in a moment, running towards the Bastion with a duffel bag in toe and half of her gear on.

“Push the red button next to the door once you’re in,” I called out as I shifted into my seat.

I’d spent the five minutes waiting for Shy to arrive, sending a few texts. I hadn’t gotten any real replies yet, but I was hoping that some people would reply. I had sent out pings to damn near everyone I knew personally. Gros Baton, Grasshopper, Emoscythe, Crackshot Cowboy, and even some I didn’t know quite as well, Jolly Monarch and the other Family samurai.

It was a simple text, basically just say ‘hey, we could use a hand over here before things go crazy.’

I even, reluctantly, sent a text to Deus Ex. 

She was, unfortunately, the only one to reply. 

Deus Ex Foxtrot: We will look into it.

That was all I got out of her, but that was something. 

Shy entered the Bastion and soon the rear doors were closing. “Ah, I’m in,” Shy said.

“Okay. grab onto something,” I called back before flipping a few switches. The engines whined and with a blast of loose dust, we were hovering out of the garage and then climbing into the night. I flicked on all of the exterior lights and announced my intention not to get out of anyone’s way to air-traffic control. 

The flight over was long enough to fret, which was frustrating, because I could have used it to sleep if I wasn’t so wired up already. An extra half-hour nap might have been helpful in the long run, but it wasn’t to be. Instead I set the ship to autopilot and squeezed my way to the back.

Shy had finished changing into her full suit. I think there was some new gear there? The guns linked to her armour under the poncho looked a little different and I think she had new armour over her elbows and knees, with little thrusters built in.

I didn’t ask. Instead I moved over to the BOBCAT and looked the mech over. I hadn’t used it much yet, but if I was going to be in it this morning I still wanted to make sure it was in decent shape. That meant taking some time to refill the munitions and checking on the two Compact Autonomous Technicians running around.

I watched as one of them shot by, a wrench in its little mouth before it leapt-up, catlike, onto the back of the mech and fit the head into place and used its entire body to pull in back and forth, undoing a bolt.

Yeah, nah, this was Myalis’ fault. I wasn’t going to comment on it as long as it worked, that would just give her ammunition to pull off this kind of thing more often.

Plus... Lucy would find them cute.

I didn’t get very much done, but it was good to keep my hands busy. A tone went off and I ran back to the cockpit. Quebec was coming in over the horizon, a shiny city, filled with towers lit up from within and walls covered in floodlights. And smoke. A disconcerting amount of smoke, especially on the more northerly side of the city.

“Fuck,” I muttered as I took the stick and flicked off the autopilot. I decided to circle around, but stay within the walls, basically keeping to above the level where flying traffic usually held.

I split my attention on what I could see below. The city was... in a shape. Even a cursory look showed roads with burning cars and a few buildings had fires raging on some of their lower floors. 

Firetrucks were out in force, and the police, but there was also a massive crowd still lingering

I was torn out of my inspection when a proximity alarm went off. “Fuck!” I shifted us to the side with a jerk, then reached out and turned on all of the point-defence guns.

Almost immediately, the machineguns dotted around the Bastion shifted, then started firing, spraying tracer fire in three directions at once and lighting up darkened shapes that bended in almost perfectly with the gloomy night sky.

Model Elevens. They had wingspans like semi-trailers and enough mass to be a problem, though the Bastion flew right through a swarm of them without too much trouble, and in out passing we left a half-dozen of them plugged full of holes.

Some wheeled around with surprising grace and started to fly after us, but I had a rear-facing gun for a reason. Sporadic machine gun fire took another out, sending it spiraling down below, then I dipped, angling us down and into a rapid swoop, trading energy for speed, and with the mass we had to play with, that was a lot. 

I levelled off near that tower that Libre used. It was still one of the main army hubs, and I could tell from the hastily-raised fences all around and the swarm of tanks and APCs that it was very much still being used as a staging ground.

People were up and about. There was no fucking around at this time. 

As we came down, some AA spun up on the ground and sprayed upwards, criss-crossing lines of fire painting yelling flicks across the sky that sometimes intersected and mulched an alien. Then a couple of rapid little missiles zipped out and tagged  the furthest of the Model Elevens, blowing them out of the air.

So, we have functional anti-air. That was great.

There were also aliens within the city’s airspace, which was very very much the opposite of great. 

I brought us in for a landing in a large, cleared area, guided down by a few soldiers wearing hi-vis vests and carrying light-up batons. I didn’t want to squish anyone on the way down, so I appreciated the help. Especially seeing as the space was damned busy. 

The Antithesis had truly kicked the hornet’s nest. 

But... maybe they’d gotten ahead as well. The wall just to the north and slight west of where this base was had long pillars of smoke crawling out of it and climbing into the night. I saw several mobile AA platforms on fire as well, and with more fires in the city, I had to wonder if the fire department would be overwhelmed. 

“We’re on the ground,” I said as I unbuckled myself. Shy was already pressing the button to open the door, but as soon as she noticed that there was someone on the other side, several somones, actually, she dipped to the side and literally disappeared.

Rolling my eye--and keeping the newer one fixed ahead--I walked across the back of the Bastion and then checked the group out. Soldiers, with one of them in a nicer uniform with more tinsel then the rest. 

“Ma’am!” the officer said with a quick, efficient salute. “Glad to see you here.”

“Hey,” I said. “You are?”

“Lieutenant Pewter, ma’am,” he said.

“Where’s Juno?”

“Busy.”

Fair enough. “Okay. What’s the situation? I just woke up under an hour ago and I’m still out of it. I looked over some reports, but it feels like shit hit that fan, so filling out reports isn’t anyone’s priority.”

“That’s an accurate assessment, ma’am,” Pewter said. “At twenty-two hundred hours, our advanced scouting units noticed and reported a large Antithesis advance. By twenty-three hundred hours our AA was being overwhelmed and the northern wall was being heavily contested. We’ve gotten three dozen reported breaches so far, and we suspect that there are a lot more. The skies are contested, and we have fires in the city.”

“Got it,” I said before I reached up and rubbed my face. “Any good news to go with that?”

“Uh... you’ve arrived,” he said. “That might help morale.”

“Wouldn’t want the troops to be depressed while being turned into plant-chow,” I muttered. “Okay. Shit’s fucked, got it. Did Juno have a place for me to be?”

“No ma’am, sorry.”

I grunted. “And where’re the others? Hedgehog, Gomorroah, Princess and her sister?”

He swallowed. “Samurai Hedgehog is at the wall. Samurai Gomorrah and Crisis Mode are in the command area. Samurai Princess and Knight are on the edge of the city.”

“No one’s hurt?” I asked.

“Not any of the samurai. Not as far as I know.”

I nodded along. Well, that was good. “Let’s clear some space, I’m moving a couple of mechs out of the Bastion. We’ll park them here and I’m going to go check on Gom. Unless you need me for something?”

He quickly shook his head. “No ma’am,” he said. “Ah... though, speaking personally, I think we’d all appreciate a save?”

“Yeah yeah, I’ll see what I can do.”

***