Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Fifty - Cat's Scan

"Friendly reminder: Horrors beyond YOUR Comprehension should not impact YOUR Quotas!"

--an AI-generated workplace encouragement poster, 2028

***

"Okay, cool story, I don't give a shit. We're leaving the front."

I continued to keep an eye on the strike group was we continued to move out of the area. The wall was coming up ahead, and just seeing it was lifting a stone off of my back. If we were ambushed here, there would be some fire support from afar. Maybe not enough to stop a strong ambush, but... well, we were getting closer every minute.

Then Libre came on the comms again, the channel turning on with no sound for a long few seconds, then only his breathing. Creepy fuck. "You--" he started, then stopped. I picked up the sound of someone walking in a tight circle, then he returned to the mic. "Understood, Stray Cat. Can I ask that you deploy... some sort of sensor system? I think you used a sensor shell earlier? Something like that would help immensely. Can you spare the points for it?"

"Yeah, sure man," I said. "I'll fire a round to my right, more or less in the direction of the sound?"

"If you could fire two, that would be good. One to the left and one to the right of the origin? If you can spare the points." He sounded like it was taking a lot out of him not to start giving orders again.

Honestly, I still felt like telling him to kiss his own ass, but his request wasn't entirely unreasonable. The sensor shells were expensive, but the data would be valuable. Hell, if they travelled far enough, we could feed it to the army and the artillery crews, and then whatever they had cost would be worth it from the more accurate fire alone.

"Ah, acknowledged, Libre. Give me a second to get the new shells loaded in and turn my turret around. I'll have my mech transmit the data directly to you and to army command."

"Thank you," he replied a few seconds later.

I bought two shells from Myalis without much fuss, turned the MEOW's main gun around ninety-degrees, then up a pinch, and then fired. The next shot came a few seconds later, aimed slightly to the left of the first, and it flew off into the distance as well.

I set the mech to autopilot towards a point in the distance, specifically near the narrow entrance into the wall. I was going to be the last one in regardless, so if I had to wait, I might as well do so while looking at what the sensor shells picked up along the way.

At first, it was a bit of a mess, then the mecha's computer came in clutch and sorted the scans, overlaying them together to form a more coherent picture. The central part, where both shots overlapped, looked pretty good compared to the slightly grainy edges.

The result was an expanding pair of cones with a venn-diagram-like overlap in the middle. The scan penetrated the ground a few feet, but mostly that was to show some rocks and the occasional root or animal burrow.

With the angle I fired them at, the shells travelled a damned long ways. They ended up crashing into the ground a few kilometres away, well past the main body of the enemy force.

I toggled an option that highlighted all suspected Antithesis in red.

Near where we were, along the edges of the river, were a few Antithesis. Mostly model threes, a few bigger ones, but nothing past the single-digits. Scouts, probably, or units that got lost on the way to the main battlefield, maybe?

As the shell continued and the range expanded with their growing height, I saw the entire battlefield grow beneath. The sensor's edges tickled the walls and the field of literal fire that someone (definitely Gom) had put down. The fire was arranged in fat, lateral bars, with space between them.

At first I wondered why, but then I saw how the Antithesis were moving around the fire, and I got it. She had created a bunch of funnels. Areas the aliens were naturally avoiding. It was bunching them up together in larger clumps, and larger clumps meant that it was probably a whole lot easier

I continued to scan through the image until I had the full picture. It was... less bad than I had expected, honestly.

There were a lot of aliens running about, but they were spread out pretty far except for some larger pockets. For the most part, it was single-digit models, with a few in the teens here and there for spice.

I expected ten times as many. We didn't need this many samurai defending against this number of Antithesis. One to three could handle them given some time to set up, and maybe that was why the numbers were so thin.

Or maybe there was some other shit going on that I wasn't privy too? The Antithesis had been acting smarter than I was used to, and that didn't bode well.

"Scan sent," I replied. "Do you see your white whale?"

Hell yeah, a literary reference! Not that I'd ever read Moby Dick, but I'd read a six-page cartoon summary of it once.

"Negative. But that sound was him," Libre said. "I'll ask the army to send a flight of drones out. Thank you for the scan. We'll aim our next volley more carefully to make the hits worthwhile."

"Sure," I replied. "While I have you, do you know what's going on here? The numbers seem low."

Libre took long enough to reply that I'd made it to the wall by then and was waiting for the strike group to slip in one at a time. The Wolverines were narrow enough to go in fast, but the others had to line up with the entrance and were slow to move in.

"I can speculate with a decently high predictive certainty. But that isn't guaranteed certainty."

"Lay it on me, old man," I said.

"I'm... thirty-eight."

"More than twice my age," I said.

"That... may explain some things. Regardless. I think that the current numbers are based on what the Antithesis expect is necessary to keep us busy here. Enough that if our defenses lower, they'll find a way through, but not so much that they're straining their own long-term production."

"What's the goal there?" I asked.

"Likely it's something like preparation for a larger-scale attack. Possibly one we don't expect. The smokescreen attack from earlier was a strategy that they haven't used on Earth in over nine months. I think they're cycling through tricks to see what's more effective against us."

"Stupid," I said.

"How so?" he asked.

"There are a half-dozen Samurai here," I replied. "Like, sure, they'll come up with something, but we'll just have a counter for it."

"True, but I think that Samurai in general are a factor that the Antithesis don't know how to plan around. Switching tactics as they're doing is exceptionally valid when fighting a conventional force with conventional logistics. If the army brings munitions and weapons designed to take out aerial units, but none show up, then those were wasted. If they only bring an answer to ground-based forces and aerial ones appear, then they're in deep trouble. If they find a way to foil our ranged advantage, or fool our artillery, or make up, split our focus... there are any number of ways to make our slower-to-react conventional forces lose the advantages that our modern weapons bring."

Damn, that man liked to yap.

"Got it. They're being little shits and won't just run into our line of fire like they usually do. If we blow the fuck out of this hive, you think that'll reset them?"

Libre took a moment to reply to that. "I don't know. It's possible, but it's also known that the Antithesis have means to communicate information globally."

"What?" I asked. "They're not a fucking hive mind, everyone knows that."

"True. But there have been major losses on other planets which were due to the Antithesis communicating vital information to different pockets across long distances. We know that they can do this via Model One relays, or long trails of interconnected root networks, but they can also transmit information through dense spore packets that are no larger than a mote of dust. Imagine a body where a white blood cell has discovered something and is sending that information to the rest of the body."

"I... need about three years of biology class to really get that, I think, but sure," I said. "Look, long story short, we might be dealing with smarter fucks across the planet?"

"Yes. And I suspect it's due to the Phobos incident. The Antithesis samples that crashed then were different."

Cool, great, it was all--in a roundabout way--my fault for not being better at stopping the aliens from crashing on Earth a while ago. Loved that.

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