"The issues with mechanised walkers, as in, bipedal mechs, is... everything. There is no advantage to any of this. On paper, every aspect of this design is a disaster waiting to happen!"
--Ignored Noeing Engineer Memo, 2048
***
If I wasn't used to dealing with whining children then I might have been a little overwhelmed at the level of brattiness I had to deal with when I returned.
"It's not working," Princess said.
"Well, we haven't exactly tried everything, now have we?" Crackshot shot back.
"This isn't according to protocol. Not that any of you have the faintest clue what that even means," Hedgehog grumped... okay, so it wasn't grumpy, but rather the mature adult man's version of grumpy, which was the same but with a deeper voice.
I blinked at the lot of them, then slowly looked over to where Knight was standing next to Tankette's tank. Neither of them seemed willing to join in on the incessant whining, which was actually kind of nice.
"Alright, fuckwits," I snapped. That calmed them all down, though I think it might have pissed off a couple. "Someone needs to tell me what's going on."
They, of course, all started talking at the same time.
I sighed. "No, no, shut up. Hedgehog, you go first. Gimme a report as if I'm... I dunno, some out of town shareholder."
Hedgehog stood taller at that.
When I'd come over, I'd discovered the newbie squad spread out across a couple of acres. They were bitching over the comms and very clearly not working out what to do next. Princess and Knight were stabbing at the ground on one end, Tankette was parked at the back doing nothing. Crackshot was planting explosives into the ground with a sort of post-digger, and Hedgehog was patrolling the outside area while complaining the hardest.
Nothing practical seemed to be getting done, and it kind of annoyed me. So I had them all gather up in the shadow of that hill we'd fought from earlier, then I got out of my mech so that they could read from my body language. I wanted it to be clear that I wasn't impressed.
"Once you left with Gomorrah, we continued to fight the antithesis until the area was cleared of living examples," Hedgehog began.
"Alright," I said. So far so good.
"Then we couldn't decide on how to get rid of the hive. I suspect we all started to take care of things in our own way," Hedgehog said.
"We were just gonna cut up all of the roots," Princess said.
"And I was planting bombs all over. They're sucky vacuum bombs, they'll rip the area up without tossing too much dust into the air," Crackshot said.
I nodded slowly. "And Hedgehog, you were..."
"Waiting for orders," he said.
How did this wet sock become a samurai? "Tankette?"
The tank's hatch opened up and Tankette slowly poked her head out. "Um, well, I didn't want to argue with the others. I was mostly keeping an eye open for any distant aliens that might be coming around."
I couldn't be angry with her. Tankette's mom aura had a critical advantage bonus here. "Fine," I said. "Princess, cutting things is a good idea. Doing it manually is stupid. We have plebs for manual labour. Or robots. Crackshot, better idea, but again, too slow. Hedgehog... you are the one who gives orders now."
"They didn't seem inclined to listen," he said.
"They're listening to me, and I have no more authority than you do," I said.
The merc opened his mouth, then shut it slowly. I saw him eyeing my mech, and I was sure he was thinking that having that gave me some authority--and he was right--but it was just a big toy that I'd bought that he could buy one of for himself, not an actual sign of any actual authority. "Understood," he said in the end.
"Right, so, Crackshot's idea is the least useless. Get back up on the hill. You still have those mortar launchers?"
Crackshot nodded. "Thought of using them, but I didn't want to accidentally smack someone down here with 'em."
"Fair. Let's move out of here and load them up. We'll vacuum this entire area up and call it a day." It was probably gonna cut their point-earning short, but fuck it, I didn't feel like sitting out here all damned day long.
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The others all seemed either annoyed, or a little humiliated as they climbed back up and around the hill. I actually kind of felt bad for them. Not enough to do anything about it, but like, bad on principle.
"You handled that well," Gomorrah said.
"You do know that I've raised dozens of kids, right?" I asked.
"That's... kind of horrific, actually. Did you ever check up on those children now that some are out of your care? Prisons have visitation rights, no?" Gomorrah asked. She sounded too innocent for a moment there.
"Oh, fuck off. Lucy's connected to all of their socials. I'm pretty sure she's kicking them some credits and shipping leftovers over when no one's looking."
"Truly, the better half," Gomorrah said.
I shook my head at that. Not that she was wrong. "So, vacuum bombs? Think that'll work?"
"It should," Gomorrah said. "I'll salt the land afterwards. I have a few decontamination drones I can buy. They'll hover around and filter out the topsoil and the water. It'll take a few months, but the area will be clean enough by the end."
I scanned the area at a glance. Lots of broken trees and burnt grass and whipped up dirt. "Might be a while before this area's safe. I bet there's a few model threes under all that dirt just playing dead or something."
"Very possible. The army will have to look into it," Gomorrah said. "Our job is to kill the hive. Making sure it stays dead either happens as a consequence of how hard we kill it, or it becomes someone's full-time job, at least for a while."
Made sense to me. We'd probably left a few husks of hives behind us already that needed to be scoured. Someone probably earned a nice hourly income making sure that every last root was burnt to a crisp.
Gomorrah and I made it to the top of the hill where Crackshot was buying up some crates of ammo. "My AI got a grid laid out for us to follow," he said before sending a file out. "Just got to line things up and then we can pull the trigger."
"Oh, can I do it?" Princess asked.
"Yeah, sure thing, kiddo," Crackshot said.
With the mortars loaded up, they started to fire out bombs that rose up, then thumped into the soggy ground. It was nice to see the pattern forming, bombs every two metres or so in a sort of circular spiral pattern.
I sat back and waited while they loaded and fired in sequence. At the same time, I checked the news. There were some hints that the whole Phobos thing was being leaked. Politicians were seen panicking about things, and there were lots of celeb-news channels that were saying that fan-favourites were looking into bunkers all of a sudden.
Some were saying that it was just an after-effect of the whole global incursion, but it felt like more, especially knowing the full story.
Poor fucks thought that bunkers would save them.
"Alrighty! We're done!" Princess said. She raised both hands as if she were the conductor of an orchestra, then paused. "All clear?... Yeah? In that case... ka-boom!"
There was, in fact, a rather nice ka-boom some split second later. The explosions started in the centre of the spiral, then continued outwards. They were rather strange, loud pops that had the air in the area visibly sucking inwards even as dirt was kicked up on the edge. With each subsequent explosion the circle grew and the spiral of missing dirt continued to grow.
Then all was done, there were a few last explosions in some nooks and corners, and a row of them along the shoreline that had the lake's water churning, then it was over.
A few spots revealed some ancient roots from the old trees in the area, liberated at last, and a few spots looked like the sort of roots I'd expect from a hive.
"Nice work," I said. "Now... Gomorrah, what's the next step?"
Gomorrah, who'd relocated to sitting on the hood of the Fury. Looked my way. I could imagine her blinking languidly at my attempt to fling responsibility her way. "The next step is returning to Saint-Jérome. The city will survive without us for a few hours, but it'll be better if we're there."
"Good point," I said. "Back to the city, folks!" I said.
Time to go back and see if the army had managed not to set themselves on fire while we were gone for... what, four hours?
Even odds, I figured.
***