"The Trees are coming! Oh god, the trees are coming!"
--Overheard from a Soldier of the 45th Heavy Battalion, 2048
***
Things were going fine, and it was making me nervous as fuck.
The wall was properly defended now, there were tanks sitting on the outer side blowing up anything that showed up, we had mortars being installed and pre-fabs coming in from behind. I even checked the reports to see if there was something going wrong somewhere.
The worst I found was one report about a common side arm having ammo that wouldn't work half the time, and a second report about a logistics train being ambushed in the city. But it was defended, so the ambusher was mowed down in short order. More teams were being sent back to comb through every building to look for stray aliens to shoot.
I almost jumped when Gomorrah called me. "We have a problem," she said.
"Oh, thank fuck."
"Pardon?" she asked. "Are you... happy that we have a problem?"
I nodded, even if she couldn't see me. "You wouldn't believe how happy I am. I was getting real worried there. What's the problem, and is it the sort that can be blown up?"
"... Yes Cat, it's the kind of problem that you can blow up. Can you meet me at the front? There's a FOB over by the edge of highway 117. Princess and Hedgehog are here as well as Tankette."
"Alright, I'm on my way. See you in five," I said.
"See you in ten," she agreed before cutting the line.
I rolled my eyes. Just because I've been consistently late in the past didn't mean that I was going to be late again today. I found Crackshot chatting it up with a few soldier types while wiping a cloth over the barrel of his gun. A tap on his shoulder and a point out ahead was enough to get him to follow. Knight was hanging out by the edge of the wall, her back pressed up against one of its pillars and the visor of her helmet raised so that she could stare at... a physical phone.
"Is that a smartphone?" I asked as I got closer.
She looked up and nodded before tucking the phone away in a belt pocket. "It is. My dad... kind of insisted that I learn how to use one."
Weird, but whatever. Rich people would want rich people toys, I supposed. They'd gone out of fashion some thirty years ago, but I supposed that fashion stalled a lot for the upper crust. "Alright. Gomorrah said there was trouble, so we're going to go find it and blow it up, wanna come?"
"Uh, sure," Knight said. She stood up, and then followed as I made my way out.
It was kind of strange to step out past the walls. The space within was all city. Sure, it was some shithole little city, barely worthy of the name and it probably didn't even have a seven-figure population, but it was still urban. The space right outside the walls very much wasn't. It was open, cleared fields for about half a kilometre, then scraggly woodlands that no one seemed to care about clearing.
The tanks of the Twenty-Second were spread out across the space, each one with a dozen metres between it and its neighbour. There were two companies of heavy armour in that battalion, that was twenty-eight tanks in all, plus the same number again of lighter armour. That made for a pretty long line of heavily armoured fuck off.
Any aliens coming in from the north were going to be running into a rude surprise. And that wasn't including all of the infantry sitting around, or the APCs and lighter transports that still had guns strapped on because fuck it, why not?
All that to say that I was feeling pretty confident when I walked up to the middle of highway 117 where someone had set up a massive unfolding pavilion tent. I supposed that the mobile bases were still at the other end of the city right now, so we'd have to handle things without that convenience.
Gomorrah's Fury and Tankette's mini-tank were parked off to the side of the tent. We walked past them, then ducked into the tent itself. Gomorrah was there, sitting on one of those shitty foldable chairs next to Tankette. Hedgehog was at the back of the room, minding his own, and Princess was pacing in the corner. There weren't any fancy projectors, just a normal-ass table in the middle of the room with some maps unrolled on it. Across from them was Lieutenant Colonel Britannica and Lieutenant Colonel Juno, the two of them talking while looking at a tablet held between the two.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"Hey," I said calmly as I walked over to Gomorrah. "You said there was trouble?"
She glanced up at me, then nodded. "Some. Take a look at this." She made a small gesture in the air, like flicking something my way. My augs got a ping at the same time. A video file? I opened it, then enlarged it so that it was just about the only thing I could see.
It was satellite footage. Or maybe drone footage? In any case, it was taken from high off the ground. The video scrolled across a city that had to be Saint-Jérome, then continued northwards, following the highway for some ways. There were lots of forests, and a few small towns built up around intersections on the highway.
Then the video stopped before... something big. Or lots of big somethings, rather. An uneven line of black splotches. They were moving, but not quickly. The camera fixed on one of them ahead of the rest by a bit, then zoomed in on it.
It was covered in leaves and greenery on top. Actually, if there weren't so many of them and they weren't lined up, I might have dismissed it for a couple of trees as seen from above, but this thing was moving, and as it was zoomed-in-on, it was easier to make out the small figures around it as model threes.
"What in the fuck are those?" I asked.
"Model twenty-twos," Gomorrah said.
"I'm... sorry, but what are those, exactly?" Knight asked. She had moved around the room to be next to Princess. They were both looking at the same video on a tablet held between them. What was with all the handheld shit today?
"Model twenty-twos are also known as mobile hives," Gomorrah said. "They're one of the larger models in the twenty-range of antithesis. They're six-legged, big, and pretty tough. They're also not an offensive model."
"They do shit out offensive models," I said.
"I... wouldn't use that term, but it's not entirely inaccurate," Gomorrah said with a nod. "Model twenty-twos can produce smaller models. Anything in the lower ranges that's smaller than a midsize car. They can produce something like ten model threes an hour, or between two and four model fives in that same timespan. They often produce mixed models."
"How many of them are there?" I asked. I scrolled back in the video, then counted the line. "I see seven?"
"We know of nine," Gomorrah said. "But for all their size, they're relatively hard to spot."
"They're heading this way," Princess said. Then her face lit up in a massive grin. "They're heading this way! We're going to get to see you at work, Miss Cat!"
"Uh... uh-huh," I said. That girl still creeped me out something fierce. "We're going to have to roll out the welcome wagon for them, that's for sure. If they are heading this way, will the Twenty-Second be enough to take them down?" That last part was directed to the two Lieutenant Colonels.
Britannica sniffed. "I'd like to see them stand up to a salvo of 105mm armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabots to the face!"
"Myalis, I'm going to assume that that would work?"
Yes. That would certainly be sufficient to take out a model twenty-two.
I nodded. "Cool. So we either sit back and wait for them to get into range, in which case we blow them the fuck up, or we rush out there and mess them up ourselves."
"I think the problem isn't so much the model twenty-twos as it is the number of them, and their origin. There's a hive to the north capable of producing a large number of these. That's a concern," Gomorrah said. "And just because they're coming this way, doesn't mean that they won't stop out of weapon's range and just sit there producing more and more aliens to send our way."
"They have a lot of biomass available to them," Hedgehog said. We all turned his way. "I've seen this kind of thing before. They'll sit way back and start pumping out weaker models by the dozen, then by the hundred, then in massive swarms. We're going to run out of bullets before they run out of trees and dirt to eat."
Well, that was a bit of a problem.
***