Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Sixty-Five - Pspspspsps

"There are two types of illnesses common in large conventions. The 'Con flu' which is any variation of the common cold carried by the visitors and guests of the convention and shared between them because of their close proximity.

And the con plague. Similar to the flu, but more likely to lead to many deaths."

--Fur-Con Guide to furry conventions, 2032

***

"Here aliens aliens aliens," Princess said. She was talking over a loudspeaker embedded in the MEOW's outer armour, so her voice was being projected out and all around us, pretty loudly too.

Unlike the Nyanzerfaust, which had lots of stealth tech, the MEOW was... not as subtle. It had some amount of ECM, but it was mostly to throw off electronically-targetted weapons, and it felt like something tacked on, just in case.

I was pretty sure the mech could take on an artillery barrage and come out stomping the other side with no issues.

"Pspspsps," Princess called.

I blinked, then shifted in my chair to look back. Princess noticed, and at least had the common decency to blush. "Are you calling out for the aliens or for wild cats?" I asked.

"Sorry, I didn't know what to say?"

Fair enough, but I still felt a little slighted. I hoped that Nya wasn't listening in, otherwise she might show up and start batting us around.

An artillery barrage I was confident against. A bored Nya... not so much.

We continued to thump through the forest, heading in the general direction of the red spot the map. I was starting to wonder if there were even any--

A green blur shot out from the underbrush and I gasped as I saw it coming through a dozen sensors, all of them connected right into my head. A few more screamed a warning when I was already mid-jump, and I fumbled and lost hold of the controls for a moment.

Then the alien thumped against the front of the MEOW, claws slicing at the mech in a mad scramble and not really doing much.

It was just a model three, a big one, but still. I brought the mech's foot around and pressed the model down and into the ground, then, lacking any proper melee weapons, I stepped on it. It popped like a grape.

"Wha, that spooked me," Princess said.

"Yeah, likewise," I said.

"I'm sorry I didn't see it."

I glanced back, then refocused on the forest around us. "You don't need to say sorry. Not like I saw it either."

"Yeah, but it was my job," she said.

"And it was mine to pilot us, which means a lot more of the responsibility of looking around was on me," I said. "Don't worry about it, alright?" Princess nodded, and I continued to push up forwards. "At least this means that we're probably on the right track."

I scanned the area around us, quickly switching between vision modes. That's how I caught some motion coming in from the right.

"I see them," Princess said. She pinched her tongue between her lips, then moved one of the gimballed guns around. The moment the sight was on target she fired, then shot downwards. "Oh... there's no recoil to compensate for?"

"It's not a video game," I said. "And that kind of calibre won't do anything to move this tank."

"Sorry sorry!" Princess said. She re-aimed, but the model three was dead already.

Targets Eliminated: Model Three x2
Points Earned: 12
Point Total: 7,612

Hmm. Not a lot in the bank, but better than nothing. I had been getting a small trickle every day, passive income, as it were. Today was hopefully going to be better for gaining points. More so than the last week, at least. Hopefully.

"More ahead and a bit to the left," Princess said. "I see some heat signatures that way. It's either really warm rocks, or more aliens."

I snorted. "Yeah, alright," I said.

It only took a minute of gentle stomping through the forest before we started to get attacked with a lot more regularity. First model threes jumping out of the brush and trying to bite and claw their way into the mech and failing utterly.

Princess started to switch between guns, firing into the aliens and leaving them as bloody messes. I continued to press on, at least until I saw a model six, one of those big, tanky fucks, rushing out of the forest ahead.

A single 75mm HE round turned that rush into some messy fireworks. It felt nice, too, the way the vibration shook up the entire cabin.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Alright, the hive can't be far from here," I said. "There's more and more of them."

"Look! The monkey-looking ones. They're the, uh, model tens, right?" Princess asked. "I've seen them before. They're not too hard to kill. They're not worth a lot of points, though."

"They're not worth much. Which sucks, because they can put up a fight," I said.

"Aren't they only as strong as children?" Princess asked.

I nodded along. "Yeah, just about as far as I can tell. You ever wrestled a kid down? Because they had knife hands--the aliens, not children--and they're wiry and fast. The Model Tens can lay traps and stuff too. Like kids."

"I feel like the kids I know weren't like that."

"Well, you obviously didn't have the same quality of kids around you when you grew up as me," I said.

"Yeah. I didn't see that many others," Princess said. "It was just me and my mom, and sometimes my sister. My dad would visit too, sometimes."

I winced. "Yeah..."

"I mean, at least I had one!"

Princess was quiet for a long, long time.

Then she gasped. "Omg, was that insensitive?"

"I mean, probably, but it's fine?" I said. "Oh look, aliens."

Thank fuck for the Antithesis.

I think this is one of the few recorded moments where a Vanguard feels genuine joy on seeing large numbers of Antithesis charging at them.

There was a decent amount, yeah. Some three dozen model threes, a full flock of model ones, and then a smattering of other lower-ranked aliens. "Lay into them, try not to let them flank too hard," I said as I positioned us so that they were mostly to our front. Then I aimed the secondary guns and fired. Two 75mm rounds did a number against... anything they hit, really, but the actual explosion on impact didn't kill as many as I might have hoped.

"Ah, I can't do this and use the big gun," Princess said.

"I'm on it," I replied. It was designed to be operated by a single person, so I toggled over to the controls for the primary turret and levelled it off right above the largest group. There was a small wheel on the joystick, like one a computer mouse, it let me lock in the timing for the detonation in metres. Obviously, I set it to go off at a range that most militaries would call 'danger close' and then I fired.

The 155mm shell rocked the entire mech as it shot forward, and then there was a second tremor as it detonated.

It was one of those fancy fragmentation rounds. Bands of loose ball-bearings, none of them very large, all around an explosive core that had more punch to it than a basketful of hand grenades.

When the dust settled, there was a cone of cleared out foliage and shredded alien meat. The trees on the outer edges had perfectly evenly spaced holes punched into and out the back, each hole starting as small as a pencil nib and ending large enough to fit a fist into.

"Looks like the hive's that way," I said as the autoloader shoved another round in.

"They sure seem angry," Princess said. She was plugging a few rounds into some survivors. Some had been covered by neighbours and were able to avoid the brunt of the damage from the shell going off, and some had been outside of the blast radius entirely, though most of them had been tossed around by the explosion.

I think it wasn't meant to be used in such close quarters, which was silly. A blast radius, in my opinion, ought to be considered more of a suggestion than anything else.

"We're lucky that the explosions didn't damage us," Princess said.

"It's not luck, it's armour," I said. "The hive can't be more than a hundred metres out. They don't usually get this crazy unless you're close."

The trees thinned out ahead, back peeled off, lower branches cut off, and a lot of the foliage and bushes on ground level had been ripped right out of the ground. Biomass pulled back into the hive to feed it, probably.

The hive itself wasn't hard to spot from up close, though I could see why finding it from a satellite image might be hard. It was dug into the side of a slight dip in the terrain, a cave entrance burrowed into the ground and supported by roots.

"Alright, let's see if this hive likes getting shot into, then we'll plant a bomb and get the hell out of here."

***