Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Forty-Seven - Kami-Can't

"Drone warfare is changing everything.

A soldier costs millions to train. A drone can be produced for cheap. American explosives, parts made in a Chinese 3d printer, motors made in Vietnam, with Taiwanese chips, running off of Indian software.

Give me a million dollars and I'll hand you a thousand flying bombs worth more than ten times their cost in soldiery."

--Former Naytheon CEO Jim Jimmies, moments before retired US Marine Tucker Bison assassinated him, 2031

***

Just before I returned to our... cinema tent, I got a message from Grasshopper. The Big Gun was ready to fire.

Before that, however, we had time to sit back and watch the Keirestsu's kamikaze run. I was looking forward to it, actually.

Seeing a nuke go off in space was going to be neat, I figured, and seeing multiple was... probably going to be pretty awesome. I wasn't going to miss that. A sudden pang hit me as I walked back in though. I missed Lucy. Bet she would have loved to see this, but it was a little late to run back and fetch her.

"Myalis, are we recording these streams?" I asked.

Of course. For data analysis, if nothing else. There is also a possibility that these streams may serve as propaganda pieces later.

I frowned, but... yeah, that was very possible. People needed to know that shit wasn't hopeless, and what better way to give people hope than to show their enemy being peppered with nukes.

"Hey," I said as I returned.

"You're back," Princess said. "How did it go?"

I shrugged. "Not so bad, I think. Doctor Radikal calls it a seven out of ten on the shit scale. So it could have been worse. We'll have to see how this next hit goes, and then give it our own shot."

Gomorrah nodded from her seat nearer the front. "That seems reasonable. Are there any changes in the plan? New tactics or the like?"

I flopped down onto my seat and stretched a little. Damn, it was kinda comfy. "Nothing too big. We're switching to a sort of... war of not-quite-attrition from here on out. The Keirestsu can keep ramping up, and we'll be in charge of smacking Phobos every hour on the hour. Our nerdier friends will crush the moon four times a day, so I think, overall, things will work out."

"Oh, I see," Grasshopper said. "A war of attrition rarely works out against the antithesis, but in this particular case, the antithesis are playing a zero-sum game. They only have the moon's resources at their disposal. And the ambient energy from the sun, I suppose. They can't claim any more biomass than they have. Every piece of Phobos we carve away is part of their foundation gone forever."

"That's the rough idea, yeah," I said. "Do we have any idea when the Keiretsu's thing—"

Grasshopper looked at one of her four wrists. There was an old-fashioned watch there, without even a digital screen. I didn't know how to read clocks with the little arms like that, but I supposed she did. "In about five minutes," she said. "Enough time to warm up some more popcorn!"

"I'll get it," Tankette said as she hopped out of her seat. "No no, please. I'm feeling useless." The last was aimed at Hedgehog who had started to stand, presumably to help her.

Tankette left, and I settled down to wait. We did chat for a bit, though not about anything too major. Gomorrah was debating with Grasshopper over the methods by which to burn Phobos. There were plenty of chemicals that could be lit up in some semblance of fire, even in empty space with no oxygen, but the issue seemed to be quantitative.

A slug from the Big Gun had an upper limit on size, which meant that even with incredible amounts of compression, there was only so much gas or liquid that could be flung out at Phobos. Even the solid-fuel projectiles that would break up were relatively small.

I could understand why Gomorrah was a little upset. Lighting shit on fire was her thing. "Maybe we can do one or two shots of something flammable," I said. As a treat. Plus the image of a chunk of Phobos burning would be good PR.

Tankette returned just as the screen shifted. There was an image of Susan, in a boardroom filled up by a large round table. The people around him were samurai. Some three dozen in all, all of them dressed... like samurai, I supposed.

There were a few punks, some dressed in form-fitting outfits that were extremely bright, and others in more traditional mil-spec armour and gear. One of them stood out to me, a woman with cat ears and a pair of long tails that twitched behind her, but hers were... not mechanical.

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"We begin," one of the samurai that I didn't recognize said. A dude in clothing that looked fit for a ninja, though his face was covered in a form-fitting demon mask, the eye holes filled with dozens of hexagonal lenses. "Please, foreign friends and allies, observe the work of our collective."

The feed immediately switched to a set of some three dozen hexagonal camera feeds. Each of them were in space, but were feeding high-enough dimension footage that with some zoom we could make out the distant blob that was Phobos.

A third of the screen was replaced by a plotter of sorts. A rotating three-dimensional view of the kamikaze swarm, blue lines trailing behind little triangles all shooting out towards a yellow circle that had to be Phobos. There was a Japanese kanji over the moon, one that Myalis translated as 'Enemy' for me.

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"Final approach vectors locked in," an unfamiliar woman's voice said in faintly accented English. "Thrusting in... three, two, one. Thrust.

The stars in those hexagonal screens started to slip by just a little faster as the drones accelerated on the plotter. There were individual speed-readings, but I had no frame of reference for how fast they were going. I did see the... drive plumes--I think that's what they were called--of some of the drones who were out ahead from the cameras of those farther back.

It did seem like Phobos was getting larger faster.

"Contact in... three minutes."

I sat back and watched. It was strange, how fucky space made distances. The timer sank faster and faster.

"Boosting first-contact drones," the woman said.

"They're making space. So that the drones don't swallow each other in their blast radius," Grasshopper said.

I nodded along. That made sense to me.

And then, just as the timer was reaching one minute, one of the screens went dark.

"Review!" the ninja guy's voice snapped.

The footage was played back. The drone had crashed into something dark and formless in the void of space.

Two more drones blinked out.

"Engaging evasive manoeuvres," the woman's voice said. She didn't sound quite as calm. "Nuclear warheads primed. Contingency twelve active. Sacrificing drones one through six."

Four of the screens went white.

From the viewpoint of the other drones, there were suddenly four suns floating in the void of space out ahead of them, growing balls of brilliant light that they just barely skimmed by a split second later.

The plot showed the explosions as balls the size of marbles next to Phobos, which, comparatively, looked like a beachball on the screen now.

Two more drones were lost. Then six more.

The plotter started to fill with hundreds of contacts out in space. Winged monsters, black and nothing, some of them were discorging spines and spikes and exploding balls covered in thorns that caught some of the drones mid-flight. ƒгeewebnovёl.com

It was thinning the drone swarm.

But not enough to prevent some from striking the moon's surface.

On the screen for those, it looked like Phobos went from a distant baseball-sized lump of rock to the moon suddenly being right up in their face. I jumped in my seat at the suddenness of it.

Every screen went white.

They switched to what I presumed was another observational drone, and we got to see nine growing spheres of bluish smoke expanding in front of Phobos. Their edges curled and twisted, a fractal that soon splashed across the moon's surface.

When the dust settled, there were expanding craters pock-marking the front of Phobos' surface.

"Nine successful detonations," the woman's voice said.

"Out of thirty-six kamikaze drones," ninja-guy said. "We will send the data now. Prepare for initial observations."

The plotter grew to take up the entire screen, with notated information around each location that was struck. The shockwaves from the nukes were still travelling through Phobos' surface, and the chunks blown off the moon were coming back down, crashing into it to leave even more cracks and dents on its all-grey surface.

"Was... that a complete flop?" I asked. "What were those things, in space?"

"Space-capable antithesis," Grasshopper said. "And I wouldn't call it a flop. Rather... let's call it a learning opportunity. We'll have to do better, next time."

"Next time is our turn," Gomorrah said. She stood. "Come on. Let's try and see how well we can do."

***