Chương 173: Chapter 167 – A New Lease On Innocence

The largest population on Earth of people with true, healthy confidence are children. Not the Successful, not the CEOs of the world's biggest corporations. Not those calling the shots in operations big or small, not those spiritually developed and secure. Children, young, inexperienced… and utterly unshakable in their trust that getting up follows falling over. It is in the sudden flash of our adventurous spirit that we greet the child we once were.

It is in our taking another stumbling step in a task we have never yet succeeded at that we channel the child outgrown. It is in our unexpected curiosity, breaking through decades of smothering disappointment to flood our mind with sunny contentment, that we smile our child's delight.

– That Which You Thought Beaten To Death ⁂ Through a dozen dozen cameras, Leah's sleepy eyes rested on her personal north star; a pretty little murdermachine riding a wafting halo of energy shining in the colors of an aurora borealis, who guided their convoy southwest, towards Baie-Comeau, the great river's banks, and, most relevant, the direction of Dervish. The clouds had mostly disappeared, lightening to a degree beyond even the usual gray skies Canada suffered these days.

The rain had turned into a steady drizzle. Tiny drops that broke the light beautifully on their way down. The sun was still morning-low, roughly at our backs. It turned out that a dozen dozen eyes, spread across a half dozen vehicles, saw a dozen dozen different rainbows. The composite was majestic. Beautiful beyond anything she'd seen on the Mesh. And Tinea was sailing in the middle of it: a fairy in her element. Another clip for her secret collection.

On her pod's screens, Leah kept an updated map where she could follow the progress of the horde of Res Mechanica Repentis scavenging ants as the Sim Cell guided them from afar. They were slowly losing numbers, but the tactical computers showed themselves savvy enough to make the Antithesis bleed a hundred times over for each one lost—nevermind that the ants had insane staying power; every time two or three units got damaged beyond functionality, their intact parts would be recycled to make a new ant.

It really stretched their limits. The point income was nothing to sneeze at. Distance and the degrees of separation introduced by the autonomous remote control reduced the worth of each kill to an eighth, but the numbers still stacked up, and the Sim Cell was proving itself quite capable of waging a war unsupervised. That's great, Leah thought tiredly. It meant they'd be able to go home very soon—though at this moment she was occupied more with the need for sleep. Combat was… exhausting.

⁂ I circled calmly with my canopy fully deployed for maximum lift and my motors set to just enough thrust to offset my sink rate and the mild downdraft of the cool air. I'd be able to stay up for hours like this, and with no aerial Antithesis models in sight, it was a very peaceful moment. The devastation wreaked by the floods pouring from the higher, rockier areas where we'd fought, down into the lowlands was shocking.

The waters had really picked up speed in some places—a hundred meters' vertical difference meant an awful lot of potential energy to bleed off at the bottom. I counted myself very lucky I hadn't touched down in one of those. Well… I probably would've been fine eventually. It just would've cost me a few hundred points to work my way free again. Nothing was left of the sprawling forests but shredded logs and the spill of acres of landslides.

The new shapes carved into the geography were weird and uncanny—the storm had been artificial, and the floods had been placed along unnatural boundaries that didn't feel congruent with the natural topography of the place. Nothing lined up with what it was supposed to. It just looked wrong. Kinda like the Antithesis, actually. Fitting, I supposed. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Leah's huge Implacables were less walking and more swimming on their grav engines across the mud. Water was incompressible and therefore made a great surface to spread pressure across. It also had an unhelpful tendency to, well, flow away to escape the pressure. The result was that the Implacables displaced as much mud as they weighed, which meant they'd effectively turned into boats. Spider legs did not make for great locomotion on viscous surfaces, but they could stab meters down to find solid ground.

It still gave them respectable speed, if nothing compared to what they'd displayed on rockier terrain, which in turn explained why Leah had originally wanted to stick to Hatchets for the travels home. At least the flood water was draining back into the St. Lawrence quite quickly, and the mud would eventually compact under its own weight.

Perhaps even soon enough that Leah's army-to-be wouldn't need specialized gear, especially because any regular production would churn out Hatchets rather than Implacables, and the Hatchets were having a lot less issue moving at speed in the unfriendly terrain with their proportionally longer legs. I considered my own condition. The battle leading up to the destruction of the Thirty-Threes had been downright kind to me.

Aside from some singeing around the fringes, I'd taken no damage—the presence of the heavier warstriders had been an incredible gamechanger. My leg was starting to look healthy beneath the knee, and my tail would get there in a handful of hours. I'd even regenerate my spinneret, since its original method of integration had come with an editing of my tail's DNA. My bionites would make sure I wouldn't end up with an amputated stump.

The migraine born from the forceful ejection from the Quanta's time dilation still pounded away in the back of my skull, but the spiking headaches had already smoothed out. It would subside soonish. Physically, I'd be okay. I could use a good meal, and that would help my body heal faster, too. Psychologically I was stable, I thought. The peaceful mood of reflection I found myself in was a sign of a balanced mind. Those memory blockers had done a great job of giving me the space I needed to be… effective.

Still, I thought wryly. Two decades of no combat. I can't tell if I should be weirded out that I've settled right back into it, or if I should be glad. I'd changed a lot in just a few days. There was a lot of exploration of myself, in between the bouts of adrenaline-fueled battle mania. I was a woman. I was different. I'd discovered some completely new facets to my personality. Playfulness. Happiness. Cuddliness. That whole thing about wanting to grab Leah's kids and hug them an inch from death.

I was still totally myself in some very… characteristic ways. The certainty with which I responded to danger. The lack of confusion when it was time to go. The ease with which I accepted that the danger had passed. Yearning for touch. I'd gotten unreasonably lucky there, with Leah. I did very much look forward to seeing what the future would hold for me. Leah's friends and family. A reordering of my old life. A new lease on innocence, and perhaps, on giving it up again on my own terms. Honestly. It was… wondrous.

A blessing that might've had my eyes pricking with the kind of happiness that was just a bit too much to process all at once. ⁂ The knock-knock reached Dolores in the form of a digital ping bouncing across the water. Medium frequency radio, designed to cover miles and miles. The kind once used by a lively shipping industry during her childhood days. Voice only. She had to paint magnetic fields into the air to make an antenna long enough to properly catch it. How anachronistic.

"Dervish," came the cute— And rather deadly, Dolores reminded herself—brunette's voice. Simple analysis told her that the radio waves had bounced their way across roughly a hundred kilometers. That meant that the two samurai weren't at the village yet, and it also told her that the small woman was flying high enough to avoid killing the signal on terrain.

"Done playing weather witch?" Dolores was tempted to burn another century's worth of energy to revive the storm, but, even underclocked, her social scripts prevailed and told her to knock it off. Her fellow warrior didn't seem particularly receptive to that level of goofing around. Oh well. Maybe she'd find a nice oblique reference or three instead, to annoy the redhead with."

'Verily,' proclaim my auspex's auxiliaries set at the head of the village, 'no fresh host of filthy xenos hath been espied these thirty minutes past.' The fluvial tides are stayed, and my hands shall soon be loosed to attend unto matters inland." The put-upon groaning from the ginger Nerd-at-heart did give away her presence and was music to Dolores's ears, as was the downright adorable giggle of the blackhaired maiden.

"We've got the immediate Incursion handled with the floods," continued Tinea, "but the thousands of still-producing hives remain active."

"I'll be moving against them very soon. I'm just planting a bunch of new sensors around the river to better track the waterborne Antithesis. Don't wanna have the village overrun because I wasn't around."

"Didn't have any, previously?"

"Sure did, but not enough, and not far enough. Antithesis in the water don't generally bother anything on land if it isn't loud enough to get them investigating. A little village, especially a seaside one, knows better than to get that loud. Samurai activities are a different matter entirely, though."

"I see. Anyway, we were hoping that you'd be willing to fund a series of purchases, considering that you killed the million-or-so Ones we were counting on."

"Sure. Have your AIs send me a sum of the expenses you're incurring in the pursuit of my home's defense, and I'll sponsor any purchases."

"Even if it's stuff we intend to take with us?"

"Yeah. If there's questions, let's just let the AIs hash out a fair compromise, yeah?"

"Cool." ⁂