Chapter Forty-One – Hive Five!

“We’ve had a 70% increase in the number of school shootings this year…

Which is FANTASTIC news!”

–KiddieArmour Co. Internal Memo, 2037

***

Gros Baton slowly lowered his styrofoam bowl, then glanced past me to Rac. “T’avais pas envie de me dire qu’elle allait venir ici?”

Rac snorted. “Nah, I thought it being a surprise would be funnier. As… repayment, for that surprise the other day.”

Gros Baton stared for just a moment before rolling his eyes. “Bitch,” he said, but somehow, even with his little accent, it came out as mostly endearing. “Hello, Chat Errant,” he said.

“Hi! Bonjour, I’m Nya!” Nya said.

“Salut,” Gros Baton said, even as he backed up from Nya who slinked over and loomed above him. She leaned forwards, and for a moment I thought she might give the boy a peck. Instead, she sniffed at the top of his bowl, then slipped it out of his grasp. “‘Ey! That’s my poutine!”

“Oh! Nya heard of this,” she said. She raised a hand, plucked a pair of (very obviously) cat-themed chopsticks out of the air, and then dug in. “Hmm… this tastes like… potatoes and heart problems.”

“Potatoes are a vegetable,” Gros Baton said.

“Keep telling yourself that,” I said before taking a look at the camp again. It was a pretty nice set-up. Very… manish, though. Several tables had been dropped to their sides, with like, office supplies stacked up on the far side to make for quick barricades. In a few other spots, there were more purpose-built barricades. These were made from metal plates that hooked into the ground and rose up to about my lower waist. A matching plate always hung from the ceiling, leaving a slit to see out of.

There were a few turrets around. Little deployable box turrets, with what looked like drum-fed assault-rifles held in gimbal arms with a sensor suit slapped onto the side. They looked well-engineered, so probably Protector-tech or very high end corporate stuff.

Actually, no logos, so definitely Protector-bought stuff.

The barricades had walls of spines on the outside, like the ass-end of a porcupine, so no guess who bought those.

“Is Hedgehog around?” I asked before sidling over to a couch that looked like it had been stolen out of like, a bank lobby or something. It wasn’t comfortable.

“Ouien, he’s a few floors down,” Grow Baton said. “Are you ‘ere to steal all our kills?”

“Nah,” I said. “Just doing the rounds, checking in on everyone,” I said. “Do you know Deus Ex?” I asked.

“From the cartoon?” he asked.

I stared at him. “Huh?”

“He means that one samurai TV show, for kids,” Rac said. “The one with a bunch of anime-versions of popular samurai. Which he should know are mostly workers. You can’t go pointing at them and telling them that you know them from a fucking cartoon, you moron.”

“Tabarnak, laisse faire. Pis, ce Deus Ex, what does she want with me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Well, not quite. Did you know that there are samurai in charge of different cities?”

“Yup!” Nya said. She extended the empty bowl to Gros Baton and he stared at it for a moment, rolled his eyes again, then muttered something in French. A moment later there were four more bowls on a little tray decorated in.. sticks? “Oh! Good boy!”

“Ah, thanks,” Gros Baton said past a blush.

I shook my head, but took the bowl that was offered to me. I wasn’t gonna let Lucy know, but this shit hit different. “Thanks,” I said. “So, you’ve found a sort of goldmine in here, huh?”

“Something like that,” Gros Baton said. “‘Edge’og and I’s AI think that there’s an ‘ive in the bottom floors.”

“In the basement levels?” I asked, sitting up a smidge. If a hive was down there, then it was basically loose in the city. That meant access to a lot of major arteries, and more importantly, a million minor ones. Water and electricity was piped through the sublevels of most mega buildings, and that shit lead everywhere.

“Nah,” Gros Baton said with a shake of his head. “We checked. We even left some sensors and things down there, in case. And we sealed off the first floor after clearing it out, so if the aliens want to make it to the city, they need to break down through the first floor.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Okay,” I said. “So, they’re pinched between floor one and here?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We think it’s just a small hive. It, uh, ran out of food.”

I blinked at that. “It’s starving? Is that even possible?”

“Nya’s seen it happen,” Nya said. “Not often though. If there’s heat, then it can eat that, and keep growing, but the aliens need to eat something. They can’t make mass out of nothing!”

“Alright,” I said. “So… what, there’s just not much food in this building?”

“No farms,” Gros Baton said. “I think it was made before indoor farming was big. And… uh… there was just the people and maybe some food in storage to eat.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Kinda fucked up, right?” Rac asked. “Every alien in this building is at least part people.”

“That is kinda fucked up,” I agreed.

Thankfully, I didn’t get queasy easy, and this poutine stuff was heavy eating besides. Gros Baton finished chewing on a bite, swallowed, then continued. “Ça va bien jusqu’à maintenant. We’ve been trying to clear the building floor by floor. It’s slow work.”

“I think there are companies that do that,” I said.

“Yeah, but I want the points, and ‘Edgehog and I are faster.”

“Your English has improved,” I noted.

“And you haven’t learned French yet,” he shot back, which… ouch, but not wrong.

I frowned, and was about to tell him to keep it up, but something was niggling at me, a tickle in the back of my brain. This felt about as safe a situation to fight the Antithesis as one could manage. They’d be looking around floor by floor, taking out… “What kind have you run into, so far?” I asked.

“Just lower models,” he said. “Some three in the stairs, ones… all over, really. They fly up the elevator shafts. We got ambushed by some model fours.”

“The tentacle-y ones,” Rac said with a shudder.

I nodded along. So, nothing that really stood out.

“And there’s lot of model sevens in the walls and such,” he said, which had me sitting up a little. “They’re hard to find, but we have tools to spot them, and then we just blow the walls up. There’s hair vents all over.”

“Air vents,” Rac corrected.

“Yeah, that.”

I turned to Nya. “Hey, old-timer,” I said, which caused a fun little shudder to run through the old cat. “What do you think of all this?”

Nya finished being dramatic, then tilted her head in thought. “Nya thinks… that the little boy is underestimating the enemy a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The hive might be small, but you can’t really enclose one of those, can you? And while you can probably stop giving it fresh food, I bet it’ll find something.”

“There’s power in the building,” Nya said. “And heat. It’ll keep improving itself, even if it means eating itself.”

“What do you mean?” Gros Baton said.

“Nya means that you’re going to make it to the hive, and then it won’t be bonjour, it’ll be… bye bye, nya.”

Gros Baton frowned. “We could move faster.”

“How long have you been farming this thing?” I asked. “It’ll be ready for you.”

I was thinking a big ambush or something, but Nya nodded and added her own two cents. She had a couple of decades on me, and a lot more time as a samurai to draw from. I was inclined to trust her opinion. “If you’ve been using the same trick on every floor, then it might figure out how to counter you. You’ve been exploding the model sevens? The little brain worms?”

“Yeah,” Gros Baton said.

“Then you might do that again, only to find that they’re ready to explode you back. Humans think in rooms and floors. Nya, being superior, knows that you can’t trust this.” She tapped a foot on the floor below us.

“What’s that mean?” Rac asked.

“Nya means that you see a floor, and you think ‘I can stand on that’ but the Antithesis, they see it as just a thing that they can’t eat yet, which means it’s an obstacle. They aren’t afraid to go up and through the floor!” She made a clamping gesture with her hands, like a trap closing.

“They might bring the ceiling down too,” I said. “Or collapse the entire building.”

“The supports are huge,” Gros Baton said.

“And they’ve had… what, a week and a bit to chew through them?” I asked.

Gros Baton paused, then swallowed. “Ah, câlisse,” he swore.

***

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