Chapter Sixteen - Making Lots of Little Problems

Chapter Sixteen - Making Lots of Little Problems

Chapter Sixteen - Making Lots of Little Problems

Its true that the antithesis are essentially plants, without a centralised hive-mind, or even a coherent structure of command. They are true aliens, unlike nearly anything that weve ever seen on Earth.

But dont discount their cunning.

-Professor Christie, Lecture on the Mysteries of the Antithesis, 2029

***

I lowered my Laser Pointer, placed the red dot in the sight over the model ten, then tapped the trigger to release a trio of rounds with a hush-like whisper and a faint kick to my shoulder.

The water around the aliens splashed up and I stepped back a bit not to get hit by it. The rounds I fired pierced through the water and rammed into the little alien, two of the three finding their mark and ripping it up.

Okay, I said. This is fucky.

Is this normal? Manic asked. She flicked a rock into the hole with the tip of her boot. It splashed next to the corpse which gently floated up and away from the root.

Ive never seen anything like it, I admitted. This was very strange. The root seemed to go on for a while. In fact... I knelt down and lowered myself over the hole, following the path bored into the ground. I couldnt see far, not with the lighting being as poor as it was and with my vision obscured by murky water, but it was pretty obvious that the tunnel went on for quite a ways. Onwards, and deeper too. Myalis, what am I looking at?

It looks like an artery root from an antithesis hive. They are frequently grown along tunnels dug out by model eights and, of course, guarded by model tens. These will frequently link two sections of a hive together.

Theres an entire heap of bad implications there, I muttered as I stood back up. Were going to need to call Gomorrah about this.

I want to know where the roots leading to, Manic said.

Trouble, I answered.

She scoffed, but didnt press. I think we both knew I was right. Now, that begged the question, why was there a root like this underground? Or... no, that was a stupid question. Higher-tier samurai than me had been smashing hives all over. This one was probably a lot harder to discover, hidden as it was underground and under a layer of water. It was beneath the city, too. I bet a cursory glance would just suggest that it was some piping or something normal instead of a giant alien problem.

I rang up Gomorrah, and she picked up within a few seconds. She was breathing hard on the other end of the line. Hey, I said.

Hello, she replied. What is it?

Nothing super urgent, are you alright on your end? I asked. She was breathing pretty hard. Was she in a running fight?

Stealth would be preferable. We didnt know what wed be running into down there, and Id rather it not know that we were around until we chose to let it know.

I ordered up two drones, and they appeared in a set of boxes next to me. I pulled the top off one of them, revealing that I should have asked Myalis to be a little more specific.

When shed said stealth drones, I had a mental image of a small thing that hovered invisibly, maybe covered in cameras or something. What I found was a small robotic cat wearing a tiny set of scuba gear. I reached in, plucking the cat out by the nape of its neck. It weighed no more than a real cat, but looked to be cold to the touch.

What? Manic asked.

No, I replied, even if it didnt make much sense. Then I flicked the cat into the hole where it landed with a splash and sank right down. The second drone joined it a moment later, and I kicked the boxes out of the way.

Myalis opened a pair of screens over my augmented eyes vision, one from each of the cat drones. So far, there wasnt much to look at but light-corrected footage of two dark tunnels.

Are you getting that? I asked Manic.

Yeah, Ive got it, she said. Not much to see so far.

Let them swim out for a bit, I suggested. I imagined that whatever these hives were hiding it wouldnt be sitting just a few metres away.

One of the cats reached a fork in the tunnel and I cursed. The root split two ways, one was clearly larger than the other though. That was bad news in any case. The antithesis had to have a whole network of these things.

Myalis directed the cat to follow the thicker root, and I watched with growing anxiety as it continued to swim along next to more and more offshoots and side tunnels. At one point the drone stopped as a pair of model tens scampered by, seemingly unbothered by the water around them.

The roots eventually turned downwards, and I tightened my fists as I watched them lead into a much larger space. An underground cavern of sorts, with large sections dug out from the walls and the ground. Model eights, the big worm-like ones, were hard at work enlarging the space.

They werent the only aliens around. The roots covered nearly every surface, and there were hundreds of pods lumped together like grapes on a massive stem, each with an unborn alien within.

Those didnt concern me as much as the really large, really disturbing pods taking up the centre of the room, each one as large as a semi-trailer.

Thats going to be a problem, I said.

Then the other cat reached a second chamber, and I closed my eyes. There were more than one of them.

We were sitting on top of a massive hive, one filled with every sort of antithesis in the books, and I was willing to bet they were just looking for an excuse to pop up and make my life complicated.

***