Chapter 66: A Person’s Job

  “Many people argue about what is the best firearm. They’re all fucking wrong! Want to know what humanity’s most successful gun is? The Maxim machiiiinegun, mother fuckers!

  Do you have any fucking clue how powerful that fucking weapon is? A weapon put in service in 1886 that lasted… wait for it… until NOW! The maxim machinegun survived world wars, civil wars, stayed in soviet warehouses and was pushed out again and again, including against the antithesis in the modern mother fucking day! 180 years of service! No gun has ever done its job better!

  A weapon created at the same time as bolt action rifles were being perfected and stays in service against fucking aliens! A weapon invented before smokeless gunpowder! How fucking insane is that!?

  It not only became a powerful and useful machinegun, it CREATED every single modern machinegun! The father of all machineguns! ALL HAIL MAXIM, BITCHES!”

  –GustheGunGod, 14th and final episode of the ‘Coke and Colt’ podcast, 2051.

  ***

  Johnny looked at his friend with worry. He’d felt burning, white hot rage like never before when he heard the news, but now worry took over more and more.

  “Mine!” He called, violently cycling his lever action rifle as he fired round after round into a model six. Could he have ended it faster and with less ammo? Yes. Did he want to? Heck no. This was a young hive, they had the time to vent frustrations.

  Johnny was a gun man, he lived to see beautiful guns, analyze their mechanical nature, their history, the stories surrounding them. They were epic tales of heroism and tragedy, of betrayals in the business world and insane characters that you cannot believe actually existed, yet did!

  He also loved to shoot guns, a lot. As in, an unhealthy amount. He practiced without any aim assist or aug-link frequently, simply because he loved it and it sharpened his skills even more! Without a steady hand, aim assist didn’t mean that much.

  He also loved the feeling of sending destruction downrange, the recoil hitting hard and seeing the target react violently. God, he spent too many credits just on stuff that might be fun to shoot and see explode from hydrostatic shock!

  The effects on antithesis, coupled with the recoil just felt heavenly! It helped a lot with his mood.

  Mad was a bit more… physical. There was nothing wrong with that! Heck, he admired that about Panda, the willingness to put your rear on the line and get in there, take the fight to the enemy straight in their faces and accept death as your dancing partner! To take the danger away from others, like him, and onto himself.

  They worked wonderfully together. He couldn’t be even half as effective without Panda to attract attention, giving him all the time he needed to set up better shots, greater attacks, all that good stuff.

  Still… Today, Panda might have gone mad…

  “MINE!” He could hear the rage and gritted teeth, the agony in his voice…

  When he saw what the angry samurai had called, his worries crystalized. Why?

  Well, because Panda had yet to fire a single shot, or even use melee weapons. No, the idiot had been punching his way through this hive!

  Bastard could punch like nobody! A European ton of metal and advanced alloy bones, muscles and power armour destroying everything in his wake! Problem was? He’d just called a freaking model thirteen…

  “Christ’s saving grace–Mad!” He didn’t listen. The darn fool kept punching without blades! His tail at least did some useful work but the guy stood nearly on the darn thing and just wailed on it extremely friggin’ hard!

  Those whip tentacles struck him though, sometimes at the right angle to throw him around but he kept on going! Sometimes it hit the samurai so hard that the stone walls were damaged from the impacts! That shit had to hurt like hell! Idiot probably took his dose of KP-Kicking and just didn’t care about the damage. Regeneration or no, it strained him, right?

  No, he had to stop this. “Fuck it…” Johnny opened fire, using as much power as possible with hypersonic expanding rounds, causing ridiculous damage. The beast died after only six of those high-powered, battery draining shots.

  “The fuck Johnny!?” The man turned to him, enraged.

  “Six turrets, NOW!” Johnny glared and that made Panda pause. Their trust wasn’t that old, but it was there, and it was deep. Barely a few seconds later, six turrets fell in front of them. “What the fuck are you doin’!?” Johnny didn’t swear often, but this warranted it.

  “Killing xenos!” The response came too fast, and he… stood a bit oddly?

  “No, you ain’t! That ain’t how you fight, Mad!” Really, his posture was a bit off… Wait… “Why are you still injured!?”

  “I…” The man never lied, so he just clamped up.

  “You deactivated your nanites!? You ain’t taken that battle drug neither!” He accused, obviously right from how he stood and leaned on one leg more than the other. “The heck are you doin’?” He asked again, a lot more gently.

  Again, his partner clamped up, the fight leaving his body in seconds. He slumped and fell with a great thud on the ground, leaning on the cavern wall with a hand cradling his right ribs and his tail wrapped around a nasty hit near his left knee.

  Johnny got closer before kneeling on the ground, looking him straight in the eyes or, well, the spot they should be at since the animated ones were absent. “Buddy, this ain’t alright…”

  “I know…”

  “Why?” The question probably came with a ton of baggage, and he had to help his best friend unpack it.

  It took a full minute for an answer to come out, turrets firing all the while. “One hundred and ninety-eight… The kids, I… I know all their names. I saw all of their faces… I heard them all with that monument…” His voice was thick with emotion, tears probably falling.

  “Mad…”

  “Every fucking name, man… Every fucking one… I spoke all of them… Can’t remember a fucking date, or what day it is but I know all their names… They’re not just kids, Johnny, they’re my neighbor’s kids, my children’s friends. I saw some of them as infants, or playing with my daughters or… Fuck… I knew those kids Johnny… I fucking knew ‘em…”

  “That ain’t your…”

  “Don’t say it!” Some of his fire returned, rage radiating off of him. Johnny didn’t move back, not intimidated by his friend. “Don’t you fucking dare! They…” The fight drained right out of him in moments. “I lost half my enforcers before the incursion, you know? But… they were enforcers, they signed up for this shit… The civvies didn’t, they didn’t deserve… They…” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “They deserved better than me…”

  “You couldn’t have saved them all, Panda…”

  “I could have saved more! How many fucking died while I took that shower? How many…” He looked away. “One hundred and ninety-eight kids, Johnny. Also, thirty six of my friends. Over one thousand five hundred dead civilians… I spent days going through the list, going to that memorial-”

  “That ain’t on you.”

  “It fucking is!” His scream was interrupted with an aborted sob. “I’m a protector! It’s not my job Johnny, it's who I am! It’s what I am! It’s my reason for being there, my responsibility, my job! They’re fucking mine to protect, my responsibility and I… I’m…

  It took a deep breath for his friend to finish that sentence. “... not meant to survive them, Johnny, not the kids…”

  His shoulder shook as he looked down. “I fucking failed them… I don’t know how many, I have no fucking clue, but I failed some… That’s too fucking many… Angel Crawford, Nathan Phillip, Samara Ferra, Julio Gonzalez, all of them, any of them… even if I just failed one, I should’ve died before they did… God knows how many adults, enforcers… I failed…” Two last words tore out of him, like duct tape on an infected wound, two words that must have haunted him for way too freaking long, new trauma bringing them back with a vengeance. “... my mom…”

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  His shoulders shook non-stop now. “I saw their corpses… The ones who went easy and… the other ones… I saw every picture or sifted through their remains… All of them…”

  Johnny finally saw it. Mad wanted to get hurt. He wanted to be punished for his perceived failures, not get hailed as a hero! Not get rewarded beyond belief, showered in points and credits! He just wanted to hurt, because that’s what he deserved in his own eyes. “Panda…”

  “Please… Please don’t… I can’t….” The man, who currently looked a lot more like a crying young boy, couldn’t make coherent sentences anymore.

  Johnny nodded to himself, making a decision.

  So, he got back up, and kicked Panda in the ribs! Exactly on the spot that hurt, right next to the guy’s hand.

  He groaned, holding the spot tighter, hunching more on himself. “‘That enough?” He kicked harder! Hard enough with his augmentations that it might have killed a normal unarmored human. “Ain’t that enough!?” His friend had gasped, but still didn’t react any more and his shoulders kept shaking.

  So? He kicked even harder! Enough that he probably broke one of the guy’s ribs! “Is that enough!?” Now his friend stopped crying, or at least sobbing. He ended up breathing wheezily, back to the wall.

  Johnny got back to eye level. “When is it enough, Mad? ‘Cause, ain’t no need to remind you, you did fuckin’ die. Hell, countin’ the number of times you should have died, we’re in the what, freakin’ twenties by now? You almost died so many times for your people it’s friggin’ ridiculous, and you think you didn’t do enough? What the heck else could you have done!?”

  “You don’t remember that mosh pit? How much did that model five venom hurt? How ‘bout those bites? I remember you drippin’ a puddle of blood when you were done. You got your ass flattened by a model six, skewered countless times, took darn artillery balls from model fifteens to the chest multiple times! I saw you take anti-armor railgun rounds! Not that long ago, you got to experience the joy of plasma lances and friggin’ shaped charges! Every single one of those, they happened to help your people.”

  “If you did have a penance to pay, you paid it in your own darn blood. You tried to give your life countless times and survived to do your duty another day. Yet: IT. AIN’T. ON. YOU!”

  “You didn’t give it your all, you gave a lot more than that. You did your duty, your job, fulfilled your responsibility or whatever a couple dozen times over and, yeah, bad crap still happened, but that’s ‘cause you ain’t god. Could some other bastard have done better? Heck no. Anyone even mildly saner wouldn’t have taken the crazy risks you did which saved countless lives, like, oh, I don’t know, takin’ on the entire friggin hive’s output with just you and a couple buddies! I can’t imagin’ any other doin’ better or givin’ as much, and removin’ you from that situation means everyone would’ve died.

  “You fought and won an unwinnable fight, finished a war you never started or wanted, but people die in wars, ain’t nothin’ you can do about that. You already went through hell, and ain’t grief enough pain? It hurts already, why add to it? Those kids couldn’t have been saved by any mortal, so stop your bullcrap.”

  “Want to get stronger, protect your family? Aight, let’s kill some xenos. Want to save more people? Well, whatcha waitin’ for? None of that can happen if you’re dead though. Our world sucks, that ain’t a reason to blame yourself. Blame the people that did bad things, then make sure they can’t hurt any others. It’s what you do, Panda, what we do. You’re a protector, and the job ain’t freakin’ done. People need you to be who you are and do what you do. Now, you gonna activate those nanites, or shirk your duty?”

  Panda fell silent, and he decided to give him a minute. After two, he asked again. “So?”

  “Gimme a sec, fucking nanites are having trouble with the fucking rib that pierced my fucking lung…” He grumbled without any heat.

  Johnny snorted. “Worked, didn’t it?”

  “It did…” The helmet turned to him slightly. “Thank you.”

  “Now, ready for a proper shootout?”

  ***

  I exited the burning hive with Johnny, a lot of my pain, anger and sadness worked out through the therapeutic power of vast amounts of violence! I wouldn’t mention that to the AI therapist. “Hey, hum, Johnny, just… Thanks for having my back.”

  He looked at me with a cocky smirk. “Always, partner.”

  After exchanging a smile, we turned back to our troops. It was time to fuck up some goat fuckers! “Altany, call Laser Jack, please.”

  It didn’t take long for him to answer. “Hey, Mad Panda, are you doing better?” The guy actually sounded concerned, how sweet!

  “Yeah, a bunch, violence and a tough talk from Johnny and I’m ready to fuck shit up. So, are you going to give me locations and names?” I asked, my tone turning back to murderous.

  “Well… Yes, but –and don’t be angry give me time to get this all out!– we’re worried about the hives. If those fuckers sold hives and helped create more of them or grow them, that means there’s a chance they’ll have deadman triggers…” He said, leadingly.

  Fuck. Fucking fuckity fuck fuck fuck on a fucking toasted fuck sandwich!

  “So… You’re telling me not to go on a murder spree on the horse-cock suckers that fucking killed my fucking people?” I asked, angry, but not necessarily at that specific corpo….

  “Not at all! I’m telling you to get an appetizer. There are quite a few hives in the archives we’ve decoded so far, some of them old, and they won’t realize we’re onto them if we kill those first, or at least in a specific order with the right info leaks. Our intel teams are doing what they can to find them so we can hit both and… Well, you’re better at killing hives like this without collateral damage?” He asked, clearly worried about my reaction.

  I gritted my teeth, but nodded stiffly. Innocent people were the fucking priority… “I… Alright… So, you want me and my enforcers on hive assault duty?”

  “Yes!” He said enthusiastically. Must have been worried about my reaction. “I’d like to link you with another samurai for the next one, she’s not really a member so you don’t have to hate her, you know? She’s really nice!”

  “And the monsters who killed my people?” I asked, eyes narrowed.

  “I was thinking, since you agree to follow the plan, as a compromise, I’d ask Jackal to handle them?”

  That… was actually a good compromise. I repressed the ever living shit out of that room, but the couple fleeting images I didn’t want to think about ensured I felt satisfied about this plan.

  “Ok, I can live with that. So, she’ll handle all of them?”

  “Oh, dear god, no. There are too many people to eliminate. We can’t have a corporation thinking they can spread hives! No, the entire corp is about to have a very bad time. This is going to be a longer project than you might think. Eliminating every guilty party without getting a deadman’s trigger activated is going to be tricky. We need to make the hive eliminations look unrelated, which means spacing them out.”

  “Aren’t we going to have problems when they find out their black site’s been hit?”

  “Not at all. Our intel team will fake a functional site and hack into the enemy systems to handle any previous alarm. Jackal can be sneaky when she wants! She has what it takes to make people disappear without raising too many red flags. Doesn’t mean they’ll die in their sleep though, don’t worry.” It did make me feel better, no matter how fucked up that may be.

  “Alright, I’ll ask her personally. Send me location, time and level of force required. I can bring more enforcers, maybe militia too.” We barely exchanged some pleasantries before I hung up. My fists clenched and unclenched a few times, trying to calm my nerves…

  “Please call Jackal…” A few seconds later, I got an answer.

  “Gneh? Wassup…” Shit, did I wake her up?

  “Hey, you alright? Got a favor to ask, but I can call later…” Just like that, she hung up. Huh. I wondered… “Altany, is Lila sleeping in her bed at the moment?”

  She is.

  “I know there’s a privacy thing between samurais, but since Lila’s there and you have access to her augs…” I asked leadingly.

  Yes, Jackal is there as well.

  That got a smile on my face! My sister was getting laid, yeah!

  Wow, that sentence felt weird… Moving on!

  I returned to my APC with Johnny, aiming for home. We’d have hives to destroy, and they’d apparently be dangerous as fucking hell! I wanted my people fresh and ready for a fight. I hadn’t informed everyone of our discovery yet. It’d be an… interesting conversation.

  Half an hour later, Jackal called me back. “‘The fuck do you want you cunty bitch…” Still didn’t sound that awake.

  “Need to ask a favor.”

  “Yeah, I got that fucking part, what’s the fucking favor?”

  “I found out who’s responsible for Peach-Trees’s incursion.”

  I let that statement linger and could almost imagine the woman’s reaction. “Explain.” Oh boy, that single word sounded extremely dangerous. That’s my girl!

  “See, there’s this corp that decided to sell hive starting kits. One of the entries on their ledgers? Peach-Trees.” Silence lingered a bit more after that.

  “What’s the favor?” She asked, cold, murderous rage in her voice. I almost felt ba– actually, no, this was exactly what I hoped for!

  “I’m organizing with Laser Jack to handle the corp, but I’m better utilized on hive clearing duty. We’re worried the prolapsing swine cunts have kill switches, which means they need to be killed discreetly and in a specific order, at least until we can eliminate them all without innocent people being put in danger. I’m not the most discreet and I can be a bit too… soft. I need you, and I need you to be the worst version of yourself. I’m sorry.” It was a lot to ask. From what I knew of the woman, she didn’t feel proud of the level of fucked up she could pull off, but…

  “It would be my genuine fucking pleasure…”

  O-kay, let the painter paint! We all have our jobs.