Chapter Fifty-Eight - Knight Takes Moon

Chapter Fifty-Eight - Knight Takes Moon

"People still play chess? That game''s ancient! Why would anyone still want to play that?"

--Live Streamer MonMonMan, 2034

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The hours were crawling by, and if the fate of the entre world wasn''t at stake, and if I wasn''t making points hand over fist, I might have fucked off already to do something more entertaining.

As it was, Gros Baton and I were in our sixth game of chess. The kid had bought a holographic chess set for like, three points or something.

It hovered between us, the board currently a bit of a mess as our pieces were locked trying to contest the middle. He was winning, of course, but if he made about... six major mistakes in a row, there was a tiny chance that I''d make it through.

His pieces looked like tiny mediaeval people. His knights looked like knights and his bishops like bishops. His pawns were teeny-tiny napoleonic soldiers with itty-bitty muskets.

"Pawn to E5," he said, and one of his lil soldiers struck one of my knights with the fun end of his bayonet.

My pieces were cats. My king and queen were lions, my knights were bobcats in platemail, my bishops were leopards with little pope-hats, and my towers were small towers with lazy tigers sleeping atop them. My pawns were plain old house cats. What few I had left.

"Ah, fuck," I muttered. That move had opened up the middle, once that pawn of his died his queen would be right up in my king''s grill.

And then my phone rang. Or the phone app on my Augs went off, at least. I jumped, and blinked at the names calling me. The Keiretsu and the Nightwatchmen calling me at the same time?

I glanced up at the Phobos monitor before I hit reply. Gros Baton and I had smashed two more shells into the moon. An electron suppression bomb, which had done... something? It left a large hole bored through the moon and made the radiation sensors the Keiretsu have go absolutely haywire. And right after that, a black hole bomb. That one had been less impressive than I''d hoped. It went off before the moon and gave it the bad suck. Lots of dust and smaller debris was ripped off the surface of Phobos where the bomb went off.

It looked like a good quarter of the moon had been power washed by the time the bomb went all supernova and blasted that end of the moon until it looked like something Lucy had started to cook and promptly forgot about.

Pretty okay results, all in all. We were up to ten percent, which was a good sign, I figured.

"Yo," I said as I answered the call. I made the universal ''I''m on a call'' gesture with thumb and pinkie so that Gros Baton would know that I wasn''t just surrendering.

"Ah, Miss Stray Cat?" Doctor Weber said. "Good! It''s a pleasure to speak with you again. I heard that you were currently operating the Big Gun''s... Big Gun, and so I thought it would be a good time for a conference."

"Yeah, sure," I said. "Sup? And uh, hi to you too Susan."

"Yeah," I said, because what else could I say?

"In any case, fire that device. The Teslakollisionsgenerator is warming up now and should be ready for another strike within the hour. This time we''re aiming for the opposite of the usual compaction method."

"You''re gonna make the moon uncompact?" I asked. "Like, spread apart?"

He laughed. "Exactly! Before the larger wave of drones arrive and risk being battered by the moon''s expansion. Hopefully this will expose the hives within the moon so that they might be eliminated."

"Is that even a problem at this point?" I asked.

Susan huffed. "Obviously. Though I can see your reasoning in thinking otherwise."

"Yeah, lots of reasoning going on here," I said. "But explain it to me anyway."

He was silent for a moment, and I think that the language barrier saved me a little. "The antithesis within Phobos is a higher-tier model wrapped around a large hive. Were it to crash on Earth, it would survive."

"Damn," I said. "So we want it dead before it gets around, but we''re breaking the whole moon up anyway, so it''s kind of a moot point, no?"

"Not quite," Radikal said, and he really sounded like someone who''d earned his doctorate as he ''um actually''d'' me. "The issue with the antithesis currently inhabiting Phobos is that it allows the moon to adapt. The wings we saw earlier, the production of small fliers dedicated to eliminating keiretsu drones, and now there''s evidence of organic cooling systems below the moon''s surface as well as organic reinforcements threaded throughout the structure. According to all of our calculations, Phobos should have been cracked and destroyed by now. The antithesis is holding it together, and more importantly, encouraging the moon to repair itself."

"Repair itself?" I asked.

"It''s producing a cement-like compound and filling gaps," he said.

Ah, well, fuck. "Okay, that does make things more complicated. Will your drones be able to kill it?"

"They will do what they can," Susan said.

"Alright then. Let me and Gros Baton here load up the next shell, then we''ll see about spreading that moon out like... uh..." I froze. None of the metaphors I could think of when it came to spreading things were PG 13. "Anyway, yeah," I settled on.

"Thank you, Stray Cat," Radikal said. "If we do happen to fail, it will comfort me to know that I was at least able to work with such talented people."

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