Chapter 123: Chapter 118

Rayna nodded, from her position on the wall. I programmed a Fumble-Bee drone to follow her with a flick of my hand. It fell into an unobtrusive orbit, hovering just over her shoulder. Slowing the truck to better keep my eyes on the ‘road’ I started assigning the rest of the bees a position.

I only had access to five, so I put four in positions and left the fifth roaming. The rest were on the grid, keeping the bombs off our heads. From Dearth’s perspective, this was like throwing firecrackers to distract some bugs, so their port could operate in peace. They kept trying to step on us, like bugs. It was getting irritating. I had to do something about them before they attacked us directly, with enough force to do the job.

As I drove, I watched the high altitude drone footage. Rayna was watching the same thing and directed her hobbs across the entire wall, using the drones.

“North east corner prepare for attack! Spears and Mo-gas unless breached! This will be long fight! Preserve ammunition!” The hobb woman barked orders to her troops, and I watched as she led them.

A thin stream of exploratory yarsps trundled toward the north-east corner of the compound, Sundew Valley’s section. The first to arrive carefully descended into the trenches and began working their way around the rebar defenses. Long-handled spears punched into them from above, as hobbs silently did their morning’s work. Bombs flashed overhead, and the movement from the forest thickened.

Huge groups from the forest buttressed the lines of yarsps, and within seconds, the entire area was a flood of running insects.

Rayna moved, heading into the fighting herself, with Tollya at her side. “Sprinklers!” she yelled.

Two hobbs tipped barrels of Mo-gas over, flooding the sprinkler system.

I had to focus on my driving. The ranger trail threaded up the mountain part-way, and entire sections of it offered a view of the forest below. As we climbed, I saw more and more of the horde. Thousands of yarsps raced out of gaping holes in the mountainside, joining the flood of their kin, churning the earth beneath their claws.

“Rayna, you have incoming from my position. Big incoming.” I checked the aerial drone footage and shook my head, looking for Silken Sands through the trees. The horde of yarsps flowed from my position all the way down the mountain and through the forest, straight across the open patch of desert, to my walls.

The more of them that flooded in, the harder they pressed each other into the rebar. Soon, the trench was full of writhing, impaled, and still-fighting yarsps, into which Rayna tossed a lit match.

Grunts filled the air as the trench went up in flames. Oily smoke billowed up in a line, cutting off the vision of the defenders. They donned face-masks and goggles, and the hobbs on spear platforms were separated fully from their colleagues on the wall.

Civilians in the compound below hurled Molotovs over the wall, in the areas that didn’t have sprinklers installed. Patches of burning desert lit the running insects on fire, splashing flaming liquid onto one another as they moved.

Yarsps grunted in the morning air as smoke rose in a line from Silken Sands. Hobbs plunged spears down, over, and over, replacing them from the stockpile below when they broke. None of them fired rifles.

“BuyMort!” Rayna shouted. “Sell yarsp, whole shell, at seventy-five degrees internal temperature!”

Several BuyMort pods began to fill the air, flying from Prescott over the mountain toward Silken Sands. The first to arrive on the scene merely hovered high above the trench, scanning down into the flames. Several more arrived and began warping out individual yarsps, flitting back and forth across the battlefield.

The trench emptied, yarsps falling down into it as their dead companions were warped away. Our affiliate account began to ping with sales. I squinted at it in my cracked HuD as I tried to keep the truck crawling along up the mountain with a mech in the cargo compartment.

Purchase: Food, in shell cooked yarsp. Rarity, common. Condition, poor. 14 Morties dispensed.

Purchase: Food, in shell cooked yarsp. Rarity, common. Condition, good. 93 Morties dispensed.

Purchase: Food, in shell cooked yarsp. Rarity, common. Condition, excellent. 134 Morties dispensed.

The burnt ones sold for the least, but the closer to properly cooked the yarsp was sold at, the higher the price we got for it. Soon, the range of prices paid was steadily seventy to one-hundred and fifty morties.

“This is really quite a pretty morning, you know!” Phyllis shouted. She was looking in the other direction, where the desert twinkled in the night, pristine and peaceful. The nonagenarian was also smoking a fresh joint. I suspected she had hundreds of them stashed in her mech. When she shifted, I could see the beauty in the rearview mirror.

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I breathed it in, before looking away to focus on the road.

The path ahead of us opened up, and we arrived at a ranger station half way up the mountain. It was stationed on a gentle plateau that allowed us a fantastic view of the battle in the valley below.

Silken Sands was a smoking smudge in the distance, surrounded by a seething mass that flooded from the forest across the desert. Every so often, a bomb would detonate in the air above it, lighting up the scene for an instant. I craned my neck to peer up and could barely make out the glint of the station at the top of the space elevator.

The cable hung massive on the other side of the mountain, blocking out the view of most everything else and appearing to rise from the top of the mountain itself. A gaping metal wound on my world.

My anger grew at Dearth. They had watched and waited as the Sleem rolled through Prescott, as the dream storms and yarsps had cleared out the rest of the survivors, and then they had moved in. It made sense. After all, why waste resources clearing out the locals when BuyMort would do it for you?

Even us, the last holdout in the area, they treated with a sense of disdain and neglect. Tossing firecrackers at us from their station, to bring down the bugs and cut their own security payroll for a morning. It made perfect business sense.

I shook my head and focused on my task. We had to infiltrate the hive and shut it down from inside. I had to figure out their meat source and determine if the queen was something we could sell or use to our own advantage in some other way. Live capture would be preferred, but all I needed to complete the Dearth bounty and earn my affiliate five hundred million morties was their bounty tag.

A bounty tag was a tiny robotic drone, similar in some ways to our Fumble-Bees. Its only purpose was to infiltrate monster holdouts like this and provide an automated payment from BuyMort to whoever could retrieve it. It was programmed to avoid other drones, so to claim one you typically had to lay hands on it yourself.

The tag we were after was buried in the mountain, at the heart of the yarsp hive, in the queen's chamber. I could see it blinking on my mini-map in the helmet, but it merely showed a direction, north-east and down.

Phyllis stretched and flicked her joint’s burnt out butt onto the ground.

“Phyllis!” I scolded. “What would the park rangers think?”

She scoffed and pointed at the empty parking lot. “No narcs here. Besides, it gives your ravens something to do, they follow me around for these butts like I’m dropping skittles.”

I shook my head and focused on the battle back home. It was going well. The flames had guttered, and the smoke cleared almost immediately. With the BuyMort pods warping out burning yarsps, the fires didn’t have the fuel needed to keep burning.

Fresh barrels were rolled into place. The hobbs weren’t pouring in full barrels, each seemed to be only about a quarter filled. Even in the face of overwhelming numbers like these, the hobbs fought smart, and economically.

Rayna got my attention. “Boss! Tyson!”

I turned away from Phyllis and Doof, who was peeing on a nearby signpost, and pulled her up to the center of my vision. “Yeah.”

“We are holding. If you threaten queen, horde will retreat. Come to attack you. Be ready!” She yelled, before turning back to managing her battle. The hobbs were moving with the yarsps, spreading out along the wall as the horde slowly enveloped the campground.

At the northern, eastern, and western sides of the compound, the fighting was fierce. Particularly the north-eastern corner, where most of their ordinance stood ready.

I turned away from the battle with a shake of my head. Rayna had that under control, I had my own job to do. I clapped my thigh and whistled to get Doofus’ attention, and his head poked up from a nearby scrub bush.

“Time to get to work, let’s go,” I said. Phyllis stuck her tongue out at me and lit another joint, falling into step as I started walking toward the nearest yarsp hole.

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