It took several hours and several hundred points to finally put all the surface fires out. The M17 was bad enough, it took several attempts with multiple types of extinguisher to put it out and several more attempts to find something that would keep it out, but the heat from the plasma shell ended up causing scrub brush several hundred meters away to spontaneously ignite.

  While we were taking care of that, Bob led several expeditions down into the former hive complex. Both he and the badgers were uniquely suited for trudging through several inches of burning ooze to ensure we’d destroyed everything.

  They reported that the birthing chamber was completely destroyed. The plasma shell not only incinerated the entire structure but also melted part of the walls. Nothing organic could have survived the blast. Which was good, because I was tired of the plants surviving the bullshit I threw at them.

  It took much longer to clear the maze of tunnels and connecting corridors. Although it was unlikely that anything survived the inferno, we still needed to check everything. A hive could completely regrow from a single errant root tendril, as long as it had the necessary nutrients, and I really did not want to give it a chance to recover.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to deal with the problem entirely on my own. About ten minutes after igniting the surrounding area, the first local samurai showed up. A super sleek silver hover sedan came screaming in from the east. Despite sounding like a jet fighter as it came in, the car somehow managed to evade every single early warning system on the Strato Carrier. I made a mental note of one more thing to upgrade once I had the points.

  As soon as it had come to a stop, three people jumped out. The driver looked like an old-school superhero, wearing a light grey one-piece bodysuit with black and yellow lightning bolt patterns and a half mask that hid his face. He wasn’t visibly armed, but he did have armored gauntlets, boots, and a chestplate. With protector tech, those could do almost anything.

  His two companions had far more traditional combat outfits. The woman was wearing something similar to the armor I’d seen most private military wearing, just several generations more advanced, and she was carrying some sort of futuristic assault rifle. The boy had a shoulder-mounted gun and several small flying drones following him around.

  The driver swaggered over to me. “Are you Teddy?” he asked, with a deep, almost fake-sounding voice.

  “That’s me,” I confirmed. “And you are?”

  “I’m Mercury, and the two over by my car are Sarge and Falconer,” Mercury declared. “We’re from Kansas City and decided to head over when we got your call.”

  “Nice to meet you,” the woman, who I assumed was Sarge, announced.

  “What happened here?” the boy asked, looking around in awe. “I was told we were going out to check out an isolated stealth hive. No one mentioned a flying battleship, the army of teddy bears, or the badlands being on fire.”

  “Yeah… that’s my bad,” I said. “Things kind of got a little out of hand.”

  “I got that,” Mercury smirked. “You want to explain?”

  “Well, I came out here to sightsee with my family as part of our vacation, and one of my bots noticed traces of Antithesis activity,” I said, throwing a thumb towards Bandit. The fox stood up straight and waved. “I figured it was something small, because there was a lack of surface activity, but once we penetrated the outer shell and started looking around, we discovered the hive had built up a strategic biomass reserve.”

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  “Shell?” Sarge asked.

  “Yeah, it enveloped itself in a hard outer shell to preserve water, or so my AI tells me,” I replied. “Anyway, when we finally got down into the bowels of the complex, we discovered the hive had been preparing for a long time, waiting until it found a proper target. There was an absolutely colossal birthing chamber down there, one that started coming online once we breached. I had to take care of it ASAP.”

  I gestured towards the still-burning shrubbery around me. “As you can see, I resorted to fire.”

  “Do you think anything survived whatever inferno you unleashed?” Sarge asked. “It was so hot that it triggered the thermal sensors on the Family’s surveillance satellites, you know.”

  “I filled the tunnels we traveled through with nanites to chew up the structure, but I didn’t get a chance to explore the whole thing, and I don’t have any sort of seismic sensors to track down any offshoot structures. I’m kind of set up to handle hordes, not track down hive matter.”

  “It’s too bad we missed the action I’ve been itching for a fight,” Sarge announced.

  “Didn’t you guys get hit by the global?” I asked.

  “We did. I just like to fight,” the woman grinned.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about tracking down the hive tendrils. That’s why we brought Falconer,” Mercury announced.

  The boy jumped slightly when his name was mentioned, and he stopped staring at the scenery and turned towards us. “What do you expect me to do? Most of the fucking desert is on fire, and my drones aren’t fireproof.”

  “It’s the badlands, not a desert,” Sarge corrected. “There’s a difference. Besides, we just wait until the fire goes out. It’s not like we’re in a rush.”

  “I am,” the boy whined. “I have a date tonight.”

  I sighed. “Do you have any spare points?”

  “I do… but not that many. I was awakened fairly late during the global, and I spent most of them just trying to survive until the end of the day,” Falconer replied hesitantly.

  “Nyx? Are my upgrade catalogs compatible with boy’s drones? The armor ones, more specifically,” I asked.

  The trio looked at me oddly, and Sarge opened her mouth to ask something, but before she could, a random bear working nearby turned towards us. “Yes, although he may have to pay a slight premium on the upgrades, his models aren’t from the modular catalogs.”

  “That’s fine. Give him access to anything you think would be helpful until we part ways,” I said, before turning back to Falconer. “If you want to get to work early, you can use my thermal armor catalog to protect your drones. There might be some other goodies in there you can use; you’ll have to go over it with your AI.”

  The boy looked at me, surprised. Maybe no one had told him samurai could share catalogs before. “Thanks?”

  “You’re welcome,” I replied.

  “You just share your catalogs with other samurai?” Sarge asked. “For free?”

  “I don’t see a reason not to,” I replied. “As long as that tech is used to kill aliens and not shoot me in the back, then go nuts.”

  “Do you have anything else interesting you’d be willing to share?” she asked with a grin.

  I made a show of looking at the various bots going about their business, then over at the Strato Carrier, before looking back at her. “I’ve got a few things,” I finally said.

  “Nyx you want to contact Sarge and Mercury’s AIs and see if we have anything to offer them?” I said. “I’d ask you guys if you’d be willing to share too, but I already have a backlog of items a mile long, and I really don’t want to build on it.”

  “I appreciate it,” Mercury said politely. “Is there anything we can do to help with the hive, or clean up? We expected there to be Antithesis to fight, and we came an awful long way to just sit around.”

  “I’m mostly focusing on cleaning up my own mess right now. I kind of expected the fires to go out by now, but I know a number of Model Fours made a run for it once I collapsed the roof. I can lend you some of my foxes, my tracking units, if you want to try and hunt them down,” I said thoughtfully. “Other than that… my team approached the birthing chamber from that second, slightly less fiery pit over there. We didn’t get a chance to explore the complex that much, so if you concentrate your search on the opposite side, there’s a chance you still might find intact hive sections, and living Antithesis.”

  “We can work with that,” Mercury said, grinning widely. “Sarge I’d like you to…”

  “I’m taking the foxes,” the woman announced. “Dryll has already created a list of toys for me to purchase, and I want to try them out. Besides, I’m not good at the slow and steady shit, you know that.”

  Mercury laughed. “That’s fine, that’s what I was going to suggest anyways. Falconer and I can start looking for intact tunnels. With a little luck we’ll have this dealt with in a couple hours, so the kid can get home for his date.”

  “And I can get back to my vacation,” I grumbled. “I appreciate you all showing up to help. Even with the bears, this was going to be a slog.”

  “No problem,” Mercury replied. “Helping is what I do!”

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