Martialla and Sordee led an elite unit of our deadliest and most expendable killers up the mountains to take out the Invincible airbase. Martialla, who is mostly overly impressed with the people trying to murder us, for a change was highly critical of the Invincible leadership for allowing us to do that. She says that as soon as they knew that our mountaineers were in play and had local knowledge of the crags and the ability to move across them they should have moved their airbase immediately. At that point it was only isolated from support, not from attack.
But they didn’t move it. Martialla reported that they destroyed sixteen aircraft. She had improvised (is there any other kind now?) explosives but she saved them and they just pushed the planes off a cliff after they had killed everyone. I don’t know if that’s irony or what, but seeing a bunch of planes tumble down the side of a mountain would have been something. She did save one plane for herself. If you ask me flying back while your fighters all laboriously climb down a mountain is not good for building morale but most of them were dead anyway so I suppose it doesn’t matter much.
She’s very excited about this plane. She says that unlike the other homemade flying junkpiles this one is “80% an original Yak3”. Doesn’t sound like much to get excited about if you ask me, it’s as ugly as a yak for sure. When I failed to be impressed she grabbed me by the shoulders like I was a hysterical housewife in a black and white move, like she was going to shake me.
“This is a real plane Ela, a plane that I can fly!”
I looked at it dubiously, many of our men were pawing at it like the ape-men in that opening scene in 2001 “So it has guns or something?”
She pulled back obviously annoyed that I wasn’t more impressed “Well yeah but the ammo is long gone. That’s not the point. The point is it’s a real plane! One that I can fly.”
“You already said that.”
Whatever. While she was doing that Lucien was busy setting up a defensive line in front of Wyo. Several of defensive lines actually, defense in depth he calls it. Trenches, ditches, fortifications, ambush points, land mines, all kinds of shit. It’s a good thing I showed up because the fighters, I keep wanting to say men but it’s not men it’s everyone, hate him a lot.
They don’t want to dig latrines and build more fuel-efficient engines, they want to tear-ass across the land in their killmobiles and hack people to bits. The people in his logistics group are so miserable I’m surprised they haven’t jumped off a cliff themselves. A couple of rousing speeches from yours truly along with the promise of bloody slaughter to come has held off their rebellion for now, but we need some wins to get some hearts and minds action going.
On the other hand I’ve got my personal killers picked out for the old “when you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow” maneuver if needed as well. Hopefully it won’t come to that.
Even though it was their idea to continue the dig the 127 people are being very cautious with their freaky digging machines. It’s almost like they’re religious artifacts to them or something. I kept pushing Sordee to get them out and digging as soon as Martialla and Lucien were off doing their thing but they’ve delayed and delayed and delayed because they want to make sure that they’re safe from Invincible attack before they do anything.
“They’re as safe as they’re gunna get buddy boy” I says to Sordee at one point.
I guess they’re operating under the assumption that if they have to they can just wait until we all die because then clearly I wasn’t the messiah like they thought and as long as they have the digging machine they can wait for a new messiah.
Religion cuts both ways like that.
