by Faith Hunter
Jagger landed beside me, picked me up, and raced back toward the clearing.
As Mateo’s words settled inside me, everything came clear. “You sorry, bloody son of a bitch,” I said. The Simba hadn’t been accidently buried. No. It had been infested with PRC nanobots and deliberately buried.
Instead of nuking the Simba, someone in the military must have found a way to put the bots to sleep, so they’d stop deconstructing the tank, then had sealed the tank and buried it to keep it safe until scientists learned how to kill the little suckers. Mateo had discovered how to kill the PRC nanos all on his own. He had discovered the Simba and its history. He knew I, or someone I transitioned, could likely survive being infested with PRC nanobots during a rescue mission.
He had used me to get himself a war machine to rescue his . . . his what? Evelyn had been his second in command. They had probably been a lot more than that.
Mateo had sent me into the infected Simba to start it up. Had made sure we’d have an antigravity device big enough to power up the Simba and zap the nanobots on site. He now had the Simba, earthmovers to free it, and two portable Antigravity Grabbers. My thrall had done that. On his own.
“What have you done?” I whispered to Mateo.
“What I have to, to rescue Evelyn and kill the queen.”
“You could have asked,” I whispered.
“You never asked me,” he said.
“You didn’t have a brain to ask,” I said.
I was infected all over again. My nanobots would have to fight the pure PRC mech-nanos I picked up in the Simba. Mine would probably win, but I’d need a med-bay in less than seventy-two hours.
Jagger opened the truck door, stepped up high, sat, and cradled me on his lap. When Gretchen tried to help, he accepted a wound kit and sent her on her way. “Gloves,” I snapped. Jagger was already pulling on a pair over his armored hands. Gently, he cleaned my wound. “Don’t touch your face,” I said.
“Copy that,” he said.
My heart thundered. I wanted to smash something. Mateo had . . . Mateo had betrayed me.
“I remember the moment I first saw you,” Jagger murmured, “sitting there in that silly getup, grime under your nails. That awful orange nail polish chipped and dirty.” He dabbed my wound, dropping bloody cloths into the empty wound kit. A lot of bloody cloths.
He pressed my scalp, trying to stanch the blood, the stuff on the cloths stinging like dozens of bees. “During the war, I saw the vid of you, twelve years old, crawling toward a Mama-Bot like a soldier under barbed wire. It took an hour for you to climb to a tiny hatch midway up her side.” He dropped the gloves and cloths into the medkit and sealed it. His free arm went around my middle and he pulled me closer, murmuring into my ear. “You paused and looked back at the ridge where your chapter hid. You said something. No one ever knew what.”
“I love you, Pops,” I whispered, repeating what I had said that day. “That’s why I was doing it. That was all that mattered.”
“You were weak, a skinny little thing. And yet your father sent you to the Mama-Bot and directed you to the one hatch we thought you might be able to get in.”
“You say we. How were you involved?”
“I was fighting in the Battle of Mobile at the time. We had killed a Mama-Bot the week before. It took a nuke to kill it. We had spotted the hatch, but no one wanted to risk the nanobots. . . .” His voice trailed off. “Your own father sent you into harm’s way. Knowing you would come into contact with the PRC mech-nanobots.”
I tried to get a deep breath and murmured, “Pliable mode.” The suit went limp. I could breathe again. “Yeah. He did. So what? Can we talk about this later?”
“I recognized you the moment I saw you. And I knew that somehow, even with the mech-nanobots, you had survived. For years. You looked tough enough to take me. I’ve never met a woman who might be able to take me in a fair fight.”
“There are no fair fights,” I whispered.
“No. There aren’t. So . . . how?”
“I was stung. By bicolors.”
Jagger went still. His arm tightened around me.
“The male ants swarmed me just outside of a little town, eight weeks before my thirteenth birthday, near the end of the first year of the war. They bit off parts of me, stung me full of poison. Then the queen stung me and deposited me full of DNA-based bio-nanobots.”
“People swarmed by bicolors die,” he said. “Horribly. I’ve seen it.” In the background, people moved, a fire danced high. Closer, the pump made a steady erp-slosh sound, as if it were throwing up. Spy jumped into my lap, sniffed the bloody cloths in the wound kit, and leaped away.
“Three humans survived being stung by a queen,” I said. “Clarisse Warhammer, me, and a guy. The bio-nanobots attacked me on the genetic level, the way they were designed to do with the ants. They fixed what was wrong with me in the transition, then made alterations they thought I needed to survive. I lived, somehow. I became faster and stronger than pure human.
“And then in the Mama-Bot, I killed some puffers, and a lot of their mech-nanobots got into a cut. My bicolor ant bio-nanobots attacked the new invaders and went to war inside me. I was immediately sick. I was dying and I knew it. But while the nanobots fought it out inside me, I found the Mama-Bot’s AI and set a small nuke. I got out. My ant-nanos altered the mech-nanos, and I survived my second transition. It sucked. I remember every feverish, aching, puking moment.
“I was a preadolescent and wasn’t able to spread the nanos yet. I was safe for a little while. And the world was safe from me.”
“There are all kinds of nanobots,” Jagger said.
“Yeah. The bicolor queen’s nanos are the only kind that survive inside a human body without taking it apart. If you survive them, they remake you, then attack and take over invader bots. Like me, Cupcake survived nano-transition twice, just like Enrico will have to. You got lucky, in a way. You got my dual bio-mech-nanos on the first try.” I laughed, and it was a sad sound. “My fault. And I am so very, very sorry.”
“So that’s what’s been making me faster and stronger. Heal faster. All that. Mutated nanos.”
It’s also what’s making you fall in love with me, I thought. But I didn’t say it. “I got out of the Mama-Bot, back to OMW base camp. The Mama-Bot died.”
“We saw livestream vid. That week, other Mama-Bots were attacked the same way,” Jagger said, “and most died, though none of the volunteers survived. I’m guessing because they didn’t have bio-nanos to combat the PRC nanos.”
“The puffers inside a Mama-Bot carry the nanos and attack en masse. They’ll take a human apart in a skinny hellish minute,” I said. My wound itched. That was a bad sign. The PRC nanos were awake and in my wound. “Then the Alien Bugs came; they eventually forced peace on Earth. During all that, puberty hit me. The nanobots did more work, turning me into a Queen. My body changed; the mutated nanos began to secrete through my skin in an attempt to modify others. In an attempt to build a nest.”
I’d killed a few people before I started to wear gloves and avoid people. And then Pops got sick. Him I had deliberately infected in an attempt to save him from Parkinson’s. But I had waited too long. My nanos couldn’t save him.
“My nanobots are changing you,” I said, clenching and unclenching my armored fist, remembering the sound of Pops the night he stopped breathing. “I’m sorry. I don’t want thralls. I never did.” Though Mateo was clearly not a thrall anymore. Hope leaped inside me.
“We have a second Antigravity Grabber back at the hotel,” Jagger said. “We can decontaminate our suits at least.”
On our private channel, Mateo said, “According to my readouts, the PRC mech-nanos came alive in the Simba the moment you banged your head. Mechs last forever and they never die, as long as they have something they can break down and digest. Any nanos you left on the Simba will last seventy-two hours and die off. But any mech-nanos that got into your bloodstream will go to war,” Mateo said. “I had hoped that
wouldn’t happen.”
Softly, I said, “So I’m collateral damage to the rescue of Evelyn?” Mateo didn’t reply. “Will mine die? They infected your spaceship. They turned your AI into Jolene.”
“I became Jolene all by myself, sugah,” the sentient AI said, breaking into the private chat. “All your little micro-pets did was flip a couple switches before they died off at seventy-two hours. I did all the rest with the ship’s libraries: 3D and laser films and vid games and novels. Berger chips gave my CO Mateo back his autonomy and his personality, and I picked a personality all on my own.”
On the open channel, Mateo said, “More PRC mech-nanos are waking up. There must be trillions of them. We need the Antigravity Grabber inside the Simba, now.”
Jagger tapped his comms and said to Amos, “Update.”
“I got the water diverted. That motha is one big-assed machine. It’s got a path to crawl out of the pit if its batteries get enough charge.”
To Jagger, I said, “You better get the hatch open again and drop in the IGP to decontaminate it the way Mateo did the SunStar. It can do two jobs at once, charge the engines and kill mech-nanos.”
“Use the primary hatch,” Mateo said. “The nanos there are still quiescent, and you won’t be attacked.”
“Roger that,” Jagger said.
“I got this,” Amos said, the sound of a hatch opening in the background.
From the swamp I heard Amos bellow with joy and then felt the soft vibration of WIMP engines as the Antigravity Grabber powered up the Simba. I smiled slightly and said, “I think the Simba came online.”
Into my earbud, Mateo said, “Copy that. Simba. CO Mateo—” That was all I heard before Mateo shut me out of the comm channel.
Jagger slid from beneath me and picked up the sealed wound kit. “I’ll toss this into the Simba, under the grabber to decontam.” He left me in the cab, his powerful frame throwing night shadows as he walked. I opened a bottle of water and sipped as I watched Gretchen and Cupcake work, feeding the small crowd, putting each of them for a while in the piss-poor med-bay. And then Gretchen dragged the first of the still-living attackers close to the fire. Someone threw on fresh logs. The flames danced high.
Cupcake backed away, shock and horror racing through her strongly enough for me to feel traces of it through the nanobots. She whirled away as the man started to scream. Raced for the rig and surged into the cab, shooing me to the passenger side. She started the truck and did a complicated set of maneuvers, getting the rig turned around so it faced outward and we didn’t have to watch the fire or the payback. She put music on, something prewar and lighthearted. Loud enough to drown out screams.
I wasn’t squeamish, but I was glad not to have to watch or listen. I stared into the night, thinking through what we needed to do before we went after Evelyn. Not for Mateo, but for the rest of the world. We didn’t have long.
My nanobots wanted me to have more help. They knew I was about to go into danger, and they wanted their queen in a nest, surrounded by others who would face that threat. But I had never sat back and let others face risk. I had always, every moment of my life, run straight into danger, leading any attack, or, more commonly, taking it on alone. If I had more thralls…
I curled my fingers.
I would not make another thrall. I would not.
Except that . . .
Mateo had self-will again. He had created a plan and kept it from me. Mateo was a thrall, but not. Cupcake made her own decisions and had gotten snippy several times on this trip. Thrall, yet not. Jagger may just need more Berger chips. Maybe my thralls would be less slave and more whatever a self-willed thrall was. But I had a feeling they would still want to be around me. I liked being alone. I was a hermit at heart. I didn’t want a nest. Bloody freaking hell.
I had a lot of thinking to do.
On the far side of the trees, the Simba rolled out of the swamp, over scrub, through mud, and across a small road. It was like watching an entire city block crush across the landscape on tank tracks. Then it stopped. As I watched, Jagger and Amos lowered the portable IGP into the front hatch, resealed it, and climbed down. The Chameleon skin flickered into place, and the traveling lights went dark. Even the noise decreased to nearly nothing beneath Cupcake’s bar-hopping, lying, life-is-easy music. Under Mateo’s control, the main battle tank had now effectively vanished.
Spy soared to the top of the cab and glared at me through the armored windshield. Without my asking, Cupcake turned the music up to cover the screams, and I opened my door. All the cats raced up, supple as silk, and jumped in. Except Spy. Limber and willowy, she walked across the hood to the open door, holding my gaze as if to make a point. She judged the distance and flew across, twisting in midair, and landed on my lap, an impossible leap-landing. Her claws dug in. She hissed.
“I have armor,” I said to her, maybe a tad too complacent.
She hissed again and sprang away. I figured I was doomed. She’d get me back for whatever she was mad about. As long as she didn’t hock up a hairball and deposit it on my pillow. I banished that thought and filled my head with images of tins of salmon, just in case she could read my mind. I closed the door. Cupcake turned down the music.
Minutes later, Amos clambered into the back and made himself comfy on his recliner.
Jagger motored up to us on his bike, pointed down the road, and took the lead. Into my earbuds, he said, “I’ll call the local Law at dawn with an anonymous tip. Gretchen will turn over the name of Deputy Darson, but not until he’s in my hands.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. “Any of Marconi’s men come here?”
Jagger hummed a note that might be an affirmative.
“Listen, Asshole, you can’t pretend that sex camp back there didn’t happen. Anyone who visited that camp and abused those people—”
“Will be dealt with. Part of the negotiations between Marconi and the OMWs.”
“But—”
“None of your business, Shining. I’ll handle it.”
My thrall had just shut me down. And he wasn’t even polite about it.
That was so bloody cool.
∆∆∆
An hour outside of Charleston, my armor ran out of power and turned into a rock-hard solid piece of sculpture. It compressed into my middle like a seatbelt combined with an old-fashioned girdle. The pressure instantly made me have to pee, but I had to get out of my armor to do that. Desperate, I ripped one hand free. I lost a little skin. I left behind a little blood at the wrist joint, but the suit would be decontaminated once we got back to the hotel, and Mateo would have to decontam the cab after this trip anyway. The other hand was easier. I didn’t bleed on that one.
“What are you doing?” Cupcake asked as we bounced over ruts in the road.
I gave a grunt, lifted a leg up to the dash (which did terrible things to my bladder) and started on my right toes, manually unhinging the armor. The armor resisted. Clearly, I wasn’t doing it right, but I was growing frantic.
Spy and her crew took up positions on the dash and stared with intense interest at what I was doing. Occasionally they touched heads one to another. The black male cat thought I’d appreciate how limber he was, so he lifted a leg in the air and cleaned his unneutered privates. Which (again) I did not need to see.
Slowly my leg came free. When I got to my hip, I started twisting and bending in ways my bones were not designed to accommodate. Spy and her clowder thought I was hilarious and made little chuffing noises.
“As soon as I get one arm free, I’ll slap all of you,” I threatened. That made them chuff harder. Spy showed me her teeth in what communicated clearly, “Try me.” It took a lot of work, but I finally got my leg and the necessary parts free of the fancy armor and dragged the rest of me to the composting toilet in back. I tore my undies trying to get them off. “Bloody damn,” I muttered. The cats gathered around and watched, out of range of my hands or feet. I know. I tried to swat them. But the relief was immediate.
&
nbsp; Getting back to my seat, I started working on the other leg. Mildly, Cupcake asked, “Are you trying to get your armor off?”
“What the bloody hell does it look like I’m doing?” I snapped.
“Mmm. Well. See the little silvery disk-shaped thing under either arm? That’s a little viber. Press the oval spot in the center with a finger.”
I glared at her. Touched the oval spot. Felt the spot shiver a little as the suit compared my identity with the primary initialization. There were little clicks all down my body. The suit fell off me. “You didn’t think that might be useful information for me to have?” I demanded.
“You don’t like it when we smother you.” Cupcake changed gears, slowed, and we bumped over a big rut in the road. I bounced in the seat, nearly banging my head. “It isn’t my job to tell you things unless I know you want me to.”
I opened my mouth to argue but snapped it shut. She had a point.
“You know how to talk. You can ask,” she said.
“You tell her, sugah,” Jolene said into the rig’s speakers. “All that moping and growling is just a case of bad manners. Yo’ mama taught you better.”
“You clearly never met Little Mama. She taught me to stand up for myself. And how to throw knives.” I wasn’t sure where this was going, but some part of me was enjoying the burgeoning argument. Argument. My thrall (make that thralls)—Jolene and Cupcake—were arguing with me. Hallelujah.
“I bet good green money your mama taught you to say please and thank you and yes sir and yes ma’am,” Jolene said.
“Little Mama wasn’t Southern,” I said to Jolene.
I tossed my armor behind my seat, found a pair of old pants and work gloves stuffed in a side pocket, dressed, and belted back in. The pants smelled like grease, but what the heck.
“Shame about that. You’d be a lot nicer to deal with if you had been taught to act like a lady.”
I burst out laughing, thinking about a lady wearing spike heels and a dainty dress climbing into a Mama-Bot, alone, carrying nothing but a blaster and a tiny nuke to save the world. Yeah. Most ladies had died in the first hours of the war. Those humans who had survived had different skill sets from reading literature, writing poetry, drinking champagne while doing yoga, and ordering around servants. Or whatever ladies did.
