Junkyard Cats
Page 11
The vision shifted again, this time to the crack. One person remained on the edge, holding a rope that indicated a lot of tension and movement. The other person was probably down in the crack, checking on the ones Jolene had shot. I needed to stop the invaders, just stop them, not kill them. I needed intel and info. And . . . I needed to protect the office. And the SunStar. And Mateo, whether I trusted him now or not. And I needed to do something about the Puffers. If Mateo had been able to stop them inside his suit, he’d already be back in action.
There was no way I’d be able to do all that.
No matter what I did next, my life as I knew it for the last few years was probably over. If I killed Jagger, I’d have to run again. If I left any Angels alive, I’d have to run again. And if I used my best weapons to stop and kill them, the satellites might register the energies and I’d have to blow up the scrapyard and still have to run again. Which sucked.
My vision shifted. I was seeing my own face, my funky bright reddish-gold irises looking into my own eyes. Tuffs’ eyes. My brain reeled. I closed my eyes and held very, very still to fight off the vertigo, now seeing my closed eyes through the cat’s. Tuffs nose-butted me.
“What?” I asked her.
Mentally, she showed me a water bowl. Showed me a food bowl full of scraps and kibble. Showed me a bowl of goat milk. And a vision of the dead man being fed on by a dozen cats, Rikerd Cotter, number three in the Angels, dead. And a woman farther out, also being eaten. The two dead bodies at the back airlock. And then the dead bodies in the entrance drive. Two cats were feeding on one of them. In the distance, the cats smelled coy-wolves, the feral half-breed species patiently waiting for the humans to leave so they could get to the dead. Or attack the cats. Or both.
Lastly there was a vision of a cat, sitting inside the Mammoth, up on the dash, staring out at the feeding cats and dead humans.
“Is that one of yours?” I asked.
Cat of ours, the concept came back. ‘Cat’ was a thought that conveyed a sneaky/savvy/smart fighter, a female warrior cat. The thought ‘ours’ contained a series of relationship parameters, successful military maneuvers that resulted in dead rats brought to the pride for protein, and bloodlines that I couldn’t follow, except to gather that the cat was probably Tuffs’ great-great-great granddaughter. And Tuffs was proud of her.
“She got the driver to let her in,” I guessed.
Tuffs made a satisfied sound that was sort of like, “Hhhhah,”
“She knows what they’re saying. What they’re planning.”
“Hhhhah mmm.”
“And . . . without me, you don’t get water and food and goat milk. And we make a good team.”
“Hhhhah mmm.”
“So, you’re telling me to keep fighting and we’ll go on as before. But I have to tell you, Tuffs, we might not be able to do that.”
Tuffs sent me a vision of the Mammoth Tac-V full of cat food, cats, Mateo, and me, driving off into the distance.
I laughed. It was such a strange sound I hardly recognized it. I couldn’t really say when I had last laughed freely.
“Okay. I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, the unfamiliar grin on my face.
“You do know that talking to yourself is a sure sign of insanity, dontcha,” Jolene said.
“Yeah. I do. I need my arm back.”
“How long will it take you to heal the damage and be able to use it again?” Jolene asked.
“It’ll be a while. I’ll raid a medical supplies locker for bandages and a sling.”
“Really? That’s your plan?” Jolene said.
But she released the command sleeve. Needles slid from my flesh, ripping clotted blood from the hundreds of minuscule wounds, clots that had slowed the bleeding. The pain was like lightning and ice and fire and sharp blades and salt. So bad I forgot to breathe. The faint hum of a decontamination feature went into effect, a feeling against my shoulder—a half-buzz, half-high-pitched drilling noise. My arm slid out and flopped in my lap. Pain like I’d been flayed, thrummed through me. I was scared to look at it.
Jolene said, “Yeah. You’re all badass, uh huh. I can see that. And you’re gonna take on the bad guys, single-handedly, ain’tcha?”
When I could breathe again, I looked down. I had fallen forward against the Comm Sleeve. My hand was in my lap. My armor was off up to a space above my elbow. From fingertips to the edge of the remaining armor I was skinless. Bloodied and leaking. The pain so cold and sharp and intense that even breathing was a torture.
“Ha, ha,” I whispered.
“What’s funny?” Jolene asked.
“Single-handedly?”
“Oh,” she said. “That was funny. I’m programmed for humor. Mateo doesn’t let me use it often.”
Mateo. Her CO. Who was brain damaged. That had to have been awful for her all these years, alone, semi-sentient, with no one to talk to. Which I must have mumbled aloud.
“What do you mean, semi-sentient? I’ll have you know I’ve evolved way beyond my original programing, Darlin’. I left CAIT behind more than four standard years ago. I can give you the exact day I evolved, if you want.” When I didn’t answer, she said, “Huh,” sounding disgusted. “There’s an emergency med-bay to your right. The blue vertical lights? It’s sized for the chief engineer, but I can modify it to fit you. If you step inside, it’ll fix you up enough to survive and fight for a while. It usually gives the chief engineer or the last man aboard twenty-four hours of extra life.”
I looked at the glowing blue lines, and realized it was an upright coffin-shaped closet, about two and a half meters tall and a meter wide. As I watched, two doors unsealed and swept back. The inside was a standard med-bay, except it was formed for standing upright. I popped the safety straps away and tried to rise from the command seat. A puddle of half-clotted blood ran down my legs. Splashed on the floor. Splattered everywhere. Had to be a couple liters at least. Too much to lose and still fight. All four cats raced to lap up the protein.
“Erp,” was all I managed.
Then the world tilted, spun. I was falling inside the med-bay. Everything went black.
* * *
The med-bay door opened and I dropped, boneless, onto the engineering command floor. I knew I had fallen because my cheek was on the cold hemp-plaz tile, half of it having dropped from the ceiling. And three cats were in front of me, noses nearly touching mine.
“Hey,” I said, mostly to the cats. “That was weird.”
“That was twenty-seven minutes, forty-six seconds of IVs, healing lasers, topical blood clotting chemicals, two syringes of plaz-skin, four layers of Inviso-Dermis, and enough time-release chems and steroids to let you beat an augmented prizefighter in a—”
“Stop,” I managed. She did. “Tuffs. You still here?”
Tuffs shoved the other cats aside, including Notch, who was twice as big as her and twice as mean. Or so I had thought. He gave way to the Guardian Cat.
“Show me Jagger. Then the invading vehicles and people out front. Then Mateo. Then the two in the Grabber. Then the two at the back of the property. Please,” I added, knowing I was demanding help from a source who was not used to taking orders. She sat, slid her tail around her legs, and stared at me. “Um. Pretty please?” I added. “With sardines on top?”
Tuffs touched my nose, then forehead to forehead, and sent me a vision of small fishes in the prides’ food bowls. There were two sets of dishes, one for each pride of cats.
“You bargain hard,” I murmured.
I pushed with my uninjured arm and managed to sit upright. My own armor sleeve was open on the floor beside me. I wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. Energy spurted through my bloodstream as the first of the time release pain meds and steroids kicked in. “Oh,” I breathed. That felt better. Fortified, I studied my arm. The Inviso-Dermis made my flesh look gelatinous and the weird colors of the plaz-skin beneath looked like a toddler had been drawing on my skinless muscles.
I looked back to Tuffs. “Deal.”<
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Tuffs again put her head to mine, and I figured she had to be touching for me see through her eyes, though that might change as my blood did things to her insides. My vision skewed sideways, and I saw Jagger through a cat’s eyes. He was standing in the middle of the office, feet shoulder-width apart, back ramrod-straight, OMW para-military badass enforcer to the core. He was studying the screens and my huge NBP compression seat, drinking from one of my stored water bottles. His expression said he was drawing conclusions I didn’t want him to draw. Jagger was smart. Like Jolene, I liked a smart man. Usually. Bloody damn.
My vision went sideways again, and I saw the invading vehicles out front. The people were no longer just standing around. The Mammoth Tactical Vehicle had been damaged, showing blackened blast marks on the grill and the silk-plaz windshield. Dents marred the formerly pristine body. While I was out, Gomez and Jagger must have surprised them with a bombardment. The bodies were still in the dirt, but all the cats were in hiding, not feasting.
The surviving invaders were inside the Mammoth, and my vision went upside down as I saw through a different cat’s eyes. Vertigo sent me spinning and I nearly fell over until I realized the cat was stretched out on some man’s lap, getting a belly rub. It was a weird view. The humans were drinking coffee and eating meat jerky, if the smell through the cat’s nose was anything to go by. My own nose and inner ears revolted at the unaccustomed scents and position.
In the Mammoth were six people, one injured. Five of them were sitting around the transport walls, on padded benches they had lowered just for that purpose. Clarisse was sitting in the center of the humans. Each of the others were touching her, somewhere, hand, foot, arm. It was an odd positioning.
Tuffs listened through her great-great-great granddaughter’s ears and I heard Clarisse say, “I’m not calling for reinforcements. We’ll wait here until the insertion team has exfiltrated with the needed intel. Once we know we have everything we need, we’ll bomb the scrapyard building into a crater. How long until the internal nanos have repaired our equipment?”
One-Eyed Jack handed her a cup and said, “Twenty minutes, more or less.”
That gave me a tight timeline.
“Next time, someone bring more coffee,” a man’s voice griped. “And decent food. This jerky sucks.” He handed a stick of aromatic dried meat to Clarisse. “And while we’re talking, why not use a nuke?”
“You’re a nuke whore,” a fourth man said. “If we nuke the place, the crack might cave in on the spaceship.”
Bloody hell. They had a nuclear weapon?
“What about the SFM?” the coffee-griper asked. “Why work with the military if we can’t blow things up?”
An SFM was a shoulder-fired missile launcher, which meant I hadn’t disabled all their missiles when I took out the mini-tank’s armaments.
Clarisse said, “I’m not wasting my four remaining missiles on a junkyard.”
Bad for her. Good for me, I thought. Then, Four missiles? Bloody damn!
The cat in the Mammoth felt the lap she was in shift. From my current perspective, it felt as if the vehicle’s internal repair nanos were mending damage to the undercarriage while the invaders were taking a break and brainstorming. Twenty minutes before the tracks of the mini-tank and the tires of the Tac-Vs were repaired too, assuming they all came with standard military mechanical repair nanobots. They were one-time-use nanos and very good at what they did.
“Jolene?” I asked the ship’s AI. “Start me a timer for twenty minutes. Give me a two-minute warning and thirty-second warnings thereafter.”
“Copy that, Darlin’. Twenty and counting.”
“Show me Mateo,” I whispered to Tuffs.
The vision shifted again. Mateo was still on the ground. His suit was juddering and shaking. The two observer cats were intent, watching the battle from outside the suit. Others were keeping watch from vantage points above the warbot. Through their eyes I saw evidence that the pride had attacked and killed several more Puffers. There was a third dead cat and bloody tracks that told me the survivors had carried injured cats to the office for med-bay treatment.
Tuffs switched me to the two humans hanging from the Grabber. They were either dead, or out cold and brain dead.
Tuffs’ vision moved to a different vantage point, watching the back of the property. There were three now, two standing and one man bleeding from both legs, which had been mangled. His armor suit’s automatic pneumatic anti-shock programming had initiated, and both legs had received competent field dressings and tourniquets. That had kept him alive, so far. The cats crept closer and I heard him talking through their ears.
“It’s all there,” he whispered as the uninjured man, clearly the leader, offered him a squeeze bag of fluid. He drank and sighed. “Devil Milk. Thanks.”
“You can hate me when we cut you off and you go into withdrawal,” the leader said.
“What’s down there?” the woman demanded.
“Everything. Just like Evelyn said. Look at my cam. Every damn thing. Every . . .” His voice trailed off. He was unconscious.
The woman tapped things on the injured man’s chest and they both stared at what I assumed was a vest cam.
“Holy damn. I didn’t believe it,” she said.
“You’ll owe Clarisse an apology.”
“That bitch can stuff an apology up her ass. I’ll rig a sling. We need to get away from the crack so we can communicate with the team.”
I’d been right. Whatever was inside the crack had cut off transmissions. That might explain why no one had come looking into the crack until now.
“Jolene,” I said pulling away from Tuffs. “Did emissions from the damaged ship in the crack prevent mayday transmissions from getting through?”
“Affirmative.”
“And you didn’t think that was an important bit of intel for me to know?”
“Well, I never,” Jolene said, insulted Southern ire in her tone. “You told me how to answer. Your exact words were”—my own voice came over the deck speakers—“Stop. Request minimal information in response to questions.”
I cursed at myself and the snippy AI and when I stopped cussing, Jolene was silent. Was I supposed to apologize to an AI? She was Southern, so I figured yes. I snapped the armor sleeve on over the plaz-skin and Inviso-Dermis. I felt no pain at all, which was probably a bad thing. I flexed my fingers. No pain. I figured that wouldn’t last long, so I better apologize and then fight while I could.
“I’m sorry, Jolene. Please tell me about the ship transmissions. And tell me how many people were aboard the SunStar when it went down. And was one of them named Evelyn?”
“USSS SunStar and the USSS MorningStar were in a near-earth orbit battle with the PRC and the Russians. It was two nations against us at the time, thanks to a temporary alliance between the Ruskies and the Perkers. I took a helluva lotta damage and ended up with a dozen crawlers inside me,” she said, proving again that AIs didn’t hold grudges. “The crew fought ’em but things wasn’t going real well. Then the Bugs showed up.”
Jolene hesitated, oddly for an AI, and her voice lost some of its Southern twang as she began speaking again.
“The WIMP massive-particle propulsion accelerator had been hit, so we dropped into the upper atmosphere to get away and to give the crew time to launch evac pods. We were incapable of providing future assistance to the MorningStar. The crew got away. The CO stayed behind and, together, we were able to use the forward WIMP engines to maneuver us away from populated areas.
“My hull began to break apart during reentry, at a damaged section halfway between the forward and stern WIMP engines. The rear half hit the existing mine crack and caved in the mine, creating a much larger crack and damaging the WIMP engine. Massive particles have been leaking ever since.”
I dredged though what I knew of WIMPs, which wasn’t much, so I tapped my Berger-chip and let it give me the information. My chip dumped a version of History of Physics 101 into my brain.
Simultaneously, researchers in China discovered a second WIMP particle and entered the race to create an engine system using the WIMP2. In an unprecedented race for the planets, both nations had WIMP engine prototypes capable of intra-sol-system space and atmospheric flight by the end of 2028, though there were hardware problems in flight that resulted in multiple deaths among flight crews on both sides.
Within four years, in early 2032, China sent an automated vehicle to Mars, using instantaneous Entangled Neutrino communication to control the ship. The flight took forty-two days. China followed it up with a manned flight in 2035, and claimed the entire Martian planet for the People’s Republic. The European Union, the U.S., and Russia all took offense, and in 2037, all three sent manned vehicles to repudiate the claim. It is believed that tech from the alien “Bug” spaceship retrieved by the European Union in 2036 assisted in the allied WIMP engine development. Ultimately, the Mars debacle and the alien tech led to war.
I shut off the chip’s info flow. Everything had led to war. Every single thing.
Aloud, I said, “So the WIMP engines are leaking, and the EntNu can’t communicate.”
“Except with me,” Jolene said, sounding apologetic, “and that’s only been for the last six-hundred twenty-five days. It took me that long to convince the CO to run a hard line down into the crack.”