Junkyard War, page 1
JUNKYARD WAR
Faith Hunter
Lore Seekers Press
Copyright © 2023 Faith Hunter
JUNKYARD WAR
ISBN: 978-1-62268-177-8
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information contact Lore Seekers Press, P.O. Box 4251 CRS, Rock Hill, SC 29732. Or online at www.loreseekerspress.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Also available in Trade Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-62268-178-5.
Cover illustration by Rebecca Frank, Bewitching Book Covers.
Lore Seekers Press is an imprint of Bella Rosa Books.
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Acknowledgments
No book is written in a vacuum. This novel, and the entire Junkyard Cats series, has been dependent on several people.
Robert Martin, physicist and theoretical physicist-adventurer. The creator of the science behind the WIMP engines and the EntNu communications system in the Junkyard Universe.
Bonnie Smietanowska, physicist.
Mud Mumudes for all things plant-ish and genetic-y
Brenda Rezk for breaking down genetic stuff I couldn’t understand.
Lets Talk Promotions for running PR.
Agent Lucienne Diver with The Knight Agency for getting me an Audible Original with the Junkyard Cats series.
Editor Steve Feldberg at Audible for all the wonderful suggestions and insights, for the Audible Original. Every care has been taken to deviate not at all.
Cover design by Rebecca Frank of Bewitching Book Covers. Love it!
Teri Lee editor extraordinaire.
And my final thanks to Lore Seekers Press for the e-book and print editions.
Junkyard War
“Reconnoiter via feral cats. This is a first,” Mateo said into my helmet’s communications system. There might have been humor in the words. Hard to tell through his metallic larynx.
“Cats approaching outer perimeter. And they ain’t feral, CO Sugah,” Jolene said. “The pride done named themselves Felis catus destructus.”
I looked up from the small screen I had opened in my helmet’s vid display. “The pride cats understand Latin?”
“Prolly,” the AI back at the USSS SunStar said, in the Southern accent she chose for herself. “But Tuffs just kinda asked me for help and we came up with it together.”
I didn’t know which was the worse possibility, the pride cats speaking Latin or the not-supposed-to-be-sentient-but-was AI talking with the not-supposed-to-be-sentient-but-were cats. “Fine. Whatever.”
Mateo snorted. It was a grating sound I interpreted as laughter. There wasn’t much left of one side of his head, and part of his throat had been so damaged by swarming PRC nanobots that my med-bay had implanted an artificial one I’d bartered for at an illegal swap meet. Medical supplies had been hard to come by back then, and still were. Mateo also didn’t have all his limbs, which I hadn’t been able to fix, and lived most of his life in the neural-net-controlled warbot.
I could practically feel him looming above me, seven and a half meters of legs, torso, and head with a meter of horizontal silk-plaz view screen. With his dynamic environmental camouflage off, the warbot suit looked like the love child of a deadly spider and a kid’s toy, and if this recce went sideways, Mateo’s suit and his battle tank, situated half a click away, might be the only reason we got out of here.
“The cats got through the outer perimeter, y’all,” Jolene said. “We got visuals from both of the cameras.”
Even with night-vision goggles, it was hard to tell much. The cams had been mounted on the chests of the cats’ tactical harnesses to make it harder for sensors to spot them, and they were emplaced to give us a good angle and line of sight, but there was only so much we could see with the cams at fifteen centimeters off the ground. Spy and her mate, Maul, were currently running—that crouched-predator sprint-stop-sprint, of cats—through autumn-dry prairie grasses, giving us no actual view of the target: a heavily fortified and armed World War III bunker.
I fidgeted as the cats approached what had looked like a small overgrown hill in the drone flyovers we had done. It had taken us weeks to get to the stage of in-person reconnoiter and, as patient as I had been, now I was jumpy, jittery, and my armor readouts showed it. I tried to relax. Wasn’t helping. Where was the bloody damn bunker? The cats should be right on top of it.
In the last weeks we had created cat-sized tac harnesses with comms systems, destroyed the nanobots infesting the Simba battle tank, checked out its systems, retrofitted hardware, added new weapons, and tied the crashed spaceship’s EntNu comms system to the tank. EntNu was based on the practical application of the science of entwined neutrinos and gave us instantaneous communication with Jolene back at the junkyard. All that, just so we could verify that the bunker had been taken over by our enemy, the MSA’s Clarisse Warhammer, and maybe get a look inside.
Amos and Mateo had done most of the preparatory muscle work. Jolene had spent the time collecting intel on the motorcycle clubs, while Cupcake (and sometimes I) talked to intermediaries and put together the upcoming negotiations. There was a long list of potential trade items to cement the safety and cooperation of the participants—the leaders of the most successful biker clubs in what was left of the US. My plans were fluid, my goals even more so, and what I discovered from this current recce would change what I negotiated for at the parley.
Not that the biker club VIPs knew everything about the upcoming meeting. They didn’t even know who was invited. The Outlaw Militia Warriors and the Hells Angels thought they were just gathering to divide up territory and discuss an ordinary war of guns in a battle against the MS Angels. They didn’t know about the prisoner we wanted to rescue or what Clarisse Warhammer really was.
The MSA was what was left after the West Coast portion of the Hells Angels biker club had been usurped by the old MS-13—the Mara Salvatrucha gang. The merged criminal enterprise was bent on taking over the entire country. Warhammer was now the driving force of that move, quickly rising to the top of her own ultra-violent gang while invading the other clubs’ territories.
I couldn’t stop the MSA’s expansion or Warhammer alone.
I’d seen Pops have these conversations with powerful men during the war—dialogues of half-truths, allusions, and insinuations to convince others to meet and talk without giving away secrets or killing each other, all while dangling the promise of monetary and territorial benefits. It had been boring when I was twelve, just watching and listening. It was bloody damn freaking boring when I had to do it myself. I was not cut out for politics.
One of the things we might offer the VIPs, to assure that the negotiations were successful and a treaty I liked was reached, was info on the inside of the bunker where Clarisse Warhammer had her nest. Warhammer, who wanted more slaves and territory, was a nanobot-modified, mutated queen who could enthrall and enslave humans. And we believed she had a prisoner in her nest, one we would need to exfil before we destroyed it.
Bad thing! Back!
Spy’s fear-laden vision-smell suddenly shocked through me. Adrenaline spiked and hardened my suit armor in reaction.
A soft verbal “Orrrowmerow siss” followed, which in cat-speak meant There is a bad problem and danger. The camera mounted on her battle harness showed me what had shaken her. Two centimeters from her paw, something was sticking out of the ground. Metallic.
“Mateo?”
“Land mine. They step on it, they’re goners.”
I sent the image of an explosion to Spy through our newly established mental contact, and added the thought, Stalk slow. Watch for bad things. “Be careful,” I added aloud, so Maul would hear too, on the harness’s comms system.
“Mrow. Siss,” Spy hissed into the small mic near the camera. Invaders. Dangerous. She added a soft growl, a sound I had learned meant hunt and kill.
Spy looked at her mate, Maul, his scars caught on her low-light camera, bright and hairless against his black fur.
Maul had chosen the name himself, after fighting his way to the top of the male mating cats. Maul, as in “he mauled and killed all the cat contenders with testicles.”
He was Spy’s weapon of choice, an enforcer like Jagger, my . . . whatever he was. Maul operated under the orders of the Guardian Cat queen, Tuffs, and also at the whim of Spy—his mate and Tuffs’s heir.
Maul placed his head against Spy’s, communicating through the spooky weird ESP crap that was the result of Tuffs being infested with my nanobots early on at the junkyard. They separated and continued on, their progress slowed, grasses passing beside them as they moved. Maul crossed a gravel two-rut road overgrown with saplings. The small trees showed signs of being driven over, though not often enough to kill them.
On my helmet screen, Jolene began generating a map of the grounds, with defenses noted in red.
Moments later, we saw dual vids of triangular reinforced concrete to either side of massive metal doors, all with dynamic enviro camo that made them look, on first glance, like boulders and dead grass.
The main entrance to the bunker was near the intersection of old I-77 and I-81, near Fort Chiswell. It had been locked up and left empty by the military at the end of the war, per orders of the Bug aliens. Except for the faint signs o
I didn’t have to tell Spy what to do. She and Maul skirted the doors and began quartering the hillock the bunker had been built into, looking for hidden or disguised entrances, noting defenses and, most important, searching for ventilation shafts. The two cats and I had studied hours of video showing the various kinds of air shafts, hidden back doors, weapons emplacements, and man-made openings used by the military so the cats could spot them without constant direction from me.
Thankfully for my temper, they found an air shaft twenty minutes later, and then four others, sticking their heads through the grates into each, evaluating their size and the smells and sensation of air moving through. The map on my face shield depicting the hillock of the buried fort grew, becoming more detailed.
The cats picked a promising duct with a rusted hole in one corner of the covering—no airflow, a flat place to work from, and an autumn-dry tree nearby to provide cover. Through the hole, the cams revealed a slanted shaft disappearing into the dark.
Maul scratched open a small pocket on Spy’s vest and pulled out a rope with loops on each end. As if the cats fully understood the physics of belaying ropes—which they might, because that had been covered in the videos, too—Spy stuck her head through a loop and trotted around the small tree, pulling it taut, then moving under and over the rope itself several times, effectively making a freaking knot. Maul did the same with his. It wasn’t as good as rappelling gear, but since the cats hadn’t evolved fingers, the strap around the head was the best we could do.
Spy studied the inclined air shaft, breathing in the scents. “Mehshh,” she said softly. It was the word for rats. On her camera, I spotted rat droppings along both sides of the shaft.
I gave her a mental nudge and she let me in. Vertigo sent nausea through my system. I couldn’t stay in her mind for long, hence the tac harnesses and comms gear. The shaft on the other side of the damaged grate was maybe 80-by-80 centimeters, and it went down at a barely manageable thirty-five-to-forty degree angle of descent. Spy crawled through the rusted hole and stopped, crouching. Her harness camera, already adjusted to night light, indicated a faint reddish glow just ahead. It was a WWIII era security camera with a tiny red light indicating it was still active. It wasn’t a multi-spectrum device, and looked like a bottom-of-the-line cheapie, which made sense for an air duct.
Body in a tight ball, her paws out in front to slow any inadvertent slip, Spy moved toward the cam. Bracing her feet, she humped up to it and around to its back, where she turned and pressed her tac harness to the camera casing. I heard a faint click as the magnetized infiltrator bug attached itself to the camera’s metal housing. We had practiced this maneuver, and it went off without a hitch.
Two minutes later, Jolene said, “I’m in. Deactivated security cam. Digging my way through the camera node to locate the central security system.”
I chuckled and sent Spy an atta girl through our mental link.
Spy slid-skidded-walked down the angled shaft, her claws clicking on the metal. Spiderwebs and a nest of leaves and twigs appeared to the side in an uneven portion of the metal duct. Spy stopped, sniffed, and said, “Mehshh.” There was a thick trail of rat droppings along both sides of the duct but no fresh scent, so I assumed the rat nest was abandoned.
Beyond it was a fan in a cowling that narrowed the shaft considerably, the fan blades unmoving. She stepped over and through it, passing a large rat skeleton tangled in the blades—probably the reason why the ventilation fan no longer turned.
A little further on, a narrow secondary shaft opened, and smells came up the passage to Spy, some of which I recognized through our mental connection—human sweat, sex, and blood. There was the smell of cooking food and the reek of a human toilet. And beneath it all was the stink of Warhammer’s nanobots.
Spy said, “Mrow. Siss.” Invaders. Dangerous. “Kah,” she breathed. Enemy queen.
Our intel had been good. Our recon crew had just confirmed the presence of Clarisse Warhammer in this bunker, somewhere. A spike of relief speared through me, trailed closely by a barb of worry. Warhammer had already attacked me and mine once. To protect us, I would have to kill the only other nanobot mutated queen I knew of, one way or another.
Spy continued along the larger tunnel, digging in her claws as it steepened or flattened and other adjacent shafts moved off into the dark. Four times she spotted cameras ahead, and Jolene turned them off. Disabling all the cameras was a key part of our strategy for the coming war. This recon was the first real indication that we might succeed.
For my small group, this would be a dual-purpose war—a war to rescue Captain Evelyn Raymond, Mateo’s number one on the starship that had crashed on the back of the junkyard property; and a war of vengeance for the death of Harlan (my best friend) at the hands of Clarisse, who was holding Evelyn prisoner. Tears still prickled beneath my eyelids each time I remembered Harlan—dead, tortured, being eaten by bicolor ants, delivered to me in back of a hunk of scrap metal. And if the severed finger she had sent to me was an indication, Warhammer was now brutalizing Evelyn as well.
Warhammer had to be stopped. I would stop her.
My armor informed me that I was breathing too fast and my heart rate and blood pressure had spiked. It asked if I wanted liquids, nutrients and stimulants, or hardening and recoil adjustments. “No. I’m good,” I said, forcing my breathing to smooth. “Jolene. Any update on spotting more entrances?”
“Four camouflaged entrances noted in RVAC remote flyovers, Shining Sugah. All are behind blast doors. Three appear to have been used recently. There are six air shafts, most not suitable for human use, though with cat infiltration that makes a total of ten potential entrances. Multiple entrenched and camouflaged armaments have been catalogued, but none appear to have been activated since the original abandonment, and all are overgrown with vegetation.”
“Any luck seeing heat signatures, or anything that would tell us how many thralls are in there?”
“Negative, Darlin’.”
This recce would determine everything. The more humans there were inside, the more help we would need to accomplish our objectives, and the more likely there would be an internal war between the biker clubs after the battle here, to take the spoils. And the more likely that we would be spotted by the military sensors and corporate satellite systems.
The coming operation to rescue Evelyn Raymond and kill Warhammer had FUBAR written all over it.
Spy reached the bottom of the shaft where its trajectory flattened out for about two meters. The shaft ended and there was a grate over the opening. Spy would have been stymied at that point, but there were teeth marks on the metal. The rats, which sometimes reached more than ten kilos, had gnawed open a hole. Through steel.
Bloody hell.
I sent a warning to Spy to remember to watch out for rats bigger than she was, and that had steel-gnawing teeth. Bloody mutated rats. Spy sent me an emotion that felt unimpressed and bored. In my screen, Maul dove into the shaft, following his mate. His camera showed him running-sliding down the shaft, through and past all the things that had slowed Spy, and up to her.
They bopped noses, slipped the ropes off their heads, having not actually needed them, and crawled through the rathole. Their cameras auto-adjusted to a much dimmer light. The room had large steel tanks, tables, and bins, and to Spy’s nose smelled of ancient rotten fruit, old rat droppings, and piss, but there was no fresh scent of anything.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Mateo said. “Those are fermentation tanks for wine or beer. This was more than a war bunker.”
“CO Sugah, this mighta been one of them bunkers set aside for what you might call the last resort,” Jolene said, then added, “A habitation for the politicians who would rebuild the world after Armageddon. After the rest of y’all died a horrible death.”
