Junkyard War, page 12
I turned to Wanda. “What about you and Alex?”
“Alex and I will be staying behind with Jolene to protect and care for the junkyard and the cats,” Wanda said. “And . . .” She stopped and turned her head away. “We’re both feeling a little sickly. Just like we did when we transitioned.” Wanda turned her penetrating gaze back to me. “Are we transitioning again?”
I looked at the kid, who was petting a juvenile cat and listening to everything with that feigned inattention that kids used when they were faking tuning out adult conversation. I’d used that same device when I was their age.
Twelve.
No kid should have to go into battle.
The cat in Alex’s lap looked at me. It was the yellow-eyed Little Kitten, the cat who thought she could take over from Tuffs and Spy. I looked around and also saw Little Kitten’s clowder, the juveniles inspecting my living place and my seat of power. I wasn’t sure why Tuffs had allowed Little Kitten and her pals into the office, and I also wasn’t dumb enough to fall for the cat just adopting the kid out of love, but Jolene had eyes everywhere in the junkyard, so Alex and Wanda would be safe. I hoped.
“Shining?” Cupcake asked.
“Yes. There were PRC nanobots in the Simba. We all went through an additional transition. I had hoped you two wouldn’t have to, but—” I stopped and rubbed my chest with a fist again, fighting the pressure building there. “I’m sorry.”
Alex grinned at me before sliding sly eyes at their mother. “Shit happens.”
“Alex,” Wanda said, admonishment in her tone.
Alex giggled and hugged LK. The kitten didn’t scratch them, so points to the juvie cat.
I said, “The cats who want to come with us. Where do they ride?”
“Inside the Simba with me,” Mateo replied. “They’ll need protein and a cat box.”
“Speaking of which. No cats in the office while I’m gone,” I said. “Wanda will provide protein, kibble, and water as per the usual schedule.” I set my eyes on Little Kitten. “Any cat who tries to enter by stealth or diversion will be neutered when we get back and put on half rations for two weeks after. We clear, Little Kitten?”
She showed me her hind quarters, which drew Tuffs’s attention. The queen cat looked from the juvenile to me and narrowed her eyes. Slowly the Guardian Cat stood and walked across the table to the young cat in Alex’s lap. Deliberately she stepped down onto Little Kitten and stood there, looking away, as if unaware she had pinned the smaller cat. Little Kitten’s ears went back, and she showed me her fangs, hissing. Tuffs turned her eyes to the smaller juvenile cat and leaned into her. Touching her.
Little Kitten’s snarl disappeared. Her body went rigid. Her hair stood on end.
Tuffs raised her head and, moving faster than I could follow, bit Little Kitten’s ear hard enough to pierce the skin. Tuffs held the cat in place with her fangs. Two beads of blood appeared.
Slowly, Little Kitten’s shoulders hunched and her body flattened on Alex’s lap. A good three seconds later, LK went limp.
“Wow,” Alex said, their own eyes wide.
Tuffs released LK’s ear.
Little Kitten sprang off Alex’s lap, leaped across the room, and leaned her whole body against the airlock door. Wanda opened the door, and all of the kitten’s clowder departed, tails low, feet almost flying.
“Well, now, that was mighty interestin’,” Jolene said.
I had a weird moment of curiosity. Could I do that—whatever that had been—to an enemy? Or . . . could I scare off an unwanted thrall? “Yeah. It was.” I scowled. “Jolene, if I told you to bomb a small city, would you do it?”
“Hey-yell no.”
I laughed. “Good. Mateo. When do we leave?”
“Today. Dark.”
I said “Done” and shooed my nest out of the office. Alone, I took a deep breath and said, “Gomez? You there?”
“Indeed.”
“Disconnect from Jolene.”
“Now wait a minute. That’s my fella you’re—” Jolene’s tirade stopped.
“Done, Shining.”
I hadn’t talked to the office AI in weeks. There was something creepy about airlock doors suitable for interstellar, intragalactic space travel, a comms chair big enough for several humans, and talking to an alien AI. Creepy enough that I tended to avoid it.
“Thank you.” I wasn’t sure how polite I needed to be to Gomez, so opting on the side of very polite manners was smart. “Secure the airlock doors, please.” I heard the suction sound as the doors sealed tight enough for space travel.
“Secured.”
“I’m going downstairs.”
“Do you wish to use the feline pathway or your previous method?”
I stopped, my hand a hair’s breadth from the handle that opened to a sharply angled chute to the lower levels. “The cats have a way in?” Little crawly phantom fear-spiders scampered across my flesh.
“Indeed.” The command chair rotated silently into the command center, leaving that part of the floor empty. “If you press the small black button in the center of the floor, a panel will open, and a stairway will be visible. Lighting will appear as you descend. It is my impression that the wavelength is too dim for human eyes, though the felines had no difficulties. Now that I know humans have such poor vision, I have devised methods to increase the illumination if you wish.”
“Yes. Ahhh. Thank you.” I spotted the black mark on the floor where the command chair usually sat, an oval with notches. It wasn’t a button as I would describe it, or a knob. It wasn’t raised, and it felt prickly to my fingers, but when I pressed the rough black oval, the section of the floor around it slid open to reveal a black nothingness that led to more black nothingness.
“When you are below the level of this deck, the access will close,” Gomez said. “When you are ready to return, there is a small black button in the same location on the other side that will alert me to provide access.”
“How . . .” I stopped. “Which cats went down there and when?”
“The felines that you refer to as Tuffs, Notch, Spy, and Maul have been down on four occasions. If you wish to know the dates, times, and duration of their stays, I will be happy to provide Jolene the star-time standard of my commander’s race for her to apply Earth conversion rates.”
Four times. The cats had been here four times. And that had to have been after Spy was an adult and had chosen a mate, which meant four trips down in the last few weeks. Devious little four-legged sneaks. “No. For now, keep this between us two. Also, the cats are forbidden access until and unless I say so.”
“I am sorry, Shining. I cannot follow that order. My commander and pilot left orders that the cats are to be allowed access as they choose.” Along with a peppermint scent from the air filters, an unpronounceable noise came across Gomez’s speakers that sorta sounded like, “Garrouling PopPop likes the felines.”
The phantom fear increased. “Garrouling PopPop?”
“That is a most unsuitable vocal approximation, without the twelve hertz syllables, and the scent is missing.”
“I can’t hear or speak twelve hertz, and I can’t make smells appear.”
“That is unfortunate. Without the proper vocal range and scent, my commander and pilot’s name is incorrect.”
“So if I meet a Bug alien I should just bow and say hi?”
“Bowing means you are offering yourself as protein.”
Bloody hell. Why hadn’t I asked this kind of question before? Not that there were any live aliens down there. Just the dead one, so far as I had ever found. Not that I had explored fully in the dark. Once I found the dead Bug, I was done.
Below me, the deck began to lighten and revealed a staircase of sorts, each step with a drop over a meter to the one below, with foot space only half a meter wide, perfect for the Bugs. Not so easy for me. But it was still better than the chute, which had required me to scoot on my butt, palms, and heels. This time, I’d be going down on hands and feet, facing backward, like on a ladder.
I wiped my palms on my pants, grabbed the floor, and dropped over the edge. “I’d like the lights brighter, please,” I said as I dropped into the dimness.
The lighting brightened, mostly in the red range, and when my hands pulled away, the hatch closed over my head.
* * *
The ship was built for free-floating, nongravitational travel, constructed of what I’d call interlocking gyroscopes, meaning that lots of things were overhead and/or upside down. I figured that the Bugs didn’t need gravity and the gyro let them have access to anything they needed by rotating the ship around them.
I knew what each deck was used for because they were identified by symbols carved into the metal. It was all in Bug language, but on one of my visits I had taken vids of everything, and Mateo and Jolene had later translated from her databanks. I didn’t come down here often because it was dark and spooky. I had to admit it was a little less creepy with the better illumination, but not by much.
The ship’s power source and engine were located two decks below my office in a metal bubble that was held in place through the center of the ship like the core of a planet. Weapons had to be sandwiched in an outer layer around and between the power source and the command level. When the ship crashed in the junkyard, most of it had been buried by the impact and had rotated so the office was on the top, with windows I could see out of, and weapons unseen. They had to be underground.
I didn’t need the engine room. WIMP energies would probably fry me anyway. In desperation, I had once used the ship’s shields (which were considered to be weapons, in Bug-think) against Clarisse Warhammer, but I had never been able to make the weapons move using the controls in the Command Chair. Now, I wanted a look at the weapons, if I could figure out where they were located from the inside. In the back of my mind I was curious if the weapons could be powered by an Earth power source, and if I could remove the weapons and retrofit them to take with us, the way Mateo had with the bunker busters. That crazy idea had come to me in the mission-op briefing.
I crawled around the side of the wall along the gyro ring where one of the laser-WIMP-destructor weapons should be mounted—if Jolene’s Bug language translations were correct—looking for an access plate. The Bugs would have needed to be able to access the weapon and its mounting at some point, and I figured there would be a way to close off the rest of the ship from atmospheric loss to repair or service things, and therefore I could get to any external weapons from the inside. The first year Mateo and I had come to Smith’s Junk and Scrap, we had used a backhoe, digging from the outside, looking for the airlocks and weapons. We never found the weapons from the outside, and I’d never looked for the mounting booms from the inside. I should have. Long ago.
“Could I get some more illumination here?” I asked Gomez.
The light brightened to full spectrum, instantly chasing away most of the creepies.
I crawled, feeling for an access panel. Anywhere. I knew the weapons weren’t on top. I’d spent a lot of time up there working on the rain-water collection barrel. No weapons were visible along the sides, or even up to two meters underground, which was as far as Mateo and I had dug out the ground and the bedrock, so they had to be on the bottom half and deeper.
The metal felt fuzzy, scratchy, and slightly uncomfortable to my hands as I worked all the way around the ring, and the ring beside it. There was no discernable access panel. There was also nothing I could identify as metallic nuts and bolts or an attachment plate. When I had worked my way around the rings twice, and was deep underground, I finally discovered a faint groove between the two rings I’d been inspecting.
“Gomez, can you hear me down here?”
“You are within me, therefore, yes.”
There was something vaguely insulting and droll about the tone, which I put down to my exhaustion and not the fear that he was sentient like Jolene.
“How are your weapons attached to the gyro? Like plates and nuts and bolts and access panels?”
“My weapons are not attached to the gyroscopic rings. They are part of the rings and develop in place, during the initial growing process.”
Growing process? Had to mean manufacturing process; maybe a translation glitch. I ran my hands over the faint seam, where nuts and bolts or the Bug equivalent should indicate where the weapons were attached. There was nothing. It wasn’t smooth, but there was the crack. “Where are your weapons located now, in relation to the office?”
“They are beneath me, the weapons rotating into landing struts.”
Well bloody damn. Why hadn’t I asked that to start with? “So I can’t remove them?”
“Only by disassembling my structure at the molecular level or by applying a MAP deconstructing device from the outside. Should you begin a dismantling process, or initiate MAP deconstructing, or attempt to breech my power module, I should be forced to retaliate. I have been equipped with a failsafe self-destruct program. Please do not force me to initiate that program. I like Jolene and wish to continue my research and study with her.”
“No! No self-destruct program is necessary.” Disgusted with myself, I climbed back to the floor above me and, out of morbid curiosity, opened the panel to the burial room. It wasn’t really that—the purpose of the space translated as “Supplies and Health”—but it was where I had found the Bug pilot, at the bottom of the chute I used originally to get down here. The round doorway telescoped open to reveal the empty room. And the dead Bug.
Bugs came in several sizes and shapes. This one was about two-and-a-half meters tall, two meters wide, and was composed of three sections with interlocking exoskeletons. It had seven antennae—three on either end, and one on the center carapace—that together worked as eyes, ears, nose, and probably other senses. They all had multiple limbs, and the scant literature suggested that the number of limbs depended on age and specialization. This one had fourteen.
It had cracked one of its bulbous exoskeleton sections somehow, probably during the battle that had crashed both the SunStar and the Bug ship here. It had died. It was still dead, though Gomez always referred to it as “achieving maximum inactivity.”
I had never touched it before. Curious, I picked up one of its smaller limbs and considered it in light of the odd knob beneath the command chair. The limb ended in a foot or hand with a central pad and ten small claws around the pad. I pressed on the pad and the claws spread outward, sharp and needle thin. I released the pad and they retracted. I shrugged and dropped the limb, returning to the main area, and closed the oval door behind me.
“Gomez, what did the cats do when they were down here?”
“They explored, much as you are doing. But they seemed most interested in Garrouling PopPop.” Again, the smell of peppermint filled the air around me.
“You said your pilot liked the cats. How long after the crash did your pilot die?”
“Garrouling PopPop reached maximum inactivity three of your Earth days after the crash of the ship.”
“Did he call his people? Ask for help? No one ever came looking for him.”
“Yes. Jolene and I believe that my pilot’s distress signal did not work properly.”
Or, maybe his people didn’t care. Or maybe he was alone on the planet and the signal had to travel to his home world and help was still on the way. Or, or, or.
I started climbing my way out, and gave my shoulders a major workout pulling myself up each step.
I closed the hatch behind me and asked Gomez to air out the office. It stank of peppermint.
* * *
Someone once said that war was hell. They were probably talking about actual battle, with death and maiming and the horrors of people killing people because someone else told them to or to protect what they loved. That said, they likely had no idea of what logistics and transpo might be with Cupcake singing (when we weren’t hiding from aerial bots or being tracked overland by dogs and good ol’ boys with rifles, at which times she was blessedly silent) and our ATVs strapped to a wartank tracking its way across the excavated stone desert of West Virginia.
It took three nights and two days to get to the bunker. The daytime hours were spent in the elements, hidden by a rare copse of trees and half under the rubble of a disintegrating house, exposed to the elements, with no heat, no AC, no showers, no bodily or mental comforts at all.
The three nights were blacker-and-colder-than-the-pitch-of-hell travel with Cupcake and Amos cuddling (when she wasn’t singing), and that was engraved on the back of my eyelids to give me nightmares forever.
One thing was certain. I was never doing this again. Ever.
If I ever found another queen (except Warhammer, who would soon be dead at my hand, or I’d die trying), she was welcome to the world. Screw it. All I wanted was to sleep late, take a bloody damn shower once a week, and eat what I wanted, not run the blasted world.
When we finally arrived at our bivouac, about two klicks from the bunker, I was shaking with misery. The trip could only be described with Pops’s style of foul language. So, as I gathered myself to climb down from the ATV at dawn—stinking, wet with sweat, and freezing my butt off—I said into my comms system, “This . . . This was a murderous, pissing hell. You, Mateo, are the son of a motherless goat and a bum-buggering, sodding, rutting pig. If I ever have to ride your rat-arsed Simba again, I’ll shoot you with a blaster and laugh as your innards boil. This trip was not just bloody bollocks, it was buggering surgery without sodding anesthesia. I’d rather beat the bishop with a fist full of nails than ever go through this again.” My language went downhill after that.
When I was done comparing Mateo’s lineage with every disgusting creature I could think of, I jumped the last meter and landed on the ground. My teeth nearly clacked shut on my own tongue, and my knees gave way, as gravity without the Simba’s vibration weighed on me. “Son of a goat-buggering-bitch,” I said through my teeth.
There was a lengthy silence when I, at last, stopped raging, hanging off the Simba’s track, panting.
“Well, I never,” Jolene said, sounding all bristly and proper. “You, young lady, are in a foul mood.”
