Junkyard War, page 2
“Which would mean Warhammer has enough supplies to last years,” I said.
“And a lot more weapons than we anticipated,” Mateo said. “And a lot more square footage down there. The cats’ GPS shows a significant increase in depth.”
On the screens, I watched as the cats scouted the fermentation room. It was big, maybe fifteen by twenty meters, and abandoned rats’ nests were everywhere. There were small bones of prey here and there that could have been cat or dog, hunted outside and dragged in.
“Be careful,” I thought at Spy. She ignored me.
The cats followed a well-traveled rat path of droppings through a chewed hole into the next room, and wove a path into a hallway with a stairwell. Here, the scent of rat piss was strong, and fresh droppings were everywhere.
“Mehshh,” Spy said again. She didn’t like this place and wanted to move on, but there were doors at the next landing up, and I sent her the request to position so I could read the words on the doors. Grain Storage 24 was stenciled on one. MREs 5 was on another. All food perfect for rats. The rodents had moved from the fermentation room where they had to bring in outside kills, and had set up living quarters where there was likely enough food to last years.
A rustling sounded and Spy looked up. She met the glossy brown eyes of a monster rat. And then more pairs. And more. The rats moved forward a single step. Then another. In unison, like a marching band. Or soldiers. Or puppets.
“Mrow. Siss,” she said into her small mic. Invaders. Dangerous. “Orrrowmerow,” she added. There is a bad problem.
“Get out,” I whispered into the mic and into Spy’s head. “Run.”
The cats raced away, along the corridor and through another rathole. The rats didn’t follow, and I pretended not to know that Spy—who had been unconcerned and blasé only moments before—was seriously freaked by steel-eating, lockstep-marching rats. I was freaked too, and nauseated from our mental contact. I pulled back a bit, following their travel on the cam feed on my screen. They ran down hallways, along plumbing pipes, through holes. I was lost when they stopped, quivering, side by side, touching all along their bodies. They seemingly conferred.
I swallowed down nausea. Oversized, mutated rats, walking like soldiers in parade formation. Mind controlled. What if the rats had been transitioned the way the junkyard cats had? With a rat queen? That would suck.
“You got the layout?” I asked Jolene, focusing on the floor plan she was constructing from the cat cameras’ views and coordinates.
“The cats’ trackers and cameras are providin’ a floor plan of hallways and ratholes,” she said, “but we need more information about rooms and their designations.”
I returned my thoughts to Spy and sent her Jolene’s instructions through our mental link. I got back a series of impressions before the cats separated, seeming calmer. They stepped out, their gaits smoother.
“Are you inside the camera node? Can you turn the cameras they pass off and on?” I asked Jolene.
“Do I look like I just stepped off the assembly line?” she said, sounding huffy. “Of course I’m in. I can hide the cats’ incursion. It’ll look like the system is experiencing a flicker-glitch.”
I wasn’t sure flicker-glitch was a real term in sophisticated security systems, but I understood it. Jolene’s extrapolated floor plan grew in the corner of my face shield just above where it disappeared into my neck gasket.
Spy moved along one hallway. Maul took the other, their cam visuals side by side on my faceplate. When the cats came to doorways or signs, they stopped and sat up, angling their cams so we could see. They found storage for linens, cleaning supplies, a laundry, and a hallway marked as containing pool, lockers, and exercise room.
The cats also found humans.
Even at night, there were a few people moving here and there, wearing casual clothes and boots, clean-looking and smelling, no weapons. Each time the cats sensed a human, they raced into a different hallway or up or down a flight of stairs. Our floor plans were solidifying. And while the cats hadn’t been spotted so far, we were pressing our luck.
I heard a sound, not through my comms, and froze. I lowered the volume on my speakers, softened my armor into silent mode, and activated the Chameleon skin enviro invisi-mode, blending me into the landscape. A human form moved through the dark, crunching grass less than twenty meters from me, a flashlight in hand, aimed at the ground and then up into the trees.
“Sentry. Heading my way,” I whispered. “Going silent.”
Sharp shadows cut through the night, interfering with my lowlight vision. I made out something hanging on a strap. Automatic long rifle. It was the first sign of pickets outside the bunker. She was in cloth clothing—not armor—and she wore an old-fashioned-looking, single-ocular headset.
I eased behind a trunk and raised my faceplate so the camo would hide my heat signature and blend me into the background. If her ocular was low-light, I was okay. If it had an IR component, I was toast. I glanced at my ATV. It had good enviro camo, which worked well enough in daylight or low-light, but it wasn’t top-of-the-line. The heat signature of the small electric engine was still a vibrant red in infrared. If the sentry bumped into it by accident, there would be no hiding it. Also no hiding the tracks it had made getting here; flattened grass would be a dead giveaway. I bent and lifted a stick from the ground. A smaller twig snapped off.
The guard swung the light more slowly. Moved my way.
When the light swung away from me, I threw the stick. It shushed through the air. Made a subdued thump when it landed in the grass.
The guard turned and followed the sound. Stopped, made a careful detour around nothing that I could see, and then resumed. I figured the detour was to avoid a landmine. The sentry inspected the area where the stick landed. I heard a plastic click, and a woman’s voice said, “There’s nothing out here but dead grass, rat-sign, and rabbit crap, Marvin. And it stinks like dead bodies. Who the hell is burying the failures? They need to dig deeper.”
“I’ll pass your complaint up the line to the commander,” Marvin said wryly.
The female sentry turned away. “You do and I’ll be dead, but I’ll take you with me first. I’m coming back in. Over.”
“Charlie says you can take him with you. You’d go out screaming with pleasure.”
She laughed. “Tell him I said to shove it up his butt.”
“Check out the burial site before you head back. See if the rats have been digging in it again.”
“Fuck that, Marvin. Dead’s dead. Let the rats have dinner.” She clicked off. Paused. Stopped. Her flash went dark, giving me a clearer view in my own low-light. She studied the area, stepping in place, scanning 360 degrees. And turned toward my ATV.
“What the . . . ?” She inspected the area with the flash. Turned it back off. Walked slowly toward the small armored unit. I tensed. I couldn’t let her talk to Marvin again. I couldn’t let her go back to the bunker. I activated my left sleeve. I didn’t want to kill her.
I didn’t.
But I had to.
She clomped toward the ATV. When she reached it, she bent forward. A foot from me. Her hand bumped the vehicle. She jerked back. Fast as a snake, I shot my right hand out and snatched the headset off her, then kicked out, hitting her knee. A series of cracks sounded, and she fell onto me. My left arm went around her throat. Tightened. I pressed the button on my armor to full hardening.
Other than a pained oooff, she was silent as my Dragon Scale sleeve cut off her air. Her legs kicked, ramming the ATV. The tree. My armored shins. She was taller than I was, heavier. But the armor made the difference. I crushed the headset and dropped it, grasping my elbow with my free arm to increase the pressure.
She wrenched. Twisted. Threw her weight against me. Her chest heaved as it tried to draw a breath that would never come. Fingers clawed. Scrabbling at my glove.
Tears gathered in my eyes.
Her arms dropped. I didn’t let go. A single tear spilled down my cheek.
She stopped fighting.
Something stabbed, sharp, into my groin. Again. Again. Somehow, she had grabbed a knife. Stupid move against armor. She was supposed to give up and die. Should have been dead already. Nanobots keeping her oxygenated?
She kept stabbing. I felt some of the little scales the armor was constructed of slip out of place. Just a fraction. My suit sent me an alert.
“Shining?” Jolene asked, turning up the volume on my speakers. “Sugah? You okay? Your suit cam shows—Cupcake. Shining is not alone. Repeat, she is under attack.”
The stabbing continued.
“On the way.”
Something at the stabbing site gave. I didn’t think it was possible, but the fail-proof armor had a weak spot even when hardened. I breathed out a laugh. It sounded odd. Maybe a little crazy. I pressed my other hand against the side of the guard’s head and shoved-twisted.
I heard a dull crack, loud in the silence. I kept twisting. More pop-cracks reverberated into the night. Her head turned all the way around to face me. Dead eyes met mine.
I held her there, staring into lifeless eyes.
Time passed.
“Shining?” Cupcake asked, softly.
I had felt her approaching but I couldn’t look away from the eyes of the guard I’d killed. Brown eyes. Dead brown eyes.
“Shhhhiiiining . . .” Cupcake said.
I couldn’t think what to do. My brain was still on shocked-numb-kill mode.
Standing in the dry grass of the bunker. Cradling her at my chest.
“You can let go, Shining,” Cupcake said, oh so gently. “I got her.”
“Okay. I can do that.” I released my sleeve, softened my armor. But I didn’t let her go. I held her close. Staring into her eyes.
Gently, Cupcake eased her from me. I let her reposition my limbs like a doll on a shelf, arms at my sides. When she fully held the dead sentry, draped over one arm, her suit doing the work, she said, “Jolene. Shining is okay. I’m going to toss the body on a landmine, but we need to get out of here. We’ve alerted someone. We’ll pull back into the brush.”
“Copy that,” Jolene said.
I bent and picked up the crushed headset. Placed it around the woman’s mangled neck.
“I’m tossing the body onto a mine,” Cupcake repeated, her blue eyes on mine. “Then we’ll retreat.”
“Okay.” I watched as Cupcake moved through the grasses. Adjusted her armor. Threw the body. And fell facedown as the guard with brown eyes tumbled through the air and dropped. The mine exploded.
An instant later, blood and a small sliver of tissue hit my face shield. I watched as it slid down my face plate. Already cooled in the low-light view.
A hand touched my elbow. Cupcake guided me into the passenger seat of the ATV. Slowly, she backed it along my previous track, behind a boulder big enough to blend with the ATV camo. She turned off the electric engine. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at me.
“It’s harder when you’re up close like that,” she said. “When you can see their eyes.”
“Brown eyes. She had brown eyes.” I took a breath that hurt to inhale and opened my face shield. The night air was cold on my face. “I could have tied her up and taken her with us. Transitioned her. At least she’d have been alive.”
“And they would have looked for her harder, found our tracks, and been able to calculate numbers. They would have been more alert for an attack. Now they have a body and a logical explanation of why she’s dead. They won’t look for us. You made the right choice.”
“Bloody hell.” I scratched my fingernails through my hair, which I knew was a stress tell for me. Reaching to my groin, I manually repositioned the mini-scales. They would need some work. The armor hadn’t failed, but interestingly for armor that was advertised as having no weak points, also wasn’t perfect. “I’ll have some bruises. She was strong.” My voice sounded odd. Stiff and dead as the brown-eyed woman.
I shoved the image away. Touched my suit into a more comfortable mode. Tried to focus on the pictures and readouts. “I’ll think about this—about her—later. Where are we on the Op?”
Mateo said, “We still don’t know where Evelyn is.”
I steadied my breathing. Without looking at her, I said, “Thank you, Cupcake. You can return to position.”
“You’re welcome. Anytime.”
I felt her moving away. I remembered to breathe. Stared at the screens to figure out what I was seeing. Cats. Right. Cats.
Maul was at a “T” intersection of hallways, a staircase to the right. To the left was a heavy-duty honeycombed hemplaz carbon-fiber composite door—damaged, warped, repaired, but shut. It was marked as Admin Suites. Maul sniffed, and must have smelled something he found upsetting. In the edge of his cam, I saw his hair lift out, standing on end.
As if sending out a call for assistance, he said, “Orrrowmerow.”
Spy raced to join him, and standing shoulder to shoulder, they studied what they could see of the hallway and the narrow crack at the base of the door. They sniffed steadily, touching noses often, conferring.
“Admin Suites,” I said, sounding almost normal. The cats were on the lowest level. The safest place to be in many ways, protected by the floors above. “Spy, what does it smell like?”
She sent a memory vision to me, one that was upside down, from when she infiltrated the truck filled with Warhammer’s people. Spy had been lying across the knees of a man as he scratched her belly. One of the faces was One-Eyed Jack, another Clarisse Warhammer. All the cats had eaten from the bodies of Warhammer’s dead thugs, but Spy was the only cat who had been in close proximity to the queen herself. Only Warhammer and her lover Jack had escaped after we fought off their assault.
“Mrow. Siss. Kah,” she said again. Invaders. Dangerous. And kah, the word we had decided upon to mean enemy queen. It meant she smelled Warhammer’s nanobots. And Warhammer herself.
As if the scents were disgusting, Spy sniffed loud and long, and hacked. It was the same sound as coughing up a hairball. “There are a lot of them in there, aren’t there?” I asked her. “In the suites. The queen and her primary mate. And lots of thralls.”
“Hhhhah mmm,” she said, confirming my guess.
We had gotten lucky. We’d found Warhammer’s nest. And we had gotten unlucky. It was in the best-protected site in the bunker, at the bottom level, behind what looked like a modified blast door. There was no way in except with human intervention and, considering the damage to the door, maybe heavy bombardment.
“Spy, can you get an eye down to the crack between the door and the floor and see anything?” I asked.
A moment later, I got a vision of several pairs of shoes and one pair of dark-skinned human feet, the toenails painted in glittery purple. From down there, I was able to pick up a bit of sound over Spy’s mic. “Mateo, can you increase the volume?”
“Affirmative.”
The sound went from fuzzy to clear.
“She isn’t coming out of it.” Warhammer’s voice, bored and dismissive. “I won’t feed another mindless whiner. End her.”
“Can you get us visuals from any cams inside the admin suites?” I asked Jolene.
“They seem to be on a different node,” she said. “Working on it.”
“No. Please. She’ll come around,” an unknown voice said from under the door. Male. Bronx accent. “Just let me work with her another week. Please—”
Blood splattered across the floor. Splattered again. And again. Pulsing out in a steady rhythm. The body attached to the purple-painted toenails fell. Bounced. Still spurting blood. Spy caught a view of the face of a Black woman. Her throat had been slit. Blood pulsed out from the carotid. Then it dribbled. And stopped.
In the background I could hear a man sobbing softly. Two pairs of shoes headed toward the door. “When you finish weeping like a child, clean that up and dispose of it outside,” Warhammer said. “Jack, bring in the next batch of people to be incorporated. This is taking too long and we’re losing too many.”
Spy rose off the floor. The two cats separated and darted away, disappearing into the dark.
“That was . . .” Mateo didn’t finish his sentence.
“Yeah. It was,” I said softly. Warhammer was making thralls fast and not helping them along with med-bay protocols. Some were dying in transition.
On my screen, I followed the progress of the cats as they explored. At one corner, Spy found a stairway going up, marked Level 2 on a bright blue sign. Maul also found a staircase up. Working separately, they found the main command center, marked MCC; storage for armor and munitions; a medical department; and lots of unmarked doors. There were few traces of rats here, but signs of a lot of human activity. The cats dodged people several times, darting into shadows.
After exploring the rest of Level 2, Maul joined Spy on the other side of the compound, and keeping a sharp eye out for more cameras and people, they slinked up the stairs to the upper level, Level 1.
On this side of the compound there was only the faintest old scent of rat. Instead there was the stench of sweat, urine, cooked food, sex, and moldy showers and latrines that hadn’t been properly cleaned. Spy disapproved of the complicated tang, and sent me a scent-vision of the different smells of many people, an equal mixture of male and female, healthy and sick. The sick scent was the pong of humans transitioning into thralls.
“Barracks for the hoi polloi,” Jolene said, sounding chipper. “If Evelyn is enthralled to Warhammer, this is where she’ll be.”
Unfortunately, there were a lot of technologically sophisticated cameras, probably multi-spectrum. “Jolene? Cams?”
“On it, Sugah,” she said. One of the cameras rotated away from the cats, as if something had caught its attention. The other cam followed. “Looks like we got more than one security hub. This is fun.”
And dangerous, I thought. “Spy, you and Maul circle this level fast and head back.”
The cats took another turn, peering around. Their tactical-vest cams adjusted to an even dimmer light. They trotted that way and Spy caught the stench of filthy human bodies, the reek of rotting blood, death, and despair. They followed the stink and peeked into a narrow passage. It was murky here, twilight, but the floor was clean. No rat droppings. There were doors along the corridor, three to each side. A sign Maul caught on his camera read Stockade.
