Junkyard War, page 4
“Perve,” Cupcake said, but her word sounded all lovey-dovey.
“Ever’ chance I get.” He kissed her on the forehead and lumbered through the airlock, letting out one batch of cats and letting in another, who instantly started roaming and familiarizing themselves with the space.
The cats were all juvenile males this time, and Tuffs gave me a demanding look that cemented my idea about the cats thinking they were in charge. But she had a point. My job today would be to stick all eight of the unneutered juvenile males in the med-bay for a snip-and-tuck. The males had no idea what was about to happen, and to make it easier on myself, I reconstituted some goat milk and added a hundredth of a milliliter of illegal Devil Milk.
While I worked I replied to Cupcake, “We have to stop Clarisse. We have an ethical obligation to rescue Evelyn.”
I set the bowl on the floor, and the males came running. Tuffs stretched yoga moves on top of the commander’s Bug chair and watched in satisfaction.
I tucked in my earbud and tapped it. “Mateo. Talk to me.”
“After going over all the cat-cam footage again, the recce shows we have to go with Plan D,” his grating voice said in my ear. “Evelyn is not a thrall. No thrall would be in such bad shape. I’m getting her out. I owe her.”
“Or she is a thrall, and Clarisse is torturing her with her nanobots. And before you ask, yes, I think it’s possible, and no I will not test my theory on any of you.”
Mateo cursed.
For him, Plan A had always been to sneak in and rescue his second-in-command and deploy the Simba’s city-killer bomb. It assumed that there weren’t many enemy thralls to fight and that Evelyn could be knocked on the head and carted out. Plan B, had Evelyn not been in the bunker at all, had been to just drop in the city-killer to destroy Clarisse and her thralls. Plan C had been a weird combo of an all-out assault and heavy bombardment, based on the probability that Evelyn was a thrall, then using the city-killer threat to negotiate for her release. And then double-crossing Warhammer and deploying the city-killer after we had Evelyn. Now we had a new plan on the table—Plan D, which was like Plan C but without negotiating and without the use of the city-killer. Just infiltrate, get Evelyn, kill Warhammer, and take down everything with different weapons—ones that would not detonate or damage anything WIMP-powered. D ended with me transitioning Evelyn, to heal her with my nanobots.
Plan and A, C, and D required more warriors than we currently had—which is why we needed to recruit the bikers we would be meeting.
I couldn’t stop seeing Evelyn’s tortured body. Or the blood spurting on the floor of Warhammer’s nest. The Black woman’s face as seen through Spy’s eye beneath the door. Or the brown-eyed guard I had killed. The mutated mega-rats walking in lockstep. Instinct said we had to save Evelyn and kill everything else in that place.
But I also remembered the size of the bunker. And the three-story WIMP room.
As if reading my thoughts, Mateo said, “If there’s a WIMP bomb or power source in that bunker, the Simba’s city-killer will likely detonate it.”
He’d said this before, and I knew it was true. “Options?”
“We can employ other explosive devices to bring down the bunker once we have Evelyn and after we are safely away,” Mateo said. There was something in his voice that said he wasn’t telling me everything that was going on in the back of his Berger-chipped brain, but I wasn’t going to exploit my control over him to demand he tell me. That would be an abuse of power.
I sighed softly. Explosives. Right. There weren’t enough explosives in our entire arsenal to get through that shielding, and Jolene hadn’t been able hack her way through the WIMP door electronically. The Simba—the Suit Initiated Main Battle Tank—and especially its city killer was supposed to be our ace in the hole. People had died for us to get it. And now it was useless.
“Mateo,” I said. “Outline Plan D. A version that lets us get away alive.”
He chuckled, that grating noise that sounded like rusted pipes being rubbed together. “The Simba has weapons that can take out precision targets at five kilometers using aerial targeting systems. It’s equipped with jamming devices to bring down remote aircraft and is mounted with a rail gun and rapidly repositioning blasters that can take down a platoon of warbot-suited warriors. It has precision lasers that can cut through some heavy steel plate like butter. But since we can’t use the city-killer because of the WIMP presence . . .” He paused. “We’ll have to use bunker busters.”
My head came up at that. “You have bunker buster missiles?” I had no clue the Simba had weapons big enough to bust through earth and fortified installations.
“Jolene zaps the security system, we precision infil small teams. Close-quarter combat. Take Evelyn. Kill Warhammer before she knows we’ve gotten in. Let the bikers remove what they want provided everything is washed down to kill nanobots. Then we take down the bunker safely with the busters. Fire them on a low trajectory, so they don’t display on standard sensors or sats and alert the military. And bug the hell out before they find us.”
“Okay.” I said, hands on my head, hiding my eyes as if not seeing could keep us away from all the pathways to danger and destruction. “You’re right. If—and that’s a big if—we can get the bikers to help, we’ll go with Plan D.” Plan D was slightly less suicidal than the others. And . . . missiles. Bloody damn.
Mateo blew out a breath. It shrilled like an old-fashioned whistle. “Roger that.”
“Somebody talk about the pink elephant in the room. All this? Attacking a military bunker? Fighting another queen and her entire nest? Risking our lives? For love?” Cupcake said, her tone full of frustration, as if love was the biggest problem we faced. “But fine. As long as you understand that you’re taking me and Amos to the negotiations. We already decided.”
I shook my head in resignation, picked up the eight sleeping juvie cats, placed them in the med-bay, and punched in the sequence to de-ball them.
Then I set the rest of the office to decontam, killing off any additional nanobots I had left behind in the last few days. I decontaminated every day now.
I had been reinfected with PRC nanobots when we rescued the Simba. The infection had been brutal, as my own bots attacked and destroyed the invaders, and though mine had won, the attack had changed the composition of my nanobots. The cats hadn’t shown signs of sickness, but Amos, Cupcake, and Mateo had all been forced back through transition again, simply because they had been close to me. Since then, my people had gotten more ornery, which had given me hope that the humans I had previously enthralled were also less mentally enslaved.
A girl could dream.
Sometimes dreams had consequences.
I stepped into the cool of the morning.
* * *
Autumn in the stone desert of West Virginia was unpredictable, the thermometer shooting up into the thirties Centigrade by day and plunging below zero at night. We all sweated with summer stink when the sun’s heat was blaring off the broken stone and the junkyard’s metal scrap, and slept under blankets at night, when the temps dropped and froze the water in the cats’ bowls. But this abnormally hot day had me itchy, jittery, as if expecting . . . something. Nothing major was supposed to happen today. I had arrangements and timelines for everything, and today was for final discussion, decisions, and packing the flatbed. Yet, my itchy skin and nerves had me expecting trouble.
Somehow not having trouble, having to hold it all in, made me more jittery. So I worked, sorting trade goods, sweating the worry off me, keeping occupied until whatever was about to happen, happened. Or didn’t.
I scratched at the sweat sliding down my chest as I shoved a case of military handheld blasters into the flatbed. These blasters were third or fourth generation. Kill speed was one-and-a-half seconds at a distance of six meters. At three meters, the kill speed dropped to half. At point blank, it was faster than an eye blink. The blasters’ only drawback was that the casing got hot against human skin. These were devised to be held in a fist gloved with battle armor. As trade items went, warriors would salivate over them.
I forced my attention back to paperwork, and considered the new mattress inventory Cupcake had entered onto my old handheld system. “Mattress inventory” referred to the off-the-official-books inventory kept by illegal traders, once upon a time, under their bedroom mattresses. I kept my off-book inventory on the handheld because no sat-links could access it, it was easy to hide, and I could burn the data on it to ashes with the thumbprint biomarker on the side.
As far as the Hand of the Law and the Gov.’s tax assessors were concerned, Smith’s Junk and Scrap specialized in the basics: pre-war metal and post-war surplus items like hemplaz, stripped-down military vehicles, and recyclable garbage. In reality—off-book—Smith’s was hiding a lot of illegal contraband, stuff the Gov. or the military would confiscate if they found out about it. Then they’d lock me in a Class Five Containment Center, a prison so far below ground I’d never see daylight again.
Some of this mattress inventory stuff could be used to entice the necessary people to the negotiation table, or so Cupcake had promised. We had a lot of military gear, silver, gold jewelry, real cotton sheets, canned meat, dried beans—stuff people hoarded and hid after the war and was scarce because the military and the Gov. had confiscated so much to use on the front lines, in space-going vehicles, and in low-orbit war planes. And because the cotton market had dried up when the atmosphere changed. Cotton wouldn’t grow where it used to. Neither would tobacco, marijuana, hops, grapes, or large-scale crops.
An unnamed female cat walked toward me, her direction unerring, looking to the side as if not seeing me. I didn’t look at her either, watching her from my peripheral vision. She walked straight up to me, circled once, and sat on my booted foot. She yawned and stretched her neck. Bored. Her body language said, I don’t see the junkyard queen. And if I did, I’m mean enough to take her.
Nope.
I shifted my foot slightly. Softly, I said, “If you get up and saunter away now, all the cats watching while you act stupid will think you’re fearless. You don’t leave, you’ll never make it back off the bottom ranks of the pride.”
The young cat stood, stretched, showed me her butt as if about to spray to mark territory.
Fast as a snake—or a junkyard queen—I swiped down and picked her up by the scruff of the neck like a kitten, and held her in front of my face. We met eyes, hers vibrant yellow and wide with shock. My voice barely more than a whisper, I said, “Don’t play games you can’t win, Little Kitten. I’m bigger. I have weapons that outweigh your claws and fangs. And I’m meaner than any junkyard cat you ever met.”
Her claws came out and she tried to scratch my arm, but I’d watched Tuffs deal with younglings before. She missed by half a meter. She dangled from my hand, slightly above my head.
“Keep it up and I’ll embarrass you in front of your rebel teenaged clowder. Stop now and your life will be easier.”
She hissed at me, and I lifted my brows. “You’re going to be trouble, Little Kitten,” I said. “If Tuffs brings you to me for neutering, I’ll oblige, and you will never be a queen of cats.”
She blinked, thinking, and slowly retracted her claws. She looked down in fake submission and went limp. “Uh-huh. Let’s see how you act, going forward. Threat stands.”
I wasn’t fooled, but I set her on the ground and she shook herself before reacquiring her saunter, as if taking me at the literal meaning of “going forward.” She walked away, tail high, an insult in cat body language.
“Not exactly smart,” I said, “but not ultra-dumb either. Maybe you’ll survive to adulthood, but I somehow doubt it.”
Little Kitten turned and hissed at me again before slinking around a pile of late-twentieth-century auto bodies. Stupid cat. She’d get herself and her pals killed if she went up against Tuffs. Even three-pawed, Tuffs could take the young cat.
A loud whomp shook the air, and my nerves had me flinching. I followed the sound-vibration around to Aisle Tango Three to see Mateo. He was pulling more military weapons from a buried shipping container and tossing them up to the desert stone.
When we got back from acquiring the Simba, we had also brought home some full-sized shipping containers that held military and medical hardware. There were weapons. So many weapons: top-of-the-line armor, next-generation blasters, lasers, weapons charging stations, multi-ammo-convertible automatic weapons, Tesla Lockmart IGPs (AKA Antigravity Probe-Lifter-Compactors, AKA AG Grabbers). And there was a container full of Medical Battlefield Bays, or MBBs—specialized triage med-bays—and battlefield-quality medical supplies.
It was stuff the people I would be negotiating with would kill me to obtain. I knew that for a fact because I’d murdered the man I’d taken them from. Marty Morrison had needed killing, but that was beside the point. I’d stared into his eyes while I boiled his innards with my old but functional blaster.
One of the containers I had taken from him held a thousand blasters, all with serial numbers that would prove they had been stolen. If they went out en masse, they would eventually lead the military to me and my junkyard. Despite the danger, Mateo had removed more cases of the blasters and placed them into the pile for barter. There were nineteen cases, each containing two blasters, each case also holding one multi-method charging station. Counting the case I had tossed on the truck, that made twenty cases, forty blasters.
Also lying in the dust were much bigger cases, each containing an armor suit with all the bells and whistles, and one very large box containing an armor-donning station. It was all the very latest in military equipment. Stolen military equipment. Traceable stolen military equipment.
In a separate pile were new high-quality plaz-steel military knives, and excellent quality boots which were hard to come by now that boot-making leather was so scarce due to the near extinction of cattle. There were also heat-retention blankets, ghillie suits, and vast amounts of sunscreen, which was nearly as valuable as water. No one went outside without protection from the sun. The increased radiation from the depleted atmosphere and damaged magnetosphere were directly responsible for the extinction of most animals, and the high rate of cancers. This pile was all mass-produced, desperately needed, and had no traceable serial numbers or built-in trackers that might endanger us.
It should have been heartwarming to see that Mateo had dug out and removed a great quantity of things that would not get me arrested and only a few things that would get me permanently caged. But somehow, I wasn’t feeling all warm and cozy. I’d wanted Mateo to be independent, but a Mateo who had grown obsessive over someone not in my nest was disturbing. And the fact that I was disturbed was disturbing too.
“I updated your inventory for the things I’ve pulled out,” Mateo said, his voice grating, as if responding to my unvoiced concerns by ignoring them and yet sounding belligerent at the same time. “Anything else you think we should take for trade?”
I wasn’t used to taking other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration, but it occurred to me that because Mateo was the commanding officer of a starship—even if it was crashed in a junkyard—he had no idea what people who lived in the underbelly of normal society would really want. And we would be dealing with the underbelly of the snake.
I didn’t indicate the direction of my thoughts. Instead I said, “How many of the portable triage MBBs do we have?”
“Twelve. You want to give them med-bays? Why?”
I’d never understand Mateo’s thought processes and military training. He would give current enemies only basic medical supplies to save themselves, yet that same thinking had always been okay with giving potential future enemies weapons and ammo which could later be used against us or our allies.
I ran my fingernails against my scalp in frustration. I’d dropped my hat somewhere. My scalp was sweaty. “You want to save Evelyn or you want to bitch about my bloody damn methods?” I growled.
“Save Evelyn.”
“So shut up, CO Sugah,” Jolene said into our comms system. “Evelyn comes first. You said it. So stop bein’ a pussy about regs and get with Shining’s program.”
“Pus—” Mateo went silent.
To forestall what could be the first raging argument in history between a commanding officer of a starship and his sentient AI, I said, “Pack up six triage med-bays and put them on the truck. Make sure at least one is programmed for, and has supplies for, helping people through the transition, and one is a vet-bay. Add in some good Berger chips. They make nice bargaining items, and they don’t kill. Keep out ten armor units and the multi-donning station. They’ll just fight over them unless we have enough for each club to get at least two suits of armor. We’ll take twelve blasters, max. That’s not enough for them to kill each other and me over, but enough to convince them I might have value other than raping and the sex trade.”
“I thought these were the good guys,” Mateo said.
“There are no good guys.” I stopped. I wasn’t sure if I believed that, but it was enough to shut Mateo up.
“Yup. I agree with Shining, CO Sugah. According to human history there ain’t many truly good guys, but the few there were made a big difference,” Jolene said. “Like Jesus and Buddah and Gandhi and such.”
“Yeah. Well,” I said. “We’re not dealing with holy men. We’ll be dealing with biker clubs. And the meeting is at one p.m. tomorrow, so let’s not screw this up by arguing or taking trade items that will bring them to our doorstep.”
“Roger that,” Mateo said.
“Fine by me, Sugah.”
“Good by me,” Cupcake said.
“Not that you asked me,” Amos added, his tone laconic, “but I want me one o’ them blasters to go with my armor. Imma look so cool Cupcake will drool all over me trying to get me out of it.”
“I can get you out of your armor in a snap, you doofus, but . . . I only need one part of you free to make me happy. You know. Happy?”
“Stop!” I shouted into my mic. “Not another word.”
