“Timmy fell in the well,” I muttered, quoting a 2040 film about a modified cyborg Collie dog that could actually speak English. I opened the outer airlock. Much slower than his previous speed, and looking a little clumsy in the bandages he hadn’t tried to chew off, Notch stepped out into the night. Limping, he disappeared into shadows. I closed the airlock and said, “Mateo, engage security protocols.”
“Engaging. Get to the ship. Looks like our visitors have heavy armament.”
I switched my face shield to auto and raced through the dark aisles, past tons of older, rusted skids of scrap ready to be bulk-shipped. Prewar heavy equipment scrap from the top-down mining that had removed entire mountain ranges to provide granite cabinet tops for homeowners and coal for the power industry. Farm tractors from when this area had been fertile land instead of flat granite. Alloy car bodies that no one would ever buy, not in this day of lighter hemp-based materials. The scrap back here was all old stuff that had been here when I got here, and would be here forever, the perfect disguise for what we really were.
In my face shield, a cat form showed bright golden red with body-heat, dropped six meters in front of me, and sat. I skidded to a halt.
“Tuffs? What the—?” Ahead, on an adjoining aisle I needed to take, cats attacked a Puffer, ripping it to shreds. “Oh. Is anyone hurt?” Tuffs didn’t reply, not that I could have understood her if she tried.
Mateo’s warbot body moved down the aisle on his modified three legs and scooped the busted Puffer into a bucket. “No more for now,” he said to the cat. “The Grabber will be busy. Just keep track of them, don’t kill them.”
Tuffs moved to the side. I raced on, now seeing cats leaping from aisle to aisle and pile to pile, following me. Or leading me. Right to the ghillie-tech cloth that covered the side access hatch of the United States Space ShipSunStar.
Beyond the tarp Mateo had rigged over the entrance, the ship’s exterior was still functional. Stars shone on the undamaged part, reflecting sky and desert and visions of the junkyard in the automated, actively-repositioning armor and Chameleon skin. It was effectively invisible unless someone stumbled on top of it or knew it was here and was looking for it. The ship had gone down in the middle of the war, in a major Earth-orbit battle. It had broken up and the front half landed here. For some reason it had never been found, even after the war ended.
My Berger-chip must have sensed my uncertainty, because it chose that moment to chime in:
The timeline leading up to World War Three was chaos. The tension created by stable WIMP engine technology—which led to active solar system colonization—was made worse with the appearance of Bug aliens in 2036 when a scout ship with some functioning technology crashed into the North Sea. The ship was captured by the EU and much of the alien tech was reverse engineered and shared with the United States and other allies. This new tech was later stolen by other countries—notably the People’s Republic of China, which refined and improved the Allies’ designs. The subsequent claiming and colonization of Mars resulted in a war that began in 2043 and ended when the Bugs appeared in large numbers and forced the peace treaty of 2045. Bugs divided Earth into major parties and some sub—
“Shut up,” I told the Berger-chip.
A lot of earth-based human tech had been lost in the war. TheSunStarhad space-going war tech, and some of it was lost as well—exceptfor what ended up right here. The office had even more dangerous tech. All of it was banned. The power sources and weapons, if used, could be identified from satellites. So powering the main WIMP engines would be dangerous; it might draw attention to the junkyard. Instead, I would slowly power up a backup engine, and even more slowly transfer power from theSunStarto my equipment, batteries, and pre-war weaponry that—I hoped—no one could trace. But first, I had to make the power transfer happen.
“Where did the Crawler get in?” I asked Mateo.
A single screen opened in the center of my faceplate, showing me a dusty, brownish, squat warbot, slowly crossing the border, the time-date marker a week ago. The original Crawler had all sorts of devices protruding from its carapace. There would have been dozens more devices and weapons inside on foldouts, all of them capable of independent drive and lethal measures. It was seventy-five or so centimeters high, less than that side to side and back to front, roughly squarish but with rounded edges. It was still that size when it entered the spaceship. What emerged three days later were two babies, each more than half the original’s size. They had taken on mass. From the spaceship.
“It entered the exterior rear engine compartment,” Mateo replied. “So far as I can tell, the Crawler never made it to the bridge or to engineering. It spent all its time in the shielding bay, breaking up a spy drone.”
“Copy.”
I input the code Mateo had set when we first accessed the ship—Mateo, four, eight, one, six, alpha tango delta. I placed a palm over the viber, and my face against the scanner. The hatch opened with a measuredwhooshand I stepped inside. Four cats slipped in behind me, Notch’s tail tip almost getting caught when the hatch closed with a sense of finality. He was moving great for a cat who had been nearly dead. The security lights began to glow as I opened the next hatch and entered the ship proper. The sensors showed green: a breathable atmosphere. Manually, I slid my faceplate aside. All the low-water-use air-scrubber plants in the niche boxes on the walls had died years ago, as evidenced by the metallic, stale scent of the air.
In a jarring, unexpected Southern accent, SunStar’s AI said, “Welcome home, girl. ’Bout time you came to visit again.”
The accent was odd, but not something I had time to worry about now. I raced into the dimly lit ship, searching the glowing schematics on the walls for the engineering department, or what was left of it after the ship crash landed. The floors—decks?—weren’t flat or horizontal and some had holes down to other levels; the ceiling tiles had shattered upon impact and were all over the floors, and the walls were cracked. All of it had worsened over time, making traversing the ship physically demanding and precarious. Sprinting down the halls (or decks, or passageways, or whatever space goers called them) was a little like racing over the blasted bedrock in the desert. I banged my shin into a chunk of wall.
“Bloody damn,” I said.
“Watch yo’ mouth,” the ship’s AI said over her speakers. Which nearly brought me to a stop.
Into my earbud, Mateo said, “Moving into position at front gate. Intruders approaching from the west. No human or mechanical aggressors noted from other directions. Barriers are up and functional, leading to a single defensive point. All tire shredders and tracked wheel-disrupters are up and functional. Office weapons are auto-trained on front entrance. But all automatic armaments and defensive measures are slow to respond. We are seriously low on power, Shining.”
I dropped into the engineer’s seat, hating that I was safe back here and Mateo was out front, facing an unknown onslaught alone. An attack with tech and hardware that might be better than what we could use—assuming the Angels had PRC weapons—and still stay hidden from sat-surveillance. I could only hope the upgrades we had done on Mateo’s suit and on the property were going to be enough. I strapped in, knowing that CAIT’s command center wouldn’t respond unless all the I’s were dotted and T’s were crossed.
Mateo said, “Grabber in position.Power, Shining. I needpower.”
From his tone, his suit had injected him with enough ’roids and swamped him with enough synth-pheromones to enrage a rhino.
“Powering upSunStar’s miniaturized backup WIMP-anti-WIMP particle processor engine,” I said, watching the readouts. “Ionized neodymium is present in sufficient quantities to generate antigravity and power. Initiating warmup on WIMP and transfer systems.”
“Copy. Make it fast. ARVACs indicate it’s not the Law. Not the Gov. It’s . . . It’s a private army.”
“No doubt?”
“None.”
“Starting power transfer to office batteries and direct power to your suit,” I said. Over Mateo’s comms I heard the roar of approaching engines. It sounded like a battalion. “Come on, come on, come on,” I whispered to the particle processor. In the cold void of space, WIMP engines provided gravity for personnel and antigravity for propulsion and weapons, and it happenedfast. On Earth, powering on a WIMP engine that fast—even a miniaturized backup engine—created extreme temperatures and stressed the ship, and powering it on slow meant we were dead. I nudged the power system up faster than was safe, knowing that if a military satellite with the proper scanning systems was watching this part of the desert, they’d see the system come on and they would know what had happened to the remains of their space ship. Also, the heat emissions would melt most of the junkyard if I left it on too long.
