I pulled myself up and forward, dragging my feet through the broken tiles, heading back to the access hatch. Cats followed in my wake and raced ahead, exploring.
“I’ll eat. Then we go rescue Mateo and kill off some Puffers. Oh.” I stopped. “What did the Crawler do while it was inside you?”
“There have been no reports of hostile incursion, Sweet Thang.”
“Take a look at the vid Mateo found. It’s in Gomez’s files.”
Jolene said something very unladylike and stopped talking to me. I found my way to a weapons locker, weaponed up, and then found something that looked like a food storage and prep device—if such a thing were the size of a small car—and ordered lunch. With cake. The reconstituted soup wasn’t bad, but Jolene’s crew was right.
The cake sucked.
* * *
With the exception of the office lights, which were off tonight, there was never artificial illumination in the junkyard to pollute the sky. Tonight, the moon was below the horizon, the night sky was as black as the far reaches of space, and the stars were a glowing blanket so rich and deep and intense it took my breath away. I tracked the warbot suit and found Mateo, the three-legged, three-armed warbot, on the ground in a tangle of limbs. The cats were sitting on his chest carapace, staring at the single shuddering leg.
Jolene had isolated the Puffers in one leg and kept them there.
I tried to communicate with Mateo via EntNu and radio, but he didn’t answer, so I leaned over the meter-wide helmet section and tapped on the silk-plaz screen. My “shave and a haircut” tapping was answered from the torso cavity with the requisite “two bits,” and Mateo’s comms went live, working now that we were suit to suit.
“How many Puffers are left in-field?” he asked.
“Jolene and the cats are still tracking them,” I said. Mateo’s silence went tight with tension. “Yeah. I met Jolene,Captain. We had a nice conversation.”
“I was protecting my ship.”
Mateo’s voice cut like a whip. This wasn’t the easy-going, brain-damaged employee I knew, but likely the real Mateo, the one who had evolved back to himself thanks to the Berger-chip plug-ins I had purchased for him. The Mateo I was meeting for the first time. The Mateo who was technically my thrall, thanks to the transition he underwent when I had to pull him out of his warbot suit early on in our relationship. I had to wonder how long he’d been faking the brain damage. I had to wonder if he’d somehow managed to wean himself off Devil Milk addiction.
I had to wonder if I had just discovered a way around the worst parts of the transition—Berger-chips. The annoying little chatterboxes provided additional memory and sped up the brain’s ability to make connections, which the brain lost during nanobot transition. Had they helped restore Mateo’s independence?
“I’m not arguing,” I said peaceably. “You have your duty and your oaths. We have”—I checked my Hand-Held—“seventeen minutes and change before the MS Angels attack again. I believe they have Evelyn Raymond, your second in command, somewhere, and she gave up the location of the ship.”
“She would nev—” He stopped as the implications sank in. Evelyn, a prisoner. Abused. For who knew how many years.
“We have two healthy rescuers and one injured invader, exfiltrating from the back of the property, where they ascertained the ship was in the mine crack. They are not aware of the rest of the ship on the surface under the ghillie tech. They’re moving slow and, in their current position, are unable to communicate with their compatriots at the front because of WIMP leakage. I want to interrogate one. If I succeed in taking care of the Puffers, can you make the invaders talk?”
“We’ve never tested your altered blood chemistries on Puffers. You can’t—”
“It’s too late for hiding what I am. I—”
The vision of Clarisse intruded, the way she moved, so different from humans.
So much like me.
The way the others wanted to touch her constantly.
The way One-Eyed Jack let her be in charge.
I looked out over the junkyard. Dread, like a torrent of ice water engulfed me.
“Jolene,” I whispered. “Are there any records of Clarisse Warhammer, or any of her aliases, surviving an attack by modifiedCataglyphis bicolorfabriciusants?”
Like I had . . .
“Shining, you don’t think—?” Mateo stopped as he accessed his own memory and intel plug-ins.
I removed my left ballistic armor cuisse—a blood-soaked thigh-piece—and rolled it into a column. I stuck the cuisse into the torn space on the ankle of Mateo’s warbot suit.
“Come and get me, you little buggers.”
