“There are three recorded cases of humans surviving a swarm ofCataglyphis bicolor fabriciusants,” Jolene said, sounding less snippy. “Sherman Griffith. Shining Smith. Catherine Warren, AKA Clarisse Warhammer.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
“Oh. Honey,” Jolene said gently. “You was swarmed. That hadda hurt something awful. For a long, long time.”
I blinked against unanticipated tears. No one had shown me kindness about the ants before. Pops, his body jerking and shaking with the Parkinson’s, had just sat at the end of my bed, as he would have for any fallen OMW, and watched me suffer. He’d sat there for three days while I screamed and the fever raged. When I survived, against all odds, he’d patted my foot, the covers between his hand and me, and said, “Good work. I’m proud of you,” and left my hospital cubicle.
I hadn’t started secreting nanos right away.
I had gone back into the battlefield a week later, because we were up against a wall and I was small and wiry and our enemies never even noticed me because I was a scrawny twelve-year-old child and was no apparent threat. For all those reasons, the OMW and my own father had let me go and fight. Pops had let me crawl into a Mama-Bot to try and disable it. I’d been cut in a battle with Puffers. Only much later had I begun to secrete the mutated bio-mech-nanos.Bloody hell.
No one had known back then what surviving a bicolor attack might mean. I figured that no one knew today, except for three of us. And with my mutated nanos, I was probably a singularity, the only one who could do what I was trying.
Tears dried fast in the desert air. I waggled the bloody cuisse, tapping it against Mateo’s suit to spread the blood-scent. The Puffers in the warbot suit fell still for a dozen heartbeats as their micro sensors addressed the presence of blood and my own half-mech, half-bio, mutated nanos. The Puffers attacked at full speed, about twenty centimeters a minute. I led them out of the suit and gave them the cuisse to suck on. Their nanobots would harvest my blood protein and if Mateo’s and my speculations were right, I’d be able to control the Puffers. And the cats, especially Tuffs and her three best friends now that they had all drunk my blood on the spaceship. And Jagger? Maybe. And possibly Jolene, from the one time I entered her, and more so now that I’d bled inside her command sleeve. And maybe I’d someday be able to control the office and Gomez too.
Just like Clarisse controlled the team with her. That was what I’d seen in the upside-down eyes of my cat spy in the Mammoth. The way she moved. Everyone touching her. The way they hung on her every word. She had claimed them, enthralled them, and unlike the way I felt about thralls serving me, Clarisse had made them slaves.
I held out a hand to the Puffers and pulled at them through my blood.
The Puffers came to me, slowed and stopped a hand’s breadth away. I had seen the Puffers talking to each other. So had Jolene. That meant that these mini-bots had adaptive AIs. There was a chance that, by now, they might have comms and even be able to understand English, which would be very,verybad. Unless I could control them.
I pushed with my blood, envisioning what I wanted, saying, “Stasis function mode.”
The Puffers went still.Bugger. It worked.I figured that even their nanobots were unmoving, at least for a time.
I replaced my thigh armor and leaned toward Tuffs until she came close enough to touch noses. I envisioned the location and the actions I wanted her to take, saying “If you can, herd all the bots to the Grabber. I’ll decommission them as soon as I can.” She tilted her head, her whiskers scraping my cheek, looking at me like I was crazy. I might be.
To Mateo, I said, “I need to tie off the worst of your suit damage.”
Delicate, his massive arm moving with balletic grace, Mateo handed me a plaz-tie, and I threaded it through the two sides of the under-armor on his damaged foot peg, pulling the ends tight. The repair was makeshift and wouldn’t keep out a determined Puffer, but it helped. And time was passing faster and faster; I deliberately didn’t look at my chrono.
“How much damage did they do inside you?” I asked him.
“Like rats,” he said. “They chewed some stuff up. Deposited a whole bunch of nanos—thousands more than when I escaped the ship. They’re starting to reproduce, prepping to take me apart; I have maybe seventy-two hours before they reach critical mass and start to build new Puffers. I can make do until this crisis is over and we can put my suit under the AG Grabber, just like last time.” Putting the entire suit under meant taking Mateo out of the warbot again. I said nothing about that, and Mateo handed me ties to secure the two Puffers.
“About the CO thing?” Mateo said.
“Later,” I said, attaching the Puffers to my belt and standing. “Like you said, after this crisis is over.”
Using all six limbs like a spider, Mateo pushed himself to his feet and stood upright on his three longest limbs, well over four times my height. Stepping gracefully over skids of old vehicle parts, he moved to the back of the property. I made my way to the Grabber and turned it off, letting down the two humans I had pulled into the anti-gravity field. They landed with dual thumps. I checked for pulses and discovered both were alive, but were little more than drooling bags of biology. If I stuck them under a scanner, I’d see their brain chemistries were seriously out of whack and brain activity was erratic.
I had killed them.
I studied them closely. I would remember their faces in my dreams. That was the least I could do.
Three Puffers chased by cats trundled down nearby aisles.
Things clanged softly from Mateo’s general location. Someone shouted, the sound muffled.
Tuffs wound around my legs in a supple, agile figure eight.
I pulled the human bodies out of the way and tossed the two Puffers under the Grabber, turning it back on and stepping quickly away from the energy release. The Puffers rose in the air as I walked to the front of the office, stepping over the Angels’ number three guy. He was in two parts and well chewed. I could have just walked on in, but I tapped on the office door. Jagger opened it. Heat whooshed out, into the cold desert night. I met Jagger’s eyes, too bright, feverish. There was a weapon pointed at my chest.
“Put that away,” I said softly.
Jagger started to obey and stopped. He was strong, fighting the changes in his body and the pull of my blood.
With two fingers, I pushed the weapon aside as I entered and held the door for all the cats that wanted to come in after me. Tuffs, Notch (still in his bandages), and four other named cats traipsed in. Behind them leaped maybe a half dozen cats I knew but had never named beyond Cat. They trotted in and started exploring, wandering everywhere, from the med-bay where two cats were in healing status, to the kitchen, to my bed, where three injured but healing cats already lounged. I’d never get the cat hair off the sheets. Fortunately, the cats’ nanobots killed fleas and ticks, or the office would be infested with them.
