Spy received the thought-vision, and if a cat could smile, Spy did, satisfied and a little mean, as if she had won a dominance fight.
Tuffs hissed, jerked away from me, and stared daggers at Spy. Her ears were flat, and her green eyes were vicious. She said, “Mrow. Siss.”
Spy ducked her head and crawled off Cupcake’s shoulder, inside the cab. She placed a paw on my arm and sent me a vision. I nearly jerked away in surprise. Spy’s vision was colder, sharper like pine needles, tinted with a hint of icy green light.A pile of freshly killed rats.She blinked her odd eyes at me. I glanced at Tuffs, who was watching the exchange, quivering with emotion.
Spy stepped up and leaned in, our foreheads touching. The world skittered sideways as a memory slid into my mind, glass sharp. Intense. I wanted to hurl.A toxic rat. A hunting cat stalking it. The bloody fight.
“You want to hunt?” I asked her. “Waterfront rats are huge. You’ll need to hunt in groups.” I tried sending her a vision of hunting parties fighting with a single huge rat. Teeth like razors. Claws.
Spy hissed with excitement and hunched her shoulders, her whiskers grazing my face, her odd eyes staring at me. She whirled and leaped out the window. I hoped the communication we had just shared would allow me to talk to Spy without touch, the way Tuffs and I did.
In the truck bed, I heard Mateo shake the cargo, looking for scrap that might shift. Nothing substantial moved. Cupcake brought more dirt for cat litter and more kibble.
I finished securing the weapons, adding water and snacks.One-armed, I swung out of the cab and into the bed, where I checked Mateo’s work, as he bent and checked my work in the cab. It was already hot, the temps at thirty-two degrees Celsius. I stank. Mateo’s warbot suit was air-conditioned. Not that I’d want to change places with him.
Once we were satisfied, I made a last stop at the office to use the body wand, change clothes, toss my toiletries into their small satchel, gather the laundry, and grab 2-Gen sunglasses to hide my weird orange irises. I hadn’t been born this way. When I was transitioned the second time, by mech-nanos from a PRC Mama-Bot, the eyes were the result. To the bag I added a tube of orange lip gloss and a wide-brimmed hat that had belonged to Little Mama. For an Old Lady, my mother had been a fashionista.
I inserted the earbuds for the brand new long-distance EntNu comms system. In a worst-case scenario, where we survived an attack and needed a rescue, and where I was willing to risk the scrapyard, we could call for warbot reinforcement.
“Comms check?” I asked.
“Check,” Mateo said.
“Check,” Cupcake said.
“Check,” said Gomez, the office’s AI.
“Check,Sweet Thang,” Jolene said.
I shook my head at Jolene’s endearment. It was totally out of character for a spaceship-worthy AI, but she had chosen the name, the accent, and the Southern personality based on an old song. I wasn’t going to quibble about her life choices.
“Okay,” I said. “Cooler with food and extra water is in the truck’s sleeping compartment with the stash of jewelry, extra ammo, cat litter, cat bowls, and the portable composting toilet. The bed is folded up out of the way to keep the cats off it.”
“This place is going to reek,” Cupcake said. She slid her eyes sideways to the cats sitting on the hood, watching. “No offense or anything.”
She had a point. The cab would stink. Tuffs’s reconnaissance clowder was Spy plus six cats: one solid gray, two gray tabbies, one orange tabby, one tortoiseshell, one pure black. Seven cats on a trip. At least two of the cats were intact males. Which reminded me to pick up med-bay supplies. Tuffs brought me several dozen cats every few months to neuter, and that used up supplies fast. It was a loss I accepted since it was far more humane than her previous method of claws and teeth that left the young males dragging themselves off to live or die. I stared at Spy. “No spraying. No marking territory. No using anything or anyone in the cab as a scratching post. Any cat who disobeys rides with the gear.”
Spy made a little chuffing sound and looked at her squad. I had a feeling she was sharing the warning. Cats with ESP.Bloody hell.
Mateo’s suit whirred at an almost inaudible level, and one of his shorter limbs came forward. Grasped in three of his fingers was a small black electronics box about ten-by-five-by-two centimeters. There were male and female ports on both sides with cords hanging from each. It looked like an amalgam ofSunStartech and old-fashioned tech, and I had never seen anything like it.
“This is an AI Interface Portal—the uplink for the Simba,” he said. “When you dig down to a hatch, you’ll see a port on the outside. Insert whichever end fits. The hatch will open. Remove the port and drop inside. You’ll see a keypad, a schematic for a handprint, and a slot that looks like this.” On Mateo’s limb, a screen appeared, and it showed a tiny port, like a computer port from the mid-twenty-first century. “You’ll have to manually hardwire the interface portal to the Simba by inserting this line into the slot. Input my command codes for theSunStar, verbally and manually, along with your handprint.”
“Handprint? What about—?”
“You’ll have to decontam. I’ve overwritten my handprint for yours in the IP. Jolene will do everything else and take over the Simba. Then you can activate the Grabber to power the WIMP engines, and I can drive it home.”
“Really,” I breathed. This little thingy, if it worked, would make my job much easier. “How did you figure it out?”
“I figured it out, darlin’,” Jolene said over the earbuds. “And I created it in my very own lab. It’s built according to the Simba specs in my memory banks.”
I cupped my gloved hands and accepted the device, which was way heavier than it looked. “It’s EntNu-based, isn’t it?” I asked softly. Civilian Entangled Dark Neutrino tech had been taken away or disabled by the alien Bugs, along with the military’s spaceships, at the end of the war. Now, EntNu-based devices were illegal for civilians. TheSunStar’s military weapons were illegal for anyone. I could keep such devices safely in the scrapyard because they were well hidden by theSunStar’s background shielding. But if the military discovered this interface portal or the comms system, maybe at an official roadblock while I traveled, Cupcake and I would die in a Class Five Disciplinary Barracks.
“Yes,” Mateo said. “But like the comms system on the truck, Jolene made certain it looks like prewar civilian hardware. I will be monitoring everything. You will not bealone, Shining,” he said, his voice sounding almost human.
He knew. Mateo, more than anyone else alive, knew that I was always alone. Or I used to be. Now I had him and Cupcake. And the cats. And Jagger. I squared my shoulders. “What else?” When no one said anything, I slapped the side of the diesel and said to Mateo, Jolene, and Gomez, “You three have fun.”
The clowder of cats bounded into the truck cab.
