Junkyard War
“Reconnoiter via feral cats. This is a first,” Mateo said into my helmet’s communications system. There might have been humor in the words. Hard to tell through his metallic larynx.
“Cats approaching outer perimeter. And they ain’t feral, CO Sugah,” Jolene said. “The pride done named themselvesFelis catus destructus.”
I looked up from the small screen I had opened in my helmet’s vid display. “The pride cats understand Latin?”
“Prolly,” the AI back at the USSSSunStarsaid, in the Southern accent she chose for herself. “But Tuffs just kinda asked me for help and we came up with it together.”
I didn’t know which was the worse possibility, the pride cats speaking Latin or the not-supposed-to-be-sentient-but-was AI talking with the not-supposed-to-be-sentient-but-were cats. “Fine. Whatever.”
Mateo snorted. It was a grating sound I interpreted as laughter. There wasn’t much left of one side of his head, and part of his throat had been so damaged by swarming PRC nanobots that my med-bay had implanted an artificial one I’d bartered for at an illegal swap meet. Medical supplies had been hard to come by back then, and still were. Mateo also didn’t have all his limbs, which I hadn’t been able to fix, and lived most of his life in the neural-net-controlled warbot.
I could practically feel him looming above me, seven and a half meters of legs, torso, and head with a meter of horizontal silk-plaz view screen. With his dynamic environmental camouflage off, the warbot suit looked like the love child of a deadly spider and a kid’s toy, and if this recce went sideways, Mateo’s suit and his battle tank, situated half a click away, might be the only reason we got out of here.
“The cats got through the outer perimeter, y’all,” Jolene said. “We got visuals from both of the cameras.”
Even with night-vision goggles, it was hard to tell much. The cams had been mounted on the chests of the cats’ tactical harnesses to make it harder for sensors to spot them, and they were emplaced to give us a good angle and line of sight, but there was only so much we could see with the cams at fifteen centimeters off the ground. Spy and her mate, Maul, were currently running—that crouched-predator sprint-stop-sprint, of cats—through autumn-dry prairie grasses, giving us no actual view of the target: a heavily fortified and armed World War III bunker.
I fidgeted as the cats approached what had looked like a small overgrown hill in the drone flyovers we had done. It had taken us weeks to get to the stage of in-person reconnoiter and, as patient as I had been, now I was jumpy, jittery, and my armor readouts showed it. I tried to relax. Wasn’t helping. Where was the bloody damn bunker? The cats should be right on top of it.
In the last weeks we had created cat-sized tac harnesses with comms systems, destroyed the nanobots infesting the Simba battle tank, checked out its systems, retrofitted hardware, added new weapons, and tied the crashed spaceship’s EntNu comms system to the tank. EntNu was based on the practical application of the science of entwined neutrinos and gave us instantaneous communication with Jolene back at the junkyard. All that, just so we could verify that the bunker had been taken over by our enemy, the MSA’s Clarisse Warhammer, and maybe get a look inside.
Amos and Mateo had done most of the preparatory muscle work. Jolene had spent the time collecting intel on the motorcycle clubs, while Cupcake (and sometimes I) talked to intermediaries and put together the upcoming negotiations. There was a long list of potential trade items to cement the safety and cooperation of the participants—the leaders of the most successful biker clubs in what was left of the US. My plans were fluid, my goals even more so, and what I discovered from this current recce would change what I negotiated for at the parley.
Not that the biker club VIPs knew everything about the upcoming meeting. They didn’t even know who was invited. The Outlaw Militia Warriors and the Hells Angels thought they were just gathering to divide up territory and discuss an ordinary war of guns in a battle against the MS Angels. They didn’t know about the prisoner we wanted to rescue or what Clarisse Warhammer really was.
The MSA was what was left after the West Coast portion of the Hells Angels biker club had been usurped by the old MS-13—the Mara Salvatrucha gang. The merged criminal enterprise was bent on taking over the entire country. Warhammer was now the driving force of that move, quickly rising to the top of her own ultra-violent gang while invading the other clubs’ territories.
I couldn’t stop the MSA’s expansion or Warhammer alone.
I’d seen Pops have these conversations with powerful men during the war—dialogues of half-truths, allusions, and insinuations to convince others to meet and talk without giving away secrets or killing each other, all while dangling the promise of monetary and territorial benefits. It had been boring when I was twelve, just watching and listening. It wasbloody damn freakingboring when I had to do it myself. I was not cut out for politics.
One of the things we might offer the VIPs, to assure that the negotiations were successful and a treaty I liked was reached, was info on theinsideof the bunker where Clarisse Warhammer had her nest. Warhammer, who wanted more slaves and territory, was a nanobot-modified, mutated queen who could enthrall and enslave humans. And we believed she had a prisoner in her nest, one we would need to exfil before we destroyed it.
Bad thing! Back!
Spy’s fear-laden vision-smell suddenly shocked through me. Adrenaline spiked and hardened my suit armor in reaction.
A soft verbal “Orrrowmerow siss” followed, which in cat-speak meantThere is a bad problem and danger. The camera mounted on her battle harness showed me what had shaken her. Two centimeters from her paw, something was sticking out of the ground. Metallic.
“Mateo?”
“Land mine. They step on it, they’re goners.”
I sent the image of an explosion to Spy through our newly established mental contact, and added the thought,Stalk slow. Watch for bad things. “Be careful,” I added aloud, so Maul would hear too, on the harness’s comms system.
“Mrow. Siss,”Spy hissed into the small mic near the camera.Invaders. Dangerous. She added a soft growl, a sound I had learned meanthunt and kill.
Spy looked at her mate, Maul, his scars caught on her low-light camera, bright and hairless against his black fur.
Maul had chosen the name himself, after fighting his way to the top of the male mating cats. Maul, as in “he mauled and killed all the cat contenders with testicles.”
He was Spy’s weapon of choice, an enforcer like Jagger, my . . . whatever he was. Maul operated under the orders of the Guardian Cat queen, Tuffs, and also at the whim of Spy—his mate and Tuffs’s heir.
Maul placed his head against Spy’s, communicating through the spooky weird ESP crap that was the result of Tuffs being infested with my nanobots early on at the junkyard. They separated and continued on, their progress slowed, grasses passing beside them as they moved. Maul crossed a gravel two-rut road overgrown with saplings. The small trees showed signs of being driven over, though not often enough to kill them.
On my helmet screen, Jolene began generating a map of the grounds, with defenses noted in red.
