Mateo blew out a breath. It shrilled like an old-fashioned whistle. “Roger that.”
“Somebody talk about the pink elephant in the room. Allthis?Attacking a military bunker? Fighting another queen and her entire nest? Risking our lives? Forlove?” Cupcake said, her tone full of frustration, as if love was the biggest problem we faced. “But fine. As long as you understand that you’re taking me and Amos to the negotiations. We already decided.”
I shook my head in resignation, picked up the eight sleeping juvie cats, placed them in the med-bay, and punched in the sequence to de-ball them.
Then I set the rest of the office to decontam, killing off any additional nanobots I had left behind in the last few days. I decontaminated every day now.
I had been reinfected with PRC nanobots when we rescued the Simba. The infection had been brutal, as my own bots attacked and destroyed the invaders, and though mine had won, the attack had changed the composition of my nanobots. The cats hadn’t shown signs of sickness, but Amos, Cupcake, and Mateo had all been forced back through transition again, simply because they had been close to me. Since then, my people had gotten more ornery, which had given me hope that the humans I had previously enthralled were also less mentally enslaved.
A girl could dream.
Sometimes dreams had consequences.
I stepped into the cool of the morning.
* * *
Autumn in the stone desert of West Virginia was unpredictable, the thermometer shooting up into the thirties Centigrade by day and plunging below zero at night. We all sweated with summer stink when the sun’s heat was blaring off the broken stone and the junkyard’s metal scrap, and slept under blankets at night, when the temps dropped and froze the water in the cats’ bowls. But this abnormally hot day had me itchy, jittery, as if expecting . . . something. Nothing major was supposed to happen today. I had arrangements and timelines for everything, and today was for final discussion, decisions, and packing the flatbed. Yet, my itchy skin and nerves had me expecting trouble.
Somehownothaving trouble, having to hold it all in, made me more jittery. So I worked, sorting trade goods, sweating the worry off me, keeping occupied until whatever was about to happen, happened. Or didn’t.
I scratched at the sweat sliding down my chest as I shoved a case of military handheld blasters into the flatbed. These blasters were third or fourth generation. Kill speed was one-and-a-half seconds at a distance of six meters. At three meters, the kill speed dropped to half. At point blank, it was faster than an eye blink. The blasters’ only drawback was that the casing got hot against human skin. These were devised to be held in a fist gloved with battle armor. As trade items went, warriors would salivate over them.
I forced my attention back to paperwork, and considered the new mattress inventory Cupcake had entered onto my old handheld system. “Mattress inventory” referred to the off-the-official-books inventory kept by illegal traders, once upon a time, under their bedroom mattresses. I kept my off-book inventory on the handheld because no sat-links could access it, it was easy to hide, and I could burn the data on it to ashes with the thumbprint biomarker on the side.
As far as the Hand of the Law and the Gov.’s tax assessors were concerned, Smith’s Junk and Scrap specialized in the basics: pre-war metal and post-war surplus items like hemplaz, stripped-down military vehicles, and recyclable garbage. In reality—off-book—Smith’s was hiding a lot of illegal contraband, stuff the Gov. or the military would confiscate if they found out about it. Then they’d lock me in a Class Five Containment Center, a prison so far below ground I’d never see daylight again.
Some of this mattress inventory stuff could be used to entice the necessary people to the negotiation table, or so Cupcake had promised. We had a lot of military gear, silver, gold jewelry, real cotton sheets, canned meat, dried beans—stuff people hoarded and hid after the war and was scarce because the military and the Gov. had confiscated so much to use on the front lines, in space-going vehicles, and in low-orbit war planes. And because the cotton market had dried up when the atmosphere changed. Cotton wouldn’t grow where it used to. Neither would tobacco, marijuana, hops, grapes, or large-scale crops.
An unnamed female cat walked toward me, her direction unerring, looking to the side as if not seeing me. I didn’t look at her either, watching her from my peripheral vision. She walked straight up to me, circled once, and sat on my booted foot. She yawned and stretched her neck. Bored. Her body language said,I don’t see the junkyard queen. And if I did, I’m mean enough to take her.
Nope.
I shifted my foot slightly. Softly, I said, “If you get up and saunter away now, all the cats watching while you act stupid will think you’re fearless. You don’t leave, you’ll never make it back off the bottom ranks of the pride.”
The young cat stood, stretched, showed me her butt as if about to spray to mark territory.
Fast as a snake—or a junkyard queen—I swiped down and picked her up by the scruff of the neck like a kitten, and held her in front of my face. We met eyes, hers vibrant yellow and wide with shock. My voice barely more than a whisper, I said, “Don’t play games you can’t win, Little Kitten. I’m bigger. I have weapons that outweigh your claws and fangs. And I’m meaner than any junkyard cat you ever met.”
Her claws came out and she tried to scratch my arm, but I’d watched Tuffs deal with younglings before. She missed by half a meter. She dangled from my hand, slightly above my head.
“Keep it up and I’ll embarrass you in front of your rebel teenaged clowder. Stop now and your life will be easier.”
She hissed at me, and I lifted my brows. “You’re going to be trouble, Little Kitten,” I said. “If Tuffs brings you to me for neutering, I’ll oblige, and you will never be aqueen of cats.”
She blinked, thinking, and slowly retracted her claws. She looked down in fake submission and went limp. “Uh-huh. Let’s see how you act, going forward. Threat stands.”
I wasn’t fooled, but I set her on the ground and she shook herself before reacquiring her saunter, as if taking me at the literal meaning of “going forward.” She walked away, tail high, an insult in cat body language.
“Not exactly smart,” I said, “but not ultra-dumb either.Maybeyou’ll survive to adulthood, but I somehow doubt it.”
Little Kitten turned and hissed at me again before slinking around a pile of late-twentieth-century auto bodies.Stupid cat.She’d get herself and her pals killed if she went up against Tuffs. Even three-pawed, Tuffs could take the young cat.
A loudwhompshook the air, and my nerves had me flinching. I followed the sound-vibration around to Aisle Tango Three to see Mateo. He was pulling more military weapons from a buried shipping container and tossing them up to the desert stone.
When we got back from acquiring the Simba, we had also brought home some full-sized shipping containers that held military and medical hardware. There were weapons. So many weapons: top-of-the-line armor, next-generation blasters, lasers, weapons charging stations, multi-ammo-convertible automatic weapons, Tesla Lockmart IGPs (AKA Antigravity Probe-Lifter-Compactors, AKA AG Grabbers). And there was a container full of Medical Battlefield Bays, or MBBs—specialized triage med-bays—and battlefield-quality medical supplies.
It was stuff the people I would be negotiating with would kill me to obtain. I knew that for a fact because I’d murdered the man I’d taken them from. Marty Morrison had needed killing, but that was beside the point. I’d stared into his eyes while I boiled his innards with my old but functional blaster.
