Moments later, we saw dual vids of triangular reinforced concrete to either side of massive metal doors, all with dynamic enviro camo that made them look, on first glance, like boulders and dead grass.
The main entrance to the bunker was near the intersection of old I-77 and I-81, near Fort Chiswell. It had been locked up and left empty by the military at the end of the war, per orders of the Bug aliens. Except for the faint signs of traffic, visible only from up close, I wouldn’t have known it was in use.
I didn’t have to tell Spy what to do. She and Maul skirted the doors and began quartering the hillock the bunker had been built into, looking for hidden or disguised entrances, noting defenses and, most important, searching for ventilation shafts. The two cats and I had studied hours of video showing the various kinds of air shafts, hidden back doors, weapons emplacements, and man-made openings used by the military so the cats could spot them without constant direction from me.
Thankfully for my temper, they found an air shaft twenty minutes later, and then four others, sticking their heads through the grates into each, evaluating their size and the smells and sensation of air moving through. The map on my face shield depicting the hillock of the buried fort grew, becoming more detailed.
The cats picked a promising duct with a rusted hole in one corner of the covering—no airflow, a flat place to work from, and an autumn-dry tree nearby to provide cover. Through the hole, the cams revealed a slanted shaft disappearing into the dark.
Maul scratched open a small pocket on Spy’s vest and pulled out a rope with loops on each end. As if the cats fully understood the physics of belaying ropes—which they might, because that had been covered in the videos, too—Spy stuck her head through a loop and trotted around the small tree, pulling it taut, then moving under and over the rope itself several times, effectively making a freaking knot. Maul did the same with his. It wasn’t as good as rappelling gear, but since the cats hadn’t evolved fingers, the strap around the head was the best we could do.
Spy studied the inclined air shaft, breathing in the scents.“Mehshh,”she said softly. It was the word forrats. On her camera, I spotted rat droppings along both sides of the shaft.
I gave her a mental nudge and she let me in. Vertigo sent nausea through my system. I couldn’t stay in her mind for long, hence the tac harnesses and comms gear. The shaft on the other side of the damaged grate was maybe 80-by-80 centimeters, and it went down at a barely manageable thirty-five-to-forty degree angle of descent. Spy crawled through the rusted hole and stopped, crouching. Her harness camera, already adjusted to night light, indicated a faint reddish glow just ahead. It was a WWIII era security camera with a tiny red light indicating it was still active. It wasn’t a multi-spectrum device, and looked like a bottom-of-the-line cheapie, which made sense for an air duct.
Body in a tight ball, her paws out in front to slow any inadvertent slip, Spy moved toward the cam. Bracing her feet, she humped up to it and around to its back, where she turned and pressed her tac harness to the camera casing. I heard a faint click as the magnetized infiltrator bug attached itself to the camera’s metal housing. We had practiced this maneuver, and it went off without a hitch.
Two minutes later, Jolene said, “I’m in. Deactivated security cam. Digging my way through the camera node to locate the central security system.”
I chuckled and sent Spy anatta girlthrough our mental link.
Spy slid-skidded-walked down the angled shaft, her claws clicking on the metal. Spiderwebs and a nest of leaves and twigs appeared to the side in an uneven portion of the metal duct. Spy stopped, sniffed, and said,“Mehshh.”There was a thick trail of rat droppings along both sides of the duct but no fresh scent, so I assumed the rat nest was abandoned.
Beyond it was a fan in a cowling that narrowed the shaft considerably, the fan blades unmoving. She stepped over and through it, passing a large rat skeleton tangled in the blades—probably the reason why the ventilation fan no longer turned.
A little further on, a narrow secondary shaft opened, and smells came up the passage to Spy, some of which I recognized through our mental connection—human sweat, sex, and blood. There was the smell of cooking food and the reek of a human toilet. And beneath it all was the stink of Warhammer’s nanobots.
Spy said,“Mrow. Siss.” Invaders. Dangerous. “Kah,”she breathed.Enemy queen.
Our intel had been good. Our recon crew had just confirmed the presence of Clarisse Warhammer in this bunker, somewhere. A spike of relief speared through me, trailed closely by a barb of worry. Warhammer had already attacked me and mine once. To protect us, I would have to kill the only other nanobot mutated queen I knew of, one way or another.
Spy continued along the larger tunnel, digging in her claws as it steepened or flattened and other adjacent shafts moved off into the dark. Four times she spotted cameras ahead, and Jolene turned them off. Disabling all the cameras was a key part of our strategy for the coming war. This recon was the first real indication that we might succeed.
For my small group, this would be a dual-purpose war—a war to rescue Captain Evelyn Raymond, Mateo’s number one on the starship that had crashed on the back of the junkyard property; and a war of vengeance for the death of Harlan (my best friend) at the hands of Clarisse, who was holding Evelyn prisoner. Tears still prickled beneath my eyelids each time I remembered Harlan—dead, tortured, being eaten by bicolor ants, delivered to me in back of a hunk of scrap metal. And if the severed finger she had sent to me was an indication, Warhammer was now brutalizing Evelyn as well.
Warhammer had to be stopped. I would stop her.
My armor informed me that I was breathing too fast and my heart rate and blood pressure had spiked. It asked if I wanted liquids, nutrients and stimulants, or hardening and recoil adjustments. “No. I’m good,” I said, forcing my breathing to smooth. “Jolene. Any update on spotting more entrances?”
“Four camouflaged entrances noted in RVAC remote flyovers, Shining Sugah. All are behind blast doors. Three appear to have been used recently. There are six air shafts, most not suitable for human use, though with cat infiltration that makes a total of ten potential entrances. Multiple entrenched and camouflaged armaments have been catalogued, but none appear to have been activated since the original abandonment, and all are overgrown with vegetation.”
“Any luck seeing heat signatures, or anything that would tell us how many thralls are in there?”
“Negative, Darlin’.”
This recce would determine everything. The more humans there were inside, the more help we would need to accomplish our objectives, and the more likely there would be an internal war between the biker clubs after the battle here, to take the spoils. And the more likely that we would be spotted by the military sensors and corporate satellite systems.
The coming operation to rescue Evelyn Raymond and kill Warhammer had FUBAR written all over it.
Spy reached the bottom of the shaft where its trajectory flattened out for about two meters. The shaft ended and there was a grate over the opening. Spy would have been stymied at that point, but there were teeth marks on the metal. The rats, which sometimes reached more than ten kilos, had gnawed open a hole. Through steel.
Bloody hell.
I sent a warning to Spy to remember to watch out for rats bigger than she was, and that had steel-gnawing teeth.Bloody mutated rats.Spy sent me an emotion that felt unimpressed and bored. In my screen, Maul dove into the shaft, following his mate. His camera showed him running-sliding down the shaft, through and past all the things that had slowed Spy, and up to her.
They bopped noses, slipped the ropes off their heads, having not actually needed them, and crawled through the rathole. Their cameras auto-adjusted to a much dimmer light. The room had large steel tanks, tables, and bins, and to Spy’s nose smelled of ancient rotten fruit, old rat droppings, and piss, but there was no fresh scent of anything.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Mateo said. “Those are fermentation tanks for wine or beer. This was more than a war bunker.”
