“CO Sugah, this mighta been one of them bunkers set aside for what you might call the last resort,” Jolene said, then added, “A habitation for the politicians who would rebuild the world after Armageddon. After the rest of y’all died a horrible death.”
“Which would mean Warhammer has enough supplies to last years,” I said.
“And a lot more weapons than we anticipated,” Mateo said. “And a lot more square footage down there. The cats’ GPS shows a significant increase in depth.”
On the screens, I watched as the cats scouted the fermentation room. It was big, maybe fifteen by twenty meters, and abandoned rats’ nests were everywhere. There were small bones of prey here and there that could have been cat or dog, hunted outside and dragged in.
“Be careful,”I thought at Spy. She ignored me.
The cats followed a well-traveled rat path of droppings through a chewed hole into the next room, and wove a path into a hallway with a stairwell. Here, the scent of rat piss was strong, and fresh droppings were everywhere.
“Mehshh,”Spy said again. She didn’t like this place and wanted to move on, but there were doors at the next landing up, and I sent her the request to position so I could read the words on the doors. Grain Storage 24 was stenciled on one. MREs 5 was on another. All food perfect for rats. The rodents had moved from the fermentation room where they had to bring in outside kills, and had set up living quarters where there was likely enough food to last years.
A rustling sounded and Spy looked up. She met the glossy brown eyes of a monster rat. And then more pairs. And more. The rats moved forward a single step. Then another. In unison, like a marching band. Or soldiers. Or puppets.
“Mrow. Siss,”she said into her small mic.Invaders.Dangerous.“Orrrowmerow,”she added.There is a bad problem.
“Get out,” I whispered into the mic and into Spy’s head. “Run.”
The cats raced away, along the corridor and through another rathole. The rats didn’t follow, and I pretended not to know that Spy—who had been unconcerned and blasé only moments before—was seriously freaked by steel-eating, lockstep-marching rats. I was freaked too, and nauseated from our mental contact. I pulled back a bit, following their travel on the cam feed on my screen. They ran down hallways, along plumbing pipes, through holes. I was lost when they stopped, quivering, side by side, touching all along their bodies. They seemingly conferred.
I swallowed down nausea. Oversized, mutated rats, walking like soldiers in parade formation.Mind controlled. What if the rats had been transitioned the way the junkyard cats had? With a rat queen? That would suck.
“You got the layout?” I asked Jolene, focusing on the floor plan she was constructing from the cat cameras’ views and coordinates.
“The cats’ trackers and cameras are providin’ a floor plan of hallways and ratholes,” she said, “but we need more information about rooms and their designations.”
I returned my thoughts to Spy and sent her Jolene’s instructions through our mental link. I got back a series of impressions before the cats separated, seeming calmer. They stepped out, their gaits smoother.
“Are you inside the camera node? Can you turn the cameras they pass off and on?” I asked Jolene.
“Do I look like I just stepped off the assembly line?” she said, sounding huffy. “Of course I’m in. I can hide the cats’ incursion. It’ll look like the system is experiencing a flicker-glitch.”
I wasn’t sureflicker-glitchwas a real term in sophisticated security systems, but I understood it. Jolene’s extrapolated floor plan grew in the corner of my face shield just above where it disappeared into my neck gasket.
Spy moved along one hallway. Maul took the other, their cam visuals side by side on my faceplate. When the cats came to doorways or signs, they stopped and sat up, angling their cams so we could see. They found storage for linens, cleaning supplies, a laundry, and a hallway marked as containing pool, lockers, and exercise room.
The cats also found humans.
Even at night, there were a few people moving here and there, wearing casual clothes and boots, clean-looking and smelling, no weapons. Each time the cats sensed a human, they raced into a different hallway or up or down a flight of stairs. Our floor plans were solidifying. And while the cats hadn’t been spotted so far, we were pressing our luck.
I heard a sound, not through my comms, and froze. I lowered the volume on my speakers, softened my armor into silent mode, and activated the Chameleon skin enviro invisi-mode, blending me into the landscape. A human form moved through the dark, crunching grass less than twenty meters from me, a flashlight in hand, aimed at the ground and then up into the trees.
“Sentry. Heading my way,” I whispered. “Going silent.”
Sharp shadows cut through the night, interfering with my lowlight vision. I made out something hanging on a strap. Automatic long rifle. It was the first sign of pickets outside the bunker. She was in cloth clothing—not armor—and she wore an old-fashioned-looking, single-ocular headset.
I eased behind a trunk and raised my faceplate so the camo would hide my heat signature and blend me into the background. If her ocular was low-light, I was okay. If it had an IR component, I was toast. I glanced at my ATV. It had good enviro camo, which worked well enough in daylight or low-light, but it wasn’t top-of-the-line. The heat signature of the small electric engine was still a vibrant red in infrared. If the sentry bumped into it by accident, there would be no hiding it. Also no hiding the tracks it had made getting here; flattened grass would be a dead giveaway. I bent and lifted a stick from the ground. A smaller twig snapped off.
The guard swung the light more slowly. Moved my way.
When the light swung away from me, I threw the stick. Itshushedthrough the air. Made a subduedthumpwhen it landed in the grass.
The guard turned and followed the sound. Stopped, made a careful detour around nothing that I could see, and then resumed. I figured the detour was to avoid a landmine. The sentry inspected the area where the stick landed. I heard a plasticclick, and a woman’s voice said, “There’s nothing out here but dead grass, rat-sign, and rabbit crap, Marvin. And it stinks like dead bodies. Who the hell is burying the failures? They need to dig deeper.”
“I’ll pass your complaint up the line to the commander,” Marvin said wryly.
The female sentry turned away. “You do and I’ll be dead, but I’ll take you with me first. I’m coming back in. Over.”
