“Cowling is free,” I whispered into my mic as I tilted the heavy metal and let it rest across my extended arm. It was in front of me, leading the way down, and I hoped my soft-mode sleeve would keep all the fan’s metal parts from banging against the air duct and alerting Warhammer’s forces.
I released my belaying rope and slid slowly down, my weapons out of quick reach behind me, now depending on the cats to alert me to impending trouble. The adjoining air duct appeared to my side and I used my boots and the rope to slow my slide. Carefully, I jammed the cowling, fan, and rat skeleton into it.
I reached out to Spy. She and Maul were in full fighting mode, their mental connection completely open. I felt their hunting excitement, nearly quivering with happiness. Saw through their cams into the dimly lit room. No rats were visible. Nothing in the room appeared different from the last time they were here. “Way appears to be open and clear,” I said. “Team Alpha, begin descent.”
I slid down, moving faster on the sharp slope. More belaying ropes followed me, sliding around on the metal duct, as my human team prepared to descend. I relaxed the pressure of my feet, which had been pressing on the duct walls, and plunged fast.
Just before I reached the opening into the big, dark room, I slowed and stopped. Stuck my fist camera out through the rat-chewed grating and verified what I knew from the cats’ cams. The room was empty.
Still in the duct, I gave Spy my attention. “Spy, you two can go ahead. Start your rat hunt.”
A sense of pure joy came back to me, and the two cats took off. The rest of her clowder was with the other teams, ready to move in on Spy’s command, working as contact points with her mind.
For this part, she and her mate would be alone.
Following on her sense of joy in the hunt was a feeling I couldn’t quite interpret, but it was maybe the glory of sunset, the wriggling squiggle of dying prey in her claws, the feel of meat protein in her fangs, the taste of rat blood. Spy was in dedicated killer mode.
They bounded for the first cat objective. The rats.
Again using my tool-kit glove, I removed the grate covering and eased it to the floor. I caught the edge of the ductwork to somersault out of the duct and landed silently. “Access point is clear,” I whispered. “Holding position.” The fermentation room didn’t smell nearly as musty to my human nose as it had to Spy’s. The steel tanks showed a thin layer of rust and a lot of dust, and the rat droppings were much heavier than I had expected.
Moments later, Mina landed beside me and to my right. Almost faster than I could follow, she began to quarter the room. Camilla moved to my left. Jagger was slower and louder, but he landed and moved directly in front of me. Jacopo was as silent as a cat, and headed directly toward the doorway we would need to clear into the next room.
Room after room, we cleared our way forward, until we were at the opening to the hallway where Spy first saw the lockstep rats. Here, our timing became tricky because when I inserted my glove cam through a small rat hole, I realized what it really meant for Spy and Maul to successfully attract the rats’ attention. The cats were nowhere to be seen, but the hallway was full to overflowing with marching rats. They were leaving thousands of oversized rat pellets and a stink I could smell in the next room.
The only other way out of the room we were in was through a rat hole in the wallboard into another room that was likely a supply closet on the schematic.
While the others watched the rats on their own cams, I extruded a jigsaw on the universal adjusting tool on my armored glove and cut through the wall—which was nothing but hempfoam insulation and wallboard—to the other side. When I inserted my glove cam, it revealed a storage room for paper products. If there had been rats inside, they had abandoned the room for the rat parade in the hallway. I sawed open the space between metal supports. Mina shoved past me and through.
“Clear,” she muttered into comms.
When I got through the hole, she already had a mini-cam on the end of an old-fashioned fiber-optic cable under the door to the hallway. She reeled it in fast. “Rats.”
I pressed my glove-saw against the wallboard on the other side of the storage room and we emerged into a tiny utility closet. There were more rats on the other side of the only door, so I cut through the back wall. We came out into an unused, dusty office. The hallway on that side of the complex was free of rats, and Mina was first through, clearing the empty corridor, Jagger on her tail. Camilla followed them, her weapon up and ready to fire. Jacopo edged toward her, covering the white-haired girl and me.
We emerged into a part of the bunker that hadn’t been well documented, and we were hell and gone from our own first objective. We opened our helmets, which would have negative repercussions if we ran into people, but it was worth it for the comfort. On the edge of the face shields, just above the sleeve where they retracted, Jolene had posted a possible floor plan that might lead us back to our objectives. Theoretically.
Minutes were passing quickly. We were behind schedule, in the wrong part of the compound, and on the wrong level. On Spy’s camera, I saw an image of a stairway jiggling up and down. I realized she was running full-out, up a level. I caught glimpses of Maul’s front feet as he raced beside her. On the mic pickup, I heard slithering, sliding, tapping, clicking sounds of hundreds of little rat feet chasing after them. It was rats chasing cats, in a reversal of an eons-long hunt.
“Jolene,” I said. “Where are the rats in relation to our twenty and the stockade’s twenty?”
“Sadly, not close enough for you to boil the little beasts. I’m updating your map,” Jolene said, “and I’m estimatin’ there must be three thousand rats chasing the cats. Should you so order, it would be my personal privilege to play the footage for the two people manning the security screens, and watch them mess their drawers knowing they have to fight them. For now, I’ve marked a route to the stockade that lets you avoid all the rats.”
“Jolene, you share that rat-vid at any time you think you should,” I said.
“Oh.” There was an odd silence, and I realized that Jolene had just been told she could think and act independently of me without an established protocol in her databanks. I’d just treated her as another human. “Thank you, Commander Shining Sugah. Roger that.”
I checked the screen, turned right instead of left, which felt like the wrong way, and spotted a door marked with a staircase. Mina inspected the floor and along the stairs with her tiny camera and pronounced it clear. She eased open the heavy door, and Jagger brushed by me. For such a big man he was light on his feet.
“Security cameras are on rolling blackouts and replay along the marked route,” Jolene said. “Hold. There are two humans leaving the upper floor and coming down.”
We backed into the lower hallway, let the door close silently, and waited. The others followed my lead when I deployed my helmet. My hands were sweating inside my armored gloves. I didn’t want to kill someone who hadn’t attacked me, but I might have to. Like the brown-eyed woman. I drew my blaster. Reconsidered and made a fist. Showed it to my team. They nodded, that quick jerky movement of the battlefield or sudden unforeseen violence. I adjusted the anti-recoil settings on my sleeve, and waited.
The door opened.
Jagger took the first one out with a punch that picked the guy up and slammed him into the stairway wall about a meter off the floor.
I clocked the woman, moving in tandem with him. Both of us faster than human.
