“Copy that,” Jolene said.
I bent and picked up the crushed headset. Placed it around the woman’s mangled neck.
“I’m tossing the body onto a mine,” Cupcake repeated, her blue eyes on mine. “Then we’ll retreat.”
“Okay.” I watched as Cupcake moved through the grasses. Adjusted her armor. Threw the body. And fell facedown as the guard with brown eyes tumbled through the air and dropped. The mine exploded.
An instant later, blood and a small sliver of tissue hit my face shield. I watched as it slid down my face plate. Already cooled in the low-light view.
A hand touched my elbow. Cupcake guided me into the passenger seat of the ATV. Slowly, she backed it along my previous track, behind a boulder big enough to blend with the ATV camo. She turned off the electric engine. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at me.
“It’s harder when you’re up close like that,” she said. “When you can see their eyes.”
“Brown eyes. She had brown eyes.” I took a breath that hurt to inhale and opened my face shield. The night air was cold on my face. “I could have tied her up and taken her with us. Transitioned her. At least she’d have been alive.”
“And they would have looked for her harder, found our tracks, and been able to calculate numbers. They would have been more alert for an attack. Now they have a body and a logical explanation of why she’s dead. They won’t look for us. You made the right choice.”
“Bloody hell.” I scratched my fingernails through my hair, which I knew was a stress tell for me. Reaching to my groin, I manually repositioned the mini-scales. They would need some work. The armor hadn’t failed, but interestingly for armor that was advertised as having no weak points, also wasn’t perfect. “I’ll have some bruises. She was strong.” My voice sounded odd. Stiff and dead as the brown-eyed woman.
I shoved the image away. Touched my suit into a more comfortable mode. Tried to focus on the pictures and readouts. “I’ll think about this—about her—later. Where are we on the Op?”
Mateo said, “We still don’t know where Evelyn is.”
I steadied my breathing. Without looking at her, I said, “Thank you, Cupcake. You can return to position.”
“You’re welcome. Anytime.”
I felt her moving away. I remembered to breathe. Stared at the screens to figure out what I was seeing. Cats. Right. Cats.
Maul was at a “T” intersection of hallways, a staircase to the right. To the left was a heavy-duty honeycombed hemplaz carbon-fiber composite door—damaged, warped, repaired, but shut. It was marked as Admin Suites. Maul sniffed, and must have smelled something he found upsetting. In the edge of his cam, I saw his hair lift out, standing on end.
As if sending out a call for assistance, he said,“Orrrowmerow.”
Spy raced to join him, and standing shoulder to shoulder, they studied what they could see of the hallway and the narrow crack at the base of the door. They sniffed steadily, touching noses often, conferring.
“Admin Suites,” I said, sounding almost normal. The cats were on the lowest level. The safest place to be in many ways, protected by the floors above. “Spy, what does it smell like?”
She sent a memory vision to me, one that was upside down, from when she infiltrated the truck filled with Warhammer’s people. Spy had been lying across the knees of a man as he scratched her belly. One of the faces was One-Eyed Jack, another Clarisse Warhammer. All the cats had eaten from the bodies of Warhammer’s dead thugs, but Spy was the only cat who had been in close proximity to the queen herself. Only Warhammer and her lover Jack had escaped after we fought off their assault.
“Mrow. Siss. Kah,”she said again.Invaders. Dangerous.Andkah,the word we had decided upon to meanenemyqueen. It meant she smelled Warhammer’s nanobots. And Warhammer herself.
As if the scents were disgusting, Spy sniffed loud and long, and hacked. It was the same sound as coughing up a hairball. “There are a lot of them in there, aren’t there?” I asked her. “In the suites. The queen and her primary mate. And lots of thralls.”
“Hhhhah mmm,”she said, confirming my guess.
We had gotten lucky. We’d found Warhammer’s nest. And we had gotten unlucky. It was in the best-protected site in the bunker, at the bottom level, behind what looked like a modified blast door. There was no way in except with human intervention and, considering the damage to the door, maybe heavy bombardment.
“Spy, can you get an eye down to the crack between the door and the floor and see anything?” I asked.
A moment later, I got a vision of several pairs of shoes and one pair of dark-skinned human feet, the toenails painted in glittery purple. From down there, I was able to pick up a bit of sound over Spy’s mic. “Mateo, can you increase the volume?”
“Affirmative.”
The sound went from fuzzy to clear.
“She isn’t coming out of it.” Warhammer’s voice, bored and dismissive. “I won’t feed another mindless whiner. End her.”
“Can you get us visuals from any cams inside the admin suites?” I asked Jolene.
