Cupcake chattered brightly through the meal and continued the prattle afterward, as she cleaned the office. I started on one set of the quarterly books—for the taxes and the official merch—and Amos restocked the medical supplies in the med-bay. Cleaning included giving the Bug alien command chair a thorough vacuuming and damp wiping to remove accumulated cat hair. Lately, the cats—who were led inside in small groups by Tuffs, for reasons I still didn’t understand—had often abandoned my bed in favor of the Bug ship’s extra-large Comm chair, which suited me just fine, though it was possible their lounging location meant they were assuming command. With cats, who knew?
“Did you hear a single word I said?” Cupcake demanded.
I looked up from the books, dredging through my unconscious memory for her last words. “Veggies in the greenhouse, some fruit, lots of greens. The old rainwater storage container on the roof has been patched. The new water-collection system is ready for cooler, damper weather. And you have a new toy for me.” Thirty minutes of babble condensed into four lines.
“And the part about Mateo?”
“His business,” I said, my tone going steely.
“Not so. He’s got the hots for Evelyn, and we all know it. That’s why we’re going after her. He was in love with her onboard, during the war. Youknowit,” she said, her tone as unyielding as my own.
I had always wanted Cupcake to stand up to me, to be her own woman. That desire was coming back to haunt me.
“I’m outta here,” Amos said. “It’s gonna get all girly.” He levered his big body toward the airlock. “But if you decide to go all girl-on-girl wrestling, call me back in.”
“Perve,” Cupcake said, but her word sounded all lovey-dovey.
“Ever’ chance I get.” He kissed her on the forehead and lumbered through the airlock, letting out one batch of cats and letting in another, who instantly started roaming and familiarizing themselves with the space.
The cats were all juvenile males this time, and Tuffs gave me a demanding look that cemented my idea about the cats thinking they were in charge. But she had a point. My job today would be to stick all eight of the unneutered juvenile males in the med-bay for a snip-and-tuck. The males had no idea what was about to happen, and to make it easier on myself, I reconstituted some goat milk and added a hundredth of a milliliter of illegal Devil Milk.
While I worked I replied to Cupcake, “We have to stop Clarisse. We have an ethical obligation to rescue Evelyn.”
I set the bowl on the floor, and the males came running. Tuffs stretched yoga moves on top of the commander’s Bug chair and watched in satisfaction.
I tucked in my earbud and tapped it. “Mateo. Talk to me.”
“After going over all the cat-cam footage again, the recce shows we have to go with Plan D,” his grating voice said in my ear. “Evelyn is not a thrall. No thrall would be in such bad shape. I’m getting her out. I owe her.”
“Or she is a thrall, and Clarisse is torturing her with her nanobots. And before you ask, yes, I think it’s possible, and no I will not test my theory on any of you.”
Mateo cursed.
For him, Plan A had always been to sneak in and rescue his second-in-command and deploy the Simba’s city-killer bomb. It assumed that there weren’t many enemy thralls to fight and that Evelyn could be knocked on the head and carted out. Plan B, had Evelyn not been in the bunker at all, had been to just drop in the city-killer to destroy Clarisse and her thralls. Plan C had been a weird combo of an all-out assault and heavy bombardment, based on the probability that Evelyn was a thrall, then using the city-killer threat to negotiate for her release. And then double-crossing Warhammer and deploying the city-killer after we had Evelyn. Now we had a new plan on the table—Plan D, which was like Plan C but without negotiating and without the use of the city-killer. Just infiltrate, get Evelyn, kill Warhammer, and take down everything with different weapons—ones that would not detonate or damage anything WIMP-powered. D ended with me transitioning Evelyn, to heal her with my nanobots.
Plan and A, C, and D required more warriors than we currently had—which is why we needed to recruit the bikers we would be meeting.
I couldn’t stop seeing Evelyn’s tortured body. Or the blood spurting on the floor of Warhammer’s nest. The Black woman’s face as seen through Spy’s eye beneath the door. Or the brown-eyed guard I had killed. The mutated mega-rats walking in lockstep. Instinct said we had to save Evelyn and kill everything else in that place.
But I also remembered the size of the bunker. And the three-story WIMP room.
As if reading my thoughts, Mateo said, “If there’s a WIMP bomb or power source in that bunker, the Simba’s city-killer will likely detonate it.”
He’d said this before, and I knew it was true. “Options?”
“We can employ other explosive devices to bring down the bunker once we have Evelyn and after we are safely away,” Mateo said. There was something in his voice that said he wasn’t telling me everything that was going on in the back of his Berger-chipped brain, but I wasn’t going to exploit my control over him to demand he tell me. That would be an abuse of power.
I sighed softly.Explosives. Right.There weren’t enough explosives in our entire arsenal to get through that shielding, and Jolene hadn’t been able hack her way through the WIMP door electronically. The Simba—the Suit Initiated Main Battle Tank—and especially its city killer was supposed to be our ace in the hole. People had died for us to get it. And now it was useless.
“Mateo,” I said. “Outline Plan D. A version that lets us get away alive.”
He chuckled, that grating noise that sounded like rusted pipes being rubbed together. “The Simba has weapons that can take out precision targets at five kilometers using aerial targeting systems. It’s equipped with jamming devices to bring down remote aircraft and is mounted with a rail gun and rapidly repositioning blasters that can take down a platoon of warbot-suited warriors. It has precision lasers that can cut through some heavy steel plate like butter. But since we can’t use the city-killer because of the WIMP presence . . .” He paused. “We’ll have to use bunker busters.”
My head came up at that. “You have bunker buster missiles?” I had no clue the Simba had weapons big enough to bust through earth and fortified installations.
“Jolene zaps the security system, we precision infil small teams. Close-quarter combat. Take Evelyn. Kill Warhammer before she knows we’ve gotten in. Let the bikers remove what they want provided everything is washed down to kill nanobots. Then we take down the bunker safely with the busters. Fire them on a low trajectory, so they don’t display on standard sensors or sats and alert the military. And bug the hell out before they find us.”
“Okay.” I said, hands on my head, hiding my eyes as if not seeing could keep us away from all the pathways to danger and destruction. “You’re right. If—and that’s a big if—we can get the bikers to help, we’ll go with Plan D.” Plan D was slightly less suicidal than the others. And . . .missiles.Bloody damn.
