Of course I was pissed at this entire exercise, so maybe that was an internal assumption based on grouchiness.
I had one job for this event. I was supposed to find the biggest earthmover I could and get the sucker going. Then start ramming everything on site, making a big disturbance, so the others could attack with pinpoint accuracy and hopefully little bloodshed and death on our parts. I was the bait and the target. My bloodshed was assured and my death likely.
Spy leaped to my shoulder from who knew where.
I flinched. “You nearly got batted into the snow,” I muttered.
She crawled into my armor’s helmet slot, curled around my neck, and nudged my ear, which was really weird. Weirder, she started purring.
“Stop that,” I said.
She didn’t. She mouthed my ear lobe, which was free of comms equipment, because comms were useless. It hit me at that moment. The enemy had comms. We didn’t. Point to them. We knew they were there, and they didn’t know about us. Point to us. But if I could stoptheircomms . . .
“Hey, Spy. You want to destroy their comms and give us an advantage?” I whispered.
Spy coughed and said, “Meep-huun,” which was cat for, “give me more information.”
I didn’t want to say this part aloud, just in case, so, as I trudged through the snow with a cat on my shoulders, I thought at her,Carry a small . . .I stopped that thought. I didn’t know how to describe it so I settled on a mental image, and the mental words, “. . .thing. . .into the middle of the Dark Rider’s camp, find the comms shed or building, and stay there until I call you.Then come back, close to me.I tried to make all that a mental picture, but I sucked at cat-talk.
“Mrow. Siss haah,” she said aloud.We are the dangerous invaders.
“Yes. And you get to chow down on anyone you kill until it’s time to leave,” I said aloud. Which was gross, but in this world, protein was protein. There were reports of humans eating their own dead during the years of starvation after the war. And really, if cats wanted to eat the enemy, I wasn’t one to argue.
“Kkkkk.” That one I knew by heart.Protein of dead humans.
“Hhhhah mmm,” she added. Cat forYes, this is good. We had a bargain.
I stopped in the snow and pulled the small tin from a Velcroed pocket, opened it, and removed a second small shard. I let her sniff it, and her entire snout wrinkled up in distaste. It must really stink, since she routinely hunted, killed, and ate toxic rats. I placed it in her harness pouch. “If you decide to leave it somewhere, you’ll need help to open the pouch,” I said.
Her old mate, Maul, wasn’t with her, since his injury, so I didn’t know how she would handle that, but Spy, more so than any cat I knew, was ingenious with physical tech. She would manage.
She leaped from my shoulder and bounded through the snow. Two other cats followed, both wearing harnesses. Pounce and Wrench were like her lieutenants. The three were wearing harnesses which meant they would be identified as enemies and shot if they were seen; they disappeared into the light snowfall, into a war zone currently occupied by armed drunk humans playing in snow forts like kids.
Target practice. The cats would be target practice. I was playing with their lives, putting them at risk of being shot. It was also the best tactical move I could make. I hoped.
I sped up and followed an elusive form in the dark—Enrico, staying just ahead, making sure I was safe. If I got him killed, Old Man Marconi would kill me. The biker-chick part of my soul figured that was a fair trade.
* * *
I leaned against a tree, breathing heavily; I was winded, my quads and calves were cramping. I had sealed my helmet closed and put on speed when we got close to the repurposed waterpark, without accessing battery power, which would have made the run easy, but I needed the power for later, when my life and the lives of my people were on the line.
I reached for Spy, and when the images hit, they sent my brain into a disoriented, green-black-gray tinted spin. I saw men playing in a field which was down in a rock-lined, flatbottomed, concrete hole, one that had probably once been the upper pool for water, back when the world had rain and rivers and water to spare for nonessentials.
Overlapping it and far clearer, another image showed me a building where lights poured through the windows onto the snow. Accompanying it was a reek of smells: meat and sex and misery and liquor. This was the place the commanders used, and where women were prisoners, doing duty in whatever way the men wanted, whether the women wanted it or not.
I was inside Spy’s mind, the cat knowing what I really wanted despite the job of carrying the shard. From inside came a voice saying, “I’ll check it Sarge. Likely just ice on the EntNu equipment.”
Like ice would stop EntNu when nothing else did, not space or time or matter.
The door opened and the images in my brain went haywire, growing brighter, showing a ceiling and walls, chairsand desks. Spy had gone inside, slinking around unpainted wood walls in the shadows. I chuckled silently. Spy was carrying the shard instead of dropping it somewhere, making sure it wasn’t lost. Spy knew the importance of resources. Too many couldn’t be replaced. Of course, if she was caught or shot, I’d lose both the shard and my friend.
I didn’t have many friends. I had more shards.Sodding hell. Damn cat, putting yourself in danger.
Dark Riders had long been part of the human trafficking for slaves, both for work and for sex. Now I had their commanders’ playroom in my sights. Yeah. She knew what I really wanted, and with the shard on her, she was close enough to interfere with the DR’s comms.
I needed to get close enough to kill the men and set the women free. Spy knew that. I saw the entire room in a single sweep, smelled the stink of small mice, humans and food and sex. It was ugly. But the floor plan was clear as day. The door opened again, and Spy raced through. Someone shouted, but Spy buried herself in fifteen centimeters of snow next to the building and burrowed her way into the darkness.
Behind her a man said, “Biggest fucking rat I ever saw!”
