Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,29
tiny screen over the exit door brightened, flashed, darkened, and resolved into the vision of the road out front. “Invaders,” I said to Notch, knowing he understood a very little English, mostly stuff about food. “If they get onto the property, there will be no goat milk. No water.”
“Sisssss,” he said, this one angry.
“If the Puffers continue to replicate, there will be no more protein or kibble. And they will eat your young.”
His mouth opened to show his canines, which were bigger than a normal housecat’s. “Sisssss.” Very defiantly pissed. Notch eased down the steps to the floor and walked to the outer airlock. Looked back over his shoulder and again at the door.
“Timmy fell in the well,” I muttered, quoting a 2040 film about a modified cyborg Collie dog that could actually speak English. I opened the outer airlock. Much slower than his previous speed, and looking a little clumsy in the bandages he hadn’t tried to chew off, Notch stepped out into the night. Limping, he disappeared into shadows. I closed the airlock and said, “Mateo, engage security protocols.”
“Engaging. Get to the ship. Looks like our visitors have heavy armament.”
I switched my face shield to auto and raced through the dark aisles, past tons of older, rusted skids of scrap ready to be bulk-shipped. Prewar heavy equipment scrap from the top-down mining that had removed entire mountain ranges to provide granite cabinet tops for homeowners and coal for the power industry. Farm tractors from when this area had been fertile land instead of flat granite. Alloy car bodies that no one would ever buy, not in this day of lighter hemp-based materials. The scrap back here was all old stuff that had been here when I got here, and would be here forever, the perfect disguise for what we really were.
In my face shield, a cat form showed bright golden red with body-heat, dropped six meters in front of me, and sat. I skidded to a halt.
“Tuffs? What the—?” Ahead, on an adjoining aisle I needed to take, cats attacked a Puffer, ripping it to shreds. “Oh. Is anyone hurt?” Tuffs didn’t reply, not that I could have understood her if she tried.
Mateo’s warbot body moved down the aisle on his modified three legs and scooped the busted Puffer into a bucket. “No more for now,” he said to the cat. “The Grabber will be busy. Just keep track of them, don’t kill them.”
Tuffs moved to the side. I raced on, now seeing cats leaping from aisle to aisle and pile to pile, following me. Or leading me. Right to the ghillie-tech cloth that covered the side access hatch of the United States Space Ship SunStar.
Beyond the tarp Mateo had rigged over the entrance, the ship’s exterior was still functional. Stars shone on the undamaged part, reflecting sky and desert and visions of the junkyard in the automated, actively-repositioning armor and Chameleon skin. It was effectively invisible unless someone stumbled on top of it or knew it was here and was looking for it. The ship had gone down in the middle of the war, in a major Earth-orbit battle. It had broken up and the front half landed here. For some reason it had never been found, even after the war ended.
My Berger-chip must have sensed my uncertainty, because it chose that moment to chime in:
The timeline leading up to World War Three was chaos. The tension created by stable WIMP engine technology—which led to active solar system colonization—was made worse with the appearance of Bug aliens in 2036 when a scout ship with some functioning technology crashed into the North Sea. The ship was captured by the EU and much of the alien tech was reverse engineered and shared with the United States and other allies. This new tech was later stolen by other countries—notably the People’s Republic of China, which refined and improved the Allies’ designs. The subsequent claiming and colonization of Mars resulted in a war that began in 2043 and ended when the Bugs appeared in large numbers and forced the peace treaty of 2045. Bugs divided Earth into major parties and some sub—
“Shut up,” I told the Berger-chip.
A lot of earth-based human tech had been lost in the war. The SunStar had space-going war tech, and some of it was lost as well—except for what ended up right here. The office had even more dangerous tech. All of it was banned. The power sources and weapons, if used, could be identified from