automatic pings?”
“Disabling emergency transmissions is within my capabilities.”
More annoyed.
I waited. Nothing happened.
“Have you disabled emergency transmissions?”
“Negative.”
I wanted to bang my head. “Why not?”
“Ship AI, CAIT, current moniker Jolene, does not have an order to disable all transmissions.”
And now she sounded a little malicious and a lot like she was pushing my buttons.
“Ship AI, CAIT, current moniker Jolene,” I ground out. “Disable SOS emitting from backup AI. Disable all ping transmissions.”
“Disabling SOS and ping transmissions requires CO’s authorization.”
Just pushing my buttons. Sarcastic, snide, spiteful, and enjoying it all.
Requires CO’s authorization . . . That bad feeling that had been hanging around pierced directly into my heart. CO was the commanding officer. The captain of the ship.
All those fog-shrouded possibilities came blindingly clear.
I remembered the access numbers set up by Mateo, giving me right of entry to SunStar. Mateo, who had been found only a few kilometers from here, as the crow flies. How bloody damn convenient. Mateo, who had been attacked by Puffer nanobots inside his warbot suit. It wasn’t even a guess. And I was so utterly stupid to not have figured this out already. That was why the ship crashed. It had been infected by Puffers and nanos. After it crashed, it had been hit with AG particles from its own engines, which killed the nanos. And then the ship had been left here, hidden in plain sight, on the junkyard property. Only one person other than me—and Jolene—knew that antigravity WIMP particles killed mech-nanos and that other person had taught me how it was done.
It was Mateo who had figured out how to kill them. By accident. When his ship crashed.
My brain put together facts and guesses and I said, “Authorization, Mateo, Captain, CO, four, eight, one, six, alpha tango delta.”
“All emergency transmissions are disabled,” Jolene said.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
“Shame on you. Listen to that nasty tongue.”
Mateo was the commanding officer of the USSS SunStar. Puffers had gotten into his ship. He had gone down with it. Wearing a warbot. And he had gotten away, probably not knowing he had mech-nanobots inside with him. By the time he realized what was wrong with his suit, he was enslaved by the sheriff of Boone County, West Virginia. The Puffer nanobots in his suit had been a problem he couldn’t deal with. You couldn’t put a person under WIMP antigravity for long without some serious brain scrambling, not that he had access to an AG. He had fought the nanobots as they ate him, cell by cell, piece by piece. The Puffers had nearly killed him before I showed up and brought him back here where he repaired the Grabber, crawled from his suit and let the Grabber kill the nanos. And I had put what was left of him in the med-bay to heal as much as possible.
The back half of Captain Mateo’s ship was in the mine crack, still emitting WIMP dark energy particles. And he never told me.
On the screen, the big man—who had stood next to a skid—moved, racing for the office airlock. Moved fast. Jagger fired. Fixed artillery. A well-grouped barrage. And somehow Bearded Guy wasn’t hit. Bloody hell. He was augmented. Had to be.
On another screen, the first guy from the team of six at the mine crack began to rappel down into the earth.
Then Bearded Guy began applying the bright purple third generation malleable explosives to the airlock seal. Military stuff. Somehow, he was managing to stay to the side of the weapons array that protected the airlock.
“Jagger?” I said.
“I see him. Gimme . . . Gimme . . . Now.”
He fired a pulse weapon. Bearded Guy went down in a splatter of boiling blood and viscera.
“Direct hit. Wonder where he got a pulse weapon?” Jolene asked. “Not bad shooting, there. And that butt? He’s a keeper.”
Ship AIs got over snits fast, it seemed.
Tuffs bumped my nose with a paw, and said, “Meep?”
I had forgotten she was there. “I don’t know what—”
Tuffs put her nose against mine. Her whiskers brushed like cat kisses, and she leaned in more, her forehead to mine. Everything she was seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling skittered into me and took over, a cross-sensory experience that slapped me with a severe case of vertigo. Guardian cat. Not words, but a concept I gleaned from her thoughts and feelings. Tuffs was a Guardian Cat. Like a title. Like Queen.
My perceptions shifted and I was inside several things. Creatures. Cats. Smelling the stench of gasoline, oil, old