Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,41
“Smart is sexy.”
Listening with half an ear, I pulled back from the SunStar’s screens and found Tuffs’ face up against mine, cross-eyed close. She was also inside my brain, showing me pictures of Mateo. His warbot suit was quivering very slightly. Two cats were sitting on top of his chest, heads tilting back and forth, ear-tabs flicking, eyes on the suit, as if listening to something inside.
The vision shifted to the Grabber where two people were dangling three meters off the ground. One was singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” The other was crying softly and calling for his mama. Both were signs of prolonged exposure to WIMP AntiGrav tech. It was too late to get anything useful from them.
The vision shifted again, this time to the crack. One person remained on the edge, holding a rope that indicated a lot of tension and movement. The other person was probably down in the crack, checking on the ones Jolene had shot. I needed to stop the invaders, just stop them, not kill them. I needed intel and info. And . . . I needed to protect the office. And the SunStar. And Mateo, whether I trusted him now or not. And I needed to do something about the Puffers. If Mateo had been able to stop them inside his suit, he’d already be back in action.
There was no way I’d be able to do all that.
No matter what I did next, my life as I knew it for the last few years was probably over. If I killed Jagger, I’d have to run again. If I left any Angels alive, I’d have to run again. And if I used my best weapons to stop and kill them, the satellites might register the energies and I’d have to blow up the scrapyard and still have to run again. Which sucked.
My vision shifted. I was seeing my own face, my funky bright reddish-gold irises looking into my own eyes. Tuffs’ eyes. My brain reeled. I closed my eyes and held very, very still to fight off the vertigo, now seeing my closed eyes through the cat’s. Tuffs nose-butted me.
“What?” I asked her.
Mentally, she showed me a water bowl. Showed me a food bowl full of scraps and kibble. Showed me a bowl of goat milk. And a vision of the dead man being fed on by a dozen cats, Rikerd Cotter, number three in the Angels, dead. And a woman farther out, also being eaten. The two dead bodies at the back airlock. And then the dead bodies in the entrance drive. Two cats were feeding on one of them. In the distance, the cats smelled coy-wolves, the feral half-breed species patiently waiting for the humans to leave so they could get to the dead. Or attack the cats. Or both.
Lastly there was a vision of a cat, sitting inside the Mammoth, up on the dash, staring out at the feeding cats and dead humans.
“Is that one of yours?” I asked.
Cat of ours, the concept came back. ‘Cat’ was a thought that conveyed a sneaky/savvy/smart fighter, a female warrior cat. The thought ‘ours’ contained a series of relationship parameters, successful military maneuvers that resulted in dead rats brought to the pride for protein, and bloodlines that I couldn’t follow, except to gather that the cat was probably Tuffs’ great-great-great granddaughter. And Tuffs was proud of her.
“She got the driver to let her in,” I guessed.
Tuffs made a satisfied sound that was sort of like, “Hhhhah,”
“She knows what they’re saying. What they’re planning.”
“Hhhhah mmm.”
“And . . . without me, you don’t get water and food and goat milk. And we make a good team.”
“Hhhhah mmm.”
“So, you’re telling me to keep fighting and we’ll go on as before. But I have to tell you, Tuffs, we might not be able to do that.”
Tuffs sent me a vision of the Mammoth Tac-V full of cat food, cats, Mateo, and me, driving off into the distance.
I laughed. It was such a strange sound I hardly recognized it. I couldn’t really say when I had last laughed freely.
“Okay. I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, the unfamiliar grin on my face.
“You do know that talking to yourself is a sure sign of insanity, dontcha,” Jolene said.
“Yeah. I do. I need my arm back.”
“How long will it take you to heal the damage and be able to use it again?” Jolene asked.
“It’ll be a while. I’ll raid a medical supplies locker for bandages and a sling.”
“Really? That’s your plan?”