Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,44
There were three now, two standing and one man bleeding from both legs, which had been mangled. His armor suit’s automatic pneumatic anti-shock programming had initiated, and both legs had received competent field dressings and tourniquets. That had kept him alive, so far. The cats crept closer and I heard him talking through their ears.
“It’s all there,” he whispered as the uninjured man, clearly the leader, offered him a squeeze bag of fluid. He drank and sighed. “Devil Milk. Thanks.”
“You can hate me when we cut you off and you go into withdrawal,” the leader said.
“What’s down there?” the woman demanded.
“Everything. Just like Evelyn said. Look at my cam. Every damn thing. Every . . .” His voice trailed off. He was unconscious.
The woman tapped things on the injured man’s chest and they both stared at what I assumed was a vest cam.
“Holy damn. I didn’t believe it,” she said.
“You’ll owe Clarisse an apology.”
“That bitch can stuff an apology up her ass. I’ll rig a sling. We need to get away from the crack so we can communicate with the team.”
I’d been right. Whatever was inside the crack had cut off transmissions. That might explain why no one had come looking into the crack until now.
“Jolene,” I said pulling away from Tuffs. “Did emissions from the damaged ship in the crack prevent mayday transmissions from getting through?”
“Affirmative.”
“And you didn’t think that was an important bit of intel for me to know?”
“Well, I never,” Jolene said, insulted Southern ire in her tone. “You told me how to answer. Your exact words were”—my own voice came over the deck speakers—“Stop. Request minimal information in response to questions.”
I cursed at myself and the snippy AI and when I stopped cussing, Jolene was silent. Was I supposed to apologize to an AI? She was Southern, so I figured yes. I snapped the armor sleeve on over the plaz-skin and Inviso-Dermis. I felt no pain at all, which was probably a bad thing. I flexed my fingers. No pain. I figured that wouldn’t last long, so I better apologize and then fight while I could.
“I’m sorry, Jolene. Please tell me about the ship transmissions. And tell me how many people were aboard the SunStar when it went down. And was one of them named Evelyn?”
“USSS SunStar and the USSS MorningStar were in a near-earth orbit battle with the PRC and the Russians. It was two nations against us at the time, thanks to a temporary alliance between the Ruskies and the Perkers. I took a helluva lotta damage and ended up with a dozen crawlers inside me,” she said, proving again that AIs didn’t hold grudges. “The crew fought ’em but things wasn’t going real well. Then the Bugs showed up.”
Jolene hesitated, oddly for an AI, and her voice lost some of its Southern twang as she began speaking again.
“The WIMP massive-particle propulsion accelerator had been hit, so we dropped into the upper atmosphere to get away and to give the crew time to launch evac pods. We were incapable of providing future assistance to the MorningStar. The crew got away. The CO stayed behind and, together, we were able to use the forward WIMP engines to maneuver us away from populated areas.
“My hull began to break apart during reentry, at a damaged section halfway between the forward and stern WIMP engines. The rear half hit the existing mine crack and caved in the mine, creating a much larger crack and damaging the WIMP engine. Massive particles have been leaking ever since.”
I dredged though what I knew of WIMPs, which wasn’t much, so I tapped my Berger-chip and let it give me the information. My chip dumped a version of History of Physics 101 into my brain.
WIMPs are weakly interactive massive dark energy particles, discovered in 2027 by physicists Ladasha Carter and Alexei Romanov. Initially the particles interacted weakly, meaning that they passed through the container walls. In the course of two months, Carter and Romanov discovered that WIMPs were far less weakly interacting in the presence of ionized neodymium, a rare earth element. A matrix of neodymium atoms in a crystal were able to contain WIMP particles, which then could pass through a quantum vacuum and back, instantaneously, carrying anti-WIMP particles and energy with them. The WIMP, the neodymium, and the vacuum, created truly unlimited energy in a system that was easy to create and totally stable. The physicists and their engineers vanished into the US military complex and, by mid-2028, a top-secret particle-based