Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,46
comms went live, working now that we were suit to suit.
“How many Puffers are left in-field?” he asked.
“Jolene and the cats are still tracking them,” I said. Mateo’s silence went tight with tension. “Yeah. I met Jolene, Captain. We had a nice conversation.”
“I was protecting my ship.”
Mateo’s voice cut like a whip. This wasn’t the easy-going, brain-damaged employee I knew, but likely the real Mateo, the one who had evolved back to himself thanks to the Berger-chip plug-ins I had purchased for him. The Mateo I was meeting for the first time. The Mateo who was technically my thrall, thanks to the transition he underwent when I had to pull him out of his warbot suit early on in our relationship. I had to wonder how long he’d been faking the brain damage. I had to wonder if he’d somehow managed to wean himself off Devil Milk addiction.
I had to wonder if I had just discovered a way around the worst parts of the transition—Berger-chips. The annoying little chatterboxes provided additional memory and sped up the brain’s ability to make connections, which the brain lost during nanobot transition. Had they helped restore Mateo’s independence?
“I’m not arguing,” I said peaceably. “You have your duty and your oaths. We have”—I checked my Hand-Held—“seventeen minutes and change before the MS Angels attack again. I believe they have Evelyn Raymond, your second in command, somewhere, and she gave up the location of the ship.”
“She would nev—” He stopped as the implications sank in. Evelyn, a prisoner. Abused. For who knew how many years.
“We have two healthy rescuers and one injured invader, exfiltrating from the back of the property, where they ascertained the ship was in the mine crack. They are not aware of the rest of the ship on the surface under the ghillie tech. They’re moving slow and, in their current position, are unable to communicate with their compatriots at the front because of WIMP leakage. I want to interrogate one. If I succeed in taking care of the Puffers, can you make the invaders talk?”
“We’ve never tested your altered blood chemistries on Puffers. You can’t—”
“It’s too late for hiding what I am. I—”
The vision of Clarisse intruded, the way she moved, so different from humans.
So much like me.
The way the others wanted to touch her constantly.
The way One-Eyed Jack let her be in charge.
I looked out over the junkyard. Dread, like a torrent of ice water engulfed me.
“Jolene,” I whispered. “Are there any records of Clarisse Warhammer, or any of her aliases, surviving an attack by modified Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius ants?”
Like I had . . .
“Shining, you don’t think—?” Mateo stopped as he accessed his own memory and intel plug-ins.
I removed my left ballistic armor cuisse—a blood-soaked thigh-piece—and rolled it into a column. I stuck the cuisse into the torn space on the ankle of Mateo’s warbot suit.
“Come and get me, you little buggers.”
“There are three recorded cases of humans surviving a swarm of Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius ants,” Jolene said, sounding less snippy. “Sherman Griffith. Shining Smith. Catherine Warren, AKA Clarisse Warhammer.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
“Oh. Honey,” Jolene said gently. “You was swarmed. That hadda hurt something awful. For a long, long time.”
I blinked against unanticipated tears. No one had shown me kindness about the ants before. Pops, his body jerking and shaking with the Parkinson’s, had just sat at the end of my bed, as he would have for any fallen OMW, and watched me suffer. He’d sat there for three days while I screamed and the fever raged. When I survived, against all odds, he’d patted my foot, the covers between his hand and me, and said, “Good work. I’m proud of you,” and left my hospital cubicle.
I hadn’t started secreting nanos right away.
I had gone back into the battlefield a week later, because we were up against a wall and I was small and wiry and our enemies never even noticed me because I was a scrawny twelve-year-old child and was no apparent threat. For all those reasons, the OMW and my own father had let me go and fight. Pops had let me crawl into a Mama-Bot to try and disable it. I’d been cut in a battle with Puffers. Only much later had I begun to secrete the mutated bio-mech-nanos. Bloody hell.
No one had known back then what surviving a bicolor attack might mean. I figured that no one knew today, except for three of us. And with my mutated nanos, I was probably a singularity,