I’m not— #10
The snow only came to my lower legs and there were no drifts. The storm had literally blown itself out on top of us at the mine, leaving the rest of the world with no wind, no ice, only soft pretty snowflakes. Mother Nature was a bitch.
Of course I was pissed at this entire exercise, so maybe that was an internal assumption based on grouchiness.
I had one job for this event. I was supposed to find the biggest earthmover I could and get the sucker going.
Then start ramming everything on site, making a big disturbance, so the others could attack with pinpoint accuracy and hopefully little bloodshed and death on our parts.
I was the bait and the target. My bloodshed was assured and my death likely.
Spy leaped to my shoulder from who knew where.
I flinched. “You nearly got batted into the snow,” I muttered.
She crawled into my armor’s helmet slot, curled around my neck, and nudged my ear, which was really weird. Weirder, she started purring.
“Stop that,” I said.
She didn’t. She mouthed my ear lobe, which was free of comms equipment, because comms were useless. It hit me at that moment. The enemy had comms. We didn’t. Point to them. We knew they were there, and they didn’t know about us. Point to us. But if I could stop their comms . . .
“Hey, Spy. You want to destroy their comms and give us an advantage?” I whispered.
Spy coughed and said, “Meep-huun,” which was cat for, “give me more information.”
I didn’t want to say this part aloud, just in case, so, as I trudged through the snow with a cat on my shoulders, I thought at her, Carry a small .
. . I stopped that thought. I didn’t know how to describe it so I settled on a mental image, and the mental words, “. . . thing . . . into the middle of the Dark Rider’s camp, find the comms shed or building, and stay there until I call you.
Then come back, close to me. I tried to make all that a mental picture, but I sucked at cat-talk.
“Mrow. Siss haah,” she said aloud. We are the dangerous invaders.
“Yes. And you get to chow down on anyone you kill until it’s time to leave,” I said aloud.
Which was gross, but in this world, protein was protein.
There were reports of humans eating their own dead during the years of starvation after the war.
And really, if cats wanted to eat the enemy, I wasn’t one to argue.
“Kkkkk.” That one I knew by heart. Protein of dead humans.
“Hhhhah mmm,” she added. Cat for Yes, this is good. We had a bargain.
I stopped in the snow and pulled the small tin from a Velcroed pocket, opened it, and removed a second small shard.
I let her sniff it, and her entire snout wrinkled up in distaste.
It must really stink, since she routinely hunted, killed, and ate toxic rats.
I placed it in her harness pouch. “If you decide to leave it somewhere, you’ll need help to open the pouch,” I said.
Her old mate, Maul, wasn’t with her, since his injury, so I didn’t know how she would handle that, but Spy, more so than any cat I knew, was ingenious with physical tech. She would manage.
She leaped from my shoulder and bounded through the snow.
Two other cats followed, both wearing harnesses.
Pounce and Wrench were like her lieutenants.
The three were wearing harnesses which meant they would be identified as enemies and shot if they were seen; they disappeared into the light snowfall, into a war zone currently occupied by armed drunk humans playing in snow forts like kids.
Target practice. The cats would be target practice. I was playing with their lives, putting them at risk of being shot. It was also the best tactical move I could make. I hoped.
I sped up and followed an elusive form in the dark—Enrico, staying just ahead, making sure I was safe. If I got him killed, Old Man Marconi would kill me. The biker-chick part of my soul figured that was a fair trade.
* * *
I leaned against a tree, breathing heavily; I was winded, my quads and calves were cramping.
I had sealed my helmet closed and put on speed when we got close to the repurposed waterpark, without accessing battery power, which would have made the run easy, but I needed the power for later, when my life and the lives of my people were on the line.
I reached for Spy, and when the images hit, they sent my brain into a disoriented, green-black-gray tinted spin.
I saw men playing in a field which was down in a rock-lined, flatbottomed, concrete hole, one that had probably once been the upper pool for water, back when the world had rain and rivers and water to spare for nonessentials.
Overlapping it and far clearer, another image showed me a building where lights poured through the windows onto the snow.
Accompanying it was a reek of smells: meat and sex and misery and liquor.
This was the place the commanders used, and where women were prisoners, doing duty in whatever way the men wanted, whether the women wanted it or not.
I was inside Spy’s mind, the cat knowing what I really wanted despite the job of carrying the shard. From inside came a voice saying, “I’ll check it Sarge. Likely just ice on the EntNu equipment.”
Like ice would stop EntNu when nothing else did, not space or time or matter.
The door opened and the images in my brain went haywire, growing brighter, showing a ceiling and walls, chairs and desks.
Spy had gone inside, slinking around unpainted wood walls in the shadows.
I chuckled silently. Spy was carrying the shard instead of dropping it somewhere, making sure it wasn’t lost. Spy knew the importance of resources.
Too many couldn’t be replaced. Of course, if she was caught or shot, I’d lose both the shard and my friend.
I didn’t have many friends. I had more shards. Sodding hell. Damn cat, putting yourself in danger.
Dark Riders had long been part of the human trafficking for slaves, both for work and for sex. Now I had their commanders’ playroom in my sights. Yeah. She knew what I really wanted, and with the shard on her, she was close enough to interfere with the DR’s comms.
I needed to get close enough to kill the men and set the women free.
Spy knew that. I saw the entire room in a single sweep, smelled the stink of small mice, humans and food and sex.
It was ugly. But the floor plan was clear as day.
The door opened again, and Spy raced through.
Someone shouted, but Spy buried herself in fifteen centimeters of snow next to the building and burrowed her way into the darkness.
Behind her a man said, “Biggest fucking rat I ever saw!”
Indignation quivered between us and I laughed softly. I didn’t share my amusement. Spy’s claws were not to be taken lightly.
Back on top of the snow, Spy showed me a hut with convenient signage telling me to use caution, that delicate electronics were inside.
Behind it was a much larger building, this one made of what looked like repurposed, multicolored aluminum siding on steel supports.
Nothing on the exterior matched, and it looked as if it had been made to fit by an illiterate pre-Berger chip human with a rivet gun and a manual metal cutter.
Inside this hut was the earth moving equipment I needed to create a distraction, attract attention, and maybe take down some enemies.
I set my armor suit for enviro camo and speed assistance. If anyone had time to focus on me, I’d appear to be shifting pools of darkness and pale light on snow. I raced through shadows and crouched by two big barn-type doors.
The building with the earth moving equipment was unlocked, unguarded, and I slid inside, into the dark.
The smells of equipment and machine fluids and fuel made it through my helmet filters.
Multiple kinds of earth moving equipment were parked with military neatness.
The building and everything in it were absolutely perfect.
If I could take the storage building, the tools that lined its walls, the dozers and movers and front-end loaders and baskets and boxes and all the other goodies with me, the junkyard scrapyard part of me would be in heaven.
Instead, I’d use what I needed and probably have to blow up the rest of the toys.
If I ever said “fuck,” I’d say it over the destruction of all this good stuff.
I was drawn to the biggest machine, a prewar model Caterpillar already affixed with a pusher—a reinforced dozer blade for moving rock.
The mustard-painted Cat wasn’t new, but it looked as if it had been fully restored and was well maintained, with only a few drops of hydraulic fluid on the concrete beneath it.
My Berger chip began to tell me all about it and I let the stupid thing talk as I climbed up to the silk-plaz-enclosed operator’s cage.
“The Caterpillar D9T is a high-powered bulldozer with an operating weight of approximately 47,400 kilos unencumbered,” which meant with no blade attached, “and 436 horsepower. It is designed for demanding earthmoving tasks in construction, mining—”
I tapped off the annoying voice in my head as I climbed inside the cage and studied the set up. Too bad stupid Bergers worked when no other electronic comms did. But then, they were hardwired into our brains so there was that.
The dozer had no biomarker starter, only a key slot, sadly empty.
Illustrations showing what lever, meter, and gear did what was typical of Cats.
Straightforward. The cage had armored silk-plaz windows.
They couldn’t stand up to massive weapons or stop a laser, but were suitable for rockfalls and work accidents, which meant they might resist small arms fire.
Wow! Dang thing came with a heater. I sat down. The seat wasn’t even sprung and had a new seat cover on it. Better than I had hoped. In fact, pure heaven to a chick like me.