Эндрю Маккей: Star Cat: War Mage

Maar chuckled as he watched Crain exit the room, “Fair enough. Oh, and by the way, can you send some lackey down here to clear this corpse away before it stinks the room up?”

“You’re a madman,” Crain slammed the door behind him.

Kaoz watched each of the six board members climb into the back of their waiting limousines. He held his mouthpiece in his fingertips and watched the first two cars drive off.

“This is Kaoz. Do you read me?”

“I read you,” Oxade’s voice came through Kaoz’s earpiece, “Have they left yet?”

“Yes, they’re leaving R&D, now.”

“Good. How did it go?”

“All good. We got a unanimous decision to go and blast Opera Beta into the next multiverse…”

“Yes! That’s amaziant, ” Oxade punched the air as he made his way into the animal compound. He clutched the grip on his rifle and held out his glove to the panel on the wall.

“Signatures all down?”

“You know it,” Kaoz’s voice beamed into his head.

“How did he get them to agree?”

The door to the animal compound slid open. The illuminated control hub loomed in the middle of the room, “I guess you could say it was his persuasive personality.”

“Ha. He’s got bundles of persuasion, that guy.”

“Look, don’t play around,” Kaoz continued. “Maar wants the team assembled within the hour. Some new recruit is joining you. You’re leaving one week ahead of schedule.”

“Good. Let’s get this show on the road,” Oxade reached the central control deck. He made eyes at a tall woman in a lab coat. She pressed her forearm against a plate glass surface turned to Oxade. A bizarre-looking telescopic monocle took place of her right eye. It somehow complemented her bright purple lipstick.

“Nutrene, where are the subjects?”

“Just loading the capture data into the bank. They’ll be here any moment now,” she looked up at the panel and observed the green light loading across the screen.

“How much damage did the protesters cause?”

“They nearly got everything. If it hadn’t have been for the intervention, they’d know everything.”

Oxade glanced at the technicians at their computers. They turned away and continued working, hoping to avoid contact.

“Yeah, that’s right, you lackeys. Keep crunching those numbers.”

SCREECH! WAIL! GRUNT!

A dozen chimpanzees slammed against their cages in the right-hand corner of the compound. Oxade did his best to block out the noise, “Those damn monkeys, man. I swear to God, I dunno why those activists didn’t just shoot them all.”

“Why don’t you put a bullet in the back of their heads?”

The chimpanzees hopped around, snarling and wailing at Oxade as he made his way past their cages.

“Hold on, good buddy,” Oxade turned to them and clanged the butt of his shot-gun along the cage bars, further antagonizing the animals, “Hey! You vicious turd bags. Shut the hell up.”

Kaoz’s chuckles flew through the earpiece, having heard his colleague’s malicious taunting.

Oxade arrived at the second of three doors, “Byford?”

“Don’t call me by my surname. You’re not the boss of me.”

“Not true. I’m your new captain, sweetheart.”

“Really? We’re on ?”

“Yup. Now, let’s get these little critters returned to their cages.”

Nutrene’s monocle twisted at the console as she hit the green button. The wall by the computers slid into the ground, startling the staff at their workstations.

“Right, good people. Keep back. Let the vehicles in, please.”

The wall opened out into the delivery area of the parking lot. Two forklift trucks rolled in on their conveyors. Each carried a metal cage rammed to the brim with captured felines.

Oxade approached the second bay and pulled the door across its sliders, “Offload them here.”

The trucks stopped by the main console and lowered their forks to the ground.

SCHWUMP.

“No playing around,” Nutrene lifted her left forearm and extended her index finger on her right. The tip of her digit lit up, “Head count, please.”

The driver of the first truck hopped out and kicked the cage off the metal grid, “Thirteen in this one, and I think twenty or so distributed in the others.”

“Be careful with them,” Nutrene counted the cats. She scored the numbers off on her forearm with her fingertip, “So, that’s eight… nine… ten —” she arrived at the tenth cat. An angry-looking, white Japanese bobtail. They caught each other’s gaze.

Oxade moved next to Nutrene and nudged her on the shoulder, “Everything okay?”

“Yes, it’s just…” Nutrene couldn’t tear her eye away from the ball of white fluff, “That’s Suzie Q-Two. One of the finalists in the Star Cat Project.”

“So?”

“I didn’t realize USARIC was keeping her here. She should have been returned to her owner after it was all over.”

“Who cares? Let’s get the ugly balls of fluff back in their cages.”

Nutrene looked at the driver with suspicion, “Did you make physical contact with any of these felines?”

“No,” the driver nodded at Oxade, “When he caught ‘em, we just bundled them up.”

A dozen lab coated USARIC officials pulled the cages from the first truck and moved them to the second bay.

“Damn it,” Nutrene scanned the cages on the second forklift, “I’m only seeing a couple dozen here. Where are the rest?”

“We couldn’t find them,” Oxade said. “We had ten units out scouring Port D’Souza. This is all we could find—”

“—All you could find? There’s at least thirty unaccounted for.”

Nutrene’s monocle focused on the cats in the second set of cages. Her Heads Up Display scanned each of their faces. The bottom-left corner of her lens displayed the total – 48 .

“So, forty-eight there, and twenty-two in the first set,” she recorded the number on her forearm with her lit-up digit, “That’s exactly thirty missing subjects.”

“They’re out in the wild,” Oxade said. “They’ll never survive on their own. If they don’t starve, the freeway will take care of them.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Nutrene caught the tardy pace of the workers removing the cages to the second compound, “Hey, get moving. I want them bundled up and stored. Faster .”

She returned to the console and pressed her forearm to the glass panel, “These aren’t your ordinary, everyday subjects. We need those missing thirty accounted for, dead or alive. Preferably dead .”

“Why, what’s wrong with them?”

Nutrene closed her eyes and ignored the question outright. The panel absorbed the ink from her forearm and fed it onto the screen, “We’re leaving in a week’s time.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“We need to find the escapees and bring them back.”

“Why? What’s wrong with them?”

An elderly man named Glenn Logan enjoyed a bottle of Rollneck Kojak beer on the porch of his bungalow. He’d been drinking for a few hours by now. The effects of the alcohol kicked in a while ago.

The full moon hung in the air along with the stench of hops from his umpteenth bottle of beer.

There weren’t many cars at this time of night. The occasional lorry passed by. On the rare occasion an Individimedia GPS failed to work, he’d have lost drivers knock on his door asking for directions to Houston. Or the nearest gas station.