4-10: Cargo Hold

I blasted right through the turbulence from the jet engines.

"You know you could come up from below and avoid the wash,” CORVAC said.

"Quiet in the peanut gallery," I said. "I have work to do."

"Do not mind me mistress," he said.

"I never did before," I said. "Why would I start now?"

I flew up under the cargo hold, and it appeared that my furry companions who’d been waiting for me the last time around had grown complacent. At least the door had been closed so they couldn’t fire at me.

I frowned. Wondered what the hell they were doing in there. Probably freezing their asses off.

Though with that door closed they wouldn’t need special breathing tech or anything. They’d gotten ahold of weapons somehow, but something told me rebreathers for cats would be difficult to come up with so…

"Of course," I said.

"What is that mistress?" CORVAC asked.

"They didn't have to worry about depressurizing the flight when they opened that cargo door because they were close enough to the ground that we were still at one atmosphere of pressure,” I said.

"Naturally," CORVAC said.

“That means I'm about to set off a hell of a lot of alarm bells."

"I assume whatever you are about to do is precipitous?" he asked.

"You may presume away," I said.

“Do be careful mistress," CORVAC said.

"Why CORVAC," I said. "That sounded like you almost care about the people on this flight."

"I care about the public perception if you down a flight that is loaded with civilians," he said. "The blowback from something like that would be terrible."

I rolled my eyes. Leave it to CORVAC to come at a problem from pure numbers point of view rather than looking at it with heart. Not that I should be surprised that he wasn’t coming at it from a position of having a heart since he quite literally didn’t have a heart.

I got out my wrist blaster and set it to cutting mode. Fired a beam at the cargo door and prayed that the beam wasn't powerful enough to go through the door and into a critical system.

We were in a situation where I simply hadn't had enough time to plan for everything. And knowing all of the ins and outs of a giant intercontinental jetliner like this one wasn't something I had memorized.

I slammed my fist into the door and pulled. With a creak of metal the thing broke apart and fell open. There was an almost immediate reaction from the jet above. It seemed to shudder and shake and I had to hold on for dear life as the thing went into a dive as the pilots scrambled to get down to an altitude where they wouldn’t need masks to breathe with the hull integrity compromised.

I imagined what it must feel like for all the people on that flight. There'd been a time, long ago, when I'd been terrified of flying. Back then, back before I’d developed the antigravity technology that allowed me to flip a middle finger to my acrophobia, I'd been terrified of every little bump that came along with commercial flying. 

Which hadn’t been a particularly good for my anxiety considering there were lots of strange inexplicable bumps on commercial flights.

Also? That theatrical method of getting into the cargo hatch was enough to notify my quarry that I was back. Damn.

Blasts sizzled through the air around me and landed on the other end of the cargo hold. I ducked out of the way. Not that it mattered considering I was fully shielded, but I'd rather not take a direct hit if I could avoid it.

“Do you idiots have any idea what you’re doing?” I shouted. “You could hit something important on this thing and send it crashing to the ground! Is that really what you want?”

“For the glory of the collective!” one of the cats screeched.

I disengaged from the door and matched speed with the bottom of the jet. One of the nice things about being able to fly was I didn’t have to hang onto that door where they could easily fire at me. I wasn’t going to make it any easier on them than I had to.

Also, what that little furry fucker had just yelled made things suddenly make a lot more sense.

“Fuck!”

“What appears to be the problem, mistress?” CORVAC asked.

“Those fuckers are running a hive mind,” I said. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to take out a hive mind?”

“I can imagine it would be about as difficult as trying to take out a computer who has backups of his consciousness at multiple remote locations,” CORVAC said.

“Yeah. Something like that,” I replied. “The point is if these things are attached to a queen somewhere that means this just got a hell of a lot more difficult.”

“It could be that they were simply using a rallying cry from their world rather than talking about a true hive mind, mistress,” CORVAC said.

“Yeah, and I could be the next great hero of Starlight City,” I replied.

Still, there was nothing for it. I needed to stop these worms from spreading beyond Starlight City, and that meant I had to get back in there and take the fight to these cats.

The only problem with that plan was the cats looked like they were getting ready to take the fight to me. A couple of fluffy somethings appeared on the other side of the cargo door and then they did a little crawling thing along the bottom of the plane which looked freaky.

“Damn,” I said. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

“It does not look much different from a feline climbing a tree,” CORVAC said.

“Yeah, but when a cat is climbing a tree they’re not dealing with winds going past at a few hundred miles per hour,” I said. “These cats shouldn’t be able to do that.”

I thought about the fluffy fucker that’d managed to get through the carbon fiber weave on my suit. These cats looked a little bigger than your typical house cat.

There was definitely something off about these things. Something I didn’t care for. I had a sinking feeling that the radiation from that world combined with something in our atmosphere was to blame.

Not that I had time for academic mysteries like that.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m catching one of those things and we’re going to figure out where their queen is.”

If these alien motherfuckers wanted to tangle with Night Terror then I was going to take these assholes to the dance. I flew at them.

“Mistress?” CORVAC asked.

“What?” I growled.

“I cannot help but notice that you have not pulled out your wrist blaster to fire on the possessed cats that are attempting to kill you,” he said.

I looked down at the landscape screaming past below. At this height it didn’t look like it was going by all that fast, but I knew that was a deceptive illusion because of how high we were.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “If I fire at them I risk damaging the plane!”

I got close enough that one of the cats launched itself at me. Unfortunately either its aim was off or it didn’t have much practice launching itself through the air when it was on the underbelly of a jet.

The practical upshot is the cat failed to take into account that the jet was moving through the air at hundreds of miles per hour. I had antigrav tech on my suit that allowed me to travel even faster than the jet and shielding technology that allowed me to breathe and not get my ass kicked by the wind kicked up by flying at these speeds.

The cat had none of those things going for it, and so the moment it let go it went flying back. I fired an anti-Newtonian bubble at the thing and caught it before it could fall too far, but that wasn’t going to help it considering the cat would probably die of anoxia if the eventual fall didn’t kill it when that bubble wore off.

“CORVAC,” I said.

“Yes mistress.”

“I don’t want that cat landing on the countryside below and potentially spreading the alien worm to cats in the flyover. Could you send more of your drones up here to gather that one and any others I manage to catch?”

“Are you certain that is the only reason why you are having me gather those cats?” CORVAC asked. “I imagine a fall from this altitude would be enough to neutralize the worm in the cat.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. That damned computer always had a way of cutting to the source of whatever I was trying to do.

Also? Squeezing my eyes shut was a terrible idea. No sooner had I done it than something slammed into me with enough force that it would’ve hurt if I didn’t have my shields up.

Then again that was the story of my career. One of the reasons why I’d invented technology that told the laws of physics to take a hike was that those laws did their best to kill me so very often.

I opened my eyes. Reached down and plucked the cat off of me. I was surprised these fuckers were able to operate this long considering the lack of oxygen this high. Maybe something about the alien symbiont relationship gave them the power to hold their breath in addition to all the other wonderful new superfeline abilities they were exhibiting.

“Fine,” I said, dropping the cat and firing an anti-Newtonian bubble so it didn’t splat on the ground. “You’ve got me.”

“You are trying to save the cats, correct?”

“Yes I’m trying to save the cats,” I said. “Now would you get those drones up here and…”

Another cat launched itself at me. I wasn’t particularly worried at this point. They were punching above their weight, but that still didn’t hold a candle to the kind of power I was putting out. This was an unfair fight even if there were many of them and one of me.

Only before the thing could latch onto me or go tumbling through the air a drone appeared and grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck. All the fight went out of the thing and it hung limp in the drone’s metallic arm.

“Good job CORVAC,” I said. “Use those cat instincts against these fuckers.”

“That is the idea mistress,” he said.

More drones from CORVAC’s secret science project swarmed around us and started plucking cats off of the plane. I glanced at my readouts and saw exactly why it was the things were able to breathe. We’d reached breathable atmosphere. I’d been so preoccupied with fighting off or saving the cats coming at me that I hadn’t noticed.

It also looked like Starlight City was ahead of us rather than behind us. Huh. I guess those assholes in the cockpit finally decided they were going to listen to me. They’d probably blame me for the depressurization too, and not their stupid asses for not listening to me in the first place.

“Looks like we’re heading back to the city,” I said. “Plenty of time to round up the rest of these feline fuckers and figure out which one of them I want to question first.”

“Mistress,” CORVAC said, his voice sharp.

“What?” I said, suddenly on alert but not seeing any obvious danger.

“There is something on the wing!”