Carol looks up from her battery, scrutinizes me. “Is your DAT okay?”
I sit. I nudge her left hand with my nose. She will remember the yes/no signals.
“Shit,” she whispers. “What happened?” She rests a hand on my neck. “I don’t expect you to answer that. Is the plan still go?”
I nuzzle my nose into her right palm. I am panting hard. It is surprisingly difficult being limited in this way.
“The target’s in the steam shafts?”
Right palm for yes. I made for the rendezvous as soon as the rat entered the emergency steam ventilation shafts as planned. Even if the DAT was still working, I am not sure I would tell her about the way I crashed and banged against the HVAC pipes, barking and snarling, until the rat ran for the steam vents.
“Okay,” Carol says. She clamps a wire inside the wall panel she was working on and checks her radio for the time. “If your model is right, we have about two and a half minutes for me to get to the vent controls. Show me, first, what your job is, so I know you can work the switch. Here, it’s right here.”
I target the jury-rigged connector with my paw. There is a hum from the battery that is likely imperceptible to Carol.
“Good. Okay, off again.”
I hit the switch again and the thing goes quiet.
“Okay. When you give the… shit. Shit, how will you give the signal if we don’t have DAT?”
My tail wags with exasperation. She’s thinking as though I had the body of a machine and not a dog, as if I only responded to one stimulus. I stare at her as seconds tick down, and she still does not think of the obvious.
I am going to have to be the one to say it.
I bark. Once, sharply.
Carol laughs. “Of course,” she says. “Good dog.” She turns and sprints down the tunnel toward the controls.
I move toward the strategic bend in the steam shaft that is our signal threshold and wait.
I am alone. Drones tick and tap and whir in the near distance.
Behind me where the trap is laid, the panel sits open. The target must leave the steam shaft, where I forced it earlier, and reenter either the corridor or the HVAC system in order to get to the next online reactor. It must move through off-line Reactor D in order to do this, but there are several points from which it can access this reactor from the system of steam shafts. Carol will take care of that. Once we herd the target into the correct shaft, the one where our trap is laid, I will be the one to hit the trigger.
Once it is caught, Carol thinks she will be able to open the shaft where the target is trapped and remove the rat. Then what? Will she carry it to the surface? What if it bites her as it bit me?
And when Homeland Security gets hold of it? What then? The connection between EI hunted and EI hunter, wanted or not, will bring a critical eye on me. More so if the rat speaks. From my limited experience with my target, it seems quite… verbose.
So far it seems no human has wondered if dogs keep secrets. It is vitally important that they continue not to think about that.
Carol is wrong. The original objective should be upheld.
Down the tunnel, muffled by the wall paneling and the MFA’s deep hum but still distinct, comes the arrhythmic rattle of claws against metal.
Adrenaline punches through my body. I hesitate, then bark. I bark for Carol. Then I turn, still barking, and scramble to my post by the battery and the door to the off-line reactor.
I hope she can hear me.
A distant hiss builds. I no longer need to worry; the plan proceeds. Carol is charging selected steam shafts, converting the plant’s stored power back into heat and moisture and using these to herd our target toward the trap. But the trap must not be set too soon, because the same hum that I heard from the battery will be audible to the target’s hypersensitive ears as well. It will be too cautious to walk right into that.
I smell it coming. The murky, dusty smell of rodent. Pheromonal anxiety. It moves in little rushes: scurry, scurry, stop. Scurry, stop. It pauses for a long while.
It’s afraid.
A cleaning drone trundles past, its forward bristle-barrel wheel gnawing at the grate floors. I barely notice it, focused as I am. It turns in a slow U-circuit and goes back over its original path. When it reaches where I am, it turns ninety degrees and heads straight toward me.
This I notice. I move out of its way. It drives slowly into the wall, turns, makes another ninety-degree turn. It follows me.
In the steam shaft, the rat still hasn’t moved.
At the end junction of the hallway, two more bristle-barreled cleaning drones turn this way.
Something zzzzzts, and there is a sharp, sudden pain in the back of my skull. I yelp and dance away as a sparrow-sized messenger drone clatters to the floor.
The cleaning drone lumbers forward. Behind me there is a growing, chattering chorus of metallic feet.
I dart out of the cleaning drone’s way, return to the battery as soon as it’s safely past. My ears strain for rat-nails on metal. I hear one quiet scritch that is my target moving inside the wall, nearly buried by the growing clatter of the army of feet that is—
Zzzt and another stab, this time in my ribs and much heavier. I back sideways, in a circle, my mouth open and panting. When I turn, I see what is coming for me, and I wish I had not confirmed visually what my ears had already told me. Their movement is the thing that unnerves me the most. I hate the way they move.
Tink-tink-tink go my target’s feet, only steps away from the trap’s range.
My skin burns and twitches. I am making a low, slavering noise that would be a growl if I wasn’t panting so hard from anxiety. Another flying drone makes a pass at me, but I duck. The hallway in my poor peripheral vision is black and gray and blurred with crawling movement. I skitter away from the returning cleaning drone. Something many-legged pounces on my shoulder. I shake it off. Saliva ropes away from my mouth and onto a flat, spider-legged drone that I dig at to kick away from me.
Tink-tink-tink
I leap for the battery and press the switch. From inside the steam vent a warbling, screeching squeal punctures the ambient rustling of drone-noise.
“Will it hurt it?” Carol asked when we were making this plan.
It will be uncomfortable, I told her, but not permanently harmed.
The powerful magnet Carol built is acting on the titanium that coats the EI elements integrated into the rat’s brain. Because the rat is low, close to the shaft and the trap’s magnetized band, it cannot escape the magnet’s pull. I myself can feel the magnet, even though I am a safe distance away. It’s a painful tickle in the center of my skull, similar to the feeling of a sneeze. I shake my head against the feeling as an articulated drone leaps onto my withers. I buck it off and hurry into the abandoned reactor.
The screeching inside the shaft continues. A wobble to the sound adds urgency. It is like the rat itself is being dragged through an aperture too small for its body, and I wonder if we miscalculated the appropriate power ranges of the magnets for this application.
In a moment it won’t matter.
I have outpaced the drones into the cold reactor’s high, curved room. It is like being inside one of the donuts always present at deployment briefings. Behind me my pursuers grind and whir. Ahead of me, the thick smell of Rat and my own adrenaline in my hot, labored breath.
I steel myself against the discomfort in my head. The faster I go, the briefer the pain.