by Jack Truxton
There was something of a calling card at least, as a burning catnip cigarette dangled out of the corner of her mouth. It barely moved as she said in a deep, precise voice, “I am not here to hurt you, but if you wish for that to continue, Jacob St. Clare, you need to act quickly.”
“Jake …?” Nyala questioned, her eyes flashing to me as I turned immediately towards the broken desk.
“It’s fine,” I called back. “I know just what we need.” I didn’t need to ask for details. Our mystery Kat was asking for the same thing that I did for Annie and Nyala, what seemed like a threat being a warning at how close she was for the rest of her programming, whatever that was, kicked in.
As I hopped over the ruins of the desk, Annie picked herself up, seeming to lose interest in the Kat to look down at the gasping, unconscious Brenton. “… Jake … should I save him?”
That question cut through everything else. I looked up from where I pulled our third dose of cure out of a thankfully intact desk drawer safe while Nyala moved right to Annie’s side, a hand on her shoulder. Even Arrow Kat’s level gaze was drawn to the nurse like she was a magnet.
“Patrick Brenton overstepped his position,” she reported matter-of-factly. “The company’s orders were that if you were to be unexpectedly encountered, to attempt to leave without incident and, if unable to do so, pass false information to bargain for an escape. In any event, you were not allowed to be harmed in any significant fashion.”
Nyala shot a cautious glare at the new Kat, still hovering close to Annie as I hopped back over the desk. “You sound suspiciously like a corporate agent yourself … but they’d never let one of us have that kind of freedom. You shot a member of the company. Protocols say that—”
“Should be impossible?” the Kat supplied. “Under normal circumstances, yes, but … I received orders that outranked Brenton.”
“And that’s not important right now,” I said, cutting through the back and forth. I handed Nyala the genemod injector. “Cure our new friend here, I’ll take care of Annie.”
My strident tone made even the ninja Kat pause, her expression softening. “… I did ask you to take care of them. Thank you for doing that, Jacob.”
I gave her a brief nod as I took Annie into my arms. I’d get the specifics later, but my focus now was on my lovely nurse. She looked up at me with those shining blue eyes, her ears low as her tail drooped. “It’ll be okay, Annie. I know what this guy did to you, and that’s only the start of it. He’s hurt a lot of Kats, probably been the one who sent even more to their deaths.”
“Then … I should let him die, right?” Her nose wrinkled as her face screwed up in frustration. “But … but that’s not right either! I mean, I’m a nurse Kat. He might have been horrible, but if I can save a life … shouldn’t I?”
It took some effort on Nyala’s part to tear herself away from Annie’s crisis. They had grown close fast, just as all three of us had, but she was also a professional and knew as well as I did that curing our armed visitor was important. As I ran my hands through Annie’s perfect white-and-purple hair, scratching her ear soothingly, she walked up to the strange Kat and opened her hand to her. “No matter where you come from or why you’re here, you’re still our sister, and you deserve to be free, especially for helping fight Brenton. Let me see your arm, please.”
The jumpsuited Burmese complied, holding out her free arm and letting Nyala take it without a struggle. While she took care of that, I kissed Annie on the forehead. “Annie, you need to do what you think is right. I trust you, I care for you, and I know that whatever you decide is the right thing to do.” I took a deep breath. “But if you really want to know what I think …”
As my voice trailed off, she seemed to finally realize that I was still hurt myself. Her fingers trailed over the cuts in my chest, her eyes filling with renewed resolve. “Tell me, Jake, so that I can take care of it and then you.”
I smiled down at her. “Hey, I’ll be okay. Just some scratches.” That was only mostly a lie, but it helped calm her. “But yeah, I think that if you let Brenton die without trying to save him, you might feel good for a moment, but you won’t be you anymore. You won’t be Nurse Annie. And if you don’t want to be her anymore, that’s okay with me, but I don’t think it’ll be okay with you.”
And I meant every word I said. Killing people, well, that isn’t why I was doing what I was doing. While freeing the Wonder Kats was a cause worth fighting for, in every sense of the word, I didn’t want to kill anybody. Mario Romine had killed himself, and there wasn’t a thing we could have done to save him. But if Annie could save Brenton, well, it would just prove that we weren’t the monsters here.
Annie looked up from my cuts, her eyes clearing as the last tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to be Nurse Annie, Jake.” She reached up on her tiptoes and kissed me. “Thank you, Jake,” she whispered softly before her usual beaming smile crept back over her face, lighting up the room along with it. “Now, stand back! Nurse Annie is on the case!”
She threw herself to work, breaking out the first aid kit that was stored in the office, while Nyala hovered close to our mystery friend as the telltale shakes and shivers of the curing process began to overtake her. For all that, though, she didn’t drop the bow.
With things starting to calm, I tapped the side of my smartglasses, frankly shocked they were still on my face and functioning, opening a channel to everyone on duty. “Okay, folks, the situation is under control.”
My ears filled with an onslaught of questions, though it was Candy’s sharp nasally voice that cut through as she took control of things. “Boss, what the hell happened? Richard was about to break down the door before you sent a message. We thought there was a freakin’ bear in there or something from the sound of it!”
“There was … kind of,” I replied, thinking that Monster-Brenton’s claws did seem awfully like a bear’s as well as the tufts of fur. Was Katsukami trying to get around the XX chromosome problem by using different base animals? “But everyone’s okay, that’s what’s important, and Johnson’s contained. Everybody can stand down, and thanks for following my orders.”
“You have a commanding demeanor,” the ninja Kat interjected between shivers. “Maybe because you’re fighting for something you believe in. They say that gives a man power.”
Nyala looked about to argue that point, but then she thought on it a moment. “I think she’s right, actually, though she has a lot of explaining to do.”
“Agreed.” I fished a handkerchief out of my jacket pocket and pressed it to my bleeding chin. “Now that you’ve been cured, I think you can probably tell us all about it, can’t you?”
Obviously weak from the genemod running through her body, the Kat kept her balance, though Nyala never stepped too far away just in case. The Burmese looked up at me, her green eyes like creamy jade. “They named me Nin, and yes, I will tell you everything I know happily …” She glanced at the other two Kats before looking back at me. “Jake.”
“Thank God, I would hate to have to keep correcting you on that,” I said with a laugh. “Jacob was my grandfather. I’m just Jake.” Getting on track, I turned over the broken remains of a chair and sat down. “Okay, Nin, we might as well start with the big question, even though I think we all already know the answer.”
“Katsukami found you and Annie the day after the explosion,” Nin reported matter-of-factly, flicking the arm that held her bow as she triggered some mechanism in it. The whole thing collapsed down, folding in on itself to form a compact package that could fit in a backpack easily. “Initial observation and analysis determined that something unusual must have happened for you to survive the blast, so instead of a kill order, the executive council decided to continue observation.”
“Wait, they’ve been watching us the whole time?” I arched an eyebrow at her.
“Yes.” She shrugged slightly. “The only reason you’re not dead is because killing you has been forbidden, especially as it has become obv
ious your accident has somehow done what the company has been attempting for years.”
“The feline genemod,” I said with a slow nod. “They need me alive so they can have a source of living DNA to pick apart until they crack the process.”
Nyala’s tail stood up straight as her ears flattened back. “That will never happen. I think I speak for Annie as well when I say that they will never capture you and torture you like that, Jake. We won’t allow it!”
“No, we won’t!” Annie chimed in, waving a hand covered by a bloody surgical glove in the air for emphasis.
Nin cracked as a smile as she stowed the compacted bow behind her, the thing clamping by some kind of magnetic clip to her quiver. “And, unless you turn me away, you have me as well, Jake.” Her eyes went strangely misty. “After all, I owe you my very existence.”
I blinked slowly. “I … that doesn’t really seem possible. I mean, I’ve never seen you before in my … life …” My voice trailed off as a realization hit me.
I had seen this Kat before.
Well, not this exact Kat, but I had seen the computerized projection of what this Kat would look like in the holo-tube display of my workstation the day of the explosion. Nin’s design was the one I was working on right before I was sent to Reprogramming, the strangely complex and specific ‘domestic’ model.
“But that’s impossible,” I said aloud. “That was a domestic design, and you’re …”
“Hardly domestic,” Nin said with a surprisingly girly giggle, her tail starting to quiver with amusement. “But as you’re already guessing, Katsukami couldn’t just tell their designers they were creating a ninja, could they?”
“Hold. The. Phone!” Annie cried, eyes snapping up at Nin from where she somehow had Brenton stabilized. “Ninja Kats are real?! Milk and cream, Nyala! She’s real!”
Nyala blinked at the nurse Kat’s enthusiasm, but her surprised cracked into a wry grin. “And here we thought they were just a gimmick for the vids.”
Nin looked as confused as I was amused, especially as Annie frowned a bit as she pulled off her bloody gloves. “The only downside is that I definitely can’t be called Ninja Nurse. Because, you know, you can’t call yourself a ninja when you’re working with a real one. That’s just rude!”
“Well, I sure can’t argue with that,” I admitted before taking a deep breath. “I get what you’re saying, Nin, but that design wasn’t even finished when the place blew … or did fucking Clements just hit compile when I left the room?” I mean, I’m a bit sad that my lazy co-worked probably died in the explosion, but he was also a dick who had screwed me over plenty so … no big loss at the end of the day. “Even then, Katsukami would only have the design. It usually takes weeks for proper growth and training of even the most simple of job categories.”
Nyala nodded in agreement, fishing her tablet out of the desk wreckage. Though there was a nasty crack in the screen, it seemed to mostly work. “Wonder Klass on its own is two weeks.”
“Wonder Klass?” Nin asked curiously as she adjusted her scarf, though I think she was really playing with the trailing edges like they were part of a ball of yarn. “I don’t know what that is, nor do I know what this vid you think I’m from is either. I do know that the grow tube I was in during the explosion was affected, causing more maturation hormones than normal to enter my capsule, thereby causing me to mature at an accelerated rate. I woke the same evening you extricated yourself from the rubble, and since I was technically off the books, I was given one purpose by the company. To track, observe, and eventually recover you for the company’s purposes.”
It still seemed hard to believe, but not impossible. The effects on excessive quantities of maturation hormons on biodroid growth hadn’t been well documented, and the baseline programming process was actually swift. It was the added training, the Wonder Klass, that really added on to the time to create a fully-fledged Wonder Kat.
“So, here’s my question then,” I said as Nin produced another catnip cigarette and lit it by, I kid you not, sparking her fingertips together. “How did you break your programming enough to even allow us to inject you?”
Nin’s eyes glittered as she stared deep into my eyes. “I don’t know, not exactly, but I do know when I started to see you in a different light, Jake, when thoughts of watching you became thoughts of protecting you.” When I gestured for her to continue, she smiled softly. “It was when you stood up to Romine and asked for Nyala’s freedom. At first, I simply judged that you were romantically inclined to Annie, that the rest were empty promises to make her love you.”
Nin took a step toward me as I rose to meet her. She put her gloved hands around my waist as she finished. “That’s when I knew that you truly cared about us all, and you really would make us all free.” And with that, before I knew it, she bounced up on her toes and kissed me right on the lips.
25
I touched at the hot pink Wonder Kat Show bandage on my chin gingerly while Annie eyed her work critically, hanging off of Nyala’s shoulder as the business Kat finished buttoning up my fresh dress shirt. Nyala really did think of everything, which I found out when she told me I had five suits, not just one.
“I’m sorry, Jake, that’s all I had left after, well …” Annie mewed as she thumbed over her shoulder, where Patrick Brenton was laid out on a sheet-covered conference table. His briefcase, the locks thoroughly cracked by Nin, hung open, the mutagenic fluid tank that had filled a third of the thing replaced with a gene therapy solution I whipped up for him. Another third was the blood transfusion equipment that had pumped the dangerously unstable shit into his bloodstream, while the other section …
Nin, who had been watching the interplay of the three of us with a combination of curiosity and desire, turned her green eyes towards Brenton as the old man began to stir. Her swaying tail became rigid as she spoke up. “I believe he is waking up, Jake. Are you ready to speak with him? Or shall I incapacitate him until you are?”
“I think if you were to hit him again, he’d probably die,” Nyala pointed out as she stepped around to take her usual place to my right. I found myself smiling at that thought, that she and Annie had a usual place by my side. “Besides, Jake was born ready.”
Annie giggled at that, her ears up and perky as she slipped to my left. “Oh, milk and cream, he was certainly born ready last night!”
“Do you wish to take me to bed as well, Jake?” the ninja Kat asked, easy as you’d ask for a Crown Kruller at the Emperor. “I must admit, I felt a strange pang of emotion, desire, I think, that I didn’t quite understand when I overheard your lovemaking. I believe I’d very much desire to join all of you the next time.”
I cleared my throat to give myself time to process that. I mean, hell, Nin was as gorgeous as Annie or Nyala, and it’s not even like I was propositioning her. She was free, she could make her own decisions like a big girl, and I was a big boy who could say what any big boy should say at that point.
“If Ny and Annie are fine with it, I think I’d be an idiot to say no,” I said with a smile. “But only if you really want to at the time. Don’t think this is some command or something. You don’t have to listen to those anymore.”
Annie giggled, rocking on her heels. “But you’d be stupid if you didn’t want to, Nin. Jake’s great at the sexing.”
“Whiskers, I can’t believe you just said the word sexing,” Nyala muttered as she put a lollipop in her mouth. “But you also aren’t wrong.”
“High praise coming from you two,” I admitted with a bit of a blush. Hey, I had to try to stay a little humble. “But let’s put the rest of that talk off. He’s opening his eyes.”
And I meant eyes. While some of the degradation to Brenton’s body was from old age and injuries accumulated over his years as a fixer for Katsukami, a lot of the damage was done by the genemods and mutagens he had flooded his body with. Once the mods started to get cleaned out of his system, a lot of the damage was repaired along with it. His clouded-over eye had g
one clear after an hour of treatment, for example.
The old man groaned once more before slowly propping himself up on his elbows. As he did so, Nin drifted around the table like a shadow, silently shifting closer to the three of us, a knife she produced from, well, somewhere, hidden in her palm. She expected more trouble, but I had a feeling we might be able to avoid it this time.
“I’m still alive?” Brenton gasped out, smacking his lips a few times. “Why? How?”
“The why is simple enough,” I began, reaching an arm around Annie’s shoulder. “Annie stood by her principles as a healer. When she saw that she could save your life, she chose to do so.” She beamed and purred under my touch as I raised a finger. “The how is because instead of Nyala shooting you in the fucking face or Nin putting an arrow through your eye, we just unplugged you. From there, well, Annie is the best nurse Kat that ever nursed.”
Nyala snorted as she glanced at her tablet. “And you should thank your lucky fish that it was Annie that made the choice. I’d just as soon as put that bullet through your skull for what you did to her and to Jake.”
“I … I don’t understand,” Brenton muttered, rubbing his bony fingers over his face. That’s when it struck him, as he gingerly poked at his newly restored eye. “My eye …? I can … I can see normally again!”
“I hope you like it,” Annie chimed in, waving her fingers at him. “Well, I can’t take all the credit. Jake is a super-duper ace at genetics, so we figured out a gene therapy cycle to clean out all those nasty-wasty bits of DNA that were killing you!”
Brenton glanced at his side as he finished sitting up, at the reattached tubes running back and forth to his side. Confusion was plain on his face as he gaped at all of us, his jaw working as he tried to come up with something to say.
“I am still gaining a proper handle on etiquette in this situation,” Nin confessed, folding her arms under her considerable assets, “but I believe what you wish to say, Patrick Brenton, is ‘Thank you, and I apologize for jeopardizing your lives.’” She thought for a moment. “Unless you wish to commit ritual suicide for your multiple dishonorable acts? I could provide a knife if you need one.”