Skritch's Revenge E-Book

Russell Nohelty

• Herausgeber: Wannabe Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

They pissed off the wrong cybernetic, talking, magic, murder kitty. Now, betrayal runs deep, but revenge runs deeper.

Skritch isn’t your average cat. She just happens to look a bit like one. Armed with cybernetic limbs, nanites, and a razor-sharp wit, she’s a master thief navigating a dystopian world. When her mentor, Jammer, is murdered in a botched heist, Skritch’s life is torn apart.

Framed for a crime she didn’t commit, Skritch has only one choice—track down the real killer before the authorities close in around her and get her revenge by any means possible.

As she hunts for answers in the labyrinth of Zhakatal, a city overrun by corrupt corporations, crooked cops, and deadly bounty hunters, Skritch’s small size proves to be her greatest advantage. But uncovering the truth comes with a price—one paid in blood and betrayal.

With razor-sharp dialogue, intense action, and a touch of dark humor, Skritch's Revenge delivers a high-octane cyberpunk adventure where even the smallest hero can land a deadly blow.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

ALSO BY RUSSELL NOHELTY

Skritch’s Revenge

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Author’s note

ALSO BY RUSSELL NOHELTY

ALSO BY RUSSELL NOHELTY

THE OBSIDIAN SPINDLE SAGA

The Sleeping Beauty

The Wicked Witch

The Fairy Queen

The Red Rider

THE GODVERSE CHRONICLES

And Death Followed Behind Her

And Doom Followed Behind Her

And Ruin Followed Behind Her

And Hell Followed Behind Her

And Conquest Followed Behind Them

And Darkness Followed Behind Her

And Chaos Followed Behind Them

Katrina Hates the Dead

Pixie Dust

OTHER NOVEL WORK

My Father Didn’t Kill Himself

Sorry for Existing

Gumshoes: The Case of Madison’s Father

The Invasion Saga

The Vessel

Worst Thing in the Universe

The Void Calls Us Home

The Marked Ones

OTHER ILLUSTRATED WORK

The Little Bird and the Little Worm

Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter

Gherkin Boy

www.russellnohelty.com

Skritch’s Revenge

By:

Russell Nohelty

Edited by:

Esther Jones

Peter “Frog” Jones

Rhiannon Rhys-Jones

Lily Luchesi

Cover by:

Yoko Matsuoka

––––––––

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental. Skritch’s Revenge. First edition. February 2025 Copyright © 2023 Russell Nohelty. Written by Russell Nohelty.

Chapter 1

Cats are supposed to have a wonderful sense of direction, and maybe they do because I am not a cat, no matter what people say about me. People try to explain that fact to me every time I get lost, to which I respond “I am not a cat. I am a cryptophage that resembles a cat, but I am not a cat”. They are lucky I don’t rip their arm off with my cybernetic arm when they try to give me scritches under the chin. Only my father Jammer can do that, and even then, only on his birthday.

“I wish you were a cat,” Jammer growled into my earpiece as I backtracked down the air ducts of Gensys for the third time in the past ten minutes. “Then, I wouldn’t have to guide you like a child.”

“If I were a cat, there’s no way we would work together. I would be filled with the unflappable belief that I was better than you, and present it outwardly at all times, instead of just feeling it inside every bone in my body.” I reached a four-way intersection just as the laser grid turned back toward my position. “Now, how about you show me a way that doesn’t involve me being cut into a million little pieces, huh?”

“Fussy, fussy, fussy,” Jammer said. “Okay, turn left. If you need to know which way that is, just hold up your hands and make an L with your thumb and index finger. The way where the capital L is facing the right way is left.”

“Brilliant,” I replied. “I have another finger for you. I’ll let you use your imagination to figure out which one.”

He was making a joke, but actually, it was helpful advice. Just because I was the size of a housecat didn’t mean I was a cat. If I were a cat, I wouldn’t have opposable thumbs, and the fact I did should have been a dead giveaway to anyone who saw me. I walked on two legs, I could talk, and I had both a cybernetic arm and leg, along with a metal exoskeleton running up my spine, and yet, every day at least somebody mistakes me for one of those troublesome felines.

“Stop just ahead,” Jammer said. “Wait for my signal.”

“Copy,” I replied, watching two laser grids crisscross each other.

Jammer was a dwarf, a thief, a hacker -  and as close to a father as anything I had in this world. When my mother left me for dead after I was born with only one arm and one leg, Jammer took me in and made me whole again. He taught me how to walk, talk, hack, and steal...everything one needs to become a thriving child in an end-stage capitalistic nightmare hellscape like Zhakatal.

“Okay, get going,” Jammer said after the laser grids swiped by each other. “You have fourteen seconds before they make another pass.”

I dug my cybernetic hand into the metal of the duct to get traction and leapt forward through the opening seconds before the laser grids passed behind me.

“How are you coming disabling those grids? You know, the original plan before it all went to pot.”

“Do you do anything besides complain? You have nanites. Why don’t you do it?”

The most important thing Jammer did was teach me to use nanites. Only elves were supposed to be able to control the microscopic buggers, but our clan reverse engineered them for ourselves. The elders originally didn’t want me to have them, assuming I might be an elf spy, but after Jammer fixed me up and supercharged my brain, he contended that I was as much his kind as a cryptophage, and nobody fought him on it. Once I completed my cybernetic trials, they never said another word...to my face at least.

“Because that’s not part of the plan,” I replied. “My part of the plan is sneaking through the grates and dropping the hacker disc into their system so The Spike can create a backend where they have access to their systems. You’re the one sitting on your butt and supposedly shutting down the system so I can maneuver through these stupid grates in peace.”

This was supposed to be a simple in and out job, a charity case, really. The Spike was a non-profit working to take down corrupt corporations, and it was something Jammer believed in wholeheartedly. There was a ton of corruption in Zhakatal, but gathering enough evidence was nearly impossible without a lot of help. If you could create a backend into the right server, you could make a mint reporting your findings to the government, but it wasn’t easy. These companies locked up their systems tighter than a steel drum and they got more sophisticated with every passing day.

I was less excited to work pro-bono, but I was integral to the plan. Sneaking through grates wasn’t something that a big, fat, husky dwarf could do. I was the perfect fit for all sorts of jobs like this one, which put our services in high demand throughout the city. I didn’t have a head for computers, but I was pretty good in a pinch and my ability to control nanites made me a commodity in the Bunghole, which was the area of the city we lived. It was so named originally because the runoff from a local brewery made the whole place smell like stale beer. When the brewery closed and they redirected the sewer lines to feed out into the same tributary and the Bunghole took on a different, but no less accurate, meaning.

“In fifteen seconds, take a right, an immediate left, and stop at the third grate,” Jammer said after a few moments crawling forward. “Then you should be there.”

I scuttled through the tunnels at Jammer’s directions, avoiding another set of laser grids until I finally reached the grate. I peered through it to see an ancient computer that ran an obscure program Gensys needed to run the gyroscopics in one of their older model car engines. The system wasn’t compatible with the rest of their security, but it was connected to their network, making it the single failsafe in an otherwise impenetrable fortress.

They planned to stop service on the engine model in three days, and once that happened, it would be impossible to hack into the system. No, it was now or never. As I waited for the technician to finish logging data into the system, a smirk crept across my face.

Bingo. Now, we play the waiting game.

Chapter 2

I nearly fell asleep watching the technician peck-type on the keyboard for an hour before, finally satisfied, they stood up and walked out of the room. The door closed with a thick seal, and a dozen lasers crisscrossed the room in different angles. They were stationary, unlike those in the ducts, though I still had to be on my A-game to navigate through them.

“I have a clear path inside,” I muttered as I pressed my hands on the grate and allowed the nanites I kept inside my cybernetic arm to seep into the metal and loosen the bolts for me.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Jammer growled back into my earpiece. “I’m not getting any younger.”

The grate clicked as the nanites pulled it up into the duct with me. Then, they coalesced on the wall of the duct, creating a thin strand of rope for me to tie off my belt to allow me access to the room. It was the type of thing nobody else would even consider doing if they respected tradition at all. I figured tradition was what kept me on the outside looking in, and it could all burn down for all I cared.

“You’re welcome to come in, old man, and show me how it’s done.”

“Don’t get smart,” Jammer replied, persnickety. “Remember who still opens your cans of food.”

He was the only one who could joke about me being a cat and get away with it, but he would pay for it later. I wasn’t sure how, but I wouldn’t allow his slight to go unpunished.

I pressed the nanites to a carabiner on my belt and they clasped it tightly, just as they had dozens of times before. When the “rope” was tight, I stood over the gap and fell forward until I was parallel to the floor. I spend a long moment adjusting to the position before kicking off the ledge and lowering myself down inch by inch.

It was slow going, and more than once I had to crawl back up the rope and move along the ceiling to readjust myself. Even when I finally found a clear line to the computer, it took contorting myself in every direction in order to avoid the lasers which both my body and my rope. It was a dangerous dance. You could find the perfect hole through the lasers, but if your rope wasn’t at the right angle, then it was all for naught, and you would alert everyone to your presence, just because you didn’t have the presence of mind to think before you acted. Thievery truly was more head than body, though you needed a bit of both to be successful.

Finally, after thirty minutes of slithering and snaking around, my foot touched the desk, and I pulled enough “rope” down to give myself some slack before skittering around to the front of the computer.

“I’m in,” I said.

They had given us a schematic of the computer, and I used it to find the port that I needed to insert the disk. When it opened, I pressed the hacker disc into the computer before closing it again. The computer whirled to life, and for a moment, the laser flickered, before a prompt came up on the computer asking for a password.

“Uhhh, we have a problem,” I said as a countdown came onto the computer ticking down from sixty. “Did you see a password in the schematics they sent?”

Jammer scoffed. “You would be so dead without me.” There were several keystrokes, and with each one the counter ticked down more and more, as my heart pounded more and more. I could still get out if I went right now, but before I could consider it more carefully, Jammer’s voice came over the earpiece. “It’s $t1nky34.”

“Really,” I chuckled, but I didn’t wait for him to confirm to type in the password. “That’s what I call you.”

“A password after my own heart.”

“You can say that again, stinky,” I chuckled. I pressed enter just as the countdown hit one. My heart jumped into my throat as I waited with bated breath. The computer flicked for a moment and then the screen went red, two dozen more lasers turned on, and a siren blared through the walls.

“Okay, maybe I don’t have it.”

Chapter 3

It was bad enough that three dozen new lasers appeared in an instant, but then they started to move, and that was even worse.

“Stand still, intruder. Our security system will deal with you promptly.”

“What’s happening, Skritch?” Jammer shouted. “Did everything go tits up in there?”

“That’s not even the half of how bad it is,” I leapt between two lasers. Luckily, they were calibrated to cut through bigger fare than me, which gave me the ability to slide through the gaps between them, as long as I was careful. “Now, if you’ll kindly shut up, I need to focus.”

I kicked off the wall and leapt backward. I slid around another laser and held out my hand in the gap between life and death, beckoning for my nanites, but they did not come. No, no, no, no, no. This was not good.  

I felt a burning on my shoulder and looked up to see the nanites raining down upon me, destroyed after their bodies touched the lasers. I had those bots since I was a child, and in that moment, I felt the crushing weight of every negative comment the elders said about me coming true, but there was no time to grieve now, unless I wanted to suffer the same fate.  

Okay, Skritch. What’s plan B?

As I pondered my next move, the door clicked open. The lasers dropped away, and a bulky hazmat suit waddled in holding a blowtorch. They didn’t say a word before lighting the whole room on fire. If I was any further from the door then I would have been scorched alive, but I was close enough to the door to avoid its blast, and I happened to be just small enough to evade the gaze of whomever was in the suit.

“Thanks!” I couldn’t help myself but say as I slipped under their legs. “I thought I was a goner.”

The sirens blared in sequence with red lights flashing through the hallways. Half of the base seemed on high alert, scrambling for the exit, but the other half simply rolled their eyes and continued with their work. This must not have been the first time in recent memory the alarms blared, and I could use that to my advantage.

I slipped into a cubicle inhabited by a dead-eyed human worker just as a group of security guards made their way through the room. They craned their necks left and right, but didn’t find anything suspicious, so they moved on into the next cubicle. I peered around the corner just as the security guards were getting an earful from the person in the Hazmat suit. They pointed toward my direction, and I pinned myself against the door.

“There’s an entrance to the grate at the other side of the office.” I looked up to see the dead-eyed drone speaking at me in monotone. “Or there’s a door over there, too, but you’re just an itty-bitty thing. You don’t seem big enough to open a door. Adorable though.”

“Listen!” I growled, before thinking better of myself. I didn’t like short jokes any more than cat jokes, but I decided to let it slide, taking a deep breath to calm myself. “Unfortunately, the grate has too many lasers, and I’m a bit too recognizable with the arm and leg to be mistaken for a house cat.”

The drone stood up and put on a large trench coat that had until that moment been draped around the back of her chair. “Get in”

“Why would I—”

“And don’t ask questions, unless you want to get caught.”

I didn’t even take a beat to think about it before sliding into the coat, as a security detailed rushed through the halls toward our position.

“Where is that cat?!” A security guard growled as they entered the room.

The others shrugged, and the dead-eyed drone did the same, except that they were standing. “I dunno. I’m just doing my work.”

The security guard pointed to the coat. “And why are you wearing that coat? Take it off.”

“Excuse me, sir, but it is cold outside, and that stupid alarm means we’re supposed to evacuate. Now, are you going to let me go or do I need to report you to the care team for a reprimand?”

“All of you should get out of here.” The guard growled again, but it was clear even from my disadvantageous vantage point that the drone had won. “If you see something, say something.”

She saluted him. “Yes, sir.”

With that, the drone stepped out into the hallways as the guards split into many different directions. They buttoned their oversized coat so it wouldn’t seem suspicious to have a bulge inside, and then placed their hands inside the pockets to puff out the area around me.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked. “It’s suicide.”

“You’re in trouble and my mother taught me never to leave a man behind, or woman for that matter, if that’s how you identify.”

“I never much cared for labels,” I replied. “And are you telling me you’re a member of The Spike, the terrorist group that hired Jammer and me?”

“Yes, and why don’t you broadcast it louder. It’s bad enough my coat is talking, but there are ears everywhere.”

“And eyes,” I replied.