by Faith Hunter
“No soil,” he agreed. “You got mine cracks. Makes it hard for them to travel.” Mine cracks were deep narrow drops into the earth, formed by the caving-in of old underground mines or by mountaintop removal. “Arsenic, toxic coal dust, benzene, and carbon monoxide never stopped a Perker Crawler, though,” he said.
Mateo cursed.
The fact that Jagger knew the terminology and the chemicals in the local earth made my insides clench. Asshole knew too much that was info only a local would know. Or he had a better Berger-chip silicone implant than I’d ever heard of and had accessed local info.
“Update,” I demanded of Mateo, panic setting in. The cats’ body language said this was taking too long.
“Still no visual confirmation of Perker Crawlers.”
I had never seen this OMW before. If Jagger was an OMW. But what if he was someone else? A plant. He was still targeted. If he moved, he was dead. But we didn’t have much time. Not if we had a Crawler on the property. The cats looked back and forth. Two Crawlers. Yeah. Bugger.
“Who’s prez now?” I asked.
Asshole’s eyes narrowed.
“I’ve got a video trail,” Mateo said, grim as rust. “Medium-small Crawler. Still shots show it approached the border two weeks ago moving less than two-point-five centimeters an hour. Once over the border, it sped up. According to current readings, your asshole’s right. Your jacket sent out an alert seven days ago, and it’s still pulsing.”
Unless I could spin this, and Jagger bought my story and went away peaceably, the Outlaws would know who I was and where I was. And it was possible that Jagger had been doing high-altitude ARVAC flyovers. I had defenses against Auto Remote Viewing Air Craft, but I kept their notification sensors turned down. With all the raptors around, eating toxic rats and bats that crawled and flew out of the mine cracks, I had set the parameters low. Too low.
Bloody damn.
“And Shining,” Mateo said in my ear. “I messed up. Bad. The crawler found the SunStar. The slow-bot released one of the SunStar’s hatches and stayed inside for nearly seventy-two hours. When it came out, there were two of them with more cumulative mass than when they went in. I’m running ship internal scans. Eventually, I’ll figure out what the Crawler plundered through and stole, but for now, the slow-bots have augmented themselves with space-going tech or shielding. And they’re both missing.”
Which meant the Perker Crawler had started out as a single slow-bot, stolen space-going equipment, and its mech-nanos had reconfigured it, breaking down into two smaller Crawlers before it came hunting me. Two.
I looked at the cats. They were slinking back, but still watching two different locations. Bloody damn. It—they—had found the office. Perkers were here. Targeting me. Flop sweat trickling down my spine turned to ice. I could shoot Jagger and get inside alone but if he was OMW they would send backup, and no one who took out an enforcer lived to tell the tale. Also, a second fighter might be handy short term. If he was who he said he was.
“Who’s prez now?” I repeated to Jagger, flexing the Dragon Scale armor as a threat, my voice taking on tension as I calculated all my odds. “And who do you report to?”
“Faria. I report to McQuestion.”
I chuckled. The command structure of the OMWs had shifted, but only high-level made-men knew it. The prez of the Outlaws used to be important, back before the war. Now he was the PR head, the one the cops and the media thought was the top dog, while the man with the real power was the vice-president, and his name was never given. The VP was always referred to as McQuestion. Asshole had just proven himself the real deal, or as close as I could get without scanning him and his tattoos with a viber, which would mean him taking off his clothes.
In my peripheral vision, a cat leaped into the air. Others did the same. I tensed, not knowing why they—
Gunfire rang out over the junkyard.
Asshole leaped toward the office, drawing his weapon, dropping to the earth. Wartime reflexes.
Mateo cursed.
I fell into a crouch, mostly hidden beneath the rotating table, and slid the Para Gen from auto-targeting to manual. I had forty-six centimeters of ammo. Not enough. Good thing I’d put the weapon sleeve on. I flipped a switch on my 2-Gen glasses and gave myself access to Mateo’s screens. It was a dizzying array and had taken months for me to use the glasses without tossing my cookies, but now I could follow Mateo’s tech vision.
Enemy rapid fire followed. Full auto. Short bursts. The third volley of shots raced across the front of the office, dinging and pinging and ricocheting away, not penetrating its armor. The Crawlers and my unwanted visitor probably now knew the office wasn’t an ordinary building.
“Narrowing search patterns,” Mateo said, sounding more contained now that battle had begun and his suit had injected him with ’roids and flooded his body with synth-pheromones.
The Crawlers fired again, destroying my fake satellite receivers. Plastic and bits of copper and old computer parts flew everywhere. I’d stuffed the fakes with parts to make someone think they had taken an outdated system offline. The EntNu stuff was inside the spaceship—where the Crawler had been. Damn. The Perkers fired, hitting my rain catcher on the roof. Not that it had rained in the last two years, but still.
Bastards.
Jagger sprinted, now behind a stack of old engine blocks ready for crushing. Smart move.
“Located,” Mateo said. “Perker Bot-A is confirmed at fifteen meters from you at your two o’clock. Perker Bot-B is at your six, twelve meters and closing.”
Like I’d thought. Behind me. Bloody hell.
Mateo’s vid screens divided, showing two images, current date, and time. I watched as the matte-black half-bots trundled toward the office at full speed. The larger bot, Bot-A, moved three centimeters a minute. The smaller one, Bot-B, had fewer foldouts but was twice as fast. Bot-A had more weapons, Bot-B had speed.
On a third screen, I saw a dark hulking reflection moving in on three legs, lifting himself over ancient transmissions, rusting body parts, racks of hatches and doors, a century or so of vehicles, most of which were on-site long before the war. The warbot Mateo was on the move in stealth mode, his long legs rising and setting down, his three longest limbs providing balance like a spider’s legs to facilitate both speed and silence. His warbot suit looked like an old kid’s toy, only a lot more deadly.
“Can you get a shot?” I asked.
To my right, a cat—the gray male—leaped across a pathway, three meters in the air, and disappeared. A striped female skulked on the ground around a stack of disintegrating tires.
They were hunting the Crawlers? Why?
“Targets acquired. Take cover,” Mateo instructed.
Shouting the instructions to Jagger, I curled into a fetal position behind the table, hands over my head. Not that the position would save me. If any size Perker Crawler got to me, even with the table shielding, it would take me apart. Perkers were patient, thorough, and nearly indestructible.
“Firing WaMAW.” A WaMAW was a Warbot-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon. A big-ass shotgun, a small cannon, or a small missile launcher, based on the ammo used.
Mateo fired. Fired again. And again. Which seemed like so much overkill.
“Did you get it?” I shouted over the concussive damage to my ears.
“Negative. It’s . . .” Mateo cursed again. “It’s got ship shielding.”
The Perker had gone into the SunStar. It had dismantled some part of the engine shielding, or maybe the shielding off a midsized space-going observation capsule, and adapted it to its own exoskeleton. I needed to get inside the office. But I’d have to cross the space between my dubious protection and the doorway, which they had likely been waiting on all along. And Jagger was now nowhere in sight.
I took a breath that stank of the remembered reek of war-sweat and burned ammo. I forced my body to uncurl. Carefully, knowing what I was about to say might set Mateo off, I asked, “Do the Crawlers have Puffers?” A Perk
er Crawler often carried Puffers. Puffers carried mechanical nanobots. Puffer mech-nanos had taken Mateo down.
Mateo hissed out a breath, metallic and grinding and full of fury. “Searching.”
Puffers were attendant, automatic, weaponized mini-bots that could slide out of the Perkers’ receptacles and go hunting on their own. Mini-recon-bots, or hand grenades on wheels, or specialized cutting and dismembering systems on wheels, all with versatile, origami-inspired construction, allowing the wheels to collapse inward, and the mini-bot to fold into a flat configuration, like a horseshoe crab. NASA had invented them for Mars explorers. Mama-Bots had stolen the concept and weaponized the Puffers. Puffers swarmed like bicolor ants, and because they were solar powered, and had mech-nanotech self-healing, self-altering, Puffer-building capabilities, they simply never, ever stopped. They had to be crushed or pried open one by one and blasted with AntiGrav to kill them.
Unless someone had a secret weapon.
Or was a secret weapon.
“Let me know when you see them.”
“You can’t,” Mateo snarled. “You don’t even know if it will work.”
“If I don’t try, they’ll kill us eventually. The only way you fought the nanobots inside your suit was to close it down, set it to run on auto, and hunt them one at a time. And that was in a confined space where they couldn’t run and hide and reproduce and come back with more bots. It took months and you nearly died. Out here we’ll lose for sure.”
They were bad, horrible months. The nanos had been inside his suit a long time before they had reproduced enough to start making changes to the suit. And they had eaten parts of him before he figured out that AntiGrav forces would destroy nanos. We’d had to blast his entire suit.
“We have an entire junkyard for them to hide in,” I said, trying to convince him.
“You have a witness. You cannot.”
I thought about Buck Harlan in the Tesla. He died getting me a message, probably the message that the Perker Crawler was on the way—a death sentence. The Perker now knew I had a spaceship on the property, which would motivate it even more to destroy me. And the Asshole? He was a black hole of uncertain possibilities, none of them good.
Someone knew I was here. But that someone didn’t know what I could do.
“Shining. We don’t even know if it will work. Try it my way first.” Mateo stopped, fired. When the dust started to settle and I hadn’t answered, he added, “Please.” Mateo didn’t beg. Not ever. About anything.
His polite request was a first and it made me melt inside—an angry melt, but still a melt.
“Fine,” I snarled. “According to the screens, Bot-A is nearly in position to take me. Bot-B has stopped and is waiting for A to achieve attack position. Concur?”
“Concur. I’m in position with a clear line of fire to both. On three I’ll lay down attack and cover fire and you get into the office. If you see Jagger, take him with you.”
“You sure about him?”
“Hell, no. But he’s human and he’s OMW. We don’t leave either to a Perker. One.”
My body went liquid, as battle chemicals and human adrenalin flushed into my bloodstream like a flash flood. Still wearing the Dragon Scale armor sleeve, I slammed the Para Gen to full auto and swiped control of the weapon to Mateo.
“Two.”
Crouching, I braced my feet. Placed the palm of the war-sleeve on the AG Grabber support.
“Three! Gogogogogogo.”
I was already moving, shoving off, the Dragon scale sleeve stretching and contracting, throwing me across the wide-open space and through the air. Jarring my shoulder, spine, and pelvis, but making me freaking move.
Mateo fired, a double barrage of ammo. I went deaf. My feet touched down in the dirt three-and-a-half meters from my previous perch. Legs bent. Thrusted into a dead sprint. Battle reflexes, honed and augmented by what I’d become.
The Crawler bots fired. Blasted the air where I’d been and the front of the office. But I was inside the protective airlock. Heaving myself inside. Faster than pure human.
“Where’s Jagger?” I shouted over the sound of gunfire and the airlocks closing.
“Searching.”
“Screens!” I said into the odd silence, slapping a headset on and slamming my body into the over-sized defensive Neuro-Based-Pressure command seat designed for space travel. The Dragon Scale war-sleeve slipped into the control unit and connected. Every screen in the junkyard came online. On three of them, I saw cats fighting with Puffers. Bloody hell. Puffers. On one screen, two striped females were a ball of fur, fangs, and claws against tech. The gray fighter male was rolling across the dirt with another Puffer. A third mini-bot was disassembled next to the body of its cat attacker.
That thing killed my cat!
“Where are they?” I snarled. Bot-A and Bot-B had disappeared. Except for the cats, patrolling in stalking groups of three or four, nothing moved.
Using remote activation, I dropped the hot-as-a-furnace AGR Tesla with a whomp I felt though my feet, and redirected the AG Grabber, wishing I had a portable model. The Grabber arm swung clockwise. I had to blast the injured Puffers before their AIs ordered their nanos to rebuild. Mateo’s painful experience suggested I had around two minutes before the reconstruction of the broken Puffers commenced.
“Jagger is behind the office,” Mateo said. “Four meters from the back hatch.”
I flipped switches and brought up the rear screens. Jagger was holding a bleeding cat in the curve of one elbow and his weapon in the other hand. The cigar was nowhere to be seen.
“Is he clear?”
“Affirmative.”
I engaged the back airlock to prepare to open and flashed the green light above it three times. Then three more times. It caught Jagger’s eyes and he nodded, knowing—hoping?—he was on camera. I flashed the light once. Waited a beat, flashed it a second time. Waited a beat. Giving him a rhythm. Something flew through the air from behind Jagger. The office array sights identified it as a spinning fragmentary grenade. The war-sleeve targeted the frag and fired. A small laser drilled across the spinning surface and through the small bomb. Still four meters out, it exploded.
Jagger ducked.
The green light flashed again. The airlock hatch popped open.
Jagger sprinted and dove into the airlock. I closed the outer hatch and took out another mini-grenade launcher. Spotted the Puffers that had fired them, both rolling beneath the fuselage of a Boeing-constructed warplane.
Damn.
I punched open the inner hatch, and Jagger rolled inside before it opened halfway and I punched it closed. I didn’t look around. There wasn’t time. With the war-sleeve, I lifted the AG Grabber over the closest downed Puffers out front and engaged the mechanism. It was hard to kill Puffers, but if you managed to rupture the exoskeleton and then hit it with AntiGrav, it fried the internal nanobots. Without the nanos, the Puffer wasn’t coming back. The Puffers rose into the air and vibrated as the energies hit them.
Jagger settled to one knee. He was breathing hard, trying to blow off toxic adrenaline breakdown chemicals, but he still saw too much. “Where the hell did you get all this?” he asked, meaning the office, the launching systems that had rolled out to fire the weapons, the recoilless firing systems, the space-worthy tech of the screens and command board. And the roomy, extra-extra-large NBP seat. The chair was clearly not designed for a human. But this was a scrap yard. Scrappers could get stuff others couldn’t. At least that was what I hoped he might conclude.
So, I didn’t reply, just aimed the AG Grabber at a half-dozen Puffers Mateo had crushed into pieces with a car engine. It sucked them all up at once. The Puffers did the AG dance as they expired, their little nano brains fried. I set them to cook and added a timer for the Grabber to auto shutdown.
“You’re her, aren’t you? Shining Smith?”
A frisson of shock and fear sliced through me. Bot-A emerged from the protection of a skid full of big prewar electric motor
s. I fired everything I had at it. The concussion of that much ammo juddered into the office and shook my body.
“No idea what you’re talking about, Asshole. The two Puffers who fired the frags are still loose, I have two more Puffers that need to be fried, and”—my voice rose—“I’m low on ammo.” I flicked a glance at him to make sure he knew I was ticked off and busy. “You up for loading or do I need to ask the Crawlers to take a break so I can hold your hand and sing ‘Kumbaya?’”
Jagger laughed, the deep tones scraping along my spine.
“You got a mouth on you. I like it. I can load, but your cat is dying.”
I spared the cat in his arms a glance. It was the gray male fighter cat. My heart sank at the same time it softened because a man carrying and caring for an injured cat was weirdly sweet. Remotely, I slapped the med-bay open. A soft pink light lit the room.
“Schedule C1 is for male cat.”
Jagger rose to the med-bay and chuckled because I had a med-bay already programed for cats. I heard the appropriate clicks, followed by the whoosh and the hum as the med-bay engaged. As I scanned for the Crawlers, I heard the snapping as Jagger began loading ammo into the depleted office weapons and removed shells that had dropped into the capture nets. Without a pause he also loaded the heaver weaponry. Maybe he really had been at the Battle of Mobile. Everything was recognizable to him because the office’s offensive and defenses arrays had been modified with Earth-based weapons. All the good stuff was hidden, though his questions about where I’d gotten all this stuff likely meant he was going to figure out way too much.
“Why aren’t they dead yet?” he asked of the small Crawlers. “You’ve expended enough ammo to take down a tank.”
Unless I could come up with a plausible lie, I’d have to tell him about the spaceship buried out back. Bugger. I rapid-fired three 9-millimeter hollow points at a Puffer. Shifted the AG Grabber to the downed Puffer and fried it. Sighted another Puffer and repeated the process, treating them to the AntiGrav energies as fast as I killed them.
Mateo said into my earbud, “Bot-A identified. It has SS armor-piercing warheads and it’s targeting the office.”
