Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,1

bicolors could be transferred only by the main queen in a nest, not any secondary females born or added to the nest.

There were way more than thirteen on the scrap Tesla body. All males, the short bodies and small abdomens indicating their gender.

Bloody damn.

I pulled back on the red knob, slowly disengaging the AntiGravity Grabber. The vehicle settled gradually to the ground with a muted whomp. I adjusted my hat over my sweat-spiked hair and pulled on armored gauntlets that had been scavenged from an antique warbot, circa 2040. The bot had been part of the reason I had set up for business here, in the middle of nowhere. Smith’s Junk and Scrap specialized in post-war surplus and waste. The discarded bot—and the half-buried, partially-intact, US spaceship on the back lot—had been too good to pass up. The junkyard “office”—an even bigger lure, once I figured out what it really was—had become my home and hideaway.

The warbot gauntlets were oversized and reached my elbows, but they worked just fine, slipping five miniscule needles under the skin of each hand to engage my peripheral nerves. It hurt like crap for about ten seconds, but I’d lost pain sensitivity at these particular insertion sites over the years, like calluses on my nerve endings.

In the machine hut, I found a half-empty gallon jug of Maltodine, a sodium-based, flammable substance made for killing any number of genetically modified creatures. Back in the sun, I made sure I was downwind of the vehicle and the ants, doused the Tesla in the gooey red toxin, and watched it spread. It was created to expand and wasn’t something the ants had adapted to notice as deadly. Yet. I lit and tossed an old-fashioned match at the Tesla. The fluid whooshed into flame, instantly so hot it burned blue. On fire, it spread even faster.

The bicolors screamed in unison, a terrible, high-pitched harmonic that spoke of group intelligence and communal vengeance. “Burn, you little buggers,” I muttered, watching as they rushed to try and save their pals and all burned, hot and spitting and gone. The flower-pink paint looked cheery beneath the toxic blue flames, self-healing even as the fire danced across it. The flames were pretty in my 2-Gen sunglasses as I switched back and forth between the raptor eye lenses and UV.

None of the ants made it off the Tesla’s valuable graphite epoxy trusses and hemplaz carbon-fiber composite body. Not one. Relief spread through me when the last ant died.

“My sensors are picking up Maltodine fumes,” Mateo said into my earbud. We were WIMP-powered, EntNu linked, the Entangled Dark Neutrinos providing instantaneous communication even had he been on the far side of the solar system.

Mateo was my employee. Sort of. I’d found the war vet working as slave labor in a town on the way here. I’d stolen him from his owner and given him a home. Mateo knew all my secrets. Every single one.

I tapped my ear and told him about the ants and my solution, and said, “Come hell or high water, I’m making money off this purchase.” Unspoken was the addendum: and a lot more money off the stolen, spanking brand-new, functional black-market Tesla-23B engine my contact had put in the back hatch, along with a couple of space-going pulse weapons. Mateo and I knew scrap, and the AGR and its nowhere-near-legal cargo were mega-valuable.

Scuttlebutt said the war was heating back up. Anyone with weapons and engines stood to make a nice profit. And anyone with military supplies, weapons, and scrap, needed to make sure it never fell into the wrong hands—the hands of traitors who were dealing with the enemy. I sold only to people in my network, people I trusted, and while those could be counted on one hand with fingers left over, this delivery already had buyers on both the legal market and my black-market network.

Mateo grunted, or as much of a grunt as his bio-metallic larynx could make, which was more like metal grinding and rubber squeaking. “Lunch is ready,” he added.

Satisfied, I took a break in the air-conditioned office and ate the lunch, a cold plate Mateo left in the double-sided fridge. He was mostly cy-bot now, having lost everything below the hips, part of his face, and one arm at the shoulder. He was addicted to Devil Milk, and I grew the plants in the camouflaged greenhouse at the back of the property just for him. It was the only thing that helped the military vet’s pain,