Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,12
my glasses, my eyes darted, searching, seeing nothing. My body tensed to make the rush to the airlock door and the armored-and-weaponized office. But between my position and the office there was a wide-open space, no cover, and Jagger.
Mateo needed to detect the Perker Crawler, or Crawlers, before I moved. To Mateo I said, “Do a stills comparison. Look for something that didn’t get caught by the perimeter motion sensors, moving too slow for the monitors, a Crawler, something that’s in a different place every time an auto shot is taken.” The sensors were set to go off if anything moved more than two centimeters an hour. The security system took pics every fifteen minutes no matter what.
Jagger’s body didn’t change, but his eyes narrowed as he took in my demand about a Crawler warbot.
“Anybody can survive,” I said to Jagger, pushing him, needing to push something, fight someone, my body flooding with chemicals and adrenaline. “You know how to fight, Asshole?”
“I was born fightin’.”
“Yeah? You fight many Crawlers when you were wearing diapers?”
“No sign of Crawlers,” Mateo said, “no sign of entry point.”
Asshole puffed once more, but he didn’t look so amused or relaxed now. “I’ve taken on a Perker Crawler. It’s been a good five years since I saw a slow-bot.”
The Mama-Bot Perkers had made thousands of Crawlers. No way had they all been destroyed.
“Same for me,” I said. “Crawlers don’t have good hiding space here.”
“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