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 I’d stuffed the fakes with parts to make someone think they had taken an outdated system offline.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