Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,15

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 motors. 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