Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,17
him over the engine. He corrected his balance and kept pushing Bot-A, not touching it himself. Hoping the extra distance would keep him free of nano contamination. He wasn’t even breathing hard when he said, “In position. Leaving the Bot and the V-8 for AntiGrav decontamination. Going after Bot-B.”
I positioned the AG Grabber over the Crawler and the engine and waited. Our two minutes were nearly up. The Bots’ nanos would activate in seconds.
Using an electric engine this time, Mateo shoved the second Crawler over, stacked the electric engine on top, and went back with a steel-bristle broom and a heavy-duty dustpan sufficient for picking up hemp-plaz and synth-metal parts.
“Ten seconds,” I warned. He emptied the scoop under the Grabber and stepped away. “Frying it,” I said.
The Grabber lifted the thousand kilograms, give or take, as easily as it had lifted the Puffers. I set it to cook for an hour—which would leave us with a lot of time we couldn’t fry other stuff, but I couldn’t see another option. The energy usage was draining my reserves. Timing was going to be dicey, but the sun was still up and the solar panels all showed green. They hadn’t been hit by the weapons fire, so I was still collecting energy. “What about you?” I asked—meaning what do we do about any nanos that might have infested Mateo’s warbot body. Again.
“Running diagnostics,” he said. “I’ll set the suit to scan me every hour. If I see something, I’ll cut it off and you can fry it. Then I’ll reassemble it.”
Mateo sounded calm and matter-of-fact. Clearly, he had been thinking about protocol should he ever be infested again. He hadn’t freaked when I mentioned Puffers. He was doing good. Real good. That said a lot about his improving mental capabilities and health. I’d spent a lot of money on Berger-chip plug-ins to help restore his brain and give him back his memories. Money well spent.
“Copy that,” I said. “Keep me informed.”
“Got another batch of cats on a Puffer,” he said. “Screen forty-seven.”
I flipped to that screen and saw four cats, all female, stalking a Puffer. The Puffer was a little larger than most, with a square device on top instead of a weapon. That made it a recon-Puffer. It was hiding under a shipping container full of folded flight wings—part of a batch I had lucked into last month and hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. The shipping container made a nice shady resting place for the Puffer. It also allowed the cats to slink up on it unobserved by any sensors on the Puffer’s carapace.
Jagger leaned in closer beside the defensive control seat. The scent of sweat and sunscreen and engine oil and road dust and cigar and man wafted from him—a remembered scent, distant but . . . interesting. I breathed him in. My own, no-longer-strictly-human body reacted.
“What are they doing?” he asked.
“Hunting.”
“But they’re cats. They have to know there’s no protein benefit to the Puffers. No caloric benefit either.”
Because that was why cats hunted. Food. Normal cats, that is. I spared him a slant-eyed grin before returning to the screen. “Yeah, on the surface it’s a waste of time. But a Crawler—an interloper—entered their territory, divided in two, had babies, and went after the source of their food and water. Me. In cat hierarchy, I successfully killed the Perker parents, proving I’m the alpha cat. Based on that evidence, they have to kill its babies or the babies may grow up and kill me. And they’ll go hungry.”
“You’re implying the cats have intellect, the ability to reason, and sentience.”
“Shining,” Mateo warned in my ear.
My smile faded. Jagger already knew too much. He’d seen the office. Worse, he’d touched things in the office. No matter what happened, it was already too late for him. If he somehow lived, Mateo would want to take him out rather than let him tell the Outlaws what he’d learned. At best, if Jagger left the junkyard at all, it would have to be a vastly altered Jagger. I held in my sigh.
“Yeah,” I said to Mateo and to Jagger, each for their separate comments. “Watch.”
The female cats were a mixed bag in terms of coloration—one with wide black and gray stripes; one with narrow, tone-on-tone gray stripes; one with orange stripes and a white spot under her chin; and one with splotches of brown and white and black. The tortoiseshell was the original matriarch of the pride; she had strange, long, bobcat-like tufts on her