Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,24

Rosemary Clooney.

“Makes it easier,” Mateo said, picking up where he left off. “We won’t have to burn the body. I’ll come up with the cover. Meantime don’t admit to being Shining. If he lives, it would make it harder to mind-wipe him. From now on, your name is Heather Anne Jilson.”

“I don’t look like a Heather Anne,” I grouched.

“Tough.” The printer began spitting out documents. “Heather Anne Jilson was the name of the girl whose mother was being beaten up by Darson, the one saved by an enforcer. The one who supposedly died in the Battle of Seattle.”

His brain didn’t work on every level all the time, but Mateo was thorough about security. Sometimes scary thorough. I paged through the thin brown hemp-docs on the printer. Heather now had a full ID, background, and history, all documented. I stuffed the docs into my personal storage area and pulled out my kutte. I hadn’t looked at it in ages and it was way too small to fit now. I’d been spider-monkey small at twelve and had put on a quarter meter and a few kilos since then. I pulled off the old sensors, found the one that was activated when the Crawler crossed over the property boundary, and ripped it off. I put them all into a box. I added some older sensors and a few ancient digital camera parts. Some early EntNu Coms, earth-to-space hardware. The box now looked as if I stored small electronic scrap in it.

I placed the box on the cabinet, knowing that the decision on how to proceed had been made for me the moment Jagger started to serve me. It was a damn shame. He was interesting. But he’d live or he’d die. Either way, I couldn’t keep him around and I had to make sure he remembered what I wanted him to.

I set the table for two. Which was really weird. I had never done that before. I checked the power levels on the office weapons that Jagger didn’t know about yet. Stirred the soup. Realized I was nervous. There were little pinpricks all over me and my wrist was all but buzzing. My system was flooding with battle pheromones and mating chemicals and my breath rate and heart rate were increasing. I fought to push my reaction down, to control my anxiety and my need, to decrease the secretions of chemicals and nanos through my pores.

I was never around people for long. I made sure that I never had to deal with this part of me. I didn’t have the control I might have if I went into town more often.

“So. I’m Matt?” Mateo said, making sure I had chosen.

“Yeah. Matt,” I said flatly. “I didn’t mean to transition Jagger.”

“You never do.”

“A transition is better for him than being dead. If I can alter his memories enough to keep us safe,” I amended.

“If he lives through the process, maybe,” Mateo said, his metallic voice managing to convey both doubt and mockery.

I rubbed my wrist and said softly, “That was mean.”

But Mateo was right. Surviving the transition was no sure thing. Yet I had lived through it twice.

The first time was when I was twelve, near the end of the first year of the war. I was swarmed by deadly genetically-engineered male ants. They bit off parts of me and stung me full of poison. Then the queen got me, depositing her DNA-based bio-nanobots. The bio-nanos entered my bloodstream and attacked me on the genetic level—just as they had been designed to do to the ants. When I somehow survived the initial transition, the bio-nanos continued to modify me.

In the second incident, I got exposed to a different kind of nano when a bigger, newer model Chinese Mama-Bot crawled out of the bay and attacked what was left of Seattle. I’d been the only OMW small enough to get inside the Mama-Bot in an attempt to disable it. Once inside, I’d been attacked by Puffers, and their mechanical nanos—mech-nanos—got into a cut. The bio-nanos already in my system adapted and modified them too.

I’d survived the two transitions but they had left me what I was now—not superhuman, but no longer just human. With abilities that humans didn’t have.

Eventually the half-bio/half-mech-nanos began to secrete through my skin, driven to seek out and modify others. All but one of the people I’d accidently or purposely touched after that had died in their own transition process. Including my father, who I had tried to save from the