Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,30
satellites. So powering the main WIMP engines would be dangerous; it might draw attention to the junkyard. Instead, I would slowly power up a backup engine, and even more slowly transfer power from the SunStar to my equipment, batteries, and pre-war weaponry that—I hoped—no one could trace. But first, I had to make the power transfer happen.
“Where did the Crawler get in?” I asked Mateo.
A single screen opened in the center of my faceplate, showing me a dusty, brownish, squat warbot, slowly crossing the border, the time-date marker a week ago. The original Crawler had all sorts of devices protruding from its carapace. There would have been dozens more devices and weapons inside on foldouts, all of them capable of independent drive and lethal measures. It was seventy-five or so centimeters high, less than that side to side and back to front, roughly squarish but with rounded edges. It was still that size when it entered the spaceship. What emerged three days later were two babies, each more than half the original’s size. They had taken on mass. From the spaceship.
“It entered the exterior rear engine compartment,” Mateo replied. “So far as I can tell, the Crawler never made it to the bridge or to engineering. It spent all its time in the shielding bay, breaking up a spy drone.”
“Copy.”
I input the code Mateo had set when we first accessed the ship—Mateo, four, eight, one, six, alpha tango delta. I placed a palm over the viber, and my face against the scanner. The hatch opened with a measured whoosh and I stepped inside. Four cats slipped in behind me, Notch’s tail tip almost getting caught when the hatch closed with a sense of finality. He was moving great for a cat who had been nearly dead. The security lights began to glow as I opened the next hatch and entered the ship proper. The sensors showed green: a breathable atmosphere. Manually, I slid my faceplate aside. All the low-water-use air-scrubber plants in the niche boxes on the walls had died years ago, as evidenced by the metallic, stale scent of the air.
In a jarring, unexpected Southern accent, SunStar’s AI said, “Welcome home, girl. ’Bout time you came to visit again.”
The accent was odd, but not something I had time to worry about now. I raced into the dimly lit ship, searching the glowing schematics on the walls for the engineering department, or what was left of it after the ship crash landed. The floors—decks?—weren’t flat or horizontal and some had holes down to other levels; the ceiling tiles had shattered upon impact and were all over the floors, and the walls were cracked. All of it had worsened over time, making traversing the ship physically demanding and precarious. Sprinting down the halls (or decks, or passageways, or whatever space goers called them) was a little like racing over the blasted bedrock in the desert. I banged my shin into a chunk of wall.
“Bloody damn,” I said.
“Watch yo’ mouth,” the ship’s AI said over her speakers. Which nearly brought me to a stop.
Into my earbud, Mateo said, “Moving into position at front gate. Intruders approaching from the west. No human or mechanical aggressors noted from other directions. Barriers are up and functional, leading to a single defensive point. All tire shredders and tracked wheel-disrupters are up and functional. Office weapons are auto-trained on front entrance. But all automatic armaments and defensive measures are slow to respond. We are seriously low on power, Shining.”
I dropped into the engineer’s seat, hating that I was safe back here and Mateo was out front, facing an unknown onslaught alone. An attack with tech and hardware that might be better than what we could use—assuming the Angels had PRC weapons—and still stay hidden from sat-surveillance. I could only hope the upgrades we had done on Mateo’s suit and on the property were going to be enough. I strapped in, knowing that CAIT’s command center wouldn’t respond unless all the I’s were dotted and T’s were crossed.
Mateo said, “Grabber in position. Power, Shining. I need power.”
From his tone, his suit had injected him with enough ’roids and swamped him with enough synth-pheromones to enrage a rhino.
“Powering up SunStar’s miniaturized backup WIMP-anti-WIMP particle processor engine,” I said, watching the readouts. “Ionized neodymium is present in sufficient quantities to generate antigravity and power. Initiating warmup on WIMP and transfer systems.”
“Copy. Make it fast. ARVACs indicate it’s not the Law. Not the Gov. It’s . . . It’s a private