Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,47

the only one who could do what I was trying.

Tears dried fast in the desert air. I waggled the bloody cuisse, tapping it against Mateo’s suit to spread the blood-scent. The Puffers in the warbot suit fell still for a dozen heartbeats as their micro sensors addressed the presence of blood and my own half-mech, half-bio, mutated nanos. The Puffers attacked at full speed, about twenty centimeters a minute. I led them out of the suit and gave them the cuisse to suck on. Their nanobots would harvest my blood protein and if Mateo’s and my speculations were right, I’d be able to control the Puffers. And the cats, especially Tuffs and her three best friends now that they had all drunk my blood on the spaceship. And Jagger? Maybe. And possibly Jolene, from the one time I entered her, and more so now that I’d bled inside her command sleeve. And maybe I’d someday be able to control the office and Gomez too.

Just like Clarisse controlled the team with her. That was what I’d seen in the upside-down eyes of my cat spy in the Mammoth. The way she moved. Everyone touching her. The way they hung on her every word. She had claimed them, enthralled them, and unlike the way I felt about thralls serving me, Clarisse had made them slaves.

I held out a hand to the Puffers and pulled at them through my blood.

The Puffers came to me, slowed and stopped a hand’s breadth away. I had seen the Puffers talking to each other. So had Jolene. That meant that these mini-bots had adaptive AIs. There was a chance that, by now, they might have comms and even be able to understand English, which would be very, very bad. Unless I could control them.

I pushed with my blood, envisioning what I wanted, saying, “Stasis function mode.”

The Puffers went still. Bugger. It worked. I figured that even their nanobots were unmoving, at least for a time.

I replaced my thigh armor and leaned toward Tuffs until she came close enough to touch noses. I envisioned the location and the actions I wanted her to take, saying “If you can, herd all the bots to the Grabber. I’ll decommission them as soon as I can.” She tilted her head, her whiskers scraping my cheek, looking at me like I was crazy. I might be.

To Mateo, I said, “I need to tie off the worst of your suit damage.”

Delicate, his massive arm moving with balletic grace, Mateo handed me a plaz-tie, and I threaded it through the two sides of the under-armor on his damaged foot peg, pulling the ends tight. The repair was makeshift and wouldn’t keep out a determined Puffer, but it helped. And time was passing faster and faster; I deliberately didn’t look at my chrono.

“How much damage did they do inside you?” I asked him.

“Like rats,” he said. “They chewed some stuff up. Deposited a whole bunch of nanos—thousands more than when I escaped the ship. They’re starting to reproduce, prepping to take me apart; I have maybe seventy-two hours before they reach critical mass and start to build new Puffers. I can make do until this crisis is over and we can put my suit under the AG Grabber, just like last time.” Putting the entire suit under meant taking Mateo out of the warbot again. I said nothing about that, and Mateo handed me ties to secure the two Puffers.

“About the CO thing?” Mateo said.

“Later,” I said, attaching the Puffers to my belt and standing. “Like you said, after this crisis is over.”

Using all six limbs like a spider, Mateo pushed himself to his feet and stood upright on his three longest limbs, well over four times my height. Stepping gracefully over skids of old vehicle parts, he moved to the back of the property. I made my way to the Grabber and turned it off, letting down the two humans I had pulled into the anti-gravity field. They landed with dual thumps. I checked for pulses and discovered both were alive, but were little more than drooling bags of biology. If I stuck them under a scanner, I’d see their brain chemistries were seriously out of whack and brain activity was erratic.

I had killed them.

I studied them closely. I would remember their faces in my dreams. That was the least I could do.

Three Puffers chased by cats trundled down nearby aisles.

Things clanged softly from Mateo’s general location. Someone shouted, the sound muffled.

Tuffs wound around