Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,50

I tossed the woman in the med-bay and closed the lid, setting the protocols for triage and advanced life support. I hit the office control for Level Five Decontamination. I mopped her blood from the office floor fast. She hadn’t been swarmed by bicolors and bitten by a queen, so she wasn’t a queen herself, like Clarisse Warhammer and me. She couldn’t spread her own nanobots, but I wasn’t taking chances. I’d figure out a way to use the Grabber in here as soon as I could, so I would never accidently infect another human.

“Estimated thirty-second warning until attack, Sweet Thang,” Jolene said.

I threw myself back into my Com seat. “Mateo, you clear?”

“Affirmative. I am at the Grabber, tossing twenty-seven Puffers under for deactivation. With your two, that makes twenty-nine for this burst. Your cats are handy herders.”

That was a lot. And . . . that meant Tuffs and the cats had understood they needed to herd the Puffers into one place. That was freaky. And kinda scary.

“Gomez, bring up shields,” I said.

But before Gomez could comply, the MS Angels hit me with everything they had. The ground shook. The noise was incredible. The vibrations clattered my teeth and rattled my bones. The shields went up sparking. The noise decreased, the Bug shields absorbing and deflecting everything. Orange light filled the office.

The cats purred. Jagger snored.

The Tac Vehicles, the mini-bot, and the Mammoth moved in, toward the office. I counted the minutes and seconds for the satellite to drop below the horizon. Hoping the shields held.

The enemy bombardment continued.

I lost a lot of scrap. I lost Tesla engines, copper wiring, the newly purchased AGR Tesla, and even a stack of old cast-iron bathtubs. The barrage cost me a lot of money. But the shields held. And Mateo’s suit sensors read stable. Wherever he was hiding it was in a safe location.

Over the noise, Jolene said, “Satellite declining below horizon. It will be safe to fire the B/B array in three, two, one.”

“Drop shields. Gomez. Target invaders and fire B/B array.”

“Roger that. Firing.”

The weapons fired. A dozen blasts of dark matter particle beams swept the vehicles out front and held there, that peculiar orange glow brightening the entire junkyard. The attackers’ weapons stopped. The engines stopped running. Everything stopped.

The temperature in the office went up twenty degrees in four seconds and the warning monitors began to blare. Cold night air blew in from outside through the retrofitted vents, hard blasts, the fan engines whining.

The cats went silent, all eyes on Tuffs and me.

The B/B array used dark energy—physics and tech no earth scientist understood yet, mostly because they didn’t have a functional array to work with and no Bug would tell them. The only thing anyone on Earth or in the solar system knew about the particles was that they sounded like “BeeBee” in Buglish. I, however, had a Bug ship, a small one that had downed the SunStar. Access to the Bug ship gave me knowledge about how to operate the array, if not how it actually worked. It also made the perfect office and safe house, as long as I could keep its presence here a secret. Snug as a bug in a rug. Something Pops used to say to me when he tucked me in at night, before the war.

It took a good five minutes to fry the people in the vehicles. I had less than that between satellites. I watched as someone jumped from the Mammoth and died, his body leaping and bouncing as he boiled. It was kinda gross.

Tuffs jumped into my lap. She put her nose to mine and stared.

“I don’t know how it works,” I told her. “But it makes things hot, especially organic things.”

It boiled them in their own juices. It didn’t do much to Hemp-plaz. It didn’t do much to metal except make it hot, though not hot enough to melt it, damage the temper, or warp it, or not in the short term. Just hot enough to boil and sear flesh. It was a bio-specific weapon. It damaged nothing except living creatures.

“Stay away from it until I tell you it’s cooled.”

Tuffs showed me images of bodies. Dead humans. I got the concept of Good protein.

“You can have the bodies once Mateo pulls them out of sight.”

Tuffs made a gruff sound of pleasure and leaped to the floor to stare around at the members of her pride.

Time passed. Jagger snored. I got up from my chair and stood over him. He was