Mateo hissed out a breath, metallic and grinding and full of fury. “Searching.”
Puffers were attendant, automatic, weaponized mini-bots that could slide out of the Perkers’ receptacles and go hunting on their own. Mini-recon-bots, or hand grenades on wheels, or specialized cutting and dismembering systems on wheels, all with versatile, origami-inspired construction, allowing the wheels to collapse inward, and the mini-bot to fold into a flat configuration, like a horseshoe crab. NASA had invented them for Mars explorers. Mama-Bots had stolen the concept and weaponized the Puffers. Puffers swarmed like bicolor ants, and because they were solar powered, and had mech-nanotech self-healing, self-altering, Puffer-building capabilities, they simply never, ever stopped. They had to be crushed or pried open one by one and blasted with AntiGrav to kill them.
Unless someone had a secret weapon.
Or was a secret weapon.
“Let me know when you see them.”
“You can’t,” Mateo snarled. “You don’t even know if it will work.”
“If I don’t try, they’ll kill us eventually. The only way you fought the nanobots inside your suit was to close it down, set it to run on auto, and hunt them one at a time. And that was in a confined space where they couldn’t run and hide and reproduce and come back with more bots. It took months and you nearly died. Out here we’ll lose for sure.”
They were bad, horrible months. The nanos had been inside his suit a long time before they had reproduced enough to start making changes to the suit. And they had eaten parts of him before he figured out that AntiGrav forces would destroy nanos. We’d had to blast his entire suit.
“We have an entire junkyard for them to hide in,” I said, trying to convince him.
“You have a witness. You cannot.”
I thought about Buck Harlan in the Tesla. He died getting me a message, probably the message that the Perker Crawler was on the way—a death sentence. The Perker now knew I had a spaceship on the property, which would motivate it even more to destroy me. And the Asshole? He was a black hole of uncertain possibilities, none of them good.
Someone knew I was here. But that someone didn’t know what I could do.
“Shining. We don’t even know if it will work. Try it my way first.” Mateo stopped, fired. When the dust started to settle and I hadn’t answered, he added, “Please.” Mateo didn’t beg. Not ever. About anything.
His polite request was a first and it made me melt inside—an angry melt, but still a melt.
“Fine,” I snarled. “According to the screens, Bot-A is nearly in position to take me. Bot-B has stopped and is waiting for A to achieve attack position. Concur?”
“Concur. I’m in position with a clear line of fire to both. On three I’ll lay down attack and cover fire and you get into the office. If you see Jagger, take him with you.”
“You sure about him?”
“Hell, no. But he’s human and he’s OMW. We don’t leave either to a Perker. One.”
My body went liquid, as battle chemicals and human adrenalin flushed into my bloodstream like a flash flood. Still wearing the Dragon Scale armor sleeve, I slammed the Para Gen to full auto and swiped control of the weapon to Mateo.
“Two.”
Crouching, I braced my feet. Placed the palm of the war-sleeve on the AG Grabber support.
“Three! Gogogogogogo.”
I was already moving, shoving off, the Dragon scale sleeve stretching and contracting, throwing me across the wide-open space and through the air. Jarring my shoulder, spine, and pelvis, but making me freaking move.
Mateo fired, a double barrage of ammo. I went deaf. My feet touched down in the dirt three-and-a-half meters from my previous perch. Legs bent. Thrusted into a dead sprint. Battle reflexes, honed and augmented by what I’d become.
The Crawler bots fired. Blasted the air where I’d been and the front of the office. But I was inside the protective airlock. Heaving myself inside. Faster than pure human.
“Where’s Jagger?” I shouted over the sound of gunfire and the airlocks closing.
“Searching.”
“Screens!” I said into the odd silence, slapping a headset on and slamming my body into the over-sized defensive Neuro-Based-Pressure command seat designed for space travel. The Dragon Scale war-sleeve slipped into the control unit and connected. Every screen in the junkyard came online. On three of them, I saw cats fighting with Puffers. Bloody hell. Puffers. On one screen, two striped females were a ball of fur, fangs, and claws against tech. The gray fighter male was rolling across the dirt with another Puffer. A third mini-bot was disassembled next to the body of its cat attacker.
That thing killed my cat!
“Where are they?” I snarled. Bot-A and Bot-B had disappeared. Except for the cats, patrolling in stalking groups of three or four, nothing moved.
Using remote activation, I dropped the hot-as-a-furnace AGR Tesla with a whomp I felt though my feet, and redirected the AG Grabber, wishing I had a portable model. The Grabber arm swung clockwise. I had to blast the injured Puffers before their AIs ordered their nanos to rebuild. Mateo’s painful experience suggested I had around two minutes before the reconstruction of the broken Puffers commenced.
“Jagger is behind the office,” Mateo said. “Four meters from the back hatch.”
I flipped switches and brought up the rear screens. Jagger was holding a bleeding cat in the curve of one elbow and his weapon in the other hand. The cigar was nowhere to be seen.
“Is he clear?”
“Affirmative.”
I engaged the back airlock to prepare to open and flashed the green light above it three times. Then three more times. It caught Jagger’s eyes and he nodded, knowing—hoping?—he was on camera. I flashed the light once. Waited a beat, flashed it a second time. Waited a beat. Giving him a rhythm. Something flew through the air from behind Jagger. The office array sights identified it as a spinning fragmentary grenade. The war-sleeve targeted the frag and fired. A small laser drilled across the spinning surface and through the small bomb. Still four meters out, it exploded.
Jagger ducked.
The green light flashed again. The airlock hatch popped open.
Jagger sprinted and dove into the airlock. I closed the outer hatch and took out another mini-grenade launcher. Spotted the Puffers that had fired them, both rolling beneath the fuselage of a Boeing-constructed warplane.
Damn.
I punched open the inner hatch, and Jagger rolled inside before it opened halfway and I punched it closed. I didn’t look around. There wasn’t time. With the war-sleeve, I lifted the AG Grabber over the closest downed Puffers out front and engaged the mechanism. It was hard to kill Puffers, but if you managed to rupture the exoskeleton and then hit it with AntiGrav, it fried the internal nanobots. Without the nanos, the Puffer wasn’t coming back. The Puffers rose into the air and vibrated as the energies hit them.
Jagger settled to one knee. He was breathing hard, trying to blow off toxic adrenaline breakdown chemicals, but he still saw too much. “Where the hell did you get all this?” he asked, meaning the office, the launching systems that had rolled out to fire the weapons, the recoilless firing systems, the space-worthy tech of the screens and command board. And the roomy, extra-extra-large NBP seat. The chair was clearly not designed for a human. But this was a scrap yard. Scrappers could get stuff others couldn’t. At least that was what I hoped he might conclude.