Meanwhile, I was now protected by a flap of material constructed from part of a space-capable warship. I was effectively shielded from anything he might be carrying. Lucky, that. Because he was holding a 40-caliber H&K, a mid-war weapon created for close-in work against the Russian bloc in Eastern Europe. I’d been right. A blow-’em-to-hell-and-back, down-and-dirty, leave-a-message-splattered-on-the-walls weapon.
“Nice,” he said. Outlaws might use pulse weapons in wartime, but they were all gun nuts at heart. And the Para Gen was a made-man’s fantasy gun.
The motion revealing the haft of a knife in a hip sheath, he put away the down-and-dirty gun. I didn’t put away the Para Gen. He walked over, watching as the barrel followed him. He chuckled as if having an auto-targeting system and enough ammo to rip apart an elephant was amusing. He stopped in front of the barrel, and it was pointed at his solar plexus. I returned to my chair, feet up like before. Shoved the extra beer across to him with my boot. It slid with a smooth sound, leaving behind a trail of water. The stouts had been on a separate table leaf and hadn’t flown into the desert air. I’d never waste good beer.
I drank down half of mine. He looked over my weapons as he popped the top and drank his. Stopped. Lowered the bottle. Studied me. His eyes changed. The lie had been perfect. But that was when I knew I’d screwed up. I just didn’t know how bad.
He blew a smoke ring. I didn’t care much for most tobacco, but good quality cigars were an exception. The smoke and the scent fit him. Something like longing filled me. Longing was dangerous. My wrist itched. I narrowed my eyes at him. Not that he could tell much behind my orange lenses.
He tapped ash. Talked around the cigar. “I’m looking for a kutte.”
Holy hell.
“Oh?”
“Special kutte. Been missing a while. Tracking sensor was activated a week ago.”
I had admitting to knowing about Outlaw Militia Warriors, so I couldn’t say I didn’t know what he was talking about. Pops’ OMW kutte was in the vault, vacuum-sealed. I hadn’t touched it. No one had. Not even air had touched it. No way it had been activated.
If Harlan had been decomposing inhiskutte, it was a goner and I was screwed. OMWs didn’t burn kuttes except at a proper ceremony.
However. Pops’ kutte wasn’t the only one on site.
I set my mouth as if I was thinking through inventory; I figured it out fast. My kutte was hanging in my wardrobe. It had a few ancient wartime sensors implanted in the patches, warnings about fumes from gas-attacks, a radiation sensor, that sort of thing. All of them had gone offline years ago as the batteries finally died. But there was one particular sensor, one I hadn’t thought about in years, that had been put together by Pops just before he passed, after I’d been swarmed by bicolors and after I’d had my run-in with a Mama-Bot, but before I’d had to run. If its battery had survived the war and the years . . .
I blinked behind my sunglasses and took a slow breath of dry desert air.
“Triggered a week ago? What triggers it?” I asked, as fear began to glide across my shoulders and down my spine. Because I already knew.
“PRC warriors or bots,” Jagger said casually. Too casually. His eyes watching me intently.
Since there were no more warriors from the People’s Republic of China left alive this far east, that meant an autobot was nearby.
A PRC warbot was on my land. APerker. Its presence had triggered the sensor and notified the mother chapter I was in trouble.
I came slowly upright. Dropped my feet.
As Mateo processed the same things I had, he cursed into my earbud, softly, long, and inventively. His voice carried anger, as much as his metallic voice allowed. Mateo hated Perkers and with good reason.
I looked at the hunter cats. They were no longer looking at me. Or the OMW. They were tracking something. Cat heads swung back and forth as they accumulated info and stored it in their linked consciousness. Something besides the enforcer was on the property.
Bloody damn hell.
In my peripheral vision, I tracked the cats as I put it all together.
Each PRC warbot—Perkersin the lingo—was unique, created by the massive things the U.S. military called Mama-Bots. They were built according to a bot algorithm only another bot could understand. The PRC Mama-Bots had pulled themselves out of the waters of Possession Sound, Washington, and begun destroying everything in their paths. With the detritus of destroyed cities, their mechanical nanobots built Perker Crawlers. The Crawlers crawled off the Mama-Bot assembly lines by the thousands and hitched a ride on anything that moved, crossing the country, moving east until they found a place that looked nice, a town or small city, which they destroyed and took apart to make more of themselves. Or, they buried themselves in the soil like mines, hidden where they could stay for years.
Each Crawler had a timer or trigger that set it off. When activated, they’d dig themselves out of the soil, like locusts or cicadas, and go hunting. Find a target. Destroy it. Perker Crawlers could be the size of a tank or as small as a wheelbarrow, but none had been seen in the West Virginia desert in more than five years, mostly because there was only stone near about, no soil to bury themselves in. Also, they had to travel to get here, andherewas the middle of freaking nowhere. Crawler AIs were smart. They went to cities where they could cause mega-damage, not into a desert of stone.
Unless one had been targeted at me, or deliberately dropped off near here, and something had triggered it to come hunting me. And the Perker then set off the kutte. The fear-sweat trickling down my spine went cold in the heat.
“A week ago,” I clarified softly, “you say the sensor you’re looking for was triggered. By a Perker.”
Aweekagoa Perker had entered my land. My kutte had sent out an alarm to OMW central. Yet Mateo and I and our exquisite security system hadn’t received the alarm or spotted the Perker. Because we hadn’t been looking. We’d gotten sloppy.
Bloody damn, bloody damn, bloodydamn!
In my earbud, Mateo suggested a sexual activity that was anatomically impossible by anything with bones. I rolled to my feet, slamming my ungloved hand into the war-sleeve at my side. It clamped around my hand, forearm, and molded to fit up to my bicep, the scales adjusting to my slender form instead of the muscular dead soldier I’d taken it from. Moving faster and smoother than pure-human. Way faster. I aimed my weapon at my assassin, and a piercing green laser centered on his chest with a soft hum and latched on.
