“Still no visual confirmation of Perker Crawlers.”
I had never seen this OMW before. If Jaggerwasan OMW. But what if he was someone else? A plant. He was still targeted. If he moved, he was dead. But we didn’t have much time. Not if we had a Crawler on the property. The cats looked back and forth. Two Crawlers. Yeah.Bugger.
“Who’s prez now?” I asked.
Asshole’s eyes narrowed.
“I’ve got a video trail,” Mateo said, grim as rust. “Medium-small Crawler. Still shots show it approached the border two weeks ago moving less than two-point-five centimeters an hour. Once over the border, it sped up. According to current readings, your asshole’s right. Your jacket sent out an alert seven days ago, and it’s still pulsing.”
Unless I could spin this, and Jagger bought my story and went away peaceably, the Outlaws would know who I was and where I was. And it was possible that Jagger had been doing high-altitude ARVAC flyovers. I had defenses against Auto Remote Viewing Air Craft, but I kept their notification sensors turned down. With all the raptors around, eating toxic rats and bats that crawled and flew out of the mine cracks, I had set the parameters low. Too low.
Bloody damn.
“And Shining,” Mateo said in my ear. “I messed up. Bad. The crawler found theSunStar. The slow-bot released one of theSunStar’s hatches and stayed inside for nearly seventy-two hours. When it came out, there were two of them with more cumulative mass than when they went in. I’m running ship internal scans. Eventually, I’ll figure out what the Crawler plundered through and stole, but for now, the slow-bots have augmented themselves with space-going tech or shielding. And they’re both missing.”
Which meant the Perker Crawler had started out as a single slow-bot, stolen space-going equipment, and its mech-nanos had reconfigured it, breaking down into two smaller Crawlers before it came hunting me.Two.
I looked at the cats. They were slinking back, but still watching two different locations.Bloody damn. It—they—had found the office. Perkers were here. Targeting me. Flop sweat trickling down my spine turned to ice. I could shoot Jagger and get inside alone but if he was OMW they would send backup, and no one who took out an enforcer lived to tell the tale. Also, a second fighter might be handy short term. If he was who he said he was.
“Who’s prez now?” I repeated to Jagger, flexing the Dragon Scale armor as a threat, my voice taking on tension as I calculated all my odds. “And who do you report to?”
“Faria. I report to McQuestion.”
I chuckled. The command structure of the OMWs had shifted, but only high-level made-men knew it. The prez of the Outlaws used to be important, back before the war. Now he was the PR head, the one the cops and the mediathoughtwas the top dog, while the man with the real power was the vice-president, and his name was never given. The VP was always referred to as McQuestion. Asshole had just proven himself the real deal, or as close as I could get without scanning him and his tattoos with a viber, which would mean him taking off his clothes.
In my peripheral vision, a cat leaped into the air. Others did the same. I tensed, not knowing why they—
Gunfire rang out over the junkyard.
Asshole leaped toward the office, drawing his weapon, dropping to the earth. Wartime reflexes.
Mateo cursed.
I fell into a crouch, mostly hidden beneath the rotating table, and slid the Para Gen from auto-targeting to manual. I had forty-six centimeters of ammo. Not enough. Good thing I’d put the weapon sleeve on. I flipped a switch on my 2-Gen glasses and gave myself access to Mateo’s screens. It was a dizzying array and had taken months for me to use the glasses without tossing my cookies, but now I could follow Mateo’s tech vision.
Enemy rapid fire followed. Full auto. Short bursts. The third volley of shots raced across the front of the office, dinging and pinging and ricocheting away, not penetrating its armor. The Crawlers and my unwanted visitor probably now knew the office wasn’t an ordinary building.
“Narrowing search patterns,” Mateo said, sounding more contained now that battle had begun and his suit had injected him with ’roids and flooded his body with synth-pheromones.
The Crawlers fired again, destroying my fake satellite receivers. Plastic and bits of copper and old computer parts flew everywhere. I’d stuffed the fakes with parts to make someone think they had taken an outdated system offline. The EntNu stuff was inside the spaceship—where the Crawler had been.Damn. The Perkers fired, hitting my rain catcher on the roof. Not that it had rained in the last two years, but still.
Bastards.
Jagger sprinted, now behind a stack of old engine blocks ready for crushing. Smart move.
“Located,” Mateo said. “Perker Bot-A is confirmed at fifteen meters from you at your two o’clock. Perker Bot-B is at your six, twelve meters and closing.”
Like I’d thought. Behind me.Bloody hell.
Mateo’s vid screens divided, showing two images, current date, and time. I watched as the matte-black half-bots trundled toward the office at full speed. The larger bot, Bot-A, moved three centimeters a minute. The smaller one, Bot-B, had fewer foldouts but was twice as fast. Bot-A had more weapons, Bot-B had speed.
On a third screen, I saw a dark hulking reflection moving in on three legs, lifting himself over ancient transmissions, rusting body parts, racks of hatches and doors, a century or so of vehicles, most of which were on-site long before the war. The warbot Mateo was on the move in stealth mode, his long legs rising and setting down, his three longest limbs providing balance like a spider’s legs to facilitate both speed and silence. His warbot suit looked like an old kid’s toy, only a lot more deadly.
“Can you get a shot?” I asked.
To my right, a cat—the gray male—leaped across a pathway, three meters in the air, and disappeared. A striped female skulked on the ground around a stack of disintegrating tires.
They were hunting the Crawlers? Why?
