Junkyard War

JUNKYARD WARFaith HunterLore Seekers Press Copyright © 2023 Faith HunterJUNKYARD WARISBN: 978-1-62268-177-8All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information contact Lore Seekers Press, P.O. Box 4251 CRS, Rock Hill, SC 29732. Or online at www.loreseekerspress.comThis book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.Also available in Trade Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-62268-178-5.Cover illustration by Rebecca Frank, Bewitching Book Covers.Lore Seekers Press is an imprint of Bella Rosa Books.Lore Seekers Press and logo are trademarks of Bella Rosa Books. Acknowledgments No book is written in a vacuum. This novel, and the entire Junkyard Cats series, has been dependent on several people. Robert Martin, physicist and theoretical physicist-adventurer. The creator of the science behind the WIMP engines and the EntNu communications system in the Junkyard Universe. Bonnie Smietanowska, physicist. Mud Mumudes for all things plant-ish and genetic-y Brenda Rezk for breaking down genetic stuff I couldn’t understand. Lets Talk Promotions for running PR. Agent Lucienne Diver with The Knight Agency for getting me an Audible Original with the Junkyard Cats series. Editor Steve Feldberg at Audible for all the wonderful suggestions and insights, for the Audible Original. Every care has been taken to deviate not at all. Cover design by Rebecca Frank of Bewitching Book Covers. Love it! Teri Lee editor extraordinaire. And my final thanks to Lore Seekers Press for the e-book and print editions. Junkyard War “Reconnoiter via feral cats. This is a first,” Mateo said into my helmet’s communications system. There might have been humor in the words. Hard to tell through his metallic larynx. “Cats approaching outer perimeter. And they ain’t feral, CO Sugah,” Jolene said. “The pride done named themselves Felis catus destructus .” I looked up from the small screen I had opened in my helmet’s vid display. “The pride cats understand Latin?” “Prolly,” the AI back at the USSS SunStar said, in the Southern accent she chose for herself. “But Tuffs just kinda asked me for help and we came up with it together.” I didn’t know which was the worse possibility, the pride cats speaking Latin or the not-supposed-to-be-sentient-but-was AI talking with the not-supposed-to-be-sentient-but-were cats. “Fine. Whatever.” Mateo snorted. It was a grating sound I interpreted as laughter. There wasn’t much left of one side of his head, and part of his throat had been so damaged by swarming PRC nanobots that my med-bay had implanted an artificial one I’d bartered for at an illegal swap meet. Medical supplies had been hard to come by back then, and still were. Mateo also didn’t have all his limbs, which I hadn’t been able to fix, and lived most of his life in the neural-net-controlled warbot. I could practically feel him looming above me, seven and a half meters of legs, torso, and head with a meter of horizontal silk-plaz view screen. With his dynamic environmental camouflage off, the warbot suit looked like the love child of a deadly spider and a kid’s toy, and if this recce went sideways, Mateo’s suit and his battle tank, situated half a click away, might be the only reason we got out of here. “The cats got through the outer perimeter, y’all,” Jolene said. “We got visuals from both of the cameras.” Even with night-vision goggles, it was hard to tell much. The cams had been mounted on the chests of the cats’ tactical harnesses to make it harder for sensors to spot them, and they were emplaced to give us a good angle and line of sight, but there was only so much we could see with the cams at fifteen centimeters off the ground. Spy and her mate, Maul, were currently running—that crouched-predator sprint-stop-sprint, of cats—through autumn-dry prairie grasses, giving us no actual view of the target: a heavily fortified and armed World War III bunker. I fidgeted as the cats approached what had looked like a small overgrown hill in the drone flyovers we had done. It had taken us weeks to get to the stage of in-person reconnoiter and, as patient as I had been, now I was jumpy, jittery, and my armor readouts showed it. I tried to relax. Wasn’t helping. Where was the bloody damn bunker? The cats should be right on top of it. In the last weeks we had created cat-sized tac harnesses with comms systems, destroyed the nanobots infesting the Simba battle tank, checked out its systems, retrofitted hardware, added new weapons, and tied the crashed spaceship’s EntNu comms system to the tank. EntNu was based on the practical application of the science of entwined neutrinos and gave us instantaneous communication with Jolene back at the junkyard. All that, just so we could verify that the bunker had been taken over by our enemy, the MSA’s Clarisse Warhammer, and maybe get a look inside. Amos and Mateo had done most of the preparatory muscle work. Jolene had spent the time collecting intel on the motorcycle clubs, while Cupcake (and sometimes I) talked to intermediaries and put together the upcoming negotiations. There was a long list of potential trade items to cement the safety and cooperation of the participants—the leaders of the most successful biker clubs in what was left of the US. My plans were fluid, my goals even more so, and what I discovered from this current recce would change what I negotiated for at the parley. Not that the biker club VIPs knew everything about the upcoming meeting. They didn’t even know who was invited. The Outlaw Militia Warriors and the Hells Angels thought they were just gathering to divide up territory and discuss an ordinary war of guns in a battle against the MS Angels. They didn’t know about the prisoner we wanted to rescue or what Clarisse Warhammer really was. The MSA was what was left after the West Coast