Morning People!
As promised, I hereby offer a snippet from the first pages of JUNKYARD WAR, #3 of the Junkyard Cats novella series.
I am only on page 20 so don’t expect is soon, and this is a REALLY rough draft version so ignore typos and anything else that pops your bubble.
“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 suit’s vid display. “The pride cats understand Latin?”
“Prolly,” the AI back at the USSS SunStar said in her self-chosen Southern accent. “But Tuffs jist 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 to the 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 warbot suit. I couldn’t see his warbot in the dark with the concealed enviro camouflage pattern running, but I could practically feel him looming above me, five and half meters of legs and another two meters of torso and head with a meter of horizontal silk-plaz view screen. Camo off, looked like the love child of a deadly spider and a kid’s play toy, and if this recce went sideways, his suit might be the only reason we got out of here.
“The cats are inside the outer perimeter, y’all,” Jolene said. “We got visuals from both of the cameras.”
Meanwhile, OF CLAWS AND FANGS will be out in May 2022.
Tea!
Faith