The Unknown - Chapter 10 by nova

Chapter 10

I didn't think about it very long, maybe all one beat before I switched my brain over to processing important stuff like the fact I was hungry, my feet hurt, and now I was going to have to come up with a new plan or two or three. I didn't bother moving of my horse haunch chair, instead I did a quick scan of most of the scene and focused on how Kat and Ty were doing. He was digging. She was staring at the hole he was creating. An efficient allocation of labor. Not.

Once upon a time I would have got up and suggested she find something to do or her squad leader would have. I let it go. I liked her, a lot, and I had also rediscovered sex with her and found I liked that a lot too. So I sat and ran what what No Name had told me and what I thought it meant.

Killing me was no big deal. There were more of them which wasn't a big deal either. What it did mean was who ever was in charge was somewhere else, probably in town or camped near it. It also told me they had enough people that this leader could send eight people out and still have enough left to maintain security. He, or less likely but still possible she, would have come in person with them unless there was enough people left behind that they didn't feel comfortable leaving. That meant more then ten but less than twenty as the grazing and hunting around here wasn't good enough for more then that. Even then they would have to move every couple of days.

The feds? This was a long way for them to reach out and they were having problems elsewhere. The people they had in town had been for a negotiation and business venture, not a strike team, or they wouldn't have had to hire contractors for security. They might send in a team to kill me, god knows they hated my guts enough, but I didn't plan on sticking around long.

Their advantage was the same as it had always been, tech, but I was willing to gamble that they wouldn't send any of their remaining drones for a couple of days. That gave me a window of 48 hours to wrap it up here and begin the advance back to Salt Lake.

Once I got us into Saint territory the drone masters would be less willing to follow due to political reasons. It also helped that the Saints had their own anti drone tech and didn't hesitate to use it. Like everything else the feds created, drones weren't cheap but countermeasures were. Directed EMP blasts were easy to do and if you weren't using electronics the advantage was all yours. I figured that was a large enough window of time that I could get my old boots back, eat, get laid, and kill some more people.