by Faith Hunter
Over my dead body.
Over Harlan’s dead body.
Assuming they were a swarming party, sent to bring back food to an established nest, that meant these bicolors had been transported a good hundred kilometers from their queen; it tended to take a few hours before the ants noticed that they didn’t have a female anymore. It took seventy-two hours to complete the transition to female. I didn’t know how long they had been away from their nest, but they would notice they needed to create a queen soon. I had to act now.
But I needed that note.
“Shining. Company,” Mateo’s synthetic voice said directly into my wireless earbud. “Bike. Unknown model. Ten klicks out. I am launching ARVACs,” he said, referring to Auto Remote Viewing Air Craft—flying drones with better-than-standard artificial intelligence and real-time viewing, part of the junkyard’s defense system.
“The Law?” I whispered, looking at Harlan’s body, the jug a handbreadth from my fingertips. I had no desire to be hauled in for questioning over a dead man I hadn’t seen in years. But I had no desire to have ants take over my junkyard. I had no desire to be swarmed again. Remembered fear shivered down my spine like thousands of tiny ant feet.
“Unproven,” he said. “One vehicle. Approaching at 54 kph. No visible backup.”
No sane lawman rode anywhere alone, and never on a bike. Someone had sent Harlan’s body, part of a special delivery sealed by the Gov. With bloody bicolor ants which no sane person would have done. It could not be simple bad luck.
Not the Law. Not the Gov. Not the military. The gift-giver was someone who wanted to play with me like a pride of cats with a junkyard dog. Or someone who knew what I really had on the property.
I opened the Maltodine and tossed the entire container in the hatch. The ants swarmed toward me.
I struck a match. Reached for the hatch door with one gloved hand. Tossed the match with the other. Lightning fast, I ripped the note away. Just before the hatch closed, intense heat boiled out, and I heard the ants scream as the sound cut off.
Maltodine burned anything anywhere, even without oxygen—except hemp-plaz composite. Maltodine didn’t burn anything made of metal or hemp that had been combined with silk-plaz at the atomic level. It burned until it no longer had anything organic to fuel it. Harlan, however, was organic.
I tapped over my heart with a two fingered salute and said, “Peace, my brother. There will be no more war. May your last ride on the dragon’s tail be peaceful.”
I dropped my salute. “Deets on the visitor when available,” I requested of Mateo. “And calculate Maltodine burn time of one hundred kilos of organic matter in an anaerobic environment.”
“Copy that.”
The Berger-chip implant started to provide the answer. I shut it down. Once I let that thing start talking it never shut up, and I had to sleep sometime.
With a gauntleted fist, I hammered the red ignition button and the AG Grabber came back on, the almost-imperceptible whine an itch under my skin. Initiating the controls, I maneuvered the Grabber over the top of the Tesla and lowered the unit until it almost connected. Then I raised the old war fuselage three and a half meters off the ground, the maximum ever achieved on land, even by the military of three warring groups of allied nations. AntiGrav was a misnomer on a planet surface, the moniker applied by a PR person when it was first invented, and it had stuck, even after WIMP engines had given us intra-solar system flight that did way more than levitate stuff.
I headed to the office, through the airlocks, back into the cool, where I flipped open the note. It said simply:
SS—
I hope I make it to you alive, but that ain’t looking likely. I was ambushed. Shot. Made it to the Tesla and crawled through into the hatch. Name of the shooter was One-Eyed Jack. They know about you. They’re coming.
—BH
SS was me, Shining Smith. BH was Buck Harlan. They were the people who had killed him. And were coming for me.
“Coulda used a little more info in your note, Buck. But I’m sorry you died delivering it.” Tears evaporated so fast I hardly noticed them gather.
I opened the small hatch of the armor niche and stepped up on the mounting pedestal. I was about to turn my back to the armor suit and initiate auto-donning when it occurred to me that appearing in military armor and weaponed up was acting out of fear and giving away my hand. It was one person heading in. Not an army. Maybe I was wrong that this person was coming for me. Maybe Harlan was wrong. Maybe my life as I knew it wasn’t over.
If whoever sent Harlan to me, dead and all, had just wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. If the military had figured out who I was, and half of what Smith’s Junk and Scrap really was, my small part of the Earth would have been inundated with uniformed warriors. If the Gov. itself had found me, and knew what I was, the bureaucracy would have been more direct. A missile barrage would have arced over the junkyard and taken out everything, leaving nothing but a hole in the rock. End of Shining Smith.
So, I didn’t need to wade in fighting. Yet.
Fear receded now that I was thinking and not just reacting. This wasn’t done by any usual suspect who wanted me dead. No. Someone was sending me a message and a threat. Someone wanted something I was or something I had. I thought about the crashed spaceship debris half-buried out back, hidden beneath the best ghillie tech camo cloth ever devised. But no one knew about it, except for Mateo. And only Mateo knew the full nature of my defenses. So, they must be after the conventional weapons I had stockpiled for the eventual resurgence of the war.
I wasn’t giving up my weapons, my money, or my ship. I especially wasn’t giving up the weapons to traitors. And I sure as hell wasn’t giving up my office.
I needed to go in with a presumptive position of weakness and lie through my teeth—assuming that, just because a motorcycle was heading this way, it was not my past nightmares come calling. It might not be. It could be coincidence.
I cursed and stepped away from the niche, into the personal toilette compartment—which would have been a bathroom if we had sufficient fresh water—and checked the lipstick. Combed my hair, which was still wet and spiked with sweat. Smeared on Kajal, desert-dweller’s heavy eyeliner. Lips and lids were all the makeup the heat could stand. Anything more would melt off my face. I pulled the desert camo tank top and military cargo pants off my body and hung them to dry. Ran the body wand over my pits and privates. Spritzed on something to counteract my natural stink. Some women smelled of lilacs and roses. I’d been brought up a warrior. I dismantled vehicles and ran a black-market weapons business at a junkyard. To smell better would deny what I really was, and also, I just hated the stink of perfumes. I sprayed an extra layer of sunscreen over my very bronzed skin, because you can never have too much sunscreen, not since the WIMP explosion over Germany tore through the planet’s electromagnetic shield and ripped all the good stuff out of the atmosphere.
“Location of bike?” I asked Mateo.
“Six klicks out. ARVAC cameras reveal male body shape, full face helmet, and cold-clothes, all in white and desert camouflage patterns. Bike is matte black.” His recon briefing paused. “Correction. Visual shielding has been activated. Bike is now desert patterns. Activating Silent Tracking.”
Silent Tracking was something left to me by my father. At the time, it was the very latest in military R&D, a way to track most anything that created a visual, audible, or thermal trail even through the military’s own shielding. Pops wasn’t supposed to have that kind of tech, and I had no idea how he got it; I had no idea how he got any of the stuff I’d found here. The Silent Tracking had been stored in a kiosk in the middle of the junkyard when I returned, half dead and with a stolen, deranged warbot in tow. Then, I had discovered the other devices—the weapons systems, the AntiGravity Grabber—a stockpile of illegal weapons to which I had added significantly. The USSS SunStar—a spaceship built by the western alliance, led by the US—had crash-landed at some point prior to my arrival.
And then there was the office. The main reason I remained here, in a junkyard Pops had kept off the books, was the office.
And then the meaning of what Mateo had said hit home. Visual shielding on the bike meant military connections or a wannabe soldier. Either way it meant trouble.
“Calculation of burn time in the Tesla?” I asked Mateo.
“Two hours and sixteen minutes to clean bone. Four hours additional, give or take, to full ash.”
Cremation would have taken about one hour. Maltodine was just as effective but it took longer. Six and a half hours. The sun would be down by then and the solar panels offline. I didn’t have the battery power to run the Grabber into the night. I’d have to set the Tesla down soon and let it burn on the ground. But not while I had company.
“Speed of approaching vehicle is increasing. Suspect our ARVACs have been made.”
“Fine. Bring them home and dock ’em. You geared up?”
“Little Girl, I’m always geared up.”
Which was true. Mateo was semi-permanently attached to his bot. If he left it, if he was disconnected, he’d be dead inside a week. And he’d die badly. I’d seen him out of the suit when I placed him into the med-bay the week we met. It hadn’t been a pretty sight.
At the closet, I ignored the dresses, which would not fit with the persona I was envisioning, and pulled on a bright pink tank, the color I chose surely inspired by the hot-pink of the AGR’s paint job. The color made me look sweet and defenseless. Not like me at all. The tank and the matching cargo pants had belonged to Little Mama, my mother. They still smelled like her, and though it had been years since she died, tears threatened. Little Mama had looked cute when she rode bitch-seat on Pop’s bike. But she had manned the guns for him when the war started, and had gone down fighting when the soldiers of the People’s Republic of China’s Central Military Commission landed in Port Angeles, Washington, with the first warbots. The Outlaws had been mid-rally when the PRC warbots walked ashore, and the motorcycle club had defended the public until the nearby cities had been evacuated.
That was the start of World War III and the end of the world as I had known it.
I was hell and gone from the war, I reminded myself. Hell and gone. But my nerves buzzed with adrenaline and fear as I slid a sweat-wicking, UV-protected, sheer dupatta over my tank. It wasn’t cold clothes, but the dupatta fit the persona I was adopting. A civilian, a transplanted city girl who still looked to fashion. Dark tanned from sun exposure under the thinned atmosphere, weird eyes hidden under the 2-Gens, a stray lighter streak in my short, spiked hair from too much sun exposure. The grease under my nails and the chipped polish told the truth about me, and I probably should have repainted them, not that there was time.
No female ever went unarmed in the wild, so guns were okay even with the outfit. Under the dupatta I slung a harness around my shoulders and hips, and tightened it on my waist. Considered pulse weapons, but a scrapyard employee would more likely have explosive-based weaponry, not high-end military stuff. I checked the three 9-millimeter weapons the harness was built to hold, reconsidered, and clicked just one into place in its hemp-plaz holster. Added extra mags into the pockets. Basic minimal wear for a female employee in the wilds, like I was now pretending to be. I pulled on a pair of gloves to protect my fake persona and to protect the visitor from me, just in case he got close enough to touch.
“ARVAC data reveals the bike is a new variation of the OMW One Rider,” Mateo said.
My hands froze. I stopped moving entirely.
“Silent Tracking scans reveal the One Rider has been militarized with after-stock equipment and weapons. Listing: One 9-millimeter Heckler & Koch MP8 UMP. Two 9-millimeter Heckler & Koch MP8 machine pistols. Two semiautomatic weapons on his person, make unknown. Though it’s currently offline, the bike is equipped with a camouflaged miniaturized pulse weapon.”
Bloody hell.
He was equipped to start a small war and half the bike stuff made no sense. Miniaturized pulse weapons were practically unknown outside of the military, and it was just weird on a Harley. The burning Tesla had been retrofitted with pulse weapons, based on dark matter, for battles in space, but no one—even Outlaw Militia Warriors—had access to it in peacetime. Unless the bike had been part of a government contract. OMW always had government contracts.
“Bugger,” I cursed.
“The Harley has defensive shields available but not activated,” Mateo said. “Bike’s visual shielding is good. Maybe as good as mine.” He hesitated. “Maybe better.”
Mateo’s military bot shielding was the very latest design from the end of the war. No one should have defensive or visual shielding as good as his. All the details meant that the dude riding up to my place of business and arriving just after Harlan’s untimely demise and appearance wasn’t a fluke or coincidence. Whoever the traitors to the war effort were, they had found me. Unless . . . Unless I’d been found by more than one group or person, because worst-case scenarios were just my dumb luck.
If so, then one group had killed Harlan. Another had sent a rep carrying a Universal Machine Pistol and the latest in OMW weapons. Within minutes of each other? A different kind of message or the OMW responding to the first message?
Bloody damn.
I could kill the rider. I could toss him in with Harlan, whose body was currently powering the Maltodine burn. But my newest visitor was surely tracked and others would come.
In his wonderful British accent, Pops had once said to the OMWs, “The world is changing, lads. We have to adapt. We have to evolve. To remain static is death.”
“Pops,” I had said from the front row, where I was watching his speech. “Even corpses change.” I knew. I’d seen enough of them.
Some of the warriors had laughed. Pops hadn’t.
And then Little Mama had died. And I had been swarmed by bicolors. And we had done the unthinkable, a lot of unthinkables. And Pops had started dying, slow bit by slow bit as the Parkinson’s ate his body and his brain. I had tried but been unable to save him. Nothing had saved him.
I slammed my feet into cute, heeled boots and ran a finger up the seal. Crammed a clean hat, with a wide brim and a faded silk rose, on my head. I snatched a nail file out of the flowerpot that had once held Little Mama’s orchids, wiped two insulated bottle keepers, and plucked two iced drinks out of the fridge, wiping them as I raced out of the office through the first and then the second airlock doors. Sealing both airlock doors on the cold air inside, I walked out to meet the rider. The heat hit me like a wrecking ball and fresh sweat broke out all over.
“Activating perimeter defenses,” Mateo said.
“You never deactivate them,” I said.
“True,” he said. “But the road along our front border and the drive stay at DEFCON four unless we expect trouble. Now we’re at DEFCON three.”
“Why DEFCON three?”
“Because something smells.”
Since Mateo no longer had a real nose, I knew he meant figuratively.
“You aren’t armored up,” he stated.
“I’m going for Little Mama’s defensive tactics,” I said, setting the icy bottles in their holders in the shade, not that the shade offered much protection from the summer heat.
“Ahhh. Poor guy.” It wasn’t easy to tell, but Mateo sounded almost happy about the coming carnage. “ETA sixty seconds.”
I knew that by the sound of the bike. There were muters on the engine, the soft snore familiar for a wartime One Rider Harley in infiltrator mode. I missed the full-throated war-bike roar, the wind in my hair, the road thrumming through my body. I missed that freedom.
I pulled a chair into the shade of the AG Grabber; the seat was padded and so hot from the scalding sun that it burned my butt through the cloth of Mama’s pink pants, but there wasn’t time to cool the seat or baby my butt. I slid the converted, inverted shooting table in front of me and I propped my booted feet on it. Unlatching the thumb-lock on the table, I made sure it would
invert in its usual half second if I dropped my feet, exposing the prewar M249 Para Gen II Belt-Fed Machine Gun, currently mounted on the table’s other side. The weapon was hidden by the heavy-duty, honeycombed composite sheeting that was actually a pretty good shield for most small arms fire. I had repurposed it from mid-grade-quality space scrap. If an enemy assassin riding a bike had found me, there wouldn’t be enough left of him or his bike to send home in a box.
The burn inside the Tesla had superheated the desert hot-as-the-entrance-to-hell air. Sweat was trickling down my spine.
If the OMW had found me, I didn’t know what would happen. I was supposed to be dead. If two groups had found me . . . I was well and truly screwed.
The muted engine noise grew closer and changed trajectory as it slowed and turned down the drive.
“Company’s here,” Mateo said. “All systems go.”
Sweat slid between my boobs and soaked into my clothes across my back and belly. The sun beat down around me like nuclear fallout, forty-five degrees C in the shade. Water boiled at a hundred, so I was halfway to scalded. I popped the top of one drink and took a long pull, set it aside, pulled off one glove, and flipped the nail file up. I was as ready as I was going to get. The bike went silent. I gave it a good five-second pause before I called out, “I’ve got a cold drink with your name on it if you come with cash to buy.”
Five more seconds went by as the rider either got into a better position to kill me or tried to decide how to proceed. Mateo didn’t update me, so I was betting my death wasn’t intended. Yet.
Another five seconds went by. And another.
I caught a slight reflection as Mateo moved into place between the entrance and me, his seven-and-a-half-meter tall warbot suit in full visual shielding, his head invisible behind a meter of horizontal silk-plaz view screen.
Mateo muttered, “Body posture is too ready.”
I relaxed just a bit. Filed a rough spot off my trigger fingernail. The black engine grease around my cuticle was a dead giveaway that I wasn’t the girly girl the clothes suggested. If I let the stranger get close enough to see that grime, I better already know he wasn’t a threat.
