Junkyard Riders #2
I took a seat at the bar while Jolene bustled around looking official and efficient.
Jolene’s barkeep alter ego droid-body was also the bouncer.
She served food and drink, and enforced the Rules of Entry with prejudice.
Her body—a burnished black metal bot with three legs and two (sometimes three) arms, standing more than two meters tall—had been made in her lab aboard the SunStar.
From the hips up she had gone for humanoid with big pointed boobs, a tiny waist, and wigs.
Today’s hair was a retina-scarring scarlet, curling around her sex-bot face.
Her arms appeared humanish, but were built in the style of warbots, meaning they contained hidden weapons.
Hanging from her waist was a weapons harness shaped like a short apron, worn over a glittery sequined dress in rainbow hues that, thankfully, covered up her boobs.
Jolene’s new fashion sense was in the developmental phase and tended to ruin my eyesight.
One of her arms placed a beer at my right and I sipped.
This was a new batch of Mateo’s house brew.
Better than anything I could purchase on the market, the stout was dark, foamy, rich, and had a mouthfeel like a Guinness or Samuel Smith’s Chocolate, both out of the UK, and neither of which was easy to find, postwar.
Mateo’s beer was a calling card. Expensive as the market could stand, it was brewed in small batches and when it was gone, it was gone.
His brand name was Roadhouse, and he had named the stout Velvet Claws.
If I had needed any more proof that our almost-cyborg warbot former-commander of a starship liked our junkyard cats, the name of his stout was it.
Comfortable using the ultrathin gloves almost all the time now, I forked up a taste of the chicken salad, onions, and peppers, and discovered Cupcake was right.
There was garlic in the mix and some kind of herb.
And fresh meat protein, once rarer than compassion in a politician’s heart, had become a more-than occasional addition to my life.
The meal was better by far than any diner food sold within eighty kilometers.
Thanks to the roadhouse, new industries had started up in Naoma, the town a few kilometers away.
Naoma now boasted an inn, a chicken / egg farmer, and someone had brought in a few goats, producing milk and cheese, and eventually goat meat.
A hair and nail salon. A cobbler to make and repair boots and shoes, because there were no imports. It was all by hand since the war.
I loaded my fork with another bite. “Cost?” I asked the droid, indicating the utensil, holding a scoop of meat.
“You don’t wanna know, Sugar. But we’ll make a profit, so that’s all that matters.”
Jolene parked her three legs to my left to watch me eat, and said, “Comms report.”
Her mouth didn’t move, and the words came from a speaker, but somehow I was compelled to look in her bot-eyes. Which was creepy. I was chewing, so I waved my fork for her to proceed.
“Cupcake and Amos got to the mining camp, no problems,” Jolene said. “She’s still pissed about you trading away the seed potatoes.”
I shoveled in a bite and chewed, swallowed. “Remind her we don’t know how to mine, and if the miners starve to death, we can’t trade with them.”
“Will do. As soon as they get the comms system up and working.”
Which might mean never. They had taken a bunch of pre-war, non-satellite based tech to create a comms system that was intended to span the distance between Logan, West Virginia, the Four County Mine, and the roadhouse. It was old tech and new concepts, so it actually working was iffy at best.
“When you finish lunch, Gomez said he wants to talk.” She sounded disgruntled. “Alone,” she finished.
I stopped chewing. Stopped everything. Gomez, the alien AI, in the half-buried alien Bug ship, wanted to talk to me?
Alone? Why alone? Had to be about Bug alien stuff.
Maybe about the Bug alien spaceship equipment and devices we had brought back from Logan.
Had to be something I wasn’t going to like.
Bug aliens had ended the Final War. Stopped it cold.
My personal quarters were a Bug alien ship run by Gomez, a Bug alien AI.
Just like our AIs could do more than a human could, it was likely that their AIs could do anything they could do. Bloody powerful thinking machines. And one wanted to talk to me.
Jolene ambled away in the peculiar gait of all three-legged bots, though she had managed to program in a distinct hip sway that could be her concept of a sexy stroll. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.
Cats raced in and five leaped to the bar, tails high, inspecting, one sticking a nose in my plate. “Down,” I said.
The oldest cat, a Torti like Mateo’s, hissed, and four cats hit the floor.
The Torti was Tuffs, the “Guardian Cat” in her own ESP cat language, and even I didn’t tell her what to do, not if I valued my safety.
I had accidently transitioned her years ago while trying to heal her of a partial amputation, but unlike humans, she had not become a thrall.
Instead, she had become a queen in her own right.
I didn’t tell her what to do and she and her warrior cats didn’t kill and eat me. It was a good bargain.
I offered her a tiny piece of chicken.
She accepted it and ate, cocking her head as she considered the taste. “Hhhhah mmm,” she said, which meant, “This is good.” Then she stared at me, her mixed-colored eyes intent.
“Kkkkk.” It was cat speak for protein, usually human meat protein.
Until recently, the cats had mostly subsisted on toxic mine-crack rats, but for now, we had good supply of enemy bodies in the SunStar’s freezers, and it had been a while since I had fed the cats.
She showed me her teeth and said again, “Kkkkk.”
I flipped open my pseudo Hand Held Morphon and sent a note to Jolene to thaw a body and put it out for the cats. Pretty please. Jolene liked manners.
Since the war, only family, friends, and lovers buried their dead. No one wasted the protein of their enemies these days. If nothing else, the meat could be fed to pigs. Starvation changed social mores pretty fast.
Leaving the plate and mug on the bar for someone else to clean up—I had been reminded that presidents don’t do dishes—I pulled my coat out of the mini-Anti-Grav and took the winding hallway to what I used to call my office, the area my staff now referred to as the prez’s quarters, or HQ.
The place in the crashed alien spaceship where Gomez was.
As I moved, I was joined by the queen cat, limping slightly, and the other five cats she had brought.
All were young males, being given the grand tour.
The males would be left with me to be placed in the medbay to be neutered.
Even feeding the cats the bodies of my enemies, there wasn’t enough protein for Tuffs to allow unrestricted mating and unlimited litters.
I sealed us in to the command deck of the Bug alien spaceship / HQ / office, tossed the coat into the nook that served as a closet, peeled off the gloves, and wanded myself clean in my personal toilette compartment.
More comfortable, I made a little milk from water and dry milk powder.
I added a single drop of Devil’s Milk to put the kits to sleep.
As I worked, I said, “Gomez, Jolene said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes. Shining Smith, I thank you for your attention and your time.” Today Gomez sounded like a snooty pre-war New Yorker. He was still trying on accents. I was waiting on him to try Texan. That would be perfect with Jolene’s Southern belle drawl.
“Okay,” I said. I opened a bottle of water and drank, waiting, watching the kittens drink and stagger.
Devil’s Milk was addictive, but since they would never get another sip, Tuffs had deemed it safe.
It was also kinder than her old method, where she ripped off their testicles and they either lived or died.
“This refers to the being previously known as Garrouling PopPop,” he said, as the air filters shot the scent of peppermint into the room.
Bug aliens used scent as part of speech, and the speech part wasn’t anything a human mouth could make.
Garrouling PopPop, no peppermint scent, was the best I could do.
“Okay,” I said again and put the glass bottle in the rack for cleaning and refilling.
“Garrouling PopPop is no longer in a state of maximum inactivity.”
“Uhhh. Okaaay.” I had no idea what that meant. I picked up the juvenile kittens, plopped them into the medbay, and set the procedure for cats, male, neuter, and closed the lid. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“Garrouling PopPop,” Gomez said, with a fresh spray of peppermint.
The scent was so strong, I started sneezing.
Between my sneezes Gomez finished, “—is no more.”
“He’s dead?” I asked. I grabbed a handkerchief and shoved it against my face.
“He is not a he and never was. Garrouling PopPop is not dead. I have told you repeatedly that Garrouling PopPop has been in a state of maximum inactivity. Now, Garrouling PopPop is no more.”
“Which sounds like dead. Please stop saying his name. I’m dying here.”
“No. Your poor ability to scent emotions, your limited neural capacity, lack of neural computing capability, and deficient problem solving skills are insufficient to understand my captain’s biology.”
“I think you just called me stupid,” I said. “If he’s not dead, what is he?”
“The closest analogy in your nonspecific language is, ‘active, timorous, saturated, multilarval sponge state’.”
I pressed the spot on the command center that flushed the smells out of HQ. “So, he’s not dead.” I blew my nose vigorously.