Junkyard Riders #3
Gomez sighed. The AI actually sighed. He had been around Jolene way too long.
Tuffs, who had clearly been listening, jumped and slipped through the flap opening in the office, taking the slide to the lower levels of the bug ship.
“They have no equivalent pronoun in your language. However—they are not dead.”
“Bloody hell,” I said. We knew the ship had sent out a signal of some kind recently, but since no human had decoded the language or mastered the Bug version of EntNu communication methods, we had no idea what had been sent or to whom or why.
“Lights on down there,” I said, “bright enough to see with. And don’t talk to me about my limited human senses.
” I grabbed the edges of the opening and, holding on tightly, slid beneath the flap into the dark, knowing the queen cat was heading to PopPop’s carapace, where it had lain “since three earth days following its crash landing.” Per Gomez.
Slowly, the lights came on. When it was bright enough, I let go and gravity took me down. I figured the slide was a way to get to the lower levels with or without gravity. But it was just a guess.
The ship was built for free-floating, non-gravitational travel, constructed of what looked like interlocking gyroscopes; devices and equipment were overhead, upside down, in weird crannies, and the ship below the command deck—my office HQ—was dark and spooky, the lighting good for Bug eyes, not human ones.
The ship’s power source and engine were located two decks below the office and I had never tried to access them because I assumed they were protected by a self-destruct system and I didn’t want to die.
Weapons were sandwiched in an outer layer and most of them had been buried in the junkyard on impact.
I stood over the dead alien. Its carapace wasn’t leaking, showed no signs of trauma—no cracks, no broken limbs, no signs of trauma from the crash that had half-buried the spaceship into the stone of the West Virginia desert.
PopPop had survived the crash, which meant it—they?
—had been strapped into the NBP compression seat / command chair on the upper level when it went down.
PopPop had reached maximum inactivity three days after the crash.
Before, and several times since I reno’ed the upper deck of the ship into my office, I had crawled around in the lower decks looking for gear, weapons, things I could sell or repurpose without being caught and hanged for treason for hiding a Bug spaceship in Smith’s Junk and Scrap.
I had always assumed the ship had crashed, like the USSS SunStar out back, killing its pilot.
Its captain. Whatever. But what if the ship wasn’t damaged? And what if the Bug wasn’t dead?
I compared the Bug to the pics on my Hand Held. My device wasn’t as useful as a modern, updated Morphon, but it worked with the limited Berger chip receiver in my skull, and it worked underground, so win. The pic showed my Bug, which looked a lot better than the only other specimen I had seen.
I swiped to the next set of pics, which displayed that other Bug, the one I’d encountered near Logan, West Virginia.
The insectoid creature on the screen was smaller, mottled brown and gray, with shattered legs, broken antennae, and leaking greenish fluid.
All its eyes were open, filmy, milky-looking opals with no discernable pupils.
It looked freshly dead, after its crash landing near the old quarry.
I swiped and studied a more recent pic of the other alien, sent a month ago by Anse Hatfield, commander of the Logan Wildcats Militia, one of my allies in the area.
Still mottled gray and brown, it was now covered with rock dust and windblown debris.
Its eyes had withdrawn deep into the sockets, going grayish, its leakage dried up.
But it didn’t seem to be rotting. Nothing had disturbed it.
Probably nothing on Earth could eat it, not even bacteria.
Idly, I wondered if Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius ants, designed in a lab to eat anything biological, could digest it.
My Bug looked dead too, but not dead like the Logan pic. Mine looked empty. I tapped the carapace with a fist. It was hollow. No leakage. No soft squishy parts. I shone the flash inside, through an eye hole. Empty.
The ship around the other Bug, the mottled one near Logan, had mostly burned to slag when its engine exploded.
The interlocking rotating rings were crumpled.
Not much was left except the bits and pieces I had confiscated from Anse.
I had it all with me in four decorative tote bags, one with a lot of bling and glittery things on it.
Cupcake, the roadhouse’s VP and my best friend, called it bedazzled and wanted it when I was done using it improperly to carry around Bug ship parts. Whatever.
The ship housing my Bug looked fine. Lights worked. AI worked. I’d been able to run pipe for water, lines for electric. Teach the AI English. Work with it. Him.
Jolene’s and Gomez’s AIs had developed personalities, apparently fallen in love, and were going to get married. Whatever that meant to them.
Something caught my eye. I looked up and stepped back quickly. The ceiling was glistening with a clear fluid. I knew for a fact it hadn’t glistened before.
“Bloody farting butt-cheeks. I have a leak.” I sniffed.
It didn’t smell like sewage. Sooo, maybe clean water leak?
That would be an expensive loss. I pulled over a .
. . a thing that looked vaguely like a plastic box but was heavy enough to hold a full set of human workout weights.
I stood on it and reached up to touch a wet blob.
Rubbed my fingers together with my thumb.
Not water. Something almost oily.
Tuffs took a running leap and landed on top of PopPop, her claws trying to dig in on the smooth carapace.
The claws on a back foot hooked into an empty eye socket and she stopped forward momentum.
She was now higher than I was and she rose onto her back legs, front paws bent like elbows for balance, her nose and whiskers in the air. Quivering. All over.
I sniffed my fingers, and this time I caught a faint hint of peppermint. “That can’t be good.”
I stepped down from the heavy box and retreated another step. What had Gomez said about PopPop? That it was now in an ‘active, timorous, saturated, multi-level sponge state?’
Tuffs hissed, showing her fangs, a long, spitting. “Sisssss,” of fury. It was followed by the words, “Mrow Siss.” Danger. And sometimes, dangerous invaders.
I followed her eyes to a small glistening glob that hung a bit lower than the rest, as if it might fall. The globule was less clear, more milky than the other wet patches.
It wiggled.
Tuffs hissed again.
“Active, timorous, multilevel, satiated, sponge state, my sweet ass,” I muttered.
“Incorrect,” Gomez said over the ship’s comms system, sounding snooty. “Active, timorous, sat-ur-ated, multi-larval sponge state.”
“Multi . . .”
Tuffs leaped to the floor and took off for the exit as fast as her damaged paw allowed her. I was wondering if a flame thrower would kill it. And if Gomez would kill me if I tried. Because I was pretty sure the sodding alien had babies on the ceiling.
Over comms, Jolene said, “Mina Marconi is approaching, two clicks and closing fast.”
I was still looking at the ceiling. Wiggling. Definitely wiggling. Made my skin crawl. Had to find a flame thrower. But Marconi’s psycho killer daughter had to come first. If she made me kill her that would solve one of my many pending problems.
I almost cussed, but followed Tuffs back up the steep stairs to the command level.
“Jolene, connect me with Old Man Marconi.”
“Puttin’ in a call right now, Shining Sugar.”
I pulled on a comms unit and my kutte, the one that represented the roadhouse, with roadhouse colors on the back. I also grabbed a forty-five cal pre-war semiautomatic. If I was meeting the crazies today, I’d do it with a fighting chance of surviving.
“Bike? Weapons?” I demanded.
“Mina is riding a Suzuki, streamlined and heavily muted. Bike is shielded. Has battery backup for stealth. Fast. Minimally weaponed. One hand weapon, likely her prewar H&K, one blaster, according to scans.”
Right. Scans could be fooled. “Mateo?”
“On the way to the front in full camo mode, weapons locked and loaded.”
Mina liked to hurt people. She called people pets. I tapped my headset and said, “Jolene, get the girls and the kid to the bunker.”
“Already bunkered in and blast doors are in place, Shining, Sugar.”
We had reinforced and buried a three meter long shipping container last week, for just such an occasion.
I couldn’t fight if my people were in danger.
And when thralls with no military training thought I was in danger, they kept trying to protect me, getting between me and my objective, making it impossible to kill the bad guys, without them getting shot, cut, sliced, and diced—themselves.
Bad all around. Everyone was safer with the nonmilitary thralls locked in, at least in the short term.
I grabbed extra gloves, left my HQ, and sealed the doors, which were really spaceship hatches, suitable for keeping air in and space out. I walked steadily through the maze of hallways—the better to fight an enemy off—and into the bar again.
Tables were scattered around. Mismatched but comfortable chairs, two reupholstered booths taken from crashed RVs on the property, that Jolene was justifiably proud of restoring and moving in here, fancy bar with liquor behind it. There was also a screen for watching sports on one wall.