Junkyard Riders #5
“Good morning, Shining Smith, President of the Junkyard Roadhouse. I hope your day is progressing well,” Marconi said.
“That’s a bit better. Want to try a sincere apology?”
Marconi snorted.
I laughed. A VIP in a motorcycle club never apologized but the niceties had been concluded. “So, what made you call?” I asked. “Was it the sight of Mina flipping in the air or her landing?”
“How badly is my daughter broken?” he asked.
I had answered that twice, but maybe he wanted specifics.
I sat in my favorite stool and tapped on the countertop.
The keyboard appeared as thin lighted lines, letters, and numbers.
It checked my biometrics and opened a screen over the bar.
A second tap brought up the UC medbays. Both prisoners were receiving treatment.
The readout above Mina’s bay told me she was being sedated and scanned. A soft beep indicated a prelim triage.
I said, “No broken bones. Pissed off as hell. Fighting being sedated with amazing strength of will. What dose were you keeping her on?”
Marconi went silent again, but this time I hadn’t been muted. He must really be upset.
“We didn’t want to put her on the . . . DM,” he said, in case someone was listening in on comms. His words were heavily laden with guilt and fear.
“I get that.” Devil’s Milk was highly addictive to people not transitioned by nanobots, and was illegal as hell. Didn’t stop me from growing it.
He sighed and when he spoke again, it wasn’t as the Old Man, but as Daniel Marconi, a father who loved his children.
“What would you have done, Little Girl, if you saw the proof that your daughter was a psychopathic killer? What would you have done if your daughter tried to kill her brother on the battlefield?”
I had seen that close up and personal. She had only thought about killing Jacopo, not actually killed him, but that was a very small distinction.
I said, “I’d like to think I’d have had the strength of will to put her out of her misery, but I would likely have taken the less direct path and gone the DM route, the way you did, because if you do it slow, killing your own child seems less horrific.”
The silence hung again as they digested the murder accusation.
“What do we do?” Lucretia asked, her tone reasonable. Too reasonable.
Lucretia was the steel blade in the Marconi household. I’d rather have faced the wrath of the Gov. or the military than Marconi’s wife when she got “reasonable.” Reasonable was likely to get me into trouble.
Careful to suggest nothing, and to traipse far around what they might be asking, I said, almost pedantically, “You’re her parents, but she’s an adult, legally speaking.” I didn’t acknowledge the reasonable tone.
The Marconis knew, in rudimentary terms, what my nanobots could do.
I had transitioned their son, Enrico, and returned him to them a different man.
Totally. He was my thrall, but he could live away from me, if he seldom saw me or came close to me.
However, if I called him to me, if I called any of my thralls to me, they would come, no matter what, and lay their lives at my feet. I hated having thralls.
“Can you help her?” Daniel Marconi, the father, asked me, still talking around what he was asking.
“As you did Enrico,” Lucretia said, pinning me down.
“Bloody hell.” I slumped on the counter. Alex brought me a Coke, a real Coke, from the last open bottler north of Georgia. It was on ice. Real Coke. Real ice.
I sat up and took a swallow. The harsh, stringent, not-too-sweet taste flooded my entire system. I took another fortifying swallow and sent a smile the kid’s way.
They grinned and hunched their head in a sort of bow.
“If I put my hands on Mina, she won’t be like Enrico,” I said.
“Mina won’t be manageable, no matter what Berger chips I upload into her.
Her brain isn’t normal, Daniel,” I said, more gently, because this was personal.
Calling him Daniel indicated this wasn’t club business.
“You both know that. She might become a vegetable. More likely, she’ll seem fine except for wanting to kill anyone who looks at me wrong.
I’d have to keep her chained in a lockup.
So, no. I’m not going to be responsible for what your daughter needs. ”
“What do we do?” Lucretia asked again, her tone less reasonable and carrying the cutting edge.
“Kill her.”
The silence lasted longer this time. I could practically feel the rage starting to boil in Lucretia.
I took another sip, wishing for a plastic straw.
Red. Like when I was a kid. Thoughts to keep me from having to say what I was saying.
But . . . “If I infect her, clean her up, and set her free, the psychotic killing rage will still be there. The addiction to DM will still be there. And the two together will send her back here where she’ll kill anything that looks at me twice.
I mean that. You need to know that saving her, for me, is the same as killing her.
Your best bet is to pick her up and haul her back to Charleston. ”
“Or . . .” Lucretia said, drawing out the word.
I had a feeling I was not going to like the rest of her sentence.
“We could send her after the Dark Riders,” Lucretia said, “with orders to kill them all.”
Bloody damn. “Send her to certain death in battle,” I said. “A personal Glory War? Very Valhalla-ish of you. Kind of kinky.” My own voice went hard. “Either way, she’s dead.”
On the screen Tuffs, the Guardian Cat, the queen of cats, leaped to the top of Mina’s medbay. She sniffed all around the lid, tail twitching.
Spy, Tuffs’ many-times great-granddaughter and heir apparent, jumped up too.
A third cat joined them, one I had been calling Scrappy.
Scrappy was a ruddy ginger and, while ginger cats were freaks of nature, Scrappy was the freakiest of the gingers ever, her coat reddish, her eyes matching.
Together the cats sniffed the lid in what looked like a purposeful joint maneuver with a specific endgame. I starting getting the willies.
“Hang on,” I said, watching.
After a thorough inspection, the three cats pressed their heads together communing. I had learned up close and personal that the nanobot infected cats had some funky kind of ESP going on. And they could share it with me, when they wanted something or when I convinced them to.
Tuffs pulled away and put her paw on first one, then another medbay control button. The medbay paused. The lid opened to reveal the girl, now naked, her short black hair flying with static electricity. The cats leaped around the moving lid and landed inside, nimble as . . . cats.
Stepping gracefully, weaving around her, they sniffed Mina Marconi from head to toes, paying close attention to her ears and nose, which was weird. Spy jumped to the floor, leaving Tuffs and Scrappy.
In a move I didn’t see coming, and didn’t actually follow visually, Tuffs swiped Mina with her good front paw. Lines of blood appeared on the girl’s forehead. Tuffs had scratched her.
I slid off the barstool to go stop whatever this was.
Tuffs licked Mina’s blood away and the two remaining cats did the head touch again.
Scrappy turned around twice, as if studying her surroundings.
She licked Mina’s wound and lay down in the medbay, at the top of Mina’s head.
The ruddy ginger cat stretched her body around Mina’s head, from ear to ear, and snuggled herself down in comfort.
Tuffs leaped down. The lid closed on Scrappy and Mina.
“Marconi,” I said, my bottom lip slightly numb where I’d bitten down on it. “Never mind what I said. I might have an idea. I need to do some research. I’ll stick her in a medbay and see what I can do.”
Lucretia said, “You will call. We will expect to hear from you before sunset. Seventeen hundred, latest.”
The call ended.
“Yeah. Sunset,” I said to the room, drinking Coke, thinking. Was Tuffs transitioning Mina? Did Tuffs think she could control the girl? The cats had ESP, so maybe Tuffs, or Scrappy, could control her? The possibility switched my willies into full blown panic. “This is crazy,” I said to myself.
But for all my big talk to the Marconis, most anything was better than having to dispatch the girl for what she would definitely do someday.
I tapped my Berger chip for info. “Female ginger cats,” I said.
“Ginger cats,” the outdated Berger said into my brain, “also known as orange cats or marmalade cats, are not a specific breed, but rather a coloration pattern characterized by a red or orange coat. This coloration is caused by the ginger gene, which is carried on the X chromosome. Most ginger cats are male because they only need one copy of the ginger gene to express the orange color, while females need two ginger genes to achieve complete ginger coloration. Otherwise they are mottled in color with white patches and other coloration. There are some who say ginger cats are friendlier than other cats and comparatively less technically competent, meaning they do not figure out how to open door—”
I shut it off.
“Shining?” Wanda’s voice was timorous.
That meant I was acting in a way she didn’t understand and I was scaring her. Mentally, I shook myself and turned to the kitchen doorway. “Hey, Wanda. All’s good. Lunch crowd will be here soon. Anything I can do to help?”