Junkyard Riders #10
I said, “Jolene. Can you and Gomez use the new EntNu comms to imitate a Bug communication signal? And if so, can you send it out from a different place if I managed to put equipment where I want it to come from?” She didn’t answer right away, so I added, “I might want to lure the Riders to a place of my choosing.”
“Ohhhh,” Jolene said. “Let us talk a sec.”
I didn’t know how long a sec was to AIs, but when she didn’t reply right away, I contacted Mateo and asked if he wanted to go for a ride and a fight in his dune buggy.
It wasn’t a dune buggy. It was a weaponized, armored, four wheeling, Quadro ATV, like a small tank but twice as ugly, and he loved any chance to get out of the junkyard.
He’d been cooped up here for years until he managed to get a means of transportation that would fit his warbot suit. As expected, he was all in.
Bags packed, I left the office.
Jolene said into my comms, “Sugah, we can mimic Bug comms and show a different origination location as requested. And we can fake some alien weapons out of things in the SunStar. Weapons that won’t register on sat-cams, because they don’t really exist and the AIs won’t recognize them. If we have time, that is.”
“You sound almost eager,” I said. “You’re getting something out of the trespasser, aren’t you?”
CAIT answered. “That is ‘need to know’.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Jolene get me the stuff I need and figure out how to pack it into the Quadro’s trailer.”
* * *
Leaving Wanda, Alex, and Jolene’s bot-form to keep the roadhouse safe, I packed up the Bug transmitter from the crashed ship, which I designated Bug Ship Two, and also packed the device that let me communicate with the SunStar without satellite.
The one at the mine was a homemade, clunky device, reverse engineered, and held together with duct tape, baling wire, and spit. This was the original.
We hit the road, packed down with enough gear to compress the tires of the Quadro and its trailer, and leave actual tracks in the hardpan beside the cracked asphalt of the roads.
There was no such thing as road repair (except for a few main thoroughfares) since the war, and the road surfaces were disintegrating.
Because of the asphalt conditions and the weight, we were moving too slowly for my preferences, but I wasn’t going to leave Mateo behind.
Not that he couldn’t take care of himself, he could, but I didn’t want to have to scrape body parts off the road if someone got cheeky with him.
I wasn’t riding my club bike. The paint job was still in progress in Jolene’s lab, so I was straddling a rebuilt DR bike, put together out of bits and pieces from bikes damaged when the junkyard had been attacked.
The Dark Riders had become cat protein, but the bikes?
Useful. It had been a long time since I’d ridden anything but a Harley.
This crotch-rocket screamer-bike wanted to go fast, and it had built-in weapons and auto camo, but the speed and the weapons couldn’t make up for the loss of the joy that riding my Harley usually brought. This was necessary transportation.
Riding with cats in the panniers, AKA saddlebags, was a novel experience. I had cat heads peeking out, surveying the surroundings, two per bag.
Mateo had cats riding on his carapace and upper limbs, and more in the trailer, bedded down in the gear. I had no idea how many cats had joined us but it was enough to kill all the rodents wherever we ended up.
As we traveled west, out of the strip-mined, stark, barren, and inhospitable rock terrain that boasted Junkyard Roadhouse and not much else, low hills appeared on the horizon and dry streambeds sliced along beside the road.
Trunks and the bare branches of winter hugged the hills, creating small forests, scraggly trees and scrub, gripping onto life, roots in the polluted ground.
West Virginia had been abused and the mountains removed down to bedrock for profit, with slag and detritus left behind on the stripped, rocky flatlands. The mines had never been ecologically reclaimed the way the mine owners had promised. Broken promises were a fact of life in West Virginia.
I usually rode too fast to give the land my attention, but now I was moving as slow as Mateo, straddling a bike not meant for meandering. The winter made the view more grim than I remembered, the road more switchback than I recalled.
We were sixteen kilometers from Highway 85, south of Bald Knob, when I heard the click of EntNu comms in my helmet speakers.
Jagger’s voice was broken up and full of static, which was weird for EntNu communications.
In fact, it was supposed to be so difficult to intercept or disrupt that it had been called by one comms guy in the war, “Perfect.”
I was able to make out, “. . . ound DRs. . . . diner at the br . . . . . . olled up . . . side watchin—”
Comms squealed and quit.
“Jagger?” I asked, my voice sharp as broken glass. “Asshole, you copy?”
Jagger didn’t reply. I said, “Mateo?”
My other thrall didn’t reply either. Or at least not fast enough to make me happy.
I gunned the engine and whipped the bike in a controlled oversteer, fishtailing around in a one-eighty, and raced back to Mateo.
I had gotten further ahead than I thought, and when I spotted Mateo around a bend, his ATV quadro stopped dead, and electric fear zigzagged through me.
It took a half second to realize comms and I were being ignored as he finished blasting a small bot into molten metal and charred silk-plaz.
I pulled up close to the smoking mess and shuddered.
He was killing a small PRC bot. I had no idea what kind but it was the size of a perker.
The junkyard had been attacked by perkers not so long ago.
I came to a stop, boots on the blacktop.
“Mateo? Where did that bot come from?” When he didn’t answer I said, “If that was a perker, they carry nanobots.”
His leg flattened on the end and he stomped on the remains of the bot. “You think I’m stupid, Shining? I hit it with a portable antigrav before I started cooking it.”
“You have a portable AG unit? Why did I not know that?”
“Because I just had it attached.” He held up a new, modified arm.
He had lost an upper limb in Warhammer’s Battle and I hadn’t noticed the new one.
It was small, on an extendable, telescoping-style stick, so he could hold the weapon away from himself.
“And the damn perker got Sam, so he’s extra dead now. ”
“Sam?”
He dropped his legs half-closed and picked up the white, black, and brown Torti juvenile cat. He tried to place it back onto the small ledge at the bottom of his horizontal viewscreen, but the cat wasn’t having it. Not at all.
Mateo hadn’t looked at me yet, deeply involved with the perker and the kit. His supply nook to the side of the warbot upper body opened, like a sliding airlock door. He placed the kitten inside.
Mateo closed the sliding door to the nook and the kitten crawled onto his lap and peeked out the big viewscreen.
“I hope you have a litterbox in there,” I said.
Mateo looked at me, no expression his face.
“If I make more jokes, you’ll shoot me, won’t you?” I asked.
“Into hamburger. And then I’ll feed you to the cats.”
I managed to keep the mirth off my face and not cackle, but it was a near thing. “Copy that. Did you hear Jagger’s SOS?”
“I did. You go ahead to the diner. I’ll get there when I get there.”
There was only one diner in these parts, and it happened to be on the way to the mine.
It was a perfect place—the only place—to stop for a meal so it made sense the DRs had stopped there.
Finding Jagger and Jacopo would be easy enough.
Without another word, I fishtailed the screamer bike around again, put on the muters and camo, and gunned the engine for the diner.
My armor was in the small trailer. My larger weapons were there too.
I bent into the wind I made, and rode like hell.
Twelve clicks later, I rounded a random boulder and comms came clear.
Like instantly, totally clear. I slowed and circled back to the boulder.
It wasn’t made of stone. It was pitted, weathered slag the size of school bus.
Or a tank. I pulled off a riding glove and touched the slag with my bare fingers.
The touch didn’t feel like the visual representation.
It was camo-ed.
Maybe not slag? Maybe sophisticated camouflage.
Maybe, some piece of alien tech left over from the Bugs that interfered with EntNu?
That wasn’t possible. Not that we knew.
I wasn’t totally sure I could trust Gomez with the info about the slag. Except that he probably already knew it was here. Unless he didn’t know and I had discovered something I could use against the Bugs. Or . . .
Maybe this was a way to curry favor with the alien species. Bargaining was something I did, something I was.
Silently, I rolled away from the boulder. Thinking. Deciding.
Regretting it but knowing it was the smart thing to do, I tapped comms and said, “Jolene. You copy?”
“I do, Sugah.”
“I have a hunk of melted slag that blocks EntNu. You have my location?”
Gomez broke in. “We do. Thank you for the return of the Brrrpt-shlmmmm, Shining Smith.”
I figured he had just stunk up the office with some disgusting scent but I didn’t say that. “Consider it a gift from humanity to the Bugs.”
“Hmmm,” was all the Bug AI said. It had learned to sound skeptical. I bet that stank up the place too.
“Jagger,” I said into comms. “You copy?”
“Roger that. Sending my coordinates.”
Best as I could figure Jagger was on a low hill north and west of the diner.
Diners were a rarity in the badlands, which were any place outside of a well-armed, well-defended city, and the food, while basic, was better than awful, if customers liked roadkill cooked in lard.
The décor was very Earth 1950s mixed with retro construction site. Sort of homey.