I’m not— #9
The man was right. It was obvious. I just hadn’t wanted to see it. I had hoped we could just send the vid to the right people, maybe make some money off the military gear, and other people would take care of the Dark Riders and the traitors.
Enrico landed in my lap, a clumsy graceless heap, wrapping his arms around me. I grunted an awkward, “Ugh,” and caught him to me. “What?”
“They want me. They want me to help them.”
I tightened my arms around him. Enrico had been Warhammer’s before he was mine. It should have occurred to me that they might know, might feel him, and that, if so, he would need help.
Looking at Jagger, I managed a crooked smile. “Ride or die.” It meant I was all in. I’d never let one of my people, my friends, be taken away. And if I didn’t stop this now, I might not be able to stop it tomorrow.
Jagger gave me neck-breaking hug, a thumb up, and disappeared into the snow. I held onto Enrico, keeping him safe as the blizzard caked snow and ice into my open helmet.
* * *
Repairing, commandeering, and flying a Sikorsky required several things: the ingenuity of the only rider in our group who had a modest mechanical knowledge of helicopters from the war and uploading a few helpful chip tutorials found on the command flight into his Berger unit; my earth mover, to pull their vandalized earth mover from the fuselage of its damaged transport; and the necessity of dividing up our groups—one part to properly restrain and care for the people we had shot and injured, get them triaged in our medbay, and the other part to charge our armor and load our equipment into the empty Sikorsky.
We also had to rip out the pilots’ flight seats and toss them into the snow—because, our pilots?—a brain damaged spaceship CO and his brain damaged captain, both sitting in a warbot suit perched where the pilot seats used to be.
And then find some way to drop off the Sisters of the Cross—without crash landing—so they could hit the internets, sat-nets, and military and Gov. nets live with the video, names, and crimes of the cabal—at the exact moment we hit the Dark Riders’ base.
If I had known we’d be flying out of here and trying to land twice, I’d have asked for less initial damage to the helos and their cargo.
Hindsight and all that. It was night by the time we had completed the repairs and gotten our gear strapped down.
We weren’t taking our bikes because no matter how we might try, there was no way to make a stealthy approach to a battle while riding a Harley.
By dusk, the storm was blowing itself out, heading east. Right where we wanted to go. Because that’s the way life works. Silently, I cursed Murphy and all his stupid laws.
Like everyone else in the seatless helo, I used silk-plaz flex to strap myself down, and if I’d had the ability to claw my armored fingers into the cabin floor to hold on better, I would have.
There was no way to trust Mateo and Evelyn.
Between them, they had about five hours total time in helicopters. Total.
Zero in a Sikorsky.
Almost as bad—I had never flown.
We were all gonna die. I knew it.
I re-tightened the flex straps until they cut into my middle.
It had been a mixture of post-war ingenuity, common sense, and hope to repair the helo. It was scary as shit—like, my bowels wanted to move—getting the Sikorsky into the air.
The helo teetered, tottered, rolled left and then right. Bumped back down on its landing gear a few times. I didn’t count. And finally we were airborne.
I discovered that nanobots did not protect against air sickness.
* * *
Despite being charged for two hours, my armor was low on power, currently at twenty-three percent.
It had approximately eleven hours of normal, non-combat usage at this level.
Full combat usage would drain the suit’s power levels to zero in something like three hours.
I left the suit on full AI monitor, knowing that unnecessary programs might be shut down as needed to preserve power—unnecessary programs like auto hard / pliable mode, and suit-powered blast weapons.
I left temperature on, because freezing to death in a lobster shell sounded horrible.
When we at last approached the Dark Riders’ base of operations—an abandoned waterpark near Charlotte, North Carolina.
We were flying low, skirting the treetops, relying on scanners to avoid old electrical and cell towers.
Lights off. Depending on the darkness to keep us safe. Seeing jack-nothing through the snow.
The waterpark glowed like a beacon in the night, bright lights on the new snow, maybe a tenth of a meter deep.
Peaceful. Pretty. The snow had beat us by two hours, but it had expended its fury and might on us in West Virginia.
In North Carolina, the snowstorm was soft, sweet, covering the raw earth and scars of the past like a scene from a book or an old-fashioned postcard.
Snow coated and draped the branches of trees, covering the ground in a pristine layer of reflecting white.
The helo went on silent mode, and skirted the park from a distance.
According to my Berger chip, the waterpark had once had seven pumps and two ponds: a water storage pond down low from which water could be pumped to the high pond.
From the high pond there were three channels that allowed water to flow downhill, bump into rocks, make rapids, and recollect in the lower pond.
For idiots in rafts and small boats to fight their way through.
Dangerous, maybe, maybe not. Stupid either way. Give me a bike and an open road. You couldn’t drown on a bike unless you were really stupid or tried really hard.
There were buildings scattered here and there, and though we didn’t know for certain which was command HQ, we figured it was the one flying the American flag and another flag, this one depicting a black fist with a red dragon circling it, on a white background.
The dragon looked like the ones tattooed on the Dark Riders.
Scanners showed us a basic floorplan in each building. We couldn’t get closer because human forms were playing in the snow.
They were building snowmen, rolling in the snow like kids, throwing snowballs behind a snow fort wall. They were also staggering, falling, clearly highly inebriated under the searing lights.
The helo banked and, at a stupid as hell angle, took us away from the drunken DRs’ fun and games. My stomach rose in my throat. I will not spew. I will not. But I barely kept it down, armored fingernails clawing against the cabin floor.
We had considered bringing my earth mover, but I figured that the base had more new stuff like the one they brought to extricate and transport the Bug ship, the bait we had used to get them to come to us.
With the extra space we had half our warriors and enough weapons and ammo to kick some significant butt. One camera.
Tomika came with the camera.
Bengal, working outside of the Boozefighters, came with Puta-Bella, One Eye, and Chewy.
They brought their personal weapons and a small cannon.
It was essentially a shoulder-mounted, guided missile launcher, and it had three missiles.
I was pretty sure he had salvaged it from Warhammer’s Nest, as part of his club’s payment, despite the fact that it still probably belonged to the military.
“Finders keepers” was biker club law and the junkyard itself made a pretty penny from salvaged military equipment.
It wasn’t stealing if it had been abandoned, or had been stolen from the original thief, at least that was biker rationale.
In addition to Bengal and his people, I had Jacopo, who brought HAs loyal to the Marconi Chapter: Hammer, No Dog, who I knew from the day the roadhouse opened, and Newbie, along with a woman whose name I didn’t remember.
She was tough, mean, and though she had no armor, she carried a good eighteen kilos of weapons and ammo as if weighed nothing and wore spikes on her riding gloves.
Jagger came with the OMW. He had Razor McBride, Big Dick McKraken, and two others, who were low-listed wannabe members hoping to make a name for themselves and achieve made-man status.
Loosely speaking, the roadhouse brought Mateo and Evelyn, Enrico, because he refused to leave my side, and a destruction of cats led by Spy, wearing her war harness, this time carrying water and kibble in addition to the cameras that would record but have no way to transmit what it videoed.
Amos and Cupcake had stayed behind to coordinate the care and feeding of our prisoners, with the intention of keeping as many alive as they could. I missed my best fighters at my side, but they had been mostly support in the last few days, not battle-ready comrades.
They were safe. That was important to me. My nanos liked their safety more than they wanted the two with me. Nanos were confusing, so I ignored them as often as I could.
The Sikorsky set us down in a clearing a klick away from the former waterpark, near what was left of the Catawba River, a dried up trickle of its former glory.
I set my armor to minimal temp protection, minimal enviro camo, minimal everything, except hardening against projectiles, to save batteries.
I was down to twenty-two percent. And—because there was only so long a girl could hold her pee—I had been forced to activate the bodily fluids removal device, which hurt like hell, no matter what the military said. They lied. Always had.
“Invented and developed by men,” I muttered as I set boots in the snow.
The rotors still spun overhead as I took in the midnight scenery.
The short warbot suit scuttled out of the helo and telescoped open its legs to its full seven plus meter height.
Eleanor and the torti cat were inside the warbot suit carapace with Mateo.
The clearing quickly filled with people and gear.