I’m not— #11
Satisfied that I could operate it, I climbed down and began a search for keys, which I found neatly arranged and labeled on a row of hooks on the back wall.
“Nice,” I muttered to myself. “Sweet of you to leave all these for me.” I scooped them up and stuck them into an ammo pocket.
If we lost, my enemies would have to make new keys and, depending on their mechanical abilities, that could take days.
In order for my enemies to think I was one of theirs, the helmet would have to be down, exposing my head.
Weighing the consequences of alerting DR guards to our presence, I scooped up ear protectors that didn’t look as if they contained too many man-cooties, and a hardhat, hoping the wearer didn’t have hair lice.
Stupid time to go girlie, but lice had to be the devil’s evil brainchild.
Hopefully, with the hardhat and earmuffs, they’d think a drunken DR was getting into mischief, not that they were under attack.
And better me without cranial battle armor than my unarmored people getting shot.
The big Caterpillar was parked on the back wall near the keys. I’d have to take out that back wall to get free. Doable. But the moment I powered up, everyone in the compound would know something was up.
I closed myself into the cab and switched the key to “on,” checking the meters and the fluid levels. The last user had topped off the hydraulics, but left it low on diesel. Lazy, or they were expecting a shipment soon. There was enough fuel to get the job done. I hoped.
Spy and her lieutenants jumped into the cab with me, Pounce and Wrench took up places on the tiny dash. Spy climbed back to my shoulder and yawned against my cheek.
I pumped the manual fuel button the requisite three times on the label, and turned the engine over.
The Caterpillar started with a roar that would have taken out my eardrums without the ear protectors.
I was supposed to let it sit a while, so the fluids would be properly circulated, but after about forty-five seconds, the door opened.
A man with a long rifle slung across his back stood there.
I had made the right choice. From his vantage point, I looked like I belonged, wearing a hardhat and ear gear, and my armor was below his sightline. He didn’t touch the rifle.
I waved, throwing my arm as if I was an excited drunk.
He shook his head and gestured me down.
I gave him the finger, put the dozer into reverse, and backed through the wall. The top of the cage took a hit from the beam that held up the building’s roof system, but it didn’t fall, so I ignored it.
I braked, put the big machine into low gear, then high gear, and steered the Cat at its top racecar speed, 11.
7 kilometers per hour, around the big equipment building and completely over the electronics shed.
It crumpled like tissue paper beneath the pusher and as the treads crushed it flat, a feeling like joy fluttered through me.
This was almost more fun than my Harley, though the vibration was enough to shake my teeth lose.
The man with the rifle appeared beside me, waving his arms, still thinking I was one of his men.
I shot him the bird again and turned the Caterpillar toward the command building.
That brought people running from everywhere.
Some armed. Most drunker than skunks, though I had never seen a drunk skunk.
I had seen a drunk dog once, when I was a kid, and some biker gave his dog beer for taking down an attacker. Skunks had to be cuter than that.
I looked back to see Tomika, camera in hand, on top of the heavy equipment building I had driven through. Filming. Filming everything. I raised my hand to wave.
A hole punched through the silk-plaz windows.
I jerked my hand back. “Well, I guess it isn’t bulletproof,” I said aloud, my voice hidden beneath the earmuffs.
I inspected my hand, glad I hadn’t lost a finger.
They took forever to regrow in a medbay and my medbays didn’t come equipped with limb regeneration.
“Either they don’t care if I’m one of theirs or they figured out they were in trouble.
” I tossed the hardhat and the ear protectors onto the scant floor space and raised the armor’s helmet for protection.
That dislodged Spy, who dropped to my lap and sat high, balancing as I used legs and feet and hands to change gears and work the pusher blade.
My cage took more hits, and I paused long enough to open the door and let out the cats, with a final admonishment, “Don’t eat everyone. I need to question some.”
I closed the cage door and crashed into the back of the command building.
I rolled through the conference room, over a bar, wishing I had time to snag a few bottles to sell, but seeing them shatter on the floor was nearly as satisfying.
I took out a bathroom. Rolled through a strip club, currently unoccupied.
My treads crushed the brass pole and took out the stage.
I rumbled out the other side, leaving a demolished tunnel through the command center.
After that, all I could see was buildings to demolish and people shooting at me.
Jacopo from somewhere high, was firing in a steady rhythm I recognized, taking down the commanders with non-lethal shots, for the most part.
Mateo’s snow-camo-ed warbot suit hauled the injured away and left the dead on the snow.
The ones Mateo took were Prisoners of War, but I didn’t figure the Geneva convention covered the treatment of traitors.
I took out what might have been a bunkhouse, but avoided the building marked Chow and the one marked UC, for Urgent Care, because they might have stuff I wanted to salvage. I was working up an appetite grinding the Dark Riders’ HQ to splinters and scrap metal.
Twenty minutes after we began, our enemies laid down their weapons and held their hands in the air. With the command structure taken out, the boots-on-the-ground were surrendering.
A man rushed out of an unmarked building.
Firing. Firing. Firing. Fast. Accurate. At me.
Handgun. Big caliber. My damaged, bullet-riddled cage shattered and fell inward on me.
I raised the scraper-pusher to protect myself.
But not before I recognized the man. He had been in the roadhouse, eating a meal with his wannabee biker buddy and two chicks.
I had thought they were just lookie-loos.
They had been looking all right. And they had seen me. And Alex.
I lowered the blade and gunned the dozer. Spy leapt to the man’s back. Pounce wrapped the shooter’s leg in its four legs and bit down behind his knee. An unnamed cat grabbed his shoe on the other foot and the man went down.
I dropped the blade. I ran over him. Slowly.
Nobody comes into my roadhouse and plans to do evil to one of mine. There were Rules.
Pounce, the unnamed cat, and Spy leaped into my busted cage. “Thanks,” I yelled over the roar.
I was out of fuel and the big Caterpillar was sputtering when I rested the pusher blade on the ground and turned it off. There was blood on the blade and on the track treads. Good.
Laughing in that giddy, not-quite-sane way I had begun to adopt in battle, I looked around at the destruction I had wrought.
The cage was bullet riddled, and my suit had taken a few rounds here and there, but I was uninjured.
I unlocked my helmet and it settled into my collar groove.
I patted the dozer. “You are my new best friend,” I said to it.
“If I can find the fuel, you’re coming home with me. ”
I checked my chrono. Twenty minutes was a really long time in terms of human-on-human battles.
Short bursts of violence were nothing like the wartime battles against mama-bots, Perker Crawler Slow-bots, and other PRC Warbots.
Each of those machines had their own power plants and those battles had gone on for hours, sometimes for days, as the bots destroyed entire cities and killed tens of thousands of civilians who were trying to escape.
Fortunately for the Dark Rider traitors, I wasn’t a bot made by the Peoples Republic, and didn’t have unlimited power.
I was just a happy dozer operator set free to destroy. And now out of fuel.
* * *
No one came to help the Dark Riders—who turned out to be called Dragon Fist—which sounded stupid, like something out of a prewar Kung fu film—because the comms were still mysteriously out. My people had all the time in the world.
Jagger set up our HQ in the big dozer building and began to question the riders.
He started with having them disrobe, taking pics of them naked for later identification with close up pics of the red dragon tattoos all of them wore.
Then he put on his brass knuckles and began beating the truth out of people. I didn’t stay to watch.
Instead, I rounded up all the people who were infected with Clarice Warhammer’s nanos and did my own interrogation.
I touched all the thralls I found with my bare hands, to begin a second transition and make them mine.
Part mine. Because I didn’t complete the process.
I just made them sick and unable to think, the way Warhammer had done to Evelyn and the people the queen didn’t like but wanted to use.
When I had rescued her, Evelyn, half transitioned, hadn’t been able to heal properly, couldn’t think, couldn’t do much of anything but sit and stare.
That’s what I wanted for the Dark Riders.
Using the same minimal technique Warhammer had used on Evelyn would leave them disinterested, unmotivated, lethargic, and possibly half-braindead.
Maybe I should have had compassion or something.
But it was impossible to feel compassion for people who wanted to run the world.
People who knew about Alex. And me. And Cupcake. And . . .
Yeah. No mercy.