Assuming they were a swarming party, sent to bring back food to an established nest, that meant these bicolors had been transported a good hundred kilometers from their queen; it tended to take a few hours before the ants noticed that they didn’t have a female anymore. It took seventy-two hours to complete the transition to female. I didn’t know how long they had been away from their nest, but they would notice they needed to create a queen soon. I had to act now.
But Ineededthat note.
“Shining. Company,” Mateo’s synthetic voice said directly into my wireless earbud. “Bike. Unknown model. Ten klicks out. I am launching ARVACs,” he said, referring to Auto Remote Viewing Air Craft—flying drones with better-than-standard artificial intelligence and real-time viewing, part of the junkyard’s defense system.
“The Law?” I whispered, looking at Harlan’s body, the jug a handbreadth from my fingertips. I had no desire to be hauled in for questioning over a dead man I hadn’t seen in years. But I had no desire to have ants take over my junkyard. I had no desire to be swarmed again. Remembered fear shivered down my spine like thousands of tiny ant feet.
“Unproven,” he said. “One vehicle. Approaching at 54 kph. No visible backup.”
No sane lawman rode anywhere alone, and never on a bike. Someone had sent Harlan’s body, part of a special delivery sealed by the Gov. With bloody bicolor ants which no sane person would have done. It couldnotbe simple bad luck.
Not the Law. Not the Gov. Not the military. The gift-giver was someone who wanted to play with me like a pride of cats with a junkyard dog. Or someone who knew what I really had on the property.
I opened the Maltodine and tossed the entire container in the hatch. The ants swarmed toward me.
I struck a match. Reached for the hatch door with one gloved hand. Tossed the match with the other. Lightning fast, I ripped the note away. Just before the hatch closed, intense heat boiled out, and I heard the ants scream as the sound cut off.
Maltodine burned anything anywhere, even without oxygen—except hemp-plaz composite. Maltodine didn’t burn anything made of metal or hemp that had been combined with silk-plaz at the atomic level. It burned until it no longer had anything organic to fuel it. Harlan, however, was organic.
I tapped over my heart with a two fingered salute and said, “Peace, my brother. There will be no more war. May your last ride on the dragon’s tail be peaceful.”
I dropped my salute. “Deets on the visitor when available,” I requested of Mateo. “And calculate Maltodine burn time of one hundred kilos of organic matter in an anaerobic environment.”
“Copy that.”
The Berger-chip implant started to provide the answer. I shut it down. Once I let that thing start talking it never shut up, and I had to sleep sometime.
With a gauntleted fist, I hammered the red ignition button and the AG Grabber came back on, the almost-imperceptible whine an itch under my skin. Initiating the controls, I maneuvered theGrabber over the top of the Tesla and lowered the unit until it almost connected. Then I raised the old war fuselage three and a half meters off the ground, the maximum ever achieved on land, even by the military of three warring groups of allied nations. AntiGrav was a misnomer on a planet surface, the moniker applied by a PR person when it was first invented, and it had stuck, even after WIMP engines had given us intra-solar system flight that did way more than levitate stuff.
I headed to the office, through the airlocks, back into the cool, where I flipped open the note. It said simply:
SS—
I hope I make it to you alive, but that ain’t looking likely. I was ambushed. Shot. Made it to the Tesla and crawled through into the hatch. Name of the shooter was One-Eyed Jack. They know about you. They’re coming.
—BH
SS was me, Shining Smith. BH was Buck Harlan.Theywere the people who had killed him. And were coming for me.
“Coulda used a little more info in your note, Buck. But I’m sorry you died delivering it.” Tears evaporated so fast I hardly noticed them gather.
I opened the small hatch of the armor niche and stepped up on the mounting pedestal. I was about to turn my back to the armor suit and initiate auto-donning when it occurred to me that appearing in military armor and weaponed up was acting out of fear and giving away my hand. It was one person heading in. Not an army. Maybe I was wrong that this person was coming for me. Maybe Harlan was wrong. Maybe my life as I knew it wasn’t over.
If whoever sent Harlan to me, dead and all, had just wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. If the military had figured out who I was, and half of what Smith’s Junk and Scrap really was, my small part of the Earth would have been inundated with uniformed warriors. If the Gov. itself had found me, and knew what I was, the bureaucracy would have been more direct. A missile barrage would have arced over the junkyard and taken out everything, leaving nothing but a hole in the rock. End of Shining Smith.
So, I didn’t need to wade in fighting. Yet.
Fear receded now that I was thinking and not just reacting. This wasn’t done by any usual suspect who wanted me dead. No. Someone was sending me a message and a threat. Someone wanted something I was or something I had. I thought about the crashed spaceship debris half-buried out back, hidden beneath the best ghillie tech camo cloth ever devised. But no one knew about it, except for Mateo. And only Mateo knew the full nature of my defenses. So, they must be after the conventional weapons I had stockpiled for the eventual resurgence of the war.
I wasn’t giving up my weapons, my money, or my ship. I especially wasn’t giving up the weapons to traitors. And I sure ashellwasn’t giving up my office.
I needed to go in with a presumptive position of weakness and lie through my teeth—assuming that, just because a motorcycle was heading this way, it was not my past nightmares come calling. It might not be. It could be coincidence.
I cursed and stepped away from the niche, into the personal toilette compartment—which would have been a bathroom if we had sufficient fresh water—and checked the lipstick. Combed my hair, which was still wet and spiked with sweat. Smeared on Kajal, desert-dweller’s heavy eyeliner. Lips and lids were all the makeup the heat could stand. Anything more would melt off my face. I pulled the desert camo tank top and military cargo pants off my body and hung them to dry. Ran the body wand over my pits and privates. Spritzed on something to counteract my natural stink. Some women smelled of lilacs and roses. I’d been brought up a warrior. I dismantled vehicles and ran a black-market weapons business at a junkyard. To smell better would deny what I really was, and also, I just hated the stink of perfumes. I sprayed an extra layer of sunscreen over my very bronzed skin, because you can never have too much sunscreen, not since the WIMP explosion over Germany tore through the planet’s electromagnetic shield and ripped all the good stuff out of the atmosphere.
“Location of bike?” I asked Mateo.
“Six klicks out. ARVAC cameras reveal male body shape, full face helmet, and cold-clothes, all in white and desert camouflage patterns. Bike is matte black.” His recon briefing paused. “Correction. Visual shielding has been activated. Bike is now desert patterns. Activating Silent Tracking.”
