Bloody hell.
Bloody sodding damn it all to hell.
***
The next morning, Jagger eased out of bed before the sun rose. I pretended to be asleep as he crept out through the airlock doors. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling or what my nanobots wanted him to feel, and it seemed wiser, as well as safer, to just let him go.
Chicken. We both were chicken.
In a biker club, unless one was legally married or an Old Lady, sex was a casual thing—no love, no romance, no future beyond the tumble in the sheets. But this was something else, something new, at least for me. This felt like . . . more. More of what, I had no idea. And Jagger had gone, as he always would, back to McQuestion, without words or discussions or feelings. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t especially hurt.
But maybe I was numb, just a bit. And very,veryangry.
As the airlock closed, Spy and Maul, Tuffs and Notch leaped to the bed and snuggled into the warm place where Jagger had rested. Not slept, not last night. But with the cats snuggling around me, nearly as warm as Jagger, I fell into dreamless sleep. And for once, Cupcake didn’t wake me for coffee and breakfast.
* * *
Once she no longer had to provide cover for me, I hadn’t paid much attention to Wanda and Alex at the negotiations. But after Jagger left and we started preparing for the battle to come, I learned what they had been doing. Alex had been spying on the biker clubs by carrying an oversized, lazy-looking cat around in their arms and listening to the Old Ladies chat among themselves. Alex was an excellent snoop, with a keen eye for details and a great ear for gossip. They also looked innocent, which was not a trait anyone in a biker club was accustomed to.
Wanda, on the other hand, had strolled from group of Old Ladies to group of Old Ladies, facilitating trade; setting up an impromptu swap meet among the women in the clubs; and talking about cats and her fab-o armor. With the female made-men, she chatted about guns, armor, military tech, and knives. Having worked at Morrison’s, Wanda knew a lot about weapons and tech. She might not shoot a lot, but she knew the lingo, and the female made-men had needs Wanda was willing to encourage and attempt to fulfill. She made a number of sales and useful trades during the negotiations, a lot of it from my mattress inventory. She also created a new social concept: the Old Ladies and Female Made-Men Party, with booze, stuff to exchange or bargain over, and lively conversation about how horrible men were. I’d had no idea what she was capable of until I heard the details.
She had gathered all the women together and encouraged them to talk. She had listened to the women complain, argue, gripe, and had also watched them fight. Literally. Fists and knives and sword-edged words. Safe and protected in her armor, she had pulled apart the participants of three fights before she realized that wasn’t enough. The Old Ladies were about to go to war when Wanda shook two fighting women like cats and ordered them to behave or she’d show them how many teeth a woman in a suit of armor could knock out.
Wanda then began to divide and conquer. She gathered the remaining Old Ladies into a separate spot, got them roaring drunk, and suggested to them that the clubs could and should have quarterly swap meet / meet-and-greet combos, like a summit between heads of state—discussions to avoid future confrontations. She had told them they had more power than they thought, because men would agree to anything after a good tumble, and they could keep their men and their children and their clubs safe if they worked together instead of going to war. They hadpower. It wasn’t a foreign concept, but maybe no one had put it to them quite the way Wanda did.
Once she had the Old Ladies happy, she had turned her attention to the female made-men, a much more violent, rugged group. She suggested that the clubs could work together and divide up the nation instead of fighting each other, and then fight the PRC and the Gov. if necessary. She also suggested that the clubs, working together, would have enough power to negotiate with the military from a position of strength instead of taking contracts that put them in danger in return for smaller gains. Female made-men usually liked to fight and were always looking for ways to move up in the hierarchy of the clubs, which meant fighting each other even more than the men. Working together, fighting only the men, they could gain status.
What Wanda suggested was part anarchy, part conquest, part treason. While she hadn’t really meant to bond the women together with a long-term goal, she had. She had also managed to pit the clubs against the runaway military authorities and the Gov. Working for Marty had prepared her to take a place in my nest I had never expected.
After she was done fomenting peace and betrayal and treachery all at once, she had provided Cupcake a list of new trade items and lots of intel. Like Cupcake, Wanda was exploring her abilities and talents, natural and nanobot-given, looking for a way to serve me.
My alternative to all the alliances was to transition every human on the planet and rule them like a queen.
Which just gave me the squicks.
* * *
The second day after Jagger—no. The second day afterAssholeleft my bed and my office, Cupcake, Amos, Wanda, Alex, and I had breakfast together, discussing our final preparations for battle. Mateo and Jolene were present via screens and speakers through the ship’s EntNu.
Cupcake snapped open her Morphon, and standing like a drill sergeant, said, “CO Mateo. Simba update.”
“Simba’s city-killer has been removed and placed in theSunStarfor safekeeping,” Mateo replied. “The Simba has been upgraded with all the weapons and defenses I think we’ll need, and is currently strapped down with charging stations, armor-donning stations, ammo, long-distance weapons, and up-close-and-personal weapons. We have armaments that can take out precision targets at five kilometers using aerial targeting systems and auto-guided missiles We also have eight bunker busters. They’re capable of breaking through an underground bunker to a depth of twenty meters, and, with a one-two punch of delivery systems, can reach to two hundred meters.”
I frowned at his image on the screen over the command chair. “Where did we get bunker-buster missiles?”
“It’s in the mattress inventory,” Cupcake said, amused and proud of herself.
I didn’t remember seeing weapons of that size, but then I had only made it halfway through the mattress inventory. I flipped up my Morphon and scrolled through until I saw the last page. Mateo had added eight bunker-buster missiles to my arsenal. How had he . . . ?
Bloody hell.
“Mateo,” I said. “These bunker-buster missiles. Where did they come from? And how did you get them?”
“The weapons fall under my purview as CO ofSunStar,for both fulfilling my mission and assigned objectives, and for any operations required to protect and rescue my crew.”
I stared at the image of his misshapen head and decided there was more than a hint of hostility in his body language. If his voice could carry emotional overtones, I had a feeling he’d sound mocking, arrogant, and condescending.
And it pissed me off.
