I read the letter. My shock fired out to everyone in my nest. Even Wanda, who had yesterday and today off. I felt her worry and shuttered my reaction to keep those even farther away from picking it up. I didn’t need an Asshole and his sidekick made-man showing back up. I wasn’t good at comforting people, but I tried to think happy thoughts and send them out. Wanda settled, which was weird that she’d respond and weirder that I’d know she had.
I took the letter and the bit of metal to the door of the UC.
“What is it,” Amos asked me. “Why’d you go all squirrelly?”
“This,” I stopped and turned the bit of metal around so they could see, “is part of the insignia of an officer of theUSSS Sunstar.” Which had crash landed on the junkyard at the end of the war and hidden itself. There was a time when only I knew it was here. Word was getting out, but no one had parts from the ship. Until now.
This,” I tapped the paper, “is a request for para-military-type assistance from the owner of the Junkyard Roadhouse, Bill’s little ‘gal,’ with a link for private communications via EntNu comms system.” Bill was my father, once the defacto leader of the OMW motorcycle club. EntNu comms was a space-travel communications system which could only be used from a spaceship and had to have satellite backup to link to an earth address other than itself.
“Someone is telling you they know who you were with the OMW, who you are, and what you’re hiding,” Cupcake said. “It’s also a blackmail threat. Help or I’ll tell all to whomever I want.”
“They know I have access to a spaceship. And they have access to a starship. Bloo-dy damn,” I whispered.
Mateo, captain of said starship, and I needed to have a chat. I left the Urgent Care.
His lower limbs fully extended, my seven-and-a-half-meter tall employee-thrall-sorta-friend, was waiting outside. His legs retracted and folded as he dropped until we were mostly face-to-face. His weapons withdrew into the upper limbs, and a three-fingered mechanical hand extended from one of his two upper limbs. I hadn’t found a perfect replacement for the third one. Space worthy warbot suit parts weren’t exactly easy to find, and Jolene had no schematics in her databanks to fabricate one. “The insignia,” he said, no emotion in his tone.
I placed it into his hand, and he lifted it to his face shield.
The insignia disappeared somewhere inside him. He extended his hand again. “The note.”
“I want it back,” I said.
He didn’t reply. And what was I going to do if he didn’t return it? Shoot a hole in his armor and climb in there with him to get it? I placed the note, opened out to read, into his three metal fingers. He inspected it with multiple monitors and scraped a bit of blood off for Jolene to test, before replacing the paper in my hand.
Still silent, Mateo took to his full height with the faint whirr of his servos and stepped away into the afternoon sunlight. I took the paper to the office, closed out the cats, and laid it beneath the camera on the command center so that Jolene and Gomez could read the letter as I did.
Attention Shining Smith, Bill’s gal, Little Girl of the OMW, owner of Smith’s Junk and Scrap and of the Junkyard Roadhouse.
Greetings.
Some years ago, I borrowed a few things from the bottom of your mine, where it connects to the tunnel of another claim. Being a man of honor, I ceased and desisted when I learned the property, the scrapyard, and the mine had an owner. I have now been attacked by your enemies, a motorcycle gang,(The word gang had been scratched out with a single line and replaced with,club wearing no insignia, but bearing military weapons.)They took my eldest daughter prisoner and did considerable damage to my pawnshop and my scrap and recycling yard. I call upon you, as a woman of honor, to assist me in reclaiming my daughter fromyourenemies, what my people are calling the Dark Riders. In return, I’ll turn over all the ship parts removed from your property, and pledge the loyalty of the Logan Wildcats Militia to the Junkyard Roadhouse and to you personally as a support teamto reconnoiter, provide info, and, where needed, fight for you, your territory, and your people.
Below that was the EntNu link info.
It was signed,William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield.
All that twanged a bell in my brain from when I first came to the junkyard secretly owned by Pops. I tapped my Berger chip and said aloud, “Give me info on the Logan Wildcats Militia and William Anderson ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield.”
My Berger chip informed my brain: “The Logan Wildcats were a county militia, a company of the 36th Virginia Infantry. William Anderson Hatfield—also known as Devil Anse—was the leader of the Hatfields during the family war between the Hatfields and McCoys.”
“No current info on a militia going by the name Logan Wildcats, or of a living Hatfield by that name?”
“No such pre-war militia exists. No pre-war information exists on anyone officially by that name. No such name appears in the birth records for the last seventy years, up until I was last updated, at which time the birth and death records had not been updated for up to twenty years. This makes any data I have up to three decades out of date. My data requires updating. My hardware is out of date. My specifications—”
I tapped the chip off. Updating my chip meant exposing my blood to a surgeon and therefore my nanobots to a surgeon. Infecting someone else was not on my to-do list. And there hadn’t been time to see if the Surgical Med-bay could do the replacement. My list of “to-do later” was exceptionally long these days.
“Jolene? That EntNu address?”
“Shining Sugah, that address ismyaddress. That, that, thatmandone stole my EntNu comms!”
I scowled as I put it together. “So we can talk back and forth without a satellite uplink?”
“Yes. He’s been eavesdropping, that nasty old man.”
Not a nasty man. A smart man who knew how and when to use his assets. He’d probably had parts of Jolene for a while, listening in, gathering intel on us for later needs. Like now. Yeah. Very smart man. I tapped Amos’s comms. He answered with the words, “You want to know what the kid said before you got there.”
“Please.”
