Stepping back, I studied the map of hits. I had hoped the map would give me clues about where the bikers originated, but except for avoiding secure areas, the attacks were all over the place for the last year.
I could understand why they attacked Smith’s Scrap and Junk—no one knew we had weapons and we were out in the middle of the stone desert. The back of nowhere. So why did they take a chance and hit a militia-backed junkyard? Something didn’t add up.
“Jolene and Gomez, you got a minute?”
“Sure, Sugah,” Jolene said through the speakers.
“Certainly,” Gomez replied. His accent was changing, his spoken UK-style English was shifting, and had been since he and Jolene had met. He currently sounded like an upper-class snooty New York butler from an old movie. Jolene called himher boyfriend, and I did not know, or want to know, what that meant.
I said, “The attacks are all within a few days’ ride from the Kingston, Johnson City area, only as far north as Sutton, and most in the southern tip of West Virginia, into North Carolina, near the border. Outliers are one in Kentucky, two in Virginia, and one in Tennessee, though that’s way outside their usual perimeters. Are there any active military bases with flight capability inside the perimeters of the attacks?”
“So they could fly in a small team on aircraft?” Jolene asked. “Is that what you’re thinking? Like a transport plane?”
“Richmond, Cincinnati, and Charlotte are active military bases with flight capability,” Gomez said. “However, there are numerous possibilities for transportation.”
“Can you correlate the locales that have been hit, with airports suitable for landing a small cargo plane, and put them up on the screens?”
“We would require specs on what size aircraft and what length runway,” Gomez said, sounding a little snotty.
They were AIs, capable of thinking, and they hadn’t taken this any further than I had asked: no rabbit holes, no independent research, merely the stated target. Which wasn’t their usual modus operandi, and it made me wonder what they were putting all their computing time into, but I shut down that line of thought again.
I said, “Cargo planes might be asking too much. Something that could carry four to twelve bikes, as many people, and their weapons and gear. Sodding hell, they could have been transported by eighteen-wheelers. Unless they rode, in which case someone somewhere on some road had to see them traveling. Jolene?”
“There are no reports of groups of unmarked motorbikes on rural roads on the neighbors’ nets,” Jolene said. There hadbeen about two seconds between my words and her answer, time enough for her to scour every small net in the area we were talking about.
“So they had air transport or unmarked trucks or . . . Trucks we’d never find. Can you rule in or out flight transport? Use your best estimates on the size of runways needed?”
“It’s like a math puzzle. We can search and drill into feeds and be creative!” Jolene said, sounding like some pre-war cheerleader. “Come on, Gomez, darlin’. It’ll be fun.”
They went silent. I studied a photograph of Devil Anse and read the story attached. If the newspaper in Logan was anything to go by, the man had restored law and order and become a hero to the locals. Or he was a petty tyrant. Could be either.Cynic much?
I put on fresh sunscreen, layered on a jacket, and left the office for the back of the junkyard where we kept all the stuff we were hiding, in plain sight. Cats trailed me, more than a dozen racing, leaping, mock-attacking. Though most had no names, I recognized three named cats: Wide Stripe, Narrow Stripe, and Spot, all warriors, all scarred from chasing toxic mine rats. They were among the warrior cats that had stayed behind to guard the junkyard when I went hunting Clarisse Warhammer.
I unlocked the padlock, opened the squealing doors to the rusted six-meter shipping container, and blocked them in place with chunks of concrete to let in light. The cats leaped in ahead of me and strolled around. I moved empty shipping boxes and a stack of wood pallets to reach the black bikes, the ones Wanda, Jolene, and Gomez had captured when they defended the property from incursion by the dark riders while I was off razing Warhammer’s nest. They had fought off twelve attackers and not given anything away—like what we were hiding back here.
All of the matte black Kawasaki KLR250-E3s were badly damaged and unrideable. The bodies were full of bullet holes and scorched by blasters. At least one’s engine had been disintegrated by a powered-down starship laser that left evidence like a shoulder mounted unit, not a space weapon.
The cats wound around the mangled bikes sniffing dried blood. They had attacked and probably finished off the downed dark riders and they seemed to recognize the scents. I pushed one away from the Kow bike I was studying.
In the war, the military had used Mini Suzukis for recon and full-sized Kawasaki KLR250-E2s and Kawasaki M1030s for combat support, because they could run on diesel, kerosene, JP4, JP5 and JP8 fuel and, if they needed stealth and muting capabilities, on electric for three hours. Kow bikes and Susies had been made in the states during the war, all manufacturing brought to the east coast after the PRC invaded the western half of the United States and half of South East Asia. A Kow bike was an indication of possible military involvement, though a slim one.
Jolene had run the serial numbers of all the parts, and they had come from everywhere, from small plants all over the States. The bikes themselves had serial numbers but she hadn’t been able to track them, not without running a chance of getting caught snooping, and none of us wanted that. Where the bikes came from hadn’t really mattered. Until a bloodied child showed up on my property.
Had to be a military connection. Somewhere.
Though the fenders were bent and twisted and the tires melted, I could tell all of them had been built to be sleek and fast. There was no military camo, but the finish was chitosan, self-repairing, and I had a feeling the matte finish didn’t show up on scans or radar. I ran my fingers across an unburned section, and felt little irregularities I couldn’t see with the naked eye. Therewere infrared headlights and brackets for the riders’ personal weapons. One had a twisted bracket that had mounted an energy weapon to the frame.
As I had done when we got home from Warhammer’s, I went over every square centimeter of the bikes, letting eyes and hands and even my nose tell me things. Each was a one-rider bike, not a shared model, which I had been able to tell because the riders had worn smooth spots on each footrest that had matched worn places on their boots. There was a storage area under the seats that had once held packets of food and two liters of water.
I left the bike and opened a hemp-plaz shipping container. Boots, clothing, and gear smelled like smoke and death, but there were no labels, no distinguishing characteristics. I rubbed the cloth between a finger and a thumb. Woven. Neither coarse nor rough. Sturdy. Felt like a cotton blend, making it a pre-war fabric. That was something I hadn’t noted before.
I pulled out a stiff, blood-soaked shirt, which reeked of burned flesh, rotten blood, fire, and scorched fuel. Two cats jumped into the box, and I scooped them out, carrying the shirt to the open doors. Well-made, the seams turned over and restitched. Plastic buttons. Bullet holes.
I tapped the morphon on my wrist and pulled up pics of the bodies. All four of them. Lot of holes, lot of tats, which I hadn’t paid attention to originally. They all had military tats. Regular Army. There were no biker tats, so I hadn’t thought anything of them. I scanned through the pics. Each of them had some scarlet ink that might have been Asian. Intricate. Gorgeous.
I sent the pics of the bodies to the screens in my office. Apartment. Whatever.
I returned to the box. Rummaged.
