JUNKYARD RIDERS
Mateo strode across the junkyard, heading my way, his seven and half meters of height giving him a perfect line of sight across the flat, rocky ground of what used to be a top-down mine. He lifted one of his three telescoping black legs and stepped over a pile of prewar scrap. With each step, something beneath his arm jerked. Make that someone.
I tapped comms and said, “You caught a trespasser.” It wasn’t a question. It was obvious. Also obvious was that Mateo hadn’t been gentle with him. The man’s clothing, once military quality, auto-camo capable, with high-impact fourth-gen Kevlar, was ripped and torn. At the moment, the clothes fluttered in the breeze of Mateo’s passing, the cloth trying to warp visual light into whatever was closest, the black of Mateo’s warbot suit, the puke green of an old half-rusted vehicle body, even the mottled white, black, brown of the very young Torti cat perched on the small ledge at the bottom of Mateo’s horizontal silk-plaz viewscreen. Her claws dug in to hold her in place as Mateo reached me and stopped. He lowered one leg, bent, and dangled the trespasser in front of me by one of his upper limbs.
With his remaining upper limb, he caught the Torti kitten and placed her in a more secure nook on his massive viewscreen. Mateo always claimed he hated cats. I pretended not to notice his new owner.
At the moment, Mateo had only two arms. The third one was in the lab of the crashedUSSS SunStar, being augmented with a new set of weapons. Or maybe one massive missile. I hadn’t asked what Jolene and he had devised, but it would result in violent destruction. Sometimes my mostly-no-longer-bound thralls scared me.
Mateo dropped his unconscious prisoner. I knew the man was out, not faking it, because he didn’t try to break his fall. And he kind of bounced.
I knelt and studied him. Military tats, probably Army. Paramilitary clothing. No insignia. I pushed aside the edges of his shirt. Chest was bruised. Maybe a few broken ribs.
A red dragon had been tattooed across his sternum.
The tat was the insignia of the group I’d come to call the Dark Riders. It wasn’t their name, which I didn’t know, but it worked as title of the group inflicting destruction across several states.
“Why’s he so messed up? Did hefall down?” I asked, putting as much sarcasm into the words as possible. Mateo’s prisoners didn’t have accidents.
“He tried to run.” Mateo’s metallic larynx made the grating sound I associated with amusement. “He’s heavily augmented and he didn’t want to stay and chat. I was lonely and wanted to share a beer with a new pal. I wasn’t able to use my usual gentle persuasion.”
I laughed. Even a fully augmented battlefield warrior stood no chance against a warbot. “Idiot. Where’d you find him?” I asked.
“At the far end of the mine crack. Jolene saw him on the drones and disabled his vehicle.”
“Trackers on him?” I asked.
“You think I’m stupid? I may only be half the man I used to be, but I’m not reckless.”
Mateo’s human body had been chewed on and digested by the Chinese Peoples’ Republic’s finest military nanobots until I found him and got him decontaminated. He didn’t have fully functioning limbs and was missing some of his head and brain, but I’d provided him as many Berger memory chips as I could find to restore him. His neural link with his warbot suit gave him independence, mobility, and at least some chance at a life.
“What did you get out of him,” I asked, standing, toeing the trespasser’s arm with my work boot. Broken. He needed a medbay, but we were low on medical supplies.
“Nothing. Jolene wants him.”
I looked up at Mateo, my orange 3-Gen sunglasses catching a glare from the heatless winter sun. Waiting. If Jolene wanted the Dark Rider, it wasn’t to play video games or dominoes with him.
“Don’t look at me,” Mateo said. “I’m just following orders.” Mateo had been the CO of the SunStar, now crashed at the back of the junkyard. Jolene, formerly known as CAIT, an acronym for Central Artificial Intelligence Technology, had been the ship’s AI. She was now much more: sentient, conscious, self-aware. And he was followingherorders?
I studied him through the screen of his suit. He petted the Torti kitten, pretending to ignore me.
Mateo had been belligerent lately, which usually made me happy. I had assumed his anger was because the love of his life lived in a dissociative fugue state, and despite my one-of-a-kind, heals-anything nanobots, I hadn’t been able to fix her.
Trying to decide if I was angry about Jolene’s secretiveness or impressed that my first AI thrall had the ability to go behind my back, I said, “She’s going to try the new neural link adapter, isn’t she?”
“What do you think?” There was that rebellious tone again. Good for him.
“I think Jolene is . . .” My words trailed off.
Jolene, had been wanting to try her new neural link on a human, but the subject had to be fitted with a military grade Berger chip receiver. That meant brain surgery. Maybe strokes. Maybe a total loss of the recipient’s humanity. I toed his broken arm again, trying to decide if I cared. The Dark Riders were heavily into human trafficking. Women. Children. Weapons and drugs. Nah. I didn’t care. “I think Jolene’s bloody brilliant.”
Walking away, I said, “Keep me in the loop on what she finds.” When Mateo didn’t answer, I added, “Pretty please, captain, sir.”
He gave that grinding-metal equivalent of laughter. I had found him a lab grown larynx, Jolene had accessed a specialty medbay program, and done the surgery herself. But Mateo’s immune system had rejected the transplant. The voice box had died and his old mechanical one had been put back in two days ago. Maybe another reason for him to be cantankerous. My nanos hadn’t fully healed him either.
I stomped my boots clean of junkyard dust and entered the back door into the nook that led to the kitchen, breathing in the warm air and the scent of carnalizing onions, roasting hot peppers, and some kind of meat cooking. I started to salivate. Outside, the thin air was cold as an Enforcer’s heart. Inside, the temp was a comfy high sixties, thanks to the multi-grid power sources linked together to give the roadhouse its HVAC, running water, and other essentials of pre-war living. Post-war living had left most people with a whole lot less.
Before I entered the kitchen proper, I pulled off my coat and placed it inside the mini-Anti-Grav device Jolene had created, set the timer for five minutes, and hit the On button. I then pulled on thin silk-plaz gloves, because the roadhouse was already decontaminated for the lunchtime crowd and I didn’twant to decontam it again. That meant energy costs and time lost for sales.
