* * *
Leaving Wanda, Alex, and Jolene’s bot-form to keep the roadhouse safe, I packed up the Bug transmitter from the crashed ship, which I designated Bug Ship Two, and also packed the device that let me communicate with the SunStar without satellite. The one at the mine was a homemade, clunky device, reverse engineered, and held together with duct tape, baling wire, and spit. This was the original.
We hit the road, packed down with enough gear to compress the tires of the Quadro and its trailer, and leave actual tracks in the hardpan beside the cracked asphalt of the roads. There was no such thing as road repair (except for a few main thoroughfares) since the war, and the road surfaces were disintegrating. Because of the asphalt conditions and the weight, we were moving too slowly for my preferences, but I wasn’t going to leave Mateo behind. Not that he couldn’t take care of himself, he could, but I didn’t want to have to scrape body parts off the road if someone got cheeky with him.
I wasn’t riding my club bike. The paint job was still in progress in Jolene’s lab, so I was straddling a rebuilt DR bike, put together out of bits and pieces from bikes damaged when the junkyard had been attacked. The Dark Riders had become cat protein, but the bikes? Useful. It had been a long time since I’d ridden anything but a Harley. This crotch-rocket screamer-bike wanted to go fast, and it had built-in weapons and auto camo, but the speed and the weapons couldn’t make up for the loss of the joy that riding my Harley usually brought. This was necessary transportation.
Riding with cats in the panniers, AKA saddlebags, was a novel experience. I had cat heads peeking out, surveying the surroundings, two per bag.
Mateo had cats riding on his carapace and upper limbs, and more in the trailer, bedded down in the gear. I had no idea how many cats had joined us but it was enough to kill all the rodents wherever we ended up.
As we traveled west, out of the strip-mined, stark, barren, and inhospitable rock terrain that boasted Junkyard Roadhouse and not much else, low hills appeared on the horizon and dry streambeds sliced along beside the road. Trunks and the bare branches of winter hugged the hills, creating small forests, scraggly trees and scrub, gripping onto life, roots in the polluted ground.
West Virginia had been abused and the mountains removed down to bedrock for profit, with slag and detritus left behind on the stripped, rocky flatlands. The mines had never been ecologically reclaimed the way the mine owners had promised. Broken promises were a fact of life in West Virginia.
I usually rode too fast to give the land my attention, but now I was moving as slow as Mateo, straddling a bike not meant for meandering. The winter made the view more grim than I remembered, the road more switchback than I recalled.
We were sixteen kilometers from Highway 85, south of Bald Knob, when I heard the click of EntNu comms in my helmet speakers. Jagger’s voice was broken up and full of static, which was weird for EntNu communications. In fact, it was supposed to be so difficult to intercept or disrupt that it had been called by one comms guy in the war, “Perfect.”
I was able to make out, “. . . ound DRs. . . . diner at the br . . . . . . olled up . . . side watchin—”
Comms squealed and quit.
“Jagger?” I asked, my voice sharp as broken glass. “Asshole, you copy?”
Jagger didn’t reply. I said, “Mateo?”
My other thrall didn’t reply either. Or at least not fast enough to make me happy.
I gunned the engine and whipped the bike in a controlled oversteer, fishtailing around in a one-eighty, and raced back to Mateo. I had gotten further ahead than I thought, and when I spotted Mateo around a bend, his ATV quadro stopped dead, and electric fear zigzagged through me. It took a half second to realize comms and I were being ignored as he finished blasting a small bot into molten metal and charred silk-plaz.
I pulled up close to the smoking mess and shuddered. He was killing a small PRC bot. I had no idea what kind but it was the size of a perker. The junkyard had been attacked by perkers not so long ago. I came to a stop, boots on the blacktop. “Mateo? Where did that bot come from?” When he didn’t answer I said, “If that was a perker, they carry nanobots.”
His leg flattened on the end and he stomped on the remains of the bot. “You think I’m stupid, Shining? I hit it with a portable antigrav before I started cooking it.”
“You have a portable AG unit? Why did I not know that?”
“Because I just had it attached.” He held up a new, modified arm. He had lost an upper limb in Warhammer’s Battle and I hadn’t noticed the new one. It was small, on an extendable, telescoping-style stick, so he could hold the weapon away from himself. “And the damn perker got Sam, so he’s extra dead now.”
“Sam?”
He dropped his legs half-closed and picked up the white, black, and brown Torti juvenile cat. He tried to place it back onto the small ledge at the bottom of his horizontal viewscreen, but the cat wasn’t having it. Not at all.
Mateo hadn’t looked at me yet, deeply involved with the perker and the kit. His supply nook to the side of the warbot upper body opened, like a sliding airlock door. He placed the kitten inside.
Mateo closed the sliding door to the nook and the kitten crawled onto his lap and peeked out the big viewscreen.
“I hope you have a litterbox in there,” I said.
Mateo looked at me, no expression his face.
“If I make more jokes, you’ll shoot me, won’t you?” I asked.
“Into hamburger. And then I’ll feed you to the cats.”
I managed to keep the mirth off my face and not cackle, but it was a near thing. “Copy that. Did you hear Jagger’s SOS?”
“I did. You go ahead to the diner. I’ll get there when I get there.”
