“Sure,” I said into my mic, checking to see that the two bikes were still near me. “If the weather holds, we should have a couple of days to set up a nice trap, far away from our territory, on the other side of the mountain from Four County Mine and our allies, and hell and gone from the junkyard. All we need is a little help from Devil Anse in Logan, West Virginia, a working backhoe, and a transport truck. I have the equipment. Anse has our bait.”
“And what’s yourbait?” Jolene demanded.
Trusting in Jolene’s link, I said, “The rotation rings from the downed alien Bug ship in Anse’s possession.” He also hadthe other dead alien carapace. Like dead-dead, not in multilarval stage kind of death. I wasn’t going to ask for the body, however.
“You can tell your fiancé that I won’t let the bad guys get the rings.” I whipped the bike around again and practically flew back past the diner to the boulder-sized not-slag. I stopped and walked up close. With the edge of a blade, I carved off three slivers of the metal, surprised that steel would cut into it. “Hey, Jolene,” I said. “You copy?”
There was no reply, just the odd staticky absence of EntNu comms.
I began to drive, and every few seconds I tried to contact Jolene. It never worked, until I pulled over and placed the shards of not-slag into the small metal tin where the amaranth seeds were. When I spoke again, Jolene answered instantly.
“Copy, Sugah. Where the heck fire are you, girl?”
“Just about caught up to the others.” Which told her nothing, and more importantly told CAIT nothing. But it told me everything.
When I reached the others, I keyed off the bike, set the Jiffy, and dismounted. Cupcake ran up to me squealing, and threw her arms around me. I went stiff for all of ten seconds, but Cupcake had decided in the last few weeks that she was a hugger and I figured she wasn’t letting me go until I hugged her back. I reached around her and patted her back.
“That’s pitiful,” she said to me, laughing softly. “But I guess it’s better than it used to be.”
I grunted and stepped away.
Mateo had arrived in his ATV Quadro and the gear had been partially unpacked. The crew was celebrating, big grins and cold beers all around. The cats were feeding from three foil packets of something that smelled like spoiled fish, but was marginally better than the shit stink at the diner.
I took a beer. It was some local IPA stuff, too hoppy for my taste buds, but it was wet. That was what mattered. And it was celebratory. No one celebrated like a bike club. I sat flat on the ground and drank. Thinking. Swiping through maps on my autonomous morphon.
When the stinky fish was gone and the last of the beers had been drained, Mateo said, in a bad, vaguely French-Spanish accent, “What’s the plan, mon presidente?”
“All I got is the bare bones,” I said, still concentrating on the morphon and tapping out calculations. “but it starts with Brushy Fork Coal Mine, just north of Four County Mine, in Boone County.”
“You said something about an impoundment dam,” Jolene said. “I believe it was the Brushy Fork Coal impoundment?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “Twilight MTR Surface Mine, near Twilight, West Virginia created the Brushy Fork impoundment ‘pond.’ It’s really the biggest earthen dam in the western hemisphere. It’s two hundred, forty-seven meters high, as close as I can calculate it. The old records list it at eight hundred, ten feet high, so, more or less. It holds back 7.8 billion gallons—which is just north of 29 billion liters—of toxic coal ash sludge,” I said, converting units from pre-war to current, and reading at the same time. “We have a scary assortment of chemicals stored there, starting with manganese, cadmium, lead, and mercury.
“Near it is a smaller, newer, impoundment pond in a deep depression in the mine. I’m proposing that we borrow the burned alien ship rings and scrap, and place the pieces in the smaller pond, just under the surface. And just wait for the Dark Riders. As soon as they stop shitting their pants and find a way to contact their bosses, I’m betting they’ll reconnoiter the place and spot the rings. Then they’ll come. All of them. Even thebrass.Especiallythe brass. Because they’ll assume this is a big discovery, one for the history books, and they have egos bigger than the moon. And we take them all out at one time, for good.”
Mateo’s metallic voice nearly spat, “Ambush. Assassination.”
I looked up and scowled at him through the warbot face shield. I didn’t like the sound of those words. Worse, I didn’t like what I had said, what I had meant. I didn’t like what those words meant about me and who I was.
“No,” I said, improvising on the fly. “Setting up the scene and getting the DRs there is part one. Part two—we go public. I’m still working out the details but I have an idea for part two.” And, oddly, I did. If Gomez and Jolene . . . and CAIT were really willing to help. Yeah. I needed CAIT.Blast it all to hell. I needed the super-secret AI program that had lain buried inside Jolene for years. I had a feeling that CAIT would as soon fry me as scan at me, but I’d take what I could get.
Jagger chuckled under his breath. “We have a snowball’s chance of surviving the first appearance of anybody in military or Gov., but it does sound like fun.”
Bengal said, “I got some people who might be interested in it.” His tone said they would be interested and they’d show up for sure. “Thing this big,” Bengal said, “potentially, this big,” he reconsidered, waffling his bot-hand side to side, “all the clubs might want a piece. We got our own egos, our own goals, our own territory to protect. Taking down the riders and the faction in the military going their way, and the Gov. members working with them? Yeah, Little Girl, that’s big enough to interest them. Maybe. Let’s find out if the devil wants to come out and play first, and take a gander at the containment pond. Then I’ll take it up channels.”
That was fair. I called Devil Anse and shared the bare bones of Part One. “You in?” I asked.
What followed was a dicker-session between two junkyard owners about borrowing the rings of Bug alien ship number two. Anse said he wanted two truckloads of coal to borrow the rings, and he wanted the rings returned.
I was at a disadvantage. I wanted something from Anse more than he wanted what I had. I was about to pay two truckloads of coal to rent the rings when Cupcake butted in.
“One truck load,” she said.
Since Cupcake had just come from Four Corners Mine, I stepped away from the conversation. In a matter of minutes, she had charmed him down.
Anse said, “Cupcake, I’ll take one load of coal and a favor to be returned. For the outstanding favor, I’ll even deliver the rings and scrap.”
Too easy. The other shoe would fall at the worst possible moment and I’d pay the worst possible return. As an investment, this one sucked, not that I had a choice. Grudgingly, I nodded agreement.
