Zeroin a Sikorsky.
Almost as bad—I had never flown.
We were all gonna die. I knew it.
I re-tightened the flex straps until they cut into my middle.
It had been a mixture of post-war ingenuity, common sense, and hope to repair the helo. It was scary as shit—like, my bowels wanted to move—getting the Sikorsky into the air.
The helo teetered, tottered, rolled left and then right. Bumped back down on its landing gear a few times. I didn’t count. And finally we were airborne.
I discovered that nanobots did not protect against air sickness.
* * *
Despite being charged for two hours, my armor was low on power, currently at twenty-three percent. It had approximately eleven hours of normal, non-combat usage at this level. Full combat usage would drain the suit’s power levels to zero in something like three hours. I left the suit on full AI monitor, knowing that unnecessary programs might be shut down as needed to preserve power—unnecessary programs like auto hard / pliable mode, and suit-powered blast weapons. I left temperature on, because freezing to death in a lobster shell sounded horrible.
When we at last approached the Dark Riders’ base of operations—an abandoned waterpark near Charlotte, North Carolina. We were flying low, skirting the treetops, relying on scanners to avoid old electrical and cell towers. Lights off.Depending on the darkness to keep us safe. Seeing jack-nothing through the snow.
The waterpark glowed like a beacon in the night, bright lights on the new snow, maybe a tenth of a meter deep. Peaceful. Pretty. The snow had beat us by two hours, but it had expended its fury and might on us in West Virginia. In North Carolina, the snowstorm was soft, sweet, covering the raw earth and scars of the past like a scene from a book or an old-fashioned postcard. Snow coated and draped the branches of trees, covering the ground in a pristine layer of reflecting white.
The helo went on silent mode, and skirted the park from a distance.
According to my Berger chip, the waterpark had once had seven pumps and two ponds: a water storage pond down low from which water could be pumped to the high pond. From the high pond there were three channels that allowed water to flow downhill, bump into rocks, make rapids, and recollect in the lower pond. For idiots in rafts and small boats to fight their way through.
Dangerous, maybe, maybe not. Stupid either way. Give me a bike and an open road. You couldn’t drown on a bike unless you were really stupid or tried really hard.
There were buildings scattered here and there, and though we didn’t know for certain which was command HQ, we figured it was the one flying the American flag and another flag, this one depicting a black fist with a red dragon circling it, on a white background. The dragon looked like the ones tattooed on the Dark Riders.
Scanners showed us a basic floorplan in each building. We couldn’t get closer because human forms were playing in the snow.
They were building snowmen, rolling in the snow like kids, throwing snowballs behind a snow fort wall. They were alsostaggering, falling, clearly highly inebriated under the searing lights.
The helo banked and, at a stupid as hell angle, took us away from the drunken DRs’ fun and games. My stomach rose in my throat.I will not spew. I will not. But I barely kept it down, armored fingernails clawing against the cabin floor.
We had considered bringing my earth mover, but I figured that the base had more new stuff like the one they brought to extricate and transport the Bug ship, the bait we had used to get them to come to us. With the extra space we had half our warriors and enough weapons and ammo to kick some significant butt. One camera.
Tomika came with the camera.
Bengal, working outside of the Boozefighters, came with Puta-Bella, One Eye, and Chewy. They brought their personal weapons and a small cannon. It was essentially a shoulder-mounted, guided missile launcher, and it had three missiles. I was pretty sure he had salvaged it from Warhammer’s Nest, as part of his club’s payment, despite the fact that it still probably belonged to the military. “Finders keepers” was biker club law and the junkyard itself made a pretty penny from salvaged military equipment. It wasn’t stealing if it had been abandoned, or had been stolen from the original thief, at least that was biker rationale.
In addition to Bengal and his people, I had Jacopo, who brought HAs loyal to the Marconi Chapter: Hammer, No Dog, who I knew from the day the roadhouse opened, and Newbie, along with a woman whose name I didn’t remember. She was tough, mean, and though she had no armor, she carried a good eighteen kilos of weapons and ammo as if weighed nothing and wore spikes on her riding gloves.
Jagger came with the OMW. He had Razor McBride, Big Dick McKraken, and two others, who were low-listed wannabemembers hoping to make a name for themselves and achieve made-man status.
Loosely speaking, the roadhouse brought Mateo and Evelyn, Enrico, because he refused to leave my side, and a destruction of cats led by Spy, wearing her war harness, this time carrying water and kibble in addition to the cameras that would record but have no way to transmit what it videoed.
Amos and Cupcake had stayed behind to coordinate the care and feeding of our prisoners, with the intention of keeping as many alive as they could. I missed my best fighters at my side, but they had been mostly support in the last few days, not battle-ready comrades.
They were safe. That was important to me. My nanos liked their safety more than they wanted the two with me. Nanos were confusing, so I ignored them as often as I could.
The Sikorsky set us down in a clearing a klick away from the former waterpark, near what was left of the Catawba River, a dried up trickle of its former glory. I set my armor to minimal temp protection, minimal enviro camo, minimal everything, except hardening against projectiles, to save batteries. I was down to twenty-two percent. And—because there was only so long a girl could hold her pee—I had been forced to activate the bodily fluids removal device, which hurt like hell, no matter what the military said. They lied. Always had.
“Invented and developed by men,” I muttered as I set boots in the snow.
The rotors still spun overhead as I took in the midnight scenery. The short warbot suit scuttled out of the helo and telescoped open its legs to its full seven plus meter height. Eleanor and the torti cat were inside the warbot suit carapace with Mateo. The clearing quickly filled with people and gear.
The snow only came to my lower legs and there were no drifts. The storm had literally blown itself out on top of us at themine, leaving the rest of the world with no wind, no ice, only soft pretty snowflakes. Mother Nature was a bitch.
