“Already bunkered in and blast doors are in place, Shining, Sugar.”
We had reinforced and buried a three meter long shipping container last week, for just such an occasion. I couldn’t fight if my people were in danger. And when thralls with no military training thought I was in danger, they kept trying to protect me, getting between me and my objective, making it impossible to kill the bad guys, without them getting shot, cut, sliced, and diced—themselves. Bad all around. Everyone was safer with the nonmilitary thralls locked in, at least in the short term.
I grabbed extra gloves, left my HQ, and sealed the doors, which were really spaceship hatches, suitable for keeping air in and space out. I walked steadily through the maze of hallways—the better to fight an enemy off—and into the bar again.
Tables were scattered around. Mismatched but comfortable chairs, two reupholstered booths taken from crashed RVs on the property, that Jolene was justifiably proud of restoring and moving in here, fancy bar with liquor behind it. There was also a screen for watching sports on one wall.
The roadhouse, including its repurposed and re-painted spaceship hatch front doors, was built to withstand small-arms fire and anything up to a short barrage of mid-load rockets, andit had its own armaments, well placed and out of sight. Silk-plaz windows let in outside light but no one outside could get visuals and no heat-sigs from inside showed through, which was an inconvenience to would-be drive-by shooters and long-range assassins. I’d made sure the building could stand up to a battle, because I had too many bloody-damn enemies. Like Mina.
The whining but distant scream of Mina’s bike came through the open front doors. The spaceship hatches hadn’t been open when I left.
“Marconi of the Hell’s Angels,” he said over the speakers.
“Roadhouse, Little Girl.” I said. “Your kid is approaching.”
“Which one?” But by his tone he already knew.
“Mina.”
Marconi cussed a bit, then said, “Lorenzo. Go see how many she killed getting away this time.” To me he said, “I got her on DM, and I never increase the dose.” Which implied she was now always jonesing. “She knows you . . . knows about DM.”
DM. Not using the name in case someone had cracked our comms. Devil’s Milk. I grew it in a hidden green house for the cats and for Mateo, who was always in pain. Or used to be. Lately he was weaning off the DM. My nanobots were helping at least that much.
“You got it for her?” I asked, wanting to be sure.
“It was that or kill my own daughter.”
“If she breaks the wrong rules, she’s dead anyway.” I made a cutting motion and the comms went dead.
The Rules of Entry were painted on the front doors. Anyone who entered the roadhouse had to pass through a scanner that worked as metal detector, X-ray machine, and explosive detection device. No guns, no weapons allowed. Except Jolene’s. And mine.
No spitting. No clipping toenails. No sex unless you paid for a private room. Lots of rules, and breaking any of them resulted in stiff, often painful repercussions.
Despite the rules, if Mina was jonesing, she’d be willing to break them all.
“Marconi is trying to contact,” Jolene said, the sound this time coming from her bot.
“Do not engage. If you have to shoot Mina, shoot to kill.”
“Sugar Love, do you think I became sentient yesterday?”
I laughed silently through my nose. Walked to the swinging doors. And out to the front porch. I pulled one of the rocking chairs over to block the entrance, sat, and settled my blaster on my lap.
I could tell when Mina turned into the drive. The cold wind had kicked up and dust devils spun. Seemed appropriate.
Jolene stepped around me and took up a position to my left. Her eye-searing wig and glittery dress was gone. Her bot body was fully exposed, but instead of sleek lustrous black, she was now wearing gray, rock-desert, mining-country camo, head to three-toes. And her lower arms had been retracted to expose much larger caliber weapons than I carried: a warbot-capable blaster and a barrel big enough to carry elephant shot, which, if I remembered right, was .450 and up.
My Berger chip started up. “The .404 Jeffery is a very effective cartridge, often considered more effective than the .375, especially with higher velocity rounds. However, it is unknown if any elephants survive on the continent of Africa—”
I tapped it off. I didn’t need to hear the current extinction rate. Humans had been running out of species to destroy long before the WIMP bomb explosion over Germany tore through the planet’s electromagnetic shield and ripped all the good stuff out of the atmosphere. Rain was scarce everywhere, now, and sowere animals. Storms were few and far between, and when they came, they were monsters.
The crotch rocket the psychopath rode whined up to ear piercing levels. Mina liked fast Suzukis, streamlined and heavily muted, the bike shielded. She used battery backup for stealth runs, so the engine scream was intended as a war cry, meant to intimidate. I grinned my Pop’s ferocious smile, all teeth and no joy. When she tore into the drive, Marconi’s killing machine in human form was already pointing a weapon at the roadhouse.
Before she could aim in my general direction, a net appeared out of thin air and dropped heavily over her. In that same instant, she hit the perimeter defenses. Her front tire blew, her bike spun around backward, then flipped in a vertical, one-eighty.
Mina flew into the air, somersaulted a good six feet off the ground, and stopped, hanging, as if grabbed by an invisible hand. Her body whipped forward, back, and swung around in a circle before she was released, to flop onto the parking lot. Her head hit first. Good thing she was wearing a helmet.
Full visual shielding disappeared from Mateo’s warbot suit, and the tall, spider-looking unit materialized, bending over the girl.
