Junkyard War, page 11
“Like I said. You let me rescue her as part of this Op, you help me kill Warhammer, and you can have all the goodies.”
All in all, the leaders reached a consensus much faster than I had expected. I had come prepared for us to stay overnight if necessary, but after seeing the Simba—and the execution of McQuestion’s wife—the club leaders were all in. Part of their easy acquiescence might have been the grief, poorly hidden in McQuestion’s eyes. Part of it was the rats. Part was seeing how many of their own people had been infected. And part was all the wartime weapons, armaments, supplies, and goodies in the bunker. But the biggest part was the men’s abilities to see a problem and decide when to be practical and pragmatic and work together for a common goal.
Plus, they knew they could kill each other afterward if needed.
* * *
It was dead-dark-thirty when the biker leaders finally hammered out the specifics of their agreement to work together, without honoring their individual supposedly-ultra-secret contracts with the military. The clubs’ parley ended with the agreement to keep their infected members in the prison—which Marconi informed us he had discovered in the basement of his fortress—until they could be transitioned back with my med-bay and my “medication protocol.” They still needed to choose a commander to run the attack—which I figured they’d fight over, then end up choosing Jagger. Sure enough, the conversation got heated, so I left them to check on the med-bay occupants, my cats, and the prisoners. While I was occupied, they also picked a time and a location to meet—about two klicks south of the bunker in a time schedule I could meet if I hustled. Maybe most important—in an action that showed solidarity with Roy Gamble, who had killed his own wife—they volunteered to shoot their own people at the slightest hint of betrayal.
When I got back, they were done, a bit more bloody and banged up than when I left, but all in agreement, which was way more than I expected. I followed them back downstairs where they each, individually, announced the plan of action to their members, the small groups that I had separated and merged into looser packs, back in place again as they talked with their club members. I had all I wanted and needed. A chance to rescue Evelyn and the promise to kill Warhammer. Nothing else mattered.
And then the leaders shook hands, bumped fists, and packed up. I managed to cover my shock when I was included in the fist bumping, gloves to gloves, but I managed not to make an eeep sound like a little girl when it happened.
The clubs dispersed, bikes roaring into the night, taking their part of the supplies and weapons I had offered. And the cats.
Spy and her clowder stayed with me, which was a relief. Spy was adventurous. She was a warrior cat. I had been afraid she might desert me.
Our crew, with Tuffs and Spy’s clowder, went back to the junkyard. I held Spy on my lap as Cupcake drove and hummed along with the radio, turned low. She was still off-key but it wasn’t as noticeable since she wasn’t competing with the radio volume. For most of the trip, my fingers massaged Spy. Then she scratched me. Blasted cat. I sucked my fingers. “You know perfectly well how to tell me to stop. Next time you scratch I’ll roll down the window and throw you into the bushes.”
She flicked her tail at me, unconcerned, and rolled over, exposing her belly for more scratches, which I ignored. I wasn’t risking my flesh again.
“Tuffs was an abandoned cat,” I said to Spy. “Maybe she got tossed out of a moving car. You should ask her how it felt.”
On the dash, Tuffs opened one eye, held my gaze for five agonizing seconds, and closed it.
I crossed my arms and tried to decide if I was pouting. I probably was, so I concentrated on the good things that had happened: I had intel taken from the traitors’ Morphons, an indication of how widespread Warhammer’s contagion was, along with names, ranks, addresses, and pics of dozens of her thralls. I had gotten away without touching anyone with my skin except Razor. Without expanding my nest. And without sticking my tongue down Jagger’s throat. I had spies in every leader’s family and the principal chapter house in every club. If the cats bothered to tell me what was going on, that was an ace up my sleeve. I decided I had come out ahead and fell asleep as the old truck rolled down the back roads, the Simba behind us in stealth mode.
I lurched awake when the truck bounced into the office’s driveway and up to the sealed gate, Cupcake working the gears, her voice silent.
Mateo, in the Simba, was in front of us, trundling back into hiding.
Jolene said, “Welcome back, y’all. It’s so good to see you all alive. And you brought company too. Now ain’t that sweet.”
I didn’t know that Jagger had followed us until his bike thrummed up the drive and circled around us. He’d been driving lights-off, night-camo mode. I hadn’t checked the sensors. Hadn’t sensed him. And no one had told me he was following, though they had to have known. All of them.
I swung down from the cab to the ground and met his eyes in the darkness. Heat branded its way through me, thrust into my muscles, seared along my nerves. I turned away for the office. He trailed me, his armored boots nearly silent on the dirt.
I was so tired that I didn’t speak when he followed me through the airlocks and secured the doors, locking the cats and my people out of the office. He held my eyes, not speaking, his heated and dark and promising everything. And nothing. I waited in silence as he stepped to the donning station and his armor was removed. He was naked when it fell away, and he stood there, letting me look my fill. Then he walked to me, took my hand, and led me to my bed.
He had promised me it would be, “Mind-blowing. Screaming. Hot. Sweaty. Sex.”
He was right.
Bloody hell.
Bloody sodding damn it all to hell.
***
The next morning, Jagger eased out of bed before the sun rose. I pretended to be asleep as he crept out through the airlock doors. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling or what my nanobots wanted him to feel, and it seemed wiser, as well as safer, to just let him go.
Chicken. We both were chicken.
In a biker club, unless one was legally married or an Old Lady, sex was a casual thing—no love, no romance, no future beyond the tumble in the sheets. But this was something else, something new, at least for me. This felt like . . . more. More of what, I had no idea. And Jagger had gone, as he always would, back to McQuestion, without words or discussions or feelings. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t especially hurt.
But maybe I was numb, just a bit. And very, very angry.
As the airlock closed, Spy and Maul, Tuffs and Notch leaped to the bed and snuggled into the warm place where Jagger had rested. Not slept, not last night. But with the cats snuggling around me, nearly as warm as Jagger, I fell into dreamless sleep. And for once, Cupcake didn’t wake me for coffee and breakfast.
* * *
Once she no longer had to provide cover for me, I hadn’t paid much attention to Wanda and Alex at the negotiations. But after Jagger left and we started preparing for the battle to come, I learned what they had been doing. Alex had been spying on the biker clubs by carrying an oversized, lazy-looking cat around in their arms and listening to the Old Ladies chat among themselves. Alex was an excellent snoop, with a keen eye for details and a great ear for gossip. They also looked innocent, which was not a trait anyone in a biker club was accustomed to.
Wanda, on the other hand, had strolled from group of Old Ladies to group of Old Ladies, facilitating trade; setting up an impromptu swap meet among the women in the clubs; and talking about cats and her fab-o armor. With the female made-men, she chatted about guns, armor, military tech, and knives. Having worked at Morrison’s, Wanda knew a lot about weapons and tech. She might not shoot a lot, but she knew the lingo, and the female made-men had needs Wanda was willing to encourage and attempt to fulfill. She made a number of sales and useful trades during the negotiations, a lot of it from my mattress inventory. She also created a new social concept: the Old Ladies and Female Made-Men Party, with booze, stuff to exchange or bargain over, and lively conversation about how horrible men were. I’d had no idea what she was capable of until I heard the details.
She had gathered all the women together and encouraged them to talk. She had listened to the women complain, argue, gripe, and had also watched them fight. Literally. Fists and knives and sword-edged words. Safe and protected in her armor, she had pulled apart the participants of three fights before she realized that wasn’t enough. The Old Ladies were about to go to war when Wanda shook two fighting women like cats and ordered them to behave or she’d show them how many teeth a woman in a suit of armor could knock out.
Wanda then began to divide and conquer. She gathered the remaining Old Ladies into a separate spot, got them roaring drunk, and suggested to them that the clubs could and should have quarterly swap meet / meet-and-greet combos, like a summit between heads of state—discussions to avoid future confrontations. She had told them they had more power than they thought, because men would agree to anything after a good tumble, and they could keep their men and their children and their clubs safe if they worked together instead of going to war. They had power. It wasn’t a foreign concept, but maybe no one had put it to them quite the way Wanda did.
Once she had the Old Ladies happy, she had turned her attention to the female made-men, a much more violent, rugged group. She suggested that the clubs could work together and divide up the nation instead of fighting each other, and then fight the PRC and the Gov. if necessary. She also suggested that the clubs, working together, would have enough power to negotiate with the military from a position of strength instead of taking contracts that put them in danger in return for smaller gains. Female made-men usually liked to fight and were always looking for ways to move up in the hierarchy of the clubs, which meant fighting each other even more than the men. Working together, fighting only the men, they could gain status.
What Wanda suggested was part anarchy, part conquest, part treason. While she hadn’t really meant to bond the women together with a long-term goal, she had. She had also managed to pit the clubs against the runaway military authorities and the Gov. Working for Marty had prepared her to take a place in my nest I had never expected.
After she was done fomenting peace and betrayal and treachery all at once, she had provided Cupcake a list of new trade items and lots of intel. Like Cupcake, Wanda was exploring her abilities and talents, natural and nanobot-given, looking for a way to serve me.
My alternative to all the alliances was to transition every human on the planet and rule them like a queen.
Which just gave me the squicks.
* * *
The second day after Jagger—no. The second day after Asshole left my bed and my office, Cupcake, Amos, Wanda, Alex, and I had breakfast together, discussing our final preparations for battle. Mateo and Jolene were present via screens and speakers through the ship’s EntNu.
Cupcake snapped open her Morphon, and standing like a drill sergeant, said, “CO Mateo. Simba update.”
“Simba’s city-killer has been removed and placed in the SunStar for safekeeping,” Mateo replied. “The Simba has been upgraded with all the weapons and defenses I think we’ll need, and is currently strapped down with charging stations, armor-donning stations, ammo, long-distance weapons, and up-close-and-personal weapons. We have armaments that can take out precision targets at five kilometers using aerial targeting systems and auto-guided missiles We also have eight bunker busters. They’re capable of breaking through an underground bunker to a depth of twenty meters, and, with a one-two punch of delivery systems, can reach to two hundred meters.”
I frowned at his image on the screen over the command chair. “Where did we get bunker-buster missiles?”
“It’s in the mattress inventory,” Cupcake said, amused and proud of herself.
I didn’t remember seeing weapons of that size, but then I had only made it halfway through the mattress inventory. I flipped up my Morphon and scrolled through until I saw the last page. Mateo had added eight bunker-buster missiles to my arsenal. How had he . . . ?
Bloody hell.
“Mateo,” I said. “These bunker-buster missiles. Where did they come from? And how did you get them?”
“The weapons fall under my purview as CO of SunStar, for both fulfilling my mission and assigned objectives, and for any operations required to protect and rescue my crew.”
I stared at the image of his misshapen head and decided there was more than a hint of hostility in his body language. If his voice could carry emotional overtones, I had a feeling he’d sound mocking, arrogant, and condescending.
And it pissed me off.
“I saw no weapons in the SunStar any time I’ve been inside,” I said.
Jolene said, “Well if you ain’t telling, CO Sugah, I will. That man done crawled down into the crevasse and rescued them from the wreckage of the back half of me. Nearly killed himself.”
I rubbed my scalp. I wanted him independent, I reminded myself. I wanted this. But he climbed into a mine crack a thousand-plus feet deep and back out. Multiple times. Carrying weapons. What if he had fallen? How could I have gotten him out? I moved my fist from my head to my chest, rubbing small circles to ease the pressure. It was a motion I had seen Little Mama make as I was growing up.
Then it hit me. I was feeling like a mother. With a kid I had to protect. A kid who was in a space-worthy warbot suit and who had survived battle, a spaceship crash, and being eaten alive by nanobots inside his suit. I totally deserved my emotions. I had a right to them. But they were uncomfortable the way new shoes were uncomfortable—they rubbed the wrong way, didn’t quite fit.
Oblivious to my discomfort, Mateo continued. “With Jolene’s help I can emplace the bunker busters within two kilometers, target the bunker precisely enough to destroy it, fire them at a prearranged time, and leave the WIMP weapon or power source intact. We’d have to be hell and gone before they fire because the military will see them via satellite cameras. But we have them if we need them.”
I wanted to swat Mateo for endangering himself, but I had to agree the risk was worth it. “Will the military be able to trace the missiles to the SunStar?”
“Negative. Jolene and I tinkered with all identifiers. Also, if needed, the Simba is equipped with close-range lasers and an MJR blaster which is capable of taking down aircraft, a platoon of warbot-suited warriors, even disabling another Simba should Warhammer have all that in the bunker somewhere our recon cats didn’t go. But using the blaster would undoubtedly alert the Gov. and involve the military she has in her pocket, and should be considered a last-ditch response.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. If the military caught us, especially military she had transitioned, we’d be charged with treason, if not shot outright. We were already walking a fine line. But I didn’t say that part out loud.
Jolene took over. “The Simba is provided with one rail gun and jamming devices capable of bringing down remote aircraft. Those can be used at any time without fear of military interest. The spy-sats shouldn’t pick them up.”
“Through Simba and Jolene in the SunStar,” Mateo said, “we’ll have access to, and the ability to, jam any incoming or outgoing EntNu comms, and any standard radio, laser, satellite, or old-fashioned cell-type communications. We have Maarsies and two portable IGPs for killing Warhammer’s nanobots. Simba and I are both equipped with the military’s best Chameleon skin for traveling unseen, and a dark mode that decreases the Simba’s noise to nearly nothing.”
“We can travel by day now?” I asked.
“Negative,” Mateo said, “unless we’re absolutely certain we’re a klick or more from any human or electronic observation. Or being chased. Even the interactive camo doesn’t stop tracks on dirt roads and the movement of trees. The Simba is invisible by day only when it’s not moving. Otherwise we’ll be tracked and caught.”
Cupcake was watching me, her expression apprehensive, her blue eyes on my Morphon and its mattress inventory. I often forgot that Cupcake still needed to please me. “Good job, you guys. And good job on the weapons inventory, Cupcake. It would have made a quartermaster weep with joy.”
Cupcake blushed a pretty pink.
Mateo and Jolene continued the Op planning, detailing logistics and timing, which were going to suck even more on this trip than the last one. “Just like the trip back last time, everyone will be riding in or on the Simba,” Mateo said. “ATVs strapped on unless or until we need them. We attracted attention last time, and odds are they’ll be watching closer than normal for incursions near the Gov. center.”
“Y’all will avoid Interstates 64 and 77 from Naoma, West Virginia,” Jolene said, naming the town closest to the junkyard, “heading south to Wytheville, Virginia. Like Mateo said, your only travel should be by night, and even then I suggest y’all need to avoid most secondary and some tertiary roads. Your trip time needs to include sitting in a copse of trees or pile of rubble and hidin’ out when the sun is up.”
“Maneuvering the Simba parallel to the back roads and overland,” Mateo said, “allows us to travel in such a way that we leave no trail. Unfortunately, it also means triple power output, and even with the MPP engines, it will be a strain—triple the prewar klicks, and a longer travel time. Think of our last trip as the warm and cozy version. We’ll be moving from tank tracks to mobile support struts and back depending on the terrain and the weather, which is expected to be sunny and hotter than hell by day, cloudless and cold as shit by night. Jolene?”
“After studying the sat-maps I borrowed from the military feed, I’m estimatin’ twenty-four hours’ actual travel time for y’all to cover the distance, again with all of it after dark. That means y’all have to leave soon to reach the rendezvous point on time.”
Three nights to get there. I blinked at the time involved and leaned forward to study the current sat-map on the wall screen and the different proposed routes. We had avoided detection the first time by luck. I didn’t believe luck hit twice. So . . . yeah. We had to be smarter when we crossed over the state lines into Virginia.
