Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,4
fingertips. I had no desire to be hauled in for questioning over a dead man I hadn’t seen in years. But I had no desire to have ants take over my junkyard. I had no desire to be swarmed again. Remembered fear shivered down my spine like thousands of tiny ant feet.
“Unproven,” he said. “One vehicle. Approaching at 54 kph. No visible backup.”
No sane lawman rode anywhere alone, and never on a bike. Someone had sent Harlan’s body, part of a special delivery sealed by the Gov. With bloody bicolor ants which no sane person would have done. It could not be simple bad luck.
Not the Law. Not the Gov. Not the military. The gift-giver was someone who wanted to play with me like a pride of cats with a junkyard dog. Or someone who knew what I really had on the property.
I opened the Maltodine and tossed the entire container in the hatch. The ants swarmed toward me.
I struck a match. Reached for the hatch door with one gloved hand. Tossed the match with the other. Lightning fast, I ripped the note away. Just before the hatch closed, intense heat boiled out, and I heard the ants scream as the sound cut off.
Maltodine burned anything anywhere, even without oxygen—except hemp-plaz composite. Maltodine didn’t burn anything made of metal or hemp that had been combined with silk-plaz at the atomic level. It burned until it no longer had anything organic to fuel it. Harlan, however, was organic.
I tapped over my heart with a two fingered salute and said, “Peace, my brother. There will be no more war. May your last ride on the dragon’s tail be peaceful.”
I dropped my salute. “Deets on the visitor when available,” I requested of Mateo. “And calculate Maltodine burn time of one hundred kilos of organic matter in an anaerobic environment.”
“Copy that.”
The Berger-chip implant started to provide the answer. I shut it down. Once I let that thing start talking it never shut up, and I had to sleep sometime.
With a gauntleted fist, I hammered the red ignition button and the AG Grabber came back on, the almost-imperceptible whine an itch under my skin. Initiating the controls, I maneuvered the Grabber over the top of the Tesla and lowered the unit until it almost connected. Then I raised the old war fuselage three and a half meters off the ground, the maximum ever achieved on land, even by the military of three warring groups of allied nations. AntiGrav was a misnomer on a planet surface, the moniker applied by a PR person when it was first invented, and it had stuck, even after WIMP engines had given us intra-solar system flight that did way more than levitate stuff.
I headed to the office, through the airlocks, back into the cool, where I flipped open the note. It said simply:
SS—
I hope I make it to you alive, but that ain’t looking likely. I was ambushed. Shot. Made it to the Tesla and crawled through into the hatch. Name of the shooter was One-Eyed Jack. They know about you. They’re coming.
—BH
SS was me, Shining Smith. BH was Buck Harlan. They were the people who had killed him. And were coming for me.
“Coulda used a little more info in your note, Buck. But I’m sorry you died delivering it.” Tears evaporated so fast I hardly noticed them gather.
I opened the small hatch of the armor niche and stepped up on the mounting pedestal. I was about to turn my back to the armor suit and initiate auto-donning when it occurred to me that appearing in military armor and weaponed up was acting out of fear and giving away my hand. It was one person heading in. Not an army. Maybe I was wrong that this person was coming for me. Maybe Harlan was wrong. Maybe my life as I knew it wasn’t over.
If whoever sent Harlan to me, dead and all, had just wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. If the military had figured out who I was, and half of what Smith’s Junk and Scrap really was, my small part of the Earth would have been inundated with uniformed warriors. If the Gov. itself had found me, and knew what I was, the bureaucracy would have been more direct. A missile barrage would have arced over the junkyard and taken out everything, leaving nothing but a hole in the rock. End of Shining Smith.
So, I didn’t need to wade in fighting. Yet.
Fear receded now that I