was thinking and not just reacting. This wasn’t done by any usual suspect who wanted me dead. No. Someone was sending me a message and a threat. Someone wanted something I was or something I had. I thought about the crashed spaceship debris half-buried out back, hidden beneath the best ghillie tech camo cloth ever devised. But no one knew about it, except for Mateo. And only Mateo knew the full nature of my defenses. So, they must be after the conventional weapons I had stockpiled for the eventual resurgence of the war.
I wasn’t giving up my weapons, my money, or my ship. I especially wasn’t giving up the weapons to traitors. And I sure as hell wasn’t giving up my office.
I needed to go in with a presumptive position of weakness and lie through my teeth—assuming that, just because a motorcycle was heading this way, it was not my past nightmares come calling. It might not be. It could be coincidence.
I cursed and stepped away from the niche, into the personal toilette compartment—which would have been a bathroom if we had sufficient fresh water—and checked the lipstick. Combed my hair, which was still wet and spiked with sweat. Smeared on Kajal, desert-dweller’s heavy eyeliner. Lips and lids were all the makeup the heat could stand. Anything more would melt off my face. I pulled the desert camo tank top and military cargo pants off my body and hung them to dry. Ran the body wand over my pits and privates. Spritzed on something to counteract my natural stink. Some women smelled of lilacs and roses. I’d been brought up a warrior. I dismantled vehicles and ran a black-market weapons business at a junkyard. To smell better would deny what I really was, and also, I just hated the stink of perfumes. I sprayed an extra layer of sunscreen over my very bronzed skin, because you can never have too much sunscreen, not since the WIMP explosion over Germany tore through the planet’s electromagnetic shield and ripped all the good stuff out of the atmosphere.
“Location of bike?” I asked Mateo.
“Six klicks out. ARVAC cameras reveal male body shape, full face helmet, and cold-clothes, all in white and desert camouflage patterns. Bike is matte black.” His recon briefing paused. “Correction. Visual shielding has been activated. Bike is now desert patterns. Activating Silent Tracking.”
Silent Tracking was something left to me by my father. At the time, it was the very latest in military R&D, a way to track most anything that created a visual, audible, or thermal trail even through the military’s own shielding. Pops wasn’t supposed to have that kind of tech, and I had no idea how he got it; I had no idea how he got any of the stuff I’d found here. The Silent Tracking had been stored in a kiosk in the middle of the junkyard when I returned, half dead and with a stolen, deranged warbot in tow. Then, I had discovered the other devices—the weapons systems, the AntiGravity Grabber—a stockpile of illegal weapons to which I had added significantly. The USSS SunStar—a spaceship built by the western alliance, led by the US—had crash-landed at some point prior to my arrival.
And then there was the office. The main reason I remained here, in a junkyard Pops had kept off the books, was the office.
And then the meaning of what Mateo had said hit home. Visual shielding on the bike meant military connections or a wannabe soldier. Either way it meant trouble.
“Calculation of burn time in the Tesla?” I asked Mateo.
“Two hours and sixteen minutes to clean bone. Four hours additional, give or take, to full ash.”
Cremation would have taken about one hour. Maltodine was just as effective but it took longer. Six and a half hours. The sun would be down by then and the solar panels offline. I didn’t have the battery power to run the Grabber into the night. I’d have to set the Tesla down soon and let it burn on the ground. But not while I had company.
“Speed of approaching vehicle is increasing. Suspect our ARVACs have been made.”
“Fine. Bring them home and dock ’em. You geared up?”
“Little Girl, I’m always geared up.”
Which was true. Mateo was semi-permanently attached to his bot. If he left it, if he was disconnected, he’d be dead inside a week. And he’d die badly. I’d seen him out of the suit when I placed him into the med-bay the week we met. It hadn’t been a