Junkyard Cats
With a soft clatter, I put down the wrench and walked around my latest delivery, hands loose at my sides. I wasn’t sure why I was so discomfited by the hunk of scrap. It triggered that sixth sense that had kept me alive for so long, but I couldn’t tell why. Maybe I was finally being paranoid for no reason.
I rubbed my sweaty scalp, my hand sliding up under my floppy hat, studying the old AGR Tesla fuselage. The hatch was sealed with the yellow tape of military and civilian decertification, tape that marked the AntiGrav Retrofit vehicle as airtight. It also marked it legal for scrap, not that it was. Legal, that is.
Everything looked normal. But still.
I picked at the cracked orange nail polish on my fingernails, staring at the hood. Walked down one side. Uncertain. My sixth sense buzzed stronger. Maybe it was the ugly paint, a piss-poor chitosan polymer job in an unexpected hot fuchsia-pink that someone with lousy taste had sprayed over the former military gray. The vivid color made the space-worthy composite body look like a military camp follower in full hooker regalia. But. It was just paint. Nothing to make me so jittery.
I walked around the fuselage and stopped at the hatch. Stepped closer. And backed away fast. That was what was bothering me. There were ants skittering over the Tesla, crawling around the hatch and up over the roof as if they had found a nice meal where the vehicle had been parked, and then seen their lunch box carried away from their nest. They were mad, racing around the sun-heated metal as if the temp wasn’t a problem at all. Ants. But not just any ants. Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius ants.
Over the last few years there had been any number of scrap deliveries that gave me the willies, and this 2035 AGR Tesla and its ants was at the top of the list. Fighting the natural desire to run, I took several more very slow steps back.
The ants didn’t belong here, not on this Tesla, not in the stony West Virginia desert. They didn’t actually belong anywhere. The bicolors had been imported from the Sahara Desert during the first year of the war, when things had gotten bad. There had been all kinds of ecological and environmental catastrophes and stupid importations and genetic modifications that the survivors were still living with. Bicolors were among the worst environmental mistakes ever created and they were nearly indestructible. The males—only the males—had been modified on the genetic level by bio-nanobots, and sent out from some top-secret lab by the millions to clean up the mounds of dead humans and eat the germs that came from the corpses. Unable to reproduce without a female, they were programmed to die at the end of their normal lifespans.
Except a few of them had absorbed some transposons from a Ginkgo biloba plant, developed sequential hermaphroditism, and figured out how to reproduce.
Their bites and stings had evolved overnight to become lethal.
They were impossible to eradicate and mean as hell.
I know. I was swarmed and survived and had the scars to prove it.
I rejected the urge to rub my right wrist on my britches. It tingled with remembered pain, burning even though the damaged nerves had been cauterized and nothing was left of the injury except the scarring and the nightmares. Unlike my other scars, these showed, and if I was making a rare trip into the big city for supplies, I either covered them with makeup or hid them beneath a sparkly bracelet to match the girly clothes and lacy gloves and dangerous strappy shoes I got to wear once in a blue moon.
I still missed the girl I had been before the war, but staying alive was more important than pretty dresses. And since I was legally dead, I avoided cities and other people like the plagues they sometimes carried.
I took another slow step back.
I hadn’t seen a bicolor in five years. My Berger-chip implant started to provide me with the usual useless data, but I tapped it off. This stuff I knew, and the only thing that mattered was that the genetically modified ants had group intelligence and killed anything that moved.
Because of the modified hermaphroditism, anytime thirteen male ants got together in one place without a queen, one would change sex and, voila, there was the start of a new nest. Twelve bicolors and nothing happened. Add in that thirteenth and bingo. The bio-nanobots that had created the bicolors could be transferred only by the main queen in a nest, not any secondary females born or added to the nest.
There were way more than thirteen on the scrap Tesla body. All males, the short bodies and small abdomens indicating their gender.
Bloody damn.
I pulled back on the red knob, slowly disengaging the AntiGravity Grabber. The vehicle settled gradually to the ground with a muted whomp. I adjusted my hat over my sweat-spiked hair and pulled on armored gauntlets that had been scavenged from an antique warbot, circa 2040. The bot had been part of the reason I had set up for business here, in the middle of nowhere. Smith’s Junk and Scrap specialized in post-war surplus and waste. The discarded bot—and the half-buried, partially-intact, US spaceship on the back lot—had been too good to pass up. The junkyard “office”—an even bigger lure, once I figured out what it really was—had become my home and hideaway.
The warbot gauntlets were oversized and reached my elbows, but they worked just fine, slipping five miniscule needles under the skin of each hand to engage my peripheral nerves. It hurt like crap for about ten seconds, but I’d lost pain sensitivity at these particular insertion sites over the years, like calluses on my nerve endings.
In the machine hut, I found a half-empty gallon jug of Maltodine, a sodium-based, flammable substance made for killing any number of genetically modified creatures. Back in the sun, I made sure I was downwind of the vehicle and the ants, doused the Tesla in the gooey red toxin, and watched it spread. It was created to expand and wasn’t something the ants had adapted to notice as deadly. Yet. I lit and tossed an old-fashioned match at the Tesla. The fluid whooshed into flame, instantly so hot it burned blue. On fire, it spread even faster.
The bicolors screamed in unison, a terrible, high-pitched harmonic that spoke of group intelligence and communal vengeance. “Burn, you little buggers,” I muttered, watching as they rushed to try and save their pals and all burned, hot and spitting and gone. The flower-pink paint looked cheery beneath the toxic blue flames, self-healing even as the fire danced across it. The flames were pretty in my 2-Gen sunglasses as I switched back and forth between the raptor eye lenses and UV.
None of the ants made it off the Tesla’s valuable graphite epoxy trusses and hemplaz carbon-fiber composite body. Not one. Relief spread through me when the last ant died.
“My sensors are picking up Maltodine fumes,” Mateo said into my earbud. We were WIMP-powered, EntNu linked, the Entangled Dark Neutrinos providing instantaneous communication even had he been on the far side of the solar system.
Mateo was my employee. Sort of. I’d found the war vet working as slave labor in a town on the way here. I’d stolen him from his owner and given him a home. Mateo knew all my secrets. Every single one.
I tapped my ear and told him about the ants and my solution, and said, “Come hell or high water, I’m making money off this purchase.” Unspoken was the addendum: and a lot more money off the stolen, spanking brand-new, functional black-market Tesla-23B engine my contact had put in the back hatch, along with a couple of space-going pulse weapons. Mateo and I knew scrap, and the AGR and its nowhere-near-legal cargo were mega-valuable.