Mad Max meets X-Men in this razor-sharp new dystopian novella by the Philip K Dick award nominated author of Velocity Weapon. It doesn't matter what you call her. Riley. Burner. She forgot her name long ago. But if you steal from the supply lines crossing the wasteland, her face is the last one you'll see. She is the force of nature that keeps the balance in the hot arid desert. Keep to yourself and she'll leave you well enough alone. But it's when you try to take more than you can chew that her employers notice and send her off to restore the balance. Then she gets the latest call. A supply truck knocked over too cleanly. Too precise. And the bodies scattering the wreckage weren't killed by her normal prey of scavengers. These bodies are already rotting hours after the attack. Cowering in the corner of the wreckage is a young girl. A girl that shouldn't be there. A girl with violently blue eyes. Just like hers.
Release date:
March 9, 2021
Publisher:
Orbit
Print pages:
96
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No one lives on the old six-six anymore. No one save pirates, ghost trucks, Ma Rickets, and me. The pirates call me a lot of things in the daylight. Asshole, mudfucker, cockslop, and things too colorful for polite company. At night they call me The Burner, and they say it real soft.
Ma Rickets calls me Riley. Ain’t my name. I think it might have been her daughter’s. Maybe an old lover. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Not much does.
When I’m coming for you, nothing you name me is gonna stop me. I’ve heard a rumor crossing yourself helps. Heard another one that saying Hail Marys buys time.
Just goes to show what value rumor holds.
The throttle is loose in my hand, warmed up and itching to burst forward. I ease up, slow the Beast down. She’s got a fresh battery pack in, and her refitted tank treads are eating up the miles. I need her slow. I need her patient. Dusk is when I operate, and the tracks are close.
This might have been northern Texas, once. Or maybe Oklahoma. It’s nameless wasteland now, cracked badlands baked in sun and insulated with dry scrub. Everyone scurried off a long time ago, retreated to the devoured coasts and the tropical north. But people still gotta eat, and the ghost trucks push food and goods across land people have long since forgotten the names of. Maybe the land’s got a name, after all: Mine.
The pirates certainly think so.
Light glints off the silvery slick of the Pac-At track to the north, and if I didn’t know what I was looking for, I’d think it a mirage of water. But I know that glint, know it like the sun-carved wrinkles on the backs of my hands. It’s my responsibility. And some very, very stupid people have been fucking with it.
The tablet taped to my console flickers at me. A black blip that is me arrows across the broken land toward a red square that is last known location. The assignment appeared on my tablet an hour ago. No description. No details. Just: This ghost truck should have been here. It isn’t. Find it. Punish those responsible.
Well, it didn’t say that last part, because that goes without saying. One less pirate in the world is one less worry for my boss at Pac-At. I’ve seen the news blips after a successful recovery: Truck pirates instigate gunfight. Excessive force was sadly necessary.
Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes the pirates start the fight. But let’s be real: If they get the first shot off, I’ve screwed up somehow. Nine times out of ten, they never see me coming. It’s why I’ve got names. It’s why I’m feared.
It’s also why they never should have touched Pac-At’s main thoroughfare. Track six-six runs big game: weapons, tech, seedstock. Those trucks have their own defense systems, heat-seeking weapons even I stay away from. Normally the pirates pick on smaller game. Produce, cloth, construction materials. Things like that, Pac-At don’t come down so hard. I can maybe let one pirate slip off with a crate of onions. But this is a heavy hit. This is damned stupid of them.
And that’s why it’s hard for me to ease off the throttle.
Been a long time since I’ve had a real challenge.
Sunlight blasts through the windshield, spearing off the horizon, and I crank up the shaders to filter it out. The track is close, just a couple dozen yards. I kill the Beast’s engines and coast her over behind a thick bed of sagebrush. With her electric engine, Beast is quiet as a shadow, but I’ve always been quieter.
Soon as I step out, I know there’s no need to bother with stealth. Through the bandana tied tight around my nose and mouth, the scent of corpses lies heavy on the air. Heady. Sweet and pustulant. I wait for nausea, but it doesn’t come. Hasn’t come for a long time now, but I like to wait and check anyway.
The wind kicks dust and grit into my face, but that’s what the bandana and goggles are for. I wipe my goggles on the back of my sleeve and creep forward. No point in being quiet, not with the evidence my nose is giving me, but I like to keep the habit. Rather be overcautious and look foolish than be surprised and dead.
Pac-At’s ghost truck is dragged off the track and tipped to one side. Its tread tires stick in the air like the legs of a dead cockroach, its metal hide dented and scorched. The ghost truck didn’t go down without a fight, though. There’s proof enough of that.
Bullet holes pepper the ground, accented by swathes of red. Ain’t nothing new, not really. Group of pirates—at least ten I can see, cooling on the ground—approached the automated truck as it clicked over a checkpoint and got blasted by the turret on the center of its roof. Amateur mistake, that. Any gang hoping to snag a Pac-At truck on the six-six should have known better than to stroll on up. Maybe they were desperate. Maybe they were just real dumb.
Either way, they’d only been dead an hour, tops, and they shouldn’t be rotting like this. The sun speeds things up, sure, but the first corpse I come across is already blackened, skin peeling in putrid curls from his bare arms and face.
None of ’em are familiar to me, so far as I can tell through the rot. I pace through their ranks, marking faces and clothes, looking for anything I recognize. These lot are new to my region. Or had been, before the ghost truck cut them down.
They may not have gotten what they came for, but that truck was still down, and it was my job to discover the fate of its cargo. And to mop up anyone left behind.
My rifle swings from my shoulder strap with ease, a practiced motion. The weight is a comfort in my hands, the smooth wooden stock an old friend. Ammo’s hard to come by for most, but Pac-At keeps me topped up. Never outright. Every month or so I’ll spot a copter cutting through the sky, and lo and behold, there’ll be a fresh cache tucked into a familiar place. Much as they don’t like publicly acknowledging what I do out here, they’d like it even less if I stopped.
The ghost truck’s on its side, so I approach at an angle, cutting across the sleek stretch of smartmetals that make up the track. Somewhere, in a high-rise office on a sea-choked coast, an algorithm on an overfed computer noticed the touch of my weight, the patter of feet, and kicked off an alert: Human on tracks at these coordinates. And somewhere deep in that computer another algorithm told the first to calm its tits—I was a known entity.
Not so much as a stray shadow lurks around the corners of the ghost truck. The. . .
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