But some had been saved from the salvage piles and smelter pits. More than were officially supposed to. They worked fields, built bridges, demolished old buildings, carried heavy loads across terrain that roller wagons couldn’t traverse. Mechs were handy for those who had the skill to operate them. And they took a lot of skill. That fact had been drilled into Clay’s head from the time he was born.

  “Get the hell up, scavenger!” the guard shouted as he yanked on Clay’s chained manacles for the hundredth time.

  Tired of the pain, and worried that the cuts wouldn’t be treated properly and he’d end up with festering wounds ringing his wrists, Clay finally complied. He opened his eyes, tensed his muscles, and shot to his feet with a speed and agility the guard hadn’t expected. The unwashed man stumbled back a couple of paces, then went for the pistol on his hip. His hand floundered a moment, and he actually looked down at the empty holster before realization lit up his eyes.

  “Left it with Snicks,” the guard said. “Didn’t want you to try to make a move and go for my gun.”

  Clay kept his face blank, acted like he either hadn’t heard or didn’t understand what the guard said. He stood and waited. Nothing else to do until he understood his situation fully.

  “Taking you to the Captain,” the guard said. “He wants to know who you are and what you were doing in General Hansen’s hemp fields. You best have some answers ready. The Captain don’t like it when he don’t get answers.”

  The guard waited. Clay didn’t respond.

  “You hear me, scavenger?” the guard snapped, giving Clay’s chains a hard yank. “You listening to what I’m saying to ya?”

  Clay still didn’t respond.

  “You deaf or something? Or you one of them foreign invaders from down south ways?” the guard asked, his lip curling up when he said “south ways.”

  Clay still didn’t respond. No shrug, no blink of an eye, no twitch of the mouth. A blank slate. The guard grunted and shrugged.

  “Suit yerself, scavenger scum,” the guard said and pulled Clay from the shack and out into the bright sunlight of the Northeast MexiCali day.

  The heat hit Clay like a hard blow from an old mule. He’d been used to traveling the day inside a cooled cockpit and hadn’t acclimated to the high temperatures of the region like he should have. He’d known better, been taught better. Always adjust to new regions with the cockpit open. Let your body get used to any extremes you may be in store for. Hot, cold, wet, dry. Anything.

  Clay felt like a fool and heard more than one of his ancestor’s cackles in the back of his head as his hemp shirt instantly stuck to his chest by the sweat that started pouring out of him. He squinted in the bright light and took a couple of deep breaths, letting the heated air fill his lungs again and again until he knew he wasn’t going to pass out.

  “It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the guard said and sneered back at Clay. “You don’t never get used to it, believe you me. Guess what?”

  The guard stopped talking, actually waiting for Clay to guess what. Clay didn’t respond, but that didn’t stop the guard from continuing on after a few seconds of silence.

  “The winter’s a bigger bitch,” the guard laughed. “But I doubt you gonna find that out. Yer time is short, scavenger scum. Like I said, the Captain ain’t a fan of quiet folk. You best get yer answers ready or get yer prayers ready. Yer gonna need one or the other in just a couple seconds.”

  Clay didn’t hear a word of what the guard was saying. He was too busy gawking at the sight before him once his eyes had adjusted to the sunlight.

  Seven mechs, not six. But one looked out of commission, its right leg being worked on by a team of welders while a mechanic twenty feet below shouted up at them, his arms waving this way and that, his feet stomping hard into the baked dirt, sending up puffs of dust to meet the falling sparks from the welders.

  The guard kept yapping on about how Clay’s time was over and there was only one way a low-down scavenger piece of scum like him should be treated, and boy was the Captain gonna give it to him. Clay kept ignoring the man, his eyes locked onto the four mechs that towered around a huge, fenced ring that was being used by two other mechs. The two mechs inside the ring circled each other, their arms up in basic fighting positions, their legs ready and braced for battle.

  No armaments though. No heavy cannons, missile launchers, or belt guns. Didn’t even look like the forearms were equipped with blast torches or flamethrowers. They were stripped-down mechs, lightened and tightened for metal-hand-to-metal-hand combat. Clay had heard of the mech rings sprouting up here and there across the continent, but considering the stigma attached to owning and operating a mech, he figured they were just tales the last of the old cavalry veterans told each other to give their retirement some meaning and hope.

  Yet, there they were. Two mechs facing off, their pilots waiting for the right moment to strike. Then it happened. The mech to the right made a grab for the other mech, but its massive hand overshot and the opposing mech took advantage of the gaffe, ducking in low and bringing its own hand straight into the grabbing mech’s midsection.

  The grabbing mech stumbled back several meters and looked like it would tumble back onto its ass, but the pilot kept it upright and settled back into its first fighting position. There was a good pilot inside the machine, Clay could tell. Same with the other machine.

  But something troubled him. He watched how fast the mech had sent the blow to the other mech’s midsection. An unblocked hit like that should have crumpled half the servos in the mech’s guts, but it didn’t. There was barely the sound of clanging metal when there should have been a crunch close to deafening.

  “Just sparring,” a gruff voice said from above Clay. “One of those pilots even so much as puts a dent in another machine and General Hansen will have his balls, or her tits, sliced off and bronzed for everyone to see.”

  Clay realized he was standing at the bottom of a set of six steps that led up into a large hut. On the top step was a sight Clay wasn’t expecting. A busty woman, bald as a baby but not anywhere as smooth, stood glaring down at him. Her hands were on her wide hips and she wore a patched and worn green uniform, telling Clay she may have fought for the NorthAm side in the war. Hard to tell anymore. Uniforms were currency in some places. A way to front for the hired men and women.

  Clay hadn’t expected a woman to be the Captain. Not with how the guard had kept saying “he” and “him” during the few times Clay had been listening. Clay also hadn’t expected the woman to be completely bald with skin that looked like it had been rolled in scorching hot coals and left there for a few days before someone pulled her out and did a bad patch job.

  The Captain nodded toward the mechs.

  “Used to be me up in there,” she said. “Fought off half a MexiCali regiment all by myself until they started lobbing phosphorous grenades and I caught one right in the cockpit. Gave me this beautiful makeover. Now I just make sure the new pilots don’t step on someone and keep from hurting those machines. One of them beauties is worth more than a hundred men or women. Pilots are a dime a dozen.”

  “Not good ones,” Clay responded in spite of himself. He clamped his lips shut and mentally scolded his ass for the slip up.

  “The scum speaks!” the guard cackled.

  “Shut up, Haggerty,” the Captain snapped. “Bring the scavenger up into my office, then go find Volker and Bandt. I got a job for them.”

  The guard, Haggerty, took too much pleasure in pulling Clay up into the hut, making sure he gave the chain a hard tug each time Clay tried to take a step, nearly sending him face first onto the weathered wood planks.

  “Just get him up in here,” the Captain barked.

  Haggerty stopped messing around and pulled Clay into the cool darkness of the hut, then shoved him into an empty chair that sat before a heavy wood desk.

  “What you want me to tell Volker and Bandt?” Haggerty asked after feeding Clay’s chain through a metal loop set into the floor under the chair.

  “To get their asses in here,” the Captain growled as she sat down in a plush leather chair behind the desk. “Stop being stupid, or I’m gonna have one of the mechs stomp the stupid right out of that skull of yours.”

  “That would kill me,” Haggerty replied.

  The Captain blinked a few times, then shook her head.

  “Just get, Haggerty,” the Captain said. She waited for Haggerty to leave the hut, then turned her focus on Clay. “What’s your name, scavenger?”

  “Not a scavenger,” Clay replied.

  He didn’t want to reveal much about himself, safer that way, but making sure the Captain knew he wasn’t a scavenger was worth the words. Scavengers were nothing but people waiting to be hanged. Clay had no desire to end up on the wrong end of a noose.

  “Yeah? That so?” the Captain asked.

  She got up and walked to a large cabinet up against the wall behind her. She pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked one door, opened it, reached inside with both hands, and withdrew a small crate. She turned and set the crate down on the desk, then took her seat again.

  “So you didn’t scavenge these off some poor old veteran of the Bloody Conflict?” the Captain asked. She pulled out Clay’s revolver and set it down on the desk, followed by his holster, belt, and hat. “This stuff is yours, is what you are telling me?”

  “I didn’t tell you anything other than I’m not a scavenger,” Clay replied.

  He studied his possessions and saw they hadn’t been damaged. He was happy to see that. The revolver would have been hard to replace but doable, albeit painful, when he reached the next town. The hat? One of a kind and almost as precious to him as his mech.

  “No, I guess you didn’t tell me anything, did ya?” the Captain said, more to herself than to Clay. “That’s what we’re going to fix right now.”

  She shoved the items and the crate aside and leaned back in the chair, her hands folded over her pooching belly. She was not a small woman. Maybe five feet and ten inches, closer to two hundred pounds than one hundred. She wasn’t soft either, except for the fat that filled out her belly. Clay could see the strength ripple in how she held her shoulders. He could sense the wiry tendons and the lightning quickness of an old soldier who hadn’t let herself go too far.

  Clay knew that quickness well.

  “You’re too young to have fought for either side,” the Captain said as she studied Clay as much as he was studying her. “You would have been just a knee-high thing when the treaty was signed and peace was restored to the land.” She let out a derisive snort. “Peace restored. That is rich, ain’t it?”

  Clay gave her the barest hint of a smile but stayed silent.

  “If you aren’t a scavenger, then that means someone gave you that pistol and hat,” the Captain said. “Who was it? A parent? Grandparent? Aunt or uncle?”

  Clay shrugged. He tried not to glance at the items, but he failed. The Captain smiled at him, reached out, and plucked the hat from the desk. She set it at an angle on her head, the smile on her face stretching her scarred skin into grotesque shapes that faintly resembled features on a normal face.

  “I’m betting it was your daddy who gave you this hat,” the Captain said. “Handed it to you on some birthday when you was little. Made you feel special, like you belonged to something bigger than the small shithole town you came from.”

  The Captain casually opened her uniform jacket, reached inside, pulled out a fat cigar, and shoved it between her warped lips. She then reached inside the other side of her jacket and produced a thin lighter. A quick flick and the blue flame burned bright in the gloom of the hut. She lit her cigar, puffed until the end glowed cherry red, and exhaled a cloud of pungent smoke.

  But she didn’t shut off the lighter. The hiss from the flame was the loudest thing in the hut, louder even than Clay’s heartbeats as he realized what she was going to do.

  With the cigar clamped firmly in her teeth and the lighter firmly in her hand, she reached up and took off Clay’s hat, letting the brim hover a few inches above the bright blue flame.

  “Am I right?” she asked around her cigar. “This hat given to you by your daddy? A special thing you’d rather not lose?”

  The hat was lowered closer to the flame, and Clay gasped involuntarily.

  “That’s what I thought,” the Captain chuckled. “I’ll give you exactly one second to tell me your name. Do that and this hat goes back on your head. Don’t do that and this is the last time you ever see this hunk of leather and felt.”

  Clay didn’t wait for the Captain to utter the one count.

  “Clay MacAulay,” Clay said, his voice even and cool despite the shaking of his body as rage built inside him.

  “Your father give this to you, Clay MacAulay?” the Captain asked.

  Clay shrugged again. The Captain’s smile fell away. But so did the lighter. She killed the flame and tossed it onto the desk, then hurled the hat at Clay’s face. He managed to catch it despite his manacled wrists.

  “How old are you, Clay MacAulay?” the Captain asked. “And don’t shrug at me again. It’s rude, and I ain’t in the mood for rude right now.”

  Clay was about to answer, figuring there was no harm in the woman knowing his age, but the words died on his lips as the door to the hut burst open and two men came strolling in. Their clothes were beyond dirty. Dust clung to their trousers, vests, and shirts. The first man in was busy slapping the dust off of himself as the second man closed the door firmly behind them.

  “Knock that off, dammit,” the Captain snapped. “I don’t need your dirt inside my office, Volker.”

  “Sorry, Captain,” the man, Volker, replied. “Been out on the range with Moog and his gang, checking the fences and making sure none of the cattle have wandered off.”

  Clay’s ear perked up at the mention of cattle and the Captain gave him a wink.

  “That’s right, Clay MacAulay,” the Captain said. “We got cattle. A full two thousand head of them.”

  “More like one thousand, seven hundred,” the second man said. Clay figured he must have been Bandt. “Close to three hundred head is missing.”

  “Thought you just said none of the cattle had wandered off,” the Captain said, her eyes locking onto Volker.

  The man was tall, thin, and had skin as dark and wrinkled as an old shoe left out to bake in the sun. He stripped off a pair of well-worn work gloves and tucked them into his belt, then pulled out a pouch from his trousers, dipped his thumb and forefinger inside, removed a thick wad of tobacco, and tucked it inside his lower lip.

  Clay knew who had hocked up a globber onto his cheek the night before.

  Volker moved the wad of tobacco around inside his lip with his tongue for a few seconds, getting it packed just right, then spat a fresh stream of juice onto Clay’s left shoulder.

  “I said we was checking to make sure none had wandered off,” Volker said. “But Bandt spilled the beans before I could give you a full report.”

  “General Hansen won’t be happy,” the Captain said. “Half our cattle is supposed to go up to Del Rado as per the agreement with the Mister. He’s got the parts we need for the iron too. Gonna need five hundred for that.”

  Clay perked up at the use of the nickname pilots used to give mechs. Iron. It told him that the Captain possibly wasn’t full of crap about taking phosphorous in a cockpit. She actually knew something. Clay stared at her hard. She was certainly old enough to have fought in the last few campaigns of the Bloody Conflict.

  “Still got enough,” Bandt said. “The Mister will get his thousand head, like he’s supposed to. Then the five hundred for the parts.”

  “I don’t care if we got enough for the Mister,” the Captain barked. “That means we’re three hundred head short on our end. You want to tell General Hansen that there won’t be enough steaks or ribs for the tournament come October? That’s next month. You want to be the one who walks inside that ranch house, right up to that chair, and says that all the folks who will be coming to the tournament will have to share a plate with each other because you idiots let Moog lose three hundred head?”

  “I’d rather not,” Bandt said, his voice matter-of-fact. “I’ll leave that up to you, Captain.”

  “Goddamn smart ass,” the Captain muttered.

  She pulled the cigar from her mouth and glowered at the tip. Several silent minutes went by before she looked up again. Volker and Bandt waited patiently, obviously used to the tactic.

  “Moog have an idea who done it?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t think it was rustlers,” Volker said. “His guess was locals. Some of the farmers from the next valley over. They all starving to death because General Hansen has dammed up their creek. They’ll live a while longer on hemp seeds, but not when the cold hits. No more farmers come spring.”

  “Could be them new folks who hustled that square of land over by Jimmy Bundle’s place,” Bandt said. “Ain’t met ‘em, but I know they is there.”

  “So they thought they’d take themselves some of the General’s cattle,” the Captain said to herself. “Might as well have put scatter guns in their mouths and pulled the triggers themselves.”

  “You want us to go cut them down?” Bandt asked. “Teach a lesson to any of the other locals or new folks thinking about stealing?”

  “I want you to go make sure those are the thieves, then I want you to report back to me,” the Captain said. “We may have them all outgunned, but no need to get the locals all riled up over some misplaced killings. Bring me proof and then you get to cut those scum-sucking thieves down. Every last one. Man, woman, and child.”

  “Can we get a bite to eat first?” Bandy asked. “Moog didn’t have no breakfast waiting for us.”

  “That is one lazy son of a whore,” Volker said. “Lives off the poppies more than food and drink. Why the hell do we have him and his gang watching the cattle?”

  “Because General Hansen owes that grizzled old junkie a life debt,” the Captain said.