by Rick Partlow
“You gonna’ be okay to move if we have to?” I wondered. “You don’t look so hot.”
“It’s not pleasant,” she admitted, her back straightening slightly as she pushed herself up with her palms on the cold, concrete floor. “But I can do what needs to be done, Munroe.”
“Relax, we probably have a while. You had to have been gone at least an hour…”
I’d barely got the words out of my mouth when the door crashed back open and Victor was tossed through, landing limp as a rag on his back. His cheek was bruised and already swollen, his nose looked broken and his face was slack before he hit the ground, drool and blood trailing from his split lip. He hadn’t been beaten unconscious though, I decided; he would have looked even worse because it would take a lot to knock Victor out. I was fairly sure they’d used the sonics on him, and I was also sure he’d made them do it to avoid being interrogated, because I hadn’t been honest when I’d spoken to him before---he did know something they didn’t. He knew where the ship had landed, and he knew Vilberg had been heading back to it.
“Up,” the leader motioned to me, not bothering to tell Divya to get on the ground. He knew she wasn’t a physical threat. “Make a stupid move, like the big idiot did, and I’ll stun you just like I did him, then we can start all this again in an hour, when you’re awake again.”
“No problem,” I promised him, hands raised, feeling the corner of my mouth turn up. “I wouldn’t want to miss this.”
The room they took me to wasn’t a cell; as far as I could tell, it was an infirmary or clinic, or some such thing. It was brightly lit and full of medical equipment: diagnostic scanners, growth vats for cloned tissue, and not one but two very expensive auto-docs. Lining one wall were folding cots, and set up in the center of the room was a sturdy-looking gurney with straps for buckling down an unwilling “patient.”
Calderon and Van Stry were there, and so was a harried-looking medical technician, her coveralls a dull white with dark stains on the sleeves. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had made those stains. The soldiers prodded me towards the gurney, then two of them pushed me down onto it, holding my shoulders and legs in place as they strapped me in.
Calderon didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked as if his head was coming to a boil and about to erupt in a steam explosion like one of the geysers Gramps had taken me to see in Yellowstone when I was a kid. I could imagine why. Van Stry looked unhappier but less out of control.
“I’m going on record here, Alberto,” she said to Calderon, her generic face yanked downward in a frown that was almost a grimace, “that I’m recommending against this. Ms. Damiani won’t be happy if your field medics bring harm to her son.”
“I don’t give a shit about Andre and I don’t give a shit about his sister,” Calderon ground out. “Ferguson,” he snapped at the med-tech, “Give him the dose.”
The technician seemed hesitant, but also scared of Calderon. She took a drug patch off its backing and laid it against the skin of my neck. I felt a slight itching sensation there, then an immediate light-headedness as the drug worked its way into my bloodstream and from there to my brain. I blinked as everything began to get blurry around me.
“Tell me something, Calderon,” I said, trying not to slur my words and working hard to focus on the officer. “What’s your boss going to say when you get his charter revoked for killing civilians and using armed, autonomous drones? Think he’ll be happy you got this piss-ant job done on this piss-ant little piece of shit planet?”
I giggled, unable to stop and frankly, unwilling. “Think he’ll be happy that he has to move his whole operation out here and work exclusively for these half-assed crime bosses scratching for their little corner of hell-holes like this?”
“Is the shit working yet?” Calderon demanded, rounding on the technician, his fists clenching and unclenching like he really wanted to hit me again.
“It’s had enough time,” she confirmed, looking at me doubtfully. “It seems to be lowering his inhibitions.”
“You think I needed this shit to lower my inhibitions, lady?” I asked her, laughing again. “I’d have told this tin-pot wannabe exactly what I thought of him ten minutes ago if he’d have stood still for it.”
The guards who’d brought me in weren’t saying anything, and their visors covered their faces, but I had the sense they were staring at Calderon, and I think he sensed it, too.
“Sgt. Rose,” he said to the team leader, “take your people and wait outside.”
“Sir, are you sure…,” he began, but Calderon cut him off.
“Now, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” The NCO waved at the others and they filed out of the infirmary entrance, then pulled the door shut behind them. It was a solid door, more like the holding cell I’d come from than the plastic pieces of shit they hung on offices in buildfoam structures like this, and it closed with a solid, metal sound.
“Got all the witnesses out of the way, huh, Calderon?” I taunted him, grinning more broadly now, feeling a looseness that was less the chemicals and more the excuse of having been drugged. “Gonna’ rough me up like you did my troop? Slap around a drugged prisoner strapped to a table? That how you get your rocks off? I bet you go beat off in your cot thinking about the kids you killed here, don’t you?”
The chiseled features of the mercenary commander loomed over me, twisted with rage and frustration, and I felt my head jerked towards him as he grabbed my collar and yanked it upward. His other hand cocked back in a fist, ready to smash my face in and be damned with the interrogation. That’s when I did it.
Of the several implants and upgrades I’d had over the last few years thanks to Roger West and the technicians who worked for him and Andre Damiani, the most useful were the medical nanite suite and the audio transceiver I’d had grafted to my mastoid bone that let me connect to my ‘link remotely. I used the mastoid transceiver daily, and the nanites way too often. But the one Cowboy had suggested that I’d nearly rebelled against was the pharmacy organ, the extra sack of cloned tissue squeezed into my abdomen that could produce various drugs when it sensed the need from my body’s various systems. I’d figured it was a waste of time; if I needed a painkiller, my armor’s systems could deliver it, or I could get one from my medical kit or slap on a smart bandage.
It had one capability that I’d never used before, and I’d honestly never wanted to. With the right prompting, it could deliver me a massive dose of adrenalin combined with an equally massive dose of painkillers. It wasn’t something you’d call on lightly, because it held the very real possibility of making your heart explode in your chest or causing a brain bleed or allowing you to break your own bones or tear your tendons or cartilage without feeling it.
Now seemed like a good time to give it a shot.
I clenched my teeth, squeezed my eyes shut, tensed every muscle in my body and imagined a solid white wall. The lethargy, the fuzziness in my head and all the other effects of the drugs disappeared like they had never been, replaced by a preternatural clarity that seemed to freeze every detail of the room around me. There was Calderon’s fist, half a meter from my face, as Van Stry tried to lunge forward to stop him. His eyes were wide and wild, while hers were narrowed and resolute, the word “don’t” halfway out of her mouth. There was the technician, cringing backwards, trying not to get caught in the middle of it, an abused dog who knows what’s coming.
Then I was surging forward, the restraint straps yanking free from their moorings when they tried to stop me. I barely realized they were there; I felt nothing but a faint, background heat that seemed to come from inside me. I intercepted Calderon’s hand as it swung past me, grabbing him by the wrist and twisting. There was a snap that echoed inside my head as the wrist broke, then a scream that seemed obscenely loud in the enclosed room, more a bellow like a cow elk going down to a wolf pack.
I smiled at that, a baring of my teeth that wouldn’t have looked out of place on one of those wolves, then slammed my elbo
w into Calderon’s nose and felt it crunch flat in a spray of blood. I sensed rather than saw Van Stry coming up behind me, pulling her pistol out of her holster, and I let Calderon’s broken wrist go. I snatched the pulse pistol out of her grasp before it could clear the holster and chopped the grip into the side of her neck; she dropped like a stone, her eyes rolling up, but I was already turning back to Calderon.
He hadn’t gone down; he was a tough son of a bitch for all that he was a pretty boy. He was clawing for his own gun, partially blinded by the pain in his nose and reaching across with his left hand to the holster on his right hip because of his broken right wrist. I had a pistol in my hand, but I wasn’t thinking very clearly at that point. I had no problem with killing him, but I felt an almost irresistible urge to beat him to death, not even considering shooting him.
I used the pistol butt as a club, instead, smashing it into his jaw and sending him sprawling backwards and crashing into the line of cots against the wall. I took a step toward him, fully intent on pounding his skull into mush, before I realized that the med-tech was yelling for help and the door to the room was opening…
I finally realized I was holding a gun. A gloved hand came through the open door, bracing itself on the frame, and I shot it. There was a crack like lightning striking a tree and severed fingers flew away from a charred and cratered section of the wall. The door swung slightly open and I fired the rest of the magazine through it, not caring if I hit anything. There was no response; the screaming and swearing was trapped inside sound-proofed helmets. But a couple of wild bursts of laser fire rattled the metal door with static discharges before I rushed across the room and slammed a shoulder into it, closing it securely. It had a physical bolt lock, much cheaper and quicker to install in a temporary facility like this than an ID-protected electronic one. I threw the bolt, then turned just in time to see the technician lunging towards me with an injector in her hand, probably loaded with sedatives.
I smacked the device away with the red-hot emitter end of the pulse pistol and she cried out sharply and grabbed at her burned hand as the injector flew out of it. I could feel myself starting to come down from the adrenalin high already, still numb from the painkillers but knowing on some instinctive level that I’d pulled, if not torn, some muscles and tendons and I was going to hurt very badly in the not-so-distant future. My nanites would fix me up, given time, but between the end of the painkillers and the beginning of the healing was going to be a world of hurt. Of course, I was getting ahead of myself; it was far more likely that I was going to die in the next few minutes, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about the pain.
I stumbled over to Calderon and yanked the pistol out of his holster. He wasn’t quite unconscious, but he was lolling stunned on the floor, blood pouring from his nose and mouth and his right wrist limp and hanging at an unnatural angle. I smiled slightly. I wanted to shoot the fucker, but letting him suffer from the humiliation of the beating was more satisfying.
I tossed the empty pistol into a corner, automatically checking the load on the fresh one. Calderon had the damned thing personalized with his initials engraved in the metal casing around the ignition chamber. I snorted.
What an amateur.
“Are you…are you going to kill me?” It was the technician. She was holding her bruised and burned hand to her chest, panic and desperation in her round, pale face and light eyes.
“Not if you don’t give me a reason to,” I told her and I could tell I was slurring my words. It was a combination of the drugs she’d given me and the ones I’d given myself. I cursed under my breath and peeled the patch off my neck. The damage was done now, its payload long delivered, but I tossed it on the floor anyway.
She cringed away as I stepped over towards her, but I walked past and retrieved the injector from the ground where she’d dropped it. Van Stry was stirring, hands going to her head. I stuck the business end of the injector into her neck and pushed the activation stud. Air hissed out along with the sedative, and the woman collapsed back to the floor, insensate.
“Hope that wasn’t a fatal dose,” I mused, tossing the device away.
“No,” the tech assured me, sitting down on one of the cots next to where Calderon was moaning softly on the ground. I noticed she wasn’t in any hurry to treat him. I doubted she liked the guy any more than I did. “It should put her out for a couple hours maybe.”
“Captain!” The voice was amplified by a helmet’s exterior speakers and clearly audible even through the thick, metal door. It was the team leader, Sgt. Rose. “Captain Calderon! Are you all right?”
“He’s alive,” I yelled back. That seemed to take a lot of effort and I had to catch my breath and steady myself against the gurney before I continued. “He ain’t talking much at the moment, because I broke his fucking jaw. And his nose. And his wrist.” I chuckled, feeling the loopiness returning a little. “Breaking parts of him has been fun…I may take it up as a hobby.”
“What about the others?” She didn’t seem too concerned about Calderon getting his face busted. He was just so popular…
“Agent Van Stry of the DSI,” I giggled at the rhyming rhythm of it, “is sedated but breathing. Your med-tech is fine.” I nodded to her. “Tell the nice sergeant you’re fine.”
“I’m fine, Sergeant!” She yelled. “He’s telling the truth about the others.”
There was a brief pause, like Rose was conferring with someone else or maybe just thinking about what the hell his next move should be.
“Munroe, how do you see this going down?” He asked me finally. “You aren’t getting out of that room alive unless you surrender, you know that, right?”
I laughed at that, sitting down on the gurney now, the pulse pistol aimed in the general direction of Calderon and the med-tech.
“Did you have someone go fetch you the Official Hostage Negotiation Handbook or something out there, Sarge?” I asked him. God, I wished combat was this much fun when I wasn’t drugged.
He didn’t answer, and I thought maybe this was it, that they were going to blow the door, but instead I heard a hammer of running footsteps; then an alarm klaxon began sounding, blaring painfully over speakers set in the ceiling. The med-tech glanced around like she could see what was causing the alert, and even Calderon seemed to stop writhing in pain on the ground long enough to look up at the sound.
They both looked over at me, and I just grinned and shook my head. The explosion came seconds later, close enough and big enough to toss me off the edge of the gurney and send a mobile medical scanner toppling over to the floor. I landed on my right shoulder and barely kept a grip on the gun, feeling a flare of pain that told me the drugs from the pharmacy organ were beginning to wear off.
Outside the door, I could hear the crack of pulse lasers discharging, and an answering fire, the distinctive whoosh of rocket weapons. The exchange intensified, loud enough that it had to be right outside in the corridor, and then it fell silent. Heavy, echoing footsteps approached the door and I pulled myself up to one knee, holding the laser at low ready in both hands.
The door shuddered under a thunderous impact, like a battering ram, and dust flew off the wall. The med-tech jumped at the noise and ran to the back corner of the room, huddling down behind the auto-docs. Another blow cracked the buildfoam frame around the door and I could see the lock starting to give. At the third hit, the door swung inward violently, letting a cloud of smoke and dust billow into the room from the chaos of the outer corridor.
The biggest Skinganger I’d ever seen stepped inside, barely able to squeeze through the doorway. His gleaming silver right hand was still balled up in a fist, and I knew instinctively that fist was what had broken open the door. A rocket carbine was in his left hand, held like a pistol and pointed at me.
“Is this the one?” He asked through sharpened, metal teeth in a gleaming metal jaw.
“Yes.” I knew the voice before he appeared out of the smoke and darkness in his black leather vest and shorts.
<
br /> It was Kane. He nodded to me curtly.
“Let’s go, Boss.”
I laughed, wincing as the laughing hurt, and the getting up hurt even more. My head was swimming and the smoke filling the room had somehow made into my brain.
“What took you so damn long?”
Then I passed out.
Chapter Eight
I was moving.
I was moving, and I was uncomfortable, and my head hurt.
No, scratch that; everything hurt.
I opened my eyes with difficulty and reluctance and saw that I was lying across a metal bench in the enclosed rear compartment of a cargo truck, my head jammed into a stanchion at an odd angle. Sitting across from me were Divya and Victor, covered in soot and smelling like smoke and looking as beat up as I felt, but still alive.
Surrounding us, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the cargo box of the truck, were nine Skinganger cyborgs, their bionics bare, proud metal. All of them had their arms and legs replaced, and most had at least one cybernetic eye as well, a couple with completely metal jaws and one with a full skull cap replacement. I’d gotten used to having Kane around, even though I still thought he was batshit crazy for wanting to replace his flesh and blood parts with bionics, but this… It was like the difference between having a pet snake and falling into a pit full of vipers.
“Where’s Kane?” I mumbled hazily, sitting up painfully. I felt like a bag full of broken glass. I was also starving, which meant I was healing.
“Up front,” Victor said, sounding cheerful despite his bruises and what had to be a hell of a headache from the stunner. He gestured towards the cab of the truck. “He’s some kind of VIP, I guess.”
“Any of the others with him?”
Victor shook his head.
“They don’t like us Norms too much,” he elaborated, shrugging.
None of the Skingangers around us seemed to object to the statement.
“Did you kill her?” Divya asked me without preamble. Her voice was flat and lacking the affectations and flourishes she usually favored.