Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The woman, who Lucia correctly surmised was the team leader, decided to end the torture. “We have orders, Corporal. We follow them. It’s not personal.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Roland snapped back. “I know how orders work. It’s why you are not dead and Harper back there...” he jerked a blunt thumb toward the bathroom, “Will recover. Eventually. What is really pissing me off is how far the Expeditionary Force must be slipping to have club-footed clods like you three running delicate dirtside ops.”

  “Seriously,” Mindy chimed in. “Silver fox there was so far behind his boner he never even saw me hit him. Screw up like that in Pike’s crew and you’re like as not to find yourself floating home without a helmet.”

  The squad leader turned to fix the now vermilion man next to her with a look that evoked mental images of brutal reprimands yet to come. “Goddammit, Braxton. You are such a shit-heel.”

  Braxton declined to answer, instead he kept his eyes fixed upon the flatly broad features of the towering cyborg. Lucia, who had been content to let Roland handle this part of the interactions, noted this fixed glare as interesting. It was quite clear to Lucia that Braxton feared his squad leader far more than he feared Roland. Which indicated the doomed man either did not know Roland very well or that his squad leader was some kind of Lovecraftian nightmare.

  “Transport’s here,” Mindy called, gesturing to the window with her chin and startling Lucia.

  Out on the drag, a thick gray troop carrier was spinning lazily downward to make a landing in the middle of The Drag. It was flanked by two smaller aircraft, each with stubby wings and rotating gravitic engines. The sleek black machines were the size of aerocars and bristled with weapon pods. Once the transport had landed, the eerie crafts ascended sharply and began to circle overhead.

  Mindy called it out. “One squad-sized transport and two Avengers, Ironsides. They’re pissed at you for sure.”

  Roland addressed the team leader without looking up. “Well, you’ll have new orders soon enough. And for the record, it’s all very personal to me.” He stood again and barked. “On your feet, chumps. If you haven’t untied yourself from those cuffs by now, then the Expeditionary Force has really gone downhill since my time. My best time was four minutes flat, and I wasn’t even augmented at the time.”

  Braxton surged to his feet, and with the courage of a very stupid man he lunged for Roland. The man was superhumanly fast, and as strong as four or five very strong men. Roland plucked him from the air like a man grabbing an insect. His black slab of a hand closed over Braxton’s head and yanked him from the floor with an ease so casual and unaffected it bordered upon insult. The squad leader followed her man, not because she wanted to or thought it was a good idea, but because protecting her men had been etched into the fabric of her very soul.

  When she felt the stupid, brutal, titanic strength of the large man’s grip close over her neck, she whispered a silent curse at the horrible misfortune it had been to be given Braxton as a subordinate.

  Roland held them aloft, each augmented commando suspended above the floor with legs kicking and breath coming in ragged gasps. He turned to his partner and smiled that sick, malevolent sneer that she had come to understand meant Roland was about to do something she would not approve of. “Sorry about the window, Boss,” was what he said. Lucia needed a moment to process the implications.

  “Oh, don’t you dare!” She knew as soon as the words escaped her lips that she was wasting oxygen. The two soldiers were already in flight, hurtling toward the opaque panels of the office’s front facade. Said panels were not made of glass. They were reinforced and thick, and under normal circumstances more than capable of handling the kind of abuse Dockside was wont to inflict upon its structures.

  Due to her accelerated reflexes, Lucia had plenty of time to note that this was not a normal case. Augmented bones and muscles were dense, and even the woman probably weighed nearly two-hundred pounds. Based upon his dimensions, she allowed that the man might be every bit of three-hundred. She also noted, with no small quantity of internal irritation, that Roland had thrown the pair with far more force than was strictly necessary. Roland could lift sixty tons without disengaging his safeties, so she knew he could have tossed them with a flick of his wrist or a shrug of his shoulders. Yet Roland had whipped the pair with a forward stride and a wide swing of his arms that split the back of his jacket down the center seam.

  The expensive front panels of The Fixer’s main office shattered with a crack like a cannon shot, sending a million shards of polycarbonate exploding outward onto The Drag in whistling streaks of lacerating shrapnel. As if the screen offered no more resistance than fine crystal, the two limp bodies never slowed in their flight. They cartwheeled through the air to scatter the assembling squad of soldiers milling around just outside. Lucia saw men and women scramble for cover, watched in awe as an elite squad of soldiers fragmented like a flock of startled birds. Weapons were already coming to bear as Roland’s improvised projectiles thwacked to the pavement among their brethren. By the time they had rolled to a halt, the troops had recovered and were maneuvering with a clean and competent efficiency to engage the threat.

  “What are you doing?” Lucia hissed. “You said they wouldn’t attack!”

  “Never said I wouldn’t.”

  “Roland—!”

  “Trust me.”

  Lucia did trust him. When the boots hit the dirt and the beads were flying, she knew that despite her cognitive superiority his was the better tactical mind. However, she had also figured out he was improvising, and that set anxiety buzzing in her brain like a thousand angry hornets. It took a lot of effort, but she pushed the mental noise into the background. Roland was very good at this sort of thing. She trusted that he had a goal and at least a concept of how to achieve it. The methods never failed to terrify her, all the same.

  “Your play, then,” she forced herself to say. “I’ll back it.” Of its own accord, her pistol had found its way into her hand.

  “Don’t shoot anyone,” the big man advised. “It’s only going to piss these guys off.” Ignoring the shattered panels, Roland kicked his own door outward, sending it tumbling like a dead leaf in the breeze and out into the street.

  A dozen weapons snapped around to transfix the emerging figure of Roland Tankowicz as he stomped across the wrecked threshold. He made no offensive moves. He merely stepped out into the street and plodded forward.

  Lucia took a moment to assess the opposition. There were eleven of them, head to toe in thick armor, and a twelfth towering over the lot was mounted to a sleek cyborg armature. The comforting weight of her CZ-105 suddenly felt much less comforting. It was an expensive and well-made piece, but it was a civilian’s weapon, meant for personal defense and deterring criminals. Flechettes that easily penetrated simple body armor would be like mosquito bites to the military-grade hide of these opponents. The snap and hum of Mindy’s sasori dagger told Lucia that Mindy had come to the same conclusion, though Lucia doubted Mindy would ever get an enemy within the blade’s range if it came to that. It was all on Roland now.

  Out in the street, Roland had made the same assessment Lucia had. A quick visual scan showed him that two of the men in drab green body armor carried heavy rail drivers. The intimidating size of the power cell housings and the impressive diameter of the bores each sported told Roland to give these special consideration. James’s voice in his ear assured him that while the weapons were an unequivocal threat to his life, they would not be used. Roland noted that James possessed a much more confident and commanding personality when he was safely away from the action.

  “The armature is the latest version of the ‘Silverback’ series, Roland. UEDF is very proud of it. They expect it will be an effective countermeasure for you.”

  Roland grunted his understanding. He was not as familiar with the Silverback as he was with older models, but he guessed where this was going. He took another step forward and tried to tell himself that he was
not experiencing a sense of delight at the increased agitation of the men before him. It was a lie, he acknowledged, yet he hated to think of himself as a sadist. This did not stop him from deliberately putting the whole squad in a situation where they did not know how to act. The men had been ordered not to attack, though he was behaving in an obliquely aggressive manner. Sooner or later, somebody would have to make a decision. He could not tell which of the tense soldiers huddled behind cars and other improvised cover would be the one to break the ice, so he chanced another forward step to force the issue.

  “Hold it right there, Tankowicz.” A man stood up from behind a blue ground car, his flechette rifle held in a low ready position. “Not another step! Wilkins, Connors, retrieve Braxton and Okejowe!”

  Two men scuttled out to grab the slowly shifting forms of the injured surveillance team. Slinging each over armored shoulders, the broad men carted the injured people off toward the waiting ramp of the troop carrier. Roland smiled at what he now understood to be the team leader.

  “Good afternoon, Lieutenant. Nice of you to drop by.” Another ominous step forward was in no way mitigated by Roland’s broadly smiling visage.

  The lieutenant’s weapon snapped up to his shoulder and the rest of the squad followed suit. Ever polite, Roland paused.

  “We both know you have orders not to attack me, Lieutenant. So let’s stop pretending I’m worried about your little pop guns.”

  “Our orders are not to kill you, asshole. Nothing says we can’t hurt you real bad, though. Take another step and I’ll shoot you right in your dumb bald forehead. Yes, I know it won’t kill you, but I’m pretty sure it’ll hurt like hell.” The weapon went down again. “Then I’ll have Murphy stomp you for good measure.”

  The man in the armature stepped forward. His chassis was large and loosely anthropomorphic. Wide shoulders framed a thick chest, and the arms swung a touch longer than looked quite right. The head was protected by a rounded helmet, a wide and sloping dome terminating in a thickly armored gorget that eliminated the appearance of a neck. ‘Silverback,’ Roland noted, was not an ironic designation. Other than the drab green paint with gold accents, the whole ensemble evoked the image an eight-foot-tall metal gorilla. The concept was only marred by the long three-barreled autocannon mounted to the cyborg’s right shoulder. It buzzed slightly as a motorized gimbal kept the muzzle leveled directly at Roland’s head.

  The big man raised an eyebrow. “Murphy, I presume?”

  Roland could not see the man’s face, but there was a smile in the mechanically filtered voice that came from that helmet. “Please give a reason, grandpa.”

  In his ear, James was talking. “Tankowicz, as long as the UEDF feels like you can be managed, they are not going to stop interfering. At the moment, several high-ranking individuals with interests in the missing armature are observing this interaction. If they were to get the impression that managing you was outside of their current capabilities...”

  “Got it,” Roland mumbled. “What am I looking at?”

  “The Silverback is the most powerful light armature currently available. This new version has been in action for less than a year. Peak output is a good fifteen percent higher than yours. Sergeant Murphy is a six-year veteran with four combat deployments.”

  “Nice.”

  The lieutenant, somewhat bemused at Roland’s one-sided conversation, seemed satisfied that the big cyborg was suitably cowed. “Send Harper out.”

  “Harper is indisposed.”

  “Then I’m sending people in to get him.”

  In a rare moment of total satisfaction with the universe and his place in it, Roland Tankowicz pressed a fist into the palm of his hand and cracked his knuckles.

  “Do what you want, but I suggest you send Murphy.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For a moment, no one moved.

  The lieutenant, obviously in a quandary, chewed his lower lip as he tried to suss out just what it was Tankowicz was doing. His orders were explicit, however, and he supposed the big jerk had this coming.

  “Okay, Murphy. Go ahead and play. Lose the ordnance though.”

  With a shrug, the simian cyborg released his autocannon from its hard point and caught it deftly as it fell. Placing the weapon and its ammo drum on the street, Sergeant Murphy stepped forward to face Roland. “Orders say I can’t kill you, so I’m only going to mess you up enough to teach you a lesson.”

  It was not often Roland had an opponent he could look in the eye. He met Murphy’s empty lenses with an expression indicating with stark clarity exactly how much he was worried about Sergeant Murphy’s ministrations. “That’s real sporting of you, kid. I’ll return the favor.”

  The men stood there another moment, squared off at a distance of fifteen feet. Neither moved, both appeared relaxed but for the thick gel of pure tension that had coalesced in the intervening space. Murphy had no facial expression to read, no body language to give away his mental state. When he lunged forward, there was no warning and no sign. A heavy metal hand extended as if fired from a mag rifle and grasping fingers sped for Roland’s face like green streaks of laser light.

  A thunderclap collision deafened the observers and dust billowed from the street at the feet of the twin giants. The tortured crashing of failing concrete and a thick cloud of dirt and debris obscured the men in a brown haze of shifting silhouettes. The lieutenant held his breath when the flurry of motion screeched to pregnant stillness in a frozen instant. With the frantic contortions over, the dust quickly settled to reveal the outcome of the first pass. The two cyborgs remained in the street, both upright. Roland had caught Murphy’s attacking hand at the wrist and was holding it in a grip of steel. Roland’s other hand was similarly captured in the giant fist of the green cyborg. The dull armored arm of the military machine vibrated and the actuators under the armor in his shoulders whined and groaned against the immovable object grasping his wrist. Roland’s muscles groaned audibly as thousands of synthetic muscle fibers fired at maximum output just to hold the newer model at bay. The scene gave the impression of an old statue. Perhaps they were just some ancient Roman memory, merely the image of two wrestlers locked in deadly grips captured in marble. It hardly seemed that the sound and fury of the exchange had amounted to anything at all until the lieutenant realized that both men had sunk into the concrete surface halfway to their knees.

  Slowly, the green titan began to force Roland back. The street cracked and popped every time Roland adjusted his footing to compensate for the inexorable might of the Silverback armature. “Getting the point yet, grandpa?” Murphy teased. “I’ll walk you all the way back inside if you need me to.”

  Roland’s footing faltered at that moment, shifting both fighters when he caught his balance. He growled at Murphy through clenched teeth. “They sure made you boys strong enough.”

  Murphy growled back, exertion clear in the clipped brevity of his words. “Damn strong.”

  “Too bad they couldn’t make you smarter.”

  Roland dropped to a knee and yanked hard on the younger cyborg’s arm. The squat green ape lurched forward to crash hip-fist into Roland’s shoulder. Roland surged upright, hauling the Silverback from the ground in a fireman’s carry. If this was a fight between flesh and blood men, Roland would have then swung the man down from aloft to smash his hapless foe’s body against the concrete. These were not regular men, and a fall from eight feet would not even scratch the paint of a military-class cyborg.

  So Roland jumped.

  To those observing, it seemed a strange and awesome thing to behold. Roland took three great running strides before propelling both himself and the thrashing cyborg on his shoulder twenty-five feet into the air. The trajectory could almost be described as graceful, if the hurtling bodies did not comprise nearly a ton of government-built war machines. Roland twisted as they passed apogee and began their descent. He rotated Murphy from his shoulder and drove downward just as the pair struck the ground with the force of a meteor.


  The lieutenant had come to this place prepared to fight a top-secret military cyborg. The briefing he had received on their potential hostile was quite vague about origins and specific capabilities, but he had been assured that his men, especially Sergeant Murphy, would be up to the task. He had believed this for two main reasons. First, he believed it because he had been ordered to and that was as much as he had ever needed. Second, Murphy’s Silverback was all of seven months old. Since getting the upgrade, the cyborg had been HALO’d into at least two piping hot LZ’s and he had walked out of both with no damage and confirmed kill counts in double digits. The UEDF sank a bona fide mint into developing that armature and the lieutenant would have paid the bill himself if he had known in advance how powerful it would be when they got it.

  His worldview shifted ever so slightly at the sight of Murphy getting driven through the dirty street. When Murphy and Tankowicz collided with the unforgiving bosom of the earth itself, the resulting tremor knocked half his squad down and sent watermelon-sized pieces of concrete whizzing past their ducking heads. That was the moment when First Lieutenant Hikaru Inoue resolved to be a little more dogged in pursuing relevant intel from his superiors. He noted, as Murphy scrambled underneath the big fixer, that Tankowicz did not move like other cyborgs. Every armature he had seen in combat moved with a jerky, mechanical cadence. They could be blindingly fast and quite agile, but they never moved quite like a man did. The Fixer was definitely not just another broken body strapped to a high-tech marionette. Tankowicz fought like a man. More to the point, he fought like a man with a lot of training and experience. Born into a family of martial artists, Inoue knew a highly trained combatant when he saw one, and Roland’s airborne kata guruma put a cold hard lump in his stomach.