Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “Breach, I have eyes on four Better Man armatures. Repeat! Four Better Man armatures!”

  Lucia’s hysterical cry over the team channel came like a punch to the gut. She needed to say no more for Roland to understand that they had been led into a trap.

  “Honey Pot!” he bellowed. “Get that fucker and exfil, NOW!” He resumed the wholesale slaughter of the pirate crew but his mind was elsewhere. “Lefty, if you have anything with EMP in your bag, get it to Lucia’s position now. Command!”

  “Go for Command,” said Pike.

  “We need heavy hitters down here on the double.” He paused to let another burst fly from his weapon. “Pull everyone back and let those things get to me. I’ll engage while you exfil.”

  “Breach,” Pike growled, “can you take four of those things?”

  “I can hold the line.”

  “That was not the goddamn question, soldier!”

  “Give me Big Bernie and my confidence goes up!”

  “Copy that, Breach. One batshit-insane battle-wagon coming up.”

  Mindy’s voice broke into the conversation. “Breach, you need to drop that rate of fire if you expect me to clear this place with a live package, copy?”

  “Copy,” the big man fumed and sent Durendal back to its holster. “Getting physical now.”

  Across the room, Mindy closed the channel with an irritated shake of her head. Sneaking in through the back had been easy enough for the assassin; however, she found the interior of the bar impossible to navigate with the sheer quantity of fire being exchanged. With the deafening roar of Roland’s enormous machine pistol silenced, Mindy was able to slip behind the ruined bar and silently kill the two pirates still hiding there. Her sasori blade hummed and decapitated the crouching men as if their necks were made of wet tissue paper. The monomolecular edge of the long dagger sat atop a fifty-thousand-degree ionized plasma channel, and the whole assembly vibrated at 20,000 oscillations per minute. If there was any material the blade could not cut through, Mindy had yet to encounter it.

  From behind the bar, her bionic eyes searched the blackness for her target. The unreliable light of muzzle flashes provided her with more illumination than she would ever need, though it still took her a full eight seconds to locate Jean Marceau. He had posted up in the deepest corner of the back, wedging himself between the vape booths. Every so often, he would poke an arm out and take a shot at the shadowed bulk tearing his crew apart. His aim was laughable, and he did not look as if he had any idea how to be effective with his big pistol. Mindy figured he was more likely to hit one of his own than Roland, though from what she could see his shots were ending up somewhere in the ceiling. Moving along the wall with the measured stalk of a hunting cat, Mindy stayed behind the action and deep in darkness. One pirate caught sight of her crouched form as he reloaded. Like a striking snake, Mindy uncoiled from her stoop into a long stride. She completed the maneuver with her arm outstretched, her body fully extended in a graceful lunge that ended in a thrust that took the startled pirate under his scruffy chin. The point parted flesh and bone like morning mist and left the humming tip of her dagger projecting from the back of his skull. She withdrew with a flourish that sent boiling blood hissing to the floor and let the man fall.

  She took this moment to assess the room, and for once in her life she was not sure of what to make of what she saw. Roland had put his gun away and set to killing pirates by hand. A gory game of whack-a-mole thus ensued, with Roland stomping down pirates who invariably fled before his rage. This crew had a few augmented members, which were easy to distinguish by their suicidal confidence. A man with four bionic limbs smashed a table over Roland’s head, and the big man turned to address the insult with the kind of speed that looked ridiculous when applied to his bizarre proportions. The pirate managed to parry Roland’s left hook with a forearm, but lost the use of that arm as a result. The prosthetic belched blue sparks with a distinctly electronic crackle and went limp. It did not matter because Roland’s right fist then crushed the crippled cyborg’s chest like a beer can. The dead man’s companions tried to honor his bravery with increased aggression. Five or six pirates used the distraction to leap upon Roland. As if trying to bring him down with numbers alone, the swarm of foes attacked with singular fervor. More joined in when Roland staggered, vibroblades rising and falling, improvised clubs swinging, and guns firing point-blank into the great war machine’s flanks.

  Mindy knew this was her moment. Roland was in no danger, and she suspected he was deliberately feigning weakness to lure the men in and create an opportunity for her. With the bulk of the crew piling onto Roland and the only pirate to see her still twitching on the floor, no one else observed the stealthy woman slip from behind the bar and sidle up to the vape booth. When Marceau popped up to take another shot, she grabbed his arm and yanked him free of his hiding place. She heard his yelp as the force of her tug wrenched his arm backward and sent the Colt Dragoon tumbling from his hands. He opened his mouth to scream when he saw her, but she silenced his cry with a knee to his diaphragm. Nothing but a strangled gasp came from his gaping maw, and Mindy finished him off with a guillotine choke that had the hapless man unconscious in just a few seconds.

  Throwing his inert body over her shoulder, the tiny killer made her way back to the bar before re-opening the team channel. “Honey Pot has the package. Bugging out now.”

  If anyone heard her, she could not say. When she cleared the back of the bar and broke out into the alley behind it, she found Manny waiting there. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked, confusion and irritation competing for dominance of her tone.

  “Lucia is having trouble with some kind of super android. I gotta work up some EM crap or something to stop them.”

  “Shit,” the little blond killer replied. “I’ll get this jerk stowed and then come back.” She almost ran off but stopped and looked the young man in the eyes. She looked through his visor, saw his tension and the pressure aging him before her eyes. She heard the rapid and shallow breaths he was taking and invested five seconds in a little battlefield pep talk. “Hey! Calm down. We got this. You got this. Just do your thing and let everyone else do theirs, okay?”

  “Right,” Manny said, voice tight. “Just do my thing. Okay.” He yanked his green satchel from over his head and started to rummage through it, mumbling all the while.

  Satisfied that he would not panic and break, Mindy sped off to the rally point with her prisoner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Lucia heard Mindy’s announcement, yet she was far too busy to concern herself with it. The first of the massive white androids to get through Bubba’s ruined intersection emerged from the smoke at the end of the passage. One of Patton’s drones sent the images to her HUD and Lucia saw that it was armed with a large flechette weapon of some kind she did not recognize. Mary Hollis eliminated that threat with a single well-placed shot from her rifle, turning the large gun into exploding fragments. This neither slowed nor dismayed the android, who simply charged their position unarmed. The passage that bypassed her storage bay was more than a hundred yards long. The machine had covered half that in less than two seconds when Bubba slowed it with a long full-auto rip from his twin machine guns. His beads washed the advancing machine in a shower of yellow fire that clogged the hall with smoke and searing ceramic fragments. The white humanoid did not stop until one of Mary’s flechettes tore across its hip and ricocheted off into the darkness behind. Wisely taking a cue from the sniper, three of Patton’s drones swooped in and began to pepper the damaged hip joint with flechettes.

  Each hovering robot was no larger than a big dog, and munitions stores were limited. After each had exhausted a thirty-round magazine, they pulled back. When the smoke cleared Lucia noted that they had succeeded in giving the machine a slight limp. She spotted the silver gel weeping from the ragged wound and was reminded of how similar these things were to Roland. “Keep hitting it!” she called out. “It will heal!”

 
“They fucking heal?” Winston cried back. “Jesus!” He stopped rigging their escape route with mines and began firing at the wounded machine, squeezing off shots twice a second and hitting far more than he missed.

  A second android emerged into the smoking passage, and Bubba lobbed a grenade at it. His enhanced musculature sent the heavy metal ball clanging down toward the newcomer and Lucia had to admit his aim was excellent when it rolled to a stop in front of two pale feet. The android seemed to ponder this, and was thrown to the deck when the explosive device detonated. A series of flechettes from Hollis lanced across the supine creature and gouged deep furrows into the creamy white surface armor. Another of Patton’s drones swooped in and fired a small rocket into the downed machine, but it did not appear to do much damage. Bubba swept both machines with his guns, swaying back and forth to keep each under a constant barrage of beads. The downed one stood despite the fusillade, lurching upward as if the assault hurt no more than a slight breeze.

  Lucia watched it rise and had an epiphany. The only Better Man armature she had ever seen had been piloted by a brilliant fighter with decades of experience. With such a man at the controls, a single Better Man had nearly beaten Roland to death in their first encounter. These versions were not moving like trained fighters. Her brain battered all the reasons this might be around for three-tenths of a second before she decided on the most likely scenario.

  They have no pilots, no brains to suck tactics from! They’re just dumb robots!

  “Breach!” she called into the channel. She did not wait for him to acknowledge. “I don’t think these guys have any pilots or encoded templates. They don’t move right.”

  This realization gave her confidence. She slid from the cover of the storage bay and leaned out to take aim. Willing her sense of time to its most dilated state, she watched her enemies as if they moved in slow motion. She noted a third android emerging just as her finger touched off her first flechette. Her shot struck exactly where Hollis had wounded the first one and the compromised armor failed to stop the projectile from penetrating. The metal dart drove deep into the android and the big white machine staggered and stumbled.

  “Getting kinda close, Mama Bear,” Hollis warned.

  Lucia agreed. The unit she had just felled was less than forty yards from their position, and the third Better Man was taking aim. “Everybody fall back,” Lucia ordered. “Mary, get that rifle!” A series of orange streaks from above indicated that Bloody Mary was already on that task. Lucia cycled the trigger on her own weapon as fast as the mechanical limitations of the weapon would allow, dumping twenty-nine flechettes into her closest foe in just under four seconds. Satisfied that she had ruined the thing’s mobility, she turned and ran from the cargo space and out into the corridor.

  “Command!”

  “Copy!”

  “We are bugging out to the rally point. We’ll keep slowing them down but be advised we can’t hold them!”

  “Copy that, Mama Bear,” Pike sounded calmer than Lucia thought was entirely appropriate. “Get there fast. Help is on the way.”

  “Understood.” To her team she called, “Rejects, let’s get to the rally point. Back-up is on the way!”

  “Copy,” said every team member at once, and a mad dash thus ensued as the five fighters bolted for the safety of reinforcements. They had no hope of outrunning the giant machines pursuing them, but Winston’s mines bought them extra time. When their path diverged from the direct route to Rum Runner’s, two of the lumbering alabaster giants broke off pursuit to head toward the cantina. This left two to chase Lucia and her team. Lucia felt a moment of self-reproach follow the relief that this brought. It meant that Roland would still have to fight two of them himself, and she would prefer he not have to fight any at all. The part of her brain still running the numbers reminded her that his chances were better than hers no matter how many there were, so she put her guilt aside and focused on the nigh-insurmountable task still in front of her. “Breach,” she blurted into the main channel. “Two of those things are coming your way.”

  “Copy that,” he growled back. “You keep moving.”

  It was a three-hundred-yard sprint to the hasty staging area that had been selected for a rally point. The wide open space was a transfer station for cargo, and it had been chosen for the convenient network of attached tram lines and freight elevators. The Privateers had rented the area for eventual use as a bivouac, though they had yet to fortify it. When Lucia and the Rejects burst thought the final hatch leading to the rally point, they found it mostly empty except for a few of Pike’s mercenaries prepping hasty fighting positions from whatever crates and tram cars they could maneuver. She slapped the hatch control to close the door behind them, though she had no confidence one metal panel would stop two Better Man armatures. It seemed a good solid door, large enough to drive a cargo hauler through and made entirely of metal. But the terrifying alabaster machines were as strong, if not stronger than Roland. She had seen her partner deal with many closed doors in their time together, and one look at the door in question told her exactly what she could expect.

  “Heavy weapons out front!” Lucia shouted, ignoring command structure. “Small arms well back. Anything here with high-explosive or armor-piercing?”

  A sour-faced woman in heavy armor answered, “Two twenty-mil flechette guns, a ton of grenades.”

  Lucia frowned at how inadequate that was going to be. “Anything with EMP?”

  “We have some jammers,” said the woman.

  “Fine,” Lucia huffed. “Opposition is a pair of armored, well, I guess they’re androids. You need to pound the hell out of them with the twenty millimeter just to scratch them. Hit them with the signal jammers, too. Just in case.”

  “Understood,” said the woman, showing nowhere near as much general apprehension about the situation as Lucia thought it warranted. There was no time to correct the matter, because a horrific booming noise chose that moment to tell them all that the enemy had arrived.

  The first blow dented the metal right where an eight-foot android’s fist would be. More booms and more dents followed, a rhythmic pounding that warped the hatch further and further from its designated shape.

  Lucia’s Rejects posted up and braced to engage, Bubba plunking his enormous frame right in front of the door. That his weapons were useless seemed to not bother him, and Lucia started to understand why the rest of the Rejects kept him around.

  He’s dumb, but reliable. And certainly no coward.

  Then the door fell. The two white androids charged immediately, taking their first strides before the hatch had stopped vibrating. Bubba Riley put a stream of beads directly into each of their faces, riding the triggers of his twin machine guns like ammo was free and he had an infinite supply of it. Both androids stumbled but did not fall as the hundreds of impacts stymied their sensors and confused their AIs. Mere fractions of a second behind Bubba’s barrage the orange lances of twenty-millimeter flechette strikes began to score the enemy’s hide with hissing streaks. The one with the bad hip went down when its leg went stiff and inert. No less than four grenades clattered to the deck around the felled enemy, even as thick limbs tried to haul it upright again. Lucia held her breath and the next few seconds was drowned in the cacophony of multiple explosions.

  The upright machine took no notice of his downed brother and continued to advance through the sustained gunfire of the defenders. Riley gave this one his full attention, directing both streams of incandescent fury into the face of this foe. The AI inside that Better Man thus decided that Bubba Riley was the most pressing threat and turned to charge the big gunner where he stood.

  True to his nature, and much to Lucia’s horror, the giant oaf stood his ground and roared like a bull gorilla while continuing to wash the charging monster with gunfire.

  Lucia wanted to shout at the man to move, but decided that action was better than orders. Her rifle came up, her finger a blur as she stroked the trigger like a mad woman. She managed
eight rounds before her weapon stopped firing due to her finger going faster than the bolt could reciprocate. She dropped it, her reactions so fast she had drawn and raised her CZ-105 from her hip before the falling rifle had passed her belt line. The pistol spat its own fire in bolts of neon lightning as she emptied the magazine faster than a machine gun.

  All of her shots missed the lunging android. Considering Lucia’s nearly flawless marksmanship, this would be unheard of had the androids been her actual target. They were not. Every flechette discharged from either weapon had perforated the floor in a discrete eight-inch circle twelve feet in front of the howling Bubba Riley. When an eight-hundred-pound android foot stomped down on that section of deck, the compromised plate collapsed. The android sank to its knee and pitched forward like a drunkard to fall at Bubba’s feet. Lucia’s perception of time had slowed to its most excruciating tempo. All the chaos of the battle became muted and muffled, the actors dancing in languid quarter-speed while she darted through the maelstrom like a hummingbird. She bolted from her cover, feet pinging the deckplates like hailstones and sprinted to Riley’s back. Her senses picked out all the individual moving parts of the battle’s chaos and her reflexes kept her avoiding crossfire from her team and the thrashing of the enemy. She made Bubba’s position in six blistering strides. One hand grabbed the giant mercenary by the harness, and the other dropped a grenade into the hole trapping the downed android’s foot. With the same motion, she swung around the bigger man and yanked him off-balance. As he wobbled onto his heels, she had enough time to watch his bewildered face as she drove a push-kick into his stomach and sent him flailing backward. She charged forward, even as Bubba was staggering, and pushed them both another eight feet before her dropped grenade detonated.