“I know all this...”
“Shut up, I’m not done. What you won’t find in his files, Bob, is that he was incredibly kind. He loved animals, gave to charity, and took care of his men. He liked old 2-D romantic comedies and reading cookbooks. He was a very complex man, Bob. But he was also a great man. A leader. The best of all of us.”
“It’s a little late for his eulogy, Breach.”
“Stay with me, moron. Pay attention. Now, everybody likes to talk about how easily a soldier acclimated to a Golem armature. It was the main achievement of the whole damn program. Well, it’s not exactly true in my case. I had a terrible time assimilating to my armature. You see, that prick Johnson wanted to see how much mass my nervous system could handle, how much armor they could load me up with before my nervous system gave up. They made me too damn big, Bob. I couldn’t walk right, I smashed everything I touched, and I was in constant pain. Rooker took it upon himself to train me. As you have probably figured out, his armature was stronger than any of the others before mine.”
“About half the strength of yours, at the time.” Bob allowed for a pregnant pause. “More than half now.”
“Yeah, I figured that,” Roland replied. “No organic CNS limitations with you. As for Rook? Well, he took a lot of nasty hits helping me learn to be a soldier again. He didn’t give up on me, he never got mad at me. I wasn’t even all that special to him, either. That’s just how Rook was. He was the kind of man other men wanted to be like, and that didn’t change just because he got a high-tech body to run around in.”
“I assume you have a point to make?”
“The point, dipshit, is that you have none of those qualities. And that tells us something very important. Have you figured it out?”
Bob’s facial expression never wavered. “I’ll let you spell it out for me.”
“You pal, are no goddamn Charlie Rooker. You might be alive, Bob. You might even have the body and the brain of a great man. But you are not a great man. You aren’t any kind of man. You are walking proof that what makes a man great lives inside the meat and the wire. Maybe you could have been something incredible, but you were robbed of that potential when Inskip fast-tracked you to sentience. He forgot the most important part of making a person.”
“And that is?”
“A childhood, Bob. A child is a creature of pure emotion until they grow out of it. It takes patience, practice, and discipline to figure out how to get through life when logic stops working. You never got any of that. You never learned to care for a pet, fight a bully, help a friend, or fall in love. Every emotion is a catastrophe for you because you didn’t get the reps in like the rest of us did. I noticed it when we fought last time. You know every fighting move there is, but you still don’t know how to fight. It’s the same with your mind. You have all the intellect, all the memory, and all the emotion.” Bob could hear the sad smile in Roland’s voice. “But none of the context. You are nothing but a nihilistic AI in the body of a killing machine, saddled with the emotional maturity of a goddamn toddler. You are a failed experiment, Bob. You are a mistake. When your personality matrix finally collapses, you will end up a raving psychotic. Inskip probably knows this already.”
Each of Roland’s words set Bob’s mind seething with incandescent rage. There was enough plausibility in the diatribe to shake his confidence, and the insult to Inskip’s genius seemed to touch a special nerve. Finding words was difficult, and his voice quivered in the presence of so much raw emotion. “I am more than you can possibly imagine, Breach. I am evolution.”
“You are a baby with a live grenade. A techno-organic time bomb. You are a mad mechanical dog that needs to be put down for the good of the galaxy.”
“It’s almost a shame you won’t live long enough to learn how wrong you are, Breach.”
“I’ve outlived all my other mistakes, so that would be a first. But I like my odds.”
“Really?” Bob could not understand his captive’s confidence.
“Yeah,” the big man said.
An explosion rocked the deck beneath their feet, and Bob’s fear surged anew. He turned to the door and bolted.
Roland shouted to Bob’s fleeing back. “You really should have killed Manny when you had the chance!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“This sure is some proper assassin-style sneaking, Manny-boy!”
Manny found the woman’s exuberance to be more than a little off-putting. His years as the premier infiltrator and scout for Venusian separatists had led the young man to believe he had seen and done most of the crazy and ill-advised things people in his profession engaged in to achieve a goal. Pulling himself hand over hand along a hydrogen umbilical in the vacuum of space outside a pirate ship was one he had avoided until this point. It would be a criminal understatement to say he did not share Mindy’s excitement with the daring plan in any measurable capacity. He remained acutely aware of just how thin and flimsy his vac suit was, and exactly how much random detritus whizzed about the exterior of Vinland station. Each white-knuckled grip came with a silent internal prayer that some hurtling wingnut or razor-sharp chip of starship exterior did not pierce the pathetic hide of the only thing keeping him alive.
Mindy, on the other hand, seemed to be having the time of her life. Manny assumed she had spent hundreds of hours hanging from the sides of buildings, spaceships, and any number of other precarious handholds in her years as a professional assassin. He wondered if her good cheer was a mask hiding the same dark lump of dread that chilled his bones. Mindy had always been a tough person to read. The real Mindy Carter was buried beneath so many layers of fake personality that it was hard to know what, if anything, really drove her. Be it assassin, bimbo, fixer, or mercenary, the little blond yanked herself along the umbilical with an easy, almost arrogant grace. Manny was forced to scramble behind her, letting his bionic limb do the lion’s share of the pulling.
“Awful quiet back there, kid,” she continued. “Am I going too fast?”
“I’m good.” He tried to say it without panting, and was unsuccessful.
She accepted his lie in the spirit it was offered. “Good. I want to get inside fast. If they decide to throw more of those ‘Better Man’ assholes at Pike’s assault, the crew are gonna take a bunch of casualties. The quicker we do our part, the better.”
“Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?” Manny wheezed.
“Little of both, kid. Little of both. Here we are.”
She had come to a stop against the side of the Sailor’s Lament. The gray steel hull arced away from the umbilical clamp, and the intimidating bulk of the frigate arced to either side of the pair for a suitably disconcerting distance. Six feet to their right, a maintenance access hatch sat ringed in rivets, the access panel a blank and dark rectangle set in the middle. Manny sidled along the hull to the hatch, then placed his left hand over the panel. The screen burst to life with a harsh blue glow against the dark metal. Manny held his palm above the keys for several long seconds while a suite of sensors within his prosthesis scanned the lock for weaknesses.
“How’s it look?” Mindy asked.
“Not going to be a problem.”
The screen flashed three times and warned, “Access granted. Clear the hatch.”
The silence of space made the door’s slow retraction eerily quiet. The engineering access beyond was not pressurized, so the pair squirmed through to the poor lighting of the narrow tunnel with their vac suits still on. They had to pick their way along in ominous semi-darkness until they found an airlock deep within the bowels of the ship. It was small and dirty, multiple layers of dust and oil clung to the metal in a muddy brown patina. Manny suspected it had not been used in years. Like its predecessor, the access panel yielded before the technological sophistication of Manny’s left arm, though he did not open it just yet. “We are ready,” he said to Mindy, who responded with a nod.
The assassin opened a channel to the rest of the attacking force and called it in.
“Lefty and Honey Pot are in position. Ready for one big ol’ distraction whenever you get around to it.”
Pike’s growl replied. “Copy that, Honey Pot. Knocking on the door presently. Hold on to something. Acknowledged you are comm-silent from here on out. Good luck.”
Manny had already discovered that when Christopher Pike tells you to hold on to something, the wise young man complies. He gripped a bracket securing several metal conduits and braced his feet against the sides of the tunnel. Five seconds later the ship lurched and vibrated. There was no sound of course, but Manny felt the explosion in his molars.
“I think Bernie’s pissed,” Mindy said with a predatory leer. “We better get moving before she rips this place apart.”
Manny unsealed the airlock and ushered the assassin inside. He followed her then cycled the air and activated the gravity. Mindy was peeling out of her vac suit and arranging her various weapons as soon as it was safe. Manny did the same, and the two were ready for action in a few minutes.
“This might get hairy, kid,” Mindy offered. “We are way out in front...”
Manny waved her off. “I’m fine. I’m ready, I mean.” He hefted his scattergun. “I brought some special shells for those androids if they show. Stay behind me if it comes to that.”
“Oh you brave little warrior, you.” Mindy chuckled and shook her head. “Boy, I’m five times as strong, three times as fast, and ten times better trained than you are. Plus I’ve got one of these.” Her sasori dagger snapped on with a crackle and she spun it in her palm. “I’ll be just fine.” She reached over to pat him on the cheek, “But you’re sweet, all the same.”
“They are faster than you, Blondie. If you think you are going to win a knife fight against something with Roland’s specs, you are dreaming.”
“You have a lot to learn about combat, kid,” was her enigmatic reply.
He scowled and donned his visor. “I suppose you are right about that.” When the HUD booted up, he checked their position and the position of the other teams. Satisfied that all was going according to plan, he turned back to Mindy. “Ready, then?”
“Lead on, Lancelot.”
The pair slipped from the airlock into a dim engineering scuttle. The narrow tube was lit with white strip lights and held only a single ladder that raced upward to the more populated areas of the big frigate. Manny went up first, deciding that if he let Mindy set the pace he was likely to die in the ascent. They had no map of the ship’s interior to work with, though the Sailor’s Lament was a commercially available model of frigate. They could only hope that the interior of this version did not differ too much from the others in its class. There remained precious little of Manny’s radioactive dust to look for, and the dense superstructure of the surrounding vessel made scanning for it a lost cause. Everybody was counting on Manny and Mindy to find the information they needed and get it to the rest of the strike teams.
After what seemed like an hour of climbing, an exhausted Manny found an access panel that he hoped and assumed would lead to the engineering section. It was dogged from the inside, but not alarmed, so he climbed past it and indicated to Mindy she should slice it open. Her dagger hummed, and an instant later the panel fell away leaving a neat hole in its place. The edges glowed dull orange and Manny waited while the hot metal cooled. Mindy did not bother. She slipped through the gap like a snake and dropped to the deck without making a sound. There she crouched, head cocked to one side as her bionic ears listened for sounds of discovery.
“Clear,” she hissed. Manny dropped next to her. Compared to her landing he sounded like a car crash.
“Christ, you’re loud!” Mindy chuffed.
“Sorry,” Manny mumbled back. He pressed his left palm against the cool metal of the deck plate beneath his feet. “Cover me.” From within the techno-organic depths of his prosthesis, a hypersonic pulse pinged lightly through the dull gray steel. Invisible tendrils of electromagnetic energy followed the sound, and a few milliseconds later a surprisingly detailed image of the surrounding area and its systems was relayed to his HUD. He stood. “Hallway is empty, and there is some sort of control room about fifty yards down that way. Lots of terminals, at least.”
“Your magic arm can’t tell us more than that?”
“You are carrying two Jericho Sluggers in eight-millimeter and one hundred and eighty rounds of ammunition. Your pack has nine anti-personnel grenades, two anti-materiel grenades, a medkit, and thirty-two ounces of hydration. Your bodysuit has been patched in six places, and your right boot has five percent more sole wear than the left.”
“Show off.”
He began to trot down the hall, Mindy keeping pace. When she pulled up beside him, he added, “Also, your left breast is slightly larger than your right.”
The little blond punched him in the arm, forcing a stumble. “Jerk! There is no goddamn way your stupid arm told you that.”
Manny righted himself with smirk. “True. Some things a guy just notices.”
“And here I thought you were maturing.”
“Here’s the door,” Manny said, skillfully extricating himself from the discussion. The otherwise uninteresting slab of gray was neither locked nor alarmed, and the two slipped inside without incident.
“Some kind of watch station for engineering,” Mindy opined. “They’re supposed to monitor drive systems or something from here. Looks like they aren’t all that diligent, huh?”
“The reactors and drives for these things pretty much run themselves,” Manny replied. “I doubt the average Galop pirate or merc even knows what to look at in here.”
“Do you?”
“Not a clue about the drives or reactors, but I can navigate any security system in space.” Manny was already pattering at a screen, swiping through menus and calling up schematics. “No sign of Roland, but there are only a few likely places to put him. I’ll mark the compartments that could be reasonably expected to hide him.”
“What about Bob? Where is he?”
“Can’t say. He’s always been invisible to scans. Roland says he had to be within a few feet of him to get a reading. But his helmet scanners are terrible.”
“How you figure he does that? Androids are usually easy to scan if they are powered up.”
“Roland says whatever he is, it’s based on Golem tech. That means he would be a tricky read under any circumstance. But as for him being invisible? I figure it’s the suit. Why else would he wear the same suit all the time? He even wore it to the fight at Rum Runner’s.” Manny shrugged. “It hides what he is.” His voice trailed off, and he frowned at the screen.
“What?” Mindy asked.
“Just something very weird. There is no sign of the stolen armature anywhere, which I guess is fine. I’d lock it up somewhere un-scan-able too. But there’s only a few places on this ship that dark.”
“And?” Mindy was not following.
“These guys seem to be moving a ton of data storage hardware into one of them. Enough for a really big database or something.”
“So?”
“The only reason I know this is because they are moving it all still powered up and connected, and tying it into the main reactor directly. It’s like they can’t turn it off, or they are afraid to, anyway.” He shook his head. “It’s just plain, damn, weird.”
Mindy held out her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Is this bad?”
Manny returned the gesture, just as confused as she was. “I have no clue to be honest. But since they haven’t left with Roland yet, I’m guessing it’s more important to them than he is.”
“Ooooooooooh,” Mindy breathed, a sick smile splitting her face.
“Aw crap.” Manny mumbled. “Yeah, whatever they are up to, we might as well go ruin it. If this thing is that important there’s half a chance the armature will be there, too.”
Mindy clapped her hands like a child getting a coveted present.
Manny’s hands flew over the terminal. “I’m putti
ng the ship’s layout up on the tac net. We are probably going to get pinged when I do it. Nobody is supposed to be down here, after all.”
“Good,” said Mindy, her tone feral. “I’m tired of sneakin’ around.”
“I’m not,” Manny mumbled as he unslung his shotgun. “But I suppose it’s time.” He tried to sound brave, and Mindy saluted the effort.
“I bet I kill more than you, Manny-boy.”
“If we were any good, we’d get it done without killing anyone.”
“’Fraid not. The more of these jerks we kill the better. This is a smash and grab, not a sneak and peak.”
“I know,” he groused. “Let’s go do this your way, then.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
While Mindy and Manny were making their way into the bowels of the ship, Pike and the rest of the platoon had been preparing for their own assault. To this group remained the most dangerous assignment, a direct attack on the main cargo bay. It had to be spectacular enough to draw most of the ship’s defenders aft, yet not so bold as to leave his outnumbered squads exposed to the several hundred mercenaries and pirates on board. It would be a very easy thing indeed for his remaining twenty-two people to find themselves drawn into the kind of firefight that even his best hitters could not win. For this reason, Pike had kept his most hardened and most experienced soldiers with him. He called them the Varsity squad, and suicidally asymmetric combat was their forte.
With the Sailor’s Lament ready to get underway, the dock sentries had been recalled. This left the docking bay unguarded. While by no means quiet, a few extra armed individuals milling about did not draw much extra scrutiny on Vinland. The whole station buzzed with tension, every crew on high alert thanks to the fiasco at Rum Runner’s. Every mercenary and pirate on the station was armed to the teeth and wary as long-tailed cats around rocking chairs. Such company made excellent camouflage for the Privateers. They lounged around the various bays looking bored, for all intents and purposes resembling any number of other cautious mercenaries.
Head Space Page 27