They could see him drop to the floor but he was up again in an instant. After a moment he started laughing. "You idiots. You can't hurt me. A clumsy giant and a little girl? That's my morning workout."
There were high windows along the walls of this room, allowing more light to enter, and the man could see them clearly. It was another cavernous floor. A faded old sign indicated it had been the bottling room, although the machinery had long since been cleared away.
Big Fella turned to KC. "We could fight with this asshole all night. Let's end this now though." He tossed his E-Thing to her. "Call in the air support while I give this guy his workout." He gave her a wink and then strode in the direction of the man. The two circled each other warily.
KC read the screen in an instant and called up the personal protection drone display screen. It showed a calm overhead view of the brewhouse. She tapped in a series of commands and stepped back against the brick wall.
Five seconds later the drone came crashing through the windows, scattering glass through the room. It wobbled from the impact, but stabilized in seconds.
The man from Vinicius' assault team looked up, puzzled, unsure of what he was seeing. The black drone hovered overhead, humming softly.
KC could see the man's expression relayed from the drone to the E-Thing. She activated the laser targeting and smiled as the man lit up. Her finger gently touched the E-Thing screen, giving the command to fire.
She looked up, not wanting to watch the result on the small screen. The nerve dart hissed and leaped from under the wing of the drone, lighting the room for a fraction of a second. It hit the man squarely in the stomach.
He glanced down at his midsection, then up, uncomprehending, and collapsed on the floor.
KC looked to Big Fella and raised an eyebrow. "Do I have to wrap this one up, or will you be a gentleman and do this one yourself?"
Big Fella let out a booming laugh. "Damn, KC. You're just nine kinds o' fine."
****
Rix watched as his foe, Vinicius Cunha, climbed up the metal spiral staircase onto the third floor. It was the first time he had seen the man up close, in person.
He had seen a lot of Modified men in his life, but he had to admit, Cunha was perhaps the most impressive and intimidating. Rix guessed six-foot-six, but it could have been more. It was the mass of the man that astounded, though. He was as thick as a comic book superhero, or supervillain in this case. He looked as solid as the pillars that dominated the ground floor of this building. His skin had an unusual texture that Rix had never seen before.
He stepped forward off the stairwell, and another man followed him up. He wasn't nearly as imposing as Cunha, and Rix judged him to be only moderately rigged.
The third floor was one large room, and Rix stood in the middle of it. The center of this floor had been mostly stripped bare, with the clutter pushed to the outside walls. There were more windows than on the lower floors, allowing in soft moonlight and starlight. There was nowhere for a man to effectively hide. But Rix was in no mood for hiding.
Vinicius Cunha smiled. "At last. I was beginning to think I had come all this way for nothing."
Rix smiled back. Oh well, he told himself. No sense making this any harder than it has to be. Who knows, it might even work.
Rix raised the two compact crossbow pistols he held in each hand. He had fabricated the small bolts with the tranq tips that had worked so efficiently against Vinicius' local men earlier in the week. Without a word he shot the bolts at the two men. The smaller man stumbled back, cursing, and fell on his hands and knees.
Vinicius stood motionless as the bolt bounced harmlessly off his chest. He watched it spin away from him and clatter as it hit the floor. He glanced over at his man, crawling on all fours, and shook his head.
"Are you joking with me?" Cunha said, as he slowly removed his jacket. "Do you think so little of me that you thought that might work? Or is ignorance your problem? I am not like any other Modified man you have met. Oh, Travis Burnet, this is going to be a long night for you."
Rix casually tossed the crossbow pistols across the room. "You can keep calling me that if you want. But you should know that's not who I am. I'm here for Open Sky to make sure you pay for all the blood you've spilled. And you have my guarantee you won't leave this room a free man."
Rix could see by the man's expression that Vinicius hadn't expected that, but his grin soon returned. "That explains much. But you are doing me a favor. I thought I was dealing with two separate problems, but now I see that it's only one big problem and I will be able to start addressing it right now."
Rix had fought against dozens of MIs in his career, but he had never seen anyone who moved so fast. In fact, there was not even time to be sure that he had actually seen the man move. Vinicius was in his face almost instantaneously. His fist slammed into Rix's chest with a force that would have instantly killed an unmodified man. Only his bone density Modification kept him from dying on the spot.
Even so, his unbreakable bones were surrounded by soft tissue, and the power of the blow reverberated through his organs. The momentum of the punch sent him flying across the room and sliding into some of the old office equipment in the corner. He stumbled when he tried to stand, and realized he had seriously underestimated Cunha's abilities. He swayed as he got back to his feet and looked at his surroundings. He realized he had been flung to the northwest corner of the room.
Good. Not the southwest corner. That would have really screwed up the plans.
Cunha was moving much more deliberately now, casually strolling over to the jumble of industrial hardware that lined the walls. He picked up an old cast iron pump housing and held it out in his hand, weighing it.
Rix was grateful for the minute to recover. He really does expect to spend the night torturing me. If he wasn't so cruel he could have killed me by now.
Rix's eyes never left Cunha, so he was ready when he threw the heavy pump. This time, with his heart racing and the do-or-die reality of the situation closing in on him, he ducked in time for the pump to fly past him. Even so, Rix was surprised yet again when the pump did not clang off the brick wall, but instead went clear through it.
The dust from the vaporized brick had not yet settled when Vinicius made another lunge. Rix kicked an old metal chair up into his face, but he swatted it aside and continued on a straight course at Rix, like a charging bull.
Rix darted to one side but not in time to completely miss the hulking shoulder of Vinicius as he charged past. Still, he managed to shoot out a kick that tripped the larger man and sent him stumbling into the wall. The impact cracked the mortar between the bricks and rattled the windows above. More of the loose bricks from where the pump had passed through the wall tumbled outside.
Vinicius shook his head as he got up but immediately leaped over the rubble, a crouching jump eight feet in the air that closed the fifteen-foot distance to Rix in the space of a heartbeat.
This time Rix was ready. As Vinicius landed, Rix connected with an uppercut that that snapped his opponent's head back. It was his first contact with Vinicius' scaly skin, and at once Rix realized why his tranq bolt had bounced off the man. His skin was hard, like a shell. Rix had never encountered such a Modification before, and suddenly it clicked into place why Vinicius had risked so much to steal the Open Sky formulas. He'd concocted his own bulletproof skin, or something very much like it.
Vinicius took two steps backward and wiped away a drop of blood that had rolled down his lip. "That was a good punch," he said, breaking into a smile. "It should have broken your hand. So there is more to you than —"
Rix lashed out with a hard jab to the man's mouth before he could continue his speech. Rix was beginning to feel the stirrings of his adrenal Mod taking over, a rising tide of ferocity spreading throughout his mind and body. His awareness of his surroundings, his evaluation of his foe, was coming into a cold hyper focus. As he circled around Vinicius, he moved with a quickness he never felt in his normal life
, even with all his other Modifications working in tandem. The "fight or fight" Modification was taking over. It was like another person awakening inside him, a berserker, a being of pure rage. Ever since he had undergone the procedure years ago he had had to suppress it, harness it, only let it loose in short bursts.
This time, he would not even try to control it.
Rix was a blur of motion as he rained concussive blows upon Vinicius. Through the fog of anger he read Vinicius' surprise, his shock at the change that had come over his enemy. Rix redoubled his efforts. He perceived each of his punches as a weapon intended not just to connect with his foe, but to pass through his body and obliterate. Each blow Rix landed reverberated through his unbreakable skeleton.
In almost no time the hyper-focus he had briefly achieved shattered and his powers of reason were swamped. He realized he was not as strong as Vinicius and it infuriated him. When each of his blows failed to destroy the man he screamed at him in red-blooded anger. When Vinicius landed a punch in response, the rage Rix felt almost blinded him.
Rix had no idea how much time had passed, but slowly, gradually, he felt the anger loosen its grip on his mind. He was dimly aware that Vinicius was still standing but barely so. The man was bloodied, and staggered backward as he attempted to counter Rix's moves. Rix looked down at his own hands and bleeding knuckles and saw that his veins were glowing red, the biochemical marker that monitored his adrenalin levels. He vaguely remembered that glowing veins was a built-in sign his body was in dangerous territory.
Rix advanced on Vinicius slowly. The large man backed up cautiously into a corner. Jumbled thoughts bounced through Rix's mind. He tried to order his thoughts, but it was still like grasping at shadows.
Hide in the corner. Yes. I will beat you there. The corner. The southwest corner. The southwest corner is where you will fall. There was… I had… I had a backup plan for the southwest corner of this room.
And then he heard it, the sound that cleared his mind and brought him back to the present moment — the sound of a quivering rattle.
Vinicius heard it too, but seemed not to grasp the meaning of the incongruous sound, a sound torn from all context, a sound that had no business being on the third floor of an old brewery. He turned part-way to look behind him, and saw what he thought was the coil of a fat hose underneath a dusty piece of vintage brewing equipment.
But the hose was moving.
In the time it took for his brain to process that information, the rattlesnake struck, a dark nightmare ripping free from the shadows. The serpent buried its fangs into Vinicius' calf, breaking through the man's hardened skin.
He cried out, and Rix could see the confused expression in Cunha's eyes, bafflement mixed with hatred, the surprise of a man who had never been physically bested but suddenly knowing for sure that the time had come.
The snake hung on as Vinicius kicked out his leg, then released after three seconds and tumbled to the floor. Rix watched warily as Caroline slithered back to her spot in the corner where he had placed the "snake-nip," as Jonathan and Young-Soo had called it. They had assured him that snake would stay close to the tray of special liquid nutrient mix they had concocted, but best not to count on that.
Vinicius ran, half stumbling, from the corner where the snake had struck from the darkness. He was half-way across the room when he collapsed on all fours. His arms shook as he tried to hold himself up. At last he slumped to the floor and was motionless.
Rix shakily followed the man and then sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of his fallen foe. He watched the man's final struggles to push himself upright. Rix felt like he might have to lie down himself.
"If it makes you feel any better, Vinicius, I'll admit that I underestimated you," Rix said softly. "But you too are guilty of underestimating the forces aligned against you. There are a lot more changes taking place in the world than just our little corner of the muscle-building trade.
"Take Caroline, there, for example. You just met her. She's been genetically engineered. Believe it or not, it was all done as a hobby by a couple of tech guys I know. Can you believe it? Gene-splicing an eight-foot rattlesnake just to see if it works? It's a crazy old world and that's a fact.
"But the good news for you is that the venom in this snake no longer kills. Sure, it's still a neurotoxin, but it mostly results in temporary paralysis, not death. I asked the geniuses one time why they were playing with the blood and guts of rattlesnakes, and they gave me some logical-sounding talk about developing new antivenin drugs, and pain blockers, and perhaps bioengineering an entirely new species of rattlesnake that can't actually kill anyone. Saving lives and all that.
"But does that give you a flavor for the times we live in? When people can alter the very nature of rattlesnakes? There has to be a thousand other guys — tens of thousands maybe — working on things just like this, and we'll never know about it until it's already done. Just like with the trade in Modifications for people. Do you know that Open Sky now has thousands of people working regularly in space? Those people are being gradually Modified to be able to withstand that environment. Do you realize what that means? We already have people in space being altered into a different type of human being, a type of person that will be able to go anywhere humans want to go in this galaxy."
Rix felt himself swaying slightly, his exertions having drained the last of his reserves. "I know some of this will have horrifying consequences," he said in a whisper. "It will make this world unrecognizable to us today. But here's the thing, Vinicius — I happen to believe it will be for the better. People will be stronger, faster, they'll live longer and be able to achieve things that earlier humans could never have achieved. I want to see those days come to pass."
He watched Vinicius' eyes for a long minute, trying to see if there was any reaction.
"But to make it all happen, people like you have to be stopped. You'll poison the well for all of this. Your brutality will turn public opinion against Modifications, and you'll bring down the wrath of governments around the world on all of us. Believe me, they'd like to control all of it, forever."
He laid down on the dusty wood floors, lacking the strength to sit up any longer.
"So that's why, Vinicius, your future is not going to be quite as you had planned. The future for the human race, however, is wide open."
20
Rix sank back in the seat, listening to the hum of the jet engines. He hoped he would be able to get some sleep before the plane landed in Las Cruces, but he wasn't optimistic.
He opened one eye and saw the Open Sky security man look away quickly. They tried not to stare at his bruised face, but not all of them could resist.
He called up on his optics the note Marie had left and prepared and read it one more time behind closed eyelids. It had shown up in his personal message file late that night, after they had already delivered Vinicius and his men, bound like mummies, to the hanger that Rohm had designated for holding. Rohm had fifty security people on the premises waiting for the captives.
Rix, Big Fella and KC had gone back to Rix's garage quarters for a brief clean-up and meal. Rix had thrown together a travel bag for the trip to Open Sky headquarters, but they had decided that Big and KC would stay at Rix's place and check for any loose ends, and wait for Marie to arrive. At least that was the story. As Rix was leaving, he saw KC snuggling up against Big Fella, her hand clasped in his.
"If anything comes up, we'll let you know," she had said. "Trust me, we'll be up all night."
But Marie, of course, would not be arriving. Rix received her message as he was boarding the plane.
He reread it again.
My Dearest Connor,
I am so sorry to do this now, right when you need everyone on your side the most. But I've done my part, what little I can, and I trust that you've been able to take care of the Brazilians. I've never known anyone like you, Connor, and I know you can handle these people.
But I'm afraid I cannot.
I'm leaving.
I've wanted to be strong, Connor. I wanted to stand by you through all of it, and see things the way you see them.
But I never wanted to be fighting all the time, always looking over my shoulder, always preparing for some conflict. I finally had to face the truth — this is the kind of life we would build if I married you. There was really no other outcome. It comes naturally to you. You revel in it. You're good at it.
But me, I'm not made that way. Connor, I will always love you for the way you picked me up and gave me my life back after the war. When my brother was taken away, I felt so much anger, and helplessness. You built me back up, showed me my potential, and opened my eyes to possibilities I never imagined.
Even with all that, however, I'm still not entirely sure all these Modifications are good for people. I look at myself sometimes and don't recognize who I see. And then I look out at these other people, the ones you chase, and I've seen what all the Modifications lead to. I've seen how it twists people.
I can't live that life.
I'm sorry, Connor.
I love you.
He had tried calling her, but all the contact channels had been closed. He called Big Fella, and he and KC confirmed that all her possessions had been removed. They hadn't even noticed it when they had stumbled into his home earlier, as weary and battered as they had been.
He looked out the small window of the aircraft. Distant lights drifted below in the lonely desert.
She was gone.
****
Rix sat across the desk from Rohm. Dawn was breaking over the desert, and he could see the purple light growing warmer through the panoramic window behind the enigmatic owner of Open Sky.
"I'd like to know what you're going to do with him. I think I've earned that right."
Rohm leaned back in his elegant leather chair. He looked out the window. Rix found it amusing that Rohm, too, like his security team, did not want to look directly at Rix's bruised face any more than was necessary.
Connor Rix Chronicles 1: Rules of Force Page 17