The Last Hercules

by Ron Bender

  “He’s right, sweet-pea.” My fury will find a way to him. “Remember the manners I taught you. Remember what Uncle Sal taught you.”

  She drops her shoulders. I know she’ll remember.

  As the mercs truss me up with braided steel cable, I try to keep my eyes on the car. I worry about it leaving, going to a different location.

  A front-end loader rumbles out of the surrounding wreckage. The men nearest me laugh about cleaning up the antiquated garbage that’s not worth recycling. Being hoisted off the ground lets me watch the car vanish into the distant building. The relief I feel doesn’t dilute my anger.

  3.06

  Captive Audience

  “Well, I’ll be. You are one hell of a showboat, ya know that?” The Texan paces in front of me, his beige duster swinging as he moves. His men gather in a half circle behind him. I’m a novelty.

  Maggie’s somewhere in the building and they’ve let me hang here, hoping to have my imagination work against me.

  I let them hang me up, arms above my head, chunks of railway tracks welded to the standing rib of an old, half-stripped space transport making crude but effective cuffs wrapping down to my elbows. I let them weld me in while I took in as much data as I could about everything I could see, smell, hear, and pick up on scanners.

  “You could tell me your name, Soldier,” he drawls. “Or you could just wait for me to figure it out. But I’ll go easy on ya if you co-operate.”

  I don’t reply. I’ve been keeping busy. I’ve already done a basic structural analysis of the building. When I choose to act, I don’t want any surprises like unsupported gantries or stairs collapsing under my weight. The trouble comes from not knowing where Maggie is. My deep scan of the structure shows me a lot of office space in a building this size. It’s a lot of ground to cover.

  Peripherally, I study the Texan’s movements, his stance, his gear, the gear of the men standing near us. I’m measuring distances from cover to cover, sight lines.

  I’m ignoring his words completely and I’m expecting his blow. I get what I expect. The upside is that he fixes the problem with my eye. The downside is that it hurts a lot. Under his duster, this guy has a lot of enhancements of his own. I haven’t been hit like that in decades.

  Maybe I’m getting soft.

  The Texan flexes his hand. “Gotta tell ya, you’re the first Hercules unit I’ve ever seen and god damn, they didn’t fuck around when they made you. I suppose the bigger the hydraulics, the more power you’d have. It must make you feel a little … dated. I mean ya gotta know I have almost as much power as you do and I still fit into normal clothes.”

  His men chuckle quietly in the background.

  I look down at him.

  “Not a big talker though, huh? Your girl isn’t either. She’s about as tough to crack as those Indo-Chinese terrorists I heard you boys dealt with on the moon.”

  His intel is good. That might be a problem.

  He’s getting information from something more accurate than a history book.

  “I heard it said that none of them made a sound.” He shakes his head. “Is that true? Not a sound, just dead silent, even when you pushed that drill into the top of their CO’s helmet.” He makes the motion and sound of a drill.

  He stares at me for a second.

  His voice gets cold. “Mind you, with your daughter, we only got as far as cookies and milk. No need for drills yet.”

  I throw him a line he’d expect. He’ll take it as bravado. I mean it as a warning. “There is no place safe in the solar system for any of you.”

  His men flinch and then, realizing that they did, awkwardly dart their eyes at each other. They’ve stopped grinning.

  “Well,” the Texan says, making an expansive gesture, “now we know you can talk.” He steps closer and leans in. “Listen, I’m hoping you’ll be more cooperative, ‘cause I have ta tell ya, there’re few things messier than torturing kids,” he grins viciously. “And I already cancelled our maid service….”

  I pick up a bit of com-link chatter and my software cracks enough of it. I need his attention on me, not wandering back to Maggie. “What do you want, Bransen?”

  “Now that…” His eyebrows go up. “That there is a neat trick.”

  He issues an order, in an instant the com chatter dies. Manual communication only for them…. It’ll make things easier for me.

  Bransen backs up and looks toward a guy who’s approaching us in double time.

  This guy isn’t in full gear, he’s barely even armed. Support personnel…. They’ve been camped here long enough to let themselves go sloppy….

  The guy hands Bransen a still frame image.

  He studies it as he speaks. “I was disappointed that the entire Defense Department went out the way they did.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if the world hadn’t sold out to the corporations.” I let him have a taste of my old anger. “Someone someplace got paid. Someone like your boss.”

  “I suppose I should clarify what I mean…” His eyes flick across a list of names on the back of the image. “…Baylen Lee.” He narrows his eyes as he looks between the still frame and me. “I meant that I was disappointed that the rest of you bastards all ran away. All those resources vanished. People like my boss? They were waiting for the fire sale. Ya’all didn’t even give him a chance to make an offer before you up’n fucked off. Left the rest of us in a lurch, forcing us to fend for ourselves….”

  He nudges the man who brought the still frame out. “Don’t stare. It ain’t nice….”

  The other man pulls his eyes off me.

  Bransen snorts. “Oh I know all about that horse race. The military tore us down to build us up, and at the end of the day, well shit … they just dropped us. Left us to tumble like weeds. Some of us learned to start racing our own horses.”

  He turns the photo around for me to see. It’s a cleaned-up image of me and a few on my men lounging in our gear just before a mission.

  Inside all that metal, we were so young. My appearance hasn’t changed much. There are wrinkles around my eye socket grafts and more angry lines curving down around my mouth. The armor plates have a few more dents and dings.

  I say, “You think you’re in charge? Someone else makes up your mind for you and you just get to be the triggerman. Your boss cuts you your paycheck, decides where you camp, who you fight…. Does your boss think you’re racing your own horse?”

  He laughs openly. “Oh, I like my boss. Hell, I even like his friends. He’s bullheaded about having things his way, but the son-of-a-bitch pays really, really well, and on time. I mean to the second. Besides, his vision of the world is better than the crap pile we inherited.”

  I clam up, letting him run on, hoping for a break, for some slipped intel.

  “As for anything else my boss is or isn’t…” He crosses his arms. “There’s only one thing you need to know for a fact: he’s gonna get what he wants from you. You can fight him, you can resist all you want, Lee, but he’s gonna win. See, I don’t need you to tell me anything to get what we need.”

  “Then why are you still talking?”

  “Because I want to establish a rapport with you before I start working on your daughter. Of course, you can choose to cooperate instead by opening that little armor plate.” He points to the plate on my hip that covers my main plugs. “Open it, and I can do my job, and you can do yours.”

  “Your job and my job, huh?” A single gust of wind swirls through the building. Motes of cement dust rise through the air and fall.

  He looks back to the door they took Maggie through. “Isn’t it a daddy’s job to keep his little girl safe?”

  If Maggie remembers what I taught her, she won’t have said anything to anyone, not even her name. She’d be terrified but uncompromised … until they hurt her….

  Bransen rocks onto the heels of his gator-skin boots. “Aww see. I’m watching you thinking about her and that’s sweet. It is. If you open up, Lee, she doesn’t get hu
rt. Or you can keep closed up … fail to be a good daddy. As a bonus though, you’ll get to watch me take her apart.”

  I pop the plate open. “I just want you to know, Bransen, that you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”

  “But if that were true, why would an old government LEO, running with a spoofed registration number, end up next to you in a dirt field?”

  “I don’t know, Bransen. Maybe it was just bad luck.”

  “You sure as shit could call it bad luck.” He gestures and a second man rolls a stack of metal cases up next to me.

  I watch the second man carefully as he juggles an assault rifle across his back and readies a set of plugs. The cases must be some kind of portable hacking rig.

  Bransen crosses his arms and says, “I’m willing to bet you know more than you think. Things like, who owned the LEO that crashed and why did the pilot decide to land next to you rather than drop into the ocean.”

  I knew the protocol. The craft was carrying something dangerous enough, that even in the middle of its destruction, the system kept scanning, looking for extra insurance to make sure that the cargo, if it survived everything else, would be dealt with by a friendlies.

  The vessel, the cargo, and Mos are gone. But it means that out there someplace are more people I might know. And they’re still moving forward, doing better than just surviving like me. Rosslyn’s promotion means that they’re still active.

  Active … and that means I walked away from my rank, my duty, for years. My feelings of guilt are wasteful, futile. It’s time to move forward. Time. There is never enough of it now that I have Maggie. I could fill a whole other lifetime just being her father.

  The second guy shoves the plugs in and checks controls in the top case. He nods and Bransen waves him off, but he doesn’t go far. He waits out of earshot, fidgeting with his assault rifle.

  My system is built from the ground up to circumvent long-term brain hacking programs. I watch as my system monitor shows me what their hack is trying to do. Their tech is more advanced than in my time, but that cuts both ways because they’re going to have to overcome compatibility issues of their own.

  “I’m gonna let you stew a while.” Bransen looks me up and down, confident in his safety. “I think a late dinner and then it might be bedtime. I’m going to pull out a cot and cozy up with a story book and your little girl.”

  I want to kill him right now. But the timing is wrong.

  He turns and walks to the second man. He knows better than to whisper. “Check the program in an hour and rotate off duty with another man. I want two hours on for each man, all night.” He points at the machine. “The order is to wake me if those numbers change.”

  I hang there, unmoving, and unmoved, in my silence. I take the only action that is safe for the moment. I dilate my eyes all the way and drop in a wide-angle lens. I scan, and I plan.

  A total of fifteen men, fully armed, have come through this room. Plus, I heard four different voices on the com-link before I sacrificed the knowledge that I had access. Two squads. Add some officers and support…. Bransen handled himself like a typical merc who favored small unit tactics, so there might be as much as a platoon with support.

  My musing is interrupted by an internal alarm. I’ve been ignoring my recharge indicator. My field truck has generator equipment built in, and I usually charge once a day. As I’ve aged so have my power packs. I burned power like a young war fighter and now I need a top up or I’m going to be useless. Looking around, there’s only one place to get the power I need. The arc welder. It looks like a variable output electric.

  I carefully test the welds holding me. The metal doesn’t give. They’ve done it right.

  In a few more hours, it’ll be midnight. Most of the men with Bransen have returned to what I can see as their standard patterns of behavior. Four of the men have moved to a distant table and are playing cards. The upper gantry has no one on standing guard.

  I scan the room once more for traces of electro magnetics. I find nothing out of the ordinary. Thermal imaging tells me nothing new either. The men in front of me have standard right arm and both legs done, wearable armor only.

  I start a watcher program, disconnect my eyes to save power, and hope my options will improve after I analyze the guards’ routine.

  3.07

  Ivory Tower

  The boss and I make our way down the hall to the cafeteria. “How much do you know about these guys? Cause I’ve never heard of em.”

  “Rumors and a lot of conjecture is what I had. Nothing concrete.” He nods at a staffer who seems surprised to see the CEO in the public food court.

  “Now what?” I stalk along beside him. I can see other employees approach who want to talk, or chat, or discuss some kind of white-collar crap with the boss. They bail when they see me. I know I intimidate the shit out of them. We’re left alone to make our selections from the counter. It’s a sign of how good the food is that he still eats here.

  “At this moment, we have to be sure we’ve got coverage on Vanessa.”

  “Oh, it’s Vanessa now, is it?” I like ripping on the boss. It’s hard to do.

  He ignores my jab and chooses a steak sandwich from the menu and fills a large glass with lemon water. “Jen?” he asks.

  She answers him on his lapel link, “Yes, Basillio?”

  I’m jealous. She practically purrs his name.

  “Please arrange a room for Vanessa and Mr. Hall and set that room to monitor them. I want the floors above and below set up as buffers.” He plows down half a glass of water. “Restricted access for the maglifts and put a full squad on each of those floors. Link those squads with Ops Room Two.”

  “I took care of their accommodations earlier.” She sounds tired. “I also made sure that it’s a signal sealed room. If she has the ability to send or receive any kind of wireless, we’ll know and it will be intercepted.”

  Her day started before I finished burying the body parts from my last hunt in the Feral Lands. That was before sunrise.

  She adds, “I’ve made arrangements to have someone escort them to their rooms after they have dinner.”

  “Good. Send me any modifications on the plan Morochevsky and Lexi are putting together.”

  “Yes, sir.” I can hear her quiet yawn over the lapel link. “I’ll have a synopsis of the different action plans ready for you inside the hour.”

  “Thanks, Jen, Forward those to Ops One. After that, I’m out.”

  “We’re going after him?” I thumb for a slab of blue rare meat. “Not complaining here, but you good with going to Texas? Texans coming here without permission is one thing, but that isn’t gonna be enough to clear up consequences if we get caught over there.”

  “Just to be clear, they’re South African mercenaries funded by a shell company in Texas.” He sounds drained, like things were when he was in the jungle. There’s a lot going on here that will eat at him because of his personality. Almost nothing about this operation is inside his control. “And my advice to you is, don’t get caught.”

  I snort and keep up with the banter because it takes his mind off of the shit. “Sure. I’ll be fine. It’s everyone else you’re making me pack along….”

  He lifts his tray and heads to the checkout. The ID reader on the counter automatically comps his meal.

  “So why risk it? I get the Vanessa thing. Why do we give a shit about a tin can and his kid?” I ask.

  He overrides the reader and comps my meal with his card. “That tin can is our link to whatever fragments of the government are still out there. A lot of resources disappeared with the collapse … and I know that most of it didn’t get destroyed. Townsend is onto them.”

  “Son of a bitch.” I served almost my entire military career with Wolf, and he could still drop crazy shit outta the blue. “Didn’t we kill him already? Are you sure it’s him?”

  Basillio nods. He nudges his food around on his plate, deciding how he’s going to tackle it.

&nbs
p; A nut job with access to a WMD weapons locker. I mutter, “Fucking Phil.”

  We eat the rest of our meal in silence.

  ˜˜˜

  “Nessa.” David follows me from one room of the suite to the next. “I can only apologize so many times for what I said.”

  “You know I said those things about Baylen when I was angry with him.” I can’t even look at him. To say that our dinner conversation had been strained would be putting it mildly. “And here you are firing my words off to Basillio Ferdinand like they’re gospel truth. Basillio Ferdinand. Probably the only person in the world who can snap his fingers and make entire districts full of people vanish.”

  David refuses to move aside as I finish my circuit of the room. I draw up in front of him. “I don’t love my ex, David, but he still is Maggie’s father. You tell Basillio about how insane Baylen is and he might agree with you.”

  His eyes fix onto mine. “Is that a terrible option, Nessa? Is it? That AlphaTek swoops into Texas and only picks up Maggie?”

  I stare at him. “I can’t believe you’d want anyone dead.”

  “Oh, come off it. You’ve been wishing him dead at least once a month since we started seeing each other.”

  I feel my eyes widen in shock at his words.

  “Now that it might happen and I agree with the idea, suddenly I’m the bad guy? That’s shit, Nessa. It’s shit and you know it.”

  “Move.” I keep my tone blandly assertive.

  He shakes his head. “You’re only pacing because you want to run away from this situation. Well you can’t. There is no place to run.”

  “Move. David. Now….” My anger at his words must show on my face because he backs up and stands aside. I storm past him and continue my prowl around the rooms.

  “Nessa.” He follows me to every doorway. “I know that Baylen is Maggie’s biological father, but I feel I’ve been an important part of her life too.”

  “David,” I say as he starts to protest, reacting to my tone. “David, you know as well as I that Baylen wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. You made him sound like a demon, practically painted a target on him.” I stop pacing and look at him. “I know that my relationship with him complicates things for us.”