The Last Hercules

by Ron Bender

  Picasso snorts as the traffic breaks a little. “As for agendas, this is Alpha-Wolf Actual we’re talking about here. He doesn’t piss unless pissing is an agenda item that shows up on at least three other lists. Of fucking course he has a fucking agenda. Get used to it. He’s not going to change how he plays the game just to suit you. Bitching about that is a waste of energy. Get that clear in your head.”

  His rant will make it easier to act later if I needed to. I lie. “I’ll work on it.”

  “You are a terrible fucking liar, but okay, I’ll let it slide. As for my other concerns, this bullshit paranoid agenda stuff is an example. I don’t know if I can trust you as far as I could throw you. I’m thinking you might just fuck off and leave me hanging in a critical moment.”

  “Fair enough. Good disclosure, Pablo.” I throw flippant back at him. I watch his face twist up at his new nickname.

  Part of me is angry that he doesn’t think me trustworthy. I catch myself. I haven’t done anything to warrant his trust.

  I wind it down and say, “So. Now what?”

  He still looks pissed at me. I ignore his expression until he sighs and pulls a folded-up piece of mono-bond out of his coat. “This is the newest intel I’ve got. A list of locations, by type of suspected operation, time and date stamped for when Bransen was personally seen in them.”

  I unfold it and give a quick look. I’m surprised. “Some of these time stamps are less than a few hours old.”

  Picasso nods. “We know that Bransen was off planet before he came here and then swapped out a lot for eCash for hard-fold. When he got here your kid was with him. He’s close, like in the neighborhood close. Basillio’s ready to flip the switch. I mean he’ll lean on Bransen so hard no one will want to be seen with him, do business with him. Hell, people won’t want to breath air in the same room as him. Basically, everything, just short of having him shot on sight. AlphaTek wants to drive him hard. Get him to go to ground where he thinks he’s safe. We get to shake out more of his operation and get your kid back.”

  “What else?” I keep looking down the list of places and the names linked to them.

  “Bransen’s got a boss.” Picasso’s voice drifts a little. “And that guy is a huge bitch. He’s the one who took and now has your men. He’s the one who wants the intel on the Hercules assets, wants to know how to leverage it, loot supply dumps, grab contact lists, all that kind of crap.”

  My men. After Maggie’s safe they come next.

  Picasso continues. “Basillio wants Bransen alive to get intel on this other guy.”

  “Not happening.” I keep reading the list and go back to ignoring his expression.

  “Look,” he says. “I’m not above cutting a deal on this one. I’ve never bred, no kids, but that don’t mean I don’t get it. Here’s my offer. I get to Bransen first; you back off and let him live. You get to him first; you do what you want to him. I don’t get in the way.”

  I stop reading and take a good look at him. I’m not surprised by his offer. It speaks of other agendas still hidden away….

  “You don’t like the deal?” he says. “We’re gonna have a problem when we find him.”

  I leave him to stew under my gaze. He’s course, he’s as direct and as blunt as acinderblock tossed from an overpass. He’s probably talented in ways that I’m not. This might work out. “Deal.”

  He lets out a slow breath and I pretend not to notice.

  I turn the paper over and check out the last items on the ‘B’ side. All the intel is tight, and it’s detailed. My eyes stop on a location; a slave market. I can’t help the noise from my throat.

  “Yeah. Bransen’s a cocksucker, a real piece of work.” Picasso pulls the truck off on a side street and crams the truck down a few alleys. Locals must hate guys who drive like this, but he gets us moving. “The guy who runs that place has an exclusive clientele with expensive and particular tastes.”

  “We go there first.” I hear my voice say. I pull Maggie out of that place and I’ll come back and flatten the building myself afterwards.

  “Yeah. I thought you might say that.” He pulls us into a junkyard crowded with wreaked vehicles. “There’s a brand-new corporate weapons stash in here. We can prep a loadout and plan.”

  3.30

  Not Exactly a Fishing Trip

  Trying to talk to Lee while we were in the truck netted me zero. Nothing useful. Soft power, my ass. Sure, he took my “Deal” but I’m thinking that was a way to shut me up. If he makes me, I’ll slam a few rounds into his vitals, kill him off and send an extraction team in to pull out ‘Maggie-the-newly-minted-orphan.’

  Except then I’d have to file a report; and Morochevsky would be all up on me about how I’m not supposed to kill people I’m paired with for work. That would escalate into a HR issue with retraining, rehab, reprogramming, and a pile of other crap. Finally, the boss would bench me for a few months. Worst part would be that Jen wouldn’t talk to me for a long while.

  I remember all of it from last time it happened. But that guy…he’d had it coming and I’d do it again.

  It’s funny that the military and business lean on their people the exact same way. Make it bad enough for an individual and they fall into line or they leave. You stay, you get perks like a paycheck. You leave and they say fuck you, go starve, we can get another cog.

  Sticks and carrots; part of my life for most of my life. Do what you love and you’ll never work another day….

  The cube van AlphaTek buried under other wreaks has been here for months. It’s a big enough space to hold crates of weapons and some other gear.

  All of it paid for with hard-fold, untraceable. Collected from across Africa over who know how long. Faceless transport people loaded this shit in here while I was still flying in.

  As Lee picks through the assortment, I call up a dated satellite map of the building we’re going to. Orbital DPR has maps of the first three floors. It’s all offices, or what used to be offices. Now… I can imagine most of the rooms are filled with dirty mattresses, drugged bodies, and untouchable entitlement.

  “You good?” I ask.

  “Geared. You?”

  “Already packed.” I say.

  We’ve been out of the truck for less than a half hour. Our truck, edged between the fence and the corner of an outbuilding building, has been spray bombed by drones from one end to the other. The graffiti ranges from obscenities, to artist tags, to gang-sign. Walking around it once I say, “I’d be pissed but this might actually be an improvement.”

  Some drones around here are preprogramed and flew around autonomously. A pain in the ass and a reminder. Out here, a half kilo of CL-HMX Cocrystal packed with ball bearings could zip next to your head and pop off. There’s no armor for that.

  “No drone control around here.” I open the truck door and pull window foam from under the seat. A quick walk around spraying down the glass has the crappy spray paint running off in lazy thick trails, down the side panels, to drip into the dusty gravel. The truck blends in perfectly with the vehicles in the yard.

  “Nice heads up.” Lee says. He gets the implications of zero drone control. As he climbs into the cab he looks around the area, seeming more aware then before.

  The new paintjob gets us through traffic quicker. The beefy, intimidating front end that everyone ignored on the drive here, now has people and vehicles hopping out of the way. “I wonder which tag we’re sport’n gets us that reaction.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Lee says. “In an hour or two this thing will be on a corner someplace being gutted by fire.”

  “Too bad. I like the new paint job.”

  I park a block away from where we need to be. “We walk from here.”

  The ground traffic is crushing around the edges of the marketplace. We walk around a side of a tower and the sight catches Baylen a little by surprise.

  He’s an orbital guy. Not many crowds up there.

  The market is blocks long and packed with throngs of late a
fternoon shoppers. Jumbles of colorful stalls, portable holo-projectors, their signage, banners, and tumbled bits of garbage jam the converted street. Business towers jut up into the sky, corporate banners from a wider world. They’re not anywhere as tall as at home but for around here they’re plenty big enough.

  The sun, following the rain, jacks the humidity to a billion percent. A crazy combination of smells, fresh mixed with rotting, hangs in the air. The wind pushing the clouds overhead doesn’t do a thing down here on the ground.

  The sounds of a hundred streaming infotainment channels pour into the space, competing with voices raised in conversation, arguments, and haggling.

  But there’s no rumble of Av’s, no one can afford the fuel. That one thing, lacking, makes the air feel weird and silent to me; foreign.

  But it’s the foreignness of the place that I like because a hyperawareness kicks in. Predatory instinct fires my guts. The thrill brought by humanity packed tightly around me. The inherent danger of an unexpected contact with a foe. The blades down my forearms tremble.

  Something about this is different from last time, or any other time I’ve been here. Glancing around surreptitiously I spot the big metal difference.

  Instead of the crush of close quarter’s danger, the crowd goes huge-eyed and pulls back the moment they see Lee coming at them.

  Lee doesn’t notice. He’s like a walking dose of JoiKill at the start of a night of binge-artistry. The let-down is crap.

  Easing up onto a blind corner I pull up a map overlay on my eye. Our target was in the middle of the block housed in an old office block.

  I can see the brutal looking front door from here. If I cared more about appearances I’d get one like it for my place in the Sands.

  Overlapped slabs of metal have been riveted and slag welded together. All of it is crisscrossed with tacked on chunks of rebar spans. A sliding slot had been cut in at head level. The recent rain has added to the look. Dripping flows of rust trace bloody fingers down its length to pool at the bottom of the door.

  I spend a minute watching traffic flowing around the building. Everyone is either ignoring what kind of a business operates here or doesn’t know.

  No one leaves the building, and more of a pain, no one goes in either. No traffic means no chance to evaluate the entrance. We’d be hitting it cold.

  Lee cuts in on a scrambled com-line. “Cameras. Three of them.”

  “Locations?” I don’t jerk around to look for them. I’m hunting people. I would have gotten to them but since Lee’s decided to be helpful I take it for what might be; a polite interruption.

  Lee has stopped at the corner and is digging into a basket of knock off watches. “Top corner behind us. Fixed mount. Wireless. Two, closer to the door; one across the lane, angled down at the door, also fixed and wireless. The last one is above the door.” His subvocalization is crisp, practiced. “That one looks like it can pan. Full gimbal mount. Hardwired. Probably thermoptic.” He finds a watch with an extra-long steel strap and pays for it.

  As I walk to the stall next to him I look for what he’s describing. I have a hard time finding the cams. “How’d you see all those? They’re pretty well camouflaged.”

  “My optics have a lot of other sensors built-in. They locked onto the electro-magnetic current; software deciphered it. Gave me the data. By the way the cam behind me has a heavy zoom. Good spot to watch the whole corner.” He pokes around inside the stall for anything else to buy. “I can’t trace the where the pick-up is for the wireless cams, but given their positioning I’d say they’re part of the target buildings security.”

  Well fuck him then. My optics can do a lot, but they can’t scan electro-magnetics or trace back and match encrypted receivers.

  The fact that we are no longer passing through the area has pulled a lot of eyes onto us. Standing around like this makes us look suspicious as hell. If we just walked down there they’ll be onto us instantly.

  Lee asks the boy who sold him the watch to set it for him and then buckles it on, turning it this way and that to look at it. He moves to the next stall down and asks on sub, “Do we have a Hat, a jack-jockey?”

  The stall I’m at is selling pot scrubbers. Hard to look interested in bins of wadded colored plastic.

  “A Jack-Jockey?” I almost laugh. “A wire-head, a Nettie.” I snort and drop the scrubber I’m holding. “Yeah, we got technical support, a Hat, no Nettie.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Nettie is what the modern world calls a technical field op, embedded with a team or near the area of operation. A Hat is remote ops. They can access more resources, bigger reach, bigger systems to crush with” I didn’t tell him that sometimes Hats suffered from com lag. In South Am I’d seen how that delay got good people killed. Four hundred rounds every fifteen seconds is a lot of lead to duck. Lag anywhere sucked. But the Big B doesn’t want to risk exposing high-value assets right now. I ignore what that means about my value to him. I know what I’m worth and he owes me.

  “Get our support on the line.” he says as he goes to the next stall down the street. “These are older cams… have them block the five-point-eight gig band, in and outbound from target. Is that possible?”

  “It’ll take a few minutes.” I reply. I’m a little pissed that Lee’s turned into a bossy prick. I know what needs to happen next. “The infrastructure around here sucks if you haven’t noticed. They may have to order in a couple of jamming trucks.”

  I link to Control and Moro passes me right to James. I get him to speed but he’s still the new kid so I gotta ask. “Can you help us out with this?”

  “Yeah.” He sounds distracted. “Yeah, of course, I’m all over it.”

  I move down a stall and look at a rack of clutch purses covered with tiny handmade metal elephants. Maybe Jen would like one of these. “Let me know when you got it locked down.” I grab one of the purses and shove it into my coat when no one’s looking. James pips .

  “Okay. It’s done,” he says.

  “Shit Jimmy.” I had heard he was fast. “You sure? I barely had time to unzip….”

  “Please. I am a professional you know. I don’t ask you if the guy you just carved up is still alive, do I?” He sounds bored with the work he’s doing. “Besides, I don’t get paid to sit on my ass. That said; the people in that building will be onto the facts pretty quick. Not a lot of communications traffic but it’s going to be obvious that the signals are cut.”

  I’m not about to tell James that half the fun of carving is seeing how much you can cut before they bleed out. “Anything you can get me about the target building?” I ask as I move to the next stall. It’s full of chunky looking gold rings. The clerk is way too attentive for me.

  “The occasional large cash transfer being wired in and off loaded. I’ve got statements for power and their net-x connection. I poured some of the data through a backtracker… and wow… there are a lot of fake names tracing back to a bunch of “Highnesses” … they link back to the cash transfers, if that helps,” he says. In the background while he’s talking I can hear gunfire and dramatic music cut in with explosions and yelling.

  “Are you fucking gaming while you’re doing this?” I’m kinda choked. My ass may get shot up and he’s fuck’n gaming?

  “So?” he retorts. “Jeez, it’s paused now. Besides, what I do on my own time is my business. Do you want my help or not? Because I can connect you to someone else in the company if you want, you know.”

  “Stay open on this line,” I say. “We may need you.”

  I move to meet up with Lee. We are both looking at different cards on a spin rack. He pulls one out with sunshine, kites, and waves on a beach.

  “Our Hat cut the cams and all com.” I look at him as I sub it.

  He doesn’t respond. He’s locked into the image on the card. I’m fucked. I actually stop using the com and physically say, “Hey. Lee did you hear me?”

  “Yeah. Your Hat did their job. Congrats.” He takes the
card with him as he walks down the street. I follow him out.

  The shopkeeper yells at him about the card.

  I haul my gun up from under my coat. The yelling behind us changes as everyone sees what I’m holding. I scan the building behind our target. I find what I’m looking for and crack off a couple of rounds. A sniper rifle drops to the street and a guy slumps off a distant rooftop.

  The sound of gunfire so soon after one of their own is yelling about a thief is a little too much for the locals. The panic takes over.

  I catch up to Lee. He looks down at me but doesn’t slow his pace. I’m watching the people around us. I don’t need the mob to shoot us as thieves over a fucking stolen eCycle birthday card.

  He drops to a trot and accelerates with the sound of hammering hydraulics. The door looks heavier than when we were at a distance. His huge metal body hurls down the narrow passageway toward the door.

  Here, I’d been thinking I’d toss a couple of charges to take it down.

  But Lee doesn’t stop. At the last second, he drops into a full slide. He’s on his back, pulling up his knees up. His arms are above his head. His arms wide out, palms skimming the ground. His legs hammer out as his feet impact the metal.

  The door explodes. Inner crossbars deform. The catch is sheared off the doorframe as the whole thing twists free of the hinges and blows aside.

  I shoot a guard inside. He’s behind a bank of screens and a fancy desk.

  Lee rolls to his feet as I jump over him and into the building. The mayhem outside is different than the shit on the security guard’s screens. The cams from outside are playing outtakes of sweeping headshots from some first-person shooter immersion game.

  This is Jimmy’s doing. He knows I’m looking at this. Jimmy the Dick.

  As we make our way down the cramped hallway Lee gets an education about what happens in these kinds of marketplaces. I watch his face turn from disgust, to anger, to grim as we open door after door. I shoot whoever looks like a buyer, or anyone ‘sampling’ wares. By the third set of doors he’s pulling the trigger before I do.