Instead of following up on his advantage, Chico turned from the fight and ran. He heard alarms ringing all around him as he sped down the white hallways of his prison, searching his fractured memories for the location of his clothes and guns. It came easily, and he was tearing the door of a locker off its hinges less than twelve seconds later. Twenty-five seconds after that, he was dressed and wielding his pistols again. Feeling like himself for the first time since the death of his brother, he barked a command to his AI.
“Nonna!”
“Ready.”
“Give me the Gunslinger in five!”
“Acknowledged.”
His flight from the laboratory that had created him took less than two minutes. Very few people tried to stop him, much to his dismay. Those who did died quickly courtesy of beads to the head, as did several others who merely had the misfortune of being between him and the exit. In the dim parts of his mind, and indicated in blinking alarms on his HUD, Chico noted several attempts by his creators to shut his body down via telemetry. Each time they tried, Nonna would block the command and close the breach in his security permanently.
The hallways blurred into white tunnels as his legs carried him at highway speeds through a labyrinth of offices and laboratories. With each stride, the voices in his head grew quieter and more relaxed. They did not fade exactly. The memories and experiences that were not his own seemed content to align themselves alongside his, supporting his actions and reinforcing his instincts without subverting his will. The killer now understood why. His will was their will, was it not? All the things that had made up the killer were now part of Chico Garibaldi.
Uncontested, his own memories came rushing back in great chunks as he ran. So many important things he had forgotten returned to crystalline focus while he hurtled through those corridors. Two of these were immediately moved to the top of his to-do list. He was going to find and kill anyone the fixer had ever loved, and he was going to win back his girl.
With a final blast of speed, Chico Garibaldi burst through the last door between himself and freedom and ran off cackling like a hyena into the pre-dawn gloom of the fading night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lucia needed to sleep in, so Roland convened them all at the office after lunchtime to assess the new situation. As they shuffled in and took their usual places, Roland noted that they all looked tired. No one had slept very much or very well in the last two days, and it was starting to show.
“You first, Mindy,” Roland said. “What do you have?”
“It looks like we have a cyborg assassin in play, Roland. There were no contracts on the boards for either Madeleine or The Widow. Certainly nothing on your landlord, either. This guy is fast and his aim is good enough to tell me we ain’t talking about a local boy with a PressPoint implant. He likes to move in quick, hit hard, and get out quick.”
“Know anyone like that?”
Mindy scrunched her nose. “No one who could make the jump. A couple of folks Earthside right now could make those shots, but just getting to that rooftop would have been a tough nut to crack. Then jumping back? Just not likely.”
“Manny?” Roland indicated he should report next.
“He is not a complicated infiltrator, Mr. Tankowicz. He did not bother overriding the security at Madeleine’s place. He accessed it briefly using an extremely sophisticated bit of software, sure. But he did not bother to penetrate past reception. He clearly had the tech to crack a security terminal and wipe his tracks clean, but he didn‘t. At The Colonnade, he simply exploited a minor blind spot. A spot that no one else could have gotten to and so it was not well defended.” Manny shook his head. “This guy takes the simplest and easiest path to the target, then leaves. If I had done either of those hits, no one would ever know I was there. In both cases this guy did not care if people knew it or not. I doubt it ever entered his mind.”
Lucia made the connections faster than any of them. “This is not a pro assassin. This is a regular killer hopped up with hard body-mods.” She paused to take a mighty swig from an oversized coffee cup. “He’s self-indulgent and impulsive. He likes to kill, so when he gets the chance to kill extra people he takes it. But he’s also not suicidal. When faced with the better security and cops at The Colonnade, he restrained himself.”
“But why Granovich?” Roland asked. “Where does an old landlord fit into all of this?”
“He doesn’t,” Lucia said slowly. “You do.”
Three pairs of eyes looked to the woman with the same question.
“What do all three victims have in common?” When no one answered, she rescued them. “They are all people Roland has helped. Former clients.”
“But I’ve worked for everyone in this town,” Roland protested. “It’d be hard to find a victim I haven’t done stuff for.”
Lucia nodded. “That’s why Granovich is important. Killing Madeleine or The Widow is easily explained with power politics or gangland squabbling. But this guy killed Yuri Granovich for no other reason than to piss you off, Roland. There is no other plausible explanation. What I can’t figure out is whether the first two were all business and Granovich personal, or if they were all personal.”
Roland was beginning to pick up the thread now. “The Widow.”
“Huh?” Lucia grunted.
“The Widow was a client, but I never liked her and she never liked me. Our relationship was strictly professional, and I haven’t dealt with her since the big hit at Belham Tower.”
“Right,” Lucia replied. “The Widow wasn’t about you. That part was business. What about Madeleine?”
“Pretty common knowledge that I was a big part of her rise. That one could be both business and personal.”
“Shit, this is getting complicated.”
Mindy piped up. “Lots of folks in my line of work mix business with personal matters all the time. Nothing beats getting paid by someone else to take out your own enemies. It sounds like our friend might be killing two birds with one stone.” Everybody winced at that and Mindy added a sheepish, “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”
Roland scowled his frustration. “Well, that’s some leads to follow up on, at least. This guy’s legs are going to be something special. Lucia, why don’t you grab your dad and start running down all the local body shops to see who’s been getting exotic work done? I’m going to hunt down this custom gun our boy seems so fond of.”
“Good call,” Lucia agreed. “Our killer is using a lot of very specialized tech. He must have a well-heeled backer footing the bills. Manny, that’s on you. I want you to start scouting all the big-money players spending a lot on biotech right now.”
Manny smiled. “Breaking into corporate records? That will be fun!”
“Don’t have too much fun,” she admonished. Then she looked at Mindy. “Mindy? You are going hunting. Madeleine may have had a lot of enemies, and The Widow had a bunch, too. I want to know which ones they had in common. Who would profit from both of their deaths?”
“On it, Boss.”
Lucia stood and chugged the last of her coffee. “All right, team. Our goal for the next forty-eight hours is to shrink our enormous suspect pool to a more manageable size. What we know: our bad guy has access to a high level of biotech, the money to deploy it, and enough motive to risk chopping the heads off major players. Our suspect is rich, angry, and well-connected at the very least. There is a real chance a personal grudge against Roland is in play as well. We are talking about a very specific group of people here. If we can isolate that group, pinpointing the killer gets a lot easier.”
“Good hunting, y’all,” said Mindy as she swept out of the office. She must have received a call just then because her hand went to her ear as she moved through the door. Lucia smiled when she heard the delighted squeal in her voice as she called out, “Hey there, Kitty-cat!” Perhaps Mindy was making some headway on that front, after all.
Good for her, Lucia thought to herself.
Manny followed behind Mindy,
chuckling at the assassin’s obvious glee as he rummaged through his satchel for some electrical doodad.
When they had left, Roland looked to Lucia. “Is your dad going to play ball? He’s not really into our kind of work.”
“With a chance to sniff around the latest high-end biotech?” She blew the magenta stripe of hair off her forehead. “He’ll come along gladly. You see how he is about Manny’s arm.”
“True enough. Good luck out there. Oh, and be careful. If this guy hates me, then hurting you might be on his mind.” It went without saying that hurting Lucia would be the most acute action one could take against Roland. When a man was made entirely of armor, direct assault was rarely a good plan. This killer had already made it clear he was willing to hit softer targets, and the thought of this made Roland nervous.
At this point in their partnership, he understood that Lucia could take care of herself. He knew and trusted this. Yet the knowledge offered very little in the way of comfort. She was not impervious to gunfire, and the enemy was a skilled marksman who had been outside their window just last night. If they had not been investigating The Colonnade, they might have been there at the same time. The perverse irony of it was maddening. Roland and the killer had to have crossed paths last night, the killer fleeing and Roland on his way to the crime scene. How close to each other had they actually come?
“I’ll be careful,” said Lucia, interrupting his thoughts. “This guy likes to work at night and he likes to hit his targets at home. He wants to have all his ducks in a row before he takes his shot. I don’t see him risking public hits on moving targets. The best thing to do in this case is keep moving.”
This was a very astute tactical consideration, and Roland was struck by just how far she had come from her days as a beverage company vice president. Some of this growth was attributable to the millions of nanomachines that swam through her body and made up much of her existing brain mass. The clever little bots that managed the uncontrolled electrical activity in her brain were constantly learning and adapting to new stimulus. As she spent more time in tactical situations, her synthetic cerebral architecture realigned to be better at the associated tasks.
Ostensibly created by her father to prevent a bizarre mutation from destroying her brain, their genesis as military hardware asserted itself in several interesting ways. The dangerously high level of electrical activity of her brain should have resulted in permanent brain damage, but because this activity was controlled by the nanobots, Lucia now had the fastest reflexes Roland had ever seen. Her agility, proprioception, and coordination were off any measurable scale as well. As a side-effect, her physical capabilities were enhanced to accommodate this. She was not a superhuman athlete, but she was as fast and strong as a woman her size could ever hope to be without exceeding human genetic potential.
The amount of pure parallel-processing capability in her head allowed her to think, plan, consider, and evaluate numerous separate trains of thought simultaneously. Where other people might have excellent intuition, Lucia’s predictive ability bordered upon preternatural when enough data was present. It could still surprise the old soldier, however. When the small, pretty executive suddenly rambled off some extremely complex bit of tactical insight, or when she took the tiniest piece of information and employed it to resolve some giant inscrutable quandary, the marvel of it painted this delicate thing in a strange and inhuman light. It was a light he understood better than most, and it was not a shade that looked bad on her, so he did not concern himself with it.
“You have that look on your face,” she said, nearly startling him. “That look you get when you are about to start brooding.”
She was not wrong. He was in fact about to start brooding. It was a touchy subject, but there was the ever-present risk of Lucia’s augmentations altering her personality to consider. The more action she saw, the more her machines tried to protect her from the emotional stress of it. She had shown some signs of maladaptive behaviors at one point, and her father had made several adjustments as a result. They found Lucia had a tendency to become reckless and detached if not carefully monitored, and the implications of a highly-skilled hyperkinetic fighter with no fear and limited empathy were not pleasant.
He obfuscated, hoping to throw her off. “I’m not brooding. Just thinking to myself is all.”
“Yeah, that’s what they call brooding, Roland.” She heaved a big theatrical sigh. “What’s on your mind?”
“Just admiring your ability to correctly assess the tactical realties of a situation.”
She gave him a knowing nod. “You’re worried about me?” Lucia might be the only person in the galaxy who could actually read the non-committal twitches and scowls that Roland used for facial expressions. “The things in my head? I think they are dialed in pretty well right now. We haven’t had any heavy action since Venus, but I’m still fast and I still feel like me. I hate that I have to trade speed for empathy, but...” She let it hang. Even she did not like to talk about the other thing she had to accept if she wanted to maintain who she was. Her anxiety could be a crippling burden at times, and there had been a time when she would have done anything to be rid of it. Everyone knew her father’s machines could kill the fear and panic at any point. A simple firmware upgrade would do it, a mere shift in the command priority matrix. The temptation to just let it happen was forever buzzing in the back of her mind. The price would be the complete alteration of her brain chemistry, though. She was not ready to pay that cost yet.
Since there was no point in lying to her, Roland answered with the least-specific truth he could manage. “I always worry about you. You are my favorite thing to worry about.”
“Awww,” she shook her head. “That’s a real compliment coming from you.” She stepped into wrap him up in a hug. It was a scene sublime for its farcical appearance. She could barely get her arms around his waist and he loomed over her by almost two feet. Yet as it so often went in these situations, it was the thought that counted. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who likes to worry as much as you do.”
“Just be careful out there. You are right about the killer, of course. Stay out in the open, move a lot, keep in crowded areas. That should keep him off you if he has an idea to try anything.”
She nodded into his chest, still hugging. “You be careful too. I’ve put too much work into civilizing you to have it all ruined now.”
“Right,” he grumbled. “I’m just all kinds of civilized.”
She stepped back, eyes sparkling with laughter. “Your belt matches your shoes at the moment. I call that a stellar success, Roland.”
He shrugged, at last feeling the levity. “They used to teach gorillas sign language, Lucy. It doesn’t mean you want to invite them to dinner.”
“Speaking of dinner. I’m starving. I’m going to pick up Dad and get lunch. You hungry?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m off to see Marty. He knows every exotic arms collector in the area. This guy is all about speed and stealth, so I suspect I’m not looking for a giant mag-rifle. It should be a fairly simple process with that in mind. A handgun that can drive a flechette hard enough to punch through four floors of The Colonnade is going to be a very rare piece of hardware.”
“Makes sense. Don’t spend all night with Marty, Roland. I know what happens when you two old war-horses get to drinking and bullshitting.”
Roland saluted smartly. “Strictly business, Boss. I promise.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Like many other bartenders, Kitty slept late. Most days it would be considered passing strange to see her rise before one in the afternoon. Fortunately, working at Hideaway brought in just enough money to pay for her own apartment. Thus, she was spared the irritation of her nocturnal habits running her afoul of a roommate.
Naturally, the first thing she did when the jangling of her comm tore her from the sweet embrace of gentle Morpheus was to curse vehemently and check the time. This would determine the precise direction in which to
aim her irritation. If the hour fell before one, she would direct her wrath at the unsuspecting caller. If it was after, she would turn her annoyance inward for the crime of oversleeping. The soft glow of her wall clock informed her that it was precisely twelve fifty-one, and this left the bleary-eyed woman in a quandary. The call arrived close enough to her customary wake-up time that she could not, in all fairness, be irritated at anyone. Thus, she was irritated without a proper scapegoat, a situation that only compounded said irritation. Kitty was not a morning person.
Another impatient chime from her comm reminded her that she still had not answered. The device, she knew, would continue to make the annoying noise until dealt with. A single arm snaked out from under her blankets and flopped around her bed table. Jewelry, some cred chits, and a box of tissues clattered and crashed to the floor as questing fingers searched without grace for the tiny earpiece. When they finally touched it, her pink-haired head popped out from the blankets. Affixing the tiny widget to her ear, the groggy woman hit the connection button and silenced the persistent chiming.
“Hello?”
The voice in her ear was thin and raspy. Like a man who had just crossed a desert and was in desperate need of water. “Kitty?”
“Who is this?” She sat up and cast around the room for her handheld to see whose code it showed. She had no idea where it was, and the voice in her ear was not going to give her the chance to look.
“Oh, man, Kitty. It’s so good to hear your voice again.”
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