“You are going to cause a crash with one of those things, Mudd. Why do you even have a wild-goose transponder? You run a bar.”
“Maybe I’m the kinda guy who doesn’t like folks knowing where he goes and where he’s been. I’ve seen what your little Venusian kid can do. Traffic net is too weak for my taste.”
“How did you get so paranoid?”
Marty gave Roland an incredulous stare. “You were on Venus for three weeks, and it messed you up pretty good. I was there three years, Corporal. By the time I came back, I had learned a lot about what kind of surveillance goes on above our heads. I don’t trust no one with nothing. Least of all my private information.”
Roland had to concede that. “You’re not wrong.”
“I rarely am. Come on.”
Marty’s ground transport was a medium-sized commercial truck. It had six wheels and a big boxy freight pod on the back. Marty gestured to the cargo bay doors. “In there, big fella. I use this thing to haul kegs of beer, so she’ll take your weight no problem.”
Roland stepped nimbly onto the tailgate and swung inside. “Where we going?”
Marty slid into the cab and opened a small window to the cargo area so they could talk. “I figure this gun is one of two things.” The truck lurched forward with the whine of electric motors. “It’s either a regular piece like a Dragoon or a Bulldog that somebody hopped up, or it’s a one-off like your Durendal. There’s about ten or fifteen guys around here who could convert a regular hand-cannon into something like what you are describing. But they don’t get the kind of clientele that could handle anything like that.”
Roland began to understand and grunted through the window. “Right. McGinty’s guy could definitely make a piece like this, but we’d already know about it if he had. You are absolutely onto something, Marty. If a guy has bionics good enough to handle a gun like that, he can probably afford a better class of weapon. We’ve already figured him to be either rich on his own or at least well-funded.”
“Exactly,” Marty said. “Why get an underworld gunsmith to hop up a piece when you can afford to have it built to order? Doesn’t make sense. Building exotic handguns ain’t exactly cheap, but compared to high-end hard-body mods, it’s chump change.”
“I guess we aren’t heading out to see one of your gun-nut pals, are we?”
“Nah. As much as I love high-cred ordnance, this sounds like a one-off. Nobody I know is going to be into that.”
Roland remained silent, waiting for Marty to explain. The crunch of solid rubber tires and the wail of electric motors went on for several long seconds before Marty realized Roland was waiting for him to elaborate.
“Anyway, I figure we can go talk to a pal of mine who has been able to locate specialized equipment in the past.” Marty quickly added, “Nothing I’ve ever needed him for, mind you. He’s just a guy who knows how to find things.”
“Got it. You know I don’t judge either way.”
The truck lurched to a halt a few minutes later and Marty opened the doors for his passenger. Alighting on the street, Roland took a moment to orient himself. They were parked against a curb several blocks off from The Drag. Roland recognized it as an area frequented by the lowest levels of Dockside street trash, and this designation held some merit. Dockside excelled at attracting hoods, thugs, footpads, highwaymen, con men, pickpockets, and all other known species of opportunistic lowlife. It was an integral part of the district’s charm and allure. However, like all demographics even the Dockside population had its strata. This block was where Dockside liked to stash the proportion of its constituents that never really developed past their base desires and most egregious mental deficiencies.
The street itself gave depressing testimony to the nature of its inhabitants. Even with the sun shining, the shadowed alcoves of building vestibules were dotted with the greedy yellow pinpricks of avaricious eyes more commonly associated with the nighttime hours. The cracked pavement was a minefield of garbage and refuse, most of it the remains of a brisk evening’s larceny. Those items with cash value or useful properties had been stripped, and the rest discarded without a second thought. Great piles and clumps of knock-off handbags, empty wallets, and the stripped corpses of ground cars lay abandoned to the elements. They would stay where they had been dropped until the sheer magnitude of the mess came to the eventual attention of city workers. Graffiti-covered walls assaulted the eyes with obnoxious images scrawled on top of each other and giant obscene slogans done in colors no human eye was interested in seeing combined.
Roland grumbled to Marty in low, dangerous tones. “It’d be best not to let me hang out here for too long. I’m not the kind of guy who is going to tell anyone how to live, but sooner or later I’m going to see something that I can’t ignore down here. Can’t promise I’ll behave myself when I do.” This was what Roland considered to be ‘fair warning.’ It was not a lie. He had lived in Dockside long enough to accept that lots of very unsavory people shared these streets, and that it was not his job to right all the wrongs of the world. Trying to prevent people from behaving like criminals was like trying to stop a tidal wave by punching it: the part of the wave you actually hit might stop, but there would always be a billion tons of water that went right around you. Roland’s nature was to punch the wave anyway, so Docksiders had learned to make sure that he did not see the worst of their depravities. Most folks figured out early on that while Roland rarely went looking for trouble, he did not exactly go out of his way to avoid it, either.
Marty nodded in agreement. “I know what you mean, Tank. This neighborhood makes my trigger-finger itch, too. My guy might have what you need, so just remember the end-game and try not to kill anyone, all right?”
“Remind me to come back and give this street some personal attention after I finish this job.”
“My pleasure,” Marty replied with vigor. “He’s just through here. I gotta warn you though, he can be real intense.”
“Can’t be as bad as McGinty’s lead,” Roland still did not know what to make of Schultz, the mad sex-bot inventor.
Marty did not sound convinced. “We’ll see.”
Much like Schultz, Marty’s friend had a robust suite of security scanners at his door. Like Schultz, these scanners told the man inside that none of his security was going to present an obstacle to Roland. Marty ushered Roland across a small lobby and into a dirty back office. Here waited a small man who could have been as young as fifty or as old as ninety; it was hard to say. He was thin, with long dirty fingers and a narrow face. His hairline had begun to recede, but a shock of sandy stubble still held the line somewhere near the top of his head. His eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, drooping slightly to give him the aspect of a man who did not get enough sleep.
“Roland,” Marty began, “this is Roy. He’s the guy I’ve been telling you about.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Roy.” Roland approached social niceties in the manner he had been instructed while still in the military. “My name is Roland Tankowicz.” Roland extended his hand.
Roy ignored the hand and scowled up at the looming cyborg. “I know who the fuck you are. How many government lists am I going to be on now that my scanners just pinged all that top-secret bullshit under your skin?”
Marty sneered. “As if your scanners are connected to anything that can be searched. I bet the city grid thinks this place is an ice cream stand or something.”
“Not the point, Mudd. This guy is a walking, talking, signal flare to all the big-brother drones and mind-control satellites in the area. Now I gotta scrub all the airwaves on the block so they can’t use them to lock on to me.”
Roland scowled. None of that made any sense. Roy blathered on.
“Once those spy drones lock onto you, they can read your freakin’ alpha waves, Mudd. Then, they are going to follow you everywhere and record your goddamn thoughts! It’s a good thing I’m blanketing this whole building with interference at all times, or they’d be scrambling your gray matter
already. But once they lose track of this guy,” he pointed to a bemused Roland, “they’re going to come looking.”
Roland looked to Marty, as it was becoming quite clear to him that Roy was completely insane. Marty shrugged and drove the conversation in a more productive direction.
“We’re looking for a gun, Roy. Completely custom and one-off. Exotic as all hell.”
This seemed to distract the jittery man from what Roland presumed would be a lengthy and incoherently paranoid rant.
“What’s so exotic about it?”
Roland picked up the thread. “It would probably be for a cyborg. A sidearm that takes both flechettes and beads in eight-millimeter. Extremely high power, though. It sent a custom penetrator through four floors of a hotel without tumbling or spalling.”
Roy frowned. “The power cell would have to be huge. How small is the thing?”
Roland shrugged. “Concealable on someone normal-sized.”
“Not possible,” Roy replied instantly. “That would need big heat sinks and a big power pack. Sure, it could be whipped up, but that won’t shrink it enough to fit under a jacket...” In that instant, a strange look came over the crazy gun-runner. “...unless...”
“Unless what?” Marty barked when the man stayed silent for too long.
Roy yanked a desk drawer open and pulled an old DataPad out. He powered it up and began swiping through screens with a frenetic, almost desperate tempo.
“Okay,” he mumbled, ignoring Marty. “So this guy who I buy stuff from got a crazy order a few months back. He’s a fabricator, but he works in real exotic materials. Anyway, he got an order for what looked an awful lot like a bead pistol frame, but the client wanted it made out of some weird-ass shit. Aha!”
He spun the DataPad around and slid it across his desk so Marty and Roland could look at it.
“What am I looking at Roy?”
“It’s a handgun frame, Marty. I couldn’t figure it out either. It has no place for a trigger, not enough room for a decent power cell, yet it’s built with enough mass and heat sinks for a gun three times that size. Inductors are not in a great line to convert recoil, but they’re freakin’ huge for a handgun.”
Marty scowled. “It’s a frame for a gun with no trigger, and no power cell?”
Roland added his impressions to that. “A gun that can handle a huge amount of energy and heat, and would weigh too much for a regular person to use with one hand.”
“It made no sense to me when I first heard about it,” said Roy. “But you two just told me how it works. This thing doesn’t need a trigger because the fucker is gonna fire it with his mind. It doesn’t need a power cell because the guy carrying it probably has as big a cell as you could ever want inside his body somewhere. Ergonomics are meaningless because the hand that holds this thing doesn’t need ‘em, and a bionic arm compensates for recoil automatically.” The thin man seemed quite pleased with himself. “This isn’t a gun, guys. This is just part of a gun. The rest of it is in the arm of the guy slinging it.”
“Somebody built this gun for a specific cyborg?” Marty seemed to be struggling with that.
Roland was quicker on the uptake. “No. Somebody made a cyborg for the gun.” He looked back to Roy. “I need everything you have on this.”
Roy looked aghast. “You trying to bring Big Brother down on me? No way. I’ve said too much already. Your makers can probably extract this information directly from your brain!”
“Roy,” Marty spoke the name in a cool and soothing tone. “Whoever ordered this part has already killed The Madame, The Widow, and a landlord from the southeast. It ain’t government. I’m thinking this is some sort of shadow organization bent on controlling the shipping trades, probably to get better access to the drug markets. You know, so they can steal our alpha waves.”
As a sentence, virtually none of those words made anything that could even loosely be considered sense. Surprising no one, it still had the desired effect on Roy.
“Oh. My. God.” Roy breathed the words slowly, face twisted in the kind of delighted panic that only a true paranoiac could experience. It was the euphoria of discovering a new, even more outlandish conspiracy theory than the current crop of lunacy circulating the deep and unexplored corners of the InfoNet. “That makes perfect sense! How did we not see it?”
Marty kept the ball rolling. “We gotta stop them, Roy. You gotta let me and Roland here take this conspiracy down before they get to the highest levels of government.”
“Jesus, Marty, this is HUGE!” Roy leaned back and gasped for a minute, then started loading information onto a memory stick. “I have to tell the dark ‘net about this!” He pulled the memory stick and tossed it across the desk. “Here’s all I’ve got.”
Just then, Roland’s comm chimed and Mindy’s voice came through even as he answered.
“Roland!” The little blond sounded frantic. “You gotta get over to the office, now!”
Then the line went dead.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mindy’s pistol barked and spewed fire toward the darting figure as it disappeared into an alley. She used the moment of respite to turn to Kitty. The pink-haired bartender was lying on the street looking terrified but otherwise unhurt.
“Get inside!” The instruction was growled through gritted teeth as Mindy returned her attention to their assailant. The figure re-emerged from the alley forty feet above their heads, leaping in a graceful arc from a fire-escape. His own weapon crackled and sent Mindy streaking for cover. She maintained a withering fusillade to hold the stranger at a distance and to cover Kitty’s escape. When her weapon finally clicked open on an empty chamber, the blond rolled to her feet and reloaded in the same quarter second.
The enemy had hit the ground across the street and was already sending more fire her way. He used two pistols, one in each hand, and this drew a frown from the assassin.
Akimbo-style shooting was just stupid. Unless one had extensive augmentations, adding a second weapon to your offense did not double your effectiveness. Quite the opposite, shooting two guns only served to make you less accurate with either.
There was nothing wrong with this guy’s accuracy, Mindy established this fact as soon as his first shots arced her way. Her augmented reflexes saved her life from the truly prodigious quantity of gunfire, but only barely and not without the help of her armored jumpsuit. Most of the incoming hail of beads missed, but two struck her in the upper back as she leapt to the side. The impacts felt like hammer blows, each large bead smashing into the armor of her suit with enough force to mash her innards. The armor kept the beads from penetrating and heavily reinforced bones and muscles prevented the kinetic energy dump from causing severe injury. Surprise and shock sent her crashing to the concrete and the burning pain in her spine promised many days of recovery.
She rolled back to her feet and returned fire without pause, but her target had already moved. His speed was incredible, and her shots all fell behind the hurtling man as he made a beeline for the office door and the trembling girl behind it. Mindy moved to intercept with all her own considerable speed, and if the distance had not been to her advantage, she would not have made it. As it was she managed to collide with the man before he reached the door and tied his arms up with her own to keep the guns from coming to bear on her. The pair thrashed and careened into the alley alongside the office in an explosive tangle of flailing limbs.
Her first close look at the thing she fought took her aback. He had no eyes, just shiny black lenses over his eye sockets. His head had been shaved, but scruffy black stubble ringing his skull told her it had been a few days ago. His was an angry face, not un-handsome but mean-looking with a cruel sneer permanently affixed to his lips. She threw a fist at that face, but it missed and this vexed her greatly.
As her fist sailed past his head, the man’s return blow was already well on its way. Still gripping his left-hand pistol, a gray-black hand traced a blistering arc inside her guard and a thunderclap of pain se
nt flashes of light across the little blond’s vision. The heavy pistol in his grip opened a jagged cut across Mindy’s forehead and sent a river of blood into her right eye. Ever the professional, the assassin took the hit with a grunt of pain and began cycling her pistol at point-blank range into the thing she faced.
The blank-eyed man folded his arms over his torso and simply let the barrage ricochet off his limbs. With his sleeves thoroughly destroyed by thirty rounds of five-millimeter hyper-velocity beads, the man’s arms were plainly visible as dark gray prosthetics. Mindy did not get the chance to reflect upon this, because the gaping barrels of his bizarre pistols consumed both her field of vision and her thoughts in the next instant. She dropped low just as the blistering report from the strange-looking weapons signaled her impending doom.
Since running away was an invitation to get shot in the back, she dove forward. The beads hissed over her head as she wrapped the man in a tackle that used all the superhuman might of her enhanced bones and muscles. Mindy had more than five times the strength of a strong man, and she put all of this into the simple task of driving the cyborg to the ground. She felt a staggering impact to her back and shoulder as some part of the man resisted her. It was as if his toes could grip the street itself, because it was simply not possible for him to weigh as much as it suddenly felt like he did.
Another impact detonated against her spine and drove her to her knees, and at this point Mindy knew she was in deep trouble. She yanked sideways, hoping lateral force might work where linear efforts had been fruitless. This was successful in shifting the cyborg and breaking his balance. Her victory was brief and two subsequent hammer blows broke her grip and sent her spinning to the street.
Back on her feet before the cyborg corrected his own balance, Mindy sent a kick at his knee, further staggering the mysterious enemy. She did not bother reloading her pistol in the quarter second of break this gave her, but rather she renewed her physical assault in the hopes she could keep him occupied until help arrived. She would have given anything to be wielding her Sasori dagger, but having failed to anticipate a close-quarters brawl with a cyborg today, the terrifying weapon remained inert and useless at her apartment.
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