For some reason, despite the blistering speed and reflexes the cyborg had already demonstrated, recovering his balance looked disproportionately slow. No regular person would have been able to perceive this, but at three times human reaction time, Mindy could tell that something about his legs was not quite as well-calibrated as the rest of him. Exploiting the delay, Mindy landed her next blow unopposed. It was a powerful straight right hand to the body, and to her eternal relief she felt flesh and bone beneath her fist and not metal or polymer. The flesh and bone were hyper-dense, not unlike her own, but this did not prevent her punch from forcing a blast of air from the man and sending him wheeling backward. She pursued to press her advantage, and had to veer off when the barrel of his left-hand pistol loomed large in her view. No one could be that fast, she lamented. Yet the evidence to the contrary could not be ignored. Dodging his next shot cost her precious time, and her subsequent overhand left only grazed his temple.
There was a thermonuclear explosion of pain in Mindy’s side at that moment, and the blond killer realized in an instant she had been shot at point blank range by one of those big pistols. Fire spread from her ribs to her chest as a second bead followed. The breath fled from her lungs. Her legs turned to jelly. All Mindy’s strength evaporated and she slumped toneless to the street.
Her arm flailed against the asphalt, rolling her away from more incoming gunfire. She did not get far before a bionic foot caught her in the ribs and lifted her body from the street to crash in a heap against the jagged edge of the curb.
The blond assassin ground her teeth with rage and dragged at a light post with her hands to right herself. It took too long, and another foot sent her back to the deck and rolling like a tumbleweed into the garbage-lined space between two buildings. She could not breathe, she could hardly think through the pain, and her limbs declined to answer any of her urgent mental commands in a timely manner.
It never entered Mindy’s mind that she might die here. It never entered Mindy’s mind that she might die, ever. Though in the instant that she saw the black-eyed man with his metal limbs and his large pistols standing over her twitching body, it occurred to the assassin that she was not exactly sure how she was going to survive this misadventure. It was not something she feared. For her, getting beaten by this asshole was more infuriating than anything else.
“Good armor,” the enemy said through a sneer. With a flourish the left-hand gun disappeared into a shoulder holster. Then he selected something from under his tattered coat and loaded it into his right-hand pistol. “But I got something right here that will get through it.” Satisfied with the loadout, he turned back to the writhing woman. Mindy was certain she had some broken ribs, and the pain circulating throughout her body indicated some other things may be broken as well.
The killer hesitated, and a look washed across his face that Mindy knew well. Their fight had torn most of the shirt and jacket away from her upper body, revealing the blue armored jumpsuit she wore under her clothes. The high-tech garment was already providing compression for her injured bones and administering painkillers and stimulants to get her back into the fight. This would take time though, and it did not appear that she had much of that to work with. By design, the suit was extremely form-fitting, and it left the considerable physical charms of the blond apparent despite covering them. Mindy noticed the cyborg hesitate, and she had enough experience to know why.
There is more than one way to win a fight. The thought was wry and bitter, but she understood precisely what was going on behind those featureless black lenses. Now she exploited it.
Mindy writhed in a manner meant to look as if she was squirming away and surreptitiously lowered her zipper to reveal as much of her chest as a man cared to see. The alley focused the light from the fading afternoon sun into a narrow beam that illuminated her body with a warm and revealing yellow luster. She was beautiful and helpless, and this seemed to please the cyborg. A moan leaked past her lips, a quiet and languid thing that sounded as if in she was in great pain. Though it was also one of those moans that devoid of context, a man might misinterpret as something else entirely.
This had the desired effect as the cyborg hesitated even more and his black blank eyes moved up and down her body where it lay in the street. Mindy’s lungs burned with every breath, and each movement sent electric fire up and down her right side. There was no way she could fight this guy, that she understood. But she had already called for help and all she really needed to do was keep his attention until it arrived. Keeping a man’s attention was something she knew how to do. Another serpentine twist served to move her away from him while also turning her buttocks toward the looming killer.
It was the perfect combination of fear, weakness, pain, and raw sex appeal to set off the kind of person who liked to think of sex as a game of power and domination. Chico Garibaldi was just such a man, and this was exactly the sort of thing to set his lust ablaze. Flush from a fight, coming down from the heady exhilaration of the Gunslinger macro, and now watching a half-naked woman built like a porn star writhe in pain before him was about as good as life got for Chico. He figured he had plenty of time, so why not take a few minutes to enjoy this? His pistol forgotten, he clicked over to the crawling woman on metal feet. He crouched next to her and rolled her roughly to her back, enjoying her gasp of pain and the sight of a large breast as it slid free of the armored suit that had protected her from his beads.
“Damn, you are one seriously hot piece of ass, aren’t you?” He grabbed her by the throat, feeling a heated surge in his nethers as she gasped and clutched at his arm. An awful chuckle followed, a cruel and angry sound that promised pain and humiliation. Then he shoved her roughly back to the street. With savage strength, he placed the still-warm muzzle of his pistol against her forehead and forced her skull down until it pressed against the concrete. His other hand left her throat to grab the exposed breast and squeeze it hard enough to get a yelp from the woman. “Bitch gets all hopped up on body-mods and forgets her place, eh? Forgets what it’s like to fuck with a real man.”
He kneaded the captured breast, squeezing and twisting with far too much force. Mindy gritted her teeth and let out several gasps of pain. She wanted so badly to lash out, but keeping the act going was critical. This guy liked to hurt people, women especially. She would let him have that. Pain was something that she was very familiar with and a little more of it was not going to make her lose sight of victory. She was almost ready to make her move, anyway.
Her suit was busy killing most of the pain from her injuries, and she could not even really feel the clumsy ministrations of her captor as he worked her nipple with cold metal fingers. Nevertheless, she whimpered, she hissed, she put a blank look of helpless terror on her face, and she waited for her moment. She felt time dilate as the stimulants coursing through her veins sharpened her focus and energized her muscles. A straight fight was out of the question, but her moment was coming. All she needed to do was keep this horny sadist thinking with his dick until then. It was not a difficult thing to accomplish.
With a jerk, the armored suit was yanked from her shoulders, exposing her from the waist up. The leer on her captor’s face widened at the sight of exposed flesh and the pressure from his gun barrel increased as his libido rose in response to the improved view.
“Well, you’re fucking with a real man now. When I’m done with you, you ain’t never gonna want nothing else.” His hands went back to her zipper and began to try to tug it down further. “All you women are the same. You all just waiting for a man to show you what you really need.” More tugging. He was trying to force the suit down off her hips, but it was so tight this was proving difficult. Mindy tensed, feigning terror while preparing to explode into action.
She could feel his frustration rising. His teeth ground together, his grunts were morphing into growls, and the gun against her head pushed harder and harder, biting deeply into the skin and smearing the blood from her forehead around in greasy streaks. Her s
uit was form-fitting by design and getting out of it was a process even when she wanted out of it. The clumsy attempts from a wannabe rapist had little chance of accomplishing anything other than bruising the woman inside the garment. His determined quest was eating up a lot of time, however, so she let him keep trying. Unfortunately, Chico was not the sort of man who dealt with frustration well and the force and violence of his ministrations increased exponentially with each passing second of sexual frustration. Soon Mindy was getting battered against the cold concrete of the alley like a snake captured by a terrier.
Then her bionic ears picked up the sound she had been waiting for, and she breathed a silent internal sigh of relief. Her moment had arrived, and she exploded into action.
Mindy did not believe her reflexes, enhanced as they were, were better than his. She had seen enough of what this man could do to dismiss any thought of matching her speed against his. But his attention was now fully engaged with the act of getting her out of her clothes. She was half-naked after all, and hers was a body that commanded the heterosexual male gaze even when clothed.
With a feral snarl, Mindy slapped the pistol away from her head and heaved upwards. Her foe grunted in surprise and confusion, momentarily thrown off balance. As she suspected, his legs did not correct for this as fast as they might have, and her own reflexes were thus sufficient to seize initiative. Every muscle in her body came to life, and pain danced up and down her nerves like a thousand drug-addled kids in the worlds loudest mosh pit. Her eyes squinted shut as fresh waves of agony washed over her, and one tiny open palm shot outward and shoved the cyborg’s chest with all the force she could generate. Her ribs shrieked, something in her shoulder tore, and a savage warrior’s cry burst from her lungs as she did her level best to shatter every bone in his torso.
She could not know with any accuracy how much the man weighed, but Mindy was certain it could not be more than a few hundred pounds at most. This did not constitute anywhere near enough mass to resist the kind of force she applied. Without his feet gripping the ground, the cyborg left the street and soared through the air like a cannonball. Mindy did not see how far he flew or how he landed because the sudden reintroduction of new pain and the competing cocktail of pharmaceuticals in her bloodstream rendered her temporarily unconscious. The last thing she saw before passing out was the body of her assailant tumbling out of the alley in an ungainly cartwheeling parabola. For an instant, just before her vision faded to black, she thought she saw a giant black silhouette framed in the alley entrance.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Chico’s internal bionics were already righting him as he flew. In a third of a second, he would land on his feet and be back into the alley to finish what he started and then some. Some bitches never caught on, and Chico considered himself just the man to teach them. It was like a calling or something.
It was a hell of a hit he had just taken, yet even the softer parts of his body were built for toughness. Nothing was broken, though pain would be his closest companion for a while yet. That much was obvious. He could manage pain. After he had his fun with that smoking hot blond he would return for Kitty. Kitty was pretty pissed at him, but she was a good girl and she would come around. They loved each other after all.
Nothing can stand in the way of true love, right?
His sensors warned him of the thing behind him before he landed. All thoughts of fun times with the chesty blond disappeared as one hundred percent of his attention and systems were subsequently saddled with the task of avoiding a gruesome death at the hands of what he now understood to be a nine-hundred-and-forty-pound military-class light cyborg.
His graceful landing abandoned, Chico’s AI twisted his body into an ungainly flopping roll just as an onyx fist the size of a Christmas ham whipped through the air where his chest would have been. The black-eyed cyborg clattered and rolled across the pavement until his toes found purchase and arrested his headlong tumbling. Without any discernable pause, his left hand drew his holstered pistol and he dumped a full magazine into his armored foe. The giant filling his optical gunsights made no move to dodge or even acknowledge the danger. It was charging at speeds even Chico’s AI found improbable.
Something in Chico’s subconscious told him not to bother. To move instead of shoot, to charge his right-hand pistol to maximum and use the penetrator he had loaded into it instead. It screamed at him to put all the power he could into the penetrator and not burn his cells on beads.
He ignored this feeling and sent a dozen beads into the fixer at less than twenty feet of range. The fusillade washed over the giant in a shower of orange sparks and the staccato cracks of shattering ceramic. Roland burst through the fragments and flames, dashing through the accumulated smoke and sending the clouds spinning off into the air like the bow wave of a freighter.
He observed the dip in the fixer’s left shoulder and a corresponding elevation of his right. Why he noticed this and why he should care was not obvious to him until another strong urge came over him and he dropped backwards.
The fist sailed over his head so fast the air cracked like a whip. It missed Chico by less than two inches and he decided then and there to start listening to these urges. The doctors had put things in his brain; he understood that. What they were and more importantly who they were he did not know. What he was figuring out was that at least one of them knew how to fight hand-to-hand better than he had ever learned to. When another strong desire to roll to his stomach and leap to his right materialized, he indulged it without question.
A size-twenty-one boot shattered the pavement where he had been just the briefest instant before. The street collapsed and a crater six feet in diameter formed around the fighters, causing them both to pause and re-establish their balance. Newly enlightened, Chico elected to heed the earlier advice from one of the ghosts in his head and had Nonna start charging the right-hand pistol to maximum. Whoever that voice was seemed convinced that Roland’s hide was going to be very hard to penetrate.
It would take a full minute to charge every capacitor in the gun, and Chico now put all his attention into the task of staying alive for that period. For fighters with highly augmented reflexes, sixty seconds could stretch out to an eternity.
Dockside legends were replete with stories of those who tried their luck against the fixer in a straight scrap. These stories almost never included the attacker surviving the attempt, neither did most of the tales have the fight lasting as long as a full minute. Both his AI and his chorus of phantoms agreed that a stand-up brawl with this thing was a losing proposition, but at least one of them was more than happy to try it, anyway. Nonna had collected some data on the man now, and the analysis included several positive outcomes. While the chances of beating Tank with fists were slim, it did not appear impossible to dance with the fearsome cyborg for a minute and live. One minute was all he needed.
Chico leapt again. His prosthetics flung him like a grasshopper into the air to sail over Tank’s head. With a light step and bounce, he alighted behind the giant. Roland spun to meet him, but Chico was faster and his powerful legs drove once, twice, three times into Tank’s right knee. With his toes dug into the street, his kicks managed to sway the big man, though he did not go down. Another leap and Chico was far outside the arc of Tank’s return blow, a savage left hook that would have decapitated the black-eyed killer had it made contact.
He darted in again, slipping a straight left and thundering another kick directly into the big man’s guts. Then he followed it with a savage elbow to the chin. Something in Chico’s head laughed to see the big bald head whip to the side and a cut open across Tank’s slab of a jaw. Spinning mid-flight, Chico braced a foot on the wide platform of Roland’s chest and back-flipped away. He cleared the danger zone easily and landed in a graceful crouch.
To his surprise, Roland did not follow. The giant stayed where he was and just watched Chico, a strange expression on his face. It was not the frown of someone frustrated or afraid. It was a look of calcul
ation, a bemused scowl dressed in a mask of homicidal fury. Chico did not know that look, but somewhere in his brain recognition was there.
Tank was analyzing him.
Since his only goal was to stall, Chico welcomed the pause and sought to extend it. “Don’t recognize me, do ya asshole?” Chico laughed. “Good. I ain’t the same guy I was the last time you saw me.”
“You are Chico Garibaldi. Or at least you were, once.”
Chico frowned. “What gave me away?”
Tank shrugged his boulder-sized shoulders. “You are a prince among assholes, Chico. You are a sadistic prick who thinks he’s a big deal. You shoot like a cowboy and prefer to pick fights with people who can’t fight back. I could spot you at a thousand yards.”
“I’m fighting you, aren’t I?”
“No. You’re stalling. As soon as I figure out why I’ll kill you.”
“As if you could.” Chico flexed his bionic arms. “You ain’t put a hand on me yet!”
“Yet.”
Chico had to admit that there was a certain confidence in the syllable that made himself and his choir of ghosts just a touch nervous. It seemed that everyone in his head had dealt with Roland Tankowicz at some point and carried the emotional scars to show for it. A few impressions, quiet yet urgent, passed through the veil of Chico’s consciousness. They warned him not to underestimate Tank’s ability to sort out a winning strategy.
Make him chase you. It came out of nowhere, urgent and optimistic. Hit and run. Don’t let him see the gun until the last second.
It seemed like good advice, and so he took it. Chico charged, accelerating to his maximum speed with just three strides. Even Tank looked surprised at just how quickly he covered the distance between them. A string of strikes came next, patterns of kicks and punches sewn into a tapestry of pugilistic elegance. Chico did not know where the combinations came from, or why he executed them the way he did. He was content to let whichever voice in his head was the fighter take the controls for this part. If Chico was prone to melodrama, he might have thought it magical. He darted, he wheeled, he spun and struck like a many-headed hydra. Tank seemed helpless to get a shot in. His big hands were too slow. Nonna analyzed and predicted his every move with time to spare. Somebody in Chico’s brain, a person every bit the fighter Roland was, directed the killer’s defense accordingly.
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