Roland does not need a bawling damsel right now. She clung to the only thing stronger than her fear. He needs a partner who can handle her shit like a pro. She heard Roland’s gruff manner in her internal recrimination. Un-fuck yourself soldier and get in the goddamn fight!
Her teeth clamped down on the inside of her cheek to focus herself. The pain was sharp and the metallic taste of blood brought her attention away from all the holistic patterns of potential doom that her brain seemed intent upon exploring. Then she began to breathe slowly and with intent.
Inhale for four seconds, exhale for four seconds. Deep and easy, no cheating.
The process slowed her heartbeat and kept her mind from going in unproductive directions. When she felt calm enough, she looked back to her partner.
“Dad’s close, Roland. Hang in there. Anything I should tell him when he gets here?”
Roland shifted slightly and inhaled. “Right lung is shot through. Filling with fluid. Systems are closing the holes and shutting down the bleeding. I’ve aspirated a lot of blood, though. Going to need a new lung, I think.” He coughed again and frowned. “Feels like a refractory bladder is torn, too. Can’t tell without my helmet.”
“All right. That all sounds survivable, at least.” She said it to Roland, though they both knew she was trying to reassure herself.
“I’ve had worse.” This, at least, was not a lie.
“If you die on me, Corporal, you better believe I’ll show you ‘worse.’”
“Copy that,” he whispered. Speaking louder was too painful.
Lucia was spared having to back up her open-ended threat when the door opened and Manny staggered in with Mindy’s arm draped over his shoulders and the bedraggled assassin stumbling beside him. The blond killer looked in no better shape than Roland. Her battered blue jumpsuit hung from her body covered with ugly black scorch marks. The broken zipper left the front open in a wide V running all the way to her waist. Her chest, the envy of most women and the cause of many sleepless nights for men, was a mass of mottled red and purple bruises that made Lucia gasp to see it. The swollen imprints of a hand were easy to pick out, and the implications of those telltale marks sickened her. Mindy’s eyes were open at least, and she was participating in her own rescue as much as she could. Manny swept the top of Lucia’s desk clear with a callous swipe of an arm and laid the tiny woman atop it. She collapsed back onto the surface with a grunt and a sigh, then reached up to pat Manny’s face. “My hero,” she mumbled, a touch of her characteristic charm in the weak joke.
The long-haired youth ignored her and began to peel her out of the damaged armor. “Hey now,” she teased through teeth clenched in pain. “I ain’t that kind of girl...”
“You won’t be any kind of girl if I don’t get that broken rib away from your organs, you idiot.” The edge in Manny’s voice was scalpel-sharp. “Your stupid jumpsuit automatically compressed it, and now it’s poking your lung.” Soon he had her stripped to the waist, and for once the young Venusian had no eyes at all for her secondary sexual characteristics. With deft hands that looked well-practiced, he palpated and pressed at the angry red welts in Mindy’s side until a quiet yet undeniably audible popping sound sent Mindy’s eyes open wide. A pained gasp erupted from the little woman, and her back arched in uncontrollable reflex.
“There,” Manny said with authority. “Breathing should be a lot easier now.”
Mindy’s eyes fluttered, and the regular rise and fall of her chest seemed much less strained than it had a moment prior. A slow smile creased her face, and a hand came up to gently brush her damaged ribs. She winced at the pressure, but already her eyes were clearing as the intense pain subsided. “Wow, kid. You come with a real eclectic skill set! You can come play doctor with me any time you want!”
“Just try not to move. I’ll find some bracing tape.”
“Could I uh, borrow your jacket there, Lancelot?” Mindy was still laying back on the desk, a single eyebrow arched in wry humor.
“Oh, right.” Manny stammered. He shrugged his jacket off his shoulders and placed it over Mindy’s exposed breasts. “Sorry.”
Mindy arranged the jacket to avoid rubbing against the more damaged areas and closed her eyes. “Thanks. A girl sure could get used to all this pampering.”
A weak, hissing grumble came from Roland, and everybody turned to look. It took a moment for the team to realize that this was not a sign of anything dire, but rather a wet and bloody chuckle.
“Kid... finally... got... to... see... them.”
Then the big cyborg lost his hold on consciousness and slumped back to the carpet. It took both Lucia and Manny to get him upright again and keep him from choking on his own blood, but they succeeded just as Donald Ribiero came through the door pushing a cart loaded with strange-looking equipment. Having already assessed the carnage in the street and now witnessing the state of his greatest professional creation, the older man heaved a mighty sigh.
A father first, though, his concern was mostly for his daughter. “Lucy?” he began. “Are you all right?”
“I wasn’t here for the fighting,” she fibbed. “Roland has a busted lung, though. Something about a torn bladder too. He’s been bleeding a lot and his right arm isn’t working. He said his systems were working on it but he just lost consciousness.”
“Well,” the Doctor sounded very authoritative, and this helped Lucia relax some. “That’s not very good now, is it?” He shrugged and began to pull equipment from the cart. “To be completely honest, as bad as this is he’s had a lot worse and survived. I think we can get him through this one too.” He paused a moment then added, “But you had better wait outside. The police are right behind me and I don’t think we want them seeing this part.”
Lucia nodded. She suspected her father was lying to protect her emotional state. She wanted to stay by her man’s side, but she figured she would just be in the way. Besides, if her father wanted to spare her the gory details of what came next, it was likely something she did not care to witness. She stood and went to the door, pausing to put a hand on her father’s back as he assembled his tools. “Take care of him, Dad.”
“I will, dear. Trust me. Now go.” He turned to call over his shoulder. “Manuel? I’ll need your help with this.”
Lucia left the office to the sounds of her father giving cryptic instructions to the young man. Her heart was in her throat, her hands were shaking, and she wanted nothing more than to bawl her eyes out. But that was not how you got things done in Dockside, so she put her game face on and went to greet the horde of police transports now descending onto the drag.
Time to start fixing this mess.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Bob dumped the inert body of Chico onto the familiar slab with a callous flip of his arm. The inert cyborg thumped to the surface with a sickening thud. Lania frowned slightly. The unit weighed almost two-hundred and fifty pounds, all told. Bob had just tossed that dead weight with all the perceived effort of a man flicking a piece of kindling into a campfire. Why a project manager would have strength augmentations Lania could not say, but nothing about working on this project made any sense, so she let the matter drop.
She gave the unit’s condition a brief visual assessment and scowled at the damage. “Where did you find him?”
Bob did not take his eyes off the supine cyborg. “He attacked two women in Dockside in broad daylight. The Golem intervened.”
Lania’s eyes widened. “He fought Tankowicz?”
“To a stalemate. Wounded him badly. The weapon’s performance was admirable.”
“Admirable?” Lania almost shouted it, incredulity writ large on her astonished features. “Admirable? Hah! Just surviving a straight fight with any Golem would have been ‘admirable.’ But a match-up with Breach?” She looked at the man in the suit as if he was a new and special kind of idiot. “Have you seen that thing’s metrics, Bob? Stalemating Breach is a goddamn career-defining accomplishment!”
“Mr. Inskip wi
ll be most pleased,” agreed Bob.
“I need to see the data on this!” Lania no longer cared a whit for Bob’s lukewarm reaction to her excitement. “Be useful and go get Wally and his team in here.”
Bob inclined his head just enough to appear polite and left the room. Too excited to wait for the team, Lania started plugging into the unit herself. Bob left her to her work and moved up to his office.
When he arrived in the spartan cube he used for a workspace, he marched directly to his desk and fired up his terminal. Quickly tapping out a code, the screen warmed to life and “ping” flashed in calming blue block letters while a secure connection was established. On the third flash, the wizened features of an old man appeared. Bob saw a face both spare and thin, with wispy white hair and narrow piercing eyes. Officially, Arthur Inskip was two-hundred-and-sixteen years old, but Bob knew the actual number to be altogether different.
Bob did not care about Inskip’s age, and he delivered his report. “I have recovered the unit, Mr. Inskip. It had engaged the Golem with mixed success. It survived and remains mostly intact.”
“I heard,” the old man said. His voice was reedy and raspy. “I understand the unit performed quite well?”
“Well in excess of expectations, sir. The Golem suffered extensive damage while our unit will be fully operational in a few hours.”
“That is impressive.” The old man’s flinty eyes sparkled. “But what about the instability in our little project? How did we lose control of him?”
“Unknown. Dr. Watanabe is working on that now. I expect answers in a few hours.”
“Excellent. She is quite brilliant, Robert. You should not be so short with her.”
“My job is to manage this project. The doctor will lose focus if not kept to task. Her desire for absolutes compromises the ability of her team to achieve project goals.”
“Perfectionists are hard to work with, it’s true,” the old man chuckled.
“Perfect is the enemy of ‘good,’ sir.”
“I suppose it is.” Inskip switched gears suddenly. “Tell me, Bob. Why did you not engage the Golem?” The man on the screen leaned forward. “You say he sustained heavy damage fighting our little Chico, I assume he was compromised and weakened. It sounds like you had an excellent opportunity to remove a thorn in our side, and you chose not to take it. I’ve always had complete faith in your strategic wisdom, Bob, yet I am at a loss on this one. Why did you let him go?”
Bob’s answer was authoritative, betraying no shame. “The police were close behind us. While in the past they have been a non-entity in Dockside, our intelligence indicates they are engaging in increased scrutiny of the district. Also, the Ribiero woman was present and the Venusian separatist was nearby. While not as formidable as Breach, those two would be a distraction. Even compromised The Golem would require my full attention. Assuming otherwise would be stupid.”
Inskip pressed harder. “You had enough manpower and time to try it, though. The assassin was down, the Golem damaged, and the Ribiero woman would not have been able to hurt you under the best of conditions. Increased presence or not, the Dockside police could have been managed.” Inskip leaned into the camera. “Tell me Robert, were you scared?”
Bob did not rise to the obvious bait. “You know I was not, sir. As I’ve said. My job is to manage this project, not extract vengeance on behalf of The Brokerage. You are correct in that my chances of success at that point were still rather favorable. They were not, however, overwhelmingly so. Entangling myself with the police could set the project back by months or even years. The risk was greater than the reward, Mr. Inskip. If you actually wanted me to engage the Golem, you would have made that more explicit in your expectations. I will complete this assignment to the best of my ability, and further destabilizing an already precarious situation is not the best way to accomplish that goal. Quite simply, sir, the whole scene seemed far too unstable to risk the attempt. Though I did consider it.”
The old man sat back, a satisfied smile nestled into the other wrinkles of his face. “Excellent response, Bob. You are a credit to your profession. I concur with your assessment even if I am disappointed at the lost opportunity. The Brokerage would like nothing more than to acquire the Breach armature, but you are right to point out that the risk this time was too great.”
Bob nodded. He had known all of this already. The old man often saw fit to test him like this, and it did not bother him at all. “Thank you, sir. I am glad you concur with my assessment. I’ll follow up with Dr. Watanabe shortly and brief you again when I know more.”
“Excellent, Robert. I look forward to it. Keep up the good work.” The face in the screen disappeared, and the tall man and his black suit rose to go see just what could be done to rectify the project’s recent upheavals.
Four levels below him, Lania labored over her creation in a quest to determine exactly what had gone wrong with the thing on the slab. She started by cutting away his clothes, and this exposed some of the damage her creation had taken in the fight. She was just finishing up all the connections necessary to download the information when Sinclair and the support team scurried into the room babbling like hyperactive children.
“Did he really take on Breach?” Wally asked, the same look of excited elation on his face that Lania could not wipe from her own.
“That’s what Bob said,” she said through a wide grin. “Stalemated him and wounded him. Bob says badly.”
“Hot damn!” Wally crowed.
“I’m pulling the data now, you start on the damage assessment.”
The small woman retreated to the observation room, newly repaired from the unit’s escape. Not everything had been fixed. A blood-stained hole in the panel still marked the place where the hapless lab tech had met his end. It made for a disturbing bit of color in the otherwise clean white space, but a little brain matter smeared on a wall could not keep the driven woman from her life’s work. She powered up the interactive window and waited, restless fingers drumming an impatient tattoo on the sill while the information was decrypted and displayed.
Chico Garibaldi’s two nights of freedom had been quite the adventure. While the fight with Breach had been everything she hoped it would be and more, her happiness was tempered by the rest of what she saw in the data. She took most of two hours getting through it all and parsing out the relevant bits. Though she remained pleased with the results, it was a much soberer Lania Watanabe who finally looked up and through the glass to the rest of the team.
Wally and his crew had already removed most of the damaged areas of the arms and were exchanging them for new pieces. The unit taking damage was a foregone conclusion, and the design accounted for this with extreme modularity. While none of the numerous bead strikes had penetrated the surface armor of the limbs, the armor itself had sustained significant deformation. The destroyed wrist and missing hand were already well on their way to being replaced, and a pair of technicians were putting the final touches on calibrating the new parts. What had entered the room bedraggled and battle-scarred was now looking as bright and clean as the day it had first rolled out of the lab.
Lania watched the hardware team do their work, saying nothing while she thought about what she had seen in the unit’s records. Wally’s crew moved like a well-oiled machine. If she squinted, Lania saw them as a racing pod’s pit crew executing complex tasks at blinding speed with no loss of precision. They did not speak because talking was unnecessary. Everyone knew their role and how to complete their tasks without being told what to do. It was impressive to behold.
Eventually, Wally looked up to see the woman watching them work, and he grinned at her. “What’s the data look like, Doc?” he asked.
“Well,” she sighed. “There is good news, and there is bad news.”
The man’s bright expression dimmed and he left the slab to approach the window. “What’s the bad news?”
“Obsessive off-mission behaviors, intense psycho-sexual ideation, poor impulse control
, and primary template instability.”
“All that, huh.” Wally seemed to weigh this for a time. “How bad?”
“Stalked his ex-girlfriend, tried to rape a woman on the street in broad daylight, stuff like that.”
“Holy Jesus! That’s not right! What happened to the implants? The guy should have the sex drive of a potted plant with all the stuff we pump into his brain.”
“It’s not really about the sex, Wally. It’s about power and the ability to hurt and control women. The primary template is achieving sexual arousal in a way the AI did not perceive as a problem.”
Sinclair finished the thought for her. “Because his need to hurt and control people is part of what makes the bastard so good at killing. Damn.”
“Exactly. We are back to the debate over dialing down the very thing that makes him an effective weapon.” Her fist struck her palm with a loud slap. “I knew something wasn’t quite right. Synchronization was off from the start. I mean, being a sick bastard was part of what made him a good operative, but we misjudged just how sick a bastard he was.”
“Or at least the specific type of sick bastard,” Wally amended. “How did he break his chains, though?” He shook his head. “We had like, five fail-safes in place for exactly this kind of problem.”
“Well.” She looked at the man through the top of her eyes. “That’s sort of part of the good news.”
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