For now, the rain was whisper-light, the first drops of a light shower just starting to wet down the ends of Kitty’s hair and press it flat against her head. Mindy stepped closer to the girl, searching for words of comfort that would not come. She had seen the look Kitty wore on her face before on other faces. She had seen it with green mercenaries and battered housewives and the faces of children grown up far too quickly. She did not need to go into the alley to know what she would find there.
“You did the right thing, Kitty. The only thing you could do. The only thing that was left.”
Kitty’s eyes turned to Mindy, slowly and without blinking.
Mindy held out her hand. “Let me have the gun, Kitty. You don’t need it now.”
The girl’s eyes widened, fear and anger warred across her face. “No! You can’t have it!”
Mindy winced, but she understood, too. “I know, Kitty. It’s your gun. I just want to hold on to it for now, okay? We don’t want an accident.”
Green eyes dipped down, and slender hands turned the gun over before them. “It’s such a little bitty thing, isn’t it? A pound of metal, a bead the size of a pea...”
This Mindy understood. “And infinite power over life and death. Feels like it ought to be a lot heavier.”
Kitty nodded. “I killed Chico,” she said, as if that much was not obvious. “It was so easy. I shot him in the dick with this. Then I shot him a bunch more.” Her voice cracked and the words began to tumble and run over each other. “I kept shooting, Mindy.” She pantomimed it with the empty pistol. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Until it wouldn’t shoot anymore. I kept trying, too. But it wouldn’t shoot. I wanted it to shoot more so he would die more.”
Mindy stepped even closer and placed a hand over the top of the gun, gently shifting the swaying muzzle in a safe direction. “He’s all the way dead now, Kitty. And he can’t hurt anyone else.”
“I hate him so goddamn much!”
They were very close now and Kitty leaned forward to place her forehead on Mindy’s shoulder. The next thing Kitty whispered. “I could have done it at any time. He let me get close. He trusted me. I could have stopped all of this from happening. That nice old man from Roland’s neighborhood would be...”
“Shhh...” Mindy wrapped her in a gentle fraternal hug. “You did a good thing tonight. A hard thing, but a good thing. I’d have done it for you if I could, but it turns out you never really needed my help, did you?” Mindy took the girl’s dirty face in her hands. “You were strong, tonight, Kitty. You put yourself out there as bait, and when things got real bad, you did what had to be done. What I would have done. What Roland would have done. Most people would have broken under the pressure. You stepped up. Be proud, Kitty. You are a hero.”
“I don’t want to be a hero.”
Mindy hugged her tightly and laughed. “It’s not a permanent position, kid. Retire anytime you want to.”
Kitty sniffled into Mindy’s scorched and grimy armor, now running with muddy black streaks in the growing rain. “I’m keeping the gun, though.”
“I would, too, if I were you. But let’s try to get you some range time soon, you’re kind of freaking me out with how you swing it around like that.”
“And get a permit.”
The women looked up at the sound of Sam Parker’s voice. The square-jawed young man had arrived with a posse of almost a dozen men and women, all of which were bustling about the sidewalk either managing the growing crowd, setting up crime scene tape, or working with forensic equipment.
“He’s in there,” Mindy pointed to the alley with her chin. “Dead. I killed him.”
“You must think I’m the worst detective in the world, Ms. Carter.”
“I’m serious, Sam. It was totally me. Kitty here was just an innocent victim.”
“Ms. Carter, just stop. This is about the most clear-cut case of self-defense I can imagine. You aren’t on the frontier anymore, Mindy. We aren't even going to arrest her for the illegal and unregistered firearm she used to do it.”
“Really?” the women said in unison.
“Why would we?” Sam looked Kitty directly in the eye. “It was taken from the dead perp while he was in the act of assaulting you, right?” A dark eyebrow rose expectantly.
Kitty nodded a brisk affirmative. “Yeah, uhm... totally what you said.”
“Great. Please go give your statement to Officer Rafferty, over there.” He pointed to a friendly looking woman waiting nearby with a DataPad. “Mindy, why don’t you go with her and make sure her statement is...” he paused and made eye contact with the assassin, “...coherent.”
“Right,” Mindy said. “No problem. It’ll be so gosh-darn coherent no prosecutor in the world could even think about charging Kitty with anything.” She steered Kitty toward the waiting officer. “Come on, Kitty. Let’s go be coherent together.”
Lucia finally made her way up to the scene as Mindy and Kitty were in the act of giving a wholly coherent and not at all fabricated official statement.
She dragged herself up to the detective and asked, “How’s your crime scene, Sam? Everything you hoped it would be?”
“Not really. I wanted an arrest and a trial. Instead I got yet another corpse in a Dockside alley.”
“Baby steps, Sam. It looks like you found few more good cops, at least. Funny I don’t see Lonnie Pritchard anywhere.”
“Yeah. Funny that. You heard from Roland?”
“Last I heard he was going to call you.”
“He did. We tasked some drones to follow that Bob character for him. He hasn’t checked back in yet.”
Lucia pursed her lips tightly. “I hope that’s not as ominous as it sounds.”
“It’s not.”
The both turned to see Roland Tankowicz shuffling toward the scene. Lucia gasped at the sight, and Parker winced. Roland was moving with a pronounced limp, his left leg obviously unable to accept his full weight. His mangled shoulder and neck were not weeping nanite transport media anymore, but the tattered remains of his shirt and pants were soaked in the silver fluid. His abdomen still bore the long slash, but it looked as if his repair systems had that one well in hand. His helmet was in his hand, and even at a distance Lucia could see that it was battered and dented.
“Chico?” he asked when he had made his way over.
Lucia answered. “Dead. Kitty did it.”
Roland’s eyes widened. “Kitty did? Wow. Shit. She okay?”
“She will be.”
“Good for her, then.”
“Bob?” she inquired, pointing to his mashed helmet.
“He got away. Sorry.”
Parker sighed. “Damn it.”
“I gave him hell, at least,” Roland said.
Lucia stepped close to examine him. “Looks like you got a little hell back. What the hell was he?”
“Robot? Android? Hard to say. Something new, that’s for sure.”
Parker was pinching the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger. “I don’t need new mysteries, Tank. I need answers for existing ones.”
“Near as I can tell?” Roland sniffed. “Corpus Mundi is making cyborg super-killers again. They are the ones who put Chico together. The Brokerage was going to use him to off all the Dockside leadership, but he went off the rails on them.”
“Because he is a psychopath,” Parker added.
“Exactly. They sent this Bob thing to rein him in, and you know the rest.”
“They’re going to keep coming, aren’t they?” Lucia asked quietly. “They won’t give up.”
“Getting real tired of playing defense, Boss,” Roland remarked with frost in his tone.
“I’m starting to agree with you, Big Guy. I think it might be time to get more proactive where The Brokerage is concerned.”
“Starting with Dockside PD,” Parker added, and pointed past the two fixers.
Lonnie Pritchard and several other plainclothes police had pulled up, and the dingy detective was stalking in their direct
ion.
“Don’t kill him, Roland,” Lucia warned.
“No promises.” It came out as a hiss, forced through gritted teeth.
“I see nothing,” Parker added, then smiled sheepishly. “Just in case.”
“Not helping,” sighed Lucia, then she addressed Pritchard. “Good evening, Detective. Out for a stroll in the rain?”
“Can it, lady. You and your big bully here are in a world of shit, now.”
Lucia let her eyebrow rise. “Wow, Lonnie. Listen to all that confidence! You grow a spine since our last chat?”
“You freaks just blew the shit out of Hideaway and left a dozen dead bodies lying around.”
“They started it,” Lucia replied. “You’ll get your statements for all of that.”
“I’m not talking about the cops.” He gave Parker a pointed stare as he said it. “Those dead guys belong to some big wheels, kid. Real big wheels. You don’t even know how big.”
“Oh, we know,” she replied evenly. “Better than you, actually.”
This seemed to confuse Pritchard. “Then what the fuck are you doing?”
Parker chuckled at the question. “Your job, mostly.” Then he swept an arm around to encompass the dozen or so police gathering evidence and taking statements. “Seems a few other cops don’t mind picking up your slack, either.”
“Thank goodness for that,” said Lucia dryly. “Someone needs to.”
Pritchard’s confidence seemed to be wavering. “You guys are fucking things up for everybody, you know. There are going to be some serious fucking consequences. I’m here to tell you for the last time to back the fuck off. You aren’t making things better. You’re making them worse.”
“For you, maybe,” said Roland. “I like the results just fine.”
“That’s because you’re bulletproof.”
“And you are a drug addicted crook with a badge.” He looked back at Lucia, eyes pleading. “Please tell me I can kill him now?”
“I’m warming up to the idea.”
Sam added, “I see nothing.”
Roland took one lumbering step forward and Pritchard bolted like a hare.
The rain began to gather momentum as they watched his headlong flight. Big heavy drops wet down the streets and buildings, turning the drab colors oily and slick. The silver smears on Roland’s chest, outward signs of the wounds he had taken, began to run down his body and disappear.
“I’m tired, Boss. We about ready to pack it in?”
Lucia wrapped an arm around his. “Yeah, I think that’s enough work for one night.”
EPILOGUE
As a general rule, being an intelligence officer meant interacting with all kinds of people. Over a long career, Deputy Chief Salvatore Wilkes of the Office of Clandestine Services had experienced the spectrum of humanity in all its wondrous variety and quality. Most of the time he found this to be a fascinating and delightful part of the job. People were interesting things, and so he had made understanding their motivations his occupation.
The man in his office was not particularly interesting. He was young and small and nervous. Fairly bright, Wilkes conceded, but definitely not interesting. He glanced down at the report in his hand. It was on old-style cellulose pulp, the contents far too sensitive to risk electronic storage.
“So what you are telling me, James, is that The Brokerage is transitioning to a war time footing?”
James shifted uncomfortably in the overstuffed chair. “Essentially sir.”
“The Brokerage doesn’t have a war time footing, James. At least they never have before.”
“Yes, sir. But I have been cataloging their activities for almost a decade now. They have been shifting their assets and transitioning to more overt means of expansion.
“That business with the Pirate King and The Combine?”
“Exactly, sir. I now believe they are responsible for several other incidents as well. It’s all in the report.”
Wilkes dropped the stack of paper on his desk and fixed the analyst with a glare. “This thing is two hundred goddamn pages, James. Break it down for me.”
The younger man leaned forward. “They have been investing heavily in biotech, starting with a recent Corpus Mundi project called—”
Wilkes interrupted. “Better Man?”
“Precisely.”
Wilkes looked agog. “They set that whole bullshit nightmare in motion? You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Christ. What else?”
James continued. “When the Better Man project lost its design lead, The Brokerage seemed to drop the research altogether. I found this suspicious. They were heavily invested in the technology, and by all available accounts the Better Man armature was at least a qualified success.”
“They didn’t drop it, did they, James?”
“They did not. They simply moved it from Corpus Mundi facilities to a series of independent laboratories out of Wayfair. In the meantime, The Brokerage gave Corpus Mundi a new project and continued moving against The Combine here on Earth. After that organization collapsed, they were free to re-insert their operatives and continue asserting control over the Dockside sector.”
“They really do want those docks, don’t they?” Wilkes mumbled.
“No sir, they don’t.”
“What?” Wilkes was genuinely confused now.
“I mean, they do, but not as much as they want something else, anyway. All of their recent Dockside operations have had at least two objectives.”
“What are you getting at, James?”
James paused, trying to condense his suspicions into digestible pieces. “Bear with me here, sir. There was a seemingly unrelated incident on Venus recently. An internal dispute with the Red Hats that threatened to destabilize the whole Venusian economy.”
Wilkes nodded. “I remember that one. Go on.”
“Something about that felt wrong to me. I looked into it and found that the whole scheme was part of an OmniCorp initiative. What do we know about OmniCorp?”
“It’s a front for The Brokerage,” Wilkes answered. “Shit. I knew we should have moved on that one sooner.”
“Now we have this latest incident. Thirteen heavily augmented operatives dead in Dockside, sir. All unregistered, all wearing state-of-the-art prosthetics and running previously unknown neural implants.”
“Corpus Mundi?”
“Definitely. The Brokerage’s latest project, to be specific. They have begun to rewrite the brain itself, integrating bionics to make them faster and more effective. It’s bleeding edge stuff.”
“But they are all dead. Must not be that great. Who brought them down?”
“It’s Dockside, sir. Who do you think?”
“Roland goddamn Tankowicz.” Wilkes heaved an epic harrumph. “Tell a guy to keep a low profile and what does he do? Fucks places up on a regular basis. We should have decommissioned that thing when we had the chance.”
“It’s not a coincidence, sir. Tankowicz has been a target of theirs for every major operation The Brokerage has run for the last two years.”
The narrative strained credibility, and Wilkes offered a succinct analysis. “Bullshit.”
James was not so easily put off. “The main operative for this latest attempt was a man whose brother had been killed by Tankowicz. He was enhanced to be faster than a Golem, and he was armed with a pistol that could shoot right through the Breach armature. This operative was designed specifically to bring down Roland Tankowicz, sir. No question.”
“Well, shit. They know what he is, then.”
“Not at first. I think they realized it when Tankowicz took down the Better Man operation. I assume Johnson and Fox read them in when they saw who it was.”
“You think they want a Golem of their own?”
“Duplicating that success is why they had Ribiero kidnapped in the first place, sir. We know this for a fact. Finding a live one must have seemed like a gift from God.”
“But why a Golem? Why dig that
one out of the past? Isn't there better tech to steal yet?”
James looked crestfallen. “That I don’t know. The Golem project remains the high-water mark for cybernetic integration. But anomalies like Roper and Lancaster give the bigger contractors hope, so they all keep trying. This latest thing from Corpus Mundi was a big leap forward, sir. It had a lot of problems, sure. But the actual performance was excellent.” He tapped the sheaf of papers on his boss’s desk. “It’s all in the report.”
“I’m sure it is,” Wilkes said drily.
James leaned forward, intensity writ large on his mousey features. “But even with a Golem, they’d need Ribiero to play ball to do anything with it. That’s just not likely. I doubt he could even be coerced at this point. The old fart would leave a back door in whatever you forced him to build. You’d never be able to trust something he made for you.”
“It’s why we haven’t tried,” mumbled Wilkes. “And you better believe we’ve thought about it.”
James did not hear him. “I can’t figure it out, sir. But they are suddenly moving heaven and earth to bring down the last Golem, and I am terrified of what that might mean.”
“They trying to kill or capture?”
“They don’t seem to care which, sir.”
“That means they don’t need Tankowicz. I assume it’s the chassis they’re after, then.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, sir. If Corpus Mundi or The Brokerage had figured out how to duplicate a Golem, they wouldn’t bother with it. But for some reason, they want him badly enough to manipulate entire marketplaces and risk pissing off the Planetary Council to get him.”
Wilkes pondered this for a few long seconds. Why The Brokerage might want Breach was a question with no happy answers.
He decided it was time to elevate the young analyst’s security clearance. “You think you’re confused right now? Hah. I’ll do you one better than that, kid.” Wilkes stood with a grunt and walked over to a secure cabinet in the corner of his office. It opened to his thumbprint and he removed a thick paper file. Moving back to his desk he dropped it in front of James.
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