Ordnance

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Roger was not necessarily afraid of this new development. To be honest, he was never really afraid of anyone. The man had invested wisely in his professional development and had the best advantages money could buy. Much of his early earnings had gone towards several dozen highly illegal augmentations that made Roger unshakably confident no matter what situation his employers dropped him into. He took great comfort in the fact that he was quite literally built for danger.

  His bones were as dense as granite and his musculature could handle picking up a small car. If that wasn’t enough, he could flat out run forty-five miles per hour if he had to. His reflexes were five times as fast as any regular person’s and his equilibrium, proprioception, kinesthetics, and other neural processes were far above what normal people could achieve.

  As extra help, he had brought along three of the latest model security androids for extra speed and muscle. These were utterly illegal as well, since they were not painted the mandatory bright yellow of registered security ’bots. Androids not dressed and colored according to their designations seriously violated municipal code. Taking them along had been a calculated risk, but their tracking modules were essential to hunting down the girl in a city this size. No, as big as this bastard was, Roger felt great about his chances. It was still slightly unnerving to look at though. That was one seriously big bastard. Roger reckoned he was probably boosted in some manner as well, which could make this very interesting.

  “Can I help you gentlemen find your way out?” the big man asked politely. If one were to translate that from ‘what was said’ to ‘what was meant,’ the result would have been, “Get the fuck out. Now.” Roger was not intimidated. Nor was he inclined to leave. Granted, he hated this place, and hated being there, but he hated not getting the job done even more. The boss could be a real prick when the job didn’t get done. Roger was not interested in that scenario. So, Roger responded in kind:

  “I can’t leave without my friend.” Translation: “I’m looking for someone and I ain’t going anywhere until I find ’em.”

  Roland picked up on the tone, but he was not playing ball, “Your friend is not here. Go look somewhere else.”

  Roger was getting aggravated, “Well Mungo, I’m just gonna hafta poke around until I’m sure. You understand, right?” He smiled an oily, toothy smile, “Unless you want to direct me right to her and then I’ll be outta here just as quick as you please.” Roger didn’t want it to go that easy. He did not like the big man, and he did not like the Smoking Wreck, or Dockside, or anything to do with today at all, really. The whole mess was conspiring to make him unreasonable, and he was in the mood to be difficult.

  But, Roger reminded himself, he was a professional; and this conflicted with his professional pride. Pros don’t bust up bars and make extra noise if such could be avoided. Pros did the job with minimal fuss and extreme discretion. Roger intended to avoid being unprofessional because he had been paid to be discreet. Besides, it all seemed quite moot. Something about this big fucker told Roger he would get his wish under any circumstances.

  Roland was also seriously trying to restrain himself. He had to get the girl out of the bar, and he knew with a high degree of confidence he could accomplish this at any time. He was aware of the fact he was dealing with at least one augmented human, and likely three more to boot. This did not really bother him much. His confidence may not have appeared sane to anyone else, but Roland was definitely not ‘anyone else.’

  Roland Tankowicz was not illegally augmented. He was not an illegal security android, either. Roland was half-a-ton of something else entirely. Roland’s origins and aptitudes were his own business, and thus not common knowledge in Dockside. Great care had been taken to secure that information, and Roland wanted it to stay that way. If everyone at the Wreck saw what he was capable of, his mysteries would not remain his own for very long. This reticence was a strictly practical consideration and it would not prevent him from doing what he had to do to get out of there alive, though. So, in the interests of preserving his own secrets, Roland continued with his attempt to be as reasonable as he knew how to be.

  “Listen, pal. I get it. You’re on the clock, and you can’t go back empty handed. But we can’t help you. I’m sure Marty’s called the cops by now, and even with their shitty response time in Dockside, you still don’t have time for this.” Roland’s voice changed to an exaggerated whisper, “I don’t think an enhanced guy like you wants to deal with cops, do you? I hear there is a special prison for you guys on Titan. Do you want to go to Titan? I’ve been there. It sucks.” Roland was bluffing, but it was a calculated bluff. Nothing short of explosions or plasma fire would bring the cops to this part of Dockside, but dealing with the police when you are illegally augmented was a legendarily grim process. He hoped that this would shake the newcomer.

  Roger wasn’t biting. He smiled that big, oily, fake smile, “Maybe I go to Titan someday, maybe I don’t. But I promise no cops are coming, Mungo. I promise that.” Money had changed hands to ensure that this little operation was unencumbered by law enforcement. Roger was far too experienced not to have handled that potential complication already.

  He made a show of adjusting his cufflinks and straightening the sleeves of his obviously expensive suit, “Now I know the bitch is here, and I’m not leaving without her. Me and the boys here can take this place apart, and all of you lowbrow scum with it, or you can make nice and hand her over.” Roger, too, was doing his best to be reasonable.

  It was a sad irony, oft spoken of after that day, that neither man was actually being reasonable. It was all just preamble to one inevitable conclusion. As Marty later told it, “We all wished they’d just get on with the stupid fight at that point. It was like the only people who didn’t know they were going to brawl was them two idiots!”

  Roger’s ’bots moved to his flanks and quartered off the bar from the doors. Everyone knew it would come down to Roland and the jerk in the suit. Some things are just obvious like that. Roger held his hands out the sides, palms up and implored with as much fake courtesy as he could, “Just hand her over Mungo, and we’ll leave.”

  Roland responded with his characteristic eloquence.

  “No.”

  Roger Dawkins did not hesitate for one second. Technically, due to his accelerated reflexes, he hesitated one eleventh of one second before he pressed on the floorboards with his right foot hard enough to launch himself in near-horizontal flight at Roland.

  Roland did nothing.

  When Roger’s right fist connected with Roland’s jaw, it had enough kinetic energy to crack the skull of a rhinoceros. Roland’s head whipped to the side and blood sprayed from Roger’s fist and Roland’s cheek. Dawkins hit the floor and rolled to his feet, already pivoting for a savage low kick to Roland’s right knee. The kick was less than a half second behind the punch and executed with a fluid and practiced ease. About one fifth of a second before his foot made contact, however, Roger noted that something was wrong with his hand. Just as his foot connected with the outside of Roland’s knee, he realized what it was: the bones had shattered. His foot was now broken as well, since his enhanced leg muscles had just driven his tiny metatarsals into what felt like a column of pure steel.

  Roger was confused. Confused and angry. His bones were not supposed to break. At least not from punching and kicking people, anyway. Even when he fought other augmented people, his bones held up just fine. Roger did not get any time to ponder this development as Roland’s ham-sized fist closed around his broken foot and hoisted him upside down and into the air. As he was being hefted aloft, Roger had to acknowledge that his own 290-pound mass did not seem to be much of a strain on his opponent’s muscles. Neither were the enhanced structures in his skeleton it turned out. Pain exploded from his foot and radiated to his tibia as Roland squeezed until an audible cracking sound sent lightning bolts of agony to Roger’s panicked brain.

  Roger’s world was collapsing around him. Everything he knew and counted on to be
true and absolute was being challenged in a most unsatisfactory manner. Roger Dawkins beat people up, professionally. It’s what he did, and he was good at it. But now someone was beating him up and he was most perturbed by this development. As it was with musical theater and modern art, Roger did not appreciate irony.

  All this was rendered moot when the flick of a thickly muscled arm sent Roger flying across the room in a most ungainly style. His enhanced proprioception allowed him to categorize each injury with infallible precision. So when he collided with the far wall of the bar, he knew with certainty he had broken his collarbone, his right ulna, and two of his lumbar vertebrae.

  His impact also buckled the heavy masonry blocks and sent radiating cracks shooting across most of the ferroconcrete structure. The whole building shook in an alarming manner and his impression made a sound like a bag of wet dirt falling from a truck. Pain from his foot and leg stopped at least, as his semi-conscious form slid down the wall in a sodden heap to rest in the corner.

  From his vantage point as a bleeding broken mess of a man slumped against the dirty wall of a seedy Dockside bar, Roger got to watch Roland Tankowicz tear three expensive security ’bots to pieces with his bare hands. The security ’bots were tough, fast, and strong as hell. They were specifically designed for hard combat in the urban environment, yet the fight was a brief and violent affair as the three machines attempted to surround their quarry and pick him apart.

  It wasn’t working though. To Roger, the huge man looked like a grizzly bear going through a pack of coyotes in the melee. The giant had adopted a strategy of buttoning up into a defensive posture like a boxer and waiting for the androids to attack. When the androids would score a hit (with little effect), they would receive a catastrophic injury from the resulting counterattack.

  Roland’s footwork was tight and mathematical, and his hands snaked out like darting sledgehammers with pinpoint accuracy and blinding speed. Roger, through the rapidly dimming haze of his own fading consciousness, could not help but admire the big man’s work (If he was even a man at all… Roger had his doubts). It wasn’t just smashing the androids, it was outfighting them; taking them apart meticulously in a manner designed to spare the building from extra damage in the process.

  Roger watched him snap a stiff jab into the face of one android, return to a high guard in time to catch the blow from another, and then counter-punch the third with a right hook. There was a pivot on his rear foot, a head slip to make the first android miss its next attack, and then a brutal hook to the body that broke something inside the expensive ’bot and sent it crashing to the floor in a spastic, heaving, heap. The big right hand then immediately caught the head of the third android, and casually raised the four-hundred-pound thing in the air long enough to punch its body away with the left hand. The body-less head was then tossed over the big man’s shoulder contemptuously.

  The second ’droid was still functional, but only for a moment. A few deft movements from Roland, and it was armless. Then Roland smashed it to pieces with its own arms. He finished by stomping the twitching android, still squeaking and sparking on the floor, until it stopped moving entirely. A faint wisp of smoke rose from the twisted scrap that had once been a very expensive piece of paramilitary hardware.

  This big sonofabitch was something different from the usual industrial cyborgs and back-alley augmentations that Roger saw from time-to-time. Roger did not know what he was looking at, but he now knew why the girl had come here, and he suspected that his job (if he lived) had just gotten a whole lot more interesting. On that wry note, Roger Dawkins slipped into blissful unconsciousness.

  Chapter Three

  Lucia Ribiero was panicking again, and she hated herself for it. Watching some terrifying giant smash and kill a bunch of robots in a bar was more than she was ready to deal with, which was an entirely understandable limitation to her worldview, she felt. That her father had been kidnapped and whoever did it had sent a bunch of cyborgs and robots to get her added a new dimension to her terror. That was a level of distress she was categorically unprepared to deal with. She worked in advertising for crying out loud, this was not how her days usually went.

  Lucia tried to give herself credit where it was due. She was as tough as anyone, and smarter than most, but this was all too much. The day really hadn’t started out that bad to be honest, so the rate and scale of its deterioration into the current state of affairs was quite significant and disheartening.

  It had all started with a quick stop at the corner coffee bar for a latte, which was nice. Lots of normal days started with lattes and lattes were a perfectly nice way to start a day. After that, she went into the office where she was the VP of Customer Engagement for a large beverage distributer. It was a meaningless title for a meaningless job at a meaningless company, but the pay was fantastic and the people were nice. With the unemployment rate over 14%, it was just nice to have a job at all right now; so she didn’t complain. Work had been fine, and all she had to do before getting home and soaking in a nice warm bath with a good cabernet, was to stop in to see her father for a bit. That’s just a lovely damned day in general, and Lucia had no reason to doubt that this is exactly how it would go.

  Lucia had been visiting her father a lot, due to a sudden increase in migraines and anxiety attacks lately. Her feeling of overall jumpiness had gotten rather pervasive, and she wondered if it wasn’t time to see her psychiatrist about a prescription. Donald Ribiero was an excellent neurologist and biotechnologist and had been supervising her treatment himself for the present. The headaches were much better under his care, but she could not shake the feeling that the whole world was moving slower than she remembered. She should probably lay off the lattes, but Lucia loved coffee more than sanity, so that was not likely to happen.

  When she dropped in to see her father earlier, she had been unprepared to find the place in complete disarray and her father gone. His beautiful top-floor apartment was always in perfect order; so, finding it a mess was a very clear indicator that something was terribly wrong. A meticulous man, Donald Ribiero was not the type to tolerate that kind of untidiness under any circumstances, and certainly not if he was going out. Don was the type of old coot who would occasionally bring a lady back for a nightcap, and he liked his place to be tidy for just such a case.

  A girl would have to be into some weird stuff to want to hang out in the apartment as she had found it. Every stitch of her father’s clothing was pulled out of his closets and drawers and strewn about the place. His antique hardwood desk had been torn apart, and the carpet peeled back from the wall in places. The kitchen cabinets were open and the contents pulled onto the floor where they sat in messy piles of cookware and utensils. His mattress was off the bedframe and left askew as if whoever had tossed the place simply dropped it when it became obvious that it was not hiding anything. Every piece of furniture was shifted or thrown over. Lucia did not need a tin star on her chest to work out that the place had been professionally ransacked. That was the first time today she had panicked.

  Ninety seconds after getting to her father’s apartment, her comm had buzzed to tell her she had a message. She was not ready for what it had said.

  “Breach,” was the one word message. Automated and electronic, she knew the coded signal was part of a triggered alarm response from her father. It was a word with a lot of meanings, but in this case, it referred to a very specific bug-out plan that she had rehearsed with the old man since she was fourteen. She never really thought she’d have to execute on it, but now she was doing exactly that, apparently.

  It felt surreal. Her father’s obsession with security had always seemed an idiosyncrasy driven by guilt over the loss of her mother. Lucia had never really taken it seriously, but the fight training and gun stuff had been a lot a fun. She simply enjoyed the private lessons and treated it as little more than her father’s personal guilt causing him to act in a hyper-protective manner. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  She remembered that the �
�Breach’ protocol meant immediately going to a place in Dockside to find one of Dad’s old army buddies. She couldn’t use any electronic devices or payment methods. Hard creds only, and no personal vehicles, either. ‘Breach’ was one of the worst-case-scenario plans. It meant something terrible was going on.

  Lucia felt her pulse racing when she left the apartment to go find “The Smoking Wreck.” When she stepped out onto the moist black streets of New Boston, it was to the tune of a thousand tiny alarms ringing in her head. Every possible bad thing she could think of competed for primacy in her rapidly boggling brain. She gritted her teeth and made a conscious effort to focus on the job in front her with sufficient vehemence to shove the buzzing to the back of her mind. The frantic woman couldn’t make it go away, but she didn’t have time to deal with it right now.

  New Boston was the home of the largest collection of spaceports and docking platforms in the northern hemisphere and boasted a population of thirty-one million souls. A few short centuries ago it had been a dirty mill town filled with red brick manufacturing facilities and the choking black soot of a Dickensian dystopia. She could still be a loud, dirty, cantankerous old lady of a city if you went to the right places, but for now, New Boston was a shining, towering metropolis. The whole planet envied her city as a global center for trade and culture.

  Right now, to her mounting unease, all that shining grandeur was lost on Lucia. The city now seemed a tepid jungle full of millions of potential evils waiting to entrap her. She put it out of her mind as best she could. It wasn’t much help to think about it.