“Fair question,” the big man conceded, “Vision OK? No tingling in the fingers or toes?” Roland tried to think of all the symptoms of nerve damage that typical neurological acceleration augmentations might cause. She shook her head at all of them.
“Just a little light headed and tired. Slight headache.”
He grunted, “Good. I know how to fix that.”
They arrived at his door and stomped up the stairs. In his apartment, Roland sat her down at the kitchen table and went to the fridge. He pulled out a loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter.
“You like peanut butter?” He asked bluntly.
“Sure.” She responded, just a little perplexed.
Roland began to make peanut butter sandwiches. He made them quickly and with a practiced economy of motion. The man obviously made a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, she observed. Lucia wrinkled her brow and asked, “Is this really the best time to have a sandwich?”
“Your head hurts and you are woozy because you just burned 2,000 calories in less than an hour. Your blood-sugar levels are shit right now,” he explained, “I’ve only got eighty-seven pounds of flesh on me and I can go through 5500 a day when I’m operating.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. The brain burns more calories than any other organ in the body, and yours is cranked waaaaaaay the hell up. Peanut butter is my go-to after a fight. Lots of calories. Eat.”
“Thanks, Doc,” she quipped. She hated to admit it, but she was in fact hungry as hell. She began to tear into the sandwiches with unladylike vigor, “at least I know I’ll keep my girlish figure now. No more diets for me!”
“You’ve never been on a diet in your life.”
“That is a fact,” She mumbled, mouth full of peanut butter.
They sat there in silence for a few minutes. Two adults munching on peanut butter sandwiches like ten-year-olds. Lucia’s headache began to subside almost instantly, and Roland grunted in satisfaction when she paused in her feasting after a third sandwich.
She locked eyes with Roland and spoke, “I’m sorry about back there. I know you were right, but I just couldn’t let you kill that guy. I don’t know why… I mean…”
He waved her off, “Don’t worry about it. I sometimes forget that things are different in other places. Life is cheap here, y’know. Always has been. But that doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be that way, right?”
He looked down at his hands, “It’s been that way down here so long, I wonder if it stays that way because we like it that way, right? Maybe the problem with Dockside is the Docksiders.”
Lucia replied, “I think there’s a bit of that everywhere. Uptown is full of erudite pricks because they like being erudite pricks. It’s almost a contest to see who can be the most awful person.” She laughed, and it was good guffaw, full of life, “We know that the money comes from the backs of spacers who spend their lives living in metal boxes on freighters. We know that people down here sweat and bleed and die in the dirt so we can sip Champagne and eat exotic fruits from across the galaxy.” Her laugh faded to a chuckle, “We know and we don’t care.”
“A man died tonight.” She was thoughtful now, all traces of humor gone, “He was a piece of trash, but he’s still dead. Tomorrow morning, they’ll clean up the mess, get on with life, and no one will care at all that he died. No one Uptown. No one here. He’ll just be… gone… forgotten.”
She faded off, and Roland didn’t know what to say. Lucia’s eyes came up, brimmed with tears she was trying very hard not to shed, “… because of me. Because of my dad.”
Roland knew where this was going, and he put his hand down on the counter, hard, “Nope. Nuh uh. Stop.” He jabbed at finger her way to emphasize his point, “Nico Garibaldi took money from Rodney the Dwarf to kill me. Period. He’d have turned you in for the bounty either way, and whether or not he and his brother raped you first would have depended on if that factored into the payday.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down on her, “Nico made his choices. He was there because he chose to be. He died because he was a dumbass who chose poorly.”
“Now you? You chose nothing. None of this. Other people have put this on you. Don’t take responsibility for anyone’s choices but your own. It’s a bad road. Trust me.”
Realization dawned on Lucia, and her eyes grew wide, “Oh my god… I’m so sorry! I must sound like such a silly twit to you right now!”
The big man shrugged, “I have a different perspective than you. That happens when evil military assholes shut your brain off and use your body to murder a few hundred innocent people.” He tried to make it sound light, but failed abominably.
“Just don’t get caught up what these pricks have put you into. It’s not your fault… any of it. If I took responsibility for what other people did to me, I’d have stood in front of those cannons myself, two and a half decades ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucia said, “I must sound pathetic to you.”
“Not even a little,” He responded with no hesitation at all, “you have never been in this situation before, you have a lot of stuff to process right now, and you are doing a lot better than most people would.”
He snickered wryly, “I’ve seen professional soldiers shit their pants the first time they saw real combat. Trust me, you smell just fine right now.”
Lucia finally laughed again, “Yeah, well, it was touch-and-go for minute there, bud.”
Roland laughed too. It felt good. But all too quickly reality came back, and he asked, “When did you sleep last?”
She thought for a second, “I woke up at five-thirty this morning.”
“OK. We have maybe a few more hours of relative safety here. You should try to get some sleep. We’ll move out of here around dawn and get set up to go visit Marko.”
“I don’t have any clothes your size,” he went on, “but there is big shower in the bathroom and towels you could probably use as a quilt. You can take the bed, I don’t have to sleep that much, so I’ll take the watch tonight.”
“I thought you still needed sleep?” She asked, “I don’t want my cyborg bodyguard to be too groggy to bodyguard.”
He shrugged, “I’ll need to sleep. Eventually. My operational efficacy doesn’t start to suffer until about sixty hours awake though.”
She nodded in appreciation, “I guess my Dad does do good work, then!” She thought for a moment, “does that mean I’ll be able to go a long time without sleep, too?”
Roland smiled, “Not unless your body and organs were built to operate nominally at ten gravities.”
“Guess I’m off to bed then!” She saluted and headed into the bathroom, “good night!”
Chapter Eleven
Roland woke Lucia just before dawn the next day. It was a bright Summer morning, and the sun rose early. Lucia was still groggy and struggled to wake.
“Come on, Lady,” he tried his best drill instructor voice, “Breakfast is ready and we’ve got a full day ahead of us.”
Lucia’s brain was a hazy fog of scattered memories and fragmented terror. The smell of bacon gathered the frayed strands of cognition and began to draw them all in the direction of the kitchen. Bacon, Lucia thought, has magical properties.
She meandered into the dim kitchen and found a plate piled high with a mountain of scrambled eggs and a fortress of bacon stacked like cordwood next to it.
Roland was seated already, drinking an enormous frothy coffee drink that smelled of mocha and digging into what looked like a twelve-egg omelet with cheese and at least three kinds of dead animal.
He gestured to the plate across from him with the ridiculous portion of breakfast on it and said, “Dig in.”
The woman gave Roland a look he had seen before. It was a look that told Roland that he was a particular type of simple, yet harmless idiot. She shook her head, “Roland, I couldn’t eat that much food in a week, let alone for breakfast.”
Roland looked up from his plate and smirked, “Lucia, y
ou ate 1700 calories worth of peanut butter sandwiches in one sitting six hours ago,” he gestured to her belly, “are you still feeling full?”
Lucia saw where he was going with this, “Yeah… I could eat.”
“Then eat. Today will be just as tense as yesterday… maybe worse.” He shoveled omelet into his mouth, “So eat now. If your turbo-drive kicks in, you’re gonna torch through a lot of calories today, and meals may be few and far between.” He turned back to his plate, “Trust an old soldier on this: when you have the time and the supplies, eat big. You never know how long till the next meal.”
She shrugged and sat down. Her hunger surprised her, and she tore into the food with gusto. In a few short minutes she was most of the way through her eggs and bacon and pouring a third cup of café mocha.
“Don’t you have any real coffee?” she asked.
“Nope,” The big cyborg shrugged, “don’t like coffee.”
She couldn’t suppress a chuckle, “Nine hundred pounds of muscles and he can’t even drink real coffee! To think I actually respected you!”
“Eat ’em or wear ’em smartass. We’ll see if you’ve still got jokes when we go see Marko.”
“Please tell me don’t have to walk. I feel like I’m going to pop.”
“We’ll walk to the storage unit and then get you some new clothes. Your outfit might look fine at the office, but where we’re going?” He shook his head, “You’ll get no respect at all in that.”
She swallowed the last bit of mocha, “What’s in the storage unit?” Realizing as soon as she asked that she sounded very naïve.
Roland smiled, “It sure as hell ain’t boxes of old books, Lady.”
She sighed, “Of course not. I don’t even know why I asked.”
—
The storage unit was full of exactly what Lucia assumed it would be full of: the kind of arsenal that could get a person imprisoned for life in a work camp in the Galapagos system 275 light-years from earth.
It was a regular, unassuming storage unit, about fifteen feet square and eight feet high. It was in the middle of huge storage facility on the outer rim of Dockside, with the Sprawl just to the north, Dockside to the east, and Big Woo to the south and west.
Roland stood in front of the opened storage bay and just looked at it all for a moment. Save for a wide aisle down the middle, the unit was positively crammed with racks of weapons stored in tight but neat bins and on well-ordered shelves. There didn’t seem to be two of any given thing, and some of the items were completely foreign to Lucia. While she was not an ex-top-secret-military-cyborg-super-soldier, Lucia had spent plenty of time on the weapons range growing up. Her father’s obsession with security had not been limited to martial arts training. She could handle most commercially available firearms and had even spent time with a few beam weapons, despite their egregious illegality.
The stuff in this storage unit, on the other hand, was straight out of a war holo. Some of it, she realized, was of a size to indicate that it had been made specifically for Roland. A few of the rifles had grips and trigger guards meant for his enormous hands. Several of the weapons looked like they weighed a hundred pounds or more, making them crew-served at best… unless you were the kind of guy who could pick up a house, of course. Most of the rest of it just looked like normal, everyday tools of mayhem; in staggering quantity and array.
Lucia had been operating in a cognitive fog since finding her father missing. It felt like part of her brain had been feeding her bits and pieces of reality, in measured doses, so she wouldn’t choke on the crushing magnitude of it. But she had noticed that it could also all come crashing in at once in a flood of perceptions and dark ruminations. She could imagine a thousand horrible outcomes in one second, and it terrified her.
Standing with a government-built cyborg staring at a personal arsenal worth a million credits, on her way to meet some underworld capo and uncover who or whatever had kidnapped her father was just about the last bit of it.
Roland had killed Nico Garibaldi, he had probably killed the guy in the Smoking Wreck, and he had almost killed Mook. She was standing next to a killer, and this was his vault of death. She shuddered down to the bottom of her very soul. A wave of fear and despair washed over her as she wondered if she would ever see her father again, or if she’d ever be able to go back to the woman she had been just twenty-four hours before. She might yet see her father, but she already knew the old Lucia was gone forever.
“Let’s suit up.” The big man said.
Roland opened a cabinet and pulled out a big black army jacket. It was exactly like any other army jacket, made of sturdy materials and with a slew of pockets and pouches in strategic locations. He also grabbed a harness of some kind and slung his arms through the loops.
It settled across his wide shoulders and Lucia realized it was a shoulder holster. For what, she couldn’t say, but whatever it was meant to secure, she could tell it was going to be big.
He grabbed a flat black hat with a short brim as well. Settling it on his head and shrugging onto the jacket, he turned to her and said, “Now for you.”
“We’re heading into Big Woo, so you are going to need a little protection,” he said, “here, take this.” He tossed her an armored grey under shirt and a set of arm guards.
“You any good with a gun?” he asked absently.
“I’m a good shot, but I’ve never shot anywhere but the range,” she paused, feeling foolish, “I don’t know if I could shoot someone, though…” She could feel a thousand little alarms going off in her head as her augmentation processed all the potential scenarios faster than she could control it.
Roland handed her a medium-sized flechette pistol. It was old Czech military model, and Lucia knew it well. It rested comfortably in her palm and she could probably hit a mosquito in the eye at fifteen yards with it.
Roland smiled, “So don’t shoot anyone, then. But take this just in case someone starts shooting at you. At least then you will be in a position to reconsider.”
She smiled, “Sound policy.”
He rummaged through a bin, he took a few minutes, but he finally found what he was looking for and tossed a bundle the size of a basketball to her.
She caught it with fluid grace and opened the black canvas bag. Inside were a pair of black armored gloves with small metal lugs. They were long enough to go to her elbow and protected her entire forearm.
“Put ’em on, “suggested Roland with a shooing gesture, “Straps to fit them are along the inside of the forearm part.”
She put them on and adjusted the straps to fit the gauntlets snugly, then she looked at Roland with a quizzical expression. “I know these must be some type of weapon, but other than making my knuckles pointy,” She pointed to the silver knobs over her knuckles, “I’m kind of at a loss here.” More alarms were going off in her head. She really wished they would stop.
Roland walked over and took her right hand in his, with his other hand, he twisted the first lug on the right glove. There was the audible whine of capacitors charging, but other than that, nothing happened.
Lucia raised her eyebrow at Roland, “Well… that changes everything, I guess.”
Roland grunted, and held out his palm, “hit me,” he instructed calmly.
“Uh, sure. OK.” She cocked her arm and drove a textbook right cross into his palm, just like back in the gym with Rodrigo, her boxing coach growing up. Her fist landed flat and flush, with her elbow in line to drive all of her weight through her first two knuckles in a blow that would have rattled anyone’s jaw.
There was a ‘pop!’ and a hiss when the knuckle lugs contacted Roland’s palm and he stated in bland deadpan, “Ow.” Smoke wafted in lazy wisps from the big black hand, and the capacitors whined again.
Lucia appraised the gloves closely, then gingerly touched one lug. Nothing happened, and she looked back up at Roland..
“They only discharge when there is a substantial impact. The harder you hit, the harder they zap.�
��
“Taser gloves?” She said, sounding excited, “these are taser gloves?”
“PC-10 series, less-lethal pacification gauntlets,” he intoned with forced formality, “the ‘PC’ stands for ‘pain compliance.’”
She nodded, “Taser gloves.”
He continued, ignoring her, “A light tap will be painful, a stiff punch will temporarily incapacitate, and your best shot could potentially be fatal. The whole point of these is so you can handle fighting a lot of people without having to swing your hardest.”
“Am I going to be fighting a lot of people?” She was a little concerned about how unconcerned he seemed to be with that scenario. The alarms were getting louder and faster. She was having a hard time focusing.
“If you want to help get your Dad back, yeah, probably.” He wanted to be reassuring, but honesty was going to be the best policy right now, “you are worth millions on the street to anyone who can bring you in. We know that. What we don’t know is exactly who wants to bring you in.” He went on, “Even though Dockside is my turf, that’s just too much damn money for my reputation to be much of a deterrent.” He smirked, “For that kind of cash? Most anyone would roll the dice on pissing me off for that much. Which means I can’t stash you anywhere in Dockside and go handle this on my own.”
Ordnance Page 9