“So, you have to come with me. This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be because you are apparently not some helpless Uptown waif,” he tipped his hat to her, “which is a nice thing because you can actually be useful.”
She smiled back, her voice straining through gritted teeth, “I’ll do my best not to be a burden. Even if it means fighting people… but until last night, I’d never fought anyone before!”
“Well, you did great considering your disadvantages.”
“Wait, disadvantages? Is this a ‘man’ thing?” She looked annoyed, “I don’t feel ‘disadvantaged,’ pal!” Now she was irritable. The million anxieties in her head were making it hard to think, and he just kept giving her more things to worry about. She wanted to hide from it all; just wanted it all to stop for a second so she could calm down and think.
He sighed, “Yeah. I said ‘disadvantages.’ There is a reason they built me this big. It’s so I can hit and get hit very hard. You? You just aren’t heavy or strong enough to bang it out with most of the guys we’ll be dealing with,” he waved off her objections, “Don’t get me wrong, your augmentation means you’ll be way ahead of all of them; and your skills are really goddamn impressive, but you still only weigh what, 125 lbs?”
She gave him a stern look, and tried to hide her terror with levity, “A gentleman would never ask.”
“Go hang out with one of those, then. I’ve never been gentle and only 10% of me is man.”
“Fair point,” she conceded regally, “continue.” Might as well get it over with, she figured.
“Yeah, so even though you aren’t going to have a lot of trouble getting your hands on the other guy, you are going to have a hard time hurting him without some help.” He shrugged in feigned sheepishness, “Sorry. Small people don’t hit as hard as big people. Physics is sexist like that.”
The big man smiled down at her, and pointed to the gauntlets, “Now, instead of wearing yourself out hitting ’em a hundred times,” he snapped a mock jab that stopped at her nose, “you’ll be dropping ’em in one or two shots each.” He continued in a more serious tone, “It will allow you to take advantage of your enhanced reflexes and kinesthetics, without having to break your knuckles or wailing on a guy for half an hour to put him down.”
He scowled, “Or you can choose not to use them and ruin your hands so you can feel like you beat me in an argument.”
“No, no. Gloves are good. I’m convinced,” she blurted, then practiced some sharp, snappy combinations in the air, “Now I can hit like you!” she crowed.
“Nobody hits like me,” Roland droned, and gestured to the vest and arm guards, “Moving on.”
It was a subconscious choice, but he affected the tone he used when lecturing green troops in a hot LZ, “Put that armor on and never take it off. I survive stuff because I have armor. You will survive stuff because you will also have armor. The armor will be hot. The armor will be stiff, the armor will not be attractive or comfortable. None of that fucking matters. You love your armor and your armor loves you. That armor is the only thing you love. Get me?”
Lucia was feeling real terror take over. She often used levity to mask fear, and she had been keeping up gamely with the chirpy dialogue, but the edges of her control were beginning to fray. She started to pull the vest on and immediately felt like it was crushing her. The terrified woman wanted out of it as soon as she felt the weight settle on her shoulders.
All of this armor and weaponry represented a big shift in the tone of her interactions with Roland as well, and she was pretty sure she knew why.
“You aren’t feeling great about going to see Marko, are you, Roland?” She asked, tension making her voice quiver.
“I never feel good about going into the Woo,” was his terse reply as he deftly adjusted her armor so it sat comfortably and fit in all the correct places. She could tell he had done this many times. The vest was black and made of a stiff-yet-pliable material reinforced with heavier sections of plate at strategic locations. The sleeves were separate pieces, made of more supple substance with more reinforced areas. All of it had to be adjusted to fit, and this took a few minutes. Roland worked silently while Lucia steadily grew more anxious.
“Big Woo is nasty territory. They don’t like me there. In Dockside, my reputation and contacts mean I can manipulate the scenario in a lot of different ways. In the Woo? I’m just another big mark, until I prove otherwise. I can do that, and I likely will, but that can get… noisy.”
He sniffed, which was an oddly human gesture, “I’ve avoided trouble with the Army by not being noisy. But in the Woo, with the price on you? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous.”
Lucia did not like that. She liked ‘confident, hard-ass’ Roland, best. In a pinch, ‘tactical soldier’ Roland would do. But ‘nervous’ Roland was not a good thing. She began to understand just how precarious her situation was. Just like the previous night on the way to the Hideaway, she thought about all the things that could go wrong and all the potential consequences. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and her throat tightened.
“Roland,” she said, and her voice was sounding more agitated, “I don’t know… I don’t… I feel strange,” was all she could articulate.
He looked up from the armor and saw tears streaming down her face, she was breathing fast and shallow, and she looked very pale. “Are you OK? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know! I’m just… my heart is racing and I can’t breathe!” She was looking very panicked.
“Shit!” the big man spat and guided her to a stool. She sat, her breath ragged and wracked with sobs.
“Lucia! Breathe. Deep breaths. Look at me!” Her eyes, wide with fear locked on him. “You are going to be OK, Lucia.” He held her by the shoulders, “It’s your neurological upgrades, your brain is getting more stimulus than it’s used to, and getting it too fast.”
He kept eye contact, “It’s OK. There is a way to fix it. It’s a little weird, but do you trust me?”
She nodded and sobbed at the same time.
“OK,” without warning he stuck his fingers into her armpits and gave her a serious tickle.
Lucia shrieked and squealed in horror, then surprise, and finally laughter. She nearly fell of the stool as he continued the assault, and he caught her and continued to tickle her until her howls of laughter degenerated into gasps and pleading.
“What the… what… aghh… you… stop it! Stop! Stopstopstopstopstop! Ahhhh!”
He stopped and sat her back on the stool, “Feel better?” He asked.
“What the hell are you doing?” She gasped.
“You were having a panic attack because you got stressed and your brain was working too fast.”
She slapped him on the arm, hard, “So you violated my armpits?” Lucia was attempting to sound indignant but the act was unconvincing.
Roland wore a crooked smirk, “Laughter dumps endorphins. Endorphins get rid of stress hormones.”
“NEXT TIME TELL A JOKE OR SOMETHING!” She yelled, but there was no actual anger. The whole scenario was just too ridiculous.
He grabbed her a bottle of water from a crate. It was warm and tasted slightly of dust, but she swigged from it in grateful relief, anyway. “Sometimes that happens with neuro augmentations. You end up processing information and stimulus so quickly your frontal cortex gets overwhelmed. When that occurs your amygdala can dump you into panic mode. Troops call it ‘Condition Black.’”
He turned away and went back to the crates, “The trick,” he said, “is to recognize it when it’s happening and try to stay ahead of it.”
“And when you can’t get ahead of it?”
“Have someone tickle you.”
“What if I wasn’t ticklish?” she asked, “What was your plan then?”
“Strip tease.” He said with no trace of emotion whatsoever.
Lucia howled with laughter again, “I don’t think I could have handled that!” The thought of the big serious cyborg doing some
thing so preposterous was just about the funniest thing she could have imagined. She laughed some more. It felt great.
“Yeah, well, that’s sort of the reaction I was hoping for. I’m just really glad you’re ticklish.” He smiled, “My dignity can only handle so much, y’know.”
Chapter Twelve
After a quick stop at a military surplus store to get Lucia equipped with some more appropriate clothing, the mismatched pair were off on their way to the Big Woo.
Lucia was sporting a much more tactical-practical look. Her fashionable business attire was replaced with sturdy grey fatigues with barely concealed leg armor underneath. Her armored vest was mostly concealed under a plain black long-sleeved shirt. It stretched a little too tight across the vest and was not likely to fool anyone who looked very closely. But the casual observer was probably not going to think there was anything underneath her shirt other than a well-endowed woman.
Roland had insisted that the armor was the best that could be obtained without going for a full ‘set of plates,’ and knowing she was now resistant to most forms of small arms fire did much to alleviate her anxiety. It made the discomfort of the extra layers more bearable.
She had to laugh at the sight of herself when she saw her reflection in the mirror though. The black boots, too-tight armored shirt and reinforced black fatigues, when equipped with her flechette pistol in a thigh holster, all made for a very interesting fashion statement. When she added the high-tech gauntlets, her outfit was downright cartoonish in its aggressiveness. Lucia kind of liked the look. I look like a total bad-ass, she smiled to herself, just needs a cape…
She had made the mistake of asking why they would bother with concealing the armor, and his tactless answer of, “Because we want the bad guys to aim for your chest, where the armor is. If they see it, they’ll aim for your head,” nearly triggered another panic attack. Fortunately, no tickling ended up being necessary.
Lucia had found that understanding what was going on in her head helped her to deal with it. With her mind processing and evaluating stimuli at many times the normal rate, a thousand niggling anxieties could gnaw at her all at once. It took very little to get that particular process started, and if she wasn’t careful, it would cascade into a full-blown panic attack.
Knowing this, she could at least force herself to calm down when she felt it starting. It wasn’t easy, and she knew she was going to need a lot of practice, but she felt confident she could beat this problem. Lucia was not a fan of the tickling.
Roland on the other hand, looked like Roland always looked: big and blocky. He wore the same black fatigues with the same black boots he always did. He wore the same black shirt he always wore. His hat was the same hat. Lucia mused that he must have bought out the store when he found things in his size. She pictured endless storage boxes filled with boring black army surplus clothing in size XXXXL in his closet. She made a mental note to take him shopping if any of them managed to survive this.
His old army coat covered his shoulder holster, which was now home to the largest handgun Lucia had ever seen. Lucia knew her way around guns better than most, and the monstrosity under his left armpit was like nothing she had ever seen.
Roland had built his own gun because that was the kind of guy he was. He wasn’t so big that he couldn’t use standard weapons, but they never fit his hand right. Why should he settle for a mundane weapon when he was built for so much more?
Roland was an unapologetic gun-nut and a fair hand in the machine shop. This confluence of factors is how ‘Durendal’ had been born. Roland had to explain to the illiterate philistines in his squad that Durendal was the name of the magic sword carried by Charlemagne’s greatest warrior, also named Roland.
Well, this Roland had his own version of Durendal, and this iteration was an eleven-pound, fifty-caliber machine pistol. It had a forty-round, fully indexed magazine of electronically triggered projectiles. The box mag contained four slots, with ten rounds allocated to each one. The individual slots could each hold a different ammunition type, and the weapon’s selector switch was programmed to load from the corresponding index.
Roland chose his usual loadout, which was ten rounds of high-velocity armor-piercing flechette, ten rounds of anti-materiel high-explosive, and twenty rounds of hyper-velocity anti-personnel bead. The main difference between his beads and a regular load being that his beads were in .50 caliber, not 5mm. they were only good for about half the speed, but the mass and diameter made them devastating to both flesh and machinery alike.
The magazine itself was detachable, but individual slots could be reloaded from the bottom without dropping the whole mag. So instead of extra magazines, he carried four stripper-clips for each of the payloads in his various pouches and pockets. This allowed him to recharge individual indexes without having to swap in new magazines. Now, if he ran out of anti-personnel bead first, he didn’t have to abandon all the other payloads when it came time to reload.
That was a lot of ammunition for a stroll through the Woo, even with Roland’s overly pessimistic outlook on life. But Roland found that carrying two hundred rounds of ammunition was pretty easy when you were his size, and his personal philosophy was ‘you can never have too much ammo.’
They pinged for an Aero Car and waited for one to respond that looked like it could handle Roland’s thousand or so pounds. The fourth one to respond was an older cargo model, and Roland estimated that it wasn’t likely to crash under his weight. Fuel surcharges were going to be painful though.
The car lifted off and quickly entered the traffic pattern that exited Dockside and arced westward towards Big Woo.
Big Woo, or as it was more commonly known, “the Woo,” was a dilapidated old section of post-industrial slums about forty miles outside of uptown. It wasn’t officially part of the New Boston megalopolis, and as such had its own rules and regulations. The sanctioned town government was ostensibly a group of selectmen that each borough elected, but multiple successive generations of graft and corruption had twisted the lofty democratic ideals of the town charter beyond recognition.
What remained was a confederation of greedy middle managers in the indirect employ of various oligarchs and criminal masterminds. These were elected and re-elected based upon the machinations of these clandestine players, and the city languished in destitution as a result.
This could continue, election cycle after election cycle, for one simple reason: No one else wanted the Woo. It was so poor it made Dockside look like Uptown. The place was one thin, insubstantial degree above a refugee camp, and nobody with a whit of sense wanted to be responsible for it. It was a haven for drug-labs, sex-slavers, mercenaries and tin-pot dictators. There was no law in the Woo, and no one who lived there wanted any. Roland found it entirely distasteful. Dockside he understood. It was a working-class area for the rougher class; not very clean or very nice, but people stayed out of each other’s way and there was a sense of respect and community. In the Woo, the rules were different: intimidate or be intimidated, take or be taken, kill or be killed. It was a bad place filled with bad people and civilized folk stayed well clear of it.
Roland meditated on this while the car entered the landing pattern over Front Street, by what had once been the town green. After the second global hegemony collapsed, the fighting in this area had levelled what had once been a promising pre-industrial hub of burgeoning enterprises. Two hundred years later, and the area had never really recovered. Towering steel buildings had been replaced with squat, brown commercial spaces devoid of character. These, in turn, were overrun by the various gangs and militias that had made the Woo their home. But they all served their purposes, he supposed. Being abandoned by subsequent governments for successive generations had led to the current state of Big Woo, and no one was interested in correcting that, anymore. What law there was in the Woo was theirs, and it was only marginally better than no law at all. It was a very insubstantial margin though, even under the most optimistic analysis.
&nb
sp; His musings were interrupted by the arrival chime, and they landed at what was still called “the Green” by locals, and disembarked. As predicted, the fuel surcharge was asinine, but Roland paid it with little thought. Being in the Woo meant being alert at all times. He could gripe about the bill later.
The Green was just a wide-open series of rust-brown landing platforms adjacent to a mass-travel station with commuter trams and local ride-sharing facilities. Vendors of various goods and services lined the edges of the square which was a quarter-mile per side and filled with Aero Cars, ground transport, and hundreds of the disheveled denizens of the Woo milling about in a perpetual daze of narcotics and depression. The air reeked of burning fossil fuels, a thousand varieties of food, and the unfiltered stink of the unwashed masses. Roland’s stature, and Lucia’s obvious good breeding were an oddity, and they attracted some unwanted scrutiny as they attempted to find their bearings.
Lucia was trying to stay ahead of the anxieties her hyperactive brain was downloading to her amygdala. Namely because she suspected this would be a supremely bad place to have a panic attack. I really can’t afford to lose my shit right now, she thought to herself, Go slow. Breathe in for four, breathe out for four….
She looked to Roland for some reassurance and saw his face set in a grim mask of stoic irritation. That was less encouraging than she wanted, but she took solace in his indestructibility and to a lesser extent, her own body armor. I will be fine, she thought, I will be fine and Dad will be fine. She wasn’t sure if she really believed that, but she intended to repeat it as often as necessary.
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