Roland was busy attempting to orient on all possible threats, while simultaneously figuring out the best way to approach Marko. He had to assume that all the nastier elements of the Big Woo crime networks as well as all the other groups of opportunistic criminals in this side of the planet would be after Lucia by now. It would be no secret that she was travelling with him, either. The best thing to do under these circumstances was to keep moving. That may have seemed counterintuitive, but the kind of firepower that could take down Roland would not be easy to move around. Taking Roland on the move meant using weapons that could be smuggled around town easily, and that meant weapons that were unlikely to be a threat to him. If they holed up in any given spot for too long that would give their opposition time to move more people and heavier weapons into position.
Roland intended to play on the general ignorance of potential pursuers as to his specific capabilities. Amateur thugs and professional bagmen alike would likely operate under the impression that Roland was just a hired bodyguard; another professional goon no different form thousands of other hired goons used by rich people the galaxy over. He would perpetuate that myth for as long as he could get away with it. He figured he had thirty-six more hours of that misconception. Roland was too old and too experienced to pretend that he wouldn’t have to flex his muscles to the extent that the ‘hired goon’ cover would stop working. Sooner or later word would get out that he was different. Then things would get much harder. So, the trick was to cover as much ground, and pick up as much intel as he could before it became general knowledge he was a super-cyborg and that the regular methods of all-purpose downtown thuggery would not be effective. Once that word got out, the exotic weapons and serious professionals would start to show up and make his job that much harder.
The Woo was a good place to be right now, the big cyborg conceded to himself. Even though it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, it did not boast the highest-paid nor the most professional criminal class in the New Boston Megalopolis. Roland was confident that no one in the Woo besides perhaps Marko himself had enough horsepower to give him trouble in a straight fight.
On the other hand, Roland was forced to concede that what the Woo lacked in quality, it made up for in quantity. Furthermore, Lucia was not as invulnerable as he was. He made a mental note to adjust his thinking on that front and focus more on getting Lucia in and out of there in one piece, and less on his own invulnerability.
At the edge of the Green, Roland pulled Lucia into an alcove between two street vendors. Both were selling some vague meat-on-a-stick item, and despite her growing hunger, the smell of it was enough to put her off her feed for a while yet.
“We need to get ground transportation. The streets are too crowded right now,” He fiddled with his comm.
Lucia looked around, “Isn’t that a good thing? Don’t we want to be around lots of witnesses?”
Roland Shook his head, “There are no witnesses in the Woo,” he resumed pushing buttons, “and the crowd hides possible tails and hunters.” He put the comm away, “We’ll wait here for a ground transport. You hungry?”
She wrinkled her nose in disgust, “I think I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself,” Roland sidled over to the bedraggled vendor and ordered four skewers of indecipherable street-meat. When he returned to the alcove, the ground transport was just pulling up. It was an older model, but it looked big enough to handle his weight in the large, boxlike cargo area it sported. The heavy, solid tires looked to be a good sign as well. He made a quick scan of the street before he signaled to Lucia, and that’s when he saw the two men in the darkened doorway of an old brown office building across the street. The sun was still high, so the shadow from the alcove hid most of their features, but Roland glimpsed the smooth curves of pistol butts and the blocky silhouettes of cheap armor under ratty long coats.
These might have been regular, uninteresting street muscle. It was common enough for local gangs to patrol prime territory like the Green, but this didn’t feel right. They never took their eyes off of Roland, and as soon as Lucia came out from between the stalls, they moved from the doorway with strides designed to appear nonchalant, but transparently purposeful. Roland tensed; he knew he had less than ten seconds to decide about what to do.
He quickly scanned the rest of the street to assess the situation. It was a wide thoroughfare coming off the Green and heading out toward the bustling north side of the Woo. Both sides of the street were lined with old brown office buildings built to the same bland specifications. Graffiti and gang identifiers covered the first-story walls, and various vendors occupied dirty ramshackle booths that encroached onto the muddy street. People were everywhere. Hundreds of dusty, stooped residents of Big Woo meandered up and down the road. In that thronged mass, spotting potential trouble turned out to be remarkably easy. Roland picked out two more men stalking their way, distinguished by the mismatched bulk of their poorly concealed armor and their intense, focused attention.
Roland quickly shoved Lucia into the cargo bay of the transport and hopped inside after her.
“GO!” He yelled to the driver, and banged his oversized fist on the roof for emphasis, “Go Go GO!”
The driver, took one look at his passengers, then immediately opened the door and dived out of the truck. He hit the ground in an ungainly heap of malnourished limbs and scrambled to his feet. Once upright, the terrified man tore off down the street at his top speed and never looked back.
“Shit.” Roland’s voice rumbled, and he guided Lucia out of the truck with one hand on the back of her neck, “Keep your head down!” he instructed as he quickly ushered her down the street from the vehicle.
Chapter Thirteen
“What’s going on?” Lucia asked, terror in her voice.
“Someone’s onto us. We gotta move,” was his curt response. he cast a glance over his shoulder as he muscled his way through the crowd. The four men had converged on the truck and were now moving with determined yet unhurried strides towards the fleeing pair as a group. Roland noted they were not moving in any discernably tactical manner, and nothing about them seemed to indicate formal training or military experience. They were moving like professional criminals, and not like professional soldiers. Roland breathed a sigh of relief. These were not high-level mercs at least. It was a small a comfort at best, but it was a comfort. Teams of Big Woo enforcers were their own special kind of trouble, and not a thing to be taken lightly, but they were nothing like the things Roland had seen offworld.
Roland took a moment to curse the capricious nature of the universe, and its apparent vendetta against him. The lengthy string of invective accomplished nothing material, but it made him feel better, at least.
He turned his attention back to the problem at hand. Roland very much wanted to escape the pursuers, but not because he feared them. There was just a real tactical advantage to not killing a bunch of gang muscle in the heart of unfamiliar territory. Doing so could end up pissing off any number of nefarious criminal organizations. If he did not handle this with care, he would add the unwelcome drama of a mob vendetta to the top of his current stack of issues. Petty criminals they may be, but respect was as big a deal in the Woo as it was in Dockside. Guys who may be otherwise inclined to leave him alone would die trying to avenge the insult to their bosses if Roland blithely chose to start stomping heads on a busy street.
Roland was trying very hard to avoid that exposure. The part of his mind that understood the nature of his scenario knew he was probably being naïve, but he would have to make the attempt. Minimizing potential carnage was not his style, but considering how Marko was likely to receive him under even the friendliest circumstances, discretion would be warranted. Though he suspected it was a forlorn hope, he intended to at least try to avoid having a running gun battle all the way to Marko’s door.
He kept his body between their pursuers and Lucia as he hustled her through the crowds and down the street. The big cyborg was acutely aware of the fact t
hat there was simply no feasible way to lose the tail in this crowd. He was a foot and a half taller than any of them, and Lucia was far too pretty and healthy to blend in with the disheveled mess of the rest of the population, even if she wasn’t dressed like she was a spec-ops contractor. As they maneuvered down the crowded street, their pursuers stayed with them for the first two blocks, neither closing the distance nor falling behind. Worse, Roland noticed, they had picked up another two hunters along the way.
Roland really wished that he knew the lay of the land better, both physically and politically. If these were transient opportunists out for the bounty on Lucia, he could probably drop them without repercussions. That would be the best-possible scenario, but the only luck Roland trusted was bad luck, so he couldn’t count on that. They were all dressed alike, which indicated a group affiliation. But he didn’t know if it was a local gang or an out-of-town group. They weren’t off-world mercs, the armor was too cheap and their behavior was that of experienced criminals, not trained paramilitary. That meant they were probably local boys of one stripe or another.
He picked a side street at random and ducked down it with Lucia in tow. It was less crowded, and much narrower. The street ran between two of the ubiquitous brown commercial buildings and dumped them into an open parking lot where assorted riffraff was congregating in hunched clumps around ground vehicles with open cargo containers. Roland swore vehemently.
Roland, in his supreme strategic wisdom, had stumbled into an impromptu narcotics market. These cropped up all over the Woo regularly. Mobility was a key element for long-term survival in the Big Woo drug game. Setting up a permanent shop stocked with money and product in the Woo invited far too much opportunistic raiding, so the gangs rolled in armed convoys and used multiple locations to peddle their wares.
Roland couldn’t be sure if this development was a good thing or a bad thing. If the group tracking them was not part of the gang running this operation, they may not want to risk showing up here in force. That would be a good thing. If the money offered for Lucia was a known quantity, they may not care. That would be a bad thing. A quick scan of the lot set Roland’s jaw in a grim line. There were no real exits to the lot other than a couple of very narrow alleyways and doorways into the buildings that framed the asphalt square.
Every eye in the square was on them as they strode from the between the buildings, and Roland made the spur-of-the-moment decision to just keep walking through as if he knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going. No one bought it.
A head wearing an explosively unkempt mane of red hair and a scraggly beard popped up above the roof of an old electric ground vehicle. The head had squinty black eyes and a thin long nose perched above narrow, pale lips. The skin was tan and leathery, and the jaw worked in a tight, wordless chewing rhythm. Roland pegged this guy for the gang leader right away. There was an easy confidence to his demeanor that only the top dog in this particular yard could have. The head turned and spat a stream of sticky green plant juice in a languid rope that struck the ground with an audible splat. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shabby grey jacket before looking back and drawling laconically, “You folks lost?”
Roland’s voice took on the subterranean bass he liked to use when dealing with potential hostiles, “Just walking though, man. Be gone in a couple seconds.”
At that moment, their six pursuers turned into the lot and paused. Avarice and indecision waged open war in their minds as they sized up the new strategic landscape. Roland felt a twinge of hope as he watched their faces twist in soundless indecision. A local group would know the protocol for approaching this situation without causing a severe problem. It was becoming increasingly obvious that this posse of hunters was rather indecisive on how to proceed. They wanted their bounty, but they were outnumbered five-to-one in that lot. Dead men spend no creds, it was the first rule of The Woo and everyone respected it.
To Roland’s supreme relief, this indecision pegged the hunters as non-local interlopers. It was the first bit of good luck he had enjoyed in weeks. This pleased Roland as it meant that just killing them all was not likely to piss off a local gang at all. It might even endear the local factions to him. This new intelligence opened a whole world of tactical options; mainly because it allowed for engaging in precisely the style of violent problem-solving Roland was built to do.
Red Head glanced over at the new arrivals. He took in their long brown coats and the undisguised weapons strapped to their hips and thighs. He looked at the seven-and-half foot monster in front of him, and the took in the armored girl as well. Nothing in his many years navigating the Big Woo gang scene had really prepared him for the situation he now found himself in. Red Head knew, deep inside his soul, that despite an otherwise unremarkable start, today was going end up being a positively shitty day unless he turned it around.
“Well, well, well,” his eyes narrowed, “Party crashers.” He had been born and raised in the Woo, and while this scene was certainly very strange, he had seen more than one bounty hunt come through in his day. He looked at Roland, “Runner or running?”
“Running,” Roland responded, watching as the hunters paused to engage in furtive to conference amongst themselves.
“How much you worth?” Red Head asked.
“Does it matter?” The big man evaded the question.
“Always, big boy. Always.” Red Head was not stupid. A good leader made decisions based on having the correct facts and knowing all the facets of a conflict. Red Head was a good leader, thanks to almost four decades of Big Woo survival. The school of hard knocks was as good a teacher as any military academy if you could survive the curriculum.
Roland, for his part, was about done playing Big Woo gang games. He decided that the drug gang would be more reasonable than the bounty hunters, so he made a bold play, “It’s not enough to die over.”
As fast as he could (which was mighty quick, indeed) Roland whipped his army jacket back and snapped Durendal from its holster. He let the muzzle linger over Red Head’s nose for a split second, watched the man’s eyes just start to widen, then whirled and stroked the trigger twice, putting two flechettes through the lead hunter’s chest.
Armor-piercing tungsten shafts burned through the coat, chest plate, torso, and finally the back plate of the unfortunate man. Both projectiles exited the body and buried themselves deep into the hunter standing behind the now-expiring recipient. The man in front collapsed, leaking blood and smoke from the two neat half-inch diameter tunnels that now occupied his thoracic region. Behind him, the other hunter sat down hard and coughed frothy blood down the front of his shirt.
In an instant, the four remaining pursuers scattered and drew weapons. The junkies looking for their next fix scurried to the edges of the lot and disappeared like cockroaches into the exits and shadows to avoid the impending firestorm. There was a depressing facility to how they accomplished this. It was obviously a technique oft-practiced for them. It also was an effective survival tactic as the parking lot then erupted in gunfire.
A dozen different weapons spat various forms of mayhem in as many directions. Roland grabbed Lucia and covered her head as he ran to the far side of the lot. The drug dealers were pouring fire into the hunters, confirming Roland’s suspicion that the turf incursion was a more pressing concern to them than the potential windfall of a bounty. The hunters, having body armor and better weapons, had weathered the return fire with little difficulty and hunkered down in the alley, sending sporadic gunfire back at the gang.
Roland frowned and flung Lucia into an alcove by a doorway. Something wasn’t right, “Stay here!” he growled, and headed back into the fray. He found Red Head behind a car, laying down suppressing fire with an ancient sub-machine gun. It barked fire and smoke while spewing spent casings onto the dirty asphalt like brass raindrops. Down by the alley, his bullets sprayed concrete chunks and ricochets into the hunched hunters. Red Head was a decent shot, Roland admitted to himself, but the armor under those c
oats was laughing at the assault.
He dropped an enormous hand on Red Head’s shoulder, and the man turned in startled terror, bringing the subgun to bear on Roland only to find it swatted away like a toy.
“Why are they still here?” Roland asked over the din, “Why are they staying?” They should have left. No amount of money was worth getting gunned down in a parking lot. While the bounty hunters held the equipment advantage, they would soon get overrun on numbers alone. There had to be thirty drug dealers hammering them right now. It made no sense.
Red head slapped a fresh magazine into his weapon and snarled, “You tell me, Big Man! They either want you bad enough to die for it, or they are expecting… Oh shit!”
Roland Figured it out at the same time he did: reinforcements. Gang skirmishes in the Woo were often brief affairs, consisting of sporadic exchanges of gunfire between two groups. With both courage and ammunition in short supply, both sides were often quick to retreat. As rare as a prolonged shootout in Big Woo was, thugs getting reinforced in the middle of one was unheard of.
“You in some serious shit, Big Man!” Red Head spat, and put more fire into the alley as another dozen hunters pushed into the alleyway. The return fire increased in intensity, and Red Head had to dive below the car as something big and fully automatic hammered their position. Screaming metal and a shower of sparks pinged off of a nonplussed Roland.
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