Roger knew his next question was the important one.
“Why me? I know outfits like yours. You must have an entire crop of professional paramilitary types you could use. Why pick me?”
Fox’s sales-pitch face fell into a more serious configuration, “Because our records show that you are the most augmented human alive, Mr. Dawkins,” Roger was not in the least surprised by this fact. He had spent a lot of money on augmentations over the years. Roger searched for signs of deception in the other man’s body language. He needn’t have bothered, as Fox answered without subterfuge, “therefore you are the most likely to survive the process.”
Roger’s eyebrows rose, “Most likely, huh?” He considered for a moment, “‘Most likely’ is not the same as ‘likely’ though, is it? What are the actual odds?”
Fox smiled again, “Oh, we think your chances are quite good, in fact…”
Roger cut him off before the prevarication could continue, “Probability has a numerical value, Mr. Fox. Any answer other than a number is a lie. Please answer with a number.”
Fox’s face went blank, and his response was flat and expressionless, “Thirty-five percent, plus or minus two.” Apprehension tightened Fox’s jaw and drew his mouth into a taut line.
Roger decided to end his suffering, “One in three, huh? For the right pay? I’ll take those odds.”
“Your compensation will be very impressive, I assure you,” the tension evaporated from Fox’s neck and jaw and the oily smirk returned.
But Dawkins couldn’t let him all the way off the hook, “My compensation was already ‘very impressive,’ Mr. Fox. We don’t have a deal unless my compensation becomes…” he paused for effect, “… ‘ludicrous’…”
Fox frowned ever so slightly before the smile came back, “That can be arranged.”
Chapter Fifteen
Roland’s code name in the Golem program had been “Breach.” All his squad’s call signs corresponded to their roles within the team. The group had consisted of “Lead,” “Comms,” “Scout,” “Sneak,” and “Breach.”
So, the designation was descriptive: When they had to breach a bunker or building, the squad would send in Roland first. Breaching was dangerous work. Doorways and other access points were referred to as ‘fatal funnels’ in the military world, because they were choke points where a small number of hostiles could hold off a large number of assaulters by pouring gunfire into the smaller target area of the funnel. This meant that for most of his service with the squad, Roland’s job, quite simply, was to absorb incoming fire.
Roland had gotten this dubious honor for a specific technical reason. A massive man before getting injured on Venus, Roland’s nervous system had no problem assimilating to endless layers of armored muscles and reinforced skin. His body and nervous system could handle more protective mass than any other candidate, and his designers used this as an excuse to push the envelope for how much techno-organic armor they could stack onto a single humanoid frame.
Being enormous was Roland’s natural state, so this turned out to be a staggering quantity of armor. The extra mass and bizarre proportions did not cause any insurmountable dyskinesia when his new body came on line. It’s why his chassis had more reinforcement than any of his squad mates, and how his proportions ended up far more exaggerated.
While his armoring-up had been a success, there were a few cons to balance out all the pros. From the squad-level tactical perspective, Roland was practically invulnerable. He was by far the toughest and strongest member of a squad composed entirely of superhuman cyborgs, which was no small thing to be. He was also slower, heavier, and much more conspicuous than the other team members; and he burned through energy at twice the rate of his squad mates. In that parking lot, on this day, he had no issues with these trade-offs whatsoever.
What he had, was a fatal funnel in need of breaching. That was a problem with a solution he understood. It felt good to be back in comfortable territory again.
The bounty hunters remained twelve in number, and were again pressing forward from the alley. At least one of them had an electro-magnetic automatic rifle, and it would periodically spew bursts of steel-shredding aluminum and tungsten projectiles at them. The sheer volume of incoming metal rain would chew the barrier of cars to pieces if it wasn’t handled in short order.
Roland wasn’t sanguine about the thought of tanking incoming fire from a weapon designed to carve up vehicles. On the one hand, he was at least 95% certain it couldn’t do much more than cosmetic damage to his body. On the other hand, his head was not quite so durable. He would have rather not had to take the chance under any circumstances.
I should have brought the damn helmet, was his silent rebuke. Not bringing the helmet along was an unforgivable lack of foresight. He just hadn’t thought it would be necessary for a thing as simple as a quick trip to see Marko. The level of this conflict was escalating far faster than he would have thought possible. His strategic analysis of Lucia’s situation appeared be inaccurate on multiple levels. He would need to adjust his tactics moving forward.
But there was good news, all strategic blunders aside. That alley was nothing more than a choke point, and he was built specifically to breach choke points. Time to go to work, he thought with a mental shrug. With a practiced psychological trigger sequence, he kicked his reflexes up as fast as his neural enhancements would go. He doubted he was as fast as Lucia, but unlike Lucia, his body wouldn’t tear itself apart if he moved at top speed. His fifty-mile-per-hour charge at the alley was in no danger of harming him.
With time dilated as much as his brain could handle, his approach still felt like slow plodding. His feet pushed on the ground with enough force to drive his toes through the asphalt and leave divots where the soles of his reinforced combat boots struck. He was two strides into his charge before the first incoming rounds hit him, and he watched in absent disinterest as the ricochets spawled off his chest in showers of slow-moving sparks. By the fourth stride, every bounty hunter in the alley was pouring fire into him as fast as they could work their triggers. It sounded to Roland’s warped perceptions like popcorn or a burgeoning rain shower, which meant it had to be an indecipherable roar to anyone not operating at five times human response speed.
The pistol and sub-machine gun projectiles flowed off of him like water droplets, and the only things Roland could feel were the heavier and sharper impacts of the big automatic rifle. By his sixth stride he was at the alleyway and into the first row of bounty hunters.
He hit the group without slowing or missing a step. His nine-hundred-and-forty pounds hurled gunmen back and into the air like straw in a hurricane. Human bodies thwacked into the concrete walls with dull claps and dropped to the ground while bones snapped like kindling under the booted feet of the hurtling cyborg. Roland stopped his forward motion by driving his heel into and through the asphalt deck and skidding to a stop twenty-five feet past the knot of gurgling and gasping hunters. His foot tore a furrow in the ground the whole distance and trenched a full twelve inches down before spending all his momentum.
Dust and debris was still settling when he spun a brisk turn on his heel to bring Durendal to bear on the alleyway. With the walls containing his prey, and the group still scattered and disoriented from being battered by his charge, there was no need for precision aiming. Roland smirked in anticipation and squeezed the trigger.
Durendal roared in a full-auto blast of noise and fire that Roland worked back and forth in a brisk arc traversing the breadth of the alleyway. A horizontal rain of steel beads tore through his enemies at ten times the speed of sound, slapping them back down to the ground and tearing fresh gasps and screams from the churning mass. The beads moved so fast they ignited from air friction, leaving white-hot tracks across their flight paths and trailing smoke from their impacts.
For most of the doomed hunters, their armor only slowed the large projectiles. Even when it blunted the impacts, the ceramic plates couldn’t cover everything. The glowing be
ads hurt and maimed no matter where they struck and any hunter still standing went down under the storm of pellets. Hunters caught scrambling to recover from the charge were driven back down by the barrage of gunfire and the flailing of their teammates. The narrowness of the alley turned the affair into a thrashing, twisted nightmare of bloody limbs and broken bones. But Roland wasn’t finished yet.
The bolt locked back on the empty HV-bead section of the magazine, and a small red light indicated that the weapon was no longer in battery. He thumbed the selector to flechette and waited the quarter second it took for the carriage to index the next section of the magazine. The light flashed green as the bolt slid back into battery, and the weapon was hot again. Then the grim giant revisited the sprawled mass of hostiles with his eight remaining rounds of armor-piercing needles.
These he took a little more care with, trying to get each round center mass on each hunter. He had forgotten that he was still on full-auto, though, and he ended up wasting three rounds sawing a single hunter in half with an unintended burst that did all but bisect the unfortunate target at the waist. Most flechettes would pass through its victim and often wounded a second before its energy was depleted and it lodged in some poor hunter’s anatomy.
The red light came on again and Roland indexed the last loadout: High-Explosive. He paused at the blinking green light and thought about conserving these powerful rounds for possible later use. The rumination lasted an interminable one sixteenth of a second. Then he was stroking the trigger as fast as he could identify targets.
Every single hunter had an injury of some sort or another, many grievous. At least half their number was dead already. To his accelerated perceptions, the mass of bodies writhed and pulsed like a colony of bleeding snakes rolling over each other trying to escape the assault of some implacable predator.
When Roland dropped the HE on them, the alleyway erupted into a cyclone of fire, shrapnel, blood, human body parts, and death. As the bolt clicked out of battery for the last time, Roland did not even bother to reload. He holstered Durendal in a smooth motion and surveyed the destruction he had wrought. He examined the results with a skilled workman’s satisfaction.
The alleyway was destroyed. It was an unrecognizable wasteland complete meter-wide craters in the ground and man-sized holes in the walls where the explosive rounds had struck. Jagged rubble and lengths of bent rebar edged the ragged gaps where brick and mortar had been destroyed. It left them looking like horrible oblong mouths with crooked metal teeth. Body parts and charred pieces of cracked body armor littered the ground where sobbing lumps moved under the tattered remains of dusty leather coats. Smoke billowed from several small fires and the smell of ozone and burning bodies threatened to choke anyone who came near.
The coughing, moaning, and gurgling of the of the surviving bounty hunters were the only sounds one could hear, until Roland stomped back through the alley with footfalls like distant thunder. He stopped in the middle of the mess of charred flesh and body parts to cast his appraising gaze over the grisly tableau. None of the bounty hunters would walk out of here, and many would never be identifiable even in death. After a moment’s searching, he spied what he was looking for and took one step over to the wall where he reached down into a mass of wounded men.
His hand came up clutching a wheezing, broken bounty hunter by the neck. The tall, gaunt man was bleeding from a dozen wounds, and his left arm was limp dead weight at his side. His face was a shredded mass of burns and scrapes, and his breath came in a wheezing cadence that did not bode well for his longevity. Roland propped the mess of a man against the wall of the alley and glared at him.
The bounty hunter slid boneless down the wall into a seated position where a paroxysm of coughing sprayed blood and foam on Roland’s pant leg. Roland growled, “Who?” in a voice rumbling with menace.
The wounded bounty hunter gasped a clipped response, almost inaudible even to the man standing directly over him, “Chill, man. I’ll play ball. It ain’t nothing personal to me. Just tryin’ to get paid!”
Roland understood. Honor had always a moving target in the Woo. In this part of town, loyalty to the boss was always proportional to the survivability of the job you were asked to do. The survivability of this caper had just gone to near-zero and thus went the loyalty. It was a pragmatic consideration and justifiable: As much as this guy wanted to make money, he sure as hell did not want to die in an alley doing it.
“Word came down from Marko…”
Roland cut him off with a growl, “I know already. Who wants her?”
The bleeding man smiled weakly, “As if I’d know. Or care…” he coughed, “… Marko knows who. He knows you’re comin’, Tank-man.”
Roland was surprised and more than a little concerned that the man knew who he was. He supposed that if Marko had brought this guy in, then Marko may have read him in on Roland before sending him out. It would explain the reinforcements. Marko only knew Roland by reputation and professional services, not about his past or capabilities, which also explained the woeful inadequacy of said reinforcements.
A niggling question asked itself over and over again at the back of his mind. It had been bothering him from the start, and the answer was still elusive. Why had Marko been so certain that Roland would be part of this? Did Marko know about the connection between Donald Ribiero and Roland? That was impossible. If Marko had that kind of intel, he’d have sent tougher people.
The man tried to laugh again, but it degenerated into more tortured hacking, “… Marko is all kinds of fired up about this shit. Something real big is going down. Marko wants that girl and you out of here, and he sure as shit don’t care how it gets done.”
The man’s eyes sparkled a little, “There’s so much goddamn money in this, Marko’s got pressure from everywhere.”
“How many more are hunting right now?” Roland pressed.
More hacking laughter, “Fuckin’ all of them, Tank. Everyone. Every crew, every freelancer, everybody planetside and some fucking frontier muscle, too. New guys from Thorgrimm Station and Galapagos coming in from the Enterprise gate tomorrow morning, man. Hardcore mercs,” he spat more blood. It was frothy and bright. Punctured lung, thought Roland, he’s in bad shape.
The wounded hunter continued, his face contorting into a wry grimace, “That’s why we hit you so fast, man. Once those psychotic fucks get in on the action, we were never gonna see that bounty. Fuckers just kill every one and don’t give a shit how much mess they make.”
Roland could not help but concur with that assessment. He was very familiar with variety of individuals who ended up as frontier mercenaries, and they all fell into a very specific category of sociopath. Things just kept getting worse. It was not possible that off-world muscle could be here by tomorrow, unless they had been summoned before Roland had ever encountered Lucia. Two days, minimum, Roland figured, and goddamn Galapagos mercs, to boot.
The Thorgrimm group was at least professional paramilitary. They were ruthless, but they were as ethical as anyone in that business could be. They followed the rules of engagement at a minimum. The Galapagos guys however, were just well-armed animals. Roland had dealt with them before, and it had not gone well for either side.
How had Marko gotten this far ahead of Roland? How was it that everyone knew Roland would be in this mess before he did? Pieces of the puzzle clicked together in Roland’s mind: Bounty jobs in Dockside and the Woo almost never called for off-world professionals. Somebody had known serious heavies would be needed for this job. Worse, they had known it before Roland ever knew there was a job going on. Which meant that whoever put the bounty on Lucia had arranged for high-level muscle to be available before the word about it ever hit the street.
The pieces were coming together, but the big picture was still blurry. Somebody had laid a trap for Donald Ribiero and planned well in advance for dealing with Roland Tankowicz. What didn’t add up, was that the teams sent so far had been woefully inadequate for that job. If someone from P
roject Golem was behind this, they’d have known to send heavier weapons and better teams. One look around the alleyway at the more than a dozen dead bounty hunters was all it took to eliminate Marko and the Combine from the list of potential suspects. They had a stake in this game, no question about that, but they weren’t the ones behind it.
There was also the unexplained presence of a high-dollar hit squad at a dive bar in Dockside last night to consider. Marko’s boys were low-rent compared to that crew, which further reinforced that Marko didn’t know what Roland was, and the real antagonist did. That is what Roland assumed had led to the issue of the inbound mercenaries.
That left some very uncomfortable realties on the table. Somebody had kidnapped Project Golem’s top biotechnologist and put a multi-million cred bounty on his daughter. This party had also shipped three teams of high-end hitters from all over the galaxy to get her. That alone told him that there was an excellent chance this person or persons knew all about Roland and his past.
This someone was also making moves on Combine turf, unsanctioned. The androids and augmented goons at the Smoking Wreck were proof of that. Ergo, whoever was behind this didn’t care about pissing off the Combine.
There were only a few possibilities left to consider when one measured all these factors as a whole. None of those boded well for Lucia Ribiero. His list of suspects now consisted of Military contractors, Giant biotech Companies, The Army, or ‘Unknown.’
Every new bit of intel widened the scope of the operation in ways that were not good for Roland and Lucia’s hopes of success, and the only real conclusion that Roland could draw was that it all added up to more evidence that he still knew very little about the emerging situation. He needed to get in front of what was going on if they expected to survive this. He needed to get to Marko without getting Lucia killed.
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