Lucia stomped a push kick into the chest of a fourth attacking man, which stopped his momentum cold and widened his eyes. This gave her enough time to score two direct hits with her reinforced fists on his jaw. The gloves left bloody streaks and scorch marks across his cheeks, but the unconscious man wouldn’t know that until he woke up much later.
The final man, still not understanding what was going on, had just started to raise his pistol at the speeding woman. Lucia streaked over and grabbed his gun arm at the wrist, extending it away from his body. Then she drove her gauntleted fist into his exposed armpit, sending tendrils of electric agony directly to the poor fool’s heart.
All five men hit the ground within one second of each other and Roland’s internal clock said the whole exchange took just two-point-eight seconds. Roland did not think that sort of thing was possible without physical augmentations, but he didn’t get the chance to ponder it for long.
There was a scream behind him, and Roland turned to see McGinty’s driver yanked into the air and slammed down into the floor with a sickening splat. As life and blood oozed out of the poor man, Roland got a good look at his attacker.
It looked like a robot or a piece of heavy equipment. Which in a way, it was both. It was close to ten feet tall, and at first glance could have passed for any other piece of large industrial apparatus. It was nominally bipedal and had it had two arms after a fashion. Both the legs and arms were just a mass of large, articulated and reinforced hydraulic joints and actuators, though. The legs seemed too short, or perhaps the arms were too long, but either way, it looked like a huge, mechanical simian. Each arm terminated in a three-fingered claw, similar to the Dwarf’s arm, but much larger. Where the machine’s ‘chest’ would have been sat a spherical canopied cockpit framed by a heavy reinforced chassis. Through that screen, Roland could see the head and upper torso of a scrawny bald man connected to various panels by tubes and wires and lit by the blue-green glow of screens and dials.
Roland had seen similar things off-world; on mining colonies, especially. When a miner was hurt or injured on the job, the big corporations would sometimes offer to augment the aggrieved party with cybernetic enhancements that benefited the company. They would give the biggest raises and benefits to the employees willing to be turned into heavy machinery, simply because it was cheaper and more efficient that buying the heavy machinery and hiring new employees. These volunteers were not given new limbs, but instead attached to a piece of equipment called an ‘armature’ designed for an industrial purpose. The pilot’s quality of life did not factor strongly into these designs, but they got to live and work and make a bunch of money. Most people took the deal when offered.
Roland was looking at an industrial-class heavy cyborg, with an armature probably rated for the harshest environments the galaxy could offer.
Roland’s tactical assessment was unnerving. That thing was heavier and almost certainly stronger than he was. Its builders looked to have been rather liberal with structural reinforcement and durability modifications, as well. A closer look revealed that at some point ballistic armor had also been added to the chassis. It wasn’t unheard of for licensed industrial ’borgs to turn to the far-more-lucrative world of freelance mercenary work, so Roland was unsurprised by this. It didn’t make him happy though.
The torso in the fishbowl cockpit grinned, “Roland goddamn Tankowicz! I’ve heard a’ you, man! You just went and got all the bigwigs pissed off, didn’t ya!”
The three-fingered clamps spun like propellers, whirring in a high-pitched squeal.
“You got a hell of a rep, man!” the face was young-looking, too young to have a complete armature like this. Whatever accident had taken most of his body had to have been horrific.
Roland squared off, and tried to stall for a little time to assess the massive machine in front of him, “Do I know you?”
The man in the machine looked disappointed, “I’m fucking Tom Miner, man! I’m famous.”
Roland chuckled, “Not here you’re not. Enceladus?”
That made the man smile, “Hell yeah! At first, but I’ve been all over the galaxy, now.” He beamed. The idiot seemed to think this was all a big game.
“You want to die here on earth?” Roland growled, shifting his weight to his rear leg, “Because if you get in my way, that’s what happens.”
“Big, bad, Tank man!” Miner laughed, “You definitely got some slick shit under the hood, man. I’ve seen some of the video feeds of you in action. But you ain’t never met anything like me.” The enormous arms and whirring claws waved in vague menace, “This is totally gonna seal my rep!”
Contrary to his opponent’s claims, Roland had seen things like Miner before. He had spent a hellish twenty days on Enceladus dealing with a rogue AI that had turned the mining robots into killing machines. It had been a brutal campaign. Mining equipment had to be some of the toughest hardware in the galaxy. If this really was an Enceladus mining ’borg, then Roland would have some serious work ahead of him.
Being indoors meant that HE from Durendal was a bad call. It would probably kill Lucia and there was no guarantee it would break anything useful on Miner. Flechette would punch holes, but tiny holes wouldn’t stop a mining bot, the damn things had so many redundant systems that he’d run out of ammo before slowing it down. Anti-personnel beads were a joke. Against a machine designed to mine asteroids in deep space, beads would be about as effective as a light drizzle. That really only left blunt-force trauma, and based on the size of the opposition, it would take a lot of blunt force to cause any real trauma. Roland stifled a sigh. This would definitely burn a percentage point or two off the ol’ power cell.
“Walk or talk. The only thing talking will give you a rep for is noise, son."
The face behind the glass grinned, “Let’s go for a walk, then!”
Both cyborgs moved at the same instant, and Roland was disappointed to note that Miner’s arms moved with blinding speed. He doubted that Miner had any neurological enhancements, they were too expensive and didn’t really enhance mining tasks. But, the brain in question wasn’t controlling a human body, either. If Miner’s brain coded a strike for maximum speed, then the armature would throw at its maximum speed, even if that was faster than the brain of the pilot could think. There was no organic nervous system in the mechanical pieces, so there was no reason to slow them down or use human nerve conduction.
The right arm of the mechanical monster thrust straight forward in a furious attempt to snatch Roland by the head or to strike the upper body. Roland’s speed was just sufficient to juke inside the path of the attacking limb, and he sent a right fist streaking toward the canopy.
But Miner’s left arm, travelling a millisecond behind the right, grazed his shoulder and sent the blow off course. Roland’s fist clanged off a reinforced section of Miner’s torso in a shower of sparks and a screech of strained metal.
Miner’s right arm had already begun a third blow, and even with his reflexes dialed as fast as they could go, Roland was caught by an arcing backhanded strike that lifted him off the ground and sent him flying.
Roland skidded to a halt forty feet from his opponent and looked up. Miner was re-orienting on Roland and the big chassis turned and lumbered toward the downed man.
Despite the setback, Roland had some valuable intel, now. His opponent had needed a second to re-acquire his target and to re-orient the chassis before continuing. If Roland wasn’t already running at his maximum temporal dilation, he may not have noticed the delay, but he caught it. Roland had brawled with enough cyborgs to know what that implied.
Tom Miner wasn’t controlling the chassis directly in the sense that Roland controlled his own body. Miner was sending pre-coded instructions to the frame with his brain. It was a cheap and efficient way to achieve superhuman levels of speed without having to jack up the entire nervous system. Numerous military drones and armatures employed the exact same system, and skilled operators could string multiple attacks and comp
licated maneuvers together the way a composer assembled a symphony out of different instruments and different notes.
Roland was confident that Tom probably had thousands of pre-coded attack patterns and reactions that he simply queued up and sent out as needed. Against ninety-nine percent of opponents, this would be more than adequate. Pretending that his lack of enhanced reflexes was going to make Miner an easy opponent was not the sort of tactical blunder Roland was known for.
He resolved himself to not be in that ninety-nine percent and sprang to his feet. Miner was far too big and heavy to locomote with any real speed, and Roland intended to exploit his advantage there.
He immediately ruled out a direct frontal assault, which irritated the man because that was his favorite approach with most things. Miner was just too strong to stand toe-to-toe with, so with some reluctance Roland elected to play a more strategic game. A game that took advantage of Miner’s pattern-based tactics.
At a run, Roland made his way to the truck that they had arrived in. It weighed somewhere in the vicinity of eight thousand pounds, so Roland took an extra quarter second to secure a good grip on the frame before flipping it as hard as he could towards the oncoming metal monster.
Eight thousand pounds was not terribly heavy by Roland’s standards, and the vehicle tumbled and rolled like a kicked beer can at Tom Miner. It shed parts like water droplets as it tumbled, but Roland didn’t notice that. He was already moving.
Inside the clear bubble, Miner keyed a standard defensive maneuver followed by a series of blows. The armature folded the arms over the canopy and braced the legs so the truck crashed into a two-ton armored wall. The truck did not fare well in the collision, and two subsequent swipes from gigantic metal arms tore the offending vehicle away and cast it to the side with contemptuous ease.
Miner’s cockpit lit up as sensors tracked and scanned for the target as soon as the dome was clear, but the target was moving. And man, could he move!
The chassis’ servos automatically reoriented to place Roland squarely in the center of the HUD. This was good because Tom was too busy queuing attack macros and building scenario trees to follow his opponent manually.
This Tank fucker is running some serious shit! Miner observed to himself, as strength, speed, armor, and reaction data popped up on the HUD. High-end military tech. It’s gotta be...
BANG! CRRRKSHHT!
A circular, spider-webbed crack formed in the canopy right in front of Tom’s face. At the center of the crack, lodged and suspended in the thick, transparent armor of the dome was a single flechette. Miner gulped in shock and scurried backwards to avoid follow-up shots.
Despite its size, Tom’s chassis was not ‘slow,’ per se. It had needed less than one full second to reorient on the darting black cyborg, but Tom Miner the man was saddled with reflexes that were only slightly better than average. So, while his body was oriented to the threat, Tom’s brain was too slow to code a response to Roland’s attack. Roland had exploited this delay to sneak an armor-piercing round past the arms and into the softest target available. The flechette failed to penetrate the bubble, but Tom Miner was rattled just the same.
Miner coded a defensive posture on instinct, using the arms to cover the canopy, while advancing towards Roland. He lined up four separate patterns and added them to the scenario tree based upon the new tactical information. Now a single arm would track Roland’s weapon hand automatically and protect the cockpit. It meant one less arm for attack, but it effectively shut down that particular strategy for Roland.
Roland observed the behavioral shift from his opponent and watched the left arm create a barrier between the barrel of his weapon and the canopy.
Clever, he conceded, but still playing into my hands. Roland was beginning to enjoy himself. He so rarely got to stretch his legs in a fight, and this scrap was feeling like the good old days. It wasn’t often he fought someone bigger and stronger than he was.
He held his ground and pumped rounds into the defending arm until Durendal’s flechette slot ran dry. The projectiles lodged and tore holes in the limb, but the damage would never be enough to shut that arm down. Sparks flew and coolant hissed in white gouts of vapor, but the arm stayed up and the monster kept advancing.
At twelve feet away, Roland holstered his weapon and charged. In that languid, underwater fashion he was accustomed to, Roland saw the big claw clench into a misshapen fist and accelerate towards his head. That is when he planted a right foot hard into the ground and pivoted as hard and fast as he could.
Waiting until Miner committed to a strike was a calculated risk. Once Miner’s armature started a pattern, things would happen faster than the pilot’s reflexes could follow. Miner relied on the speed of the armature and the cleverness of the selected attack to do the job because his brain couldn’t act fast enough to change in the middle. Roland was betting that he could switch tactics with enough alacrity to get some free hits in while Tom reacquired his target and keyed the next maneuver.
The armature, however, was every bit as fast as Roland was, so there was a very real element of risk involved. If Roland guessed incorrectly which direction to move, he was likely to receive the kind of hit that could crush a tank.
He just barely made it.
There was the impression of moving air as the giant metal arm cruised past Roland’s head with less than an inch to spare. Roland was past the first strike, and even though the second was already on its way, he wasn’t anywhere near where it would be in eight one-hundredths of a second.
As far as Roland was concerned, Tom Miner was swatting at empty air until he could reorient. In real time that was about three-quarters of a second later.
Or an eternity if you are Roland Tankowicz.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lucia had kept herself busy during the frantic opening moments of Roland’s battle with the giant machine. She first went to McGinty’s driver to see if she could help, but the oozing mass of bloody bone shards and gray matter where the man’s head had once sat precluded the administration of the limited first aid at her disposal.
The horrified woman refused to retch or even acknowledge her disgust with the display, because that was what let the fear in, and the fear would accumulate until it shut her down. She could feel that terror. It was ever-present and hungry, waiting for her focus to slip if only for an instant. Lucia beat back her fear and poured her focus into the simple tasks of the moment. This kept her hyperactive brain from running all the potential horrors of the situation through her head at ten times the speed of anyone else’s. She was learning that if she filled the frantic traffic jam of her thoughts with productive scenarios, the non-productive versions stayed in the background.
It was how she had handled the five men outside of the van. She had observed them, evaluated them, and formulated at least five different plans for taking them out in the first instant.
And then she had moved. It was so different when she moved now. Her body knew where to step, how much pressure to apply, when to turn, and exactly where to put a strike so far ahead of the moment she actually had to do it, that the whole thing felt leisurely. Like she was cheating. Fighting five regular men had felt like fighting five people trapped in gelatin.
Lucia reveled in the fact that she was unlocking the secret power of her brain and body. If she put all the thoughts into the solving a problem, all her enhanced cognitive speed and bandwidth went into finding solutions for that problem. The trick, she had found, was to focus on the solutions themselves, not the problems. Her imagination and training did the rest.
So, when four more men in black armor and harnesses came skidding in through the man door next to the bay door, Lucia was on them instantly. She struck four times in half of a second, and the gauntlets put two of the men down before they even saw her. Lucia was confused for a moment by the two remaining men not going down, but then she realized what had happened. She had struck too fast, and the gloves hadn’t had enough time to recharge. With casual
ease she dodged a counter punch from one man and grabbed the gun hand of the other, long before he could bring the muzzle to bear on her.
Her leg snaked out and her heel dug deep into the ensnared man’s guts, folding him in half and leaving the gun in her hand as he fell. With a twist of the hips and a pivot on the balls of her feet, she turned and slapped the pistol from the other man’s hand before serving him with an elbow to the cheek.
Her gauntlets were back up, and each man got a blow to the skull, blasting them into unconsciousness with terrible efficiency.
Blood was roaring in her ears when she looked back on Roland to see the big man locked in a terrifying ballet of nuclear-powered cyborg war machines.
The colossal mechanism’s arms windmilled in giant circles, smashing chunks from the concrete floor and hurling debris like shrapnel. Clawed fists smashed crates and dug furrows with every floor-shaking impact. Meanwhile Roland, looking small and thin in comparison, darted between them to slide behind the giant. It seemed to Lucia that Roland had endless seconds to react from there as the misshapen metal monster appeared helpless to stop its own frenzied smashing. It looked like Tom Miner had forgotten about Roland and declared war on the floor of the warehouse instead.
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