Tankowicz hurled himself into the back of the armature and rained furious blows against the metal giant. Fists like black cudgels struck with staccato clangs so fast it sounded like the frantic ringing of an alarm bell. Though outweighed by several thousand pounds, Roland’s strikes were delivered with the flawless technique of a trained boxer and the full force of his synthetic musculature. Having spent many hours in the ring herself, Lucia could appreciate the sharp precision of those strikes. His monstrous opponent was caught off-guard and off-balance by the fury of the assault. A freight-train punch found the weakness of an exposed hip linkage, and the sound of wailing hydraulics was added to the din of combat as the huge machine lurched off balance. With an ataxic stagger, Miner pitched forward so hard he had to catch himself with his arms to keep himself from being hurled to the floor. This bought Roland time for another flurry of punches, which Lucia noticed now targeted those exposed hip joints. Sparks flew, and the strikes resounded like the crash of a triphammer in the warehouse.
Lucia had no idea how much punishment Tom’s armature could take, but it looked like Roland was trying to find out.
But it was not long before Roland’s moment of advantage passed. With the arms splayed outward, the top half of Miner’s chassis rotated 180 degrees and a whirling backhand connected with Roland’s hastily erected defensive block.
When that giant hand contacted Roland’s defending forearm, Lucia felt the impact from her molars to the soles of her feet even though she was forty feet away. The furious strength of the horizontal strike tore Roland from the ground and spun him away from the enemy in a disconcertingly flat trajectory. Lucia realized to her terror that her companion would hit the wall hard, and she could only hope he’d survive it.
Roland Tankowicz shared that hope as well.
Being aware of his flight speed and the inevitable result, he oriented himself such that he struck the wall with his feet first. He was nominally successful in avoiding a broken neck, but the impact drove him into the reinforced concrete of the wall with enough vigor to buckle it. His vision flashed white for an instant and he didn’t need the diagnostic readouts his helmet would have given him to know that real structural damage had been done to his legs. Roland could feel pain, albeit in a muted, abstract sort of way, and he acknowledged that while not severe enough to affect his combat efficacy by more than a point or two, he would definitely feel this hit tomorrow.
He could not afford himself the luxury of injury assessment though. As soon as the unforgiving wall finished arresting his flight and he had settled in a graceless tangle of limbs on the floor, Roland clawed himself to his feet. With exasperated determination, the black cyborg began a sprint directly towards Miner.
That, Roland knew, was going to be the key to winning this fight. Miner could act every bit as fast as Roland, but he could not react with the same speed. When Roland gave Miner the opportunity to act, Miner’s superior strength and size came into play and Roland went flying. When Roland forced Miner to react, he had lots of time to score hits; not to mention avoid the likely fatal situation of getting grabbed and held by those terrifying clamps.
Roland sped upon Miner from across the room, and Miner quickly coded a defensive macro that began with blocking Roland’s charge. When Roland saw the armature’s limbs cross in front to cover the canopy, he used his split-second reaction advantage to alter his angle of attack by just a few degrees, and transition to a low wrestler’s tackle. Instead of an earth-shattering collision with the canopy (which would have certainly resulted in Roland getting grabbed and pummeled), there was an oblique slide towards Miner’s right leg, which Roland scooped up in both arms like a wrestler.
Roland seized the enormous column-like right leg with both arms and yanked it from the floor. The machine tilted precariously, but the mining armature had sophisticated balancing gear. Though it wobbled, the hips and arms adjusted the center of gravity so it did not go down. Since no subsequent attack seemed forthcoming, Roland arched his back and yanked the leg to the side, dragging the machine sideways and splaying the entrapped leg like a wishbone. With a kick that sounded like a car accident, Roland knocked the base leg out from underneath the cockpit and the armature plummeted to the floor hard in a face-down tangle of ropy limbs and grasping claws.
The immense arms reeled around and the terrifying three-fingered clamps made frantic grasps at Roland like metal snakes. Unfortunately for the mercenary, Tom Miner did not have a defensive macro for this situation, so there was no coordination to the attack. Roland, still holding the leg, stepped hard on the hip joint of the armature and twisted the trapped leg with all his prodigious might. Miner instantly realized what Roland was attempting, and braced the arms against the floor, digging the claws deep into the concrete. He rotated the torso as hard as he could, trying to wrench the leg away from Roland’s vice-like grip. Roland planted his other foot on the floor hard enough to crack the cement, and twisted back.
For a moment, everything stopped moving. It was eerie and still if not exactly quiet. But there was only the sound of Roland growling through gritted teeth and clenched jaw, mixed with the whine of hydraulic actuators straining against some unfathomable force.
At peak output, Roland could press twenty tons over his head, and lift three times that from the floor. Tom Miner’s armature was made to survive multiple gravities, destructive accidents, and the unmerciful physical torture that is heavy mining off-world. For an instant, they were frozen in place as the two mighty machines opposed each other in a tense stalemate. It was unclear for several seconds which would prove the victor: Would it be the irresistible force, or the immovable object? Lucia held her breath.
But with slow, inexorable, tortuous finality, that leg began to twist backward. The thick column of metal began to groan in morose protest of its own unavoidable fate. It was a fruitless protest. With agonizing slowness, the captured limb continued to bend further and further until, with a shriek of capitulation and a shower of sparks, the hip joint surrendered and the leg came free of the armature. Coolant and hydraulic fluid sprayed in dramatic gouts not unlike blood from a severed artery.
Roland could not stop a feral, predator’s grin from stretching across his face.
I have you now, motherfucker!
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tom Miner was in a very bad position, and he knew it. The unit had no contingency for fighting with a missing leg, and his screens were lit up with a host of structural emergencies and diagnostic bad news. He quickly switched his focus to escaping, because Tom Miner knew when a fight was lost, and he damn sure wanted to live.
But Roland was having too much fun, now. The cockpit thundered and the screens flashed static as something struck from behind. Tom had to check the rear camera to see that Roland was wielding the severed leg with both arms like a massive club, and then another blow drove the mining ’borg’s cockpit back into the concrete.
Miner keyed a series of flails and kicks to move Roland far enough away to stop the battering. It was an ungainly and undignified spasm, but he got the armature into a three-limbed crawl that started him scrambling towards the door. He wasn’t sure what his plan was, but he knew he had to get away from that guy and fast. He keyed the radio for backup and hoped it could buy him enough time to eject the cockpit. Losing the armature would be a financial blow he may never recover from, but it sure as hell beat dying.
Then the left arm stop working and Miner couldn’t figure out why until he saw the eight-foot hulk smashing at the shoulder with fists like obsidian wrecking balls. He must have severed the control lines! Miner fumed and attempted to reroute the controls to get the arm moving again. His rig had multiple redundant systems, but Tankowicz was breaking things faster than he could fix them.
Roland took advantage of the appendage’s apparent shutdown to target several more vicious blows to its mechanical actuators before Tom swatted his antagonist away with the other arm. Miner took great satisfaction in how far the muscle-bound bastard fle
w before crashing into the wall with another impact that shook the ceiling.
His relief was short-lived. His onboard diagnostics indicated that even though the controls circuit was back up, the left arm would not be operable any time soon. Most of the mechanical apparatus was too damaged at this point. His left arm was now limp dead weight.
“Shit shit shit! Miner shrieked at his machine. With far too much haste, he keyed up several improvised movement macros to continue his flopping escape, but the increasing futility of the attempt was not lost on him. His frustration evolved into panic when he saw the big man leap up nonplussed from the rubble of his landing, and sprint right back at him.
What the fuck is this guy made of? Tom lamented to himself. He searched in desperation for an escape route that his crippled armature might survive, but he never got the chance because Roland was on him in a fraction of a second.
Down an arm and a leg, it was all Tom Miner could do to throw an arm between himself and Roland. He was far too slow, and Roland sped around the sloppy, off-balance defensive swat and rocked the armature back to the floor with a stomping boot to the chassis. As soon as Miner braced his good arm to lift the cockpit again, Roland clamped onto it with both hands around the elbow joint. Tom could only watch in fresh horror as the grim cyborg braced his right boot against the cockpit. He knew where this was going.
Fear and crushing despair took residence in the pit of his stomach as the ruthless mercenary gazed at the tread of Roland’s size 21 boot, pressed against the canopy so hard that thin cracks were radiating outward from the compression. A quiet whimper snuck past his lips as the onyx titan torqued his remaining arm further and further until the shoulder joint shrieked, snapped, and died. But there was nothing Tom Miner could have done to stop it. This wasn’t a man, it was an inexorable engine of destruction; and Tom Miner had plopped himself right in front of it. There was a grim finality to that final twist; then the useless limb tore free of its moorings and crashed flaccidly to the floor.
Miner didn’t even bother to thrash his remaining limb. The big son of a bitch would just tear that off, too. He was going to be in debt for millions getting the armature fixed if he lived through this. He considered ejecting the cockpit from the frame, but that would mean abandoning the entire armature, with no guarantee that the limited mobility of the escape pod would get him to safety.
So, he resorted to negotiation, “Shit! You win, man! You don’t gotta kill me!”
“Convince me not to,” Roland growled.
“I got reinforcements coming. I can call them off,” was the weak opening gambit.
Roland raised his pistol, and a woman Tom had barely noticed earlier chimed in. She was dressed in black tactical gear and perched over the downed bodies of five of Marko’s best men.
“Do they look like these guys?” She kicked the limp form of a man she had obviously dropped personally, “because that’s not much of issue for us, actually.”
Miner’s face fell and Roland growled again, “Call ’em off, anyway. I don’t want to have to kill everyone here,” he placed the barrel of that huge pistol against the canopy, directly in front of the terrified pilot’s face, “Then we are going to talk about the best way to get to Marko.”
Miner keyed a stand down order to the rest of the compound, but no one was convinced that would work for more than a minute or two. For the moment at least, none of the reinforcements outside were displaying excessive eagerness to step inside the war zone that the warehouse had become. Miner could only imagine what his battle with Roland must have sounded like to anyone outside.
Scared or not though, if Tom Miner didn’t walk out of there soon, somebody was going to come in looking.
“Good,” Roland grunted, “now where is Marko hiding?”
Miner really didn’t want to answer. Marko was the lowest ranking guy on the Combine board, but he was still a Board member. If anyone found out he had snitched on a board member, he was dead. But the barrel of Roland’s gun, pressed against the canopy less than twelve inches from his own face, was a much more pressing concern. Miner spilled his guts after only a few seconds’ musing, “He’s usually in his office, top floor of the main building,” he shook his head, “but he will have bailed out by now.”
“Just tell me where!” Tom miner was learning quickly about Roland’s lack of patience. The black cyborg grabbed the armature roughly by a piece of twisted shoulder mechanism and smacked the cockpit against the floor with a jumbled crash.
“Gahh!” Miner sputtered, as screens flashed and the harness holding his torso in place bit into his shoulders. “Cut the shit, man! Jeezis!” He sounded whiny, and Tom felt a moment of shame as his tone reminded everyone of the mercenary’s apparent youth.
“In two goddamn seconds I’m going to crack that thing like an egg, boy,” Roland’s irritation was not feigned.
The woman’s voice offered advice, “Just tell him, kid. Otherwise I’ll end up having to hose most of you off my boots later. He’s a real bitch when he gets like this.”
Miner gave up, “He’ll be in his panic room. It’s under the cafeteria in the admin building. It’s the big gray one near the main entrance. Now let me go, man!”
“What do you think, boss?” Roland looked to the woman in black armor. He never loosened his grip on the broken mechanical monster.
The terrifying woman sniffed and affected an air of benevolent nonchalance, “Good enough. Let him go, Tank.” Tom did not understand who this chick was, but he made a mental note to steer clear of her in the future. If she could pull this bastard’s reins, Tom wanted no part of what she could do to him.
“You’re lucky,” Roland growled in a deep, guttural snarl as he dropped his defeated opponent. Tom didn’t feel lucky, but there was relief at not being dead and a small hope for salvaging his body.
“Oh!” he heard her call abruptly, “but make sure to pry him out of that thing, first. I don’t want him flopping around and getting bright ideas about calling Marko…”
Roland’s normally impassive visage split from ear to ear, “Yes ma’am!”
Tom Miner screamed…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Marko was pissed off. He was pissed off because he was nervous, which was as close to being scared as made no difference. Being scared was the one thing Marko hated above all others, and he was starting to think he might, in fact, be scared after all. But for now, he was going with ‘nervous.’
When the call came in that the truck was a Trojan Horse, he had scrambled two teams of enforcers and that idiot kid, Miner to action. Marko, citing strategic insight, had retired to the panic room to watch it play out in safety through the monitors. He was now questioning the wisdom of this decision.
Miner had radioed for back-up seven minutes ago and then sent the ‘all-clear’ three minutes later. That should have made him happy, but fifteen of his boys had gone into Building Nine, and not a damn one had come out yet. No one was on the comms, either.
The four guys with body cameras that he sent in to see what was going on had been taken out so fast that no information could be gleaned from the less than three seconds of video they had captured. Marko trusted his gut, and his gut said shit was going horribly wrong in there. He had a pessimistic gut.
Fatir was piping the live feed from outside the warehouse to his DataPad and everything looked very quiet right now. Way too quiet for the war that had to have gone on inside those walls.
The mob boss cursed himself for not putting a video feed inside Building Nine, but the damn thing got so little use it just seemed like a waste of money. Now he cursed himself for his legendary frugality.
Not that he had been all that cheap when it came to this bounty. Bringing Miner in had been something of a lark. The cyborg mercenary was already planetside for a refit, so his price had been less usurious than normal. Marko supposed that with the current bounty on that Ribiero bitch, he might need Miner’s horsepower to push other squads off the hunt. Now he was wondering if h
e shouldn’t have brought in even more heavy hitters.
Had Miner taken Tank down? Or was his expensive mercenary scrapped and all his boys dead? What was the story, here? He considered sending some of the guys guarding the admin building to check it out. He had twenty good, solid, goons on his personal detail, and maybe another thirty standing by to back up Miner if necessary. But discounted pricing aside, hiring the Mercenary ’borg had still cost a fortune. Marko was loathe to spend any more of his boys on a job he was paying someone else to do.
He stayed glued to his screen, batting potential scenarios around his imagination in a vain attempt to construct a believable reason for the deafening silence. Long seconds stretched into longer minutes. Marko’s anxiety continued to intensify.
Fatir’s voice over the comm was too loud, jarring Marko from his reverie and startling the big man far too much for his liking.
“Sir!” there was a very disheartening intensity in Fatir’s voice, a jagged edge of fear that that made each word rasp, “One of the men inside has reported in. Miner is down and unresponsive!”
Motherfucking shit! Marko thought to himself, well beyond ‘nervous’ now, “Where the fuck is Tank!”
Fatir was not calming down, either, “He left through the back of the building sir!” A pause, “He is heading for the admin building, sir!”
“I thought you were watching all the doors! How’d he get by you?” Marko knew he would not like the answer. Fatir was smart and competent, and Marko was not some comic book villain who punished underlings for things outside of their control. If Tank had gotten by Fatir, then there was a good reason.
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