The mercenaries were another reason that law enforcement would have to play a role. The permits and charters for operating Earthside required that all operators be subordinate to local law enforcement. Nobody was sure if the Galapagos crew would lose any sleep over the rules, but it was a foregone conclusion that Pike’s Privateers wouldn’t risk losing their charter over any single job.
If they got their timing right, there was a solid chance they could avoid fighting the mercs at completely. Which, Roland conceded, would be a nice thing.
The building itself was unremarkable. It was a twenty-story office building that had been re-purposed for laboratory space and some light manufacturing. The need to keep its purpose secret had precluded Corpus Mundi from using heavy fortifications or employing excessive security. That was helpful, but no one seriously expected the place to be undefended.
McGinty had not been exaggerating when he bragged about the skills of his smugglers. In just six hours they gained a ridiculous quantity of intelligence on the facility and its occupants. The sheer bulk and detail of what they had assimilated made Roland want to go update all his own security procedures immediately.
The smugglers were confident that the fifth floor was where Donald Ribiero was being held. By hook or by crook, the two had gotten their hands on some security camera footage that showed the Doctor being led to and from a room on that level regularly. Lucia had gasped when she saw it; Donald was looking old and frail in the video, a far cry from the vital man she had seen only three days prior. Roland couldn’t think of anything else to say other than, “We’ll get him out.” Her look of icy resolve indicated that she would do her part, which is a thing Roland had never doubted in the first place.
The building was part of a larger office park, which had a perimeter wall that was more decorative than defensive, and four gates for access and egress. Corpus Mundi had purchased the whole office park, and the combination of privacy and access to the less-well-patrolled suburb of The Sprawl meant that illicit supplies could be brought in from many different places with little to no risk of detection. The smugglers, it seemed, knew of the more common methods for achieving this. The most viable of those was accessing the maintenance tunnels that began at the North gatehouse and ran to every building. Trucks and transports bearing office supplies and mundane sundry items could pull in and appear to unload at the North Gate’s receiving docks. Normal-looking dock crews would offload regular supplies and contraband at the same time, right under everyone’s noses. The normal supplies would go to receiving, and the illicit goods got whisked underground to find their way to the black site building.
This was the obvious infiltration point; but there were several problems with that. First of all, Roland was too big to hide as office supplies. Stuffing him in crate worked for major cargo movement, but no one was going to believe that the office park needed so many styluses or trash bags that a container the size Roland would require would go unnoticed. Never mind how they would explain the weight.
Second, Roland was impossible to shield from scans. His mass and density alone meant that unless he was especially shielded, the lowest-ranking security guard in the world would spot him in seconds with a cheap handheld scanner. This facility had layers of scanning and security checkpoints that Roland was simply never going to get past.
The smugglers had been very disappointed when they saw Roland for this reason. One look at the size and mass of the man had dashed their hopes of slipping him in under the radar, making the whole job a lot more complicated.
“Infiltration has never been in my wheelhouse,” he apologized, “I was designed for a different role.”
Roland spared a wistful thought for Alicia Walker, or “Sneak” as she had been designated in his old team. She’d have been in and out in seconds, he mused to himself, and they’d never even know she was there. But Walker was dead, and could not help them.
Now, Lucia, on the other hand, was a different story.
“Can you climb?” they had asked her.
“Like a squirrel,” she said, “only faster.” It was a brag, but based upon what she had done at Umas, Lucia was confident the could out-climb anyone in that room.
Three hours, four pots of coffee, and two spirited arguments later, the plan came together with three major elements:
Roland breaching the gates because that was the only thing he could do. Smuggling Lucia inside during the chaos because she could move through the building faster than anyone. Finally, the timely arrival of law enforcement so they did not have to fight the two teams of mercenaries that would almost certainly show up if this took too long.
That last bit was going to be the trickiest element, but a crucial one. There was a ‘right’ amount of speed and noise for getting this job done without taking casualties, and they would need to walk that tightrope with all the care of a circus acrobat. If they made too much noise too early, Donald Ribiero would get moved to another location, and they would have to start all over. If they didn’t make enough noise, Roland would have to face down at least one elite squad of heavily armed mercenaries. In a pinch, they could call the police themselves at any time and bug out, but that defeated the purpose of the operation if it happened before securing Donald.
The smugglers would get Lucia to the basement of the building undetected, employing a complicated dance of bribes, forged documents, and intimate knowledge of Corpus Mundi security procedures and codes. She would await Roland’s signal from a storage locker adjacent to a lift tube. When the time came, she was to slip up the tube’s maintenance shaft and get to the fifth floor.
Once Lucia had secured her father, Roland would either exfiltrate or arrange for the police to arrive, one way or the other.
They decided on a nighttime raid, to keep the numbers of civilians and non-combatants in the area to a minimum. The security force would be the same, but at least this way Roland would not have to pull his punches on this run. Roland would rather fight powerful opposition with no risk of collateral damage than a weak opponent in a crowd of innocents. For Roland, pulling his punches was much more complicated than maximum output.
Thus, it was that same evening, after a quick rest and some food, that Roland stood in the back of a shielded delivery truck used by the smugglers to block scanners. He prepared himself mentally for what was about to happen, an old routine from his days in the Army. His mind played the script in his head as distinct individual moments in the overall procedural.
As soon as he stepped outside of that truck, every scanner on the street was going to light him up as both an augmented human and a cyborg. Since all his enhancements were licensed and legal, this would not cause an alarm or call for the police.
But every building in Uptown had their own scanners, too. When spying devices could be built into an eyeball, or superhuman cat burglars were walking about; smart businessmen and women scanned everyone who came through their doors. There wasn’t a building in Uptown that was going to let Roland Tankowicz through their lobby without a serious security check if at all. If anyone familiar with Project: Golem was looking, there would be no doubt as to who it was that had come knocking.
Roland’s job was simply to charge the gate, smile for the cameras and smash his way in. His goal was to get as much security response pointed at him as possible so Lucia could get to her father unmolested. Since Roland blasting his way through the front door is exactly what people expected him to do, it wouldn’t raise any suspicion at all about their ace in the hole. The trick was going to be looking convincing without wrecking the whole place outright.
The plan hinged upon this, because no one should be looking for anything else at that point. Corpus Mundi did not know that Lucia was there, or that she was augmented. That gave them an edge.
When Lucia signaled for exfil, Roland would start really cutting loose, which in short order would bring the police into the equation. When the police arrived, Roland and the Ribieros would exfiltrate, or Roland would extract himself and le
t the Police take custody of Lucia and Donald Ribiero.
He took a breath out of habit and picked up his helmet. The protective head covering was a simple affair; a black and form-fitted skull cover, with a blank silver-white faceplate that slid down and locked into the chin bar and gorget. His eyes would see through two small, lensed slits shaped like upside-down acute triangles set deep behind the contoured nasal bridge and under the heavy brow plate. When it was on and secure, the helmet covered his entire face and neck, leaving no part of him unarmored.
It settled on his head like an old friend. It smelled of plastic, and the displays lit up as soon as he pulled the faceplate down and locked it into place. A menu of diagnostics popped up, indicating the status of his various onboard systems.
His ShipCell was at 98.9%. He liked to keep it above 99%, but too much activity over the last few days and not enough recharge time was showing. Armor integrity was 100%; no surprise, there. Nothing he had been hit with over the last few days had been too intimidating. Musculature and skeletals were showing very minor damage. The nanobots could not fix all the leg strain from his fight with Tom Miner yet, but it was nothing that was going to affect his performance in combat. Much.
It had been a long time since he had worn the helmet. Strapping it on made him feel like a soldier again. He had liked being a soldier, before the Golem program had made that a living hell, and watching the menus scroll and the scanners relay information back made him feel good.
He shrugged yet another of his army-surplus jackets on to cover Durendal in its holster. Not that concealment mattered. With the helmet on, he was an inhuman looking behemoth; skull-faced and towering. Nobody was going to let him in anywhere, armed or otherwise. But old habits die hard, and he felt weird walking around Uptown with an exposed weapon.
With a last mental check of his gear and person, he sighed and grasped the release handle of the smuggler’s truck. It was time to go.
Chapter Thirty
When his comm chirped just after midnight, Fox was still awake. Morose and agitated, he was sitting crumpled in an overstuffed chair in his living room and trying his damndest to finish a bottle of brandy all by himself. He took a perfunctory look at who was calling and swore in vehement exasperation when he saw it was Johnson.
He was too drunk and too stressed to deal with whatever banal inconvenience Johnson would claim was a catastrophe right now, so he kicked the call over to his auto-answer and returned to his Armagnac.
Sweet heat warmed his throat and settled in his belly like the comforting warmth of a mother’s love; and the florid, flustered man closed his eyes. He was a third of the way through the DeLord Recolte, and the dull, numbing detachment caused by expensive liquor was the only balm that soothed his frayed nerves. He was not a man prone to excess in any behavior as it was unbecoming someone who looked to lead a financial empire; but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to put a solid drunk on tonight.
He would deal with whatever-it-was that was bothering Johnson in the morning. Which is when he would also try to figure out how to pay 130 million credits to crime boss who wanted to kill him. Tomorrow, it appeared, was going to be a hell of a day. He refilled his glass and took another long sip.
Fox was not destined to continue with his brandy and his brooding in earnest, however. Fate granted him only a few precious few minutes to enjoy either before the comm chirped again. It seemed that Dr. Johnson would not be so easily rebuffed tonight.
What the fuck is he so worried about, now?
Fox considered sending this call to auto-answer as well, but gave up on that thought. If Johnson was in a mood to whine, then he would not stop until he got his chance. Best to get it over with.
“What?” he answered in his most irritated voice. He might as well set the tone for this conversation early. If Johnson was going to be whiny, then Fox would be cranky. It was only fair.
Johnson’s voice was not whiny at all. It was shrill and terrified. It was the voice of a man on the ragged edge of pure panic, and the tone of it sobered Fox in seconds.
“Breach is hitting the facility! Right now!” Johnson’s terror was a palpable thing, “He crashed the gate and is tearing his way through security right now!”
An icy knot formed in the pit of Fox’s gut. He and Johnson were the only two people at Better Man who had the background to comprehend all that meant, so they were the only two people who grasped the magnitude of the threat. Fox remembered vividly the progress data from Project: Golem, and he had seen some of the demonstrations. As a man who prided himself on objectivity and detachment, Fox wasted no time on best-case thinking. Breach was easily the most powerful member of a squad of already powerful cyborgs. An assault from any member of that team would have been a tactical challenge, but Breach was a force of nature. Everyone who had ever worked on Golem knew it as uncontested fact: If Roland Tankowicz wanted into your building, there was no practical way to stop him.
“How the fuck did he find us?” Was Fox’s first question, and he immediately realized it was a stupid one, and disregarded it, “Fuck that. Is Ribiero secure?”
While inarguably brilliant, Johnson was not a clutch asset in a crisis, and his stammered response was almost unintelligible.
“Y-yeah… yes. Still in his cell.”
That was a relief, at least. They were still in this game, for now. Losing Ribiero meant the end of the whole program. It was the only scenario that concluded with a total loss, and Fox was invested in avoiding that outcome. He could handle the gangsters, the Company, and even the looming threat of a mob execution as long as they got the armature working in time to secure those contracts. Ribiero was the key to turning a bunch of regular grunts into super-soldiers, and in time they would get that recalcitrant pacifist to cooperate. Hundreds of billions of credits were on the line, and Fox was not going to let them slip away.
The pudgy man’s mind raced, “Johnson! You need to slow him down until we can get those psychos from off-world over there! Can you manage that?”
“I don’t think so! He’s halfway through the first floor already and we are losing security androids really fast!” The good doctor was attempting to sound like he wasn’t about to defecate himself, but the act was not convincing.
Shit! Fuck!
Fox knew that Johnson’s assessment was likely accurate. Breach used to train on security androids, and Fox had never noticed the big ’borg exerting himself too much in the process. Staffing the black site with a huge security contingent had been too much risk, so it was unlikely that anything Johnson had would do much more than irritate and delay Breach.
But that was exactly why he wasn’t sure if redeploying the talent was such a good idea, either. The mercenaries were at least an hour if not more from the compound, and introducing them to the fray would only get the site compromised. Better that then losing the whole project; but a firefight between Breach and a whole squad of elite mercenaries was not really a “winning” option either. It was a very unfortunate scenario indeed: All of Fox’s current options existed on a spectrum that ranged from ‘bad’ to ‘apocalyptic.’
He was desperate, and so he made a desperate play.
“Bring Dawkins online.”
“What?” Johnson sounded incredulous, then more confident, “Yeah. Yes. Yes, of course!”
Dawkins was not all the way up to spec yet, and he was still inexperienced with the armature. Even so, after a mere eight full hours of drive time the pair was already a powerful engine of destruction. The testing had gone far better than anticipated, and the man and his machine were operating at a level far surpassing any competitor’s numbers.
It was not his favorite idea. Using it now would reveal the project’s results before he was ready to present them to the board which was a sub-optimal outcome considering the state of the pilot. But using the Better Man Armature to stop Roland could also be the best press possible if spun with the right angle.
The state of the art model retiring the old and obsolete?
It’s a good hook, Fox conceded, I can make this work if I have to.
There was the inevitable issue of the armature not being able to perform without augmented pilots. It was unfortunate, but Fox could always stall deployment any number of ways and buy time to sort out the good Dr. Ribiero’s objections.
This could work.
It was not the best solution, and not the way he wanted this to unfold, but that was how it went sometimes. A good executive needed to be a flexible and bold problem-solver, and Fox considered himself a good executive.
“Get him up and running and have him secure Ribiero,” he paused and decided to add some insurance, “I’ll move the mercenaries into overwatch, but tell them not to engage without my order. If things inside go so badly that they need to jump in, getting the site burned will be the least of our problems.”
“Ok,” Johnson sounded calmer, which was good. Fox had lot of confidence in the armature, and Project: Golem tech was two and a half decades old at this point. Even with Roger’s relative inexperience, the machine was likely up to the task.
Fox closed the connection and sat up. He was going to have to deal with Johnson soon. He was brilliant, to be sure, but his other issues were beginning to become a liability. Once Ribiero was cooperating, Johnson could be phased out.
At least Ribiero has some goddamn balls, he mused.
Much of the confusion and fear Johnson was experiencing was borne of the fact that he was a small and petty man. Fox considered the issue: Genius? Yes. Essential? For now. Stable? Not so much these days.
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