Ordnance

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Johnson, deep down inside, was a fearful egghead who still hated the jocks and the punks. He had always been jealous of Roland’s athleticism and prowess, and now he was afraid of Dawkins because Dawkins was a bully and a sociopath. The scientist feared and resented both men because they each represented all the things he couldn’t be and were emblematic of the abuses the inconsequential scientist had endured as an egomaniacal nerd throughout his life. It was affecting the quality of his work, and Fox had noticed. If Fox could get the good Doctor to keep it together for the next few months that would be enough.

  Then he is out, Fox concluded with finality and emptied the glass of brandy in one gulp, better make those calls.

  Across town, sealed inside the command center of the black site, Warren Johnson wasn’t so sanguine about how things were going.

  He had been a senior design lead back in the Golem days and knew the specs better than anyone other than Ribiero himself. Against any other member of Golem, Johnson was confident that the Better Man system would prevail in a straight fight. Even without full nervous system symbiosis the armature was simply too well-built. It was stronger, faster and more durable. But Roland had always been a different animal. His chassis was almost as strong as the Better Man, and the man inside Breach was, Johnson had to admit, a ‘better man’ than his.

  Roger Dawkins was a fierce and competent fighter. That part was not in question. Johnson had seen him in action and knew with absolute certainty that Dawkins was a ruthless and relentless warrior. In the armature, he was a thousand times more so. The numbers spoke for themselves on that front. But Dawkins was also a bully and thug at heart. While physically the perfect candidate to pilot the armature, psychologically, he’d never have passed the first round of screening in Project Golem, and Johnson knew it.

  Roland, on the other hand, was a soldier’s soldier: determined, focused, unflinching. Johnson still had all the records from those years. Roland was a master of most weapons, a highly trained hand-to-hand fighter, and gifted with a good head for tactics. Improvements in the technology had been made in the intervening years, but that didn’t mean Roland was obsolete. Pretending that Roland was too old to challenge modern tech was a species of stupidity Fox might accept, but Johnson had been in weapons development his whole career. He knew better than to fall for that trap. He had seen enough weapons systems come and go in his time to learn a few things about war and warriors. When things got hard on the battlefield, a sharpened stick was still a dangerous weapon in the right hands.

  Johnson considered himself a very experienced stick-sharpener, and he was nervous all the same.

  Could Dawkins stop Roland? Johnson wasn’t so sure. Not with scientific certainty anyway. The armature was faster, stronger, and piloted by a man who was no slouch as fighter himself. As much as he admired Roland as a successful project, Dawkins was terrifying thing when he was mounted to the Better Man. His academic curiosity would have been highly piqued by the matchup if his own life wasn’t riding so precipitously on the outcome.

  As it was, he was just plain scared. With trembling fingers he initiated the pre-deployment procedures for the armature and started the process of waking Dawkins up. The stupid thug’s brain was so damaged from years of drug abuse and back-alley augmentations that they kept him in a chemical coma most of the time, just for safety. Waking him up took about fifteen minutes and getting him into the armature took another fifteen.

  He hoped he had that long.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Roland was a little disappointed in how easily he was breaching the facility. He had hit the doors at what was close to his full speed, and the reinforced transparent screens had exploded like so much sugared glass. His kinetic energy had been sufficient to carry him through the vestibule and into the security checkpoint with minimal loss of speed, and his landing had sent the kiosk and both security androids hurtling across the lobby like humanoid tumbleweeds.

  Alarms blared with the predictable intensity, and red flashing lights directed people to emergency exits. It was after midnight however, so there were no people in the lobby to be evacuated. Which was all to the good, Roland felt, considering how much damage he and the security forces were about to do.

  A brisk tumble across the lobby was not going to put down a good security android. These were proper security ’droids, not disguised man-hunters like the last time. Roland anticipated a spirited interaction with them.

  They were humanoid, but very little care had been taken to make them appear human. They were painted bright yellow and red, as the law said they had to be, and their faces were blank, expressionless analogs. Meant to be evocative of human features, it was apparent that making the faces expressive and friendly had not been a priority in the design.

  Roland was familiar with this model. It was one of the better ones; strong, tough, and fast. But nowhere near capable of challenging something like a Golem. The two ’droids charged him immediately after regaining their feet, and the first to meet him exploded in a shower of sparks and polymer fragments when a black fist the size of a melon tore through its torso.

  Arms, legs, and a smoking head flew past the towering cyborg as their momentum kept them moving despite the complete and utter destruction of the core. The pieces were still clattering to the floor when the second android got snared by the throat and hoisted high overhead. Limbs flailing, it was brought to the floor with all the force and weight at Roland’s disposal.

  The floor collapsed under the strain and the ’droid disappeared into the indentation it had made. Its head sheared off in a shower of blue sparks and the body jerked up to a sitting position, where it lurched like a decapitated chicken. Roland twisted his hips and kicked it like a soccer ball back out through the gap he had created upon entering. It struck the ceiling on its way and pinwheeled to the floor, shedding body parts as it skidded to a smoking, squealing stop in the vestibule.

  As he stepped further into the lobby proper, he spotted the lift doors on the far side. A security barrier had dropped, barring him from accessing these. Or they might have if they had been built to stop a thousand-pound military cyborg. They had not, and he swept the steel bars aside like so much tall grass.

  He wasn’t stupid, and Roland knew that destroying the gate would power down the lifts, but he wasn’t interested in using them, anyway. Shutting the lifts down would also mean that security reinforcements could not use them, either. There almost certainly were dedicated lifts for security somewhere in the building, but he had slowed any incoming guards, nonetheless. Which was the point; he was just buying time and making noise as per the plan.

  More security bots arrived from the far side of the lobby, armed with shock sticks. These baton-like devices were sized and set up to incapacitate regular folk. They’d even work on augmented threats, since there was no way to augment a biological against electrocution. But Roland was only 10% biological, and his chassis was rather non-conductive. The weapons were little more than sticks that tickled as far as he was concerned, and four ’droids with shock sticks would not tax his systems. Maybe if he wasn’t wearing the helmet he might have to work a little. Getting a shock directly to his head would probably have been very disorienting.

  With the helmet though, all he saw were targets. The HUD lit up with make, model, capacities and weaknesses of his opponents; and superimposed helpful targeting reticles over his adversaries’ weakest points.

  Roland drew Durendal and keyed up the targeting data, then activated the Press Point option. Holding the trigger down, he simply swept all four droids with the muzzle. The targeting software touched off flechette rounds automatically when the muzzle aligned with the area of each android’s torso that the helmet had designated as the power cell housing. Roland didn’t even have to squint; the helmet told the weapon when to discharge, so missing was impossible.

  In three quarters of a second, four armor-piercing flechettes drilled four neat little holes through four separate androids. Each hole was precise
ly five and a half inches left of dead-center on the torso.

  All four droids hit the floor at the same time, limp and lifeless.

  This is too goddamn easy, Roland griped, I don’t like it.

  They had never assumed that the building would be heavily guarded, but Roland had expected more than this. The big ’borg considered the possibility that it was just the first floor that was poorly defended. He decided to make his way up a flight to see if there was more mayhem he could cause up one level. Going too high would be counterproductive, since his job was to pull opposition away from the fifth floor, but this meager response could not represent the full commitment of the facility’s security forces. He needed to draw more fire if Lucia was going to have a chance to do her part.

  The lifts were out, but there were always stairs. He spotted the sign indicating the stairwell and moved over to it with brisk purposeful strides. Despite the staggering durability of his armored body, Roland always moved with care through a stairwell. They were tactical nightmares where enemies had the advantage of a choke point, lots of corners, and a height advantage. His habits were old and deeply ingrained, and he had never lost his respect for an enemy with the high ground.

  Roland kicked the door open and angled his view across the aperture. Never extending himself into the opening, he swept the entire doorway with his eyes, scanners, and muzzle from left to right. This gave him a wedge-shaped view of what was beyond without exposing him to fire, and that was why this technique had been called ‘slicing the pie’ for centuries.

  He was met by a sustained hail of incoming projectiles that shredded the doorway and ripped jagged holes in the surrounding walls. Plaster, metal, and plastic flew in all directions as something large and fully automatic pushed him back and away from the stairwell.

  Roland grinned a wan, feral grin, Thaaaat’s more like it, he thought, the first floor was just for show. The real shit is upstairs.

  It made sense. It would have been hard to keep up the façade of regular office building if too much security was visible. Sacrificing the lobby had always been part of their security plan, it seemed. Roland approved of the practicality of that strategy.

  Approval notwithstanding, Roland needed to get up those stairs. He contemplated just walking into the fire. Whatever was holding the stairwell didn’t look too nasty, but it was never solid policy to just tank incoming when you weren’t sure what it was. You only had to guess wrong once playing that game before you lost forever. Losing meant dying, and even worse, mission failure. Both were unacceptable outcomes as far as Roland was concerned.

  He keyed up infrared and magnetic overlays to the HUD and scanned the stairwell. There was good news and bad news in the readout. There were no biologicals in the stairwell which was good. But it looked like his obstacle was a Vogt Mobile Turret stationed on the landing.

  The Vogt company made fantastic hardware, and their Mobile Turret series of drones were extremely popular remotely operated area denial systems. With three radially mounted and individually driven wheels attached to a central axle on each side, and a low center-of-gravity, these devices could climb stairs and navigate both indoors and outdoors. Depending on the specific model, it could come equipped with 30-caliber auto cannons, 10mm HV bead, 20-mm anti-materiel, anti-armor flechette, or even beam weapons.

  It wasn’t 20mm at least, which as a relief. 20mm probably couldn’t pierce his hide right away, but constant bombardment from it would wear the armor out and smash his internals over any appreciable period of time. It wasn’t a beam weapon obviously, so he could relax on that front.

  Beads would bounce off him like pebbles, but flechette could be a problem. The holes would be small, but a lot of them would take time and energy to repair, and if by chance one nicked his biological components, he could bleed to death.

  All of this he analyzed in a quarter of a second, and the helmet’s AI determined with high confidence that it was armed with HV bead.

  This was good news, but Roland still wasn’t sanguine about charging into a hail of bullets. The cyclic rate on that turret was 900 rounds-per minute, and even though they wouldn’t kill him, they would wreck his clothes and probably break Durendal.

  It seemed likely his belt of grenades would not appreciate getting shot to pieces, either. He burned another full second to run some scenarios through the combat AI and picked one he liked.

  He selected a grenade from his bandolier and had the AI mark the aim point on his HUD. With a sidearm throw, he bounced a chaff grenade off of the floor directly across from the stairwell door. It bounced hard from the floor and struck the back wall at a steep angle. From there it caromed up the stairs and popped directly in front of the turret; a perfect two-bounce bank shot.

  The grenade cast a misty sparkling cloud of tiny particles in a blossoming sphere that filled the stairway with charged metallic chaff. It would only hang in the air for a few seconds, but for that time, the drone was completely blind.

  Roland was only a fraction of a second behind the detonation. His own sensors were useless as well, but his advantage lay in the fact that he could simply use his old-fashioned biological eyes for this part. Thus, he suffered little for the handicap.

  With a single leap he cleared the first staircase and hit the landing with a crash. His touchdown put him within striking distance of the turret and he forbore any high-tech responses and simply punched the drone as hard as he could. He could not recall exactly how heavily Vogt built this model, so he erred on the side of caution put everything he had into the blow.

  Vogt made a quality product, so Roland’s caution was well-placed. The punch connected with one of the bead cannons and tore it clear of the mount. Despite the glancing blow, sufficient force was conveyed to drive the drone over sideways, and send it to the floor.

  Before it could right itself, Roland began a series of kicks and stomps that were not coordinated in any strategic pattern. The big man simply wanted to stomp it to death before it started shooting and thus spared no thoughts for finesse.

  In short order, the expensive drone was a tangle of twisted metal and twitching, whirring shrapnel. When he was satisfied that it was finished, Roland moved up the second flight to the second-floor landing.

  The big man paused for a few seconds to let his sensors clear the chaff, then he scanned the door to the second floor before opening it.

  There appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, an army of security droids and several Vogt turrets on the other side. His HUD fed him the numbers and specs, and Roland took a moment to absorb it all.

  The tally was suitably impressive: Twenty-four security androids, nine Vogt turrets, and at least eight biologicals in power armor.

  Well shit. At least it’s all going according to plan. He shook his head in grim acknowledgement, I wonder how Lucia is getting on?

  He shrugged, grabbed another chaff grenade from his belt with his off hand and hefted Durendal in his right.

  “Time to punch the clock,” he said out loud, and kicked the door in.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Even if the alarms had not gone off, Lucia would have known when it was time to move from the sheer racket Roland made when he crashed the lobby.

  He’s not a subtle man, she acknowledged, but I guess he’s my man now.

  It was the most bizarre aspect of a most bizarre few days. Finding herself in bed with an eight-foot cyborg had never really entered her realm of imagination, but nevertheless, it had happened. She didn’t know if she was in love with him or not. She was too canny to go down that rabbit hole just yet. But now that everything she had ever thought she knew about the world had been a revealed as a lie, she was extremely enamored of the fact that Roland always told the truth. No man she had ever been with had done as much for her in any time period as Roland had in just three days. The obtuse goon hadn’t even been trying to get into her pants, either.

  She had grown up in a world where everything was a transaction and heroes only existed in her
father’s stories. Then, out of the blue, she had met that hero from Dad’s stories and it turns out her old man wasn’t exaggerating. There may have been an element of schoolgirl infatuation with meeting the subject of her father’s tales, but she was far too old to have let that push her as far as she had gone. For good or ill, she liked the big man, warts and all.

  But now it was time to go get her father, and she set her accelerated brain to the task of getting up the shaft to the fifth floor and freeing him. Lucia was really getting the hang of that part. She could completely preclude the ever-present panic if she crammed the myriad information channels of her mind full of productive scenarios. If she curated her thoughts with care, the anxieties and fears could not force their way in. Plans and strategies got examined and rejected six or seven at a time while another part of her brain ran her arms and legs with perfect precision. Her fear remained a small but persistent buzzing behind the scenes; but it stayed there at least.

  Lucia yanked the access door from roof of the maintenance closet and leapt up to grab the opening. She hauled herself up with athletic grace and scrambled into the dark narrow maintenance shaft. When she looked up, she could see all twenty stories of narrow tube overhead, and the single slender ladder secured to the side of it. It was lit to a dim iridescence for the entire length by emergency lights that pulsed faintly to indicate the alarm status. She grit her teeth in resolution, grabbed the first rungs, and started climbing.