Ordnance

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The machine staggered back two steps, but recovered easily and met Roland’s subsequent blows with Roger’s practiced ease and skill. A counter-right hand and following left hook rattled Roland’s head to the side and caused his HUD to flicker and reboot.

  Roland was certain that whoever was inside that rig had been disconnected, so he had expected the machine to be stiff and slow like a robot would have been. But the machine was moving exactly like it had been. This was a new wrinkle, but not one Roland had time to contemplate right now. The big metal creature was stringing combinations of strikes together like a man born to the ring, and the endless barrage was connecting as often as not. Roland had enough experience to keep from getting smashed to pieces, but despite his best efforts he was getting knocked around in a most disheartening manner.

  Roland’s previous rounds with Dawkins had made it clear Roger had been the superior stand-up fighter. It did not appear that this had changed simply because Roger was no longer in control of the armature. Roland was having to slip and dodge to avoid the worst of the hits, and because his foe was faster than he was, he had to accept a blow every time he wanted to land one of his own.

  Fighting a human and fighting a robot were very different things. Roland could count on a human to want to preserve its own life and avoid pain. It was how he could get the better of Roger downstairs. When Roland wanted to make a man move a certain direction, he simply gave the man a reason to do it via existential threat. If Roland wanted his opponent to move to the left, he would attack from the right, because good fighters move away from threats and attack weaknesses.

  Robots did not fight that way. Robots just attacked, sparing only the tiniest quantity of processor power on danger avoidance. Their ability to assess a threat meant that they could decide in real-time whether an attack warranted a defensive response. If it didn’t, the robot was likely to ignore it. This propensity for straightforward offense when coupled with a general lack of creativity and imagination usually made robots difficult but predictable opponents.

  Roland was detecting no such weakness in this ’bot, though.

  It has robotic fearlessness and human skills, Roland lamented to himself, So, that’s what the next-gen looks like?

  Roland tried to avoid another blistering combination from the armature. He heard Fox’s voice, taunting him the whole time, “You are obsolete, Breach! You should have just stayed in your dark little corner and kept out of this!”

  Then an aside, “Are you getting all this, Johnson? This is exactly what they’ll want to see.” Fox didn’t realize the mic was still on. A thought occurred to Roland; if they were recording all this, there was a solid chance the two were in the building right now. Johnson he knew almost for certain would be. The man’s ego virtually guaranteed it.

  Roland bought himself a breather by letting the armature land a strike to his chest, where the armor was thickest. He grasped the offending arm in a firm, two-handed grip and smashed the ’bot into the hallway walls, crushing both of them into the metal and buckling a twenty-foot section of ceiling. A quick mental command and his musculoskeletal system’s safeties were overridden, driving the techno-organic chassis well past its original tolerances. With alarms blaring in his HUD, Roland pressed and held the giant white humanoid in place.

  “You guys in the penthouse?” He asked with a nonchalance he did not feel.

  He could hear Fox’s confusion at the bizarre non sequitur, “What does that have to do with…” the voice trailed off.

  “Be seeing you shortly, then.”

  The armature, not content to with being restrained, rained punches into Roland’s ribs with its other hand at a speed that left nothing for the eyes to follow but a white blur. Eight impacts per second, each with enough force to crush a car sent shock waves through Roland’s entire torso. His HUD again lit up with alarms and damage readouts while his combat AI routed potential responses to the threat directly to the screens.

  Roland ignored all of it.

  The way to beat a robot that fights like a man, he pontificated with wry bemusement, is to be a man that fights like a robot!

  The plan was imperfect. But it was a plan. While the armature applied its full attention to smashing Roland’s internal structures to a paste of polymer and human remains, Roland routed more and more power to his arms and shoulders. He continued to keep one of his foe’s arms pinned, while his other hand went to the armature’s neck.

  Then, with all the strength he could access, Roland squeezed that neck and pulled on that arm. Like Orion drawing his bow, Roland slowly stretched the limb while simultaneously collapsing the column of that neck. For six tedious, horrible, pain-filled seconds Roland endured the jackhammer blows of his antagonist while he tried gamely to rip its arm off. He had to silence the damage alarms from his helmet just to concentrate, and he did not need the prioritized list of structural damages and other failures to know that he was getting pummeled to death.

  Mercifully, as the joints in its shoulder creaked audible protest, Roger’s AI finally decided that this threat warranted a response. The strikes to Roland’s ribs ceased and the explosions of pain retreated to a dull ache. The ’bot’s remaining arm snaked up to push on Roland’s face, trying to dislodge the crushing grip before the organic host brain was damaged or the arm failed completely.

  That worked for Roland. He abandoned his grasp on the neck and looped his arm over the pressing limb of the white giant. He pulled them together and pressed his chest tightly against his opponent’s. Their faceplates were inches apart, and Roland sent a perfunctory head-butt over just to keep the AI on its toes. That was enough of distraction to allow Roland to secure a grip that no machine could dislodge. Now Roland had both arms trapped, and he sat his hips low and under the armature’s hips.

  Roger Dawkins had never been much of a grappler, so the AI had no response for Roland’s vice-like over-under grip. When Roland dropped his hips, the AI could not calculate what that meant until after its feet had already left the floor.

  His HUD screamed alarms at Roland when he hoisted the armature over his hip. Much of the internal structure of Roland’s left side had sustained severe damage, and the lifting and twisting action of koshi guruma was not exactly advisable under the circumstances. But it worked.

  With a floor-shaking crash, a full ton of cyborg war machines struck the deck and their flailing limbs smashed great dents and rent long tears in the metal walls of the hallway. Roland landed on top and secured his opponent in a head and arm triangle hold while he took a moment to assess his damage.

  The results were not good. The ribs on his left side were displaced and fractured, and several of the support systems were backed up by structural failures as well. It would take days for full recovery, and he was down to barely enough integrity for movement. More damage to that area carried a high risk of harming his internal organics. Roland needed to shut this fight down fast.

  The ’bot beneath him never stopped thrashing. But with no tactical understanding of how to escape a good wrestler’s pin, it was like a landed fish flopping on the deck of a boat. It was a fish that could throw cars around like beach balls though, so there was a real element of danger to it nonetheless.

  Roland elected for the simplest response and started jack hammering short punches directly to the head of the flopping ’bot underneath him. He was not in an ideal position to apply a lot of power or leverage to the strikes, but transitioning to a more advantageous position felt risky. So, he contented himself to make up for the poor quality of his punches with quantity instead.

  Short punches clanged off the armored white skull like an alarm bell, the sounds of the impacts blurring together in a monotonous ringing toll. Individually, they were not impressive by the standards of advanced military cyborgs. Collectively, they rattled the beleaguered skull of Roger Dawkins like a never-ending car accident.

  The movements of the trapped armature became slower and more robotic as the repeated impacts gradually concussed
Roger’s brain into blissful unconsciousness.

  Roland felt the change in the machine’s reactions, but didn’t understand it. He knew better than to let an opportunity pass, however, and he quickly leapt up to mount the fallen ’bot properly and deliver full-power, full-force strikes en masse. Like a bull gorilla drubbing a challenger, Roland’s thick obsidian arms rained up and down in a furious drumbeat. The old soldier’s fists cycled like twin pistons; alternating thunderclaps of rage into, and ultimately through the expressionless faceplate of his implacable foe.

  In twelve frenzied seconds, Roland’s onslaught completely collapsed the head of the Better Man armature, and the skull of Roger Dawkins inside it. Where the stark white skull had sat was now home to a twisted and flattened pile of chunky pink sludge flaked with jagged white armor fragments. One lone eyeball peeked out from the mess to stare at Roland in blank accusation, but its indictments washed off black armored skin like so much spring rain.

  Roland didn’t waste a single thought for dead man in the suit. The world was better off without his kind. But he did pause to get his bearings and run some more diagnostics. He knew he was in bad shape, and the readouts confirmed that his body had no more pitched battles in it right now. Situational awareness just got moved to the top of his priority list, because in his current condition, bumping into an armature or some other heavy weapon could be terrible indeed.

  At that very moment, his comm pinged. It was Lucia’s voice.

  “Roland, you need to see this.”

  He heard the urgency in her voice and keyed her comm’s location to his HUD.

  “On my way.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Fox and Johnson stared at the screens in blank awe and terror.

  Johnson was a blubbering mess of panic and incoherent sobbing as Fox could have predicted. Fox was just numb. He did not know how to recover from this, but the ramifications of not recovering were too horrible to think about. First, he had to get out of here without getting murdered by a pissed off cyborg. Then he had to burn the site in a manner that kept the company unexposed to liability.

  Both required that he get moving, so he shook himself from his awestruck paralysis and grabbed Johnson’s coat by the lapel, “We have to leave. NOW!”

  He shoved the sniveling scientist towards the hallway, “Get to the roof and wait for me there!” He ordered, “Don’t fucking leave without me!” He added that afterthought when he considered the mental state of his accomplice. Courage had never been Johnson’s bailiwick.

  He pulled out his DataPad and checked on his mercenaries. The Galapagos crew was only a few minutes away. He ordered them to assault the facility and then blow it. It was better to use those animals for this work anyway, he assumed. Pike’s crew was likely to have scruples about dropping civilians or arson. Thank goodness those Galapagos freaks didn’t have scruples.

  He also set the building’s main reactor to override, guaranteeing an acceptable level of destruction and plenty of plausible deniability with respect to any collateral damage scrubbing the site would cause. If those merc’s got caught in the blast, so much the better. As it was, he would be buying off investigators and prosecutors for years, more than likely

  The setback to the Better Man program was going to be huge either way. There was no way around that. Fox just hoped that he could somehow get it back on track before the Combine had him killed over the 130 million they had decided he owed them. This whole thing was going to shit in front of him, all because of one thirty-year-old loose end. Fox hated no one more than he hated Roland Tankowicz right now. Except for maybe Donald Ribiero, that is.

  With his preparations complete, he locked down all the exterior doors to the building and headed towards the lift that would take him to the rooftop landing pad and his waiting car.

  The roof was quiet and Fox sprinted across it to the shadowed bulk of his luxury AeroClast. The door slid open, and he sidled into the seat next to Johnson. He called to the driver, “Get us out of here!” and sat back on the plush seat, taking a moment to let out a big expressive sigh.

  When he opened his eyes, he realized that he car hadn’t moved yet. He prepared a snarl for his driver but stopped when saw the look on Johnson’s face. Johnson, Fox realized, wasn’t saying anything. He was just sitting, looking very, very, nervous.

  Fox inspected the front of the car where the driver would be if the driver was not missing.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat was Donald Ribiero.

  “Oh, shit!” Fox’s hand went for the small bead pistol he kept in his pocket, but an inky black shadow snaked from the other front seat to strike his forearm like lightning. His whole arm went numb, and the pistol fell from nerve-dead fingers. Then a heavy-soled boot shoved him roughly back into the seat, next to the trembling Dr. Johnson. The quiet whine of charging electronics serenaded the eerie black calm of the car’s interior.

  Dr. Ribiero’s voice was thin and raspy, but still radiated the calm intelligence of a man in complete control, “Oh no, Mr. Fox. That will never do.”

  After four days of sleep deprivation, mind-breaking pharmaceuticals, and the omnipresent fear for his daughter’s safety all they had done was give him a sore throat, it seemed. Fox cursed the iron will of the old biotechnologist. None of this would have happened if he had just accepted the ludicrously large cash offer they had made him. He tried to play this strong, “I have two teams of mercenaries on their way. If I don’t call them off, we are all dead.”

  “Then your mercenaries should arrive right about the time the police do,” Donald smiled, “That should be exciting.”

  Shit! Fox swore internally, They called the police! That could be disastrous. If any cops got killed by mercenaries or if the building’s destruction was at all suspicious, Fox was as good as dead.

  No amount of bribery is going to un-fuck that cluster. The florid little man began to panic.

  “I can be reasonable, Ribiero!” Fox hated negotiating from a position of weakness, but there was no other choice right now, “We need to get out of here now, then you and I can discuss how to move forward from this. In fifteen minutes this whole place is going up, cops, mercenaries, and all of us. No matter what. There is no point in all of us dying.”

  The voice from the other seat was a woman’s and Fox couldn’t place it. It was too dark in the car for him to make out a face, either, “Plenty of time, then. Our last passenger has arrived.”

  A gauntleted hand gestured to the lift door across the landing pad. Fox didn’t have to look to know who was coming through those doors. But he looked anyway.

  Roland Tankowicz looked like hell, but he strode across the rooftop with fixed, determined strides. The silver of his faceplate was marred by deep gouges and scorch marks and his clothes were in tatters. The armored black skin of his torso was scored in a dozen places, leaving the silver-white fibers of his internal musculature exposed. He walked with a pronounced lean, and he was obviously favoring the ribs on his left side. Durendal, his mighty weapon, hung from the tatters of the holster dangling from the big man’s clenched fist.

  The broken twisted helmet, with the eerie silver face and black, hollow eyes gave the illusion of skull-faced death itself walking across that rooftop. Spotty, directed lighting from the landing pad turned the endless inky blackness of the giant’s body into a writhing mass of light and shadow as he walked; and this only confirmed the aspect of a grim reaper come to collect.

  Only this was no illusion, no trick of the light. Leland Fox was quite certain he was about to die. Johnson sobbed like a lost child in the seat next to him, but Fox refused to break. Oh, but he wanted to. This fear was a real, tangible thing, and despair followed it. He prayed desperately for the mercenaries to show up. For the police to show up. For anyone to show up and take this cup from his lips.

  But no one came.

  Johnson’s terror got the better of him and he bolted from his seat. Exactly where the pudgy scientist thought he was going to go, Fox couldn’
t say.

  It didn’t matter. The woman in the front seat turned, and a booted foot tripped him on his way out of the door. He fell sprawling and mewling at the feet of the man called Breach. One black mitt closed over Johnson’s twitching form and slammed him against the side of the car. There was a hollow thump as the back of the doctor’s skull bounced off the metal skin of the limousine. Johnson collapsed in a sodden heap and rolled to his side. Then he vomited groggily on the expensive car’s landing foot.

  Fox never took his eyes off Roland.

  “Do you even know how many?” the voice was deep and metallic, filtered through the helmet’s speakers.

  “How many what?” Fox answered, playing dumb.

  “Dead,” the grim reaper replayed, “how many they made me kill when I couldn’t say no?”

  Fox was neither sentimental nor stupid. He had known exactly what the Army was going to do with the Golems when they built them. He had seen every after-action report, and while the numbers were always couched in military jargon, he understood well enough how loosely one could define ‘enemy combatant’ when there were no witnesses alive to debate your definition.

  “More or less,” he answered truthfully, “you were a soldier. It was your job.” The justification sounded stupid. Even as he heard the words escape his lips, he felt them ring hollow.

  “Oh dear,” He heard the woman say, but did not get time to wonder why because he was hauled out of the car and hoisted aloft by the man he had spent the last several days and many millions of credits trying to kill. His legs kicked in futile desperation at empty air while the sounds of the wind and distant sirens roared in his ears.