The Man of Bronze

by James Alan Gardner

  However, note to self: DON’T SPRAY MORE WATER.

  “Huh,” Reuben said, “it is self-cleaning.”

  The man began to get to his feet. I’d been afraid of that. As long as he stayed on his hands and knees, people could dodge quickly enough to keep away from him. Once he was standing, however, he’d move faster . . . unless he collapsed from pain when he tried to put weight on his ankle. Such a collapse was unlikely. Before the operation, Dr. Jacek must have anesthetized the lower part of the gunman’s leg; furthermore, the armor might serve as a splint to support the damaged leg bones. In the long run, frisking free and easy on a broken tib-fib might leave the mercenary hobbled for life. In the short run, though, he could cause cryogenic chaos, lunging about the OR and giving freezer burn to anyone he touched—not to mention raising such a ruckus that the thugs upstairs would hear. If I tried to intervene, I’d just get gelatoed myself . . .

  Unless . . .

  Okay. New strategy.

  I whipped off one of the Uzis I still had strapped around my shoulders. “Stay down,” I told the rising bad guy, swinging my gun at his head, eye level. It wouldn’t have hurt him if he’d let it make contact, but reflexes are reflexes: he ducked automatically and—thanks to his ankle—awkwardly. A nanosecond later, I brought the pistol back on a return arc. The man was already off balance and perhaps distracted as he realized, I didn’t need to duck. When the Uzi came back, maybe part of his mind was saying Don’t flinch while his combat training shouted Dodge! Dodge! and his ankle chimed in with Hey, remember me? I’m still broken.

  The upshot was that the man fell down. Sloppily. The impact of his fall did cold, messy things to the floor, leaving sections of the linoleum looking like shattered glass.

  The Uzi I’d swung had never actually made contact with the ruffian. I handed the pistol to Reuben. “Take this.” I whipped off the other Uzi too. “Here’s its brother. If our friend tries to stand, keep clubbing him on the head as long as the guns hold out. Don’t shoot, and avoid too much noise. We don’t want our chums upstairs coming down to investigate.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my own shiny silver grenade. “Fight fire with fire. In an absolute-zero nothing-at-all-like-fire sort of way.”

  I pressed the grenade’s two buttons and waited.

  Silver rose ticklishly up my arm, reminding me of being swallowed by a boa constrictor. That may sound unpleasant, but it actually brought back fond memories of the Amazon rain forest where I encountered a dashing man from Her Majesty’s Secret Service . . . sorry, can’t tell you more without violating the Official Secrets Act. But a boa constrictor featured prominently, so I confess to being distracted as the silver continued to spread. At the very last moment, I remembered to take a deep lung-filling breath; then I was enveloped in airless silence, the mirrored shell muffling all outside sounds.

  I tried to inhale a little deeper. I couldn’t. As I’d expected, the armor was entirely impervious, shutting me off from the outside air as effectively as it shielded me from bullets. Now I only hoped that my other supposition was correct: that the shell would dissolve on its own in a minute or so, before I began to suffocate. If my guess was wrong and I stupidly smothered inside the silver container, wouldn’t my face be red? Or blue, as the case might be.

  The armor—or was it a force field?—might have kept out all air, but it let in light easily enough. I could see as if looking through gray-tinted glass. Reuben was just stepping away from the mercenary, both Uzis reduced to crumbled ruins. Farewell to the last of our firearms . . . but the pistols had served their purpose, distracting our enemy until I was armored up. Now it was my turn to deal with the hooligan: mano a frigid mano.

  He began to stand. I let him. Then I punched him in the face.

  It was more an experiment than a serious attack. I doubted my strike would penetrate his protective shell any more effectively than the Uzis or the Kaybar knife. Still, one shouldn’t take anything for granted. Since the silver barrier stuff had already displayed properties that defied my understanding of physics, I chose to regard it as magic in accordance with dear old Sir Arthur’s law. Why not test the nature of its mystic power?

  So: up with the fist and out with the fist, full strength into my opponent’s nose.

  Have you ever wondered what happens when an irresistible force, my armored fist, meets an immovable object, the gunman’s armored face? Turns out, the result is an earsplitting bang. By which I mean, BAAAANNNNGGGG!! with as many additional exclamation points as you care to append.

  The noise was hemorrhagingly loud even with silver muffling my ears. To others in the OR, it must have been deafening: a bona fide sonic boom. I imagined all Warsaw echoing with the thunderclap. Within seconds, half the city would be calling the police to report someone shooting off a howitzer.

  So much for keeping quiet. All the gunmen upstairs would come running immediately. So would the MI6/CIA/Interpol agents no doubt investigating a mysterious car explosion near the airport. I fervently wished to be elsewhere before those agents arrived. Otherwise, I’d end up “helping police with their inquiries” . . . then “detained pending further investigation” . . . then “taken into protective custody” . . . and even though the spooks knew I was no criminal, they’d threaten to put me in jail unless I did them “a few little favors.” Next thing I knew, I’d be paragliding into Beijing to steal the Sacred Sword of Sinanju or some such nonsense.

  No thanks. After that mess in Mauritius, I was sick of playing errand girl. Which meant I had to finish things off fast and vamoose before the Sweeneys arrived.

  My first obstacle: the ruffian in front of me. He turned in my direction, putting up his fists as if ready for more sonic-boom boxing . . . then suddenly he dropped his feint and bolted for the door. Coward. Then again, the man didn’t have many options left. If I was right, and the silver armor held up only a minute or two before dissolving, my opponent’s mirror shell must be close to shutting off. By the time that happened, the thug would want to be elsewhere—back with his fellow mercenaries. They were his only protection, now that his Uzi was reduced to frozen frass.

  I caught the gunless gunman just as he reached the corridor. This time, I didn’t punch him—I had no desire to trigger another thunderclap. Instead I thrust my arm around his neck and gingerly pulled back with a basic forearm choke hold. There was still a whomp as our silver shells made contact, but much softer than the first time. That could have been because the shells didn’t smack together with the pile-driving force of a punch . . . or maybe the silver force fields had blown off most of their energy the first time they collided. Now, they had far less “juice” to power sonic outbursts. Every moment they remained in contact, they seemed to drain each other more. After five seconds, both the mercenary’s silver lining and my own winked out with a soft whoof of air, like two fires that have burned up each other’s fuel.

  For an instant, nothing happened . . . but my arm was still bent around the man’s neck, pressing in on his throat, and now there was no shell preventing me from cinching up on his esophagus. I did so. The mercenary attempted to respond with a standard escape move—turning his head toward my elbow to reduce the constriction on his windpipe, grabbing my wrist to loosen the grip, and stepping into a lower stance in preparation for a release maneuver—but partway through, his injured ankle snapped from exertion.

  Nothing sounds so meaty as a leg bone breaking. It’s the crack of mortality.

  The man would have fallen if I hadn’t been holding him around the neck. He ended up dangling from my choke hold, making urgent gargling noises. I could have proceeded to kill him . . . but why? I whispered in his ear, “If I let you live, do you promise to be good?”

  He gagged out something I took for a yes.

  “Fine.” I dropped him to the ground and stepped away. He lay on the floor, gasping. I considered whacking him a few times to knock him out, but the thought of pummeling an injured man int
o unconsciousness turned my stomach. In his weakened condition, any more damage could kill him. I made do with poking my foot lightly into his ribs. “Help the poor,” I said. “Find a cure for cancer. Do something useful with your life so I don’t regret letting you live.”

  The man didn’t answer. He might not have understood what I’d said. But he looked so dazed—close to clinical shock—I was certain he wouldn’t cause any more trouble.

  I turned to Reuben. “We’d better get ready,” I said. “The bad guys will be here any moment. Time for our last stand.”

  We had half a minute to scour the OR for implements of defense. The place had exactly what you’d expect: an abundance of bandages and penicillin but a dearth of firearms, Tasers, and antipersonnel devices. I improvised what I could, then ran to the door as I heard combat boots drawing near.

  The corridor outside the OR was just wide enough for a gurney . . . and since we had a gurney available, I’d asked a nurse to wheel one out. With its brakes locked, the gurney formed a simple barricade between us and the oncoming horde. It wouldn’t stop our enemies for long, but it would slow the first arrivals. We’d also moved the emergency light into the hall to illuminate anyone approaching. Enough light spilled backward that the OR wasn’t completely dark, but we could see the gunmen more clearly than they could see us.

  Such little advantages were important. The assault force had started with sixteen bad guys. Dr. Jacek said the doorman had killed one with a lucky shot to the head and had disabled another with an ankle shot. The ankle victim was, of course, the man sprawled on the OR floor. I’d eliminated another three scoundrels upstairs, reducing the opposition to eleven less however many had been taken out by flying oxygen tanks. There was no way to guess the number of men who’d charge the OR, but even one hooligan with an Uzi was a serious threat—we had no guns of our own.

  Of course, we weren’t entirely unarmed . . .

  I took a position in the doorway. Reuben stood behind me, ready to pass armaments as needed. I saw a ruffian begin sneaking up the corridor and I held my hand out to Reuben. “Scalpel.”

  “Scalpel.” He slapped the scalpel’s handle into my palm.

  The approaching mercenary had almost reached the gurney. He was farther away than my favorite dartboard in the Fox and Trotter, but I thought I could still hit the bull’s-eye.

  With light from the emergency lamp shining in his eyes, all the man might have seen was my arm in the doorway, cocking back and throwing. Then he stopped seeing anything at all . . . at least with his right eye. He screamed for a moment, then fell silent.

  One down.

  I held out my hand to Reuben. “Forceps.”

  “Forceps.”

  Surgical forceps come in many sizes. The biggest are huge tongs for gripping a baby’s head during difficult births. The smallest are tweezers that can delicately manipulate blood vessels and other tiny tissues. Between those extremes are a multitude of variations. I’d chosen a set like the tongs used to lift hard-boiled eggs out of hot water. With rubber surgical tubing tied between the outstretched prong arms, the forceps made a nice little catapult . . . or what American weaponry catalogs call “a high-powered hunting-grade slingshot.”

  I held out my hand to Reuben again. “Hypo.”

  “Hypo.”

  He passed me a hypodermic syringe of truly prodigious dimensions. I wondered if Dr. Jacek sometimes needed to vaccinate elephants. Despite its monstrous proportions, the needle fit nicely on the slingshot’s rubber strap . . . and it flew nicely, too, as soon as I caught sight of another mercenary skulking toward us.

  Who knew that syringes were aerodynamic? It shot forward like a javelin, spiking into the bad guy’s ski mask and burying itself deep, deep, deep. An instant after impact, the hypo’s glass body broke, splashing the man with its contents. I don’t know what the fluid was—Dr. Jacek had simply handed me a bottle and said, “Fill the needle with this”—but whatever was in the hypo, it worked a wicked treat. The villain gave a gagging cough, loosed a three-bullet burst into the ceiling, and collapsed like a sack of bananas.

  Two down.

  The next mercenary tried to learn from his comrades’ mistakes. He charged toward the gurney, shooting suppression bursts down the middle of the corridor in an attempt to discourage answering fire.

  “Ether,” I said to Reuben.

  “Ether.”

  We had a big bottle of the stuff, easy to launch with the slingshot. By reflex, the gunman shot the bottle as it hurtled toward him. The glass broke; the flammable ether inside caught fire from the muzzle flash and continued forward in accordance with the usual laws of momentum. The hooligan was inundated with a faceful of blazing liquid he’d ignited himself.

  Howling ensued. A torch dance.

  Three down.

  The corridor wasn’t wide enough for two, but a pair of mercenaries tried it anyway. They opted for caution; they also opted to pop a few bullets at the emergency lamp, shooting out the bulb.

  I’d wondered when someone would think of that.

  In the resulting blackness, the gunmen moved forward as silently as they could. Bulletproof vests make stealth difficult, but I gave the men points for effort—they kept the rustling to a minimum. I held out my hand to Reuben and said, clearly and distinctly, “Grenade.”

  “Grenade.”

  This was a ruse we’d arranged earlier. Instead of a grenade—which we didn’t have—Reuben gave me a cake of antiseptic soap. I counted under my breath, softly but audibly, “Five, four, three . . .”

  I threw the soap down the corridor. It bounced off the wall with a thump. Both mercenaries turned tail and ran, causing a ruckus that I augmented by hurling a couple of bedpans I’d been keeping for just this moment. Under cover of the noise and darkness, I leapt from the OR doorway, cleared the gurney that blocked the way forward, and slipped inside the next door along the hall into a room that smelled fiercely of disinfectant.

  This was the main examination room. Every patient passed through here for preliminary inspection and treatment. It might have been full of items I could use for bringing down prey, but I couldn’t see a thing. I had only one weapon left in my arsenal: a roll of suture cord, used for stitching up wounds. I pulled it out of my pocket. The cord was strong and tough, like high-pound-test fishing line—practically unbreakable. I unwound a length, holding the spool in one hand and wrapping the loose end around a small metal clamp I’d taken from the OR. Holding my breath, I waited.

  The pair of mercenaries who’d just run away soon realized there’d been no grenade. “Just a trick,” one man muttered. “A lousy trick!” Unwisely, the man stormed back without waiting for his partner; I suppose he was eager to dish out payback on those who’d fooled him. In the dark, of course, he couldn’t see. After bumping into the wall once—bumping hard, by the sound of it—he continued forward a little more slowly, dragging his fingers along the wall to keep himself oriented. He must have thought his opposition was still on the far side of the gurney. He had no idea I was inches away, silent and unseen.

  I located my target by sound; he was quite the noisy fellow, still grumbling under his breath, “Just a lousy trick!” My ambush silenced the grumbling along with his breath: suture cord circled the man’s throat from behind in a cuttingly effective garrote. The thug struggled a bit, but couldn’t squeeze out a sound . . . nothing except a soft squirt as the suture cord sliced into his skin.

  It was over quickly. Four down. And as I lowered the corpse to join the growing pile by the gurney, I helped myself to the strangled man’s Uzi.

  A moment later, the mercenary’s partner plodded up. He heard me moving in the dark. “Charlie?” he said. “Charlie?”

  I could have been subtle; but why?

  It’s traditional to say SMGs sound like buddah-buddah-buddah, but I’ve always found Uzis are just a loud bright trrrrrrr.

  Two bursts at head level. Trrrrrrr. Trrrrrrr.

  Five down.

  Ten men—nine by me, and
one by the guard’s lucky shot—had now been eliminated. The remaining six might all have been injured or worse in the furor upstairs, but there was no way to tell.

  I rummaged briefly through the heap of fallen gunmen, searching by feel for useful equipment. I found nothing but Uzis . . . not even another Kaybar. In a way, that was good news. If none of these hooligans had night-vision goggles or even a Maglite, I could breathe a little easier. Even better—sort of—I found no more silver-armor grenades. It would have been nice to get my hands on another, but I took solace in knowing that mirror shells weren’t standard equipment for every mercenary between me and the exit. If I was lucky, none of the remaining attackers had one of the little silver devils. After all, magic armor force fields must be expensive, right? Perhaps this group of mercenaries could only afford two grenades all told.

  Especially since these thugs were clearly second-rate. Or third-rate. Poorly equipped and poorly coordinated. It didn’t say much for Reuben that his capture had been assigned to twits. Still, there’d been sixteen of them—quite a few to send after only one man. Whoever commanded this crew might have thought quantity would make up for quality. Or maybe there was more going on than met the casual eye.

  I’d think about that later. For now, I had to finish my pest removal. Grabbing another Uzi from a fallen thug, I started quietly forward . . . listening for danger.

  If I were a clever mercenary—or even a mutton head with a sense of self-preservation—and if I saw five of my comrades venture down a corridor without coming back, I’d think, Perhaps going down there myself isn’t the best strategy. Instead, I’d take a position watching the mouth of the corridor and prepare to shoot anything that emerged. On the off chance some of the bad guys had such a glimmering of intelligence, I stopped near the end of the corridor and lowered myself to the floor. Silently, I belly crawled the rest of the way forward. Then I tossed my spool of suture cord into the next room, bouncing the cord off a side wall.