“Yeah, your way is better,” Mindy agreed, ignoring Roland. “Let me check in and see who Roland has pissed of this week. Who was he, by the way?”
“Some wannabe cowboy calling himself ‘Wild Bill McClintock.’ Used a pair of Dragoons and had bionic eyes.”
Mindy shook her head and chuckled, “They sent that shmuck after you? I mean, he’s not bad from what I’ve heard, but come on! You are pretty hard to kill. Who sends a second-stringer like him after a monster like you?”
“Kind of what we need you to find out, Mindy,” Lucia had endless reserves of patience. “We need to know who it is, whether it was an exclusive contract or a general contact, and who else might be coming for our big black mascot, here. Can you handle that? Or should we do this Roland’s way?”
“Nah. Let me make some calls. I have a lot of pull with the Lodge. Give me a few hours to sort this out. It’s a pretty big breach of our code to reveal a client, but assassins and hunters aren’t like soldiers and mercs. We operate within a less... uh... rigid set of guidelines.”
“Imagine that,” Roland mumbled.
Mindy frowned at him. “We’re assassins and bounty hunters, not saints. Wanna compare body counts?”
Roland did not. He backed down. “No offense meant.”
Mindy looked sheepish, “None taken. Sorry.”
Lucia rolled her eyes. It was like dealing with children. Deadly bionic children, but children nonetheless. There was enough psychological trauma between the little girl who fled a religious colony to become an assassin and the wounded veteran betrayed by his own officers and turned into a merciless killing machine to fill entire volumes of the DSM.
“Nice. Mindy? Go make the calls, please. Roland? Let’s find you a new shirt.”
CHAPTER THREE
Wade Manson clenched and unclenched his fists as he waited impatiently for a door. It could be said that Wade Manson had never waited patiently for anything, and thus this door was not specifically the reason for his impatience. Wade was going to blame the door anyway, because Wade was a very linear thinker. The door was between him and his goal, and the door was not open. That was as much information as was necessary for the man to assign the blame for his present irritation. The fact that he was on his way to a secret meeting about perhaps overthrowing the largest organized crime syndicate in all of space might have added an edge to his impatience. Or it may have been the fact that he was going alone since he could not trust even his own crew not to sell him out if they knew what he was doing. He was a high-ranking member of said organization, after all. What he was doing was a species of betrayal no one was going to overlook. His rising agitation could also have had something to do with his being unarmed. Wade really hated being unarmed. Weapons made him feel good. No weapons made him feel bad. Linear thinking all over again.
Finally, the door whooshed open and Wade stepped off the street and into the lobby. It was an older building, located in the heart of The Sprawl, where a large portion of the thousands of office buildings and workers of New Boston's industrial area made their homes. It wasn’t as nice as Uptown, and a far cry from Cambridge or the Old Fen Way. But the Sprawl was easily light years ahead of Dockside or Big Woo. The lobby had been updated recently, and the reception kiosk was staffed with a courteous-looking reception android modeled to numerically perfect average feminine proportions. It was an expensive model, as it had a high-end emoting package with a fully simulated human face. The ‘bot looked up, affected a simulation of a polite smile, and spoke in warm tones. “Good evening, Mr. Manson. Your party is ready. Please proceed to floor five and find suite 5B to your right upon exiting the lift. Feel free to dial zero from any information kiosk if you need assistance.”
A delicately constructed and nauseatingly lifelike hand gestured toward the elevators while the exactly-average face continued to beam warmth and welcome to Wade Manson.
That is creepy as all hell, he thought with a sneer. But then again, any group that can spend a hundred and fifty grand on a reception ‘bot is the kind of people I want backing me.
He was thankful there were elevators. He considered stairs to be the bane of his existence. Wade was a fat man, and though it irked him to be such, he had only himself to blame. A love of rich food and sedentary pursuits had seen the man’s dimensions expand rapidly once he had achieved his goal of becoming a Boss. He had always meant to slim back down, maybe get some surgery or gene therapy to help. But surgery was painful and risky, and his genetics were a horrific stew of unsavory recessives. It was unlikely gene therapy would do anything other than stimulate random mutations and complicated cancers. He might lose weight, but there was a good chance he would end up an epileptic or worse from it, too.
We can get to star systems a hundred light years away in minutes, but I can’t lose a hundred pounds? So much for living in the future.
It was an old gripe, and even he was sick of hearing himself make it. He simply bought expensive suits and paid for heart surgery when he needed it. Being rich still had its perks, even for a fat guy.
Thus, he stayed fat. He had once been much smaller, back when he first started running with the crews that handled rackets in The Sprawl. When the Combine was newer, and the Anson Gates had just begun to open, Wade Manson had been part of a select class of street toughs who had found their way to the lofty heights of the Board. Wade had done it with his wits, his fists, and a streak of remorseless lethality that cut a swath a mile wide through his very soul. He had purchased his seat at the table with the skulls of anyone who stood in his way. Now his seat was in jeopardy, and Manson would not let that stand.
Hell, he mused, the whole damn table is wobbly right now.
It was a sobering thought, and the implications of a collapsing Combine were too horrific for a man so dedicated to linear thinking to bear. As was his linear way, he had thus chosen not to bear it. He went about working on the solution instead. Naturally, the solution involved Wade Manson ascending to supreme leadership. But then again, what other conclusion could a linear thinker come to? This idea is what had brought him here tonight. The opportunity to secure a backer with the resources to push him to the front of the pack. Even better, they would be non-Combine resources. Resources from outside of the other Board members’ direct spheres of influence were valuable things indeed.
He found the conference room easily and keyed the door. He wasn’t sure what to make of what he saw when it opened.
For reasons not entirely clear to Wade Manson, the room was dark. Not pitch black, but it was very, very dim. Deliberately dim. Dim with a purpose. If the purpose was to unnerve Wade Manson, then it was doing an acceptable job of it. Wade would have liked to proclaim that the vaguely ominous connotations implied by the darkened space were wasted on him, but that would have been a lie. Moving into the darkness made him wary, but this was not unusual since Wade Manson was always wary. Wariness was an important survival trait in his business, even more so now than ever before. The death of the chairman and losing three bosses had made many of The Combine’s competitors and antagonists very bold of late. Enemies were legion from both within the organization and without, so Wade Manson had learned to make caution his mantra. Dark rooms were not inherently risky, but secret meetings in dark rooms with mysterious allies were not how most happy stories began. And thus, Wade was professionally nervous.
He entered with confidence that was mostly legitimate. He paused a moment in the doorway to let the light from the hall cast him in silhouette and frame him artistically in the threshold. While fat, he was also very tall, and when he wore the right suit and got framed the right way, he knew he could be very imposing. Any apprehension about this encounter was secondary at best to the potential for advancement, so after his dramatic pose in the doorway, he put his best foot forward and strode to the center of the room with an air of command in his posture.
His shin struck a wooden chair and the fat gangster hissed through clenched teeth at the lance of pain that shot up his leg at
the impact. The chair screeched and slid until it banged against a table with a clatter.
“Fuck!” Wade could not stop the blurted expletive.
“Have a seat, Wade,” a voice ordered. It was neither rude nor unkind, but it was not nice, either. It was a command, but not the command of a superior to a subordinate. It was the command of parent to a child. Wade decided this was worse.
“Why the hell are the lights off?” Wade spat, more annoyed with his throbbing shin than anything else.
“Because someday, some cop or mercenary is going to get a hold of you, Wade, and you are going to sing like a contract tenor when they do. If you don’t know who I am, then you can’t tell them.”
“I’m no goddamn snitch, pal. And I don’t appreciate getting jerked around like this. I don’t give a fuck who you are, I’m not going to...”
Something struck Wade in the gut. It felt like a club, and all the air in his lungs whooshed out as his diaphragm spasmed. His knees buckled, and he started to drop, but his thick elbows caught the tabletop and arrested his fall midway to the floor. For a moment, he just hung there, legs flaccid and his body suspended from the table by trembling arms. His breath came in strained, labored wheezes and his mouth worked like a grouper’s until his body remembered how to breathe again.
He coughed and stood, strength rushing back to his legs as the oxygen flowed once more. He whirled to face his attacker, but could see nothing in the darkened space.
“Try that again, motherfucker!”
The voice sounded amused, “If you insist.”
This time Wade was ready. When the next blow came, he did not try to dodge or intercept. He simply took the hit to his sizable gut. But with his abdominal muscles fully flexed and his weight centered, the strike was merely painful, and certainly not debilitating. Wade folded his arms over whatever had hit him and trapped it against his belly. Far too canny to release the weapon, Wade hurled himself forward and drove his forehead into about where his antagonist’s face should have been. There was a flash of light and an explosion of pain as the three-hundred-pound Mafia boss smashed his head against something hard and unforgiving. Manson held onto consciousness and kept his weight driving forward, even as red fireflies danced across his vision and a freight train rumbled across phantom tracks inside his head.
The man and his mysterious enemy went to the floor with a deafening crash and Wade Manson at last freed his arms to rain blows on the thing beneath him. It felt like punching a leather bag filled with steel ball bearings, and it was a feeling Wade Manson knew well.
He switched to a two-handed overhead smashing motion, driving fists, elbows, and forearms into the head of what he now knew was an augmented man. The shape of a man was there, but the bones felt like granite and the muscles like spring steel. Wade had fought guys like this before and he knew that if he let up for a second, he was dead. This didn’t bother him. Wade Manson was a street fighter born and bred, and every fight was win or die in his world.
Wade Manson smashed that face without restraint.
He smashed until his lungs burned and his hands were bloody and raw. He smashed until the bones in his hands fractured. When they were useless, he grabbed a nearby chair and swung it like a hammer into the head of his trapped enemy. For several long minutes, an aging mobster dropped vicious, biting carnage onto the head of a hapless foe until he couldn’t feel his fingers anymore.
Then all the pain in the universe gathered in his chest and squeezed. Wade Manson gasped and fell over with twitching limbs and lurched around the floor, shrieking. After what felt like hours, the pain stopped and Wade was able to drag himself to a corner and brace himself there. Tortured eyes scanned the darkness, waiting for the next attack while his fuzzy brain lamented the folly of attending this meeting unarmed.
Gradually, the room grew brighter. The fat man’s eyes strained in the burgeoning light to see what was going on, to determine what the hell had just happened. First, he saw the electric pacification dart sticking out of his chest. The source of the horrible crippling pain was thus revealed, and he ripped the thing from a mushy pectoral with a grunt. Then he saw the table and the broken chair that had been his weapon. They had lost all significance in the growing light, and were now just boring, nondescript brown frames against the lighter background of a tile floor. Behind those, his eyes picked out a dark lumpy mass in another corner. The lights were even brighter now, and he pulled out details from the shadows. It was a man. He looked dead, and Wade realized that this was probably the bastard who was hitting him.
Finally the lights came up to normal in the room, and Wade stood to inspect the corpse. A pudgy paw of a hand, broken and bleeding, turned the dead man roughly by the shoulder revealing empty lifeless blue eyes and the horror of a familiar face.
“What the fuck?” It was ineloquent, but Wade Manson had never been a man who appreciated the beauty of language.
The voice returned, “Well done, Wade. You’ve just eliminated your chief rival for control of The Combine.”
There was no one else in the room, and Wade realized he was being watched from afar. “You can’t just kill bosses, Mister. Jimmy Richter has a whole goddamn crew who are gonna want vengeance for this. Whoever you are, you better fucking tell me what the fuck you got going on or there is going to be some serious shit.” This was not an idle threat. Jimmy Richter, like Wade, was the Boss of a major New Boston crime syndicate. More importantly, he was a member of the Board. Taking out a Board member was not something one just did on a lark.
Manson looked down at the dead body. He and Richter had never been friends, but he had not disliked the man either. He had no vendetta, no competing interests with Richter. Why had Jim hit him, then? Why was he working for this disembodied voice?
The voice answered the unasked question. “I told Mr. Richter that if he took part in this little charade, I would ensure his ascendancy to the high chair. He agreed rather quickly, Wade.”
Manson thought her heard the hint of a chuckle.
“And what about what you promised me? What was your plan for that?”
“If Richter killed you, it would be irrelevant. If you killed him, then I would know you were the kind of man I needed in charge of what remains of The Combine. Richter did not have the mentality for what I need, but I had to know if you still had your edge before I backed you.”
Manson bit his next words through ground teeth, “So you sicced a fucking juiced-up crime lord on me? A guy with reinforced bones and artificial muscles against a fat seventy-year-old? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You won, didn’t you?” The voice was placid, amused almost.
“That’s really goddamn easy for you to say. But I’m the one who coulda died.” Wade sat heavily in the chair and inspected his ruined hands. “Fucking hell!” The adrenaline rush had receded, and now the pain was coming in waves.
“Things are changing, Wade. The Chairman is dead. Big Woo is in the hands of a street hustler and Dockside is next on his list. The Combine is over, Wade. Dead. Part of the past. Something else will take its place and I want you to be in charge of that thing. Consider this a job interview and you just nailed it. You beat an augmented thug to death with your bare hands, Wade. My organization respects that sort of drive and commitment.”
A panel across the room slid open, revealing a well-lit area with several dangerous-looking men sitting at monitors. Dozens of displays flashed blue and crimson reflections across the faces of hunched over people as they stared intently at the action portrayed on their screens. A low background murmur of comm chatter and beeping equipment played like the soundtrack of an old sci-fi movie over the frantic movements of the team. It was a bona fide command center back there, and Wade had been eight feet from it this whole time.
One man stood up. He stood medium height, and his physique betrayed a lifestyle big on rich food and low on hardship. Thick silver hair was slicked back against his skull and as he walked toward Manson, one could detect a mild but p
ronounced limp.
The man’s face was flushed and red, and he extended a hand to Wade, but then reconsidered when he noticed the broken fingers and openly weeping knuckles.
“My friends call me Reynard, Wade. I’d like to welcome you to our little family.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The second bounty hunter was not much better than the first.
Roland and Lucia were eating a quick lunch at their new office. Both the meal and the office were modest affairs, just a half a dozen turkey sandwiches between them in an unassuming gray commercial pod. The pod had been a convenience store at one point in its life, and Lucia liked the large windows on the frontage that looked out onto The Drag. There was no prominent signage to indicate what the office was for or who could be found inside. The only sign of who might occupy the uninteresting space was a label painted on the clear panel of the main door that read, ‘Roland Tankowicz.’ There was no business name and no title, just the name in gold block letters on the door. The name was all that was necessary, as it was just common knowledge in Dockside that if you were in the market for a fixer, you could find it here.
The door chime sounded, disrupting the quiet lunch the partners were enjoying. Lucia’s accelerated body burned through many calories, so mealtimes were a fairly sacred thing for her. She was not thrilled when the chime stopped her mid-bite and she rolled her eyes at the interruption.
“You want to get this one?” she asked Roland, her eyes pleading.
Roland was intimately familiar with her eating patterns, and he knew a hungry Lucia was a Lucia far more likely to inflict horribly disproportionate vengeance upon pushy Docksiders. Since his own organic mass was less than ninety pounds and he could get by on far less food than she could, he opted to get the door and indicated his assent with a grunt. His eyes narrowed as he approached the front of the office.
Roland had not been as big a fan of the large windows of his office as Lucia was. Even though they were reinforced and armored, Roland’s pessimistic nature would have preferred a more hardened façade. He was the kind of guy who got shot at with depressing frequency, and the expansive mass of clear paneling left him feeling exposed. He had to admit, as he walked over to the controls, the big windows gave him a great view of the man at his door. They had dialed the panels opaque for some privacy while they ate lunch, but people inside could still see out through the one-way tinting. Roland paused a moment to assess his caller, because something wasn’t quite right.
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