It was a very tall, dark-skinned gentleman standing nearly in the street. This struck Roland as odd. The man had rung the chime, and then for some reason stepped back almost off the sidewalk into traffic to wait for him. Roland took a closer look. The man nearly matched his own seven-and-a-half feet tall, which marked him as odd even in Dockside. He wore a sensible suit, neither cheap nor expensive, in light brown. A quick check of the door scanner showed that the individual had no heavy bionics, but a suite of registered soft and hard body-mods scrolled down the screen next to the door. Roland studied these with careful, professional interest. It was a suitably impressive list: heavy bone work, a staggering quantity of MyoFiber, and upgrades to heart, lungs, and pituitary gland rounded out the list. Those were just the registered mods; Roland had no idea what else may lurk under the hood.
Who the hell sent this goon? Roland wondered, That’s a decent set of upgrades for street muscle.
Then he realized what was going on.
“Lucy!” he called back into the office. “Looks like another bounty hunter!”
“Really?” Lucia sounded concerned, but also annoyed. She joined him in the front office. “He looks unarmed, though. How are you going to play this?”
Lucia had seen Roland get shot, blown through buildings, fight exotic cyborg armatures, and generally pummel most of life’s problems into solutions for the last six months. She could not, however, keep the tinge of concern for his safety out of her voice. Cognitively, she understood that there was no way to augment a human enough to challenge Roland in a fight without an armature. She knew this because her father had more or less built Roland for a United Earth Defense Force super-soldier program a few decades prior. The big man was a top-tier special operator bonded to nearly half a ton of top-secret techno-organic muscle and armor. This program had produced five successful candidates, and Roland was the last of them. The others were killed or committed suicide when their governmental masters revealed that their brains could be switched off and the bodies forced to commit atrocities without their consent. Roland had been rescued by Dr. Ribiero and several other civilian contractors when they found out what was happening, and the whole program had been buried in so many layers of secrecy that merely knowing it had existed was grounds for imprisonment.
Apropos to the issue with the bounty hunter outside the door was the reality that unless the dark man in the brown suit was hiding a very exotic weapon somewhere on or about his person, he would not pose a significant threat to Roland. While Roland’s exact capabilities and origins were still a mystery to the general populace, enough people had tried their luck against the resident fixer to make his bizarre strength and durability common knowledge. Dockside had a lot of mutants, freaks, ex-military cyborgs, and augmented criminals walking around, and Docksiders did not ask too many questions about that sort of thing. This is why Roland made this part of town his home when the Army released him. The government had made it very clear that Roland needed to keep the secrets of his past if he was to enjoy any autonomy, and Dockside was a good place to hide.
“I guess I’ll just go out there and see what he wants,” Roland shrugged. “I think he’s going to shoot me with something.”
“Because of how far back he’s moved?”
“Yeah. He wants to catch me framed in the doorway. Get a cleaner shot that way.”
Lucia hissed, “Go change your shirt then, that one was pricey.” She meant it as a joke, but she still sounded nervous.
He tried to reassure her, “This guy won’t even scratch my paint. I’d let you have a shot at him, except he’s so juiced up I figure you’d have to kill him. I want him alive for questioning.”
“Fine, but still, lose the shirt please.” Finding clothing fitting Roland’s 4XL body that also looked decent was an expensive and time-consuming prospect.
Roland scowled and shrugged out of his dress shirt. One of his ubiquitous black T-shirts was underneath it, and his asinine musculature strained its seams like overinflated balloons. A few practiced presses to his palm and a triggering series of eye movements shifted the skin tone of his matte-black surface armor to a color nearly matching that of his face and head. Unless one looked closely, it would not be obvious that Roland’s arms were layered in a thick mesh of armored polymer.
“Thank you,” she smiled sweetly. “Now go kick his ass, dear.”
Roland hit the door control and stepped into the street.
The bounty hunter immediately went for something at his hip, but the distance between the two evaporated in a fraction of a second. Roland had reflexes and speed almost as good as Lucia’s, and there was not enough of a gap between the two men to delay him more than an eye-blink. Roland caught the hunter’s thick muscled wrist before it could draw a weapon and the big cyborg pulled him off balance with a sharp jerk. The man wobbled and stumbled, and Roland twisted the captured wrist behind his back in a brutal hammer lock. A pistol of some indeterminate configuration fell to the sidewalk and clattered to the curb. Roland stomped on it with all his weight, and his nine-hundred-and-forty pounds smashed the weapon into useless scrap.
The bounty hunter writhed athletically and twisted away from Roland’s armlock. He spun from the cyborg and rocked a front kick into Roland’s midriff, trying to dislodge the vice gripping his wrist. Roland felt the boot drive into his guts and raised an eyebrow, “Not bad!”
The hunter’s eyes went wide. That kick would have felled an ox. It would have killed a regular person. It was the kind of kick that would have given even other augmented freaks a hard time. Roland looked mildly amused. “My turn.”
He brought the hunter forward with a jerk of the wrist and drove his own fist into the suited man’s guts. The hunter burbled a throaty gasp and bent over, but he did not go down. Rather, he switched tactics and turned his fall into an attempt to tackle Roland to the ground. Unfortunately for him, Roland had been a wrestler and judoka since he was a boy, and the attempt was stuffed without difficulty. Roland hip-checked the takedown attempt and used a forearm to straighten the man back up so he could slug him in the gut once more.
Again, the big bounty hunter heaved a gurgling retch, but the man was too strong or too stubborn to go down. His hands, weak and shaking, clutched for Roland’s throat as the tottering behemoth tried not to lose his feet entirely.
“Oh, come on,” Roland grumbled, and prepared to level the thug with a haymaker right hand. Before he could, he saw Lucia flying through the air with her right arm cocked. With his reflexes turned all the way up, Roland could perceive things at almost five times the rate of a regular person, so he had ample opportunity to note the PC-10 gauntlets on Lucia’s arms. Her right fist, encased in the high-tech armored glove, connected with the base of the bounty hunter’s skull where it immediately delivered a prodigious electric shock directly to his brain stem. The bulky body stiffened and crashed with frozen rigidity to the pavement. There he gasped and twitched for several pain-filled moments.
Roland gave Lucia a sideways look. “I was handling it.”
“I couldn’t watch you hit him anymore, it was nasty.”
He shrugged, only somewhat apologetic, “Not easy to tell how hard to hit a guy like him. I was trying to take it easy, but he’s had a ton of bone and muscle work.” Roland did not mention that had he wanted to, he could have put his fist all the way through the man. But that would have been very messy and such theatrics certainly defeated the purpose of going hand-to-hand in the first place.
The wounded man stirred and tried to stagger to his feet. When the bulky thug had managed to struggle to all fours, Lucia kicked his hands out from underneath him and sent him crashing back to the sidewalk.
“Stay down!” she barked at him.
He growled and lurched for her legs, and before Roland could kick his skull in, Lucia whirled out of range and spun a whipping left punch into the hunter’s right ear. The gauntlet popped as it sent another shock to the hunter’s brain and then whined while the capacitors recharged.
The bounty hunter’s face bounced off the sidewalk, leaving a bloody smear from a broken nose marring the pale gray concrete.
“Slow learner,” Roland opined.
“There seems to be a lot of that going around these days,” she fixed her tousled hair, “this makes two bounty hunters in two days. You are getting popular.”
“Two bounty hunters with no clue who I am and what I can do. Two hunters who I don’t know, which means they are not from our neck of the woods, either.” Roland was beginning to sound frustrated. “It doesn’t make sense. These are street-level mooks. Not serious hitters. Who the hell could be sending these goddamn mosquitoes after me?” Roland did not want to admit it, but he was more concerned that Lucia would get hurt in the crossfire. If there was to be a string of low-rent bounty hunters taking swipes at him, there would plenty of potential collateral damage. He may have been several varieties of invulnerable, but she was not.
“Mindy still at the Lodge?” He changed the subject.
“Yeah, still trying to find out who that sparkling personality of yours has run you afoul of this time.”
Roland grumbled something unintelligible and grabbed the prostrate bounty hunter by the back of the neck and hauled him upright. “Let’s bring this one inside and see if he can’t help shine some light on that mystery, shall we?”
The bounty hunter coughed and whimpered while drool and blood ran down his chin to his shirt.
Lucia scowled at this. “Let me get some towels before you bring him in. The carpets are brand new and Mindy makes enough of a mess without this jackass bleeding all over them.”
“Good call,” the big man agreed as she jogged back inside the office. Carpet cleaning was a very real operating expense when you opened an office in Dockside. Excessive bleeding was de rigeur for many of Roland’s clients for a myriad of reasons. Lucia returned from inside the office with a towel and Roland applied it to the man’s oozing face. This elicited a muffled growl of pain and for an instant re-ignited the bruiser’s fighting spirit. Roland snuffed that warrior’s flame by squeezing the back of his neck hard enough to make the bones click audibly and then raising the four-hundred-pound man from the sidewalk with a single arm to emphasize the point. The thick legs kicked for a moment before the hunter slumped in shamed surrender and held up his hands.
“Huh,” Lucia remarked, “maybe he can be taught.”
“He might even live out the day, then,” was the answering snarl, “as long as he doesn’t forget himself before I’m done with him, that is.”
Mindy chose this moment to appear from around the corner. The tiny blond took one look at Lucia bedecked in her gauntlets and Roland hoisting a giant goon from the street and her eyes grew wide. “Jesus, Roland!” she shook her head with affected disapproval. “Are you bullying the neighborhood boys again?” Mindy walked up to the hapless hunter and gave him an appraising look, “Did he steal your bike? Take your lunch money?” She tapped her cheek with a finger, as if in deep thought, “Did he give you a wedgie? Roland! What have we told you about wedgie-ing dumb bounty hunters who can’t be bothered to do even a little bit of research or recon?”
Lucia was snorting in a fruitless attempt to contain her laughter, but Roland was not in the mood. “You know this one?” He shook the man still locked in his iron grip.
“Nope.” Mindy may have been clowning a little, but the look in her eyes was all business. “Not personally, anyway. He took the contract on you yesterday. Get this, it’s for sixty-five thousand.”
Roland sounded insulted, “Sixty-five for me?" He turned the captured man to face him, "You decided to take me on for sixty-five large? Are you trying to die or something?”
The big hunter just tossed them a limp shrug and said nothing.
Lucia chimed in, “Bring him inside. Let’s see what he knows.”
For the first time the hunter spoke. His voice was raspy and hoarse, “I ain’t tellin’ you guys shit.” His face, burned and scratched by Lucia’s gauntlets, locked into a tight-lipped mask of stoic ferocity.
“Well, shit!” Mindy giggled and turned to Lucia, “Hear that, boss? He totally isn’t going to tell us anything!” The assassin threw her hands up in theatrical frustration, “I guess we’ll just let you go then, huh?”
Even Roland had to chuckle at that, and he growled at his captive, “You just tried to kill me for less money than it takes to buy a decent aerocar. I don’t give a fuck if you talk or not, but an example will have to be made to the rest of the low-rent third-string wannabe badasses at the Lodge looking at the bounty boards.”
He squeezed his hand again and drove the man through the office door with a rough shove.
“You are going to be that example, pal. How much of you I mail back to the Lodge will depend on how helpful you end up being.” He ducked through the door, still shaking his head, “You’re new in town, so I’ll help you learn the first rule of Dockside.”
Roland shoved the man to a chair. He did not try to restrain the goon. He did not have to. The man was outnumbered and out-gunned and he knew it. He wouldn’t show fear, but it was clear to anyone looking at him that he was no longer willing to try his luck with either the giant, the crazy chick with the electric gloves, or the most famous assassin in the galaxy. He sat, he watched, and he waited for his chance to run.
“And that is?” Mindy was new in town, too. She and Lucia walked inside behind the hulking pair and waited for Roland’s answer.
Roland shrugged, “Same as anywhere else, really. Know who you’re fucking with before you start.”
“What’s rule two?” Mindy was playing a part now. Helping to soften up the hunter’s resolve with oblique menace rather than overt threats.
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“Is there a third?” Now Lucia was getting in on it.
“Same as number two.”
Mindy beamed a ditzy smile right at the man in the brown suit, “Wow! Broke all three rules on your first day! Nice work!”
CHAPTER FIVE
The basic information came easily and without coercion.
The big bounty hunter’s name was Steven Reinhardt. He had made his bones as a high-end corporate bodyguard for a mining concern out of Ariadne. The frontier station was still a very rough place, and the division VP stationed there needed a heavy hitter to keep opportunistic types from getting too comfortable. Shikomi Heavy Industries had paid for the full Corpus Mundi Executive Protection Package for him, which included some of the best soft body-mods on the market. Before long, the allure of adventure and the big money of bounty hunting had pulled him away from the cushy world of private security and sent him wandering the gate stations looking for bounties to collect. He had not been at this long, but he had picked up a few decent-paying gigs already. Mostly deadbeats fleeing creditors, and one mass-murderer from Galapagos who put up a hell of a fight when cornered. Studying and training to prevent kidnappings and ambushes had the unintended consequence of making him superb at abducting people himself. He had found that over a decade of running high-end corporate security teams had given him a very real edge when it came to hunting down runners. His experience enabled him to see the flaws in their defenses and read their moves with ease. He was still a rookie, but his star was on the rise and he was feeling great about his career right up until today.
He was on Thorgrimm Station dropping off his latest bounty when he saw the Tankowicz contract hit the boards. Sixty-five thousand was as big a bounty as Reinhardt had ever gone after, and since he had been itching to get back Earthside anyway, he took it. It was the first real tactical blunder he had made in his fledgling career, and Reinhardt was trying very hard to learn from it without dying. His swollen eyes first went to Mindy. She was standing in front of his chair with a coy smirk on her face and looking like two tons of sex appeal stuffed into a five-pound bag. Reinhardt had just had his ass kicked by a giant and a little girl with electric gloves, and even so he could not take his eyes off of Mindy’s figure. To the man’s cr
edit, it wasn’t all frat-boy leering, either. As a card-carrying member of the Lodge, Reinhardt knew exactly who Mindy was, and seeing her here made him feel stupid and small. He was a no-name lime-green rookie, and she was the queen of the bounty boards. His ignorance of her involvement spoke very clearly of his poor preparation on this job, and thus he sat humiliated in front of the one person he’d have liked to impress. Even a small amount of research would have informed him that she might be associated with Tankowicz. Certainly some recon would have.
He lamented his carelessness with a biting internal rebuke. Mindy would have reconned the target. That’s why Mindy is a legend and you are a jackass who just fucked up a sixty-five-K job.
He tore his gaze from Mindy’s artfully arrayed cleavage and looked over to the other woman. His eyes rested on the black armored gauntlets she wore and he made a note to look into those. He’d rather bash it out with Tankowicz for another round than get whacked with those things again. He still had a headache, and it was only through sheer stupid luck that he had not emptied his bladder after the second hit. His situation was undignified enough without having to face down an interrogation soaked in his own piss.
Then he took in his quarry. It was not that Reinhardt had failed to do any research at all for this gig. He had known Roland was a local fixer of some renown and that he was probably aggressively augmented as well. He had tried to bring the man down with a gun because of this. The Executive Protection Package was a very high-end suite of augmentations, and Reinhardt did not often find himself outmatched. But the rumors about Tankowicz had made it clear that caution was the way to go. The bounty was ‘dead or alive’ after all, and the hunter was not a squeamish sort. He had severely underestimated both the speed and the strength of the big man though. Steven Reinhardt thought in terms of commercially available augmentations, and in their all-too-brief fight, Tankowicz had demonstrated abilities far in excess of that paradigm. The man was at a complete loss to understand what had gone wrong.
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