Hammers and Nails

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Wade Manson was missing.

  Roland knew he had been at dinner. He had seen the fat Boss and his bodyguard at the head table. But Wade was nowhere to be found at the moment.

  This is about to kick off, he realized. I’m so going to kill that fucking bastard.

  He had no weapons, no intel, and almost no recon to speak of. He was about to get hit by an unknown quantity and configuration of opposition. His enemy had all the advantages, so he decided to start eliminating some of them. He moved through the crowded ballroom with brisk purpose, knocking gangsters and revelers aside like straw before a tornado. If anyone looked to respond to his rudeness with violent action, they changed their minds when they saw who it was they had run into. He approached The Widow, who was well into her cups and surrounded by her own security detail while she held court over a slew of sycophantic well-wishers.

  “Why, Roland! Nice to see you!” She held out a hand, presented as if Roland was to kiss it, and he responded with a look that very clearly demonstrated just how minuscule the chances of this ever occurring were. She let the hand fall and tried to speak, but Roland was having none of it.

  “Your party is about to get hit. We need to clear the room.”

  The Widow’s face clouded over, "Don’t be ridiculous, no one would dare...”

  The big man didn’t let her finish, he looked at her bodyguard, “Get her clear. Wade Manson is about to raid this place.”

  “Roland! Don’t you dare start with...”

  The Widow’s bodyguard was a man with decades of experience. Roland couldn’t remember his name, but his reputation was well-earned. He took the Widow by the elbow and began to snap brisk orders to the rest of her detail over her drunken protestations.

  Roland turned and walked away from the sputtering Chairwoman and informed the other Bosses of the impending hit. Soon, every security detail was securing their principals and looking to extricate themselves from the party with as much grace as could be managed. The rest of the crowd began to catch on that something wasn’t right, and a general murmur of unease rippled across the party as if a pebble had been dropped into a pond.

  Looks like the element of surprise is no longer theirs, Roland thought to himself as he went looking for the Widow’s security chief. He entertained a small hope Manson would see his secret plan unraveling and abort, but such was not the man’s style.

  True to form, one of the ‘extra’ security guards must have tipped off the enemy to the shift in the crowd’s mood, and the four sets of doors in the banquet hall all exploded at once.

  “Here we go,” Roland murmured.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Roland knew, from years of experience, that he needed to be moving. The people attacking the party would have had a location fix on every potential threat before they detonated the breaching charges, and Roland was easily the biggest threat in the room.

  He was moving at thirty miles per hour when the first rounds struck him, punching neat holes in his brand-new tuxedo and sending a white-hot lance of pain across his guts. He felt armor-piercing rounds try to burrow into the techno-organic armor of his skin and grunted in discomfort when another spike of pain told him that one had lodged in his abdomen.

  Rail driver! Damn. These guys were ready for me.

  It made sense. He was on the guest list and most local folks knew shooting him was a useless process. The raiders had brought a few decent sized mass-drivers it seemed, and Roland could only assume they were meant for him. They were still too small and too low-powered to penetrate deeply unless they hit straight on, but they stung like hell and enough of them would eventually shred his skin. Not to mention what they’d do if they hit the more lightly-armored area of his head. He threw an arm in front of his face and hurled himself in the direction the flechettes had come from.

  The guns were large. Almost six feet long and weighing close to seventy pounds, they employed pre-charged cells to fuel the powerful electromagnets that sent the aluminum and tungsten spikes across the battlefield at fifteen times the speed of sound. Normally, a crew of three would operate the weapons. One to shoulder and fire it, another to load and charge it, and a third to swap barrels when they annealed and cracked under the blistering heat created by the prodigious acceleration. Each cell was good for three rounds, and each barrel good for nine. Skilled crews could send armor-shredding death downrange at forty rounds a minute with these weapons, and these crews looked well-trained and competent. The only saving grace, as Roland saw it, was that the weapons were meant for extremely long range, and maneuvering them in this environment was proving to be a complicated matter for the enemy.

  The room seethed with screaming party guests and stumbling wait staff. They scrambled and lurched in all directions, a disorganized mass of panicking non-combatants frustrating the half-ton war machine as he barreled toward the enemy. But they also spoiled the aim and sight-lines of the gun crews, and for that Roland was grateful. He plowed through the crowd like a runaway train, taking as much care as he could to not harm people but not sacrificing any speed in the attempt. A few broken bones would be the least of their worries if he did not shut this down quickly.

  He hit the first squad of raiders in less than one second and beelined directly for the crew-served railgun currently spitting the large tungsten-tipped spikes his way. A hail of small arms fire washed over him as the squad tried to slow his charge enough to bring the larger weapon to bear. Roland ignored the storm of pellets, beads, and smaller flechettes like the swarm of gnats they were and hit the railgun crew like a meteor. The gunner was killed by the charge instantly, his skull and neck bones shattered by the impact and most of his upper torso torn away from the lower as Roland’s charge carried him past. The loader lasted less than a half second longer as the big man whirled on his heel to dispatch the hapless man with a backhand slap that broke his spine.

  The other gun crews never broke or lost their nerve. A steady stream of fire peppered him without mercy while others tried to remount the railgun. Roland tore into them with wild abandon, killing with every stroke and weathering the rain of incoming fire with little more than mounting irritation. He had wiped out the first gun crew when he felt the sharp heat of another flechette lodging in his upper thigh. He muffled a grunt and turned to see a second railgun crew hurling rounds his way from the other side of the ballroom. To Roland's advantage and the detriment of the partiers, the confusion of screaming guests spoiled any chance for scoring clean hits. The only reason Roland had not taken the hit dead-center was because it had passed through a cocktail waiter first and warped the round’s trajectory. The waiter still stood, a fist-sized hole in his torso bleeding and smoking. His face, pale and wan, gaped like a fish as the rest of his body finally received the message that he was in fact dead, whereupon the man crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap.

  Roland swept up the railgun he had just liberated and took aim. The gun looked oddly appropriate in his massive hands, as if it had been built to his size on purpose, and he squeezed a round off back toward the other end of the ballroom.

  Roland did not care about the crew as they were no threat to him. The railgun was, and so that is where he directed his fire. The second railgun exploded in a shower of white sparks and screaming metal shrapnel. Its squad scattered away with screams of agony and fright, and Roland was moving again.

  His enhanced reflexes gave him time to observe what was going on around him with more leisure than appeared entirely prudent, and Roland took a full second to assess the strategic landscape. There were six squads of armed and armored mercenaries engaging the guests with concentrated and controlled fire. They were not firing randomly, but killing with methodical precision. Security forces went down first, and despite their training, the out-gunned bodyguards were getting routed and pushed back to the far corner of the banquet hall. Other crews focused their attention on Roland. He had dropped two railgun crews already, but a third was setting up in an alcove and Roland was forced to abandon his curr
ent track to engage them. The big guns were the only things here that could bring him down, and he figured once they were dealt with he could manage the rest of them with little trouble.

  The third gun crew squeezed off a single flechette before Roland hit their position. He had been betting he could beat them to the punch, but the gun crew was fast and efficient. The gunner tried for a head shot, but fear rushed his trigger pull and the spike struck Roland high on the left side of his chest. His shot was straight on and suffered little to no deflection. Thus, it parted Roland’s armored skin and drove deep into his techno-organic muscle fiber. The projectile had traveled less than twenty feet and retained enough kinetic energy to drive the flechette all the way through his pectoral until it touched the solid armored carapace surrounding Roland’s internal organs. The missile, having spent too much energy getting that far into the behemoth, finally deflected off the most heavily armored part of Roland’s whole body and tore outward through the meat of his trapezius in a spray of silver fluid and sparks.

  Roland disliked getting shot by anything, but high-velocity railguns really pissed him off. He roared like a bull and completed his headlong charge into the gun crew with no thought for strategy or discretion. They died in horrible fashion, torn to pieces and bludgeoned into paste by the enraged cyborg. The silver ferromagnetic fluid that filled Roland’s chassis mixed with the dark red blood of his human opponents as he smashed the four killers to death and then spun to address the remaining raiders.

  Like a well-oiled machine the attackers were falling back and ex-filtrating the room as if by some unheard order. They know they can’t take me without the railguns! Roland realized this almost too late. The enemy was well-versed on Roland’s capabilities and this was very troubling. Roland needed answers and he would not let these men escape before he got some. He tore after the fleeing squads without a second thought. He was not as fast as he wanted to be, considering there was still a flechette lodged in his thigh, but he was still faster than any man.

  Roland exploded from the ballroom in pursuit of the raiders, not bothering to go for a stairwell or the lifts. They were in Uptown, which had real police and the coincident risk of permanent incarceration. The only way to get away with a hit like this in this part of town would be to escape to the underground tunnels and scatter. Roland knew a way to the ground floor that would be faster than any other. He aimed for the closest window and hit it as hard as he could, blasting through the reinforced glass panel like it was made of so much hard candy.

  The banquet hall in Belham Tower was on the tenth floor, and Roland had plenty of time to contemplate the one-hundred-and-twenty feet between himself and the pavement as he descended. It was not the longest fall he had ever taken. But it was the longest he had ever attempted on purpose, and he figured the resulting impact would not be without consequences.

  He was not wrong about that. He struck the street so hard he felt the synthetic bones in his legs bend and flex on impact. They did not break, thankfully. But then again, he had to admit he was built for this sort of thing.

  The street itself collapsed with a crash that broke the windows of nearby parked cars and sent great chunks of sidewalk flying. Roland found himself in a crater twenty feet across and six feet deep when the dust settled, but he was down at street level and he was certain he had beaten the enemy there. He leapt from the hole and streaked through the lobby of Belham Tower and past the security checkpoints. Every building alarm was already blaring, so he spared no attention for the additional screams his own violent entry had caused as he sped to the stairwells.

  The stairs were echoing with gunfire as building security engaged the retreating raiders. Hopelessly out-gunned and outclassed, the security forces had been pushed back away from the stairwells and forced into a holding action. A few Raiders posted up in the access doors, keeping the security guards back with controlled bursts of gunfire that demonstrated years of training and experience.

  Roland exploded through the line of security guards and blasted through the access door completely unencumbered by concentrated bead fire from the men defending it. They tried to flee but Roland ended their attempts with blows that killed instantly, and he left their corpses behind him, still twitching while he chased after the main body of killers.

  Down he ran, deeper into the sub-basement levels of Belham Tower, following the sounds of fleeing men and the barked shouts of officers snapping orders to inferiors. Their speed in getting down surprised him. Roland had underestimated his foes again and this set his jaw in irritation. He caught a rear guard defending the freight access area and figured this was how the raiders intended to make their escape.

  They must have a tram waiting, Roland figured. They’re going to escape on the freight lines.

  The plan wasn’t a bad one. Buildings this size usually had private access to the underground freight tram system. If the team could get away before New Boston PD figured out what they were doing, they’d be in the safety of Dockside or Big Woo before anyone could stop them.

  Still weaponless, Roland charged the three-man rearguard holding the entrance to the freight dock. One of them had the sense to toss a grenade his way. It clattered to a stop in front of him and Roland stomped on it to contain the blast. It was a low-yield anti-personal munition, and presented very little threat to the big man, but its blast tripped up his damaged legs and caused him to stumble in his headlong flight. He struck the entrance with a clumsy stagger and needed an extra two seconds to regain his balance and dispatch the rear guard. When he had killed the three men, he continued into the loading dock to engage the rest of the squad.

  Roland had a flechette in his gut, another in his thigh, and a third had torn through his chest and out his shoulder. It was the sort of damage any reasonable person could expect to endure when one chose to engage six squads of professional mercenaries all by one’s self. None of the damage was catastrophic, but his internal repair systems would be working overtime all week just to put him back together.

  He did not figure the reduction to his combat efficacy would keep him from finishing off his opponents, but that was before he knew about the armature.

  Running a medium or large armature indoors was nearly impossible. They were just too big. But the freight dock was a huge, wide open underground warehouse. The ceiling was thirty feet tall, the floors were concrete, and the space covered a footprint of almost forty-thousand square feet. Roland felt his jaw tighten even more when he saw his fleeing quarry loading into a freight tram while a ten-foot construction mech patrolled the warehouse floor.

  The big man swore violently. The frequency with which these mercs were outmaneuvering him was starting to annoy him on a very dangerous level. It was obvious the machine was there specifically to handle him. It was a large model, Roland did not know its exact specifications. He was sure it was over the five-thousand-pound limit for a medium. Resembling a large yellow insect, the four-legged monster had a three-sectioned body and two large grasping claws. Roland sighed. Heavies were seriously bad news. This one was low-slung and squat, with a power plant the size of a small car constituting most of its central core.

  The metal beast stalked around on its four powerful legs and gestured with its two thick multi-jointed arms. It was painted an obnoxious yellow and black, and the powerful clamps it had for hands clicked and whirred in anticipation. The fishbowl bubble encased in a reinforced and heavily armored cockpit revealed a pale and gaunt face, weathered and lined with age, and grinning with wicked glee at the sight of his notorious opponent.

  Roland had tussled with plenty of armatures. He had scrapped lights and mediums before. He had even taken down a heavy once, all by himself. But for those fights he had not been damaged, and more often than not he had his helmet and his guns when he attempted to best foes of this stature. Roland knew deep down that a heavy armature here and now was no coincidence. Roland Tankowicz was a good tactician, and he hated being outplayed. He understood with an expert’s certainty that ever
y step of this raid had been planned with him in mind, and by someone who knew his capabilities well enough to account for all possible contingencies. The old soldier could not fault his enemy’s attention to detail.

  The armature pilot oriented on Roland instantly, and the machine, large and ungainly, scuttled toward him with terrifying speed for all its lurching clumsiness. Roland had no choice, so he also charged. Tactically, he was in trouble and he knew it. His left arm was running at twenty percent strength, and the loss of nanite transport fluid had reduced all of his systems’ output noticeably. His wounded leg would be fine, except the imbalance it caused was forcing him to reduce output on the other one. The wonderful little machines driving his chassis would manage all that, but this was not the time for him to be running at less than optimal ratings.

  Though it hurt his pride, Roland made the wise decision to forego frontal assault and slid to the left at the last second to grab the machine’s foreleg. He tried to yank the appendage off the floor and drag the enemy off balance, but he simply did not have the strength or balance to move the larger machine. He felt the leg tear free of his grasp and then a thunderclap went off inside his head. Roland experienced the dull disconnected impression of flight as he left the floor and sailed across the warehouse. He struck the floor hard and tumbled in a heap until the wall arrested his motion with a painful jolt. Roland knew better than to lay there and wait, so he moved before he even knew which direction was up. This saved his life, because a giant yellow foot smashed through the floor where he had been laying and sank itself into the concrete nearly a foot deep. Close to a thousand pounds of bleeding edge military tech hobbled away from the re-purposed construction ‘bot, then spun to rain blows upon his foe with singular ferocity. Roland aimed for joints and other weak points, avoiding the heavier areas around the cockpit and main chassis.