Hammers and Nails

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “It’s a good spot, and no one will be down here for a couple days, I’m sure. Maybe a week. They only really come in her to do the inspections and clean up. How cleanly can you cut it? If it makes a mess, they’ll notice it quick.”

  Mindy grinned and the hum of her Sasori dagger joined the thrumming vibration of the main reactor. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

  A few careful strokes later, and a neat, rectangular section of the floor plate was carved out behind the service terminal. It was barely big enough for Manny to slip through, and he removed his satchel in anticipation of a tight fit. Mindy had wanted to lead, but the scout stopped her. “I don’t know if my scanner override affects the sub-basement. Your augmentations may set off an alarm down there. Wait here while I blind them.”

  Manny pulled a small cylindrical canister with a rounded bottom from his bag and dropped it through the hole. It landed on its side and righted itself with a slight wobble. There was a hiss and a puff, and the air below them filled with fine metallic chaff. Manny donned a breathing mask and slipped through the gap. Hanging by his fingers to reduce the fall, he dropped the fifteen or so feet to the floor below without too much difficulty. The space was dim, but not dark. A few lighted terminals lent a blue-green sheen to the walls near his landing spot, but did not shed enough light to pierce the darkness all the way to the far walls. The echoing of his feet as they struck the floor led him to believe the space was rather large. He moved briskly to one terminal and swiped through screens, finding the security command tree. A quick trip though the command menu confirmed that biometrics on this level were disabled. He shot a thumbs-up to Mindy and the little blond killer landed on silent feet next him.

  Manny found the environmental controls and hit the lights. He blinked in startled reflex as a giant warehouse space was suddenly illuminated around them. Tram line access was clearly marked on a large cargo door at one end and resting in quiet repose nearby was an AutoCat 8900-Series Quad-Pod. Manny gave a low whistle at the sheer intimidating bulk of it. Nine-thousand pounds of high-G rated construction mech was imposing even when on the charger.

  “That’s big,” Mindy mused with scientific authority.

  “You think?” Manny responded. “Christ, what a monster.”

  “You said you have a plan?”

  "Yeah,” the scout nodded. “I know how to handle these. I’m going to need a few minutes. You try to gather intel while I work. The scanners are down and the doors unlocked, try to find a command center or something.”

  “On it,” she replied with a nod. Then she sped off for the other side of the warehouse.

  Manny walked to the big machine and ducked below the massive yellow legs to get to the power cell housing. He opened it with a facility born of repetition, and fastidious tinkering with the blinking innards of the intimidating armature soon began.

  Mindy had found a man door across from the recharging mech, and true to Manny’s words, it was unlocked. She slipped through into a plain gray hallway and sidled down it with quiet but rapid steps. The hallway was lined with doors at regular intervals, but none seemed interesting or important until she got to the end of the hall and turned the corner. In front of her was a door marked in plain stenciled letters, ‘command center.’

  Well, that’s convenient, she thought and shifted her optics to infrared before attempting it. The room appeared empty, so she keyed the latch and the door hissed open at her touch. The room beyond was filled with terminals and screens. Most were off, but a few remained lit up and blinking. On cautious feet, she moved to the largest of these and swiped a tentative finger across the screen. It popped to life with a flash and she found herself staring at a list of files. She wasn’t sure what they were or if they were important until her eyes caught something in the filenames.

  The word “Breach” appeared far too often to be unimportant, and she gasped when she realized what that meant. She selected one at random, and one of the larger view screens mounted to the wall flickered to life. When she looked to the big monitor, she saw Roland Tankowicz battling unknown enemies on some strange planet. He poured fire from a massive rifle of some kind at unseen foes, muzzle flashes lighting his silver death’s head helmet with satanic orange reflections. He looked like death itself, reaping souls from the unfortunate with his skull aflame. Mindy shuddered. The view was at an angle to Roland and appeared to be from a camera mounted to another person walking behind him. Data scrolled on the right side of the screen in endless blocks of coded text. Most of this Mindy found indiscernible. But the parts she recognized pertained to combat numbers including rate of fire, accuracy, vital signs, and things of that nature.

  This is old combat video from before he came to Dockside! She realized this with a shiver. Oh my god. I’m watching his nightmares! The assassin was instantly uncomfortable, as if she was witnessing something private that she had no right to see. She stopped the video playback with a stabbing forefinger. Fumbling, Mindy drew a memory card from one of her pouches and inserted it into the terminal. Then she copied all the files to the card. Before yanking the card out, Mindy went to the messages folder and copied all of those, too. Then, she returned the chip to her pouch with a quick motion, since merely touching the thing felt wrong.

  Another shudder rushed through her body in a wave of cold dread that started at the base of her spine and radiated to her whole body. She did not understand exactly what those files meant about the enemy, but she understood what they were, and what it meant for Roland. If what she had heard from Lucia was correct, these files were so top secret that just knowing they existed was worth a lengthy prison sentence. There were hundreds of them, and part of her soul was convinced that every memory of a history the old soldier wanted to forget was now sitting in her pocket.

  I hope Manny is done because we really need to get the hell out of here.

  She sprinted back to the cargo bay where Manny was just wrapping up. He had a crooked smirk on his face that disappeared the instant he saw the tight frown stretched across hers.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Long story. But it’s time to go. You finished?”

  “All set,” he affirmed with a quick nod of the head.

  The pair moved quickly and silently back to the hole in the ceiling, and a powerful boost from Mindy’s superhuman muscles had Manny scrambling through the opening in short order. Then, using the corner for traction, Mindy ran up the wall and leapt to the gap like a busty squirrel. With a single motion, she slipped through the narrow hole like a greased eel and alighted on her feet. Manny was impressed, but there was no talking on the way out. They retraced their steps to the lobby where Manny erased their entry logs and deleted the spoofed ID card from the building’s memory.

  The pair slipped out into the pre-dawn darkness of The Sprawl and did not stop running until they were several blocks away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “This was in that building?” Roland’s basso profundo had a dangerous catch to it. Lucia recognized it as the dark, passionless rage that lived in the locked vault of his worst memories. It was the birthplace of the nightmares that still chased him during his rest, and a trauma so deep and personal that he was never likely to truly overcome it. Roland had tried for decades to put it all behind him, tried to outrun the monster with booze, nihilism, and a life dedicated to violence. It was all useless though. The monster was there all the same, just as alive and ready to go now as the moment it had been born. All he could do was keep it locked up and try to live like a person. His life since escaping the Army had never amounted to more than a pantomime of humanity, but he had accepted that and resolved himself to it.

  Then he met Lucia, and something inside him woke up. He was forced to take the monster out of the box and confront it. Breach was there and always would be, but Lucia reminded him that Breach was only part of him, and that he had other parts, too.

  None of that made watching the videos in Mindy’s pilfered files any easier
. He and Lucia were going through them alone at his apartment. Ostensibly, they were trying to find clues that might lead to Manson’s mysterious backers. They already knew The Brokerage was involved, but the existence of these files had added another layer of urgency to the mystery. The name “Reynard” featured prominently in the messages and file swap records, but neither of them had any clue who that could be. The duo surmised it was a code a name for someone on the Brokerage payroll, but other than some cryptic language about a prison term, there was nothing that could identify the individual definitively. He was important, that much was apparent. Just having all these files meant that this Reynard person had serious connections, but other than that ominous clue, they were at a loss. Lucia had given up on gleaning too much helpful insight from the bulk of the data at this point. As they cycled through those files, managing Roland’s emotional stress was becoming the more critical objective.

  “Yeah,” Lucia responded. “Mindy found it on the command center terminal. Nothing had been closed out... like someone had been reviewing them recently hadn’t bothered to shut down the machine.”

  Roland grunted, but didn’t speak. The file on screen was from a Galapagos incursion. It was before the Golem failsafe had been used, and he and his squad were mopping up a crew of pirates that had overrun a food production facility. The squad of cyborgs were fighting close-quarters, clearing buildings one at a time with mechanical precision. Roland was out in front, that was his job, after all. He knew from memory that the camera was mounted to Private Jasper Wellington, or “Comms” as was his designation. Jasper was the communications, electronics, and medical expert on the team, and his helmet was getting telemetry feeds from the whole squad. The data scrolled down the right side of the view screen, and despite the passage of nearly three decades, Roland could recall all the parameters from memory. He spoke absently, without inflection, narrating to Lucia for no reason he could articulate.

  “That’s Jasper’s camera. Right now he’s locked on the LT, designated ‘Lead’ in the HUD,” he pointed to the reticle around a black helmeted head with ‘Lead” blinking in yellow letters above it. Lucia said nothing, but noted that all the visible squad members had unique helmets. Roland’s helmet, she knew, was an all-black skull covering that locked into a gorget around his neck. His faceplate was metallic white with triangular eyes and sculpted cheeks. A flattened bridge ran between his eyes to a blank and featureless facet that connected the nasal bridge to the chin bar with a contoured covering for his lips and mouth. The black helmet and the silver faceplate, worn in conjunction, bore an eerie resemblance to a mouthless skull’s face floating silently above the body of an onyx giant. Roland had been designated ‘Breach,’ and he was always the first thing the enemy saw. His look was no accident; it was a deliberately dramatic and terrifying aesthetic, designed to terrify the enemy.

  Lead’s helmet was similar, but the death’s head motif was less prominent. His faceplate covered more of his face, and his eyes were larger and more squared. Lucia assumed that Roland’s tiny triangular apertures were to make it more difficult for incoming fire to exploit the weak point. He was purpose-built to take hits, and it made sense to sacrifice some scanning and data acquisition for more safety.

  Roland was still talking, “Sneak had already cut the power and blinded them, and Scout had taken out their armatures and vehicles from two and a half miles away. Bobby could shoot the wings off a fly at a hundred yards before the upgrades, so giving him a railgun and bionic eyes was like cheating.” Roland smiled a small, faraway smile that turned his mouth but never touched his eyes. “We were just cleaning up at this point. This one was a damn cakewalk. Two hundred and forty opposing force, and the five of us cleaned them out in two hours.”

  It’s like killing pirates with his friends is a happy memory, Lucia thought with just a hint of sadness, he was born to fight, and having the enemy in front of him and his friends at his back was the only time he felt whole.

  She put a hand on his arm, and he shifted, uncomfortable at the touch. “You must miss them a lot,” she offered, trying to get him to open up.

  Roland never lied, and when she asked him a question, he always answered it straight. This time Lucia could tell how much his honesty hurt. “I really do,” he whispered.

  “I’m so sorry.” It felt cliché and weak, but she was sorry.

  “It’s okay,” his voice sounded stronger, “You didn’t do this. It’s just...” His voice caught again, “It’s good to see them again, is all.”

  “Do you want to be alone?”

  He shook his head violently, “Dear god, no. I was alone for twenty-five years. I’m just not good at...” he trailed off, words escaping him.

  “Emotions?” Lucia supplied the answer.

  “Yeah. Those.” He agreed with a sheepish head nod. Then he turned somber, “Lucia... I’m uh, I don’t know. Afraid? I think I’m afraid I’ll never be right again.” He pointed to the screen, “I was right back then. It felt right. I was the guy I wanted to be.”

  “You were a super hero, saving the galaxy with your friends at your side and the enemy in front of you.” Her smile was warm as she said it. She had known him long enough to understand his post-adolescent heroic aspirations.

  “Yeah. I read too many comic books.” It was spoken as a recrimination, she realized, as if somehow his desire to be a hero was a flaw he should have known to avoid. “But they twisted it, perverted it. Even my good memories feel wrong now.”

  “You’re still a hero, Roland, and you can still save Dockside.” She slipped an arm around his, hugging his comically swollen bicep, “They didn’t take that away from you. They tried to, but you were too strong.”

  “Was I?” he wondered out loud. “I sometimes think that they were stronger.” He was referring to the two members of his squad who committed suicide when they found out that their brains were being shut off and their bodies used to commit atrocities.

  Lucia was having none of that, “Bullshit. What they made you do when your brain was shut off has nothing to do with you. What did you tell me once? ‘Don’t take responsibility for anyone’s choices but your own’? That advice helped me a lot not so long ago.”

  “I know, I get it. But I get so...” Words failed him again.

  “Angry?” Again, Lucia bailed him out.

  “It’s so much more than angry. I get cold and dark, and that makes me want to... do awful things. To kill, and smash, and destroy.” He paused, and Lucia waited.

  “It’s hard to explain, Lucia. But this whole world, this galaxy? It’s like it’s made of glass, and everything I touch shatters unless I tiptoe all the time. If I have to fight a guy, I can’t even hit him as hard as I want because he’ll explode. I’m always holding back, always restraining myself.” He couldn’t keep the snarl from coloring his words, “That building? The one where Mindy found this stuff?” His voice became a growl, “I could grab my guns and some grenades, walk up to it right now, and level the whole fucking thing. I could kill everyone inside, drag it down by the support beams with my bare hands, and then walk out of the rubble without batting an eyelash.” He stopped again and expelled his mounting rage with a heavy breath. “But I won’t. Because that is not Roland Tankowicz. That’s Breach. Breach is them, not me. But some things really make me want to be Breach, anyway. There’s a, I don’t know. Freedom? A freedom to just letting it all go and being the machine. Like when those guys took you the other night...”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “It put you in a bad place. You know, I can tell when you are ready to give in and stop trying to be a hero, and I saw it on your face that night. But let me tell you something, Corporal.” She reached up and turned his head to look at her, “You can’t ever do that. You can’t ever let it happen. Do you know why?”

  He shook his head, confused.

  “Because those little machines are in my head, too. They are trying to make me like hurting and killing. I can’t go back to who I was, Roland. I can’t be a b
everage company executive anymore. This is what I have to be now, and I can’t do it alone. Dockside needs my help. They have no chance against The Brokerage and whoever this Reynard person is. The people here deserve a chance, and without us they won’t have one. But the more I try to help, the more Dad’s nanobots will want me to be like Breach. I won’t give up on Dockside, but I need you. I need Roland. Because if you aren’t strong enough to hold on to your humanity, what hope do I have?”

  Roland had never looked at it that way. “I will never give up. But I can’t promise to be perfect all the time, either. It’s just so damn hard! I live in a world filed with glass houses and papier mâché people.” He held up a black fist the size of a melon, “It’s really hard not to break all those delicate things when your whole body is a hammer.”

  “Don't overthink it,” She suggested with a squeeze. "All you really need is the right nail to swing at."

  “Fair enough.” He looked down at her, “You know, you can't ever give up either. Because if something happens to you?” he shook his head slowly, “I don’t want to think about what I would become.”

  “Then we will just have to take care of each other. Just like your squad.”

  She crawled into his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Like it or not, Corporal. We are stuck with each other. Might as well make the best of it, right?” She planted a firm kiss on his lips and held it there for a long time.

  Their tender moment was not fated to last. The door chime came as an unwelcome interruption, and despite his promises to avoid degenerating into fits of wanton violence Roland found himself prepared to commit horrible crimes against the bodies of whoever had picked this moment to come to his door. An entire troop of cookie-selling children could be wiped out in the next moment, and he would have considered it justified. Giant booted feet stomped over to the door accompanied by the musical sounds of Lucia’s giggling. Growling like a hungry bear, Roland checked the screen. Billy, Mindy, Sid, and Manny were all waiting on his landing. Well, this can’t be good, he thought, with a sigh of defeat.