Paulie had considered all of this in a fraction of a second, which was a good thing, because the tiny blond darted her crackling blade at his face before he was done. He tried to intercept her slash with a cut of his own to her wrist. She twisted to catch his blade in a glissade that took his attacking arm out of line. He retreated to avoid her riposte, a thrust at his guts, and countered with a horizontal slash at hers. The lithe assassin twisted to the side to let his buzzing weapon slide across her torso. Though not as dangerous as Mindy’s Sasori dagger, Paulie’s vibroblade caught on her harness and sliced the armored jumpsuit in horizontal line across the top of her bust. Either oblivious or nonplussed by the near miss and near disrobing, Mindy’s left hand descended in a punch designed to fracture his jaw.
Paulie ducked under the blow, and brought his own left fist around to return the favor. Mindy caught the strike against her right forearm and brought her knee up and into Paulie’s groin. The mercenary huffed a pained grunt at this, but he was wearing full combat armor, and that included groin protection. The force was enough to lift him from the metal decking however, and he waved his knife hand in a series of uncoordinated slashes while staggering backward.
Mindy batted his ineffectual swipes aside and planted a booted foot into his chest. This sent the mercenary flying backward to land on his back. She leapt again, but he was ready this time and rolled into her attack instead of away. His shoulder collided with Mindy’s stomach with a bone-jarring impact, and Paulie drove it forward with all his strength. This took Mindy from her feet with a yelp and sent her blade clattering to the catwalk. To Paulie’s confusion, instead of scrambling away, the woman wrapped her legs around his torso and fell to her back. Mindy’s arms, comically thin compared to the armored bulk of her opponent, trapped his knife arm in a grip of steel. With a grunt, the mercenary tried to sit up, but found himself trapped between Mindy’s legs and held fast by her grip on his arm. He twisted and heaved, trying to extricate himself from the vice-like prison of Mindy’s legs, and for a moment he caught himself staring down at her exposed cleavage.
He snarled with sadistic glee and drove his crotch against hers, “If you wanted me like this, Mindy, all you had to do was ask.” With a wrench, he managed to drag his knife hand over to her chest, and the point vibrated mere inches from the heaving swell of her breasts, no longer covered by the protective mesh of her jumpsuit. “I can’t wait to tell everybody that I was the guy who finally got inside you!”
Mindy increased the pressure from her own hands, forcing the blade back and away for a moment, but Paulie doubled up on his grip and the inexorable descent resumed with quivering slowness. When the point of his knife vibrated less than three inches from her sternum, Mindy’s eyes flashed up to meet Paulie’s and for a tiny moment Paulie savored the look of unfiltered terror on her face. Strangely, while he watched her and pressed the pommel of his weapon ever downward, her expression shifted to something that Paulie might have mistaken for amusement.
Then all the resistance to his knife evaporated, and it plunged downward. To his surprise, it did not tear through the legendary assassin’s equally legendary chest. Mindy had twisted her hips and rotated to his right, bringing her body out of the path of the blade. The knife missed her entirely and drove into the catwalk with all the force generated by Sven Paulsen’s superhuman muscles. It sank into the metal all the way to its hilt and lodged there. Before the stupefied mercenary could make sense of what was happening, Mindy threw her left leg over his right shoulder, trapping his arm between her knees. She held him there, in complete possession of his right arm, and giggled at the confused mercenary.
“Typical man,” she admonished, “When will you silly boys learn that just being on top doesn’t mean you are in control?”
Still gripping his wrist, Mindy stretched. Paulie’s arm straightened, and he realized in a moment of terrible clarity what was happening. Her legs held his shoulder in place with his elbow braced against her inner thigh. As she stretched and pulled, he felt his arm lock out as straight as it would go. Then the sadistic little killer kept pulling, and the limb began to bend backward at the elbow. Using his left arm, Paulie slapped and punched with desperate fury, terrified at the inevitable outcome and hoping against reason that there was a way to avoid it.
There was not.
With a sound like a gun shot, the tendons of his elbow snapped and Paulie’s radius and ulna dislocated from his humerus. His right forearm tore backward and away from his upper arm and he howled like a banshee when his ulnar nerve shredded like spaghetti against the twisting bones.
Mouth agape in a silent scream, he tried to stand. But Mindy twisted again and her legs swept him over his side and onto his back. She rolled atop the armored man and pressed her forearm to his throat with a strength that made her intentions clear. Another hand closed over his mouth to silence the howls of pain the man was trying desperately to exorcise.
“Oh, no no, Paulie-boy. No leaving just yet. You are really going to want to see this next part.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Manny and Lucia infiltrated Reynard’s building in exactly the same manner as the previous attempt. Lucia, like Mindy, was suitably impressed by the ease with which the young man outmaneuvered the diverse security features arrayed to keep them out. Manny treated expensive security systems like a Sunday crossword: occasionally tricky, but never insurmountable and usually fun to get through.
They moved through the lobby and into the elevator unobstructed, but upon exiting the elevator at the reactor level, they started to encounter complications. It was in that hallway that they bumped into their first patrolling guard. He was as surprised to see them as they were to see him. There had been no guards wandering the halls when Manny and Mindy had last been there. When Lucia stepped out into the hallway, she nearly ran into the startled mercenary. He was a burly man, over six feet tall and every bit of three-hundred pounds. He was dressed like a guard, and not like a man about to go raid a shipyard, thus Manny and Lucia did not have the added complication of full battle armor to overcome.
The guard’s eyes went wide at the sight of a young man and a pretty woman suddenly stepping from a secure elevator. This was not an evolved thinker, but the tall mercenary was very nearly almost certain that this elevator should only discharge grizzled mercenaries and the occasional ex-con. These two were not members of either group, and so the guard made an executive decision in that moment to investigate.
“Hey!” he began with practiced eloquence. Whatever insightful dialog he might have introduced was lost to the annals of time though. He did not get to finish his interrogation.
Lucia, perhaps because she had been forewarned by her father about the changes her nanobots might be causing, resisted her instinct to draw her CZ and shoot the man. It bothered her that her first reaction had been to go for a lethal solution, but she was relieved she had caught it in time to resist the urge. There was hope for her, at least. This entire mental journey took place over a tenth of a second, which left her plenty of time to select and employ gentler resolutions.
Manny was still wrapping his mind around the emerging situation when Lucia fired three strikes into the looming guard. The first was a right hook to his body that would have stung even if she had not been wearing her PC-10 gauntlets. She was wearing them, and so a crippling electric discharge contracted all the muscles of his trunk and he folded over the punch as if kicked by a mule. The second was a rising knee strike, breaking the man’s nose for what turned out to be the eleventh time in his life. The guard had no opinion on this as the knee was followed a fifth of a second later by her third blow: a right hook that connected with his ear and sent a nasty shock directly to his brain. Lucia had punched enough people in the head at this point to know that no matter how big you were, or how many augmentations you had purchased, a large electric charge delivered directly to the gray matter was a nearly infallible method of putting a guy to sleep. This time was no exception. The guard sank to his knees
with a gurgling sigh and flopped forward. His face came to rest on Manny’s boots, where it lay drooling and snoring.
Manny looked askance at the small woman, and then down to the large man. Then he looked back at Lucia again.
“Oh, come on!” he whined, “Is there anybody on this team who can’t kick my ass?”
Lucia shrugged, “My dad?” She paused, then shrugged. “Well, maybe. He’s old, but he fights dirty. Come on, when he wakes up they are going to sound the alarm.” She turned from him and moved down the hall toward the reactor room.
Manny followed, mumbling, “I got to save up for some bone and muscle shit or something...”
At the reactor room, Lucia pulled up short. She pressed a finger to her lips and signaled for Manny to wait. Then she placed her hand over the latch panel and took a deep breath. She exhaled a protracted breath and then pressed the latch. Willing herself to think and breathe as slowly as possible, Lucia’s sense of time ground to a torpid crawl. The door did not whisk open, it meandered. When it was open barely fourteen inches, she slipped through as fast as she could and streaked into the reactor room. There were two men in the room, both proportioned and dressed like the last one. Lucia perceived their reactions to her presence as criminally slow, handicapped as they were by normal human reflexes. She stretched the first one out with a straight left in passing and was on the other just as his hand was moving toward his sidearm. Her right fist put that one down, and a mere second-and-a-half after pressing the latch two professional mercenaries were asleep on the floor. She quickly scanned the room for further hostiles. Finding none, she went back to the door and signaled to Manny that it was safe to proceed.
He stepped through and gawked at the downed men laying glassy-eyed on the deck. “Why am I even here?” He wondered aloud.
“Because I need you to unlock doors.” Lucia answered sweetly.
“Right,” the young scout acknowledged with a shake of his head. “The panel we cut is right behind that controls terminal. The drop is like fifteen feet though.”
“I brought a rope.”
“Good call! But hold on a sec,” he reached down and pulled an ID card from one of the unconscious mercenaries. He brought it over to a facilities panel and inserted it.
“What are you doing?” Lucia asked, sounding distressed, “It will want to scan you!”
“No it won’t,” he amended, "I disabled biometrics when we came in, remember?” Then he pulled the card out with a triumphant cry, “There! Try sounding the alarms now, bitches!”
Lucia gave him a sideways look, “You couldn't disable the alarms before?”
He shrugged, “Needed a security badge to do it. All I had was facilities.”
Lucia nodded and then stuck her head through the hole to get a look at the warehouse before dropping through. It was as dark and empty as they had hoped it would be. She secured a rope and slid down to light on the floor. Perhaps not so silently as Mindy, Manny noticed, but quiet all the same. He followed, and his own descent was loud in comparison. But to his relief it did not matter. They were alone in the cavernous space.
Or at least they assumed they were. Down the long hallway and just around a corner, the man who had once been called Leland Fox, now known simply as ‘Reynard,’ got his first warning that he might be in trouble.
He sat back in his chair, hands steepled in front of his nose, and watched the screens mounted all around him. His face was drawn, his mouth set in a tight line as he pondered the state of his operation up to this point.
Paulsen had never consented to letting him run telemetry on their missions, so he was blind to how the raid on MassFreight was going. The mercenary claimed it was because he did not want the risk of the telemetry getting hijacked by the enemy, but Reynard suspected it had more to do with his contempt for an ex-corporate man’s tactical skills. Reynard had managed to bug Manson’s crew, though, and he was well apprised of the situation in Quinzy right up until the shooting started and Manson dove for cover. At this point, however, he had only audio and video from the corpses of Manson’s men to work with. From their limited, non-living vantage points, he was hearing a lot of gunfire, seeing a lot of bright flashes of light, and getting high resolution video of the occasional booted foot.
Reynard forced himself to be calm and rational. Prison had taught him that. When he was a corporate man, the occasional angry outburst could be very motivating to an under-performing employee. Clients wanted warmth, and the sense of a shared connection from him. Fox had been equally competent at both, but the maximum-security pod at the Badlands Correctional Facility had neither employees nor clients. When surrounded by rabid animals, it paid to be calm and in control. The scum needed to wonder what it was you knew that they did not. The hotter a situation became, the more necessary it was to make decisions from a place of glacial authority. It was just this kind of thinking that prompted an incarcerated murderer from Quebec to comment “fou comme un renard!” after watching Fox successfully manipulate some guards into tossing an antagonist into solitary confinement. He had been “Reynard,” ever since. He liked the way it sounded.
So, Reynard considered the progression of the evening’s raid with detached calm. The Dwarf had been a surprise. He had underestimated Rodney, it seemed. It did not appear that the evening was unsalvageable as this represented a chance to rectify a missed opportunity and take The Dwarf off the table. This was sub-optimal, but he could work with it, so he was content to let Paulsen engage. How Rodney had known about the supply drop was irrelevant, but it probably had been leaked by Manson’s people or Sid’s operation. He had never meant for it to be a secret after all.
Like his field commander, though, Reynard wondered just where Roland Tankowicz was. The chance to take Manson should have been far too tempting. They had been setting this up for this reason all along. Roland would need answers, and Manson was the one who had them. Reynard knew Roland better than most, and he would have bet a million credits the big oaf would be there to pick up the intel. There was no sign of him, nor was there any sign of his people, either. Something was not right, and this gnawed at his calm.
Then a message scrolled across the bottom of one terminal. It was small and blinked angrily in yellow text. He scowled and leaned in to read it.
SECURITY TIMEOUT-HANSON
While he read that one, two more joined the first.
SECURITY TIMEOUT-JURGEN
SECURITY TIMEOUT-KOLHAAGEN
Reynard scowled. Just what the hell are those guys doing? If they are drinking again...
He stabbed a console with a finger. “Security teams! Sound off and hit your checkpoints, please!”
Nothing. Silence.
“God damn it!” Reynard began to understand what was happening.
Tank’s people aren’t at the drop, because they are here!
Reynard’s blood turned icy with fear as he swiped through building menus to see what was wrong, but every system seemed fine except the security grid, which for some reason was stuck in a ninety-minute diagnostic and reboot cycle. He did not like to admit it, even to himself, but the thought of facing Roland again terrified him. As part of the project that had created him, Fox had always seen Roland as little more than a product he produced for a client almost thirty years ago. Seeing what Breach had become since then, up close and in person had left him with deep psychological scars. That night on the rooftop, not so far from where he sat right now, had changed Fox fundamentally and not entirely for the better. He had witnessed the near collapse of a man struggling with an enormous darkness inside of himself. It was a darkness Fox had helped put there, and only Roland’s desire to be human had prevented the darkness from overwhelming the giant war machine. Ironically, it was Roland’s victory over his own worse nature that had kept Fox alive, and Fox knew it.
I will not panic. Fox might panic. But Reynard survives.
He could not fathom how they had found him, or how they had infiltrated this building, but he knew better than to hesit
ate. He punched the general alarm and reached for his comm. But something was wrong. He turned back to the general alarm and noted the panel’s mute and accusing silence. He hit it again, and still nothing happened. Twice more he jabbed the button with his thumb, but the switch ignored his attempts. There would be no police or other help for him now, and he realized he had been outmaneuvered.
Reynard stood and gathered his files with haste demonstrating motivation just shy of panic.
I’m not done yet, he thought. I’m still in this fight.
When he thought objectively, it occurred to him that Roland was probably not in the building. Roland could not really sneak anywhere. His mass and appearance were too difficult to mask, and his augmentations and cybernetics were impossible to hide from scanners. Even with the building scanners offline, the street level scanners would have picked him up. Furthermore, Roland did not need to sneak in. If he already knew the mercenaries would be in Quinzy, there was no reason for him not to just smash his way in. It’s not like anyone here could stop him.
They are sneaking in because they have to. That means Breach isn’t here. This thought calmed him. This will be some of his people. Mindy maybe? The Ribiero woman, to be sure. Sent here to do what though?
He figured it out a second later.
Are they here for me? But that’s impossible! How could they possibly know I’m here?
As infuriating as not knowing things was, this was a problem for another moment. His courage now buoyed by the knowledge that his own personal nightmare was not, in fact, coming for him, Reynard grabbed his comm and keyed a text code to Paulie, then began to shut down terminals. At each, he burned the drives manually to ensure the data was irretrievable before he shut them down. When he was done, he shoved all the data chips into his pocket and grabbed a pistol from his desk. He checked the magazine and tested the charge before jamming the item into another pocket.
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