I need to get to the rendezvous and pull Paulsen back before Breach shows up. No matter what the old soldier was up to, Reynard should avoid playing into it, and avoid being overzealous on the attack. If Paulie had not brought down The Dwarf yet, he would just have to accept the loss and move on. Nothing breach could do would derail the overall plan by much. He could add a delay, to be sure. But The Brokerage wanted New Boston, and they were perfectly fine with playing a very long game to get it.
His breathing slowed, and his heartbeat settled from a terrified drumbeat to a mildly agitated patter. The situation was under control, and there was an instant of shame about how close he had come to panicking. He had tried to prepare himself for the moment. He had always known that he may have to face the cyborg again. When he thought the moment might be approaching, he had cracked like an egg. He found an ember of rage to fan over that thought, and with it came resolve and confidence.
“We’re not done yet,” he snarled aloud to either reinforce the sentiment or convince himself he was brave. It was hard to tell, but he did not care. With a last check of his pockets, he whirled and made for the door.
Which is where he ran in directly into Lucia Ribiero.
“Oh no, Leland. I’m pretty sure you are!”
She struck him with her elbow, not wanting her gloves to render the man unconscious. She was wearing full tac harness, though, and an armored elbow pad cut a deep gash across Reynard’s forehead. His head jerked sharply to the side and blood flew in a crimson rope from the ragged cut. He yelped in pain and staggered back on wobbling legs. The small woman spun on her heel and whipped a back kick into his gut that took him from his feet and sent him careening into a shelf of monitors. Man, machines, and furniture all crashed in a broken heap to floor. Reynard scrambled within the tangle of detritus, hands groping for purchase.
“He sure looks done to me,” a voice Reynard did not recognize said. He could not see very well with his own blood in his eyes. It sounded youthful and almost amused. Gasping and shouting, Reynard fired his pistol from inside his own pocket toward that voice. He knew the Ribiero woman was wearing armor anyway, so the young man seemed a better target.
He heard the voice cry out in pain and heard Lucia scream, “Manny!”
The bleeding man kept shooting as he rose. Relying on the cover of his sustained barrage, Reynard heaved himself to his feet and worked his bead pistol as fast as he could at the pair while angling for the door. The blood in his eyes nearly blinded him. But the two were less than seven feet away, and even with obscured vision he could see Lucia had covered the other person with her armored body. The fleeing man presumed, and quite frankly hoped, that she had taken several hits as well. Whether or not he had wounded her he could not say, but he was certain she would not leave her partner to die in order to pursue him. She just wasn’t the type.
His weapon clicked on an empty chamber, so he lowered his head and ran. As he passed the two prone forms, he felt a hand snatch at his ankle, nearly snaring his pant leg. He fired a frantic kick without looking down and the spasm broke the tenuous grip on his trousers. Then the terrified Reynard burst through the door and sped down the hall as fast as he could.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Torvald checked the readouts again and swore. No matter how carefully he moved, his internal temperature just kept rising. He had fallen back at Paulie’s command, but he had to stay in position to cover the fire teams or else leave them stranded in the exposed expanse of an open hangar. Everybody pulled an oar on this team, and the old man would not leave any of his people in the lurch.
Another big railgun hit shook the machine, but at this point he was content to ignore those. His ‘Cat had been rebuilt so many times, and with so much extra armor, that it would take a hundred hits like that to bring him down unless they hit joints or scored direct impacts against the canopy. It was clear whoever was flinging them in this battle was no kind of marksman, and so the chance of such was minuscule. It would take something very large indeed to punch a hole in his chassis, and it appeared no one had brought a weapon up to the task. This confused him as they seemed otherwise prepared for his presence. Had they thought the mines would hurt him? That seemed far-fetched. The overheating was problematic, and it was certainly reducing his ability to fight as hard as he might have liked. But it was not making the armor thinner, so what the hell was their plan? Even overheating he was far more than they could handle.
Torvald did not have the time or energy to give these questions any more than cursory consideration. Managing the machine with the heating issue took quite a bit of focus. He kept his movements slow, and he had shut down most of his more advanced systems to keep the heat load manageable.
When I get a hold of the piece of shit who messed with my baby, I’m gonna rip his spine out through his arse, the old man vowed to himself. I’d kill a room full of puppies for just one good autocannon, he added to the thought. But he knew it was a useless desire. Just getting this machine approved for offloading had been a nightmare of forged paperwork and sweaty, angst-filled inspections. Even the dullest customs inspector would get suspicious if a giant armature arrived around the same time as a bunch of vehicle-sized guns did.
“Commander,” He called into the command channel as the last fire team fell into defensive positions with the other troops, “Last fire team has been secured. Still running hot, but if we don’t push our luck too much, she’ll get home safe.”
There was a long pause before he got a response. It was long enough a break he was about to key in and repeat himself. But then the command channel crackled to life. It was not, however, his commander’s orders he heard. It was a squeaky woman’s voice blasting out to the whole team of mercenaries.
“Hey, y’all!” said the chipper woman on their command channel. “Mr. Paulie is a little busy right now, but I’ll go ahead and fill you guys in on what’s happening, okay?”
The woman cleared her throat, “Ahem, uh. You see, none of you assholes are supposed to be here, and we all really want you to leave. Obviously, we could just kill all y’all the old-fashioned way, but that won’t keep your friends and such from coming back all pissy and cryin’ like babies. But my buddy, Roland, tells me you Galapagos guys have a system for sorting out this kind of thing without having to kill everybody and make a big thing out of it. So, uhm, I’m supposed to let you know that Roland Tankowicz demands uh... Holmganga from you creeps. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I’m pretty sure that Roland is going to kick the shit out of the big yellow jerk.”
The gunfire stopped, and the various mercenary comm channels burst into life with excited and angry chatter. The unidentified woman stepped on the channel again, silencing the cacophony and proving that she was in possession of Paulie’s comm. “Oh, shut up! You can either agree to this holmgang business or I’ll drop your boss from the roof like I did that other guy.”
Torvald recognized who was speaking and realized in an instant what it meant for his boss. The situation had gone from problematic to precarious, and he did not trust this gaggle of uniformed murderers to navigate out of it without getting the boss killed. He answered before anyone else could, “Fine! Send the little man out. But when he loses and I’m wearing his skin like a coat, we will pass you around the rec room like a party favor, Mindy.” The mercenaries calmed and murmured approval. Whether it was approval of Torvald, or approval of passing Mindy around the rec room was up for debate. Either way, it worked to keep the more skittish members of the unit from doing something foolish. “Trust me, little girl, everyone will get a turn!”
“Everyone but you, you dickless old codger!” she replied cheerily. “But I’m sure someone will bring you a nice prune juice to enjoy or something.”
“Oh, shit!” a quiet voiced hissed from the darkness at the insult.
“Meh. I still like to watch,” he replied.
That got a chuckle from the mercenaries.
“Then watch your ass, old man,” said the woman.
>
From the roof, a dark form dropped. It hit the concrete floor with a crash like a meteor and buckled a circle of spider web cracks in a radius of twenty feet. The thing was a dark and indistinct blotch against the gray of the crumbling cement, but everyone understood what it was even before it uncoiled from the floor to assume the shape of a large and bulky man. The figure stood, and a face like an angular silver skull locked onto the canopy of the big yellow armature.
While Roland’s entrance may have been carefully crafted to impress and frighten the mercenaries, the effect was lost on Torvald. He had seen all the videos. He had observed the death’s head visage of Breach a hundred times over many hours of studying the soldier’s exploits. Torvald Hardrada was a man who had forgotten how to fear long before Roland had even been born. He had taken enough long voyages through his own heart of darkness that he could wear fear like an old blanket to keep off the chill. It would take so much more than a dramatic entrance and a scary helmet to rattle his cage. But decades of serving with Galapagos boat crews told him the soulless thousand-yard gaze of the former soldier was probably terrifying the less courageous mercenaries. The faintest hint of memory brushed his consciousness and told him why. Torvald smiled when he realized he was looking at something he had seen only a few times in his very long life.
Well, look at that, he mused, a man worth fighting.
Torvald looked again and realized that Roland gripped an object in his hand. His face split into a grin when he saw what it was.
“Corporal Tankowicz!” He boomed over his PA system, “I am Torvald, Harald’s son. I sit as first bench of Iron Sven Paulsen’s crew. I am known as ‘Hardrada,’ and I will meet you in the holmgang!”
Another raucous cheer arose from the mercenaries at this, and Torvald stomped his machine forward into the center of the hangar.
Roland’s response, broadcast through his helmet, rang with a mechanical detachment that bordered upon robotic.
“Torvald Hardrada! I am Roland Martin Tankowicz, Joseph’s son. I am The Fixer.” There was a pause, “Living men call me 'Tank.' Dead men call me ‘Breach.’ I will meet you in the holmgang.”
The Docksiders, not to be outdone, raised their own cheer to rival their opponent’s. Roland turned and took his place across from the mech at the center of the room. As he stepped under the strip of working lights, the object Roland carried was illuminated for all to see. Two hundred heavily armed men and women arrayed on opposite sides of a spaceship assembly hangar all squinted at once as their brains refused to accept what their eyes were telling them.
Clutched in his balled right fist, Roland cradled a hammer.
Not just any hammer. An enormous hammer. The haft was six feet long and thicker than a table leg. The head of the great thing looked like a single ingot of some dark gray metal the size of a shoe box. One side of the black mass was flat with rounded edges, and the other had been worked into a blunt wedge. It was a bulky and ponderous tool. It looked unbalanced and unwieldy. This was not an elegant weapon or a technological marvel. It was incongruous and ugly compared to the sleek industrial complexity of Torvald’s armature. With access to all the great weapons that science and ingenuity had produced in the whole history of human conflict, Roland had chosen a massive piece of metal on a stick. Brutal and simple, the stone age tool made no sense in a world of interstellar travel and fantastic technology.
When Roland stood across from the big yellow cyborg, he dropped the hammer, head down, to the floor. It made a hollow, ringing, boom that seemed far too loud for so short a fall. Torvald jumped at the unexpected noise, then chuckled when he recovered from his surprise.
“What’s that now, son? Do I face old Thor himself? I don’t hear any thunder. But then again, I’m an old man and don’t hear so good anymore.”
“Maybe I’m a carpenter. Are you a nail, grandpa?” His helmet hid all facial expression, so it was impossible to know if Roland was trying to be humorous.
“I’m pretty sure I’m not, little one.”
“I think you are. But then again, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Torvald considered the strange choice of weapon, and could find no compelling reason to be all that worried about it. He double-checked his heat levels. The previous two minutes of near motionlessness has kept them from rising, and the machine even seemed to be recovering a few degrees at a time when he held still. He had seen the Golem specs in Reynard’s files. He knew he was far stronger, and far more durable than the soldier. His machine, unencumbered by human nerve conduction, would also be comparably fast. But he had only the basic neurological enhancements necessary to operate a QuadroPod armature, so Torvald was aware at just how much faster Roland’s reflexes would be compared to his own. He would have to fight a methodical fight, manage the heat output, and convince the little man to come at him. Chasing Roland was a fool’s game with his current cooling issues. But if he could get a solid grasp on him, he could pull Roland apart like string cheese without running the chassis too hot. Even overheating, Torvald felt comfortable that he had more than enough of an advantage to beat one light cyborg, and Torvald liked having the advantage.
He addressed the soldier, stalling for more time to cool the armature. “You have terms, Fixer?”
“I win, we return your commander and you all leave. No weregild, no nothing. You do not come back. You void your contract with Reynard and The Brokerage and go.”
The elderly raider tilted his head, “So you have been to the building then? Fine. If I win, you return our commander unharmed and Dockside agrees to be administered by The Brokerage.”
“I cannot speak for everyone in Dockside,” Roland replied, “but my people will stand down if I lose.”
“Agreed, then. Without you the rest will fall easily. It will complete our contract either way.”
“Then I accept,” Roland replied. Then, in a strangely human gesture, the bulky black cyborg shrugged out of his coat and removed his shirt. The garments would not survive this fight, and there was no reason to have them destroyed. With the speed and precision of endless practice, he folded the clothes and put them to the side. He did not bother to shift his dermal mesh to a more normal color; he no longer cared what the Docksiders saw or thought of him. He would let them speculate about his origins, but the days of hiding in the corner of the bar were over. It was time for him to lead, and if he wanted the Docksiders to follow him, then he needed them to see this. It was not enough for him to know what he was and hide it anymore. Now was the time to take the monster out of the box and show it to the world. They needed to know, and Roland needed to know, that Breach was always there and always ready to do what had to be done. Lucia needed to know that Breach could be controlled, employed, directed. Because the reality was far more simple than it appeared at first.
Breach was not a separate entity. It wasn’t some demon that haunted him, no matter how badly he wanted to believe it was.
Breach was Roland, and Roland was Breach. Pretending otherwise was the escapist fantasy of a child. It was a cheap trick to shunt the responsibility for his actions, and thus the blame, to some unknowable monster. If I am ever going to be free of my former masters, I need to stop looking backward at them. What they did no longer matters. What I do today is what matters. That was then. This is now.
What he did now was for himself, his friends, and the place he called home. This thought filled him with a resolve and conviction that he had not felt in a very long time. But he remembered it: the solution, the moment, the catalyst was so simple and so pure that he smiled under his skull mask. He was fighting to save the world, with his friends at his side, and the enemy in front of him.
I’m a soldier again.
The thought of it made him feel powerful. His exaggerated musculature, illuminated in dark undulating streaks of shadow by the limited lighting, rolled and writhed like living snakes fighting under his skin. The edges of muscles limned white by the dim light shifted against each oth
er whenever he moved. The pale metallic glint of his faceplate against the depthless blackness of his body cast him in a ghastly caricature, like some imagined horror from Dante’s deepest nightmares. It was an eerie, inhuman sight. It unnerved both groups to see something they knew to be a man look so much like a human, yet also impossibly alien.
“So, then,” an unimpressed Torvald boomed to his opponent, “do we dance now, little man?”
He stood bare-chested and unmoving for a moment, and then thick obsidian fingers curled around the oversized haft of his primitive weapon. "They’re playing our song, old timer.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Lucia bit her lip to distract herself from her mounting panic.
She hurt all over her body, but she was fairly certain there were no serious wounds to contend with. Roland had preached the gospel of quality armor to her on enough occasions that rare indeed was the time she went on a mission without a Level II tac harness and plates. Fox’s fusillade had cracked several, and bruised her in many places, but his tiny pistol had been far too weak to penetrate. Manny had not been so clever. He had never worn real armor before, and he wasn’t sure how it would have affected his ability to sneak about. The scout had settled for a light, Level I vest instead of the bulkier harness and plates. The vest ended up being superfluous, anyway. Because the shots came upward from the floor, Fox’s bead had entered through Manny’s unprotected armpit. It had traveled through his shoulder and exited at his clavicle. The wound would be grievous enough under any circumstance, but Lucia was convinced that it had severed his brachial artery.
This was a new situation for Lucia, with new fears and new outcomes for her brain to calculate. Her nanobots, having no experience with this paradigm, could offer only the most basic assistance with her mounting panic. She was on her own with her anxiety once again, and she hated it. She had gotten quite accustomed to all the wonderful things the machines that lived in her body and replaced many of her cells could do for her. Lucia liked that part. She liked being strong, fast, and agile. More so than anything else however, she especially liked being fearless. For so much of her life, her anxiety had held her down. It was a monkey on her back that fed on itself and grew larger as it did so. It was not enough for the fear to pop up at inconvenient times. No, it had to come as a crippling terror rendering her weak and useless. When she had learned to manage that, then there was the omnipresent fear of the fear. The endless gnawing knowledge even though she was fine if her concentration slipped at the wrong time she could be reduced to a useless sobbing mess once again. It was a horrible thing to live life being afraid of being afraid.
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