The machines were fixing this, and knowing they were on the job had taken some of the endless, interminable weight from her shoulders. She felt powerful again. Whole. She had thought she could accept the price for this. Losing her fear bore the risk of altering he personality into something darker, or perhaps more robotic. This seemed like a bargain to her at the time. Now, as her fingers slipped for a third time pulling the release tab on her second bottle of ElastoQuet, she wondered if she should reconsider.
How did I not check for a gun? How could I be so careless?
She knew the answer to that.
Because I’m super fast and wearing armor. I didn’t think to check because I didn’t need to. I wasn’t afraid of a gun, so I didn’t care.
If she had been just a little more nervous and a little less casual, Manny might not be dying on the floor of the enemy’s stronghold right now. Her wonderful, empowering confidence may have just resulted in a teammate’s death. The young man, whose face had always been a rich dark tan, lay on the floor looking ashen and pallid. The floor was carpeted, so the total volume of blood staining it black where he rested was hard to determine, but the rug squelched and wept crimson tears when pressed with anything more than the slightest touch of force. Lucia was not a doctor, but nobody could lose that much blood without serious consequences. As a final, bitter, ironic touch, she was about to have a panic attack on top of it all. If her reckless tactics and lack of fear failed to kill her teammate, the overwhelming flood of unvarnished terror turning her fingers to clay and her mind to tapioca stood ready to finish the job.
The terrified woman bit down harder, tasting blood, and she hissed out long slow breaths. Searching for a quiet place in her mind, she willed herself to calm as she inhaled for a four-count, and then exhaled for the same. She focused her entire attention to the task of opening an ElastoQuet. Desperate, she willed each individual finger to move, visualizing what it would look like when they at last complied. Then, finally and to her extreme relief, they did. Her sense of time was dilated further than she had ever experienced, and a task taking her less than one second to complete felt like it had taken hours. But the tab peeled away and the applicator tip sat exposed and waiting.
Lucia had widened the entrance wound with her knife already. With her gorge rising and her fear a crushing pressure in her ears, the former corporate executive stuck her hand inside the weeping red flesh of her friend’s arm and peeled back muscles to expose a gushing red nub of stringy meat. Breathing in tortured sobs, she fumbled the ElastoQuet near what she hoped was the upstream end of the damaged blood vessel. It was bleeding so heavily she assumed it had to be.
She pressed down firmly on the activator stud and a stream of tiny thread-like strands jetted from the white plastic tip. Trembling, she spread and smeared them as best she could around the oozing artery. When the canister was empty, she twisted the stud to the right and pressed it again. The strands all twisted and contracted when she did, binding around the artery in a tight knot and sealing it. Manny lurched and exhaled a low moan as this happened, his eyes opening wide with pain and surprise. Then he lay back down with a thud.
With the worst of the bleeding stopped, she now faced the daunting prospect of closing the hole with a can of ReStaunch expanding foam. Repeating the process she had used to open the ElastoQuet, Lucia managed the task of opening the can with less trouble this time. Forcing herself to move slowly, she filled the exit wound with the slimy yellow goo and checked Manny’s vitals again. He was breathing in quick shallow breaths, and his eyes fluttered without closing or opening completely. But his pulse, though weak, was regular. She found an ampule of atropine in the first aid kit and gave Manny a shot to strengthen his heart beat, and a moment later his eyes stopped fluttering and he shifted about like he wanted to get up.
“No, Manny. Lie still. Once I’m sure you’re stable, I’ll carry you out of here and get to a hospital.”
His eyes, heavy-lidded and slow, looked around, “Fox?” He croaked.
“Don’t worry about him. We’ll get him next time.”
“No,” he lurched again. Lucia held him down.
“Relax Manny, we’ll get him, don’t worry.”
“No,” he said again, as if she did not understand a very simple concept. His hand fumbled and flopped at his side until it found his satchel, the brown leather dyed black with his own blood. He tore open the flap with clumsy fingers and dumped the contents one-handed onto the gore-soaked carpet. Then he quested with his hand for some item. He was too weak to look over, and so he searched by feel until he found it. His fingers closed over his handheld and he lifted it to waver unsteadily in front of Lucia’s face.
She wrinkled her nose, not understanding. Then she read the scrolling message on the blood-smeared screen and her eyes widened.
“Oh, Manny! What a sneaky, nasty, clever little bastard you are!”
The notification was simple and clear:
TRACKING SIGNAL: STRONG <980MhZ> BEARING: <265>
The “DISTANCE” number was ever changing, climbing as Fox ran further and further away.
“Go... get... him...” the young man insisted.
“Not yet. Hospital first.”
“No!” Manny insisted and pointed to himself, “Terrorist. Hospital... no good.”
Lucia smiled down at the boy, “Manny. You have a lot to learn about our little town. There are eight places in Dockside alone that will treat you without anyone ever finding out about it. Trust me. Hospital first.”
She picked him up as gently as she could. Since stealth was no longer important, she would not concern herself with the challenge of getting Manny back up through the hole in the reactor room floor. There was a stairwell just a few doors down the hall, and it seemed as good an exit as any, so long as she didn’t mind making noise or running into another patrol. He weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds, which while heavy enough to be noticeable, did not feel like too much for her to carry to the stairs. Going up would be unpleasant, but she would manage.
Lucia wrapped the wound in a bandage and then bound the arm tight to his side so it would not move. Then with a brief apology for the indignity of it all, she pulled him up and over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Manny grunted and hissed, biting down on his pain but otherwise not complaining.
With her partner over her left shoulder, and her pistol in her right hand, Lucia exited the office and made her way to the stairs. As she moved, she noticed that all of her perceptions had altered from when they had started the mission. The fear was back, the uncertainty and trepidation returning now that the operation had taken on a new and unexpected turn. Not in a crippling way, but in the sort of normal buzzing background anxiety she had grown familiar with over the years.
New situation. She thought. The nanobots haven’t learned what to do with this. She realized she did not want them to learn how to fix this feeling. She was scared and anxious because someone was hurt and needed her to help. That was normal. That was appropriate.
Not all fear is bad. I need to talk to Dad about this.
Her booted foot eliminated the need to work any of Manny’s infiltrator magic on the stairwell door. Two kicks bent the bolt and broke the latch, rendering both devices incapable of serving their intended purposes. Lucia liked to go through doorways fast and hard. Her speed and preternatural accuracy gave her distinct advantages when she employed this tactic. Now, carrying her wounded partner, she had to take a more measured approach. She peeked through the opening, leading with her pistol, and swept the landing from left to right in a wide arc. The landing appeared clear, so she moved through with a brisk step and swept the muzzle both up and down to clear the other landings.
She registered two guards coming down. They were dressed like the previous men they had encountered, and they were moving like focused predators down from the lobby level. Lucia assumed they were moving to investigate all the noise she was making, or perhaps encroaching at the command of a fleeing Reynard. She eva
luated her options in an eighth of a second, and action followed decision with no delay at all.
She made the shots one-handed, carrying a wounded man, leaning out into a stairwell, and shooting at two moving targets twenty feet above her. If her marksmanship proved imperfect, there were a lot of justifiable reasons for it.
But her marksmanship, as usual, was flawless. Each man grew a 5mm hole under the chin and then fell in a heap to the landing. It was likely they had never even known she was there. She felt a twinge of regret at killing so casually. If she had not been carrying Manny, she might had dropped them without killing them. But Manny came first, and while she still did not like to kill, she could not bring herself to regret it too hard in this case.
I guess the ‘bots haven’t completely ruined me yet, she lamented silently.
Lucia trotted up the stairs with her payload. She started at a brisk jog, but carrying a grown man while ascending stairs was just a little more than even her impressive musculature was up for. Before long she had to slow to a plodding climb, which felt to her accelerated perceptions like the progress of a glacier. This too, frustrated the nanobots trying to regulate her brain chemistry. She had a strong urge to drop Manny and run at her top speed to safety, but recognizing the influence of her augmentation, she stifled it.
After thirty seconds that felt like an hour, she kicked her way through the lobby stairwell door and staggered out. Forty feet away was the exit, and its proximity bolstered her resolve. She jogged across the reception area and burst through the exterior doors onto the street. Her comm was in her hand before she made it three steps and she was pinging for an aerocar by the fourth.
Manny groaned softly as he jostled on her shoulder and Lucia sighed.
We’re going to make it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Roland had not chosen his weapon out of a sense of drama, nor was it selected due to some childish attraction to heroic fantasy. A hammer, Roland knew, just happened to be the right tool for the job. Tommy Guns, the drug-addled weaponsmith to Billy McGinty’s gang, had concurred with the choice when Roland had explained it to him.
Torvald’s AutoCat 8900 was strong and durable, but it was also just a piece of industrial equipment. It had been designed for use in some very hard environments, but it was not specifically built for war. In short, it could take some positively murderous hits, but it had not been designed to take a lot of them like a tank or an assault-class armature was. This did not mean it was weak. Quite the contrary. But it simply did not have the overbuild factor and redundant systems of something designed to be specifically military.
This was an important distinction, but it was also a distinction that did not change the simple reality that any conventional weapon capable of bringing the thing down was going to be too big to use indoors, and anything safe to use in close quarters would not be able to hurt it in a tactically meaningful way.
Roland realized that he had been going about the issue all wrong. He didn’t need a weapon. He needed a tool. A tool that could deliver a lot of kinetic energy to targeted areas over and over again reliably without running out of energy or ammunition, and also without causing so much collateral damage it killed everyone on his side.
What he needed was a hammer.
Tommy had found a solid hunk of depleted uranium and cast it inside a shaped tungsten carbide ingot. The shaft was a solid piece of rolled Inconel left over from a construction vehicle. In total, the hammer was nearly six hundred pounds, most of which was at the head. With what little practice Roland had time for, he had learned that if he was not very well braced, the hammer swung him as every bit as much as he swung it. But if he planted his feet firmly and drove the mallet with all his strength there was very little in the way of industrial materials that was going to suffer the blow gladly.
Torvald, who had dismissed the tool at first, gave it some respect after Roland’s first charge. A head-on bum’s rush from Tankowicz had been too much to hope for, but for some reason this is what the man chose to open with. Giant grasping claws shot forward, hoping to end the duel in its opening seconds, but the left missed and the right was swept aside by the arcing head of the giant maul. The swing, taken while moving, dragged Roland off his attack line. But he did not fight this. Quite the opposite: he let the momentum drag him in a circle.
Torvald tried to seize this moment and close to grappling distance again, but Roland’s twirl was nearly complete and the hammer had been swept into an overhead position. As Roland’s body realigned with the charging armature, he brought the head down in a powerful overhand swing just as his giant yellow enemy was about to secure a fatal grip.
Torvald had minimal neurological upgrades, but his reflexes were somewhat better than average, and this saved him. At the last possible instant, he realized that the timing was not in his favor. He might actually grasp his opponent, but the hammer was going to fall right on the canopy as he did. Something small but insistent, deep inside his warrior’s instincts, told him not to let the hammer land on the clear dome. Torvald abandoned his attack and lurched his machine to the side.
The great gray maul threw a geyser of orange sparks off the side of his life support pod’s carapace. If Torvald’s armature was likened to an enormous praying mantis, then the hammer bounced off the side of its thorax with a gong so loud mercenaries and goons alike dropped their weapons to cover their ringing ears.
The weapon ricocheted off the thick armor, leaving a deep angry gouge and then embedded itself into the concrete of the hangar floor. The nine-thousand-pound armature clattered to the opposite side on skittering metal legs struggling to cope with the sudden and fierce lateral acceleration. Torvald righted himself and lurched upright just as Roland was tearing the hammer from the crater it had made.
The two men approached each other with more care this time, wary. Each now had some insight as to what the other could do. Roland had gambled on Torvald not having enhanced reflexes, and the old raider had nearly grabbed him with those clamps. That would have been rather unfortunate.
On the other side of the fight, Torvald had failed to recognize the threat Roland’s hammer represented, and if the hit he had just taken was any indicator, it was a serious threat after all.
Both men recognized how close the first pass had been, and neither was terribly eager to try the same strokes a second time. The ancient mercenary checked his heat levels and tried to hide his grimace. Just the one brief exchange had cost him all the gains his cooling system had made during the brief respite. He stalled, “Okay, boy. I admit it. The hammer is nice touch.”
“Come get touched again, then!” Roland snarled back and advanced with a measured jog. He hefted the mallet in two hands, with the head out to his right. Torvald sidestepped and kept turning to Roland’s left, avoiding it. The armature’s four legs imbued it with excellent linear acceleration, but lateral motion was not so easy. Roland noticed this and tried to exploit it.
With Torvald circling to his left, Roland stepped forward and spun to the right, letting the hammer swing out in a wide circle. He dug his boot hard into the floor and rotated with all the speed his body could manage, bringing the hammer to bear on the armature’s cockpit again. Roland was far faster than Torvald, but the weight of the hammer and the need for firm footing slowed him enough for the machine to step back and take the hit on one trailing yellow arm.
The strike flung the limb far off its path, and a panicking Torvald sent the other arm forward to punch or push his opponent away. The hammer had bounced back from the arm and its weight nearly dragged Roland off his feet. But he brought it in line and used a short chopping stroke to parry the clumsy blow. His defense succeeded, but it was obvious his footing was poor. Torvald gambled on a rushing charge, trying to wrap the onyx giant in a crushing hug that would keep the hammer from swinging. Roland dropped under the arms and used another short swing to put the wedge side of the maul into a yellow leg joint. With his grip choked up on the haft, the strike did not land with th
e full power of a hard swing, but the joint buckled with a clang and a shower of sparks. The armature sagged to the left and nearly stumbled, which was a reprieve that saved Roland from serious injury. Torvald righted himself Roland rolled away from the giant stomping feet and landed in a crouch.
From one knee, Roland heaved the hammer in a horizontal arc, twisting hard at the hips and straining his bulging deltoids. The head gathered speed and with a suitably impressive sound collided with a rear leg. To Torvald’s relief it had missed the targeted joint by a wide margin, but the impact shook the walls and staggered both fighters nonetheless. The great gray maul rebounded, dragging Roland further to the side and off his attack line, while the leg skidded out from under the armature and sent the power cell housing to the floor with a bang. Three other legs scrambled and righted the machine in less than a second, but that was more than enough time for Roland to have corrected his own imbalances. The two powerful mechanical warriors rose and turned to face each other again.
Roland charged without pause, and Torvald winced. Every second he wasn’t attacking was a chance to cool his chassis, or mount another assault of his own. But Roland came on like a thunderbolt, hammer held tight in black balled fists. The furious cyborg loomed large in his HUD and the hammer swept up as Roland leapt high. Torvald miscalculated the nature of the attack and shifted to protect the canopy from what looked to be a hit delivered with intent to shatter the dome. But Roland passed over the cockpit and brought his fury down on the power cell housing, staggering the machine again, but doing only minor damage to the heavily armored part.
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