The biggest piece, namely the Combine, had already been removed from the game. Wrangling the other pieces was a much simpler thing to manage now. He hoped the mercenaries had taken Breach down, but one could never assume such things when talking about a Golem. Reynard found it hard to be calm and objective when he thought about Breach. His leg still ached when it rained, and he still had nightmares about what had transpired on that rooftop more than six months prior. But a good executive was always objective, so he forced himself to assess the situation with detached calm.
If Breach isn’t down, I’ll need to take him off the table some other way. He knew what would work, and he silently rebuked himself for not insisting on doing it earlier. It’s that damned Ribiero woman. I’ll need to pick her up. It’s the only thing that will bring him to heel. It figures that the last Golem to survive the program is the sentimental one.
While very few people would ever describe Roland as sentimental, Reynard had access to all the Golem files, including the psych evaluations. For all his rage and violence, on his most fundamental levels Roland Tankowicz had always wanted to be a hero. It was one of the things that had made him such a good candidate. Part of him was just immature enough to cling to stories of knights, superheroes, and white-hat wearing do-gooders. It held him together when other, more cynical candidates failed. His need to save his lady love would be strong, probably strong enough to control him.
Reynard had been resistant to trying this tactic for one simple reason. He was not entirely sure if kidnapping Lucia would make Roland pliable, or turn him into the kind of uncontrollable rage monster only Leland Fox and Donald Ribiero truly understood he could be. Reynard had not been present for the incident, but he had seen the reports from the last time Roland had lost his temper. When the enraged corporal escaped from his cell in Teton, he had caused close to half a billion credits in damage and inflicted sixty-one fatalities on those foolish enough to try to stop him.
Still, I should have tried it, he chastised himself.
His comm chimed to inform him a car had arrived, and the sharp noise tore him from his dark thoughts. With a quick scan of the dim street in either direction, Reynard scurried out from his alley and hastened to the waiting ground transport. As requested, it was a driverless model. The bedraggled passenger keyed in the address for his destination with trembling fingers and then slid hard credits into the slot for payment.
No sense getting tracked down because I was sloppy, he thought, and then slumped back into the seat with a long, cleansing exhalation. His nerves were a jangling mess and his thoughts were sinister as the small car pulled away from the curb. Understanding that things did not always go to plan was not the same as liking it. With a slow tingle of pins and needles across his body, Reynard succumbed to the familiar, exhausted lethargy that always accompanied the end of an adrenaline surge. As close as the Ribiero woman had come to thwarting him, he had still escaped. He was safe, and his plans would continue. All was not lost. This thought comforted him as he rode, shivering with the cold terror of his near-miss.
All is not lost.
Reynard let his attention and imagination drift as he allowed himself to relax.
The car lurched to a halt so abruptly the airbags deployed with a bang. Then, it shook. Reynard bounced against the interior like a ball bearing rattling around in a spray can. The car heaved first to one side, then the other to the raucous tune of sickening crunches. Reynard lost all sense of direction and position inside the tumbling vehicle. The interior lights had gone out and the violent heaving seemed to betray all logic. This was no car crash. Something was battering the vehicle off the road.
When the car stopped shuddering, Reynard almost relaxed. But the brief respite ended when an ear-splitting crash punctuated the total collapse of the car’s roof. The metal ceiling closed in on Reynard as if a giant weight had been placed upon it, crushing the center toward the floor. He was pressed downward against the seat and subsequently spilled onto the floorboards in a terrified jumble of limbs. The air was then split by a warbling, tearing shriek like the call of a tortured demon. Abruptly the descending roof was gone, torn away with the sound of failing sheet metal and the patter of shattered Plexiglas.
Reynard stared upward from the floor into the harsh white radiance of a street lamp and the infinite blackness of the night sky beyond it. Cool night air washed over him in a wave, replacing the stale scent of air-freshener with the varied effluvia of a New Boston city street. Bruised, bleeding, confused, and terrified, he shifted and shuffled from the tangled mess of clothing and limbs in which he found himself. Pale hands sought purchase on the deformed contours of the car, and with no small discomfort the battered occupant pulled himself to a sitting position. He stared in mute, blinking ignorance out through the gap where the roof of his car had just been. The light above him destroyed his night vision, turning pale shadows into unrecoverable blackness and casting his surroundings into monochromatic disarray. Then the light disappeared, and all was black.
At first, he thought the street lamp had gone out. The light, at first so bright as to be blinding, retreated to an amorphous halo around a dark center. The dramatic shift cast the interior of the car into flat dimensionless shadows. Reynard blinked, then looked up to investigate this strange turn of events. There, his eyes found that the lumpy shape of his worst nightmare was blocking the light from the streetlamp.
With a jerk, Reynard scrambled to find his feet. He surged upward and hurled himself at the door, but it had been so horribly deformed by the crash that it would not open. The man spun, considering other avenues of escape, but then stopped. Roland had not moved. The big cyborg was simply standing next to the roofless car and watching his prey scurry about like a trapped rat.
There was a time when Reynard would have started talking in a situation like this. When he was Leland Fox, he was very much prone to negotiating his way out of tight situations. He had been good at it, and the skill had made him rich. But Reynard knew better than to try it now. This was not a finance committee or a licensing board. This was Breach, a cyborg killing machine he helped create. Almost all the hardship Roland had endured in his life could be either directly or indirectly placed at the feet of Leland Fox. The doughy ex-con did not believe there was any way to talk his way out of that.
Roland spoke first, breaking the silence with that bass grumble of his.
“We have got to stop meeting like this, Leland.”
Reynard frowned at the forced levity. He had expected a tirade, or perhaps a wordless punch to the face. Breach was a creature of extremes after all. It was how they had made him.
“Hello, Breach.” He did not know what else to say. They had done this scene before. But something felt different this time.
“How was prison?” The banal small talk was adding a layer of the surreal to an already terrifying exchange. Reynard was as confused as he was scared.
“Food was awful. Mattress was lumpy.” Reynard shifted to a more comfortable position.
Roland nodded at that. Then his face twisted into what he probably thought was s smile, but bore no real resemblance to one. “Lucia says I’m too gruff. Too much about business all the time. She encourages me to try to connect on a personal level with the people I work with. Like you and I, Leland. We’ve known each other for a very long time. I’m just not sure we’ve ever connected.”
“Are you serious? You want to connect with me? Now?”
“Honestly, I don’t. But I’m growing as a person. I guess that’s the point. I’m doing things differently these days. I’ve accepted that I can’t change what was done to me. And I’ve learned that it doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole all the time because of it.”
“Uh huh,” Reynard said warily, “So... what? You’re turning over a new leaf?” He gestured to the wrecked car, “Because you’ll forgive me if I point out that the new you does not seem to be very different from the old you.”
Roland chuckled. “That’s because there is no '
old me’ or 'new me.’ It’s all just 'me.’ Now, I let you live the last time we did this dance. I did it because the thought of killing you made me just as sick as the thought of not killing you did. I had assigned all this big significance to you and your role in creating me.” He shrugged. “I hated you so goddamn much. But you know what’s weird? My life is going so well these days that I had forgotten to give a shit about you one way or the other. Sure, I got cranky when I found out you were out of prison. But looking at you now?” His lips twisted further into a grotesque smile, “I honestly can’t figure out why I ever let you bother me in the first place. Seriously, you aren’t shit, and you never were. You are a wannabe Mr. Big whose entire career is a never-ending series of fuck-ups. I’d pity you if you weren’t such an asshole on top of it all." The big bald head shook in disgust and resignation. "You know what, Leland? I’m not even going to kill you this time, either.”
That surprised Reynard. But Roland never lied, so it was a nice surprise all the same.
“I suppose it will be back to prison, then? Care to break my leg first like last time?” It was probably not prudent to goad the man, but Reynard could not resist. Prison did not frighten him. With The Brokerage at his back, prison was an inconvenience at worst.
“Oh no. Not prison. You're a Brokerage boy, now. They’d just spring you again. Besides, that would just make Mindy’s job harder.”
Something grabbed the back of his collar, and Reynard felt himself rise swiftly from the back of the car and sail through the open roof. He tumbled in free fall for a second, once again unsure as to the exact disposition of things like 'up’ or 'down.’ His confusion was short-lived, and all his questions were immediately answered with all the unyielding confidence conveyed by sudden impact with a paved street. His body hit the road hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs in a single blasted grunt. He coughed and struggled to suck air while turning to his stomach. His fingers clawed weakly at the road while he sobbed and made a feeble attempt at crawling away. He was only successful in covering about four feet.
Roland’s voice boomed from afar.
“You see, Leland, I am evolved enough to have moved past your crimes against me. But Mindy?” He hissed with an exaggerated wince, “She still has a lot of unresolved issues. We’re working on it. But I don’t think she’s in a place to let it all go just yet.”
Something that felt like a vice clamped onto his ankle and began dragging him back toward the car. The skin peeled from his fingers as his clutching hands searched for purchase against the rough surface of the street. But his resistance amounted to less than nothing in the face of his tormentor's brutal strength. Reynard was hoisted aloft again and hurled into the car door with sufficient force to knock the wind out of him for a second time.
When his vision stopped swimming, the figure of a tiny blond woman settled into focus. Her face was young-looking and would have been very attractive if not for the cold dead expanse behind her eyes.
“You bastard!” she growled, “You shot Manny!”
“Who the fuck is Manny?” he gurgled.
Leland Fox never got an answer to his question. A small fist, driven by heavily augmented muscles and supported by reinforced bones, plowed into his chest and broke his sternum into three pieces. Such was the force of it that all three shards of bone were driven directly into his heart. He felt a flash of pain and then a sudden, yawning darkness enveloped him. His eyes grew wide for a moment and then rolled back in his head.
“Feel better?” Roland asked as Fox’s body crumpled into a heap at her feet.
“I really do,” Mindy responded with a flip of her hair.
“Good. Let’s go check on Manny and Lucia.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Manny lost the arm.
Despite Lucia’s quick action, his left arm was too far gone by the time he made it to a hospital for it to be saved. Lucia took this very hard, and it was difficult to tell if she hated herself or Fox more for it. He found her in a waiting area, pacing like a caged animal.
When Roland arrived at the clandestine Dockside medical facility, battle-scarred and in obvious pain, Lucia’s eyes grew wide at the sight of him. Then they filled with tears, and she threw herself into his arms where she promptly started to cry. “It’s my fault!” she sobbed the accusation into Roland’s chest.
Roland was singularly ill-equipped to handle this much raw emotion, but he did his best. “No, it’s not,” he said helpfully. “You didn’t shoot him, Fox did. He presented this reality as if Lucia was not already in possession of that knowledge. Even the obtuse old soldier recognized how stupid it sounded. As was his fashion, this recognition occurred only after the words had escaped his mouth.
“But I led him in there. I didn’t secure Fox. I didn’t do any of the stuff I should have done!”
“Lucia.” This would not be one of those times where his pep talk made her feel better, but certain things needed to be said. “This is what command is like. You make a choice. You execute a battle plan. Then people on your side get hurt or die. If you learn something from it and it makes you a better commander, then figure out how to be okay with that part of it.”
She probably needed to hear something entirely different. Perhaps something more supportive or more insightful. Roland did not know because he was terrible at this sort of thing. What was apparent was that she was not quite ready for his blunt assessment just yet. “That doesn’t help that poor boy in there, does it?”
“No,” he agreed, “it does not.”
“I need to have Dad adjust these things in my head,” she sniffled. “I’m too goddamn confident and too fearless right now. Dad’s right... It’s not normal.” She took a breath, getting control of her voice, “I was only thinking about the mission, and thinking about getting Fox. My body was on complete autopilot. I didn’t... feel... anything until Manny got shot. But oh, man! When I was trying to do first aid? It was like it was at the beginning when I was first learning about my augmentations. Every second it was all I could do just to not have a panic attack.”
“New stimulus,” Roland agreed, “The ‘bots didn’t know what to do with it.”
“That’s how it should be, I think. I never understood it before, but I get it now. I’m supposed to be afraid sometimes. When I was in there dealing with security and kicking down doors though?” She shrugged, “I felt nothing. That’s why Manny got hurt.”
“Then let’s have him look into that. But don’t blame the nanobots and don’t blame yourself. Combat is chaos. You got your men out alive and that means you did fine.”
“Then why do I feel like shit?”
“Because you’re still human. Hold on to that. Now, let’s go in and see how he is doing, OK?”
They pushed through the door to the operating room. Manny was on a flat nondescript hospital bed, sitting upright and smiling weakly at Mindy. The buxom woman was fussing over him like an overprotective sibling. The behavior was bizarre in how incongruous to her personality it was. Manny, in turn, was swatting at her like a child who just wanted to be left alone.
“Jesus, Mindy. Leave him be,” Roland grumbled.
Mindy tossed him an eloquent scowl, “I’m just making sure Manny here is comfortable is all.”
“Taking a shine to our little scout, Mindy?” Roland teased.
The tiny blond was unfazed. “If you’d seen him waltz through a high-end security system like it wasn’t even there, you’d want him back on his feet in a hurry, too.”
“Hey, boss lady,” Manny croaked weakly from the bed. “Mindy says we got that fucker.”
“Yes,” Lucia replied, struggling to put a happy face on, “Mindy uh, handled it.”
“Fuck yeah I did! Pushed his chest bones right through his rotten heart!” Mindy pumped a fist in the air while everyone stared at her as if she had grown horns or some other equally ridiculous feat.
“What?” She whined, “Can’t a girl celebrate a righteous kill anymore?”
“You are one seriously unstable bitch,” Manny huffed from the bed. Mindy stuck her tongue out at him.
The young scout looked up at Roland, “I did my part, man. Were you serious about yours?”
Lucia answered for him, “Roland is serious about everything. So, yes, we will help you with your Red Hat problem. All we ask is that you wait until we have Dockside sorted out and running smoothly.”
“Certainly,” he nodded. “But I will have to move on soon. The Hats will find me before long and I can’t afford to be lying in bed when they do.”
“You can’t go anywhere until you are healthy and we get that arm sorted out,” Mindy blurted.
Manny gave her a measured look, “I’m healthy enough, and even with what you guys owe me, I still can’t afford a new arm. It’s okay. I’m resourceful, and at least when I go this time, I’ll have some money in my pocket.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Manny,” Lucia sounded as reluctant as Mindy to let the boy go. “My father is probably the best biotechnologist on Earth, and as a company we offer a very comprehensive health care plan. We will get you an arm unlike anything in the galaxy.”
“I can’t afford that, and I’m not really interested in your guilt or your charity, Lucia.” Manny shook his head weakly, “Debt and obligation are very big deals where I come from. You don’t owe me anything but the money we agreed upon, and I’d rather not owe you.” He pointed to the stub of his left shoulder, still wrapped in pressure bandages, “This is not on you. It’s not your obligation. If anything, I owe Mindy a debt for killing the motherfucker who shot me.”
“A deal, then.” It was Roland who broke the impasse. “We’ll get you set up with an arm. I promise you Manuel, if Don Ribiero is making it, then you want this arm. So don’t dismiss the offer. You can work off the debt here in Dockside. Lord knows we are going to need the help. When you are ready, we’ll go to Venus and manage your old friends to cover my part of the debt.”
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