Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The shockwave hit her like a freight train, driving the breath from her lungs and throwing her even harder into Bubba. She did not notice the sting of shrapnel, and whispered a silent thanks for small miracles as the pair tumbled to the ground in a mess of armor and limbs. She was still untangling herself from Riley when she heard the team channel come to life with shouts of “Tango down!” and “He’s crippled! Hit him!”

  Riley’s meaty paw clamped onto her arm and drew her upright. “You, good, ma’am?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  Lucia did not answer right away, her diaphragm still locked in spasms, so she nodded aggressively until Bubba got the hint. “Good,” he bellowed and threw himself back into the melee. Lucia was only a second behind him, seating another magazine into her pistol as she sped for cover again. She assessed the battle and found that while the team was holding their own, the two androids were still proving too much for them.

  One android was lurching upright, its right leg mangled below the knee. Silver strands of synthetic musculature stood out, clearly visible through gaps in the surface armor of its calf. Streams of viscous silver fluid poured from the wounds in what amounted to bleeding for machines such as these. The leg would not bear much weight, and the android was reduced to a lumbering hobble as it sought out foes to crush. Pike’s people continued to pepper it with gunfire, content to maneuver away from it as necessary.

  The other android was more mobile, though well below capacity itself. The accumulated damage to the thing’s hip had slowed it down quite a bit as well, though Lucia watched in horror as it pounced upon a foolish soldier who ventured too close for a better shot at the damaged bits. The android grasped the doomed man by his helmet and drove the enclosed head into the floor with a nauseating crunch. The soldier’s legs kicked reflexively, then twitched for several long seconds before the last of the signals from his ruined brain stopped coming.

  Lucia felt her gorge rise at the sight of it, but the tableau was soon obscured by renewed fire from the enraged mercenaries. The more mobile android cornered another mercenary and ignored the intense shooting long enough to kill this one with a punch that snapped vertebrae. Then it turned toward the twenty-millimeter rifles and stalked at their wielders, forcing them to stop shooting and abandon their positions. Without the sustained barrage from the larger guns, both androids managed to quarter off the remaining fighters and begin pushing the whole mass back against the freight elevator. Lucia ordered the gunners to post up and push the androids back, but she had begun to despair of ever bringing these things down. She tossed her last frag grenade at the android with the mangled leg, hoping but not believing it would do much more than make it take a single step backward. Panic began to rise again, clawing from the back of her mind and encroaching upon her thoughts as each attempt to stop the giants failed. She shoved it back, willing herself to keep shooting, keep fighting, keep directing these men and women until relief arrived.

  She screamed in rage at Bubba Riley when she saw the big man drop his empty guns from his harness, grab a massive vibroblade from his belt, and charge straight into the android with the ruined leg. Driving a vibroblade through the armor of a golem was not impossible. She had seen it done to Roland when the wielder had sufficient strength enhancements. However, Bubba was no skilled bladesman, and the speed of a Better Man was many times what the big man could ever hope to compete with.

  The white titan caught Bubba by the head and lifted him bodily from the floor. Lucia was certain that it was going to smash him through the deck or crack his skull like an egg. Before either fate could befall the brave-yet-stupid mercenary, one of Hollis’s flechettes sheered the android’s unarmored right leg off below the knee. Man and machine tumbled to the floor, and Riley hacked at the arm with a single-minded determination that dropped Lucia’s jaw. The blade bit deeply, and the mercenary made no attempt to flee or extract his head. He kept slashing, chopping, bashing at the arm until it lost all strength and flopped like a landed eel. This did not satisfy Bubba, and the man took this opportunity to leap onto the fallen android and send more snarling stabs down into its neck. The android’s undamaged and fully functional right arm ended his brief moment of strategic dominance with a punch that sent the four-hundred-pound man flying. Riley tumbled into the wall with a horrible crash, and this time he rose very slowly, his face locked in a grimace of pain and fury.

  “Damn him,” she heard Hollis hiss into the team channel. “All muscle and no fucking brains! Gonna get himself killed!”

  “I got him,” Patton called. One of his drones buzzed over to cover the big man while he dragged his body away from the wall.

  The battle was far from won, and the team of mercenaries was running out of ammunition and options. Lucia was about to scream for help into the command channel when the comm burst to life with the most welcome sound she had ever heard.

  Sergeant Bernadette “Big Bernie” Rothschilde did not have what anyone had ever called a beautiful voice, but to Lucia it sounded like a choir of heavenly angels singing hosannas.

  “Somebody call for back-up?”

  “Yes! Bernie, where are you?”

  “Coming up the elevator, ma’am. You guys clear of the door?”

  “We will be!”

  “Good. Time for Big Bernie to show y’all how to whup some ass.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Lucia was in the process of dragging a wounded mercenary to the safety of a far corner when Bernadette Rothschilde finally arrived. Several sustained minutes of combat cacophony had left her in a state of extremely compromised hearing, so if not for the insistent strobing of the elevator door lights she would not have known the alarm was blaring. When the bright yellow AutoCat 4900 stomped into the war zone, things changed very quickly.

  Big Bernie’s AutoCat was not a particularly graceful machine. Originally built for material handling in high-G environments, it was somewhat squat and wide, despite a total height of more than nine feet. Technically classified as a medium chassis, this was a bipedal model, and the feet were large and flat to accommodate the loads it was meant to lift and carry. The chassis was slung low for strength and stability, with a large power plant riding on the back of the bubble cockpit. At the end of thick arms sat a pair of two-fingered clamps, large enough to grab cargo containers and strong enough to pick them up. Since being retrofitted for combat, Pike’s armorers had added extra plate armor to all external surfaces. The extra weight might have been an issue if not for the fact that the 4900 series was rated for loads exceeding two-hundred tons in normal gravity. An extra thousand pounds of ballistic plating made no difference whatsoever to its systems. Her four main guns and their associated ammunition added more mass, putting her gross weight well over the limit for a medium armature. Foolish individuals who pointed out that this technically made her a ‘heavy’ armature inevitably learned an important (and painful) lesson about the propriety of discussing a lady’s weight.

  The deafening shriek of four swivel-mounted twenty-millimeter autocannons spewing hot metal at once washed across the fighters like a flash flood of pure sound. The fire and fury of the destructive barrage tore one android from its feet and threw it to the floor with a resounding thud. The one-legged machine, upon seeing the plight of its brother, immediately abandoned its dogged pursuit of a heavy gunner and hobbled toward the big armature. Bernie gave the automaton a long burst from an autocannon that ripped wide strips of surface armor from its chest. While visually impressive, this was not the sort of injury that was going to stop a Better Man. Entirely unfazed, the machine dragged its failing body through the carnage to hurl itself at the giant armature.

  Bernie caught the thing in a single clamp and held it in the air while she continued to sandblast the other with her guns. The android grabbed a pincer in a big white hand and braced its remaining foot against her arm. With a heave, the ivory monster straightened and tore a scream from the actuators holding the yellow clamp closed.

  “What the...?” Berni
e’s voice came over the team channel, and Lucia answered.

  “They are real strong, Sergeant! Don’t let them get a hold of you!” She had seen Roland tear larger armatures apart before, and the Better Man system was every bit as strong as he was.

  “Strong?” Bernie snarled back. The cockpit swiveled, and she brought her other clamp to bear on the trapped android. “Let’s just talk about strong, then.” She grabbed it by the head and twisted savagely. The machine locked its muscles and pushed back against the inexorable might of the ruthless mercenary. Chuckling maniacally, Bernie began to twist and wring her arms. The amused woman in the cockpit seemed to be enjoying herself, working the head back and forth, pulling and squeezing. Bernadette’s dark-skinned face, clear as day through the armored canopy, was alive with a wicked grin baring two perfect rows of bright white teeth. Academically, Lucia understood that there were no people inside those armatures. However, they were built from the same design as Roland, and each humanoid machine had bones and muscles analogous to a human body. These were made from exotic techno-organic polymers, yet they moved and operated exactly like their purely organic counterparts. This meant that when a borderline sociopath driving a modified piece of industrial equipment tore the head from its body, a Better Man armature looked more or less identical to a human being in the same predicament. Which, Lucia noted, was a very unsettling thing to watch.

  The noise was the worst, she decided. The groaning of the neck muscles rising in pitch until wet snaps announced their failure, as did the splitting of the skin along its back and chest. Then came the muffled cracks as hardened vertebrae tore free of their moorings and ground against each other. Finally, the rush of silver fluid and the pop of the skull being sheared from the spine signaled the demise of the first of their foes. The thing’s body spasmed and flopped in her claw, twisting and heaving like a fish landed on the dock. The arms swung, the feet kicked, and what remained of its spine bent and wriggled as the dead creature thrashed its last. Bernie hurled it at its brother, who was still in the process of climbing back to its feet. The dead machine sent the live one back to the floor with a crash that shook the deck plates.

  Then Big Bernie stalked that one down, too.

  It rose to meet her head on. Bernie’s guns had flayed armor from its chest leaving angry weeping channels, but the android retained plenty of strength. The modern weapon was far faster than the big ‘Cat, though this did not seem to bother Bernadette at all. “Come on, little bitch,” she taunted. “I’m gonna mount you on my wall when I’m done with you!”

  The android ducked under one of her questing clamps and leapt up to smash her in the canopy. The clear bubble did not break, but the blow resounded with a deafening crack. The AutoCat shuddered and chips of polycarbonate flew from the white-knuckled fist. Bernadette snarled and swatted the nuisance away, catching it under the chest with a backhand swipe that drove her foe into the wall and through it. She followed without a pause, letting her machine’s AI plot the course and focusing on catching the enemy before it managed a counterattack. Her autocannons came to life as the android emerged from the indentation its body had made and the hail of gunfire threw the white giant back down under a storm of armor-shredding flechettes.

  The resulting cloud of fragments and ricochets sent the surviving privateers diving for cover. Not so the android. It rose again, an inexorable and unstoppable wraith, and it staggered forward to do battle once again.

  “Stubborn little shit, ain’t ya?” Bernadette growled, then she cut the guns and charged. The android, bedraggled and leaking both parts and fluids, dodged her first strike and dove for the canopy again. This time she caught him, enduring another ear-shattering blow to the cockpit in the process. She began to thrash the white machine against the floor, smashing over and over again with complete abandon while assaulting it with a string of vehement expletives. It was a frenetic and undisciplined beating, a tantrum that made a mess of the deck and a mess of the android. After this went on for far too long, she paused to lift her foe by a leg. Very little of the android’s white surface armor remained. It bled silver goo from hundreds of tears, the right arm hung limp and unresponsive, and huge swaths of silver synthetic muscle strands stood out against the dark interior of the battlefield. The dying machine struggled still, pulling and kicking with robotic tenacity at the yellow arm restraining it. Bernie sighed audibly and grabbed it with the other claw by the neck. Bending it in half, she broke its spine like a child snapping a piece of kindling. The heaving mess was then slammed to the deck again, where Bernadette stomped onto its abdomen, grabbed its torso with both claws, and ripped the top half away from the bottom with a roar of victory.

  Her cry was echoed by cheers from the exhausted Privateers. Bernadette tossed the twitching halves of her prey aside and broke up the celebration with a snarl. “We clear, Mama Bear? ‘Cause I gotta get down there and rescue your boyfriend, now.”

  “We’re good, Sergeant,” she said back with a sloppy salute. “Go get some before he steals all your fun.”

  The huge mech stomped off toward the main passageway and the cantina, leaving Lucia to mop up what was left of her team and the supplemental privateers. Fortunately, she did not have to do much of anything. The crew were all dedicated professionals, and everything seemed to be well in hand with no input from her. Mindy trotted in at that moment, a limp body bouncing over her shoulder.

  “Package delivered, boss.” She dropped Marceau to the deck at Lucia’s feet. “Now what’s up with these androids?”

  “Take a look,” Lucia pointed to the mangled white bodies. “They are Corpus Mundi’s latest attempt to duplicate Roland. Normally there’d be somebody inside, but we got lucky. These were AI controlled.”

  “How bad?”

  “As strong as he is, just as fast. Armor comparable.”

  “Damn,” Mindy hissed. “I’m heading back.” She hefted her blade, “Seems like this thing may be needed.”

  “No!” Lucia ordered. “Mindy, these things are faster than you, and they can kill you with a single punch. Bernie is headed down there, together they can handle it.”

  “Boss,” Mindy’s eyes pleaded. “Manny is still down there! He doesn’t know what he’s doing in this sort of scrap. If four monsters like that get into it, he’s going to be toast. I gotta go cover him at least!”

  “Damn it,” Lucia spat. “You’re right. For the love of God be careful though. Let Roland and Bernie do the heavy lifting. Please don’t be stupid and try to fight these things with a goddamn knife.”

  “I’m always careful, Boss,” Mindy said as she turned. “And I’m never stupid.”

  “That is literally the opposite of what we all know to be true, Honey Pot,” Lucia called to the retreating figure. “Keep Manny safe, help if you can, stay out of the fight!”

  Lucia was certain her orders had fallen on deaf ears, but she could not bring herself to care. Her emotions were distant, and she was unable to focus on any one feeling. Striving for a clear head was like trying to use a pair of scissors while wearing thick mittens. She perceived it, envisioned it, yet when she tried to focus, the clarity she sought was elusive. The more stressed she became, the more she recognized the influence of her nanobots as they struggled to keep her brain chemistry as close to normal as their current thresholds allowed. She had not panicked during the fight, nor had she thought she was going to. With her part in the battle now over, she somehow felt worse. Without the threat of imminent death at the hands of those androids to galvanize her thoughts, all the fears that had been shunted to the background managed to ooze past her mental barriers and infect her thoughts. They flowed inward, a torrent of horrible potential outcomes, torturing her with visions of friends and family killed a thousand light years from earth. She knew they were not real, that the fears were just the echoes of her own insecurities and she should not give them credence. Though the anxieties were thin, her brain decided to make up for their weakness with volume. Under the growing swell of tiny doub
ts and fears, Lucia began to slip into the familiar throes of a panic attack.

  She bit down hard on her own lip, hoping the pain would distract her. She started to walk, no particular destination in mind, just walking to look like she had a purpose. She took long inhalations, held them, and exhaled slowly. The laborious breathing was an old trick for forcing her heart to slow down. None of it was working. The very fear of having a panic attack contributed to ensuring the outcome was inevitable, locking her thoughts into a vicious cycle of self-inflicted mental duress that ended with her broken and sobbing if something did not change. Worse, it dilated her sense of time, so she got to watch it happen in slow motion, each moment of fear and shame dragged out for maximum mental anguish. She began to shake and squeezed her fists tightly in a vain attempt to quell the shivers. The tiny drowning part of her brain that could still think and reason cried out in a silent scream.

  Please don’t lose it right now!

  Something huge and strong clamped onto her shoulder, startling her and forcing a gasp from her lungs. She looked over to see Bubba Riley’s blood-smeared face over hers. He was talking, but the roaring of blood in her ears made it hard to make out what he was saying.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am? Uh, I could use some help over here.” He was gesturing to a crate against the wall. “I’m kinda stuck,” he added, and pointed to his right leg. She did not comprehend the gesture. Whether this was because she was biting down on crippling anxiety or because Bubba was making no damn sense, she could not say. Bubba sat heavily on the crate and groaned aloud. He pointed to his right thigh again, face twisted in pain. “My leg’s broken, ma’am. But the armor it uh... he gesticulated angrily, not knowing the words, “... it like squeezes and shit to hold stuff in place.”

  “Compression?” She blurted, not knowing how or why her brain chose that moment to be helpful.