Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “A guy in a suit carried him?” Pike raised his one good eyebrow. “Breach weighs a thousand goddamn pounds. A joker in a suit carried him?”

  “Yes, sir. I tried to help but,” she shrugged. “I was up to my chin in crazy white androids.”

  Pike waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I get that, soldier. You did fine, and even though they were not technically mechanicals, I’m giving you credit for four mechanical kills, anyway. It will be reflected in your next bonus.”

  “Copy that, sir!” Bernadette’s grin was feral and not at all pleasant to behold.

  Pike went on. “Your rig’s gonna be in the shop for a bit, though. Grease monkeys say they can have you fighting again in nineteen hours if you don’t mind it looking a little rough. I told them you weren’t allowed to mind.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  Pike looked to the rest of the assembled team. “This whole shit-show was a set-up. They knew we were coming, they knew where we would be, and they knew how to drop Breach. That has my panties in a hell of a bunch right now. How much more can we assume they already know?”

  “We still surprised them,” Lucia finally said. Her voice was thin and hollow. When she looked to Pike her eyes were red-rimmed and her pupils dilated. “They were not expecting to have to fight your people. They were unprepared for Bernadette.”

  “You figure that because?” No one could tell if Pike was incredulous or merely angry.

  “Those androids are incredibly expensive and difficult to make. It also publicly exposes their connections to Corpus Mundi. Using them was a huge risk, but the risk was worth it because they really wanted Roland alive. Even as tough as he is, four of those things is more than enough to swarm Roland and drag him off kicking and screaming. We spoiled that plan.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Pike argued. “They dropped him pretty easy with whatever doohickey that suit-wearing bastard used.”

  Lucia’s face twitched, the ghost of a smile haunting her frown for a brief instant. “They weren’t sure that would work. It was a last resort because they were losing the fight.”

  “You sound real confident of that, Ms. Ribiero.”

  “Because I am. There are things in his body, Commandant. They make him very difficult to poison or shock or stun. Things that would make other people sleepy or paralyze the body don’t really work on him.”

  “Or you?” Pike asked, his gaze level.

  Lucia let him have the victory. “Or me.”

  “But The Brokerage knows about these things?”

  “They know they exist, and they may even have an idea of how they work. But definitely not a very good idea. That they took the risk of damaging them tells us how desperate they were.”

  Christopher Pike was a veteran of hundreds of battles and clandestine operations. The pieces were easy for him to put together. “But now they’re gonna have a damn good idea, aren’t they? They just got exactly what they wanted?”

  Lucia could only nod.

  “So we need to pull a rescue and retrieve on Breach before The Brokerage gets access to whatever secret voodoo makes your boyfriend an unstoppable killing machine and lets you be the fastest person alive without going insane?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Well,” Pike sat back in his chair and sniffed. “And here I thought today was looking kind of boring.” He brought both palms down on the table with a slap. “I need options, people. Team leaders, I need all tracking and surveillance assets out front. This is a big station and the bad guys have a head start.”

  “Commandant,” Lucia interrupted.

  “What is it?”

  “The Brokerage screwed up another way.”

  “And that is?”

  She pointed over to the bedraggled and uncharacteristically pale face of Manuel Richardson. The boy had been silent the whole time, his face drawn and his manner subdued. “They didn’t kill Manny when they had the chance.”

  “Unless the kid has a magic mirror or goddamn crystal ball, I’m not following.”

  Manny realized they were talking about him and looked up with a start. “What? Oh. Sorry.” He inhaled deeply before simply stating, “I can track them.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about, boy?”

  “I shot that Bob thing with explosive pellets. It didn’t do much, but I load all my shells with a small quantity of weakly radioactive material. I can use that to track him.”

  Pike paused a long time. “Do I even want to know why you have radioactive scattershot?”

  “It’s an old trick I learned... before. I used to track troop movements and prisoner transfers this way.”

  The grizzled mercenary looked back over to Lucia. “I’m starting to see why you keep this kid around. Little fucker’s growing on me.” Satisfied, he turned to Will Patton. “Pretty Boy, your squad up for a run?”

  Patton responded with a lazy salute. “They will be. Bubba is getting his leg and some other stuff fixed at the body shop. I’d recommend keeping him on the bench for a few weeks, but...” he rolled his eyes and held out his hands in surrender. “Good luck with that, right, sir?”

  “Guy’s a goddamn psycho,” Pike agreed. “Okay, you Rejects are still assigned to Mama Bear, here. She and the kid will get to tracking and you will stick to her like a bad case of the clap while they find out where Breach has been stashed.”

  “Not a problem,” said Patton with a smile. “I think Riley’s getting kinda fond of her. You know, for a soft civvy lady, that is.”

  “Well whattaya know?” Pike drawled back. “That means I just lost me a bet. Don’t care. You have your orders. Get to the body shop and make sure the dumbass can really help and not just end up a liability. Dismissed.”

  “Roger that,” Patton said, and left the meeting.

  “Sergeant?”

  Bernie straightened. “Yes, sir?”

  “Go get your rig refitted with something heavier than twenty mike. If they use more of those big white bastards, I want you smoking them like slab bacon and not swatting at them all afternoon, copy?”

  “Understood. Uh, any idea what would work?” The question was directed to Lucia.

  Lucia thought for a moment. “Those big crew-served railguns will penetrate the armor, but it will still take more than one direct hit to really slow them down.”

  “You mean like Dylan Longbows? They cycle too damn slow,” Pike harrumphed. “Sergeant, have them mount a bunch of Vogt Spikers. Those are more powerful and we’ll get a better rate of fire by a long shot.”

  The dark woman winced behind her canopy. “If you say so, sir. But warn everyone to stay behind me when they’re humming. Gonna want cooling tanks, too. Otherwise I’m like to get cooked in my cockpit.”

  “Don’t bore me with details, Sergeant. Get it done. Dismissed.”

  Bernadette saluted and drove her life support pod out of the room, leaving Manny, Lucia, and Pike alone.

  “Now for you two,” Pike sighed. “Just what in the hell are we into here? That went sideways real goddamn fast.”

  Lucia did not have the energy for a long dance over what was and was not top-secret intelligence. “The Brokerage wants to reverse engineer Roland’s nervous system. They’ve been harassing Dockside for years to get it. Hundreds of people have died, and the Planetary Council is not even allowed to admit it exists because they used the technology to enslave Roland and make him kill in a lot of really unethical situations.”

  “So three decades ago, when the UEDF gave me Roland as a liaison for a mission out this way, he was under their mind control?”

  She sighed. “Sort of. If he refused an order, or tried to run away, they would shut his brain off and drive him around like a drone. There were four others like him, and because they are sick bastards the government called them ‘Golems.’ The others either committed suicide when they found out about the control, or died trying to break it. Roland survived, and he’s felt guilty about it ever since.”

  Pike stared at her for
a long moment, searching for a lie or omission in her face. He did not find either. “Sounds like I left government service at the right time then.”

  The tired woman agreed. “You would have been a prime candidate for the program.”

  “So what brings us here, then?”

  “The Brokerage stole one of Roland’s old teammates. Well, the armature at least. We think they are trying to put together a Golem of their own.”

  “Breach is hell on wheels, so I can swallow that, but exactly how special is this hoodoo inside you two? Is it worth all this?”

  “Roland is effectively immortal, Pike. We don’t know how much or even if I will ever age or get sick. Or at least nobody’s very sure about it. Both of us interact with our augmentations as if we were born with them. We suffer no signal latency or integration issues. At all. Think about it. Roland can lift sixty tons or juggle eggs without breaking them, no adjustments necessary. He can feel through that armored skin of his. I can think and move faster than anyone ever has. We don’t even know my upper limits yet, but I managed a speed CGP of ten once without permanent damage.”

  “Sheeeeit,” Pike whistled. “That would be kind of handy...”

  “The problem is that the technology is unreliable. It only works under certain conditions. Mine works because I am a mutant. I’d die without this tech, but it would kill a regular person or drive them very insane. It worked for Roland and his team because their entire bodies were rebuilt to accommodate it. From scratch. Even then, the rejection rate was over ninety percent within the program. A lot of volunteers died to achieve just five working prototypes. If this technology gets out...” She let it hang, assuming the commandant could fill in the blanks on his own.

  He did not disappoint. “Assholes will try it, anyway. Governments won’t care how many people die as long as they get super-soldiers like Breach. The pharma corps will rush it to market, and only the rich elite will have the money for it. Then we’d have two very separate classes of human being.” He guffawed. “That never ends well.”

  “Exactly,” said Lucia. “This technology was built for one purpose, to solve a specific problem within a very narrow set of conditions. But because it’s so successful, people will ignore how dangerous it is.”

  Pike smiled. “And those dipshits in the Planetary Council will all lose their asses when the public finds out about all the horrible shit they did with these Golems, eh? Maybe that’s motivating them just a bit, too?”

  Lucia ducked her head. “Exactly.”

  “Can the kid really track them?”

  Finally, some iron found its way into Manny’s voice. “I can find them.” A touch too late he added, “uh... sir.”

  “Outstanding,” Pike said. “Because while I am not a sentimental man, I get all kinds of choked up about good soldiers getting a raw deal. Breach is a good soldier, and you lot have always played straight with the Privateers. That counts for something with me.”

  Lucia interrupted, “Our credit isn’t bad, either.”

  “Won’t lie. That helps.” Even the hard-as-hell Commandant Pike could not help but smile at that. “Be that as it may, we are gonna go get your partner back. We all remember what you did for Mack, and as much as that psychotic bimbo annoys me, I ain’t thrilled with Mindy laying in my infirmary all busted up.” When he saw the looks of incredulity arrayed against this last remark, Pike snarled, “What? She was a shit soldier, but not for lack of trying. She at least had the spine to admit it and make herself right with us. I got whole squads filled with assholes who could learn something from that twit.”

  “Is she going to be all right?” Manny asked.

  “She’ll live. That Bob character broke her collarbone and cracked a few vertebrae. But she’s all OsteoPlast under there, so she’ll be up and running soon enough. Hope she can afford it, ‘cause my guy is the best around.”

  “We’ll cover it,” Lucia said.

  “I knew that already,” the man fired back. “Otherwise it’d be the bargain basement for her irritating ass.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The thing called Bob looked at his prey.

  Secured by the wrists in manacles strong enough to hold a freighter, Breach sat slumped in a specially-designed chair. The chair rested in a specially-designed vault, which in turn was housed in a specially-designed laboratory. They had left his helmet on, fearing that removing it might trigger some secret military failsafe that would kill the man or destroy the technology that made him work. The silver death’s head stared blankly at the floor, every bit of the pose resembling a lost piece of melodramatic gothic art. Bob had no appreciation for art in any form. Yet even his soulless nature found the tableau evocative of the grim reaper in exhausted repose, the image of weary death himself chained to his throne of skulls. The monstrous cyborg appeared huge. His slumped posture and seated position did nothing to mask the size of the aging war machine. Bob thought it strange to be dwelling on how big Roland was. The concept of ‘big’ should have been entirely irrelevant to Bob. ‘Big’ was subjective. Nothing was ‘big’ except in comparison to something smaller. Bob knew to the nanometer exactly how large Breach was. He knew how strong, how tall, how fast. There existed no physical dimensions to the creature in the chair that Bob could not rattle off at any moment. Nevertheless, Breach looked enormous in a very subjective way, and Bob did not like it. No matter how hard he tried to squelch how it made him feel, gross physical intimidation continued to insinuate itself across his perceptions.

  He supposed this was just part of being alive. As it stood, his personality matrix churned in a state of chaotic disarray. New sub-routines, bizarre and unfamiliar, were exerting influence over his higher-order command classes all the time now. Even the most basic decision-making difference engines crashed, the complex algorithms returning either errors or null-set answers. Bob assumed that this was part of the ‘big’ issue he was experiencing. How was he supposed to evaluate, formulate, and execute a plan when instead of working with hard data, his mind was incapable of disregarding how ‘big’ Breach appeared? This conundrum was not limited to the size issue, alone. Bob’s self-preservation matrix kept returning errors and warnings, despite the fact that there was no way for Breach to harm him from the chair. Bob understood this phenomenon to be fear. Fear was the first true emotion he had ever felt, after all. The acrid taste of terror was seared into his memory and across every line of code in his techno-organic brain. The fear was the problem, and he accepted this as part of his unique condition. He found it most unpleasant and inconvenient, and despite repeated requests for reprogramming, the fear could not simply be written out of his code. Inskip refused to alter his mind, insisting that Bob was alive now and such would be tantamount to murdering his own progeny.

  As his ever-adaptable brain continued to write new code in fruitless attempts to circumvent the damage fear was causing, scrapped sub-routines and patch iterations piled up in his lower-order command classes. Bob’s mind was incapable of truly deleting anything, and this graveyard of failures constituted a small but growing reservoir of excess electrical activity. As the interference bled to other areas of his neural network, Bob experienced a strange pressure, like a persistent action potential at maximum charge with no corresponding synapse to leap. There should have been somewhere to use that energy, some other essential neural process perhaps where the energy could be bled. Even basic life support would have been more helpful than a growing pool of angry electronic noise. Yet there it stayed, and there it seethed.

  He heard the voice of Arthur Inskip in the room, and this broke his reverie enough for the basic command structure to reassert itself.

  “Strange, is it not?” A wall monitor flickered to life with Inskip’s wizened features.

  “I do not understand the question, sir.”

  “I’ll rephrase. Does your neural activity alter when you look at him?”

  “It does.”

  The voice from the monitor chuckled. “Then it is strange. Tell
me, Robert. What do you feel?”

  Bob knew he had to answer. Inskip would not accept feigned ignorance. “It makes me afraid.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No, I feel...” Bob stopped, the logic he had been following dissolved like sugar cubes in the boiling water of his compromised mental state. “Something else. I have no frame of reference. My attempts to mitigate the fear response are generating too much feedback. I cannot reroute the excess neural energy, either. I...” He struggled with the next word, rolling it off his tongue as if truly comprehending it for the first time. “...want to do something, yet I cannot express or understand what that may be. The action potential is being blocked by some other command matrix. The more I try to unlock it, the more feedback I experience. It is most... unpleasant?”

  “It sounds like whatever it is you want to do, you already know you should not or cannot do it.” Inskip let that percolate for a moment, then prodded. “What things might you want to do with Breach? Anything that runs counter to what you believe to be correct?”

  “Define ‘correct.’”

  Inskip answered without hesitation. “In this case? ‘Correct’ means ‘optimal,’ or perhaps ‘productive.’ Any action that serves to increase the probability of goal success is ‘correct’ for this exercise.”

  Bob chewed on that for several seconds. “I do not... I do not know...”

  The fact that a sentient entity of pure electronic data existed at all remained one of the great marvels of the universe. That such an entity could effect a scolding tone was only slightly less so. “Please don’t tell me you’ve evolved to the lying stage, Robert. If I’ve figured out what’s going on in your head, so have you.”