QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted

by Steve Rzasa

  Dunn hesitated. Then he dropped his arms.

  “LASER!” Baby screamed in his mind. It was just enough warning to save him.

  Tower reacted without thinking. Although eight years out, his combat instincts responded even if they were not quite as honed as they once were. He dove to his left without hesitation and the ruby beam of a powerful laser heated the air just between his outstretched right arm and his right side.

  “Alert, alert! The suspect is armed and dangerous!” Hildy called out, a little unnecessarily in Tower’s opinion. “Be aware the suspect is armed with a weaponized borg arm. Do not shoot to kill. I repeat, do not shoot to kill!”

  “Like hell!” Casillon shouted as he completely ignored the detector’s orders and opened fire with his Armada. Dunn fired back with four shots in rapid succession. Tower couldn’t see who hit whom; he was rolling for cover and trying to bring his Sphinx around to where he thought Dunn might be. He fired three shots in that general direction, knowing he was unlikely to hit anyone, mostly to relieve the tension that was sending adrenaline coursing through every nerve in his body.

  As soon as he was behind a tree, he rolled up to one knee and pointed the CPB at the bench. Dunn was gone, and worse, Casillon was down.

  “Man down,” Tower shouted. “Hildy, where did Dunn go?”

  “He’s heading right for Quinn and Unger. They’re in sync, they have him on map.”

  “Sergeant, you got him?”

  Quinn’s voice was considerably calmer than either Tower’s or Hildy’s. “I got him, Chief. Twenty more meters and he’ll be in open ground.”

  “Take the shot when you have it, Sergeant.”

  “Roger, Chief.”

  Tower ran to Casillon. The corporal had torn off his helmet and was already pushing himself up into a sitting position. His face was red and he was grimacing with pain, but he didn’t appear to be seriously hurt. Two burn marks, one on his chest and the other on his stomach indicated where the laser bolts had hit him.

  “What sort of homeless bastard wears a built-in laser?” he complained. “Go get the son of a bitch, Chief, I’m fine. Feels like I got a bad sunburn or something. Either he had it dialed down or that thing has less punch than a 35 Mhz Ladysmith.”

  Tower wasn’t so sure. He’d seen men with fatal laser wounds talking normally and feeling fine right up until the moment they died; between the shock and the auto-cauterizing effect, a mortally wounded man couldn’t always feel how bad the wound was. He checked Casillon’s back to make sure that the bolts hadn’t burned their way through his body. There was no sign of penetration, so it looked as if the MCID man’s armor had sufficiently ablated the deadly light to prevent it from killing him.

  “Did you get him?”

  “I don’t think so. Sorry, Chief. He got the jump on me. I just wasn’t expecting that borged laser.”

  “Me neither. Don’t worry about it, you did good. Stay here and don’t move, corporal. That’s an order. The medics are on their way. Hildy, got an ETA?”

  “2.4 decasecs. Quinn’s about to take the shot.”

  “I got him… I got him… lights out.”

  “Dart fired!” Hildy paused. “And it’s a hit!”

  “See, that’s how you do it, Chief—”

  The comm channel abruptly exploded into Quinn, Hildy, and Unger all shouting unintelligibly at the same time. Once again, Tower heard the searing crackle of lasers heating the air through which it passed, and although he was mystified as to what had gone wrong now, he ran toward the sound of the laser fire.

  “Stay there!” he shouted back at Casillon. “What’s going on, dammit?” he demanded.

  Someone screamed up ahead. A woman. Tower rounded a corner by the stone pedestrian bridge. There was no sign of Dunn or the others, and the firing had stopped. Kids played on a wall to his left. Someone’s father shouted for them to get down. A couple sat on a bench, kissing, oblivious to everything, including the nearby firefight. Trees. Sunlight. Ducks quacked. They left wakes on the pond.

  “Tower, Sergeant Quinn is down and Corporal Unger is hit,” Hildy informed him in a shaky, but determined voice. “Dunn is 25 meters ahead to your left. If you go over the wall, you should be able to cut him off. He’s hurt; Unger blew his arm off.”

  “And he’s still running? What the hell?”

  “Not that arm, the borged one.”

  “Oh, right. What happened?”

  “Your sergeant put the dart in his eye. The metal one.” Hildy didn’t say it, but Tower knew what she was thinking. The soldier boys just couldn’t resist showing off and now they were paying the price. “And watch out! He’s got another laser in his eye.”

  A second laser mod? What the hell was this guy? Tower slid his Sphinx into its holster, ran at the wall, and clambered up and over it. As soon as he was on the ground on the other side, he drew the CPB-18 again and ran on after the red icon of a running man that Baby was displaying on his right eye.

  He hoped Hildy couldn’t hear his panting. Man, he was out of shape! It had been a long time since he last ran the obstacle course on base. He vowed to do it once a week in the future, knowing even as he made the vow that it would never happen.

  “What’s… Unger’s… status,” he asked.

  “He shot me in the face!” Unger replied, sounding outraged. “In the face! With his damn robo-eye!”

  “We’re fine, Chief.” Quinn sounded mortified. “We’re behind you, we’re climbing over the wall now. It just took a little while to get the corporal’s helmet off. It’s proper slagged.”

  He closed the distance between him and Dunn. He might be out of shape, but he still had both arms. And then, he was on the gravel path, only ten meters behind Dunn, who was missing his left arm below the elbow. Two exposed wires trailing down indicated that it had been the weaponized artificial arm that had been blown off, not the remaining real one.

  “Stop! Police!” It was tough to holler, running at this speed, but he managed it anyway. He almost managed to make it sound as if he wasn’t out of breath.

  Dunn looked over his left shoulder, causing him to lurch to his right. Tower saw the useless dart sticking out of his prosthetic eye as Dunn slammed right into a servbot walking a dog. Both man and robot went down in a tangle of a bright yellow leash as if it was a spider’s web trapping them both. Its leash severed, the dog, a handsome blue-and-yellow Rhysalan Royal terrier, circled them and barked excitedly. His noisy antics served only to add to the confusion.

  “Terribly sorry, sir.” The robot extracted itself first. It rose up on its articulated legs and offered an artificial hand to Dunn, who was lying on his back. Its face was a featureless white ovoid marked only with a glowing green visual scanner. “May I be of assistance?”

  A red beam exploded from Dunn’s left eye as he pushed himself up off the ground and blew the servbot’s head clean off. But now Tower had a clear shot and a target that wasn’t moving. Without breathing, without thinking, like the well-practiced machine they were, he and Baby acted as one. He was dropping to one knee, bringing up the Sphinx with both arms, closing his left eye and sighting down the barrel even as the two crosshairs merged into one and zoomed so that Tower’s entire field of vision was filled with Dunn’s back. He observed there were fifteen shots remaining and the power was on the second lowest setting possible even as he squeezed the trigger with all the violence of a butterfly’s kiss.

  He didn’t feel or hear the Sphinx go off. Only the stream of purple light that burst from the barrel and the shot counter decrementing told him that he’d fired. The beam hit right between the target’s shoulder blades. Dunn arched his back and screamed as his nervous system tried, and failed, to deal with a storm of charged particles that was flooding most of the nerve endings in his body with electrical pain. The disabled veteran fell to the ground, screaming and helplessly writhing like a snake on a searing hot sidewalk.

  “Got him,” Tower announced. “Target is down.”

  Then he swore a
s a red laser bolt nearly slagged his helmet. A second one slashed through a tree branch, and the third went flying safely toward the sky.

  “What the hell?”

  “He can’t control it,” Baby said. “Rip it out.”

  “Rip it out? You mean his eye?” Tower was aghast. Shooting people was one thing, but mutilating and blinding them seemed a little excessive, even by MCID standards. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Not the real one, Tower. Just do it!”

  Tower hesitated, and then a fourth beam burned a hole through a rock on the far side of the path as Dunn’s nerve-induced paroxysms caused him to flop over onto his left side. He holstered the Sphinx, unsheathed the 9 cm Strider strapped to his right leg, and jumped on top of the thrashing man.

  “Tower, what are you doing?” Hildy screamed.

  “Don’t stab it in too far,” Baby warned, a little more usefully.

  He ignored them both. Straddling the man and pinning his wildly jerking arms to the ground with his knees, Tower placed one hand on Dunn’s forehead and dug the tip of the razor sharp combat blade into the bottom of the man’s left eye socket with the other. He could feel the metal root of the implant, and worked the blade deeper, being careful to keep the man’s eye from pointing directly at him. Even so, another ruby burst flaring right in front of his face startled him, and he almost fell off the man’s body, but he grimly leaned forward against to steady himself and kept pushing until he could feel the root tapering.

  He drove the knife forward just a little, to sever the bio-connection, then pushed down hard on the handle, using the big knife like a lever. A lesser blade might have snapped, but the super-tempered Strider ripped the weaponized eye out of the man’s head as if it were a white-hot metal scoop serving up ice cream. Dunn screamed in mindless, twitching agony and Tower stared at the red ruin his actions had left behind, deciding that his lunch was definitely ruined and dinner was now in serious question.

  He dropped the big knife and did the kindest thing he could think of. He made a fist and drove it into Dunn’s bloody face, hard. The screaming abruptly stopped as the man slumped unconscious and Tower wearily rolled off the man’s body. He waved to the little drone hovering overhead as blood dripped from his hand.

  “See, now aren’t you glad you left it up to the bad boys?”

  Hildy didn’t reply. Tower wondered if she was throwing up somewhere back at TPPD. If she was, he wouldn’t blame her.

  Quinn and Unger came running up and stopped at the sight of what Tower belatedly realized was an alarming amount of blood on the path. The sergeant bent down and gingerly picked up the metal eye, which was shaped almost like an elongated teardrop.

  “Holy shit! What did you do to him, Chief? Is he dead?” Sans helmet, Corporal Unger was staring at Dunn’s motionless body. “I thought we wasn’t supposed to kill him?”

  “He’s fine,” Tower said, in contradiction to the copious amount of blood that was covering his chest, his gloves, and his knees. He groaned as he kneeled down and rolled Dunn over, then belatedly realized that he couldn’t bind the unconscious man’s hands because his left arm ended at the elbow. So much for that idea. Then a thought occurred to him. He pointed at Quinn’s rifle and put out a hand. The sergeant nodded, ejected a dart from his projector and handed it to him.

  “How do I arm it?”

  “It’s good to go,” Quinn said.

  Tower shrugged and slapped the dart into Dunn’s right buttock. There! That should keep the cyborged bastard safely out while the paras worked on him en route to TPPD. Then he rose painfully to his feet and addressed the unconscious prisoner. “Hardwig Dunn, you are under arrest for resisting arrest, multiple counts of assaulting an officer, assault with a deadly weapon, and generally being a pain in my ass. You have absolutely no rights at all and should be bloody well grateful I don’t just shoot you in the head right now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Utdaga gakkeum uulhamyeon eottae

  Jotaga gapjagi sirheojim eottae

  Waejakku geurae neo nareul moreuni

  —“Beobeulpab,” Anhyu Kankoku

  It was nearly evening by the time Tower made it to TPPD. He’d first indulged in a very necessary shower back at base, visited Quinn and Casillon in the infirmary there, then endured a brief interrogation by Major Zeuthen before being released to write up a Form MD0031-AAR. Finishing the after action report took a little longer than he anticipated, as the major took one look at it and demanded that he excise the part about Tower personally removing Dunn’s eye by hand.

  “He got shot in the eye,” the major declared. “That provides sufficient explanation to explain the damage.”

  “The eye was metal,” Tower felt he ought to point out the obvious weakness in the major’s reasoning.

  “So maybe it was a fragile metal?” The major pointed to the offending paragraph. “Or maybe it exploded. Just take it out, Mr. Tower. I’m not about to get called on the carpet to explain why my men are performing impromptu amateur surgeries in the field, do you understand?”

  “Perfectly, sir.” Tower removed it, then went back and explained the damage to Dunn’s eye socket was due to being struck in the orbital region by a high-powered projectile fired by Sergeant Quinn, who had fired upon the cyborg in defense of his wounded comrade, Corporal Casillon. It was a brilliant idea on the major’s part; instead of him getting called on the carpet and Tower finding himself subjected to a harrowing round of psych consults, Quinn would end up with a medal. Everybody wins.

  Except Hardwig Dunn, of course, but Tower didn’t care about that. The crazy collection of spare parts was lucky to be alive.

  His uniform changed, his paperwork filed, and the psychiatric ward successfully evaded, Tower parked on the 52nd floor of the TPPD tower downtown and went in search of Hildy. He didn’t find her, but he did find Detectors McCandless and Vendersen, both of whom were on her homicide team. McCandless was a big man, overweight, and perhaps a year or two older than Tower. Vendersen was in his mid-twenties, a handsome young man with a cocky smile that made Tower’s fists itch.

  “Looking for our Hildy, Chief Tower?” Vendersen was friendly enough, but there was an unmistakable challenge in his eyes. Was he involved with her? Or did he merely wish to be?

  “Good to meet you, Chief!” McCandless offered him a meaty hand. “’Preciate all the assistance MCID’s been providing on this one. Saw that takedown; you soldier boys play some kind of rough!”

  “Well, we’re not any more keen on being shot at than you cops are. Any word on where I can find Detector Hildreth?”

  It turned out she was busy interrogating Dunn, who had been patched up by paramedics, determined to be in sufficient health to permit interrogation by a medical professional, and drugged to the gills before being turned over to the tender mercies of the Trans Paradis police. Baby gossiped with Victor while McCandless, still marveling at the flexibility of MCID’s rules of engagement, had the decency to offer him a plastic cup of coffee, which he accepted gratefully. It promised to be another long evening.

  “Patrol officers have finished their search of the park,” Baby told him. “They have recovered all of the stolen disruptors with the exception of one. The serial numbers suggest the missing device is the murder weapon already in our possession.”

  “That makes sense.” Tower sipped the police coffee, more out of habit than any desire to actually drink it. It tasted like hoverdrive coolant. Or rather, what he imagined hoverdrive coolant would taste like, never actually having had the privilege. “He wasn’t likely to put them in safety deposit, was he?”

  He looked up. Detector McCandless was gesturing toward him.

  “Hildy’s got Dunn in Interrogation Five Two Three.”

  “Can we join her?”

  “I’m about to bail myself and non-department personnel aren’t allowed in the interrogation rooms unless they’re subjects, but she says you can watch from the observation room. Here, I’ll show you where it is.”

&
nbsp; The detector escorted him to a windowed room above the interrogation chamber. Interrogation Five Two Three turned out to be a plain and unadorned rectangle. White walls all around, a white ceiling blazing with light, and a glossy black floor. There was a single table of silver metal at the center. Dunn sat to the right, a white bandage over his missing eye and his left arm missing entirely. His feet tapped out a nervous beat that echoed inside the soulless little room. He glanced up, searching out the flickering red and green lights in the corners—cams and sensor units of varying types. Judging by the grimace on his face, he was clearly in an amount of pain, even if it was being chemically mitigated.

  Hildy sat opposite him, with a com-page in her hands. She waved her fingers over its surface and a series of holograms sprang up. Tower recognized them as Dunn’s old records.

  “Nice of you to join the party, Mr. Tower.” Hildy let him know that she was aware he was watching. “I believe you have met Mr. Dunn. Mr. Dunn, Chief Warrant Officer Tower was your arresting officer. In light of the manner in which he brought you in, I suspect we would both prefer you answering my questions to answering his. I have noticed his interrogation methods can be unsanitary.”

  Dunn reached up to touch his missing eye with his remaining hand. He didn’t take her threat lightly, but he shook his head anyhow. “Why should I help you? Even if they don’t execute me, I’m in for life anyhow.”

  Hildy nodded slowly. “If you cooperate, I can see that they don’t execute you.”

  Dunn shrugged. She mirrored his gesture and sweetened the deal.

  “And you’ll get a new arm and a new eye. Nothing fancy, like your old ones, especially not with those additional modifications you added. But they’ll work. You’ll be able to see. And defend yourself.”