Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  More well-dressed security guards stalked the lavish lobby of The Colonnade. None were bothering to hide their scrutiny of the giant now stomping toward the front desk. A concierge greeted him before he made it that far. “Excuse me, sir. Your appointment is waiting in the penthouse. If you care to leave any weapons you are carrying at the front desk, we have a top-notch armorer who will see to it they are returned in perfect condition.”

  “No need. I am not carrying any weapons.”

  The concierge was that perfect blend of polite yet firm that only the best hospitality managers ever mastered. “Are you certain, sir? I do not mean to pry, but our security scanners are quite advanced and we could not help but notice that—”

  Roland interrupted as gently as he knew how. Which is to say, not gently at all. “I said I’m not carrying any weapons. It might be more accurate to say that the weapons carry me, if that’s not being too coy.”

  The concierge frowned into the screen of a DataPad. “I see, Mr. Tankowicz. Yes, it appears that our scanners are most confused by the nature of your, shall we say, construction? I apologize most emphatically for the misunderstanding. Please use the private elevator to the right and go right up.”

  “Thank you,” Roland rumbled. Polite company not being his forte, the reply came with a hint of irritated malice.

  With another hurdle vaulted, Roland made his way to the elevator. The doors hissed closed and a polite voice informed him that he was headed to the penthouse. Precisely eight seconds later the doors slid open and Roland stepped out into one of the most ostentations hotel suites he had ever seen. Everything was white marble. Polished floors, walls, and ceilings gleamed as if freshly polished and the glaring sheen left no shadows in which the light could hide. Roland’s light-sensitive eyes were not a fan of all this glaring brightness. Before he had adjusted to it, a man in white livery bustled up to him and offered in a calm voice to take his jacket.

  Roland dismissed the fussing toady with a scowl, then instantly regretted it. It was an unnecessary and undeserved bit of rudeness, and he could hear Lucia’s recriminations in his head. He was not in Dockside anymore and he would be wise to remember that.

  A wide arched door swung inward from the marble foyer and revealed a spacious living room trimmed in red and gold fabrics. Several long couches in matching colors surrounded a low table piled high with finger foods and several expensive-looking bottles of what Roland presumed to be liquor. Three of the ubiquitous security guards were standing behind a couch where a woman sat. She was long and lean, every inch of her bearing radiating elegance. Her dressing gown was some sort of shimmering metallic pink, and her nails were manicured in excruciating detail. Lustrous black hair fell in gentle waves to her shoulders, shining and flawless. It framed a face so perfectly symmetrical as to appear laser-cut from some light-colored hardwood. The face was unlined and free of wrinkles, yet somehow it did not appear youthful. Roland knew this was because of the eyes. No amount of plastic surgery could take the weight of years away from a person’s eyes, and The Widow was closing in on the end of her first century of life.

  “Why, Roland! How nice of you to come see me,” she purred. It was not a friendly sound. Cheetahs could purr as well as any housecat, and Roland made sure to keep this in the forefront of his mind. “Please, sit.” She gestured to the largest of the couches across from her.

  Roland gambled on its ability to support his weight and lowered himself carefully. When it did not collapse, he shifted to look at the woman across from him. “You did not make yourself too hard to find.”

  “I did not want to run so very far away. I am currently rebuilding, as you know. The Colonnade is safe enough for such things. Especially since it does not appear that my enemies are all that interested in finishing me off.” She leaned forward to select a pastry from the table. “Their goal was to break The Combine, really. Which they did. If I avoid their interests and otherwise stay away from them, they appear quite content to leave me alone.”

  “Right.” Roland had not come here to discuss the rise and fall of a crime syndicate. “You know why I’m here?”

  “Oh, I think everyone knows why ‘The Fixer’ is out stomping around and scaring all the security forces by now, Roland.” She leaned back again, reclining like a hunting cat against wine-colored cushions. “Poor Henley is probably having fits about you getting past him with so little trouble.”

  “Your guy out front?” Roland asked. “He was good. Hold onto that one.”

  An artfully sculpted eyebrow rose. “From you that is high praise, indeed. Henley will be thrilled. Now, about this business with Madeleine. I hope you know I have nothing to do with it.”

  Roland folded his hands on his lap to keep them from curling into fists. “There is a train of thought that has you making moves on her operation to strengthen your own.”

  If Roland was worried this might anger The Widow, he was relieved to find no such consternation was apparent in her response to the accusation. “It’s true that business with Manson and The Brokerage has humbled my fortunes somewhat. Madeleine’s operation was well-run and very profitable. I might have even been tempted to move on her. It’s a fair assumption, to be certain. I’m not at all surprised Rodney thought of it.”

  Roland had to smile at that last part. The Dwarf was beginning to get a real reputation outside of Dockside. “But you didn’t move on her?”

  “No. It would have been a short-term strategy. I am trying to think about a much longer game. Jumping up too fast would just put me at odds with The Brokerage again, and even adding Madeleine’s strength to my own would not be sufficient for that sort of conflict. There’s a much subtler game afoot now, and I need to be more subtle about playing it. Starting another war so soon after the last simply will not get me where I want to be.”

  “Who do you think did this, then? You think it’s The Brokerage again?”

  “I can’t say. But it’s a strange move for anyone you and I know of. Madeleine was well-entrenched and strong. She was an institution unto herself. None of our usual playmates have much to gain from taking her down. Not to mention what this will do to the entertainment marketplace! I can save you several pairs of worn-out shoes by telling you that this is not some local gang or syndicate getting grand designs. Why The Brokerage would do this I can’t say, but it has their smell about it, even so.”

  Roland could not decide if he believed her, but she was making a good point. While The Widow had always been vain and greedy to a fault, he had never observed her to be much of a risk-taker. Her defense remained thin, however. He could not bring himself to accept her apparent sincerity just yet. She was a woman in desperate straits and Roland had often observed how far out of character desperate people often behaved.

  “I’ll keep looking around, then,” he said. “I may want to talk to you again about this. You know, for more of your unique insights.”

  “Of course,” The Widow said with smile that was as unconvincing as any Roland had ever attempted. “I’ll tell Henley to let you in next time.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  Roland left the suite with many more questions than he had upon entering.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  From ten stories up, the city spread out beneath him like an interactive street map. The muffled sounds and muted odors of New Boston wafted upward, distance degrading their fidelity and twisting the impressions they made. From up here, Uptown hummed like any other happy bustling metropolis. Her lights and mirrored surfaces twinkled, jewels embellishing a crown sitting atop the regal head of Earth’s mightiest marketplace. Lights sparkled, music drifted lazily on the early autumn breeze, and the white noise of a thousand vehicles and a million voices rumbled like the roar of a distant river.

  Through the mirrored black facets of his sensor arrays, the killer saw it all. A hundred individual reticles blinked across his optics, relaying pertinent information about the things that passed before the all-seeing suite of sensors living in t
he spaces where his eyes once sat. His ears, long since replaced with far more modern versions, took in all the noises at once, separated them, cataloged each into descending order of priority. Even his nose helped supply information on his surroundings. The wind itself bore a thousand little hints of what moved and worked in his area. There was the earthy tang of ionized air to tell him an aerocar had gone by a few minutes prior. He knew the deli on the bottom floor of the building he was currently perched upon was serving something heavy and German today, probably rotkohl. The breeze told him there would be rain before dawn, but that it would not last long.

  The sheer unrelenting quantity of information should have overwhelmed his brain, but all the extra wired connections snaking in and out of his gray matter soothed and coaxed the torrent of signals into a digestible stream of helpful data. It buffeted his nerves, a jangling, claustrophobic feeling. Over time the killer had become accustomed to it.

  “Nonna.” His weapons rested in their holsters, so speaking to himself was not strictly necessary. For some reason, he still preferred to do things this way.

  “Ready.”

  “Give me the Wraith in five.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Five seconds later, his vision swam, and a wave of vertigo slugged him deep in the guts. The nausea doubled him over for a few seconds. It passed quickly, and the killer straightened himself. The blinking lights and bustling sounds of Uptown were now gone, and in their place a blue-tinged landscape of shapes and moving flashes of neon stretched out from horizon to horizon. With the visible light spectrum suppressed, the killer now viewed the dark streets of Uptown as a series of shapes created by sonar, lidar, and radar. The indistinct masses were then overlaid with electromagnetic data from the various electrical systems within range. No longer did the killer see a jeweled crown, but rather the bones, heart, and brain of the city itself. Colors became meaningless, what he saw was distance, density, shape, and form. He took it all in with millimeter accuracy and precision to the fourth decimal point. The very electrochemical activity of the world around him was there, neatly parsed by his sensors to reveal only that which Nonna deemed pertinent to his task.

  When a man on the street below made a call on his comm, that comm lit up in subtle orange and he could hear the conversation just by focusing on it. The wide cones of a street scanner’s field of view shone as oscillating blue spotlights. A number of these swaying blue fields swept the streets in broad arcs, searching for things not at all unlike the killer. He could see alarm panels, shrouded sensors, police drones, and all manner of things hidden to the naked eye. The killer had no eyes, naked or otherwise, and after seeing all the things visible light denied him, he did not miss them.

  This had been the hardest part for the killer to master. Letting go of a lifetime’s worth of reliance upon visible light had not come without effort, but the results were spectacular. The killer did not see the city. He perceived it. When he looked at a building, he was not limited to the facades architects had deigned to show him. He saw the thickness of the walls, the density of the material, the streams of information flowing to and from it. When he eventually learned how to take this all in without vomiting uncontrollably, he found the Wraith macro allowed him to experience the world on a level no one else would ever understand. It would have been a lonely thought if the killer was inclined to either introspection or melancholy.

  He was not.

  When he was satisfied that his brain and body had adjusted to the Wraith, he began to run. His legs cycled faster and faster, accelerating the man along the rooftop until all too quickly there was no more rooftop to run across. Undaunted, those legs stretched out into a leap that hurled the inhuman figure across a hundred feet of gap.

  A group of property developers, well into their evening’s revelry, told bawdy jokes as they walked along the street in search of more distraction. High above their heads a silent figure flashed briefly in the reflected street light while sailing across the intersection to another rooftop. They did not notice this, as sound- and shock-absorbing footpads turned what should have been a noticeable crash upon impact into a noiseless thump. It took seven strides for the killer’s bionic legs to use up the energy of so long a flight, but the devices were programmed for exactly this sort of exercise and the killer employed no conscious thought doing it.

  It was thus the killer made his way across Uptown’s rooftops, eventually arriving on the roof of his destination. Dr. Watanabe wanted him to exercise restraint and discretion this time, so he paused to assess before taking further action. He very much wanted to unsling his pistols and kill everyone in the Colonnade hotel, but he supposed that was not what she had meant by ‘discreet.’ Instead, he allowed his sensors to sweep the rooftop, letting the machines in his brain seek out relevant information to highlight. The Wraith AI was programmed for infiltration. It possessed enough sophistication to filter out mundane items like power cables and random comm signals. This spared the killers’ organic brain the task of deciphering which of the thousands of tiny electronic signals in his area were important and which could be ignored was why it existed in the first place.

  While nowhere near powerful enough to decrypt modern alarm systems, it had no trouble finding them and identifying their configurations. It quickly found the pressure sensors in front of the roof access doors, limning each in his HUD with a soft blue glow. The bioscanner over the door received the same treatment as well as the numerous infrared sensors. If anything warmer than ninety-six degrees or heavier than sixty pounds approached that door, the scanner would immediately begin looking for biological parameters matching an authorized user in the building’s database. Great pains had been taken to ensure the killer could not be found in any database, and he suspected the response from building security to his presence would be swift and brutal.

  Part of him wanted this to happen. Pitting the Gunslinger against an army of high-end security professionals sounded like a lot of fun to the killer. That would not be discreet, however, so he squashed the desire.

  Setting his mind, and more specifically his AI, to the task of defeating the security system was simple enough. Once a plan was selected, the depthless black lenses of his eyes would light up with all the steps he needed to follow and guide him away from making any disastrous mistakes.

  The access door was a non-starter. Even with his internal bionics and coat spoofing his augmentations as normal human anatomy, the Wraith AI had already evaluated the probability of successfully fooling The Colonnade’s security as very low. This did not mean there were no holes in the stately building’s electronic armor. The obvious flaw lay in that the bulk of the security devices were focused on the roof access door, and not the roof itself. His prey’s arrogance dictated that she stay in the penthouse and that meant better options for servicing the target were available.

  Residing on the top floor and heavily defending the only roof access might deter a more mundane assassin, but no one would be foolish enough to call this killer mundane. He selected the first blinking option and followed the instructions without questioning them.

  In a moment, his systems located the sleeping quarters through the roof surface and confirmed that the target lay quiet and unaware in her bed. On muffled feet, the killer strode over to the section of roof directly above the bed. His ability to see the entire EM spectrum showed the sleeping woman as a shifting infrared silhouette in a blue spiderweb of electronic devices.

  His right hand reached across his body to draw the gun from under his left armpit. The smooth grip of the triggerless weapon molded to the specific contours of his mechanical hand. The instant his fingers encircled the grip, his brain established a link with the AI that controlled the gun. Confirming that the hand clutching it was the correct one, the weapon came to life with a small hum and a soft vibration. The killer watched the startup diagnostics scroll down his HUD and once satisfied with the condition of his favorite tool he began to select options.

  The Wraith had alrea
dy told him the rooftop was a half-inch layer of polycarbonate covered with an adiabatic membrane. Beneath that lay an eighteen-inch plenum where return air flowed to the three large air handling units on the roof. Under the plenum sat a layer of expanded foam insulation and under that a layer of decorative ceiling strata. The weapon and the Wraith commenced to communicate and calculate options, and two seconds later a recommendation winked to life in small yellow letters across his HUD.

  With a disappointed sigh, the killer reached under his coat and selected the requested projectile. It was a flechette, three inches long and eight millimeters in diameter. It looked like a very short and thick needle. The tip slanted to an aggressive point, and the dark gray hue gave away the material as tungsten carbide. The shaft was noticeably lighter in both color and mass. Mostly aluminum, a core of Inconel had been threaded through the axis to keep the dart rigid under even extreme heat and acceleration.

  He placed the projectile into the charging chamber of his pistol manually, not bothering to swap a whole magazine for a single shot. He closed the bolt over it and locked the weapon into battery. Both the gun and the Wraith concurred that the appropriate loadout had been prepared, and his lenses indicated the proper place to stand and aim with helpful blinking reticles.

  This sequence of events left him disgruntled and unsatisfied. This was no test of his skills, no great adventure. This was about as challenging and exciting as doing his taxes. The killer had not paid taxes in many years, but he assumed it to be an appropriate analogy. Paying taxes sounded about as boring and unengaging as this operation was shaping up to be, anyway. The whole process was just so drab and mechanical, and he craved action. For a moment he gave serious consideration to setting off an alarm just for the opportunity to fight the guards. As much as the resulting chaos might do to help his mood, tripping alarms in Uptown meant the speedy arrival of Uptown police. Trying to outrun a dragnet from the extremely well-financed Uptown departments sounded like the type of fun that got old very quickly. As impressive as the Wraith could be, eluding a few hundred police drones at once was probably asking too much of it.