Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Damn, my woman is fine as hell. His appreciation for her beauty rivalled a farmer’s love for a prized heifer. An evolved thinker might have taken great offense at this, but Chico Garibaldi had never been encumbered by the burdens of evolved thinking.

  Nor was he alone in his valuation. Two dozen hoods and mooks pressed against the bar, sending equal quantities of both lurid come-ons and horrible pick-up lines her way. Each hooted exhortation was hurled with an unashamed abandon that spoke of both heavy intoxication and long periods of involuntary celibacy. In her element, Kitty absorbed the ill-conceived overtures with droll humor and the manufactured smile.

  Chico was still deciding whether to smack these braying jackals aside or talk to Kitty when the lights shifted yet again. It was as if two lasers had targeted his optics specifically and were washing his lenses with some kind of high-frequency oscillating dazzle pattern. None of which was the sort of thing Chico Garibaldi would understand, so this sudden and very specific impression shocked him at first. Then the pieces fell into place and realization struck like a ball-peen hammer.

  Somebody is targeting my optics and washing the goddamn lenses with a high-frequency oscillating dazzle pattern!

  He did not know which of his minds put it together first, but they all agreed. The rebuke returned, this time even sharper and more condescending.

  You idiot! It’s a fucking trap!

  In the next instant, a wave of electronic static tore through his bionic ears and a scream of pain erupted from his lips. Blind and deaf, Chico Garibaldi spun from the bar, tripped over a stool and crashed to the floor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “He’s blind and deaf, team. Clear the floor.”

  The music stopped with an abrupt squeal and Barney’s voice rumbled from the speakers. “Party’s over! Everybody OUT!”

  Every stoned dope fiend in Hideaway stopped on command and filed for the exits with a speed and urgency that said more than a little about how often this sort of thing happened at Hideaway.

  “Brace for chaff.”

  Manuel Richardson hit the second of four icons on the screen of his DataPad and with a soft ‘poof!’ a fine cloud of ionized metallic dust disgorged from canisters hidden between the ceiling beams.

  “Scanners are dead. Go ahead and mop up, team.”

  Oblivious to the forms closing in on him, the blank-eyed cyborg thrashed on the floor of the bar. His mechanical limbs twitched and scrabbled for purchase. From his mouth came garbled growls, and the occasional gurgled expletive.

  “What’s he saying?” The unmistakable growl of Roland Tankowicz uttered the question. His voice sounded tinny and distant, filtered through the speakers of his death’s-head helmet.

  Manny stood up from behind the DJ booth and squinted. “Something about his grandmother I think. And a... bat?”

  Before Roland could set his massive hands on the twitching man, Mindy’s pained squeal came over the group’s comm channel. “Get back! Ultrasonics! He’s using...”

  The barrel of Chico’s pistol rose from under his body and Roland dove to the left on instinct alone. This proved to be an unnecessary maneuver. Chico was not trying to hit Roland. In truth, he could hardly even perceive the giant. His chosen target demonstrated a level of tactical awareness exceeding what Roland would have expected from the Chico Garibaldi he knew.

  The penetrator, hurled from the bizarre pistol at full charge, drilled a neat eight-millimeter hole through Manny’s DataPad. The flimsy plastic device offered virtually no resistance to the powerful projectile, so it continued on through Manny’s deltoid. Passing through that, the back wall of Hideaway’s main bar was the next thing to be perforated. Not until the dense metal needle sliced through the exterior masonry did it start to slow and tumble.

  Both Manny’s bionic left arm and his DataPad thudded to the floor of Hideaway. The limb, now neatly severed at the seam where the deltoid wrapped around his techno-organic bicep, flexed and writhed along the floor. “Shit!” the young man shouted, more in surprise than anything else. His arm neither experienced nor transmitted pain, though Manny lamented the hours of work it would take to reattach it.

  Lucia’s voice crackled to life over the channel. “That’s one! We have a minute. Let’s use it!”

  Roland was already in transit. Any questions regarding the fallibility of the killers’ aim were now answered. It did not take a tactical genius to comprehend that Manny would be dead if Chico’s aim was not compromised.

  Watanabe’s notes were explicit about Chico’s eyes. With no organic components to fall back on, Manny’s light show and chaff bombs left the target entirely blind to the electromagnetic spectrum. There had been some hope that this might render the killer helpless, still it came as no surprise when the killer rose to meet his foes.

  Mindy’s ears, being far more sensitive than anyone else’s, had picked up his hypersonic pulse before the attack. Roland presumed this was a form of echolocation and sonic range-finding. While it startled them to see Chico back in the fight so quickly, Roland had to concede that they still held favorable tactical ground. The minor setback of Manny’s traumatic amputation notwithstanding, it looked like the plan had been successful in preventing Chico’s first shot from killing anyone.

  Though not as fast as Lucia, Roland possessed five times the speed of any normal human. He labored under the assumption that a full minute to work on the Chico Garibaldi problem would be sufficient. This assessment proved to be immature, however. It took a brutal side kick to the inside of his knee for Roland to remember he was not fighting just Chico Garibaldi.

  The kick took his left leg out from underneath him and instead of sweeping the killer into a lethal grip, the giant flew over his crouching foe in a tangle of his own limbs. Roland struck the bar with a crash that buckled the faux-wood panels and crumpled the brass rail beneath him like a drinking straw.

  He leapt to his feet in an instant and charged again. He remembered the fighting skill of Roger Dawkins and this time he exercised more caution. The big man took Chico’s next low kick as a glancing strike that accomplished nothing. Roland’s subsequent overhand right was a murderous thing. He held nothing back knowing that with an opponent this fast and ruthless there could be no half-measures. The blow would have floored a medium armature if it connected, but even a blind Chico was far too fast. Roland’s fist sailed over his opponent’s head with room to spare and the darting killer slid out of range with a deft leap.

  “He’s buying time to clear his sensors! Someone kill those sonics!” Lucia waited on the outskirts of the fight. Neither she nor Mindy could afford to try engaging while the men stayed locked in close-quarters battle. When the opportunity arose, they tried the occasional bead shot knowing beads would not bother Roland. The men circled and swung too quickly for this tactic to be effective, and thus, they stalked the edges of the brawl waiting for one of the fighters to make room.

  A strange stalemate ensued. Chico could not drop his pistol if he wanted it to charge, and there was no question who would win if the contest remained a barroom brawl. He dodged and kicked, frustrating his giant opponent while power flowed from his internal stores through his palm into his weapon. In time, it would accumulate enough charge to drill a hole right through the big fixer. Even with his aim now imperfect, there would be no missing Roland Tankowicz at this range, thus every one of this battle’s constituents struggled to answer one question. Could Roland beat Chico to death before the pistol charged?

  Roland attacked like a monster from a child’s nightmare. Relentless and driven, he charged and smashed at Chico as if the smaller man was a full-sized assault mech. On the other side of the fight, Chico leapt and cavorted, sending kicks from his powerful military-grade legs and darting precision punches with his left fist. Roland’s helmet rang like a gong with each blow, the silver-white faceplate showing the scuffs and scratches from the metal-knuckled strikes. Roland needed only one clean hit to end this match, one instant where luck and skill intersec
ted to put a heavy black fist into Chico’s face.

  It appeared this moment might never arrive. Another hit from Chico, this time a stomping front kick that connected solidly with Roland’s gut, blunted another charge and sent the smaller man sailing backward and away from the larger. He landed gracefully, though the new distance drew a volley of fire from both Mindy and Lucia. Prosthetic arms folded over his chest and Chico let the beads and flechettes shatter and ricochet off his armor. Then he darted back toward his giant enemy and the relative safety of proximity.

  A few things became readily apparent as she watched the fight, and Lucia spat a lengthy expletive. “He’s too fast, still! He’s going to get that thing charged up again!”

  “I’ll get him,” Roland roared back. “Just give me a second!”

  But Lucia knew it would not matter how many seconds she gave him. She had been watching the whole fight and analyzing its ebbs and flows. Her brain made a thousand connections each second, and each permutation yielded similar results. Chico’s vision was definitely clearing, and he would get his weapon charged in less than thirty seconds. Then he would shoot Roland.

  There were plenty of versions where that shot missed, and some where it struck non-lethal areas allowing the fight to continue. Unfortunately, there were very few that ended with Roland getting his hands on Chico at any point. She clocked the killer at seven or eight times normal, a speed even she could not match. He could keep this up all day, and eventually he would shoot Roland in the chest or head and kill him.

  The solution was obvious, and Lucia wondered why she ever thought it would not come to this. She waited until about fifteen seconds before Chico’s weapon would be ready to fire, then she injected herself with her father’s new nanobots. Within a half second, the first of the tiny machines migrated the new firmware to its brethren already in her body. After three heartbeats, the upgrades were already taking effect. At six seconds her entire system had been updated to the new parameters, and Lucia’s universe went insane.

  Time did not just slow down: it crawled. Her perceptions of sounds and smells dragged out, turning normal sensory information into a burgeoning swell of stimuli. The air became a thick soup as the force of a trillion air molecules, infinitesimal in magnitude and duration, pushed against her skin in protracted resistance.

  Her brain fared no better. The speed of her thoughts and reactions had always made managing her anxiety difficult, and to protect her mind from this the new firmware virtually removed her ability to experience panic at any level. This was not the relief she hoped it would be. Instead of acute terror, she now perceived the inescapable weight of a pervasive droning dread. Muted and distant, what had once been the sharp cry of terror in her mind dragged like the sound of a person screaming from within a buried coffin. It possessed palpable magnitude and volume but brought no intensity. Worse, because she was now experiencing the world at hyper-velocity, it did not fade or go away. It lingered and pressed, torturing her with the drip, drip, drip, of successive anxieties.

  Without question, the hypo worked as advertised. The fight between Chico and Roland had turned languid. It had the smooth and undulating cadence of a fierce battle between opponents trapped underwater. It was almost balletic if not for the sheer quantity of kinetic energy in play.

  When she first moved, Lucia almost fell. Her push off the floor was not the instinctive pressure of a trained martial artist, but rather the explosive spasm of a newborn colt. A slow swelling of discomfort began in her ankle and began a long crescendo into real pain as what she had hoped would be a light step sent her forward in a ballistic surge.

  Her machines adjusted, and her next step was more balanced and familiar. Over the years, she had been warned a thousand times by both Roland and her father that her nervous system was capable of driving her body harder than it could safely go. If she planted a foot wrong, turned too quickly, or rotated her hips too hard in a punch, she could easily tear her own ligaments and tendons. The creeping agony in her ankle illustrated her error with the promise of a painful recovery.

  She missed Chico on her first pass. Her grab for his gun missed because she misjudged the distance and speed involved. The urge to twist her body midflight and grasp the offending pistol was nearly overwhelming. She had enough speed, she knew. Though her brain recognized the very real possibility of severe damage to her already injured right leg if she tried. The nanobots suppressed any real apprehension over this, and a thorough risk-reward analysis had her choose caution over aggression. There was time for a second pass.

  She planted a foot and turned, snaking her left leg across the floor to strike Chico behind his heel. The metal foot slid out from under his hips with a scratching sound and Chico threw his arms out to the sides in an ugly attempt to maintain his balance. Lucia followed her foot sweep with a shot from her CZ105. It should have drilled the cyborg killer dead center mass, but a flailing prosthetic arm intercepted the flechette and sent it pinwheeling off with a shower of yellow sparks. Roland’s bulk obscured her next shot when the big man exploited this distraction to close the distance between himself and his prey.

  An onyx fist crackled past Chico’s face with the snap of disturbed air. The killer’s last-second jerk prevented the grisly death of a pulped skull from becoming his fate but forced him to retreat even more. Lucia took the opportunity to slide around Roland’s back and cycle her pistol at Chico until the magazine ran dry. None of her shots found flesh, but multiple direct hits threw sparks and chips of armor from Chico’s much-abused arms. Dropping her gun, Lucia leapt and caught the back-pedaling killer in the guts with a lunging side kick. Her foot struck a clean blow, every inch of the woman straining with the effort of kicking Chico with all her might.

  Too much might.

  She had forgotten how accelerated she was, and her throbbing ankle exploded in electric lances of sharpest agony. Her kicking leg’s knee turned to liquid fire when her foot connected and something in her hip tore. She gasped in pain and collapsed, wondering if the landed kick was worth the price.

  To Roland’s practiced eye, it was. Chico left his feet like a struck golf ball and crashed into a high-top table with enough force to send him tumbling across its surface. Flying over that, the careening killer bounced off the floor and smashed into another table. His momentum carried him across the dirty barroom, scattering tables and chairs like tenpins. Eventually, his twisted body slid to a halt beneath a pile of toppled bar furniture against the far wall.

  Roland should have charged him immediately, but he paused to assess Lucia’s injuries. She caught his glance and screamed, “Don’t-look-at-me-go-get-him-before-he-gets-up!” Her words came out compressed end-to-end and her frustrated cry exploded like a single word in some foreign language.

  Roland took the blurted advice and threw himself on the twitching pile of tables and chairs. A massive black hand plunged into the wreckage and emerged with Chico’s left arm trapped in his grip. The big cyborg yanked hard and tore the killer from under the pile of detritus like a man hauling a net from the sea. Roland did not extract Chico from the pile; he ripped his foe clear of it. Whether or not Chico’s arm separated from his body remained irrelevant to the snarling fixer.

  The limb remained affixed, and Roland used it as a handle to smash his trapped adversary against the floor. He expected this to kill the man, and another indecipherable growl thrummed rom the metal skull’s face when the stubborn gunman remained very much alive.

  “What the fuck did they make you out of, asshole?”

  Chico did not answer the rhetorical question. He was busy trying to break Roland’s grip. Success proved elusive, and the giant black fist whipped Chico skyward, dragging the thrashing killer into the ceiling with a crash of shattered lights and smashed metal. Almost lost within the scrolling damage reports meandering through Chico’s HUD, red block letters flashed the words he had been waiting for.

  “Weapon ready.”

  Roland was in the process of rolling his shoulder forw
ard to again drive Chico’s body into the unforgiving mass of floorboards when the lithe killer spun in his grasp and braced a foot against Roland’s chest. A brawny left hand clamped onto the leg and tore it away just in time to see the muzzle of the killers’ pistol swinging to align with his face.

  Roland did not know if it was fully charged, or how much charge it actually needed to be fatal to him at this range. He just knew that he did not want to get shot in the head or chest. His arm jerked to the right, and he flung his head to the left. When the gun went off with Roland still clutching Chico by the forearm. The flechette took Roland through the trapezius muscle, less than five inches away from drilling a lethal hole straight through his neck.

  The enormous black arm went completely numb for an instant and the searing light and heat of the incandescent projectile overwhelmed his eyes and scanners. The big cyborg dropped his prey to reel backward. Never one to miss an opportunity, Chico round-kicked the outside of Roland’s knee. He lacked the raw strength to do real damage to the giant joint, but the enhanced power of the bionic limb succeeded in staggering the bigger man while he tried to reacquire his balance. Pivoting on his heel, Chico whipped a spinning back kick impossibly high to bounce a metal foot off Roland’s faceplate. With the shriek of scraping metal and a shower of orange sparks, the helmeted face spun to the side. Liking the results, Chico jumped straight up and put a third boot to the side of Roland’s helmet. Upon contact the kick rang Roland’s head like a gong and finally the fixer crashed into the far wall. The thin interior panel collapsed under a half ton of lurching bulk and Roland disappeared into the blackness of a storage area.

  A string of beads from Mindy’s pistol kept Chico from following the attacks with any more. Instead, her barrage forced him to either dodge the projectiles or allow them to shatter harmlessly against his bionic limbs. The blank-eyed killer whirled across the bar, choosing one or the other as necessity dictated. When close enough, he lunged for the little blond with murder in his heart. Mindy met him with the same plus a hail of gunfire and the calculated slashes of her Sasori dagger.