Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The beads were useless against the streaking cyborg and his superior speed left the buzzing dagger easily avoided. Swatting Mindy’s gun hand aside, Chico pistol-whipped the assassin across the face. Luck, skill, and a reinforced skull saved her life, though the heavy strike spun the tiny assassin to the side. Undaunted, Mindy planted a foot and lunged with her blade. The skewering strike passed along Chico’s abdomen without drawing blood and a sharp rap from a cold metal hand sent the black knife spinning off behind him.

  Mindy tried to backtrack, but Chico’s empty left hand shot out and snared her by the hair. He gave it a sharp yank, snapping her head backward and flinging her to the floor. Before he could make good on the first of a thousand despicable acts he intended to inflict upon the woman, the roar of a maddened grizzly informed him that Roland had returned to the battle. Frustrated, he turned and fired his pistol, not caring if it was fully charged and trusting that whatever charge it had would be sufficient to puncture the fixer’s thick hide. The flechette exploded in a shower of white sparks as it spun off into the rafters, missing its mark by an enormous margin. The killer paused a thirtieth of a second to ponder just what exactly had spoiled his aim to such an egregious extent.

  It was in this eyeblink Chico noticed two things that shocked and dismayed him. He was shocked to observe his severed right hand tumbling downward in a slow descent to the dirty floor. Dismay followed when he noticed a swaying Lucia Ribiero gripping Mindy’s humming Sasori dagger in her gauntleted fist.

  Then the walls exploded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The flash of light and stinging hail of building debris sent all the combatants except Roland to the floor. The rain of wreckage pelted the big cyborg with a thousand shards of lethal shrapnel. All of which he found indistinguishable from a light drizzle. This allowed him to be the first to see the new group of fighters emerging through two fresh holes in Hideaway’s walls.

  It was a motley and mismatched squad of cybernetically enhanced soldiers that poured into the messy space of the main barroom. Men with obnoxious prosthetics of varying vintages and configurations scuttled like metal rats to take firing positions on each side of the new apertures while others scrambled inside to sweep the corners of the room with the muzzles of exotic rifles.

  Roland was at a loss as to who, and more precisely, what these new players were. However, the sudden appearance of a tall man in a black suit soon answered his questions.

  “Bob,” he growled. “Figures.”

  Roland did not waste a moment contemplating potential reasons for the man’s untimely arrival, nor did he care about the squad of heavily armed cyborgs that had come along for the ride. Lucia was hurt, Mindy was still dealing with Chico, and Manny was missing his arm. The time for parlay and negotiations had passed long ago. He knew if there was to be any chance of mission success then he would need to keep every one of these new players shooting at him for as long as possible. This was something he understood, and he took solace in that fact. The big man spared a moment to consider the possibility those formidable-looking weapons he saw gripped in cold mechanical hands might be capable of puncturing his hide. He did not recognize the weapons, so he could not say.

  Only one way to find out, he thought.

  Roland charged.

  The first incoming rounds to strike Roland’s chest washed over his armor like gnats. By his third step, the volume of fire was so intense that it felt like running through a hurricane. Nothing pierced his dermal armor at least, and he broke through the hail of projectiles like a freight train barreling through a thick fog.

  He wanted to get his hands on Bob. He assumed that bringing their leader to heel would settle the rest of the fighters down in a hurry. As he closed on the suited man, the shooting stopped. Bob never moved.

  The tall man in the nice suit met Roland’s charge with a front kick straight from hell. Roland’s injured lung screamed in protest, his torn trapezius wailed, and the polished Italian Oxford in his guts very nearly stopped the half-ton war machine in his tracks.

  Physics plays no favorites, and the now-stumbling Roland retained enough forward momentum to force Bob into a deft sidestep. A size twenty-one boot dug into the floor, pivoting Roland to follow his nimble opponent. A black paw of a hand swept out, and Bob blocked it with a forearm that felt like iron.

  Slipping under the swipe, Bob dragged the arm down and off its attack line. This exposed Roland’s ribs and Bob serviced them with rapid-fire right hooks to the body.

  Roland grunted at the impacts, acutely aware that the tall man had a punch that would shame an armature. Bob’s follow-up left landed harmlessly against Roland’s own blocking forearm and the two men separated. The big cyborg heard gunfire behind him, and feeling no hits against his back, assumed that Lucia and Mindy had engaged the rest of Bob’s men. A rush of panic passed over him. Lucia was injured and under the influence of untested firmware. The thought of her getting hurt sent rivers of ice water down his spine.

  He had no chance to do anything about it. Bob attacked again, and Roland had a new respect for what the man could do. He decided to let the incoming front kick land, just to gauge exactly how strong his opponent was. He did not like the answer.

  The kick reminded him of lying on a grenade, and it drove all nine-hundred-and-forty pounds of Roland Tankowicz back two big steps. The attacks did not stop at a kick. Roland found himself treating this normal-sized opponent as if he was a small or medium armature just to stay on his feet. He still had a significant size and weight advantage, though he guessed Bob easily weighed over four hundred pounds himself. After a few tight exchanges, Roland assessed himself to be the stronger of the two as well, though not by so large a margin as one might assume by their size difference.

  Bob attacked briskly, stringing strikes and combinations together in neat, well-practiced sequences. The style was unfamiliar to Roland. It seemed at first to be a blend of several schools, with Bob switching between techniques as needed.

  It went deeper than mere schooling, he realized. Stepping inside a high Thai round kick, Roland put his right fist into Bob’s chest, sending the man hurtling into a wall. Bob rose unscathed and replied with a blistering four-piece combo as if he had just stepped from a boxing gym. Roland boxed as well as anyone and better than most. He returned fire with a pair of stiff jabs that masked a thunderous right hook. Bob took the hook as a glancing blow to his head and danced out of range. Without an instant’s pause, he immediately snaked back into the fight with a series of rapid-fire kicks. His black dress shoes darted and flicked like a snake’s tongue as he advanced behind the dizzying fusillade.

  Roland could not pick out the specific art, but he recognized the uniquely Korean feel to the storm of snappy kicks. Now Roland knew something was not right. Bob did not fight like a man who had learned multiple styles. Bob switched in and out of fighting styles as a whole. It was as if he had multiple combat systems downloaded into his brain and swapped them in and out as needed.

  The pieces of the puzzle aligned themselves in his head and the reason for this hit him like a hammer.

  It’s a fucking robot.

  The strength, the weight, the composure, and most of all that stupid name. It all made sense. Roland renewed his attacks, desperate to finish his fight so he could help Mindy and Lucia. He bludgeoned his way through Bob’s kicks, taking some and blocking others. The suited man tried to slip off to Roland’s right flank, but Roland slid to block the move and drove Bob through the outer wall with a furious tackle. The impact shook the whole building as the two machines smashed the exterior masonry to gray chips and spilled onto the dirty asphalt beyond.

  Bob absorbed the hit without comment and squirmed beneath Roland’s bulk. Making no attempt to escape the crushing mass, he tangled Roland’s right arm and shoulder between his legs. Twisting hard, Bob turned his body against the pinioned limb to secure an omoplata shoulder lock. Roland grabbed Bob around the waist to block the move and rolled free of the attack with
an agility that seemed incongruous with his bulk.

  Neither man rose to his feet. They spun and tied each other up with matching collar and elbow grips. Roland’s weight and strength drove Bob down, but the android ducked under and spun to take Roland’s back. The big man matched the maneuver with his own turn and peeled his foe away. Bob leapt backward now, sensing or predicting Roland’s incoming rising left hook. It missed by a hair but set the thing in the suit on a defensive footing.

  Back on their feet, an overhand right from Roland came next. It followed so close on the heels of his previous swing that the eye could barely follow it. Out of room in the alley, Bob was forced to parry the blow. Upon contact, the strength and mass advantage of Roland asserted itself in the form of Bob getting thrown against the wall with sufficient force to crack the concrete blocks. The android immediately dropped low, and a giant black fist drove through bricks where his head had been a tenth of a second earlier. Roland’s arm sank into the wall past his elbow, and he extracted it in an explosion of dust and concrete shrapnel.

  Bob had not wasted this opportunity. His first punch was a straight left that connected just under Roland’s chin. The power of it made Roland’s ears ring, and he flailed defensively to clear his senses. Bob dodged and fired a right hook that spun Roland’s head to the side and sent him careening across the alley and into a rusty recycler. The android was on him in an instant, blows falling like raindrops in a monsoon, a torrent of bludgeoning fists hammering away at his armored body.

  Roland could not help but notice a disturbing familiarity to the beating. Bob looked perfectly human, but that was not it. High-end androids could be very convincing facsimiles of people, but they were simple things to beat in a fight when you could lift sixty tons. Bob fought disconcertingly like a man except for the style-switching. He was not simplistic or linear in his strategies, yet neither was he terribly creative. Furthermore, his strength was absolutely ludicrous for an android. Making this point, another thundering strike sent alarms ringing across Roland’s HUD and a ghostly stab of pain through his still-healing chest. Bob was far too strong. Nearly as strong as Roland was, and just as fast. The thing did not carry nearly enough bulk to be as strong as he appeared unless...

  Roland cursed himself for an idiot and exploded outward against his foe, hurling his bulk at Bob with no other goal than to make the punches stop. He pulsed a tight-beam scan at the android as it leapt back to avoid being crushed. The resulting data confirmed Roland’s suspicions.

  “Just what the fuck are you, Bob?” he snarled as he stalked forward. “Are they building Golems again? Could they really be that stupid?” Bob did not rise to his bait. The android (for lack of a better term) assumed a neutral fighting stance and began to circle. Roland was content to match the footwork and prolong the stalemate. “No organics, though. You’re a pure AI. Complex, too. Very convincing.” Roland relaxed, his new understanding now growing into a plan.

  Bob lunged with a chopping round kick. Roland recognized it and stepped back to avoid the speeding foot. Then, on a hunch, he pivoted to make Bob’s subsequent left hand to his body miss by a wide margin.

  “Kyukushin,” he commented drily. “Good choice for tight spaces, bad choice for a much bigger opponent.”

  Bob ignored the jibe and sent a low round kick at Roland’s knee which Roland checked with his shin. Bob’s elbow came next, whipping around in a malicious arc for the silver faceplate. However, Roland’s head had already shifted out of the way.

  “Muay Thai. Better choice. But my reach is too long for an elbow to have much of a chance, Bob.”

  The thing stalked forward, firing tight punches from behind a buttoned-up high guard. The footwork was precise and exploited the available angles well. Roland had to shift and block with his forearms and elbows to avoid taking the hits. He responded with his own combination, a jab-hook-cross-hook that had been a favorite of his before the UEDF years. Bob slipped several and blocked the rest, the final hook sending him stumbling backward.

  Behind his faceplate, Roland smiled. “You know what your problem is, Bob?”

  Bob did not seem to care, and his attacks resumed. He dove for Roland’s lead leg, hooking it around the knee and driving into the big man’s hip with a lowered shoulder. It might have been a textbook single-leg takedown, except Roland had been wrestling since high school. The hip rotated away and he threw his captured leg backward. This broke Bob’s grip and Roland’s descending mass drove the android face-first to the ground.

  “You may know all the right moves, Bob.” He growled down to his prone foe. “But no one actually taught you how to fight with them, did they?” The big cyborg spun to his feet, dragging Bob up by his neck. Four hundred pounds of android provided as much resistance to Roland as a kitten might to a determined child, and the thing in the suit was hurled back down to meet the unforgiving planet with all the strength Roland possessed. The resulting crater was suitably impressive, but Bob appeared none the worse for wear. He twisted in Roland’s grip, scrabbling for purchase and snaking his legs around Roland’s arm.

  Roland actually laughed when he pulled it free, twisted, and smashed the android against the alley wall. “Judo? Jujitsu? Really? Do you even know who I am? I learned how to escape a juji gatame when I was fucking twelve years old, Bob. Try something else.” Then Roland swung the thing against another wall, driving from his shoulder and sending them both through it to the other side.

  They found themselves back in Hideaway and in the middle of a fierce close-quarters gun fight. Beads crisscrossed the no-man’s land of the open floor as blinding orange streaks. The shouts of men and women exhorting teammates to various actions were drowned out by the staccato cracks of hypersonic projectiles and the shattering of struck detritus.

  Roland and Bob staggered into the middle of this maelstrom, and both immediately started taking hits from friend and foe alike as the volume of fire did not change for their presence. Bob’s skin appeared to be every bit as thick as Roland’s. Beads bounced off or shattered in a hail of white sparks wherever they hit the flailing android, exactly as they did when colliding with the cyborg. Both ignored the gun-play and remained focused on tearing each other limb from limb. Bob clung to Roland’s arm like a limpet, repeatedly trying to secure a grip strong enough to attack the elbow joint. Roland whipped the thing around like a man shaking a paint can, smashing Bob into any reasonably solid piece of building or furniture.

  Finally, Roland put the android bodily through the floor. Holding him there, he put a boot on Bob’s face and pulled with his ensnared arm. Bob now had a choice, which Roland elaborated unnecessarily. “Your head or my arm, Bob. Make a call.” The muscles in Roland’s upper back bulged and strained. His wounded trapezius protested, and Roland’s HUD warned him that a critical failure was imminent. Bob did not have to know that part, and based upon the stretching and groaning of the android’s neck muscles, Roland figured he could hold out longer than Bob would.

  The four-limbed grip on his arm relaxed, and it came free. Bob scurried away to avoid more pounding and Roland pursued. The volume of bead fire hitting Roland increased and the big man ground his teeth. He knew what came next.

  As Bob retreated, two cyborgs charged Roland from either side. They did not shoot, but both had wicked-looking blades extending from bulky sheaths attached to their prosthetic forearms. Most regular people would not be strong enough to shove a vibroblade through Roland’s skin, but the oversized actuators bulging grotesquely from those mechanical arms told Roland that this would not be an obstacle these men found daunting.

  The first to reach him had the same black eyes as Chico, and he sent the serrated blade at Roland’s guts with a blank grimace. Roland had to stop chasing Bob and sidestep to avoid being skewered. He snagged the offending arm at the elbow and bent it backward. A rough squeeze drew a shower of sparks from the prosthesis and a hollow electronic scream from the man wielding it. Roland whipped him around as a shield to block his partner’s incoming stab
. Roland’s suspicions about the strength and lethality of the blades were confirmed when the one cyborg neatly bisected the other. The blade hardly slowed as it passed through Roland’s improvised shield and even managed to open a shallow gash along Roland’s abdomen.

  Roland dropped the gory halves of the man in his hands and serviced the other with an armored fist through his head. A hellish spray of brains, blood and random bits of electronic flotsam spattered the floor and walls. The knife-swinging cyborg took three awkward steps then crumpled to a twitching heap. Roland looked up to see more cyborgs approaching and no sign of Bob the mysterious android thing. Furthermore, he could not see Chico Garibaldi, either. He hoped desperately that Lucia and Mindy had managed to finish him off, but had to stop worrying about it when the next pair of contenders lined up for their shot at the title.

  “Come on, boys,” he rumbled. “Might as well get this over with.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lucia Ribiero was not having a good time.

  This impression had the air of understatement to it, but for the life of her she could not summon any stronger feelings about her situation. Her nanobots suppressed so much peripheral electrical activity in her brain that she could only be dimly aware of her own feelings on any level.

  The arrival of Bob and his squad of goons had been shock. Or at least as much a shock as anything could be while experiencing the universe at more than ten times the speed any human had a right to. Either ignoring the pain or oblivious to it, she had spun away from the first breaching charge and dove for her pistol even as the shrapnel still filled the air. Reloading mid-roll, her muzzle came up and the CZ105 spat tungsten-tipped aluminum needles into the opening just as the first body appeared in the gap. Having had a few moments to adjust to the new firmware, her aim this time had returned to its usual preternatural accuracy. The first flechette took the emerging cyborg through his left eye. This made her two follow-up shots entirely superfluous, but she noted that her marksmanship for these was equally good. It remained a good rule-of-thumb to shoot cyborgs of dubious origin and unknowable capabilities more than once. Just in case.