“He broke through the wall, sir.”
“How the fuck did he…” Marko stopped himself. If Tank had dropped an industrial mining armature like Tom Miner’s, then it followed that a regular concrete wall would not be an obstacle.
“Get on him! Intercept that fucker!” Marko knew his men needed more specific guidance than this, but it was all he had right now, “Use the truck-mounted shit and bring him down!”
Marko heard Fatir’s voice, tinny and distant, as the young man echoed his leader’s commands to the rest of the men, then he came back to the mic, “Done sir, we’ll be on him in—“
The admin building shook to its very foundations. It felt like someone had crashed a bus directly into the lobby, which was not far from the truth. Marko dropped the comm in startled fright and scrambled for the safety of the corner.
It didn’t feel safe at all to the big gangster. The sounds of total war resonated above him, and he could tell his bodyguards were fighting in the lobby area. His was an experienced ear, and the panicked shouts and enormous quantity of unrestrained gunfire indicated with depressing clarity that his boys were losing this battle. Marko’s heart sank. In just the span of a few minutes, the thick steel walls and impregnable vault doors of his panic room had become far less reassuring than he wanted them to be.
The cacophony felt like it went on for hours, and yet the trembling man perceived its end with painful abruptness: There were the muffled reports of weapons above him, and the screams of hardened underworld enforcers as they were maimed and killed. Then nothing but empty stillness. An auditory void containing no more sound than the terrifying silence of a grave. Less than one minute, in all, and the madness upstairs was over.
Then, with horrible slowness, came the heavy rhythmic thuds of giant footsteps overhead. Marko looked at his shaking hands and heard the roar of his blood in his ears. He wasn’t nervous anymore; he was truly and inescapably afraid.
“Fatir! Get those men over here now! He’s in the building!” Marko tried not to sound like a terrified child, but he may not have been entirely successful. Fingers numb with adrenaline fumbled with the locked cabinet in the steel-encased panic room, and he dropped the keys twice before he got the cursed thing open. From inside, he grabbed a plasma caster so illegal just owning it could get him a life sentence. Its heft and awesome destructive power reassured him, and the big gangster slammed a charging cell home in the butt of the stock. His panic retreated slightly when the controls lit up and the weapon came to life with a keening whine.
Marko gathered his courage. Fine, I’ll do this myself.
He shouldered the glossy black weapon and set the reservoir to a full-power blast. It would burn out the cell in three shots, but he’d be damned if they wouldn’t be good ones. He almost forgot to slip on the light-blocking glasses, but remembered as soon as the brightness of the holographic targeting reticle burned dancing green spots into his vision. Surviving this was his top priority, but not going blind was also high on the list.
Marko’s preparations were interrupted by a thundering impact on the door to the panic room. The crash was so loud that Marko’s ears rang like a fire alarm for several seconds after. There was a sigh of deep relief when he saw that the door held, but closer examination brought his reprieve to an abrupt halt.
It had moved.
There was a clear line of light ringing the edges, showing that the air-tight closure had been warped off its seals by whatever horrible thing had struck it. A thin rectangle of blue-white luminescence was all it took for Marko to realize that his men were not going to get there in time.
Then the bashing began in earnest, and Marko had to drop his weapon to cover his ears as the universe’s loudest battering ram struck the six-inch thick steel vault door five times per second.
It was a good door. It lasted four seconds before heaving inward with a horrible tearing screech and crashing to the floor with a heavy thud. Bright light flooded the panic room and Marko’s hands went back down to the plasma caster. He tried to bring the weapon up, tried to make his stand; but a black shadow stretched out from behind the massive silhouette in the door and snaked across the room to strike his arm like an obsidian dagger.
There was a pop and a keening wail accompanied searing electric pain that blossomed in his arm. His fingers, now dead and numb, could not grasp the gun before two more needle-like fists sent their poisonous stings to his shoulder and then the back of his thigh.
Both weapon and man collapsed to the floor, one inanimate the other disoriented. A dozen more fiery bites from the black monster struck him with horrible rapidity and casual ease. The demon never let up, never paused. Every other contact would kill the nerves and muscles around the point of impact, and the popping and crackling noise played like castanets in his burning ears.
Soon, the most feared man in Big Woo was a wheezing, drooling, sobbing mess on the floor of his own fortress.
“Lucia! Enough!”
Marko barely heard the booming voice through the haze of pain and fading consciousness. He was grateful for the respite that came with it, for only then did the interminable stinging cease.
The next voice was smaller, but all the more terrifying for the pure feral rage that was evident, “Make him talk, Roland. I don’t care how.”
“Count on it. You go watch for his reinforcements. You don’t need to see this part.” The big shadow, which Marko now could see was Tank (as if it could have been anyone else, he conceded), spoke with a quiet compassion that conferred a horrible finality to the implications it contained. Whatever it was he was going to do, he wanted to protect the angry woman from seeing it. That did not bode well.
“Fine,” the woman spat, “How long do you need?”
Marko’s eyes found Tank’s, and the two men locked gazes for a long second. Roland’s response rang with professional confidence, “two minutes.”
Marko’s senses were returning, and the burning numbness that marked every part of him the woman had struck was already fading. Mark Anthony Johnstone was many things: A slaver, a drug peddler, a thief, a murderer. But he was not stupid, and he had made a long and illustrious career out of escaping situations like this.
No, Marko wasn’t done, yet. Down? Yes. Out? Never.
He thought about the plasma caster, laying on the floor three feet away. He needed time and a distraction, that was all. Then he could put a megawatt of pure energy through this fucker’s face and be on his way.
Tank was a Dockside fixer, Marko remembered. This was a professional negotiator. He could work with that.
The lumbering capo was slow to sit up, feigning more hurt than he felt. It wasn’t hard to be convincing; he was in enough real pain that it was easy to make the act convincing. He raised his hands in surrender and coughed, “You win, Tank. I’ll deal. What’s your price?”
Roland’s body relaxed, and the lantern jaw stopped flexing and bulging with agitation. This was now an ordinary interaction between businessmen. Marko understood this part and so did Roland.
“That’s easy, Marko,” Roland’s smile was cold, yet polite, “Where is Don Ribiero?”
Marko smiled back, “So she hired you to find her old man, huh? Figures.” He shifted on the floor to get more comfortable, only incidentally moving an inch closer to the plasma caster, “The board will kill me if I tell you, you know.”
Roland started to talk but Marko interrupted, “I know, I know… You’ll kill me if I don’t. I wrote that playbook, pal. So let’s figure out how to get you want you want without me getting killed, shall we?”
“All ears,” Roland was a poor conversationalist. He also knew that the less you talked, the more the other guy would.
Marko smiled, all business, “I can’t tell you where he is, because that would embarrass the Board. But if you were to steal my DataPad, you might find a lot of correspondence about Corpus Mundi, and a list of their research facilities that are doing the kind of work Dr. Ribiero is good at. You might even notice th
at one of those facilities is owned by a Combine shell corporation and is completely… uh… off the books.”
Marko waited for Roland’s reaction. He was playing a tight game here. He was telling the truth about his DataPad because lie detection technology was not difficult to obtain and this whole gambit centered on Roland believing him. The discarded DataPad was a pale rectangle of plastic across the room where it had been dropped earlier. If Tank went to get it, Marko would have a chance to go for the caster. If Tank made Marko retrieve it, he’d get to walk right by the damn thing.
It had been a while since Marko had gotten his own hands dirty, but he remembered how to win a fight. Sure, he avoided fights, because fights were risky and risk was for suckers. But since there was no way out of this battle, he prepared himself to win it.
Tank strolled over to the discarded Pad with confident, relaxed strides. Marko’s heart quickened, and we waited for Roland to lean over to collect the device. Marko timed his lunge for the moment the towering fixer’s eyes went to the DataPad, and then exploded like a coiled snake toward the waiting weapon just three short feet away.
His fingers closed around the grip and he rolled to his back, bringing the muzzle to bear on his unsuspecting foe.
To his dismay, Marko discovered far too late that he did not have an unsuspecting foe. It was immediately clear to the doomed man that his foe was very much of the suspecting variety. A black fist closed over the front of the plasma caster and squeezed with inhuman strength. With a depressing crunch, the muzzle of the expensive weapon disappeared into a crumbling mess of bleeding-edge materials and shattered crystal focusing arrays.
Marko stroked the trigger in a futile effort to make the gun do something, but the effort was wasted. His caster had gone from luxurious military hardware to useless lump of parts in a fraction of a second.
The other massive hand clamped around Marko’s throat and hoisted him choking and gurgling into the air, “They’re designed to go inert when damaged, dumbass. Otherwise they’d blow up,” Roland’s admonishment was a cruel taunt, his face twisted in a contemptuous sneer.
Their eyes met, and the fury and loathing Marko saw there made him wince. Roland’s hatred for his enemy was a palpable thing in that painful and extended moment. It confused and terrified Marko. The gangster lacked any capacity to comprehend what was going on behind the soulless black gaze of his tormentor. His life as a remorseless criminal had gifted him with neither the ability nor the perspective to understand hate on the level Roland Tankowicz was experiencing.
Roland had never hated anyone the way he hated Marko right now.
Mark Anthony Johnstone was responsible for ruining the lives of thousands, and to the seasoned gang lord, this was no more heinous than selling produce. Roland hated that the greed and selfishness of one man could do so much harm. This, however, was not the confusing part. As a hateful person himself, Marko could understand the kind of antipathy one man might have for another quite easily. That was not what was so terrifying to the choking, dangling man.
Marko saw something very different from naked malice in the twisted mien of his enemy. The furious tension in Roland’s massive jaw and the deep, pained furrows of that heavy brow told Marko that this went well beyond one man’s hate for another. The fat crime lord hung in the air, terrified and perplexed.
As he considered his fleeting mortality, Marko completely overlooked a basic reality that had been gnawing at Roland since he first set down in the Woo: People like Marko existed, because people like Roland had done nothing to stop them. The fact that Roland had done nothing to stop Marko over the years made perfect sense to the criminal; it was none of Roland’s business. Why should Roland concern himself with what Marko was doing over in Big Woo? A person would have to care for the feelings of others to know that the apathy and inaction of the last twenty years were eating Roland Tankowicz alive from the inside out. Marko was just not that kind of guy.
The egomaniacal mobster would never comprehend that at this moment, and in this place, the only thing Roland Tankowicz hated more than the quivering, sniveling piece of human garbage in his hand, was himself.
Roland hated himself for having done nothing. He hated his weakness and his apathy. He hated the coward he had become.
Marko would die blissfully ignorant of the silent promise an angry old soldier would make in that terrible, gravid instant. It was the worst kind of promise. The kind of promise you make to yourself, deep within the part of you that you don’t tell people about. It was the kind of promise that would be easy to break because nobody would know it existed unless you kept it.
No more.
The grim cyborg had willed it to himself.
No more dead innocents. No more slaves. No more kidnappings. No more petty dictators.
The horrible, merciless grip tightened, and Marko’s eyes bulged.
No more looking the other way. No more ‘that’s just the way it is.’
In the grim darkness of the panic room, an empty black hand curled into a fist so tight it could have turned coal into diamonds.
No more cowardice, soldier.
The last thing Marko saw was Roland’s clenched fist rushing toward his face. The blow was so fast, he did not even have time for his pupils to dilate in terror before the techno-organic bludgeon drove his maxillary bones straight though his brain.
Then Roland’s gore-spattered hand opened, and the most feared man in Big Woo spilled to the floor of his panic room like jelly from a broken jar. There, Mark Anthony Johnstone died with no more dignity than any of his victims. The mutilated dictator leaked brains, blood, and urine onto the concrete while his body twitched in futile spasms.
It was an undignified, inglorious, and pathetic death. He died never comprehending the motivations of his killer, or the unspoken oath his own blood had sealed. It was a fitting end for Mark Anthony Johnstone, and the remorseless black giant nodded to himself in grave satisfaction before leaving the room without a backward glance.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Roger Dawkins was in a great mood. In less than two days, Dr. Johnson had replaced most of his failing organs with synthetic ones, and had rebuilt his joints with the latest Corpus Mundi prosthetics. Roger had not known how much pain he had been in until the doctor fixed him up and it was gone. He felt lighter, younger, stronger. There hadn’t been time to regrow his organs from his own DNA, so the doctors had installed cybernetic versions. This was not ideal as it meant that there would be anti-rejection issues for the present. But the doctors assured him the current hardware would get him by until DNA-compliant versions could be grown.
They had reconnected his spinal cord and rebuilt his spine from Osteoplast™, and then reinforced it with something Roger had never heard of that wasn’t even available on the black market yet. Like his organs, a brand-new spine would be grown for him eventually, but the program needed Dawkins in the field in seventy-two hours and not eight months.
The surgeons had been working in shifts, non-stop for two days straight. Roger faded in and out of consciousness while the teams worked in hushed fervor The beeps and whooshes of unidentifiable medical devices kept time like ominous antiseptic-smelling metronomes while the operations commenced. Roger had neither the education nor the aptitude to discern what the various fluids in the IV bags were. It was all lost on him. But he had been a very hard drug user by necessity for a long time, and he hadn’t had a fix of any of his usual barbiturates or downers in a while. One did not need to be a pharmacist to figure that that something was keeping the DT’s away. He was eternally grateful for whatever it was, and that was all the thought power he could spare for the subject. He felt a very detached warmth in the scant moments he was awake and otherwise existed entirely behind the solid black curtain of chemical coma. The doctors would drag him through the veil to ask him a question or test his cognition from time to time, and then with cursory nods send the man back under.
Roger didn’t mind. He had been in this situation more
than once, and he appreciated the free overhaul.
The last time Doctor Johnson woke him, he was kept awake. Fox was in the room, looking pleased in that oily, weaselly way corporate types effect when they believe that they are about to advance themselves.
Doctor Johnson, adjusted a device plugged into Roger’s various new parts and asked, “Good Evening, Mr. Dawson. How do you feel?”
Roger thought about his answer, actually assessing his situation before replying.
“I should be hurting like hell, but something’s blocking my pain receptors. Other than that, I feel better than I have in years.”
Which was the truth. His mind was clear and sharp, his joints felt good for the first time in a decade, and as reported, he was in absolutely no pain.
“Yes,” Johnson replied, “we had to block that part of your brain to have this conversation. Otherwise you’d be unable to speak.”
Fox smiled even wider, “You look great, Roger. The Doc says that you are flying through all the operations and doing far better than we could have hoped. You are through the worst of it, and it should be smooth sailing from here. We are all very pleased!”
“Yes, that is true,” Johnson’s fingers tapped across his DataPad, “You are no longer in any danger of terminal rejection, and the extent of your augmentations has allowed you to survive the various implants and cybernetic additions we have fitted you with. The next stage is to get you fitted for the armature.”
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