Fortunately, this part of the task required no special tactical skills so her brain continued to run search and rescue scenarios while her arms and legs cycled in absent rhythm through the repetitive actions of scaling the ladder. Lucia was always in good shape, but a sixty-foot ladder climb at speed proved to be somewhat challenging, and her forearms burned by the time she got to the alcove where waited the fifth-floor access hatch. The nondescript square door sat on the floor of the dark niche expectantly; awaiting her decision.
McGinty’s smugglers had a decent set of schematics for the building, but they were a few years old and may have been out of date. They knew that Corpus Mundi had probably changed the layouts of the secure floors; but there was nothing they could do about that. They just had to hope that this hatch didn’t open into a guard station or worse.
She tried listening at the door to see if she could make out voices or footsteps, but all she heard was the screeching of the building alarm. Nothing left to wait for, she twisted the latch and let the hatch drop open. She looked down into a maintenance closet identical to the one she had used to access the ladder five floors below. She breathed a sigh of relief and dropped silently to the floor of the closet. Another gift from her father, it seemed, was the ability to land as softly as she wanted to.
At the closet door, she stopped to listen again, and once more heard nothing but the wailing of the alarms. She knew from the plans that she was on the far side of the building from her father’s cell, and the pilfered security camera images seemed to indicate that the path would be more or less clear of obstructions. All she had to do was get from here to her father’s cell, get the door open, and get back here undetected.
That sounded far easier than it was likely to be. Roland had lectured her at length about all the things that could go wrong, and how she should handle each one. The moron did not understand that every new wrinkle he presented her with sparked a spiderweb of branching anxieties in her frantic mind. He was just trying to help, and she had appreciated the effort if not the execution.
But at least she had an idea what to do if things went sideways, and she took as much comfort in that as she could before bursting through the door.
If the hallway was empty, her flurry of activity would go unnoticed, anyway. If it wasn’t empty, her speed and violence of action would almost certainly give her the drop on whoever was there.
The hallway was not empty.
Even though she had hurled herself through the opening as fast as she could, it felt painfully slow to her accelerated perceptions. There was a moment of panic as she immediately registered the man in full body armor who had just turned down the hallway to face her. Lucia hesitated as she tried to remember what she should do in this case, but shook herself free of the indecision when she remembered Roland’s advice: Any decision is better than no decision.
So, she sprinted. Roland had warned her about her brain driving her body beyond its physical limitations. It was a common problem with neurological augmentations, and Roland had told her more than one story about snapped leg bones and torn joints to make the point.
But Lucia had been doing some of her own experimenting, and she suspected she could move as fast as she wanted to if she was careful. So, she pushed off the carpeted hallway floor as hard as he could, bunching and tearing sections of it as her feet drove her forward and the decorative floor covering capitulated in the face of the immeasurable forces. With each stride, she willed her legs to cycle as fast as they could. It felt like she was flying and the guard suddenly loomed large in her view. She watched in detached satisfaction as his face evolved from blank, to confused, to angry, to terrified as she closed the distance.
To her everlasting chagrin, Lucia hadn’t thought about slowing down and realized too late that she wasn’t able to control her braking well enough to avoid a collision. She cocked her right fist and drove it ahead of her as she came upon the hapless man. If she had not been wearing armored gauntlets, she would have shattered the bones of her hand.
As it was, she killed the guard outright. She did not know which was the more fatal aspect of her attack: the staggering amount of kinetic energy her hurtling body must have had or the prodigious electric discharge from the glove. But she knew right away and with complete certainty that he was dead. She didn’t know if you could actually see the life leave a person’s body, but that was exactly how it felt. She got to watch it in slow motion as she sped by the man at thirty-five miles an hour. His eyes spread open as wide as possible before rolling back in their sockets as his head snapped back so far the back of his skull seemed to touch his spine. Every muscle in his body strained and flexed for an excruciating moment before all tone and tension evaporated and the soulless husk crumpled to the floor in a limp pile of flesh and bone.
Lucia could not stop her forward motion for several more long strides. Though it took only the space of two or three heartbeats, she was already sobbing by the time she came to a halt. She wanted to look back, to say something, to explain it all away.
But she didn’t. She didn’t turn back because there was no turning back now. It didn’t make her feel better to know that the man had been a criminal who helped keep her father prisoner, it made her feel worse. She felt the guilt of taking a life, but she also felt the guilt of her own judgement of Roland.
It was easy to think of him as weapon sometimes, and a person at other times; as if he could simply switch between the two roles as needed. In retrospect, this had been a stupid thing to believe. Roland was always a person, and always a weapon.
In one brief second, it became clear that she had been deluding herself into thinking that convenient labels somehow made what Roland did different or easier than what she had just done. Soldiers killed, but Roland was still a person like any other underneath it all. Sure, Roland was a soldier, but a soldier is a just a person who kills for a cause. It took the death of that guard for her to finally comprehend that the distinctions were purely academic.
Is this what it’s like to be him? She wondered, guilt and pain blossoming in her mind.
Does Roland feel every kill like this?
She couldn’t bear the thought of that. She sobbed again, a great big gasping cry of shame and pain and fear. The man was dead because she had killed him. She was a killer now. A line had been crossed. But then an ember ignited in the core of her pain, and she was smart enough to feed that fire.
So what if I am a killer? I have a cause, don’t I? Maybe I’m not a soldier like Roland, but I’m no murderer.
She caught her breath and started combat breathing. Four in, four out. Four in, four out.
Don’t you dare turn around.
She was angry now. But she could understand that. War was an angry place and in war people did angry things. Watching Roland had taught her it was OK to be angry in battle. So she welcomed the rage and surrendered to it.
Her focus returned, her thoughts became ordered again, and she let her fury wrestle all her fear and pain down and force it all into the back of her tortured psyche. She spared a single thought for the dead man behind her, you don’t have to apologize to him. He made his choice and so did you.
Then came resolve. Merciful, righteous resolve:
Get up, soldier. You’ve got a job to do!
She got up.
The corridor was plain, unadorned white passageway with silver metal doors and endless brown carpeting along it. The security footage indicated that her father was the only person kept on this level, so she could presume that most of the doors were to empty rooms. Her eyes closed as she tried to remember what the corridor around her father’s door looked like, and she seemed to recall that it was on a corner. She decided to look at all the rooms on corners near a security camera first, and circle back around if that didn’t work.
Lucia set off at a dead run, relying on her accelerated perceptions to pick out the details she needed to make a call on whether or not a door warranted inspection. The process felt slow and inefficient t
o Lucia, but an objective observer would be flabbergasted at exactly how fast she was actually moving. The fifth floor was a labyrinth of twists and turns, and there were many doors near many corners to check. She pounded on each and called loudly for her father, uncaring as to whether or not there were guards in the area.
After the fourth door, she stumbled upon another guard and she brought him down with ease. He would live, but he would limp for the rest of his life unless he could afford a new knee.
At door eight, she met her first drone. Roland had briefed her on this possibility, and despite a moment of panicked hesitation, she dispatched it with several well-placed flechettes from her CZ-105.
She made a mental note to thank Roland with appropriate enthusiasm for telling her the best places to shoot a drone because it didn’t look like the type of thing one wanted to take on with just a handgun. She had managed to dump the whole magazine in the process of landing those few food shots, but that is exactly why she carried all those extra mags in the first place.
“Nobody ever left a firefight complaining about having too much ammo,” Roland had said, and she had believed him.
She slapped a fresh magazine into the grip and charged the weapon with a fresh cell. Then Lucia resumed her search.
Two more disabled guards and another dead drone later, and Lucia found her father’s cell.
Door sixteen responded to her frantic pounding with the muffled and incredulous voice of her father.
“Hello? Who is that?” The voice was weak and thin, a far cry from the strong baritone of the Dr. Donald Ribiero, she had grown up with.
“Dad!” She cried, “It’s me, Lucia! I’m getting you out!”
Then she swore loudly as realization struck.
She needed a key to get the door open.
“Hang on, Dad! I have to find the key!”
“Lucia?”
“I’ll be right back!” She tore off at a gallop, trying to memorize the twists and turns of the corridors until she found one of the unconscious guards. Twenty seconds of panicked rifling later, she emerged with a keycard that she hoped would open the door. Then she ripped off like a greyhound back to her father’s cell.
She jammed the card into the slot with far more vigor than was strictly prudent, but she was so amped up her nascent control over her augmentations was slipping. The card slid home without snapping, and the panel blinked green. Relief washed over Lucia like a tsunami and she felt her adrenaline ebb as she keyed the latch.
On the other side of the door was a weak, tired, old man. Donald Ribiero’s eyes were sunken and hollow, his face drooped, and his shoulders slouched. He was a mere shade of his normal vibrant self, despite a mere four days in captivity.
“Oh, Dad!” Lucia cried and hugged him tightly, “What did they do to you?”
“Lucia!” he cried, tears forming, “I can’t believe… why, er… what are you doing here?” His face went frantic, “It’s not safe at all, you have to go! If they get you I… I…”
“Dad!” Lucia’s barked with stern authority, holding her father by the shoulders, “They won’t get me. We have a plan!”
“We?” tired, bloodshot eyes gazed in confusion at the black-clad and armored apparition of his daughter.
“I brought Roland!” Her face twitched in a flash of bestial glee.
“Oh,” the old man breathed, “I see.”
He gave his daughter another quick hug, “We should hurry then. We don’t want to be anywhere near him when he’s working.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Roger Dawkins came online with a rush of sensations at an intensity that still made him acutely uncomfortable. The armature made everything feel vibrant, but in a detached distant sort of way. It was like getting a finger smashed with a hammer while high on morphine: You were intensely aware of what was going on, but you were not getting the full experience.
But it was also the only time Roger felt one hundred percent awake. The bridging AI and the artificial nerves of the Better Man Armature were more than capable of feeding his brain information as fast as he could process it, and the armature itself could handle as much as Roger could give it. For the first time in years, Roger felt at home in his own skin. The sad irony being that ‘his own skin’ in this case meant a giant plastic and metal superstructure.
The Doc wasn’t lying when he said that it would be his body while he was in it. Roger actually preferred being in the armature more than out of it at this point.
With his nervous system directly connected to the suit via the surgically implanted plugs, Roger’s body was paralyzed. His entire nervous system had been hijacked by the Better Man AI and duplicated in the artificial nerves of the nine-foot mannequin. With his physical body cocooned in the torso of the armature, limp limbs were folded to take up as little space as possible while his too-human head nestled inside the hollow dome of the armature’s expressionless skull.
Roger didn’t care, because his other body was much better than the three-hundred pounds of flesh locked inside it, anyway.
The startup sequence took four minutes, which felt like hours to Roger. But, soon enough, it was complete and the Better Man rose from its docking chair. Cables and hoses fell away, and the blank-faced beast strode out through the bay doors and into the main area of the penthouse.
At the speed of thought, Roger keyed up the security cameras and alarm stations all over the building, and with superhuman alacrity he cycled through all the feeds.
Johnson had told him to secure the prisoner on level five, but Dawkins was not interested in babysitting an old man while his nemesis was trashing the building. He found his quarry on level two, waging a pitched battle against the security team outside the stairwell. A quick check of the alarm panel told him the main lifts were down, but the freight lift and the security lift were operational if you had the correct code.
Roger strode over to the freight lift and keyed the door open. He could stand up straight in this one and fit though the door without too much trouble. This made it the obvious choice.
He checked his internal systems and power levels. Everything was nominal as he knew it would be. He spared a whimsical moment to lament the lack of weapons systems, but the suit had only been operational for three weeks, and no weapons systems had even been designed for it yet. He would have to do this with his ‘bare’ hands, as it were. Roger was OK with that. It felt poetic. They had started this fight bare-handed, and that was how they would finish it. Roger was not the dramatic sort, and he never sneered at an unfair advantage if one was available, but there was certain visceral pleasure in the thought of beating that Dockside trash to death with just his fists.
With a lurch and a chime, the lift stopped at level two. The doors whooshed open and Roger strode out into the warehouse section. In five long strides, he crossed the crowded storage space and made his way towards the sounds of battle.
He keyed into the security cameras again and overlayed their data with his own infrared and EM scans. The big bastard was well on his way to mopping the floor with the security team and had pushed them back to just outside the warehouse.
He considered for a moment pushing his way through the wall to take his enemy by surprise, but the decision was taken away from him when the wall between the shipping offices and the warehouse buckled inward and collapsed, leaving a gaping aperture large enough to drive a truck through.
Chunks of ceiling and other debris rained down on the armored figure that had been the instrument of the destruction, burying the unfortunate security guard and his sophisticated battle suit in dust and rubble. Roger was impressed. That was close to eight-hundred pounds of powered combat armor, and something had hurled it hard enough to bring down a wall. Well, someone had, and Roger was unsurprised to see a Vogt Mobile Turret bounce off the rising security guard with enough force to send both skittering into the warehouse proper and tumble past Dawkins and his towering armature.
Both man and machine crashed into a shelf of boxes
and assorted parts, then came to a still, quiet halt under the resulting pile of detritus.
Roger nodded in satisfaction. As a professional, he respected the work of a peer. It cost him nothing to acknowledge that was a hell of a throw.
Roger hung back to observe his foe, taking a rare and measured tactical approach that was not his usual style. Getting off the drugs and having his neurological augmentations modulated by the AI allowed him a clarity and calm that was new and refreshing for the leg-breaker. His telemetry fed data to the AI in real time as he watched the big black cyborg in the next room finish off the security force with workmanlike efficiency.
The men in powered armor were doing better than the drones, at least. Skilled fighters and ex-military guys were all the more lethal when strapped into a suit of power-armor. Each suit was equipped with forearm-mounted HV Bead cannons, and a 40mm grenade launcher was secured over the right shoulder. The problem, Roger identified it immediately, was that 40mm HE grenades were too dangerous to use indoors, and bead didn’t seem to even scratch the finish on the muscle-bound ’borg.
With perfunctory detachment Roger noticed that the grenade launchers were loaded with non-lethal stingball and CS gas rounds, which did exactly nothing to the enemy. That left hand to hand combat for the armored guards, and they simply were not up to the task. Readings from his sensors were conclusive on this. The power armor was rated for what appeared to be about half what the opposition cyborg was putting out, and Roger could not even be sure if the big bastard was even exerting himself yet.
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