A few of the men looked at each other, as though they couldn’t understand what he was saying. Had they been out here for so long, Gavin wondered, that they’d forgotten how to speak a civilized language?
They spoke among themselves for a moment before one voice rose over them all. A grizzled and stooped old man parted the crowd of warriors. As he walked, they reverently stepped out of his way, bowing their head in respect.
He wore a scant loin cloth, definitely on the down-cycle of its lifespan. Threadbare and just barely clinging to life. Holding the last vestige of use it might have. Just like the old man, Gavin thought. It was difficult to tell if he was Gavin’s age, hundreds of years having passed in his life, or if he was much younger and just weathered harshly by the elements. Symbols were drawn on the old man’s torso. The only thing even close to being recognizable was a bird in flight.
The rest struck Gavin as a mish-mash of meaningless nonsense. Appropriate, considering the surroundings, he thought.
The old man looked up at Gavin and began to speak. High in his suit of invincible steel, he laughed. He hadn’t understood a single word. His left eye began twitching. Something that had been happening with annoying frequency over the past few days. Ever since the surgery to install the implant.
Install.
An appropriate word, he thought. Like opening a piece of machinery and putting in some aftermarket toys to improve performance. And what was the neural interface implant if not an aftermarket addition to his own brain.
Pain radiated from the device as he thought about it. A mental note to his exoskeleton and he felt the now-familiar sting of a needle injecting a cocktail of painkilling drugs into his left shoulder. The issue was likely just his body getting used to the foreign object.
The neural interface implant had not been what he was expecting. Gavin had first seen it in its entirety when Varg, or perhaps it was Virgil, had extracted it from the head of the deceased sheriff. No further across than a woman’s pinky finger and so flat that it appeared to be two dimensional. After the bits and pieces of brain and gore had been removed, it had possessed a shine like polished silver.
A mirror with a faint rainbow effect as light bounced off of its surface and was broken down into component wavelengths. Ripples moved along the unit’s surface as he watched. A demonstration of the process by which the implant sought out the proper neural circuits. The same thing that was still happening inside of his head. Perhaps that was the source of the headaches. The pain that alternated between dull throbbing and the sensation of a red-hot knife being stabbed into the back of his head over and over again.
The twitching in his eye became more intense, spreading to his cheek as well. A lingering memory danced through his thoughts. The way a dead woman’s eyes and cheeks had twitched as he had choked the life from her.
One of the few times in his life he’d killed a woman in self-defense. A would-be assassin, cutting her way through bodyguards to get to him. Something about a business deal that would condemn her family to a life in the wastes, working the mines to feed themselves.
Not only had she died, but he’d personally sought out her family and made damned sure that they ended up exactly where she had feared. He’d called in favors or simply paid to have them put there when he couldn’t count on the kindness of strangers. They ended up working the worst mines he could find. Each boasting horrendous safety records that would have gotten them shut down by any sane governing body. And all of it done in a manner that was perfectly legal.
That had been a very different time. His efforts at making something out of the shit-sandwich that the universe had dealt him when he was stranded on Lexington had taken a much different path back then. All legal and proper. Like a gentleman. A very rich and angry gentleman.
But those times hadn’t lasted. Enemies were made and in the due course of events they’d turned on him. They were all dead now, a direct result of their choices. But he’d nearly been ruined and killed more than a few times. His eyes had been opened to way things were going to have to be from there on out on the world of Lexington.
The men and women who nominally ruled had been exposed. Their power was on a slow, inexorable downward slope. They could not be relied upon. A new approach would be needed if he would ever thrive in this place, or even better, leave the sweltering shithole behind him permanently.
Now…well, now there was no one to stop him from doing things in his preferred manner. Direct and brutal. The law enforcement branches across Lexington that were still loyal to Cent-Com were, without exception, corrupt to the core. They could be bought. And most were more than happy to supplement their meager incomes by turning a blind eye to certain activities. Or engaging in said activities themselves.
The twitching spread to his other eye as well. The sensation was extremely annoying, but in the end not detrimental to Gavin’s readiness. The combat exoskeleton fed the information it gathered directly into his brain. His vision remained unaffected by the spasms.
As Gavin focused on the twitching in his eyes, his lip began to curl. A metallic taste danced across his tongue. Like what he’d expected a woman to taste like after being told so often so long ago that it, that they, tasted like copper coins. Of course, that hadn’t been even remotely true. There had been no taste. If there had been, then there would likely be another body somewhere in his past. Somewhere below him, intruding on his thoughts, the voice of the old man still buzzed annoyingly.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Gavin said aloud, holding his hands up as to say he didn’t know what was being said. The old man continued speaking, slow and steady with something approaching a smile on his weathered face. The warriors surrounding the old man seemed to be relaxing. Slowly lowering their weapons and letting their glares fade to indifference.
The wind stirred their long hair and Gavin was glad that he was inside of the exoskeleton. The smell of these filthy fucking savages would otherwise likely have been enough to turn his stomach. In fact, just looking at them was making him feel a little sick. The darkened skin, whether by sun, by filth, or by genetics, disgusted him. Ire began to rise within him.
The combat exoskeleton’s communication systems reached out to the twins. One of the best investments he’d ever made, Gavin thought. A minor pay-off to a communications officer in the grumbling Central-Command structure had led to notifications of things found in old Coalition Colonies Government facilities. The same way he’d found out about the secrecy surrounding something found in the great, vast desert.
Only that time, they had explicitly stated what had been found. Two men frozen in stasis. Soldiers by the look of it. Gavin had rapidly assembled a force of mercenaries and taken the site, hoping to find useful military equipment. Instead he’d found two military grade synthetics, robots that looked like men, still attached to a programmers control module.
That had been an incredible find. Two unstoppable, near invulnerable killing machines that would have unquestionable loyalty to Gavin and him alone. They couldn’t be bought off. They couldn’t be tempted with women or men. Girls or boys. And woe be to anyone who tried to use force against them.
Gavin had to disable some of their weaponry when they were activated. It wouldn’t do to have his new toys, or worse yet himself, obliterated by the lunacy of the Overlord system. What the fools that had placed the system in orbit had had in mind, he couldn’t say for sure.
Gavin guessed it was originally intended to enforce the disarmament of the population. An experiment in oppression. Or to be intended for use in precision strikes against active criminals. A tool for law enforcement. Regardless of its intended purpose, said purpose had been corrupted. Now, the system destroyed anything it identified on Lexington with an energy signature it didn’t like.
And there was no way to turn it off or even attempt to change its settings. The ability to interface with the system had been lost when the Coalition Colonies Government had left Lexington behind. Random chance, or grand design? Gavin didn’t k
now and didn’t care. Regardless of the origin, it was now unchangeable.
But Overlord did have some interesting interpretations of what it saw as something that must be destroyed, and something that it would allow. The use of personal firearms if not their very existence had been all but eliminated on Lexington. Hard rounds and beam weapons, even non-lethal variations were targeted.
Rocket engines had turned out to be enough to set off Overlord. Without which, the reliable tech left on Lexington wasn’t enough to go off planet. The people there were trapped on that sun-blasted rock save for a beam teleporter, which hadn’t been seen on Lexington in some two hundred years.
No jet engines. No firearms. No missiles and rockets. No energy weapons.
Anti-grav equipped aircraft eluded destruction, so long as their weapons systems weren’t used. That left one thing as the most powerful weapon systems on the face of Lexington. Projected forcefield blades.
They could cut through just about anything and had become the most sought after items on the planet. At least for the men concerned with cutting other men down. Rare things indeed, only found in the hands of the most powerful warlords of the wastes and the richest of the rich in the cities. Or housed in the forearms of military grade synthetics.
Varg and Virgil, the names already assigned to the machine-men when Gavin found them, possessed such weapons. Their control over the forcefields was precise. Surgical, in fact. They had performed myriad surgeries on Gavin and those who could afford to pay him over the years. The most recent being the implantation of the neural interface. Source of so much potential, and currently, so much pain.
All of this was restricted knowledge. Gavin knew the truth of the past, but only because he had bought the information or taken it when he could. The vast majority of the rest of the population of Lexington only knew that to operate a firearm was instant death. Beyond that, they were mostly dirt poor as well, so traveling off world wasn’t a possibility.
“Give me a translation of what this fucking ape is saying,” Gavin communicated to the twins. There was a brief moment of silence and then a stream of words in his ears, delivered in machine monotone.
“Great warrior,” the old man began. “I welcome you, in peace and in peace alone, to our village.” The old man moved his lips for a moment, as if summoning spit to his tongue.
“Share our water, and take shelter from the sun beneath the rocks that shade us. Give rest to your chariot,” he motioned to the enormous truck. “And to your slaves.” He motioned to Ryan and Zhou.
Gavin laughed at that. An apt description. The two men didn’t know what had been said. Only that they had been pointed at and laughter ensued. They bristled, lowering hands to weapons, but did nothing save for trying to look threatening. A few of the tribal warriors, more thoroughly and intricately painted over than the others over their torsos, returned hard looks and gripped their spears a little tighter.
“Translate for me,” Gavin began as he sent to the twins. “Turn words from a proper, civilized language into whatever their equivalent is in whatever filthy, degenerate monkey-talk these shit-stained, savage, apes spew at each other.” The last part he spoke out loud, gesturing about him with huge metal-clad fists. “How fucking long have they been out here that their language has degenerated to unintelligible garbage?”
A long time apparently, he answered his own question in his thoughts.
“Tell them,” he continued. “That I will accept their offer.”
One of the twins spoke out loud, a rarity that Gavin didn’t think he would ever get used to. The old man smiled and the angry warriors at his side seemed to relax, if only a little.
“On one condition.” Gavin’s voice grew hard-edged. He smiled, eyes still twitching. “That they find me a fucking cigarette.”
The twins translated the last statement to a chorus of confusion. They looked over the crowd of gathered warriors before reporting their findings back to Gavin. The tribesmen didn’t know what a cigarette was.
“That’s disappointing,” Gavin began. “But it’s your choice,” he finished, addressing the old man.
With a speed that few among the village could see and that none could match, Gavin’s blade struck. Cutting through the old man and two more before the others could react.
Within a single minute, the gathered men all lay dead and dying. A conclusion reached the moment Gavin had first laid eyes upon their pathetic dwelling.
Ryan and Zhou dragged a savage woman from her mud hut, pulling her by the hair. Kicking and screaming, she writhed as others tried to flee. Running into the desert. Gavin ignored them and let them run. Women, children, and weak old men.
It might be good entertainment to cut them down, but the desert would take care of them. A much greater suffering awaited them than anything Gavin could do to them with a blade. If death didn’t find them from dehydration and exposure, then some rival tribe might find them. Kill them, and eat them. That’s what these cunts did out here in the wastes, he mused. Eat each other.
The only reason they hadn’t immediately turned on him, he assumed, was that he had presented a face of strength to them. They had seen no weakness to exploit. Now, they were going to die themselves. Let them go, he thought and laughed.
The two men Gavin had allowed to live beat the woman, kicking and slapping at her as they ripped the filthy rags of her clothing from her body. He turned towards them and considered killing them both. Their actions bothered him, only in so far as he had not ordered them to rape the woman.
Yet there they were, having their way with the filthy savage. Their laughter and taunts mingling with her ridiculous cries. The blade was still in his hand. Gavin looked down at the gore-slicked executioner’s sword. The weight of it felt good. It would feel even better sinking into flesh.
No, he thought. These still might still have some use left in them. There was no telling what might lay ahead. And he would be a fool to throw away two obedient dogs that might take a blade or arrow meant for himself. They would continue to live.
“When you are finished,” Gavin said as he raised his faceplate. “Take as much food and water as you can. Load it into the truck and then we will go.”
The pair returned to their wok as Gavin wiped blood from the executioner’s sword. The front of his exoskeleton was likely covered. He would take care of it later. Or maybe just leave it.
It might come in handy in the future to present a more fearsome face to his foes. That way, they could stop wasting time talking and get down to business a little more quickly.
And if they ran from a blood-coated demon of steel and flesh? Then he might enjoy running them down and killing them with his hands.
REIJI cut the head from the spear and then broke the shaft in half with a solid blow. A quick swipe of the blade followed, and once more, he stood victorious.
Yet another tea ceremony followed. These old fucks and their tea, he thought as he carried out the movements. The grandfathers seemed to be in good spirits, taking their tea in silence. It was odd to be around them for so long and not have them berating him continuously from all sides.
Finally, as the last man finished his tea, one of the grandfathers stood and spoke.
“Grandson Reiji, there is much that troubles us as of late. Your skill in the arts of war are unmatched, and your determination to find this man and kill him heaps great honor upon your name. All that you’ve overcome tells us that nothing short of total annihilation will be able to stop you.”
A murmured chorus of agreement sounded and the old man looked at the others seated near him. “But after you find this thief and put him to the blade,” The old man mimicked striking a foe down with a longsword. “What then will you do?”
Reiji hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. He had always assumed that once Gavin was dead, he would find his place in the wastes. But the desert, as large as it was, didn’t cover the whole face of Lexington. There was a wide open world that lay ahead of him. And almost all of it tha
t even remotely resembled civilization was under Cent-Com authority.
“Will you then return to the lowly life you led before? A scavenger feeding on the misery and misfortune of others?” The grandfather almost sounded sad to Reiji as he spoke. Did the old man actually give a shit about him?
But the grandfather did have a point. If Reiji were to return to Cent-Com controlled territory, it would mean living in the shadows and doing more of the same bullshit until he could afford some type of biometric altering treatment. Surgical or otherwise. Without that, it would only be a matter of time until he was located. And then he knew well what would happen next.
“No,” he answered. “I will not spend the rest of my life in hiding. Nor will I spend the rest of it in the backwaters of some Stone Age village in the wastes, or the jungles, or the forests.” There was steel in his voice, reflecting a level of determination that he rarely had felt before.
“What will you do then?” The grandfather asked, the shadow of a smile creeping upon his aged features. As though he knew the answer before Reiji did.
There was no premeditation in Reiji’s reactions. Spontaneous and from the depths of his mind. He rose from his knees, drawing his blade and driving it down into the tatami mats point first where it stood upright, reflecting a dazzling array of torchlight form the near mirror finish of its spine.
“I will make war on Central Command. I will raise an army and I will utterly destroy them. I will rule over all of Lexington. And any who do not bow to me will die.” His voice echoed over the training hall, bringing a palpable tension to the air.
The grandfathers rose as one, each man smiling, and began cheering. Shouting his name over and over. His name and the name of the clan. A long line of warriors swathed in glory and drenched with the honor of the blood of their enemies. A great house on the verge of rebirth.
The Way of Death Page 31
