Aphrodites tears, p.24
Aphrodite's Tears, page 24
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Managing Roland’s fury was not a simple thing. When Lucia failed to show up at the rented sleeping pod they had selected for a rally point, the big man’s mood had deteriorated from mild concern to the sort of quiet homicidal seething that almost always resulted in multiple fatalities.
Lucia’s disappearance was noticed almost immediately, yet by the time they had pinged for a location fix on her comm it was dead.
“She cannot be far,” Manny surmised. “They haven’t had that much time.”
With a few seconds’ worth of tapping on his DataPad, Manny was back into the hotel security net and tracing her movements from the security cameras. Roland watched gray-faced as they saw Killam Grimes sneak up on Lucia and hit her in the neck before leading her away.
“Drugged her,” the grim cyborg rumbled.
Manny swiped through a few more camera angles. “I picked them up in the alley outside the service entrance. From there he takes her to a roller. I’m pulling its transponder now.” Municipal traffic networks were not the sort of thing Manny had difficulty penetrating. In mere minutes, he had enough access to follow the vehicle’s route.
“All right. The car’s transponder cuts out for twenty-five seconds at four separate points in the next ten minutes.”
“Four locations then. At one of those he jumped out with the boss.” Mindy had changed into her armored blue jumpsuit, and was busy buckling belts pouches to it. As if she had never existed, the prostitute disappeared and in her place was a professional killer positively dripping with weapons and gear.
“How far can that thing cover in twenty-five seconds?” Manny asked, mostly to himself.
Roland answered. “Doesn’t matter. It would take at least a couple of seconds for him to jump out, pull Lucia out, and then send the car off. If he bailed out with Lucia during one of those blackouts, the thing will have traveled less distance while hidden than the other times.”
“Right!” Manny said. “Let’s see. First blackout it went eight-hundred-and-sixty feet. Second blackout...” a pause while he scanned the data, “...we get six-hundred and forty.”
“That’s a lot lower,” Mindy pointed out.
Roland was less sure. “Check the rest. He could have stopped it just to fuck with us.”
“Number three is seven-hundred and eighty. Fourth was just over nine-hundred.”
“Either two or three, then,” Roland muttered. “Probably number two.”
“Should we split up?” Manny asked.
“Yeah. I’ll take number two. You guys take three. What’s in those areas, Manny?”
“Second blackout covers a good chunk of an entertainment zone. Nightclubs, bars, vape dens, VR parlors and that sort of thing. Third blackout is not far away from that. It runs through a neighboring commercial zone. Tons of retail and food services.”
Roland started barking orders. “Everyone pull the maps up on your comms. Cover the zones and look for hiding places. He’ll want lots of noise, electromagnetic interference, things like that to cover him. He’ll avoid areas with lots of cameras, too. Manny, when you get close, try to slice through any security nets and use what cameras there are to see if he fucks up.”
“What about you?” Manny sounded concerned.
“I’ll do this shit the old-fashioned way.”
Manny shook his head. “Caelestus cops are not a racket, Mr. Tankowicz. You can’t just tear up a nightclub and not expect to deal with them.”
“I’ll be discrete.” His tone failed to convince either Mindy or Manny that such a thing was possible. However they both wisely let the matter drop. If the Caelestus constabulary wanted to duke it out with Roland Tankowicz, that would just have to be their lesson to learn.
“Stay on comms, and I want check-ins every fifteen minutes. We rendezvous back here in three hours unless the trail gets hot.”
“Roger that,” Mindy acknowledged. “Let’s grab a car, Manny.”
Roland took off at a loping jog. Once he had the room he stretched his stride and accelerated. The folks wandering through the evening streets of Venus Caelestus were thus treated to the sight of a towering cyborg in a casual suit hurtling through the traffic patterns at more than fifty miles per hour. He vaulted whole rows of vehicles with great leaps that shook the ground when he landed, and his pace never suffered for the distraction.
He arrived at the entertainment block in less than three minutes, where he checked his comm to see precisely where the roller had gone dark and where it had lit up again. He began by simply walking the six-hundred and eighty feet as directly as he could, searching for likely places to escape a car with a drugged woman in tow.
The first few buildings were obviously bad choices. Ritzy, glitzy gentleman’s clubs festooned with cameras at street level sent a very clear message to anyone who cared to look that no sort of trouble was to be tolerated by the owners of these establishments. Another few hundred feet of pitted metal decking later and Roland was looking at an altogether more appetizing locale.
The first thing that hit him was the noise. A thumping, booming rumble in the pit of his stomach that seemed to cancel out all other sounds as it battered the inside of his skull with tuneless rhythm. Then there were the lights. Signage both holographic and neon washed the sidewalk with an unforgiving photonic noise to rival its oppressive sonic counterpart. Combined, the noise and the lights would confound the passive eavesdropping of any police drone that passed by. A final scan of the building confirmed Roland’s other suspicions. Not a camera or door scanner was to be found for many feet in either direction. If he was a professional killer with a drugged prisoner, this is exactly the sort of place where he would unload her.
Grimes would not be stupid enough to bring Lucia through the front door. This place looked like a legitimately functioning entertainment venue. Somebody would notice something. There would be real live bouncers inside who would not take kindly to such shenanigans. He knew this because decades ago he had been one of those bouncers. Insurance premiums were as immutable as death and taxes, so respectable nightclub owners did not appreciate patrons in the grips of powerful pharmaceuticals. Certainly not if those pharmaceuticals had been purchased somewhere else.
Forcing an outward calm he did not feel, Roland stalked across the flashing façade. Between this building and the next was a narrow space, not even wide enough to be called a proper alley. It was nearly pitch dark because the dull featureless metal walls had no sheen and any light that found its way in the space died an unhappy death against those surfaces.
It was perfect.
The glacial rage inside the big man began to churn in his guts. His anger was almost never a hot thing. It did not burn brightly and manifest itself in agitation or bluster. It simply existed as a frigid determination to hurt and kill bolstered by an unshakable confidence that he possessed the skills and hardware to make that happen.
He feared for Lucia, but he knew he would find her one way or the other. It would be best for everyone if he found her the one way. For if he found her the other, he expected he would kill every Red Hat on Venus before he calmed down enough to be reasoned with. That would be a sub-optimal outcome for all involved. If he kept his thoughts logical, he understood that there was virtually no chance she was dead or seriously harmed. The meticulous extraction methods Grimes used to get her out of the hotel proved this. Great care was taken to remover her without harm, and that meant they wanted her alive and whole for something. Roland could not guess what that might be with any specificity, though in a general sense he knew it was to draw Manny out in a way that precluded Roland from interfering. He acknowledged that this was a good plan.
He stepped into the deep black of the alley, then waited for his eyes to adjust. There were times he envied Mindy her bionic eyes, and this was one of them. His organic eyes were as good as modern gene therapy could make them, and once acclimated to the reduced illumination he saw through the darkness as well as most folks could in bright moonlight.
The club owners were using the space to store their recyclers and a few refrigeration condensers thrummed noisily in the dark. Whole sections of the ground were just lightly vibrating grates that let extra steam and water vapor escape from unseen equipment below the street level. It was a great place to defend, and a perfect setting for booby traps.
The machines that lived in Roland’s body were very similar to the ones in Lucia’s. The United Earth Defense Force had been wise enough to ensure the brain chemistry of a high-tech super-soldier never got too far out of nice, safe, and “healthy” parameters. As such, Roland could not experience acute anxiety in the classic sense. If his amygdala became too active signaling for stress hormones, the little nanobots would scrub them from his system before the thousand-pound armored superhuman could do something untoward with all that impressive offensive might. Since Roland had never really had any issues with anxiety, this feature had never interfered with his personality the way it was affecting Lucia’s.
However, in the narrow corridor between those two nightclubs, Roland Tankowicz experienced a very strange, very disconcerting feeling.
He was afraid.
Thirty years ago he had been here. A lone soldier standing in a dark enclosed space not unlike this one. In a similar suffocating darkness, a hidden bomb had torn a hole in the side of a dome and ripped his body apart. The improvised explosive had hurled his pieces raw and bleeding onto the orange dirt of this burning hellscape. Where the blast had destroyed his exposure suit, his naked skin instantly burned black, and his lungs took a great gulp of superheated air through the cracked faceplate of his helmet. He could not even crawl back to the shelter of the shattered dome just a few dozen feet away, because he had no arms or legs with which to pull himself. He had tried to hold his breath, tried not to breathe the atmosphere that was burning him to death both inside and out. The young man had closed his eyes tightly, because they were boiling to steam inside his skull, and that twenty-three-year-old soldier had bitten down on to a silent scream of agony for the longest sixteen seconds in recorded history. Roland remembered every one of the endless heartbeats it took for his squad to rescue him. Time is a very relative thing when you are roasting alive in your own skin.
Two days later and he wished they had not. Blind, crippled, breathing on a machine and shitting into a bag, Roland Tankowicz had begged for death like a mother mourning a lost child. He had lived entire lifetimes of terror and pain in this brief chunk of time, and he awoke from his resulting coma a broken old man. This is when a portly scientist named Warren Johnson had made him an offer no man in his condition could refuse, and the young pile of failing organs leapt at it. A golem was born that day. The horror that would become known as Breach was birthed on Venus in a dark hole just like this one. That monster had done a lot of killing, and all of it had started here and started with the Red Hats. All the nightmares Roland had been trying to avoid were abruptly before him.
This dark alley frightened him because it was all too close to that catalyzing event. He had put three decades and millions of miles between himself and that day, and somehow, he had convinced himself that was enough. If he had stayed away from this planet, it might have been. Yet he was here all the same, and he was afraid. This remained a distant and unpleasant feeling, but not entirely unfamiliar.
If not for Lucia, he might have forgotten fear altogether. The irony of this was not lost on him. Roland was a man made of armor, an invincible juggernaut. The universe held few things that scared him. The sad terrible coincidence of his current existence lived in the fact that one of those singular things was the love of a small woman from Uptown. Another was a head full of bad memories about a horrible thing that happened on Venus. Now fate had seen fit to seat these fears across from each other as dueling obstacles to goals Roland was unable to abandon. Roland hated fear. He had gone to great lengths to avoid and conquer it. He even thought for a while that he had succeeded.
He had charged heavy gun emplacements on exotic worlds without any problem. He had kicked through fortified bulkheads to battle cyborgs and robots inside spaceships without issue. He had happily hurled himself into a hundred battles against impossible odds with a smile on his lips and a song in his soldier’s heart. This was his way and he loved it. Roland wore fear like cheap jewelry; it was an afterthought at best.
Staring into a black alleyway while his guts churned like green recruit reminded him that this was a childish conceit. The man who could lift sixty tons and run faster than a cheetah, the hero of a dozen wars and a hundred battles, the hardened armored super-soldier of nightmare and legend, was having trouble taking a single step forward.
If he was not trying so hard to understand and process a heap of unpleasant and unfamiliar emotions, Roland might have laughed at the perverse cruelty of an indifferent universe. In the end it was Lucia who saved him, because despite his own heap of insecurities, he feared losing that woman more than he feared anything else. More than any bomb, more than the loss of his own soul, the thought of not saving her filled him with a galvanizing dread sadly indistinguishable from actual courage. He suspected he was not the first person to experience this sensation. He had been in enough battles to suspect that some of the more courageous men running into the fight were doing it not because they were brave, but because some horrible thing inside their own minds was chasing them.
He had brought no sensors. No tracking devices. There was no way to tell what might be waiting for him when he ventured into the darkness. He did not care, and his first stride into the alley was long and bold. There was no sound, no explosion, and no attack from within. Just bleak shadows and the quiet of empty space. He scanned back and forth, eyes squinting to pick out details as he passed deeper inside. He found the door about forty feet down, nearly hidden by the shadowed bulk of a recycler.
He paused, not exactly sure how to proceed. Then, with a small mental shrug of dismissal, he punched the door off its hinges.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Killam’s question took Lucia by surprise.
“What?” she replied, almost forgetting to maintain her illusion of drowsiness. Whatever Grimes had dosed her with had been strong, but her internal machines had begun scrubbing it from her system almost immediately. This did not prevent her from experiencing intense dyskinesia and confusion for a while, but by the time Grimes had strapped her to the cot she was already nearly completely recovered. She spent the time while Grimes was gone working on the ‘Kuffs, and she was nearly out of them when he returned. Only a few thin strands of polycarbonate held them together, and she left these now while Grimes questioned her.
“What did you steal from Hardesty tonight?”
“You don’t know?” She was not sure why this surprised her. It made perfect sense for Hardesty to hide his indiscretions from his clan of brainwashed assassins. It would not serve the man’s interests to have the Balisongs know their biggest booster was, in fact, betraying them. It just felt strange to be questioned this way under these circumstances.
Grimes kept his voice calm and level. “Humor me.”
Lucia let her brain run a few dozen scenarios. The time Grimes spent in meditation had allowed her to reign her anxiety over being drugged and captured back to a tolerable level, so her analysis was not ruined by encroaching panic. In about one second, she made her choice.
“We stole his records. He has been dealing behind the scenes with OmniCorp to break the Union and revitalize Venusian mining with machines and off-world labor. Manuel knew this was going on, and it’s why Hardesty wants him dead. If the Union finds out Hardesty is betraying them...” She let that part trail off. She wanted Grimes to fill in the blanks on his own. His response would tell her how much he knew and understood. It might give her leverage.
She watched her captor intently, dilating her sense of time to catch the nuances of his facial expressions. She looked for tells in the arch of his brow, the curl of a lip, the barest twitch of his jaw. To his credit, Grimes was inscrutable.
“This does not seem plausible.”
“Why not?” Lucia fired back. “Hardesty has been at this for decades. He’s a tired, drunk, self-serving horndog who likes wearing fancy clothes and screwing young girls. He’s just done with it all and cashing out. People do that all the time.”
“You are either lying or missing something. Craddock would never go along with it.”
“Manny said the same thing. We figure Hardesty has something Craddock wants. A carrot to dangle in front of his nose. Something so tempting that Craddock might forget to ask enough of the right questions before giving Hardesty what he wants. We assume we will find it in the records we stole.”
There it was. A tic, the slightest tightening of a single cheek muscle. Lucia seized upon the opportunity. “Think about it, Grimes. Everyone knows that zealots are easy to manipulate. That’s why despots and megalomaniacs like them.” Her sneer was cruel. “You’re a zealot, so I presume you get that. Right now you are trying very hard to not believe me, but you can’t deny that what I am saying makes sense.”
Grimes knew she was wrong. Mushin was ego-less, so the crippling doubts that wanted to erode his resolve were simply the buzzing of flies against a closed screen door. He was aware of them, yet they could not exert any influence over his thinking. His specific knowledge of Lincoln Hardesty had been limited for quite some time, though the preparation for this mission had required some research. Hardesty’s proclivities were hardly private, and his flamboyant bias toward excess was not new information. It stood to reason that Hardesty enjoyed being rich, and that OmniCorp had the ability to make him more so by many degrees. On the other hand, Hardesty had always been a staunch and material booster for the Red Hats. To betray them now was a bizarre shift for a man with decades and millions of credits invested in the cause.
