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The wall across from Roland burst forward and broke into a thousand chunks of masonry and cheap panelling. The blast was concussive in nature, carrying no incendiary component beyond the heat of rapidly expanding gasses. It pitched people and debris around the room like so much laundry in a washing machine.
At the center of the storm, Roland stood with feet planted firmly and jaw set with concentration as first the shockwave and then the hail of shrapnel washed over him. He observed everything in slow-motion as a swarm of tiny nano-bots dilated his sense of time to five times what normal people could perceive, and another horde of the diminutive machines prepared to drive his body at velocities to match it.
As the wave hit, his expensive suit was sandblasted off his chest, revealing the coal-black armored skin that covered synthetic muscles modelled after human anatomy. Bits of plaster cut jagged grooves into the paler dermal mesh of the towering fixer’s face as he stared through narrowed eyes at the new aperture at the other end of the room. Roland made no obvious movements in response to the explosion, but rather leaned into the wall of force and held his ground. Roland could afford to be patient. He knew what came next.
The blast had not been meant to kill. Though spectacular in its violence and shock factor, it was too small and there was no additional shrapnel media in it to maim limbs and rend flesh. Roland knew with an expert’s certainty that the blast was designed to open the wall so someone could breach the room. Roland knew more about breaching walls than just about anyone alive, and he needed only the first fifteenth of a second to ascertain what was happening. He shifted his weight ever so slightly and ground his toes into the floor to give them solid purchase. Roland waited like a coiled snake for the enemy to reveal itself and was prepared for what happened next before the first target was through the hole.
In that instant, the space opened by the bomb filled with darkly amorphous humanoid forms moving at speeds Roland could barely rival. Four of them streaked into the room faster than the eye could follow, and they were amongst the occupants before the last of them had hit the floor.
But not before Roland got to them.
Another dark shadow entered the maelstrom when a thousand pounds of cyborg war machine intercepted the first of the attackers with a left hook that sent its recipient pinwheeling back through the gaping hole and deep into the darkened space beyond it. Roland felt the signature crunch of artificial android substructure under his fist and was simultaneously relieved and irritated.
Androids meant that there would be no surrender or retreat from the enemy, and no interrogations afterwards. This was annoying but not unexpected as this is exactly why nefarious actors liked to use droids like this in the first place. But using non-human agents also meant that Roland did not have to pull his punches, either. Controlling his output was not inherently difficult, but he really enjoyed cutting loose every now and then. It was good for business, too. The entire Board was about to see why Roland was not to be trifled with, and it was a lesson long overdue.
A second assassin-droid, oblivious to its companion’s fate, was plucked from headlong flight toward the dazed form of Pops Winter. Roland spun his deadly captive away from the elderly criminal and drove it through the table top with a right arm like a pile-driver. The table, already much abused by the breaching charge, collapsed with a pained crash and a shower of splinters. Roland did not wait to assess the damage, but employed his left hand to twist the metal skull away from its body and pitch it at a third android. Nonplussed, his target dodged the improvised missile easily and turned to face the new threat.
In an instant, as if by unspoken assent, both remaining machines paused and turned to assess Roland. Whatever calculations their AI subsequently ran must have returned similar answers because the androids’ original targets were forgotten as the new hazard in the room achieved supremacy in their pre-programmed priority matrices. The two surviving androids altered their paths to confront the massive cyborg while the dazed and coughing board members were still picking themselves up from the floor.
Roland and his opponents were a study in opposites. One was a gigantic hyper-muscled hulk, with arms as thick as trees and a back you could park a mid-sized aero-car on. He stood stock-still, feet planted wide and his weight sunk low from the hips in a natural, stable fighting stance.
The others, while nominally humanoid, were lanky and sinuous. Blank, featureless faceplates twitched back and forth as suites of scanners analyzed and assessed the targets in the room. Their long slender limbs, painted a deep matte midnight blue, possessed far too many joints and writhed like snakes in serpentine patterns intended to hide the origin of incoming strikes.
The machines sidled and slithered when they moved and skittered about their quarry on whatever appendages suited the needs of their locomotion. To his chagrin, Roland realized that he could not discern the make or model of these machines, which was very disconcerting. Dealing with unsavory elements was his profession, and he was usually very good at recognizing this sort of tech. It did not bode well that he could not place these versions of assassin androids, or even their type.
Each limb terminated in a slender three-fingered hand; Roland realized in abrupt irritation that each clutched a long, thin blade of some kind. Knives and their ilk were not particularly terrifying to him; his armor had proven more than capable of stopping anything so pedestrian as sharp bits of metal. But the men scuttling around that room trying desperately to get away from the fight were not so hardened. If Roland’s guarantee of safe passage was to have any merit, he needed to keep those blades away from his charges.
The assassin ‘bots attacked with insect-like furor. Typical of AI-driven weapons, they struck with a single-minded purpose and ignored any pretence toward defense or self-preservation. The blades whirled and darted like sewing-machine needles in dozens of attacks coordinated between the pair, and Roland cavorted and lurched to avoid getting stabbed in the face. The resulting dance appeared to onlookers like a horrific, hyperkinetic ballet performed by twisted caricatures of people.
Roland was not interested in getting caught above the neck with one of those blades. The skin of his face, nominally Caucasian, was nowhere near as heavily armored as the black mesh that covered the rest of his body. There was some concern that at the androids would possess enough strength to drive one of those knives through his neck or eye socket, which could be catastrophic.
Otherwise, Roland was confident there was little chance of suffering serious harm from the blades. Which is why it was so surprising when he felt one penetrate deep into the techno-organic ‘meat’ of his left shoulder. The big cyborg grunted in surprise and pain at the unfamiliar sensation and was momentarily taken aback by the novelty of his new paradigm. This would not have been apparent to anyone watching him, though, because Roland perceived damage to his chassis in a very dull and muted manner. It was a design feature that minimized panic and involuntary fear reactions in a soldier destined to receive punishment on the scale of interplanetary warfare. If anything, his face demonstrated only confusion and irritation at what would have been a grievous wound for anyone else.
None of which, of course, meant that getting stabbed in the shoulder by an android didn’t still hurt like a sonofabitch. It just did so in a manner that was less acute and piercing to his nervous system than that of a normal, un-augmented person.
A runaway amygdala in a thousand-pound war machine was a very dangerous prospect, and his builders had taken great care to prevent that from happening. Roland, at this point, would have liked to give the reins to his fight-or-flight response a little bit, because getting stabbed really pissed him off. He was far too seasoned a fighter to permit this, but the thought of doing so was comforting. As it was, he applied his highly evolved tactical mind and his heavily augmented reflexes to the problem instead.
The problem with stabbing someone, from the stabber’s perspective, is that unless you kill or incapacitate the stab-ee, you have just transferred meaningful possession and control of your weapon to the other guy until such time as you can dislodge it. Roland’s shoulder was the size of a basketball, and made of synthetic muscle analogues consisting of reinforced strands of techno-organic polymers.
The dagger, which was obviously very sharp and made of a very serious alloy itself, had sunk four inches deep. This was effective in severing a few of these strands, but Roland had many others at his disposal and it left the blade hopelessly lodged in the rest of them.
Roland grabbed the offending arm in his left fist and pinned the limb in place so he could strike a blow with his right that punched through the robot’s chest and exploded in a shower of sparks and debris from its back. Before he could dislodge either his fist or the knife sticking out of his deltoid, he felt another blade slide under his ribs. This hurt more, as it had gone much deeper than its twin, and the tip felt like it had stopped no more than three inches from the eighty-seven pounds of original organic material that lived in the center of the giant cyborg.
Roland’s chassis was very durable. It had multiple redundant systems and had been built from materials specifically developed for their indestructibility. But the warm, wet, and squishy mass of pure human that lived inside of that towering technological achievement was no more invulnerable to stabbing than any other. The higher level of damage, and the terrifying proximity of that blade to his less-resilient pieces, drove Roland’s anxiety well above what he was accustomed to.
It never really amounted to fear; Roland was well past the point where the fear of death affected him. But he did detect an old, nearly forgotten pang of apprehension with how precarious this battle had become. It drove him to heightened levels of speed and power as the consequences of failure became a potential reality, and his clever little nano-bots disengaged the safeties governing his output.
The offending blade, having not been ensnared by a large mass of muscle, withdrew in a spray of the viscous grey nanite rich fluid that served as “blood” within the chassis. Its wielder immediately began a second attack that Roland could only twist away from while he frantically shook the carcass of the other ‘bot off his right arm.
The cutting edge slid along his abdomen, throwing orange sparks and parting the armored skin. More grey fluid flowed from the shallow wound and black skin peeled back exposing the silver strands of artificial muscle fiber underneath. It was a shallow cut, but the ease with which the dagger slashed through his dermal mesh was alarming. When he factored the lethality of the weapon with the truly asinine speed with which the android could cycle its stabbing arm, Roland acknowledged he was in a potentially lethal situation. This did not happen to him often, and he did not like it.
A third strike was already rushing his way and an enraged Roland Tankowicz met it with his characteristically concise tactics. He stopped the tip of the dagger with the palm of his right hand and let it punch through to the hilt, dragging a growl of pain from the big man but stopping the weapon long before it could touch anything vital.
Roland simply closed his hand at that point and a grip like a hydraulic press clamped over the comically tiny fist of the attacking ‘bot. The blade snapped off at the hilt as Roland squeezed his fist as hard as he could and the delicate assassin’s hand collapsed as if it had been caught in the heart of a neutron star. With a triumphant snarl and a vicious tug Roland tore the offending limb from its bearer in a spray of blue-white sparks and dancing electrical arcs.
Roland’s left hand, only marginally below optimal output due to the blade still lodged in the shoulder, gripped the android by the throat and held it aloft. This is where the last assassin met its doom, kicking impotently against the immovable obsidian mass of Roland Tankowicz while the big cyborg beat it into scrap with its own severed arm.
When he was quite convinced that the machine was well and truly destroyed, he took a moment to survey the room. He was relieved to see that no one appeared to have been killed by the assault, but more than one of the Board members would be limping for a few weeks. This was acceptable to the fixer, and he proceeded to further evaluate the room.
His eyes passed over wheezing gangsters, sparking androids and the scattered wreckage of the table. He was about to begin evacuating the Board when something caught his eye. If he had not been a combat engineer before getting his cybernetic upgrades he may not have noticed it, but his trained gaze was snared by a lumpy black mass the size and shape of beer can. It would have been easy to miss as it resembled many of the other pieces of random android detritus mixed in with the remains of the table. It was an unremarkable thing, but wired to the side of it was a small, commercially available system controller popular for its cheap price and decent capacity to run complex logic. It was a popular device, Roland realized almost too late, for detonating explosives under various programmed scenarios.
Like, for instance, if your targeted assassin droids can’t get to the one guy you wanted dead, then the chip could be programmed to detonate a bomb upon their failure.
Action followed realization by less than a tenth of a second.
“Everybody stay down!” he boomed as he lunged for the device.
With all the speed he could muster, Roland scooped the bomb up and ran. He did not bother with the door, or the hall, or any furniture that might be in his path. He just lowered his head and charged in a straight line, smashing through interior walls like they were so much paper and hurling dingy office furniture before him like the bow wave of a tanker ship. It was a singular charge, with a singular purpose. All the big man’s thoughts were fixed on the unpretentious goal of reaching the closest exterior wall before the device detonated. He made it in four seconds, but the bomb went off in three-point-seven-five.
It was a good bomb, well-made and potent. As a professional, Roland might have been moved to compliment the builder. But since he was holding it when it detonated, none of his thoughts were that charitable. The explosion ripped a hole in the side of the old Dockside office building large enough to pilot a small shuttle through and rained orange fire and smouldering debris to the darkened street five stories below. Roland’s body directed most of the energy outward, so no one inside the building suffered much more than collapsed eardrums and abject terror. Roland Tankowicz, however, was thrown upward and backward with a force and velocity he had never before experienced. Considering his past, that was a terrifying thing to endure.
He held on to consciousness as best he could, and for an instant he thought he might not black out. But then his body struck the first of several walls and ceilings and he knew with absolute certainty that hitting the roof was probably going to leave him in very bad shape.
He was not wrong. Consciousness fled without warning when he finally contacted the steel superstructure hard enough to dent the I-beams. Under the merciful black shroud of insentience, the giant cyborg lay in a heap of smoking rubble happily unaware of the army of criminals, cops, and other unknown players that had begun to swarm on his prostrate form.