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Most people found space travel to be disconcerting at best and nauseating at worst. Ironically, the act of gating was entirely passive and imperceptible to travellers, but getting to the gate took some doing.
To get from Earth to the closest Anson Gate took an average of forty-eight hours, and a good portion of that time was spent under some degree of acceleration. Going from gently floating in high-Earth orbit to nearly ten million miles per hour was a daunting and unpleasant task, but if one wanted to get out to Jupiter and catch the Enterprise Gate to Galapagos or Thorgrimm it was a non-negotiable element of the trip.
Roland at least, had been designed for deep space action, and he had no such reservations. Another two days of rested uptime was both a welcome break and an opportunity for his core systems to continue the arduous process of rebuilding the damaged sections of his skeleton and the carapace around his internal organics. He hoped to be at ninety percent by the time he got to Enterprise Station, and as long as he didn’t have to fight any robots or mutant cyborgs on the trip, he would achieve that with no trouble.
The ferry departed at 0800, and the gentle pressure of low-G acceleration was quickly replaced with 3.5G compression as they sped out of Earth’s gravity well. Most passengers were then sealed into their G-Pods where a calibrated stream of anti-gravitons would counteract the punishing forces of the main jump drive ignition sequence.
At that point, the ship would lurch to 15G for eleven hours or so, and anyone not in a pod would collapse like a soup can at the bottom of the ocean. Roland had toyed with the idea of not going into the pod, mostly because they were small and he was not. Fifteen G’s was about the limit of what his chassis was able to handle for any length of time, and if he was at full fighting fettle, he probably would have ridden the acceleration out. But he still required the internal repairs and his weakened skeleton and carapace did not need that kind of stress, so he resolved himself to spending a few hours in the cramped interior of his pod. It was times like this where his resistance to alcohol really bothered him. A quart or three of Czech Pilsner would have really made the trip fly by if only he could get a decent buzz on. Thanks to Lucia, he could afford as much fine brew as he wanted, now.
The acceleration itself was uneventful, the balance of the ride, not so much. After achieving cruising speed, there was nothing to do but wander the ferry and avoid talking to other bored passengers. Evading talking to people was a skill set Roland had long ago mastered, and he applied all his acquired experience to the task of appearing supremely unapproachable. Thus, it was with some surprise and no small quantity of irritation that the big cyborg found himself grunting abbreviated responses to the relentless small talk of a determined conversationalist in the ferry’s bar and lounge. If Roland had any sort of social awareness or interpersonal skills, he might have observed that his tormentor seemed to have been oddly focused on him from the start. As it was, the fact that the woman in question did not seem to be bothered by his conspicuous reticence was more annoying than anything else.
“I’ve never been to a Gate before,” the attractive brunette burbled, “Are they big? I wonder what it’s like to go through one? Have you gated before?”
Roland had to think about that. He had lost count, but he probably had close to a hundred gates under his belt. “Nope,” he lied, hoping to deflate her chatter. It did not work.
“I bet it feels weird. Where are you headed?”
“Enterprise Station.” It was a detached grumble of a response, pitched to sound just annoyed enough to make a point but not quite touching upon rude.
It was too subtle a rebuff, it seemed. The woman’s response had lost none of its effervescent enthusiasm, “Well, duh! We’re all going there, silly! I meant after that. Where are you gating to?”
Roland’s irritation overrode his usual adherence to operational security and he replied with the truth, “Nowhere. My business is on the station.” He instantly regretted it. There was no reason to tell this person anything, and for that matter, no reason for her to be talking to him at all. Even wearing a business suit, Roland was too massive and strange-looking for someone to think he was just another tired passenger. Everything about him screamed, “hired muscle.” Mostly because he deliberately projected that image. Roland believed in truth in advertising.
All of this begged the question: In what galaxy does a woman on her first gate jump pick him to talk to on the ferry ride?
I don’t like this at all.
The thought came unbidden, and it was more than just his proclivities towards misanthropy that made it manifest.
The woman seemed harmless enough. She looked to be in her early thirties and was pretty enough with long brown hair worn in a tight bun. She was dressed for comfortable travelling, but her outfit was sleekly utilitarian and while stylish, not necessarily fashionable. It did not jibe with her bubbling and vacuous stream-of-consciousness patter.
Why is she so keen to talk to me? Is she coming on to me?
He dismissed the thought as ridiculous as soon as it materialized. In thirty years, precisely one woman in all of explored space had shown any interest in him. Two, if you counted the bartender at Hideaway who was really only ever fishing for tips when she batted her eyelashes at him. That girl would bat her eyelashes at a potted plant if she thought it had two Creds to rub together, so she hardly counted. Women just did not look at Roland in that manner. Frankly speaking, women did not look at Roland at all, and they certainly did not chat him up on random ferry rides.
He had only been half-listening to the woman’s prattling while he pondered this mystery, and re-tuned in to the conversation when he absently recognized another question.
“It’s such a big place! I hope I don’t get lost trying to find my ship. Who are you going to see?” Roland, now listening with a critical ear, began to pick up on the pattern of conversation. She was feigning naivety to put him off guard, revealing enough information about herself to appear conversational, and then casually pinging him for intel. Counterintelligence had not been Roland’s forte in the Army. His callsign of ‘Breach’ was a descriptive designation, after all. But he had been trained and briefed on OpSec numerous times, and while not a subject-matter expert, he was not helpless, either.
“Just some old Army friends,” he lied casually, “Who are you with?” Roland didn’t see the point of trying to verbally spar with a professional espionage asset. He was tactically astute enough to avoid competing outside his skill set, and so he figured he might as well create an interaction more suited to his style.
“Oh, I’m travelling by myself. Off to Thorgrimm for vacation. Visiting some friends, sightseeing, stuff like that,” she smiled sweetly, “You were in the Army?”
Roland smiled, which was a horrifying thing to behold, “You know, I was never good at this cloak and dagger shit.” He shrugged, “I was a CQB and demo guy. But we had this crazy spook ninja lady on the team, and she could pick intel out of any situation, and leave without anyone knowing she was there.”
The woman crinkled her nose adorably, “Huh? What are you talking about?”
Roland scanned the room more closely, something he should have done from the start. When he saw what he was looking for he pointed it out, “She would have spotted your back-up or handler or whatever that guy is to you.” He pointed to a burly man in sloppy, ill-fitting athletic wear drinking a cocktail and ineffectively pretending to not be listening to their conversation. The man briefly made eye contact at Roland’s gesture and immediately returned to his drink. Roland guessed his role as ‘bodyguard’ by the size of him and his obvious discomfort with the current situation.
The woman, to her credit, maintained her subterfuge, “Well, I don’t know what has you so touchy...”
“Stop,” Roland rumbled, silencing the woman, “I don’t really care who you work for or why you are trying to pump me for intel. But because I don’t know who you are, I am certainly not going to tell you anything interesting. Do you even know who I am?”
Her facade of vapidity gone, the woman stared daggers at Roland. He knew the look. It was the look of a woman who wanted to kill him, but didn’t think this was her chance. “I know who you are,” she purred through clenched teeth. Her voice sent the memory of a shiver down the old soldier’s spine and he felt the carefully managed ferocity under the surface of her frosty composure. It did not feel like anger to him. Rather it gave the impression of a fierce and intensely focused purpose with irritation sprinkled liberally atop it. Anger was something Roland understood, but whatever drove this woman made him very nervous.
But then again, heights made him nervous too, and that wouldn’t stop him from doing the job. He got to the point with brutal clarity, “Good. So, let’s go over the rules, shall we?”
He spoke in polite tones, “You and your boyfriend are going to return to your pods and stay there. If I see you again this trip, I will kill you. If I see you on Enterprise station, I will kill you. If I find out you are interfering with my work in any way, I will kill you.”
He pushed on, “You can spend the time in there telling your boss or client or superior officer or whoever it is you report to that I am to be avoided at all costs. I’m just not that clever or creative, you see. I don’t do intel, counter-intel, or espionage or any of that shit. I just kill people, ma’am. If anybody decides to interfere with the job I’m getting paid to do, that is really the only way I’ll know how to deal with it.”
He nodded at her amicably. “We good?”
“Peachy.”
Roland got the distinct impression that they were not, in fact, ‘peachy.’ If her facial expression and body language were to be believed, there was no combination of fruit that was going to accurately convey the nature of the relationship between them. As he watched her move away with stiff, angry paces, a prophetic thought crossed his mind.
That woman is going to try to kill me at some point. He gave a mental shrug and returned to the bar for another beer.
I really wish I could get drunk.
Back in her G-Pod, the annoyed woman relaxed in her couch. Her bodyguard keyed in a moment later and plopped down in his, looking dour and irritated.
“That was close,” she said aloud to no one in particular, but since he was the only other person in the Pod, her bodyguard assumed she was talking to him.
“Fuck that asshole,” he opined.
“Eloquent as ever, Roy,” she sighed. The man was a very good bodyguard, but he seemed possessed of a bizarre notion that she cared what he had to say or even wanted him to speak.
“Well, I gotta call it like I see it, ma’am,” Roy was at least self-aware enough to sound embarrassed.
She untied her hair and let it fall to her shoulders, then ordered an orange juice from the pod’s terminal. To be stuck in the G-Pod for the last part of the trip didn’t really bother her, and she wondered if trying to scrape some intel from Tankowicz hadn’t been as good an idea as she thought. She wasn’t spying on him, of course. It was only stupid random chance that had brought them both to this specific ferry. But once she had recognized his unmistakable features among the other passengers, she just could not resist trying to see how his investigations were coming. It was also the first chance she had to meet the man in person, and she wanted to get a feel for him. He was not at all like she thought he would be.
His reputation made him out to be this fearless and nigh-unstoppable thug. Thus, she had expected something ruder, or angrier, or at the least more stupid than the man she had just spoken with. Something more like Roy, when she considered it. She decided to see what he thought.
“And how do you see Tankowicz, Roy?” She asked bluntly.
“He’s just another big-ass mutant from Dockside, ma’am. I don’t see why everyone is so afraid of him. I know he downed Marko and all, but Marko was way past his prime,” the man sneered, “Fucker is muscle, same as me or Mack and Mindy.”
You are not the same as Mack or Mindy or Roland, she almost said aloud, but chose not to. Instead, she pressed her inquiry, “What do people in your profession say about him?”
“He stays in his territory and never works with a crew. Outside of Dockside, most of us only know him by reputation”—a shrug—“He’s a psycho. It’s like hell follows him wherever he goes, y’know? Once he passes through an area, it’s all just craters and dead bodies behind him. But he keeps Dockside off-limits to the big outfits, which makes some of the guys scared of him. Folks in the Woo love him, obviously, and the Dockside crews are very protective of him. Probably because he keeps competition away.”
This assessment coincided with her other sources. If one listened to the street-level chatter, there would be two distinct versions of Roland. Either Roland Tankowicz was a giant monster from parts unknown who ate babies and murdered people for the fun of it; or he was a Robin-Hood do-gooder who was tragically misunderstood. As was so often the case with these things, it appeared that the truth lived somewhere in the middle.
But some things just didn’t add up, and now she was starting to understand why. The Corpus Mundi job showed signs of careful planning and skill in real-time combat tactics. Some more in-depth probing had shown that all of Roland’s actions followed that pattern of simple, uncomplicated problem-solving masking a deep understanding of his own capabilities and those of his enemies.
“So, you think you can take him?” Roy's unshakeable self-assuredness made the answer a foregone conclusion, but she wanted to hear his reasoning.
Roy grinned, “Yeah, probably. He’s fuck-all big and all that, but nobody’s that bullet-proof, y’know what I mean?” Roy pantomimed firing a rifle and winked. As if somehow, he had just illuminated a deep and complex strategy for overcoming his opponent that no one else had discovered. The woman stifled a sigh of disappointment in her bodyguard.
At least this confirmed her suspicions about Roland’s tactics. It’s an act, she felt certain of this, He plays the part of a brainless troglodyte, but he is smarter than he appears. He wants you to underestimate him and if he can’t outmanoeuvre you, he’ll just turn it into the kind of fight he can win.
Both Roy’s impressions and her own recently acquired intelligence confirmed this. If Roy decided to take a shot at Tankowicz, Roland would simply exploit his superior understanding of his and Roy’s capabilities to end the fight with brutal efficiency. He had done it to others. When dealing with her, Roland had realized he was outclassed in the espionage department, and simply picked a fight with her. The woman had to accept that it was a good plan. Maybe he wasn’t going to outwit her, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to try to outfight him. It was simple, uncomplicated, and based on an accurate assessment of both of their capabilities.
This pattern may ultimately be exploitable, she considered, but today is not the day for it. Verbally sparring with dangerous cyborgs of indeterminate provenance was a stimulating and engaging distraction, but there was no reason to neglect her current project over it.
The cold brunette decided to take his threat at face value, either way. Nothing in either her files or the interaction she had just had with him indicated that killing her would bother the man. But since her business here had nothing to do with him (at least not directly, anyway), it cost her nothing to leave him alone as requested.
She briefly toyed with the idea of sending Roy after Roland just to see how it would go. Roy, for all his bluster, was a formidable fighter and a heavily augmented ex-cop. It would be a very good opportunity to assess Roland’s capabilities first-hand. But her honest assessment was that Roland would just kill Roy quickly and come after her. She was not prepared for that sort of confrontation and so she would avoid it. For now, at least.
At some point, I am going to have to bribe or hack my way into Roland’s military dossier and find out exactly what he is, she ruminated as she leaned back into her acceleration couch, I’m probably going to need to kill him someday, after all.