Roland caught the descending arm at the elbow and blurted an inarticulate curse. The Fist stopped an inch from his faceplate and quivered for a second before the Knight yanked it back. Roland rose with it, never releasing his grip on the elbow. He tried for a shoulder lock, but Jericho spun with him, a deft pirouette that kept his arm untwisted and shoulder position neutral. Roland saw the smaller left hand en route to smash his face and let go of the Fist with another grunted expletive.
He waded forward, keeping his body inside the potential arc of any other punches, and pressed Jericho back with two stiff jabs. Neither connected with any power, piling more frustration onto an already impressive hoard. The speed and reflexes of his opponent made no sense. Unaugmented, Jericho was matching him step for step and blow for blow. The other Knights had been fast, but Jericho moved like a man born into an armature. Worse, the Knight’s obvious skill and training turned a problematic opponent into a serious tactical challenge.
He ducked a counter right hand and kicked at an armored blue kneecap. His boot skidded off the greave, and Roland recovered with just enough time to slip another potentially lethal blow from the huge blue fist. He stepped offline to buy himself a half second to think. The Knight laughed at him.
“You seem unaccustomed to a foe with skills, Fixer,” Jericho taunted. “You’ll not find me so easy to bully as the others.”
Roland stepped further out of range. “You do seem to have found your way into the ring once or twice, haven’t you?”
“Twenty-seven years I’ve worn this armor,” Jericho said. “I remain undefeated.”
Roland frowned inside his helmet. If Don was to be believed, twenty-seven years in that suit should have left Jericho brain-damaged. A thought struck Roland in that instant that irritated him more than Jericho did. Cursing himself for an idiot, Roland keyed the elder Ribiero’s comm code and dove back into the fray. With his helmet speakers off, he called into the channel before Ribiero said anything. “Don! Need some help!”
“Roland what are you—”
“No time!” Roland slipped a right hook and fired three punches back at Jericho while talking. “I’m going to scan this guy with as tight a beam as possible—” He took a pause to block an overhand left and kick Jericho away. “I’m going to be right on top of this bastard too. I need you to get a good look at him, okay?”
“Are you fighting someone right now?” Ribiero sounded incredulous.
“Yes!”
Roland swore he could hear Ribiero roll his eyes. “Fine then. I’m ready.”
Roland dove at Jericho in a low tackle. It took the Knight by surprise, sparing Roland from a crushing right-hand counter. His helmet scanners burst to life, washing the blue metal suit with a dozen different types of radiation. Roland hurled Jericho away before the Knight could recover himself and smash back with the gravity hammer hidden in his gauntlet. The Knight landed on his back more than twenty feet away, rolling to his feet with easy grace. Electric static turned his foe’s hollow laughter into something ominous and unearthly.
“You are an excellent fighter! It’s been years since I’ve had this much fun!”
Roland ignored him. “You get that, Don?” he called into the channel. Jericho advanced on him once more.
“Yes, yes,” Ribiero sounded annoyed. “I’m looking at it now. Give me a minute.”
“Sure, Don. I’ll just keep dancing around with a guy packing a fifty-megajoule gravity hammer while I wait, okay?”
“A gravity hammer, really? What kind of idiot uses a gravity hammer anymore?”
“Don!”
“Sorry,” mumbled the older man. “Working.”
Roland resumed his stalemate with Jericho. He knew he was stronger, and he knew he ought to be faster. Jericho’s combat mastery frustrated him, though. In the ring or the cage, a good opponent made for more satisfying matches. In a battle to the death, however, Roland preferred a more one-sided affair. Without the gravity hammer, Jericho would have been enough of a threat to command his full attention. With it, Roland doubted he could force the fight into the kind of scrap he could win. It was only a matter of time before that fist made contact, and time was on Jericho’s side.
Roland noticed two important things early, though, and both gave him hope. First, Jericho’s attacks came with judicious precision. Never wild, the big right hand only came when it looked like it might land. And second, Jericho took great pains to avoid grappling range. The Iron Fist could only hold so much charge, it seemed. If Jericho wasted that charge on the thick reinforced floor of the atrium, or one of the enormous metal columns, it might be some time before it could accumulate enough energy to be a threat to Roland’s armored body again. Jericho’s reluctance to come to grips with Roland told the big fixer that Jericho preferred his odds in a boxing match. This made obvious tactical sense, as the Iron Fist could end the fight in a picosecond. As long as the Fist stayed charged and lethal, a boxing match was all Roland could hope for.
While he waited for Ribiero to get back to him, a plan formed in his mind. He began to give ground. Circling and retreating, he let the Knight push him toward one of the support columns. He tried to sell the retreat as legitimate, letting the Fist get perilously close to striking him more than once. During one such pass, Ribiero’s voice startled him into almost falling.
“Roland, I thought you said these Knights don’t have implants.”
“They don’t,” he growled back through gritted teeth.
“This one does. Clearly. It’s actually quite clever how they hid them but rather obvious once you—”
“Give me something I can use, Don!”
“Right. This Knight has a fairly sophisticated cerebral bridge, and it looks like... say, more than two hundred internal nerve conduction buffers. He can handle a staggering amount of bioelectric energy, Roland. He must be very fast.”
The Fist drove for Roland’s midsection, forcing him to leap backward. “You don’t say!”
“If he’s giving you trouble, start damaging the buffers, Roland. They are not durable.”
“They are when they’re under six hundred pounds of power armor!”
“So hit it harder. That armor is loaded with paired transceivers. They activate the buffers when he wears the armor. That’s how they hid them—”
“Don!” Roland lost more ground. “Short version!”
“Sorry! The armor feeds back far too much energy for an unaugmented pilot to operate safely. Every transceiver you break takes some of these buffers offline. It increases his pain, and, ah... damages his nerves. It will slow him down. I’m lighting them up on your HUD now. They, ah, do seem rather well-protected now that you mention it.”
Red indicators began to flash across Roland’s view of Jericho, again looming large in his HUD as the Knight attacked. Each blinking target lay beneath some bulky piece of blue armor.
Roland heaved a mighty sigh. He had assumed merely pummeling the man to be a poor strategy. Now it seemed like the best one. Roland rarely appreciated irony, and this time was no exception. Of course, as long as that big blue gauntlet posed a threat, there would be no pummeling of anything. “Okay, Don, once I deal with this stupid gravity weapon, I’ll try it your way.”
“It looks like the gravity hammer is only a threat to your systems when above about two-thirds charge, Roland. Not lethal until eighty percent or more. Make him miss. It will not recharge quickly.”
Roland ducked again, nearly tripping against the pillar. “He’s not big on missing, Don, but I’m on it.” He killed the channel and found his balance once more.
Jericho never stopped advancing. Flawless footwork and impenetrable defense kept Roland’s fists from finding a home. Roland did not tire, and so he thought as he fought, keeping one eye always on the giant blue gauntlet. He spun to put the pillar between himself and Jericho, forcing a break in the Knight’s relentless assault.
“Do you hide, now, monster?” Derision colored the taunt. “We are only just now getting to the good part!”
“Just curious, actually. How come you don’t go nuts like the others?”
“God favors his faithful. He has favored me with the will to be his instrument.”
“And who favored you with all those bionics, then?”
Jericho stepped around the pillar. Roland stepped around to keep them separated. “What are you talking about?” Jericho snarled.
“I wondered how you were so fast, so I took peek under the hood.” Roland tapped his helmet with a finger. “I scanned more than two hundred little nerve conduction buffers in your body handling all that crazy neurological feedback from your armor.”
“You cannot best me in battle so now you try to fight me with lies?”
“I don’t have to lie, pal. I’m uploading the scans to your local InfoNet right now. In five seconds, everybody on Gethsemane is going to know that their greatest champion is actually a cyborg.”
Jericho slid to the side and lunged around the pillar with a straight left. It missed Roland. “You cannot deceive me, monster!”
“Why not? It looks to me like a bunch of people already have.”
Jericho lunged, throwing his body around the column once more, nearly scoring a hit with the Iron Fist on Roland’s head. “Temper, temper, Sir Knight,” Roland teased. “I hope you’re ready for a scandal because my upload is already making the rounds. No point getting worked up over it now.” Jericho stopped chasing for a moment. Roland assumed that curiosity had gotten the better of his foe, but the Knight’s posture looked far too tense and ready for Roland to make a move just yet. He pushed harder. “Take a look. I’ll wait.”
“This is not possible,” Jericho said. “This is a deception, a forgery.”
“I literally just took that scan. The data is less than two minutes old, pal. That’s awful fast for such a good fake, don’t you think?” Roland stepped out past the pillar. “Don’t take it too hard. I’ve been a cyborg more than half my life. I mean, you’re definitely going to hell, of course, and all your tournament victories are pretty much bullshit. But other than that, it’s not so bad, really.”
The rhetorical jab proved more effective than any physical blow yet landed. The Knight’s posture shifted, and he bristled with restrained rage. “Liar!” Jericho screamed. He lunged for Roland with a looping overhand right driven by the twin fires of fear and anger.
Roland pivoted on his right foot and let the punch sail past his head. “Gotcha,” he muttered.
The massive blue gauntlet had devolved into an azure blur when it collided with two hundred tons of exotic load-bearing alloys. The sound that followed was too low in pitch to be heard by human ears at first. A solid wall of compressed air exploded outward from the point of impact, warping the light into an expanding sphere that lifted trash and dust from the metal decking and sent the detritus scurrying away like frightened rodents. The column, tall and thick, shuddered and undulated from bottom to top in waves of rippling metal. When the waves struck the ceiling, concrete cracked and rained down in watermelon-sized chunks that exploded against the floor. With a great shriek of tearing metal, the column split along its axis, a wide fissure darting halfway to the vaulted ceiling above. The whole thing leaned, lifting the deck plates where they attached to the base and filling the air with a horrible groan before settling into a mangled caricature of its former glory.
The blast threw both fighters to the floor, and they rose to renew their contest without a word. Roland shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears and watched Jericho do the same while his HUD rebooted. A small smile stretched his lips behind his death’s head mask. “That’s what I’m talking about.” His scanners, coming back online one by one, confirmed his and Ribiero’s suspicions. It would be some time before the Iron Fist posed a threat to Roland Tankowicz again. Time he intended to use to his advantage.
“Ready for round two?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jericho replied, his tone clipped and angry. Something in the terse syllable caught Roland’s attention. A strange sense of detached resignation, flavored with a dash of incandescent rage. It was a tone Roland had heard many times before. Soldiers at the end of their ropes, too tired and angry to care about anything anymore except the fight in front of them used it. Some of the most horrific and callous actions ever conceived on the battlefield had begun with that tone. Jericho was no longer fighting for his God, or his people, or his honor. He fought on because fighting was all he had left. His universe, once ordered and reliable, now swirled with uncertainties and contradictions. Fighting he still understood, and he would cling to it like a terrified child clings to a favorite blanket.
When a man with great skill and bearing weapons like Jericho’s spoke like that, Roland knew what came next. He let it come. Revealing those implants had destroyed the man’s identity. It was necessary. Nevertheless, Roland understood what he had done and accepted Jericho’s hurtling charge as his penance. He met it with a left hook that bounced off Jericho’s guard to no effect. Jericho answered with his own left hook that Roland parried with a forearm. Without the danger of the Iron Fist, Roland could finally stand his ground. He leaned into his counterattack, blasting punches at Jericho’s armor wherever he saw a hole. Conditioned to protect his head, Jericho’s tactics left his most heavily armored places at the transceivers beneath undefended. Roland’s fists slammed into the blue cuirass over and over while Jericho bashed at Roland’s face. Roland felt the impacts of his punches as they dug into Jericho’s flank and grunted in satisfaction when the Knight staggered. His HUD highlighted the location of his targets and their paired buffers. The blinking red icons covered the blue armor, spoiling Roland with targets.
Jericho remained unaware of Roland’s strategy. To Roland’s practiced eye, the Knight looked entirely focused on his own fight. He targeted Roland’s head with powerful blows, even employing the Iron Fist at low charge when an opportunity presented itself. Pain exploded in Roland’s midsection when the big gauntlet dug into his ribs. The gravity wave was a mere shadow of the blast that destroyed the pillar, and Roland’s mass distributed most of it without damage. Some of the shock found its way to the armored carapace surrounding his internal organics, rocking him backward with a gasp of surprise and pain. Roland failed to defend the overhand left that followed and took the blow clean across the helmet. He fell, and Jericho was atop him once more.
The Iron Fist dug into the floor an inch from Roland’s head, blasting a divot into the steel by his left ear. Ignoring the sudden wave of pain and static, Roland drove his hips upward to unseat the Knight. When he felt the weight leave his chest, a quick roll dragged Jericho over his hip. Jericho fell to the deck but turned to his hip and immediately began to rise. Instead of rising himself, Roland grabbed Jericho by the helmet and yanked him back down. He trapped Jericho between his legs and pulled him in tight. The Knight resisted, pulling his shoulders back and lifting his body away from Roland with the whine of overworked actuators. Roland held strong, arms and legs both. He bet his strength and position against the power of Teuton armor and refused to let Jericho pull away or free his right arm. Scanning at close range, Roland’s HUD highlighted six buffers along one blue arm and a transceiver buried beneath the pauldron. He seized the straining limb in a grip of iron. Jericho twisted his body in anticipation of what came next, yet he remained powerless to stop it. Roland threw a leg across Jericho’s face and pulled the trapped arm straight against the inside of his thigh. Juji-gatame attacked the victim’s elbow, though the blue armor of the Teutons proved strong enough to spare Jericho a painful dislocation for a few seconds. Jericho used those precious instants to sink low and force his arm out of a locked position. Roland barked a cry of victory at the predictable reaction and rolled his straight arm bar into an omoplata shoulder lock. Again, Jericho proved to be well-trained. He grabbed his own hip to prevent a ruptured shoulder and rolled in the direction of Roland’s torque.
Exactly as Roland knew he would.
When Jericho completed his escape, it left him lying on one hip. Roland surged upward, yanked the arm straight, and punched the inside of Jericho’s elbow as hard as he could. Something under the surface crunched beneath the black fist, and the arm bent awkwardly for an instant. Roland turned it over and drove a hammer fist against the back of Jericho’s arm right were the pauldron met the rerebrace. He was rewarded with another satisfying crunch and a growl of pain. Heaving with impossible strength, Jericho scuttled away with a feral snarl and vaulted to his feet. Roland did not chase.
Roland’s helmet scanners were neither powerful nor precise by the standards of the day, but at this range spotting the damage to Jericho’s internals required neither power nor precision. Jericho’s left arm bore the scars of Roland’s blows in ugly dents and warped metal, and the six blinking indicators in Roland’s HUD had shifted to dull gray.
“We can stop this, Jericho,” Roland said, though he knew his words were wasted. “You can’t help what you are, what they did to you. But you still have choices.”
“I choose victory,” Jericho hissed. “Or death.”
“I knew you’d say something like that,” Roland replied. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“What men like us want is unimportant. God’s will be done.”
“Get to doing, then,” Roland said through clenched teeth.
The two men met once more in a flurry of blows. Roland still respected the Iron Fist, but no longer shied away from it. Their punches landed like thunderclaps, each man bashing at the other’s defenses like giants from some ancient mythology. Roland aimed for transceivers beneath the surface, making his targets unpredictable to Jericho. Jericho’s damaged left arm could no longer match Roland’s speed, and the big Fixer’s relentless assaults focused on the weakened side. Roland slipped a hook beneath one of Jericho’s jabs, and his fist crumpled a section of cuirass near the left armpit. Jericho brought the Iron Fist around to punish Roland for this, and Roland bobbed beneath it to land an uppercut to the same area on the right side.
Ribiero had been correct in his assessments of Roland’s adversary. The armor was quite tough, and even his strongest blows were only denting it. However, the transceivers beneath the shell were delicate by design. Large quantities of force directed to these specific locations proved effective, and Roland saw the proud blue Knight falter and slow. Jericho’s counterattacks came later and slower as damage accumulated. The Knight’s movements lost their easy fluidity and grew stiffer and more mechanical with each damaged component. This only made Roland’s work easier, and the big cyborg did not hesitate. Roland found new targets everywhere. The neck, the knees, the spine, all took murderous hits to precisely the right places. It did not feel fair. Roland attacked weaknesses the Knight did not even know existed, leaving him powerless to defend himself. Jericho snarled and flailed in angry confusion while Roland pounded at what appeared to be random targets. Jericho slowed with each successful attack, and after three minutes of precision striking Roland knew the battle was his.
Finally, a booted foot crushed the top of Jericho’s cuisse, buckling the leg at the knee and sending the Knight to the floor. Roland’s boot whirled around once more, unable to resist the target of Jericho’s exposed helmet. The kick landed without mercy and nearly decapitated the Knight.
Jericho’s helmet cracked like an egg, pieces flying off in three directions. He spun two full turns in a cartwheel before slamming into the floor with a metallic crunch. Roland ran him down before he could rise again. He shouldered the staggering Knight back to the ground, put a knee on his chest, and raised his hand to crush the exposed skull.
Then he stopped.
Harland Jericho stared up at Roland, his jaw working up and down and emitting small choking sounds. Jericho’s body twitched in his armor, a bloodied eye looking up in fear and horror at the silver skull above.
“Holy shit,” Roland said, comprehension socking him in the throat. “You didn’t know, did you? You never knew how much it hurt.”
Jericho gasped, finally forcing some air through his lungs. “The... pain...”
“Twenty-seven years,” Roland said. He grabbed a twisted hunk of blue breastplate and hauled Jericho into a sitting position. Tears flowed from the Knight’s eyes to mix with the blood from his broken nose. “Twenty-seven years you’ve been lording yourself over your brothers, bragging about how easily you shouldered their burden. You thought you were better than them, didn’t you?”
Jericho could only wheeze and choke. His body shuddered in waves of convulsions. Roland released him, and he fell back to the floor. Jericho gasped his words to the air. “I did not... I did not...”
“You didn’t know,” Roland repeated, softer. “That you are a cyborg. Just a weapon built and lied to and used to advance somebody else’s agenda.” Roland felt his anger cool. “Just like me. Just like Chapman.” A thought occurred to him. “Just like Grimes.” Roland kneeled to look into the pale, blood-streaked face of yet another of his dark reflections. “I didn’t come here to kill you, Sir Harland. And I don’t need fancy armor or rituals to tell me how to do the right thing. So here,” Roland extended his left hand. “You’ve had the iron fist from me, so here is my velvet glove. I have people who can fix what is broken and help you learn to live with what you are. Take it or leave it.”
Jericho’s eyes narrowed, and he lurched upright. His words were slurred, and his eyelids twitched. “Victory... or... death...” he growled.
Roland turned his back to the Knight with a defeated sigh. “Die on your own time, then. I have shit to do.”