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Lucia Ribiero was panicking again, and she hated herself for it. Watching some terrifying giant smash and kill a bunch of robots in a bar was more than she was ready to deal with, which was an entirely understandable limitation to her worldview, she felt. That her father had been kidnapped and whoever did it had sent a bunch of cyborgs and robots to get her added a new dimension to her terror. That was a level of distress she was categorically unprepared to deal with. She worked in advertising for crying out loud, this was not how her days usually went.
Lucia tried to give herself credit where it was due. She was as tough as anyone, and smarter than most, but this was all too much. The day really hadn’t started out that bad to be honest, so the rate and scale of its deterioration into the current state of affairs was quite significant and disheartening.
It had all started with a quick stop at the corner coffee bar for a latte, which was nice. Lots of normal days started with lattes and lattes were a perfectly nice way to start a day. After that, she went into the office where she was the VP of Customer Engagement for a large beverage distributer. It was a meaningless title for a meaningless job at a meaningless company, but the pay was fantastic and the people were nice. With the unemployment rate over 14%, it was just nice to have a job at all right now; so she didn’t complain. Work had been fine, and all she had to do before getting home and soaking in a nice warm bath with a good cabernet, was to stop in to see her father for a bit. That’s just a lovely damned day in general, and Lucia had no reason to doubt that this is exactly how it would go.
Lucia had been visiting her father a lot, due to a sudden increase in migraines and anxiety attacks lately. Her feeling of overall jumpiness had gotten rather pervasive, and she wondered if it wasn’t time to see her psychiatrist about a prescription. Donald Ribiero was an excellent neurologist and biotechnologist and had been supervising her treatment himself for the present. The headaches were much better under his care, but she could not shake the feeling that the whole world was moving slower than she remembered. She should probably lay off the lattes, but Lucia loved coffee more than sanity, so that was not likely to happen.
When she dropped in to see her father earlier, she had been unprepared to find the place in complete disarray and her father gone. His beautiful top-floor apartment was always in perfect order; so, finding it a mess was a very clear indicator that something was terribly wrong. A meticulous man, Donald Ribiero was not the type to tolerate that kind of untidiness under any circumstances, and certainly not if he was going out. Don was the type of old coot who would occasionally bring a lady back for a nightcap, and he liked his place to be tidy for just such a case.
A girl would have to be into some weird stuff to want to hang out in the apartment as she had found it. Every stitch of her father’s clothing was pulled out of his closets and drawers and strewn about the place. His antique hardwood desk had been torn apart, and the carpet peeled back from the wall in places. The kitchen cabinets were open and the contents pulled onto the floor where they sat in messy piles of cookware and utensils. His mattress was off the bedframe and left askew as if whoever had tossed the place simply dropped it when it became obvious that it was not hiding anything. Every piece of furniture was shifted or thrown over. Lucia did not need a tin star on her chest to work out that the place had been professionally ransacked. That was the first time today she had panicked.
Ninety seconds after getting to her father’s apartment, her comm had buzzed to tell her she had a message. She was not ready for what it had said.
“Breach,” was the one word message. Automated and electronic, she knew the coded signal was part of a triggered alarm response from her father. It was a word with a lot of meanings, but in this case, it referred to a very specific bug-out plan that she had rehearsed with the old man since she was fourteen. She never really thought she’d have to execute on it, but now she was doing exactly that, apparently.
It felt surreal. Her father’s obsession with security had always seemed an idiosyncrasy driven by guilt over the loss of her mother. Lucia had never really taken it seriously, but the fight training and gun stuff had been a lot a fun. She simply enjoyed the private lessons and treated it as little more than her father’s personal guilt causing him to act in a hyper-protective manner. Now she wasn’t so sure.
She remembered that the ‘Breach’ protocol meant immediately going to a place in Dockside to find one of Dad’s old army buddies. She couldn’t use any electronic devices or payment methods. Hard creds only, and no personal vehicles, either. ‘Breach’ was one of the worst-case-scenario plans. It meant something terrible was going on.
Lucia felt her pulse racing when she left the apartment to go find “The Smoking Wreck.” When she stepped out onto the moist black streets of New Boston, it was to the tune of a thousand tiny alarms ringing in her head. Every possible bad thing she could think of competed for primacy in her rapidly boggling brain. She gritted her teeth and made a conscious effort to focus on the job in front of her with sufficient vehemence to shove the buzzing to the back of her mind. The frantic woman couldn’t make it go away, but she didn’t have time to deal with it right now.
New Boston was the home of the largest collection of spaceports and docking platforms in the northern hemisphere and boasted a population of thirty-one million souls. A few short centuries ago it had been a dirty mill town filled with red brick manufacturing facilities and the choking black soot of a Dickensian dystopia. She could still be a loud, dirty, cantankerous old lady of a city if you went to the right places, but for now, New Boston was a shining, towering metropolis. The whole planet envied her city as a global center for trade and culture.
Right now, to her mounting unease, all that shining grandeur was lost on Lucia. The city now seemed a tepid jungle full of millions of potential evils waiting to entrap her. She put it out of her mind as best she could. It wasn’t much help to think about it.
Lucia understood her city and her place in it all. She knew that Dockside wasn’t where she was supposed to be, but it was where she had to go. So, it was with very real trepidation and no small discomfort that she hailed a cab and hopped in to take the long ride over the container tram lines into the seediest and most dangerous area in the whole sprawling megalopolis. The cabbie knew it too, but was too polite to say anything.
Lucia had her second bout of panic when the cab driver stopped the car four blocks away from “The Smoking Wreck” and told her that he could go no further. Only cabs that were paid up with the local crime syndicates were allowed to operate in the Dockside district, and her guy was behind on his dues. She would have to walk the last mile, and hope that the local criminal element was not interested in well-dressed urbanite ladies walking down dark alleys at night in the bad part of town.
It turns out that this was a silly thing to hope for. When she felt the two men settle in behind her as she walked, she knew deep down in her lizard brain that they intended to rob her... or worse. It just wasn’t fair! She was scared, worried about her father, confused, and she could feel a migraine coming on. Now two assholes were going to jump her for the seventy-one creds left in her purse. She quickened her pace to try to put some distance between herself and the two men behind her, but that only hastened the outcome.
Those two men behind her, affectionately known among the folks in Dockside as “Mooch” and “Poco” were professional-level losers. They had never met a get-rich-quick scheme they didn’t like, and they were prone to bouts of intense physical violence whenever the mood (or the drugs) came upon them. They were street-level opportunists with a moral compass that never pointed north. The sight of an uptown girl with expensive boots and a purse that just had to be stuffed with creds was just too appealing to the two young men. Especially since the word was already trickling down about a certain short-haired rich bitch that might be worth some serious creds to the right people. They had no clue at all if this was the right girl, but either way, they were going to have some fun tonight.
They fell in behind her to see if she would turn onto a less-used side street or even an alleyway so they could make their move in private. When she sped up, they knew they were caught. All thoughts of strategy went out the window at that point, which did not change the results by as much as one might think. The duo were not high-level strategic thinkers on their best days; and today wasn’t even close to their best. They simply ran and clutched at the fleeing woman.
Lucia, now fully panicking, experienced the strangest sensation when Mooch and Poco started to grab her: Everything slowed down. A lot, really, when she thought about it. The closer their hands got, the slower they seemed to move. The headlong charge looked more like an underwater ballet as the two men hurtled toward her, arms outstretched and fingers reaching. All the terrified woman saw was the languid loping of a pair of drunkards.
Her own reaction was slower than she expected as well, but it was light-years ahead of the two thugs. Her right hand, clutched tight in a balled fist, came under the first one’s arm and arced cleanly up to the chin and made solid contact. Poco’s jaw clicked shut hard enough to break teeth. His head snapped up and back in an abrupt u-turn and a stream of blood and tooth fragments began a torpid parabola from his broken mouth.
Mooch registered none of this as his own clumsy fingers closed on the empty air where his erstwhile quarry had just been. He saw Poco’s misfortune in passing, but he could not alter his own trajectory in time to do anything about it.
As soon as he had control of his momentum, Mooch spun to take another swipe at the small-yet-slippery girl. He got his bearings on her just in time to catch a savage kick to the groin. It was the first time in two years a woman had touched him there, and sadly, the previous contact had also been a soccer-kick to his tender bits. His knees buckled immediately as fireworks of pain danced on his retinas.
Lucia was already turning back to Poco, who was still holding his leaking face. His eyes grew wide for a moment as they caught the image of a small, well-dressed woman streaking towards him. He never even saw the ferocious whipping trajectory of her tiny, bony elbow as it traced a horizontal path to, into, and through his left cheekbone. Poco checked out of reality at that moment and took a nap on the street, blood and dignity oozing pathetically from his ruined face.
Mooch decided at that moment to try to extricate himself from the rapidly deteriorating situation. His crushed testicles limited his mobility, and the bottled lightning he and his unconscious partner had tried to abduct got to him before he ever found his feet. She punched him four times in one second, with alternating hooks fired with machine-gun-quick patter. Each impact whipped his head in the opposite direction, turning his cranium into a spastic oscillating speed bag. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. Which was a blessing, really.
So, it was less than twenty minutes after winning her first fistfight ever, that Lucia found herself hiding under the table at a bar, watching a man she knew only from her father’s stories fight a battle against superhuman enemies to protect her. She felt, as the incessant pressure of a mounting panic attack began to fray the edges of her sanity, that it would be entirely justifiable if she lost her mind completely and fainted from all the pressure.
And that’s precisely what she did.