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Lucia moved without hesitation. In a quarter second her pistol was out and she was hustling Billy to the deepest corner of The Dwarf’s office. Rodney was not so quick, but in short order he was barking orders to his men and calling for reinforcements.
Roland grabbed the desk with one hand and dragged it to block the door with a screeching hiss.
“Hold the line,” he called back to her, “I’ll handle this. Rodney, tell your goons not to shoot me.”
The Dwarf had pulled the claw off his arm and was replacing it with some kind of weapon. It had a thick barrel and a large power supply. From the elbow down, Rodney’s prosthesis was now some kind of enormous gun. A rotating cylinder loaded with ten six-inch long and pointed spikes spun freely around the part of the limb that would have been his forearm, it gave the whole apparatus away as a rail-driver of some sort.
Roland smiled to himself, So that’s why he kept the ugly thing! It’s modular.
“I’m comin’ out wit’ ye, shite-stain.” The stocky little man looked deadly serious, “It’s a bold fooker what comes to my house with a whole squad to fook wit’ me. I aim to look him in the eye before I kill him.”
“Have it your way,” Roland grunted. “Stay behind me, though. You’ll last longer.”
“Figured that much out all by meself, ye great metal bastard,” Rodney grumbled back.
There was the sound of an explosion and shouting from the main bar. The enemy was at the gates.
“Let’s go, then” Roland sighed and ran down the short hall to where the action was. He careened into the main bar and found The Dwarf’s crew engaging (with far more enthusiasm than skill) a squad of men dressed in the same gray armor and tac harnesses as the raiders from Belham Tower. Roland burned a quarter second to assess their armaments, briefly concerned they might have brought more railguns or other heavy weapons. But these men were armed with mag-rifles, bead rifles, and anti-personnel flechette weapons.
They weren’t expecting me to be here, Roland realized. Then he charged.
The first man Roland encountered dumped a full fifty-round bead magazine into his chest, ruining yet another expensive tailored shirt. The rifleman was obviously augmented because he ducked Roland’s killing blow and reloaded his weapon with superhuman speed and grace. Like many of his opponents, the man mistook Roland’s size to mean he was slow. As fast as he was, the doomed rifleman never got back on target. A follow-up strike delivered by a wrecking-ball fist turned ribs to splinters and he fell screaming to the floor to die.
Roland spun to address another target, beads and flechettes tearing his clothes to shreds. He picked another man, engrossed in the furious hurling of flechettes, to be his next victim.
The Dwarf beat him to the literal and metaphorical punch, however. The mercenary’s torso exploded with a floor-shaking boom, and the falling corpse erupted blood and gore from a softball sized chest wound like a fleshy volcano. The big cyborg whirled to see what had happened and found Rodney McDowell gurgling a sadistic laugh as the cylinder of his arm weapon rotated and charged another spike. Then, still cackling, he aimed the heavy-barreled cannon at another hapless enemy. The walls shook with the report, and a massive gout of orange fire traced a path from Rodney’s weapon across the room to where it blasted another armored killer into two pieces with a gut shot. The Dwarf laughed even louder as the dead man’s legs stayed upright for a few seconds before collapsing into a sodden heap.
Roland shrugged, not being one to judge a man for taking joy in his work, and returned to the fray himself. Rodney’s goons had all found cover of some kind and were working as best they knew how to hold the invaders at the doorway. The enemies were experienced and had succeeded in stacking up and pushing five or six men through before the firefight broke out in earnest. Thus, the battle had devolved into a desperate holding action at the choke point of the entryway. The raiders were working hard to push men through the gap, and the gangsters were pouring unrestrained hell into the door to discourage them.
Roland realized early that the small arms used by The Dwarf’s crew were simply not going to be effective against that body armor. Lucky hits and shots to the face were still very much an issue, but the mercenaries had come prepared for dealing with street muscle, and it showed.
“Pull your men back, Rodney! I’m taking the door!” Roland shouted over the din as he surged forward, “Shoot anything that gets past me!”
The volume of fire splashing over Roland increased exponentially as the mercenaries realized who and what was coming at them. There was enough incoming ordnance that Roland had to push through the rain of projectiles as if walking against the current of a swiftly flowing river. Roland lowered his head and covered his face with a forearm as he charged. As hardened as he was, the old soldier was well-versed in what the chaos of battle could do to even a good plan. A lucky hit to his eye would make for a sad end to his heroics, and so he ran forward blindly. He hit the doorway in four strides, whereupon he set to smashing anything wearing gray. Some of his enemies were augmented or bionic. He could feel the heavy impacts of blows delivered by metal limbs as sharp directed shocks he could detect all the way in his bones. He noticed his own strikes missed as often as hit, which indicated some of these attackers had enhanced speed and reflexes as well. Roland could respect a quality opponent, but still they died with crushed torsos, splattered skulls, and broken necks.
The mercenaries held the door with game professionalism for six seconds. Then, like everything else Roland set his fists and rage against, they broke. The survivors fell back from the entrance with far less military comportment than they had shown in taking it. It was a stumbling, ignominious, scurrying retreat. It was a collapse devoid of precision or tactics. The mass of fighting men spilled into the alleyway like lemmings, fleeing the roaring onyx giant in pursuit. One man had the presence of mind to toss a grenade behind himself as he fled, and Roland had to pause and cover it with his body to spare any bystanders from shrapnel.
The antipersonnel munition stung horribly when it went off, but lacked the kinetic punch necessary to do more than irritate the big man. It bought the fleeing mercs enough time to get to their cars though. Roland poured all his speed into pursuing and was on them as the last car lifted off. Massive legs bent and flexed, hurling half-a-ton of furious cyborg into the air. Roland struck the side of the last car like a wrecking ball and he latched onto the ascending vehicle with fingers akin to docking clamps. The car leaned and tipped as an extra thousand pounds dragged one side back toward the retreating earth. With the sudden change in angle, Roland’s grip slipped, and he nearly fell. In desperation, his arms wrapped around a stabilizer nacelle, which arrested his fall and further twisted the struggling vehicle. Driven by a fit of inspired malevolence, the cyborg further degraded the car’s flight capabilities by sticking his arm into the spinning blades of a nearby steering turbine.
There was a horrible shrieking sound as a thousand delicate engine parts collided at high speed with an obsidian forearm as thick as a tree trunk. The cyborg hissed through gritted teeth as his fist smashed through the metal fan blades, but they were made to be lightweight, and thus were not designed to tolerate the spontaneous introduction of armored appendages. With a snarl, Roland heaved his arm outward and felt, rather than heard, the popping of brackets as he tore much of the stabilizer free of its moorings. When he was certain the car was no longer airworthy, he released his hold on the side of the wounded machine.
It was almost fifty feet to the pavement and the giant landed with a crash that did far more damage to the street than it did to the man. From the crater his body had made, Roland watched like a satisfied hunter as the wobbling aerocar listed and spun in lazy circles above the street. The other two cars had abandoned their damaged companion, and Roland left them to their escape. He had what he needed. After a brief and precipitous attempt to gain altitude, the driver obviously realized the machine was going to go down. The car then twisted lower and lower as the driver attempted to wrestle the crippled thing into as gentle a landing as possible.
Just as it became clear the driver was going to put the car down without crashing, the main gravity engine disappeared into a brilliant ball of expanding fire. A blue-white explosion engulfed the back half of the descending vehicle and erupted outward with a solid wall of pure heat. This was followed by a shock wave that knocked windows out of the nearby buildings and set off alarms over a three-block radius. What remained of the car plummeted the last fifty feet to the asphalt as a screeching rain of burning metal and flaming debris. The wreckage collected right in the center of the busiest street in Dockside, a blazing pyre burning with thick black smoke that stung the eyes and nostrils.
Roland spun at the sound of gruff laughter and saw Rodney the Dwarf looking at the wreckage with a smug grin, his raised rail-driver, still wafting gray smoke in lazy tendrils.
“God damn it, Rodney!” Roland threw up his hands, “I was trying to take some of them alive, you dipshit!”
“And I was trying to fookin’ kill the whole lot of ‘em, boyo.” His eyes went dark, and his accent thinned to shadow of its former self, “They came to my house, Roland. If I don’t send the right message, I’ll have problems with the others. You know this.”
Roland had to agree with the assessment. Respect was king in Dockside, and someone had just seriously disrespected Rodney McDowell. But the disrespect had been immediately answered by the big gun attached to the little man, and in spectacular fashion. All anyone on the street knew was that somebody tried a hit on The Dwarf, so The Dwarf blew them out of the sky right above The Drag for it. The story would be all over Dockside in thirty minutes, and Rodney was going to look stronger than ever as a result. Anything less than that would have had people wondering if The Dwarf was as big a deal as his reputation proclaimed. There would be no questions about that now.
“Let’s go inside,” was Roland’s grumbled answer.
Inside, they found Rodney’s crew already cleaning up the mess. Lucia, watching from the hall, wasn’t sure if she was impressed or horrified at how practiced the whole group seemed to be with the process of cleaning up dead bodies. The men were sharing nervous small talk and already fabricating exaggerated tales of their own prowess in the battle. That Roland and The Dwarf had done the lion’s share of the heavy lifting remained only a tertiary concern to the weaving of those stories. By the time they were done congratulating each other, Lucia suspected the evening’s bar patrons were going to spend hours being regaled with the legendary exploits of The Dwarf’s crew as they bravely defeated twenty, thirty, or even forty heavily armed paramilitary contractors. Respectful lip service would be paid to Roland’s role, since no one would believe he had not handled himself ably. It amused the woman to hear them chatter since it humanized the faceless goons in a way that was odd for how comforting it was.
If Roland picked up on any of this, or if he cared, it did not show. “Any survivors?” he asked, hope springing eternal.
Barney scoffed and pointed to a man whose neck was broken so badly the head looked like it might fall off, “Like this guy?” He then pointed to another lifeless form. This one’s chest had been crushed so horribly that the only thing holding his organs in place was his armor, “Or maybe this guy? No! Wait! I bet this guy can still talk!” He pointed to third man, lying with arms akimbo and wearing a skull that had been collapsed inward so catastrophically his eyes had popped from their sockets.
Roland scowled, “I get it, Barney. I’m not nice. In my defense, they were trying to kill us.”
“Just sayin,’ Roland. If you want survivors, don’t hit so hard.” Barney went back to picking up.
Lucia chose that moment to emerge from her vantage point and enter the main bar with McGinty in tow. She took a look at Roland and rubbed her face with weary resignation before lamenting, “Oh, for crying out loud!”
Roland’s face twisted in confusion for an instant, and then comprehension came, “Sorry about the suit, Lucia.” His nice suit was nothing but shredded rags above the waist. “Pants might be salvageable, though,” he offered. If Lucia’s facial expression was any indicator, this did not help. Then she saw the piles of corpses strewn about, resplendent in the red tincture of gory disarray. Lucia’s stomach lurched at the sight of it and a wave of terror ran through her body.
Nanobots weren’t ready for that! She mused, Kind of wish they were, though!
She didn’t want to surrender her humanity to the tiny machines that made her so formidable, but if they could keep her from tossing her lunch in front of The Dwarf, she might be inclined to let it happen.
“Are we goin’ ta talk about what the fook just happened?” The Dwarf’s pudding-thick accent had returned, it seemed. “Yer seriously bad juju these days, Tank! I’m gonna need ta know why the fook yer bringin’ yer baddies to my shop, boyo.”
“Look around, Rodney,” Roland barked back, “They weren’t here for me.”
“Of course they were here for you, you great gobshite! They been hittin’ at ye for weeks now!”
Lucia swallowed her gorge and forced a chuckle, “Rodney, when they last tried to kill Roland, they brought three railgun teams, land mines, and a heavy armature." She picked up a bead rifle from the floor and tossed it to the Dwarf. “Is this what you would bring to take on Roland?”
The hairy little man examined both the rifle and the Fixer for a long moment. “I can’t argue wi’ yer logic, lady. But why in all the nine hells are these fookers suddenly up an’ after me, then?”
Billy supplied this answer, “Combine’s gone, Rodney. That means the other territories are up for grabs. Dockside ain’t got a boss, but it has gangs. And let’s be honest, here. You are the only real threat to The Brokerage and Wade Manson out here.”
“They’ll be after you too then, McGinty,” The Dwarf said, “Once they’ve taken over the other districts and chewed up Dockside.”
“Exactly why we are all here, Rodney,” said the red head. “The only way to beat these guys is to out play them. The Brokerage is going to use Wade Manson to take over, and then they are going to run this town like one of their shell corporations. It’s all they know how to do. We gotta organize, and we gotta find a way to work together that sticks, or this shit is just going to keep happening.”
“And our great big muscle-y hard case over yonder can’t just keep punching everyone who gets out of line anymore, eh?” The Dwarf snorted, “I guess it’s been a long time comin,’ boyo. But rest assured, whatever we come up with, it better do right by Ol’ Rodney, or ye can all go fook yerselves.”
“It’s gonna do right by everybody, Rodney. That’s why it will work.”