44 – Merc Time

  Tony held his shotgun ready, following in Beef’s prodigious shadow. If he were calling the shots, he’d be scouting ahead, but Beef seemed to trust the intel his boys had given him, and he wasn’t slowing down to talk tactics; no doubt the chemstick he’d been sucking on was partially responsible. They were creeping through the wide, dark corridors of the decrepit trauma center, moving steadily toward the northeast stairwell where Reject had said the two Dead Boys were standing watch.

  Now and then, they passed one of the dredges of society who called the old building their home. In the lobby, there’d even been a few spaced-out chem-heads sprawled around a trash barrel with a smoldering fire burning. If the windows weren’t mostly missing, Tony would’ve wondered how they hadn’t died of asphyxiation, but even in the caustic haze of burned plastic, there was an evident updraft as cool air poured in through the broken and missing windows and rose toward the vaulted ceiling.

  As he and Beef rounded a corner, moving away from the emergency ward, they passed a few jittery scavs, cutting at the plastic walls, digging for untapped copper wire or maybe pipes—the hospital must have had gas lines, Tony figured. It was hard work; the walls were thick and hard, designed to resist the bumps of trauma carts and patient beds, and the scavs used chipped knives and razors. One of them had a hand-held torch, but he was just making a mess of the plastic, trying to soften it. Beef shoved past them, growling, “Look out for that one, T; he’s covered with scabs.”

  Tony appreciated the warning; the scav in question had a virulent infection and didn’t seem wholly cognizant of his surroundings. He walked in a zigzag down the corridor, bumping into anything in his path. Tony was pretty sure his nanites could deal with most common infections, but some of the stuff these types picked up was hard to classify and highly resistant to standard treatment—experimental phages, vectors, and even misbehaving smart vaccines that were dumped or lost when pharma corps went belly-up. Needless to say, he gave the guy plenty of space.

  Beef’s boys had sent him a layout of the first floor, and Beef had shared it with Tony. According to his updated mini-map, they were only fifty meters from their destination, with a single corner between them and the stairwell. When Beef reached that last turn, he slowed and looked at Tony. “Got a blade?”

  Tony hated the simple question. Why didn’t he have a knife by now? Shouldn’t that have been the first damn thing he picked up in a place like the Blast? He shook his head, hoping his scowl conveyed his self-disgust.

  Beef exhaled heavily through his wide nostrils but didn’t say anything. He reached into his vest, his hand probing toward his lower back, then yanked out a huge bowie-style knife. “It ain’t no plasma-edge, but it does the trick.” He flipped it, caught the point in his meaty palm, and offered the handle to Tony. Tony switched his shotgun to his left hand and took the knife, wrapping his fingers around the smooth, epoxy-resin grip. Beef lifted his cleaver off his belt. “You get what’s next, right?”

  Tony nodded. “We ice the two guards—quiet-like.”

  “Yep. You pull the door open. I go left, you go right. Don’t let ’em make any noise.” With that, Beef ambled around the corner, and Tony followed. He could see the stairwell door ahead—industrial metal, with a narrow rectangle of wire-reinforced glass. Beef didn’t slow or try to hide; Tony figured he was counting on the bangers being lax and knew every second spent creeping was just another second in which they might peer through the little window and notice him and Tony.

  When they were five meters from the door, Beef waved Tony forward, and he darted around the bigger man, wrapping his fingers around the door handle. He peered through the window—one quick glance—then turned to Beef. He held up one finger and pointed to the left, where he’d seen a guy leaning against the wall. Then he pointed to himself and straight ahead, where he’d seen the other banger leaning over the railing, looking down the stairwell.

  The big guy nodded, and Tony pulled the door open. Beef shot through, and Tony followed, shamelessly using Beef’s bulk for cover in case bullets came flying. As Beef cut left, Tony went straight, knife raised. The banger by the railing had just started to turn, surprised, no doubt, by the sound of the door crashing open. Tony’s mechanical right hand hacked the knife down and to the side, nearly severing the guy’s head. The banger fell to the ground, gargling as hot blood sprayed.

  Tony didn’t waste a second. He knelt beside the dying man, pushed him onto his side, and jammed the knife’s tip into the PAI chip on the back of his neck. He didn’t know what sort of dead-man protocols he might have set up—a message to his banger buddies or maybe a recording of his final seconds sent to the net. It didn’t matter; whatever it was wouldn’t be good for Tony. He turned to Beef in time to see the enormous banger grunting as he worked his cleaver out of the other Dead Boy’s skull.

  “Pull his PAI or wreck it,” Tony hissed.

  “No shit.” Beef grabbed the banger’s chip—he had a data port on the side of his temple instead of the more common back-of-the-neck installation—and ripped it out, trailing a wad of glistening micro-fiber synthetic nerves. Beef threw it down, stomped on it with a grunt, then straightened, his cleaver dripping gore. Tony looked around the stairwell and cursed when he saw a camera array in the corner by the door. He ran over and smashed his knife into the lens, twisting the blade into the housing until he was sure he’d ruined the wireless device.

  “Hopefully, they weren’t watching too close. I don’t hear anything,” Beef grunted. He motioned to the stairs. “Ready?”

  By way of answer, Tony padded past him, jogging lightly down the first flight. He peered over the railing and saw only one empty landing below them. He hurried down to it and had just reached the basement level when he heard feet stomping outside the door. “Incoming!” He hissed, then stuffed Beef’s knife in his belt as he moved into the door’s blind corner and lifted the shotgun.

  Beef was still up on the mid-point landing, but Tony saw he had a hand cannon ready—big, ugly, and with a barrel bore that was too damn wide to fire anything but custom ammo. It looked heavily modded, and Tony really didn’t want to be anywhere near it when Beef squeezed that trigger. He didn’t have much time to worry; someone slammed into the door’s crash bar, sent it flinging open, and then charged through.

  If Tony hadn’t seen people do a million boneheaded things in combat, he would have been surprised by the merc’s recklessness, but he had, and he wasn’t. He watched the guy charge for the stairs, heard Beef’s gun erupt like a bomb going off, and then a hole the size of a watermelon appeared in the guy’s torso. As blood and viscera showered the landing, spraying everything, including Tony, in a fine, warm mist, someone screamed on the other side of the door, “Frag out!”

  Tony didn’t hesitate. He kicked the door shut. Something clanged against it, and then another boom shook the stairwell, and the door deformed a few centimeters, bending almost enough to slip free of its frame, but not quite. Tony grabbed the handle with his cybernetic arm and yanked, ripping it open with a squealing grind as it scraped against the damaged frame. When he was faced with white smoke and concrete dust, Nora switched his visual spectrum to infrared, and he saw two warm figures illuminate.

  One was writhing on his or her back, apparently regretting throwing a grenade against a closed door. The other was hanging back, crouching. Tony saw the far figure lift its arms, obviously aiming a gun, and he tried to beat him or her to the punch, squeezing the trigger on his shotgun. The magnets whined, and the weapon discharged its payload with a satisfying zwap, but, at the same time, a submachinegun coughed, and bullets pinged the door beside him. Tony ducked back, taking cover.

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  “How many?” Beef asked, coming down the steps, his massive pistol trained on the doorway.

  “Two. I might have hit one, and the other ate some of that frag.” More submachine gun fire tat-tat-tatted from the hallway, and bullets pinged and thudded into the stairwell and the wall where Tony was taking cover. He was grateful for the thick concrete.

  Beef nodded and shook his hand cannon toward the door. “I’ll blast, then you push. I ain’t got optics.”

  “Smoke should be clearing, but sure, do your thing.” Tony lifted a shoulder, pressing his right ear into it, then plugged his left ear. He wished he still had auditory implants; Nora could have squelched Beef’s gunshot for him, but he had to work with the reality of the situation. Beef waited for a pause in the gunfire, then sidestepped in front of Tony and blasted.

  “You fuck!” a woman’s voice screamed, and Beef chortled, stepped back behind the wall.

  “Shot the guy on the ground.”

  Tony didn’t respond; it was a dirty move, but they were playing for keeps; what did those mercs think? He rotated smoothly, training his virtual crosshairs on the crouching figure ahead. She was partially behind a corner on the left; he pulled the trigger, watching as the pellets ripped hunks of concrete away, and she fell back. Tony advanced, firing another round as soon as the batts were primed. His gun zwapped, and the pellets tore the corner apart, pinging against the far wall, and then he heard the sound of boot heels pounding on concrete, receding. She was running for it.

  While Beef wrecked the two dead guys’ PAIs, Tony looked at his shotgun’s readout—the battery was down to thirty-seven percent. He frowned at that; it shouldn’t be that low, and he figured it probably needed replacing. Not wanting the gun to fail on him at a critical moment, he leaned it against the wall and drew his pistol out of his waistband. If he had to retreat, the shotgun would be waiting for him, and if not, he could pick it up after Addie was safe.

  “These ain’t Dead Boys,” Beef announced, joining him near the junction. There weren’t any lights in the concrete corridors, but ahead, Tony could see the glow of white LED lamps, and to the left, where the merc had run, Tony heard activity and saw that someone had rigged up the building’s old light fixtures to a power source.

  He waved his hand over his face, annoyed that the concrete dust was sticking to the blood Beef had sprayed all over him. “They’re mercs. Maybe operators. Not too good, though.”

  “Which way?” Beef leaned close, peering around the corner.

  “One of ’em ran this way, and that’s where I think they’re probably holed up, but there’s light straight ahead, too.”

  “Split up? Or you need me to hold your hand?”

  Tony looked at the banger and saw him shoving thumb-sized bullets into his pistol’s fat magazine. “We can split up. Just don’t fucking shoot that thing blind; Addie could be around any of these corners.”

  “No shit.” Beef grinned and then slammed the mag into his gun. “See you on the other side.” With that, he lumbered toward the white LED glow. Tony shrugged and started after the merc, pistol held ready. Tony had been in a lot of firefights. He’d been in some real shit, so to speak, and he’d gotten used to ignoring the smells of combat. In this case, though, he had to carefully breathe shallowly to keep from gagging. Beef had made a real mess out of those two bangers with his hand cannon, and stuff that was meant to be in a person’s guts didn’t smell good when it got violently removed from said guts.

  The further he crept from the intersection, the easier it got to breathe, but the more nervous he became. He was a fish in a barrel in that long hallway, so he darted for the nearest doorway, pausing inside the frame, pressing his back to the partially open door. It was jammed up against piles and piles of old rotten boxes and broken carts and chairs, so he wasn’t worried that his quarry had run into the room.

  He peered around the doorjamb, staring toward the lit-up intersection ahead, listening and watching, hoping for a clue about what might be coming. He was beginning to think the female merc had run for it—that nothing awaited him—when a horrified shriek echoed through the corridors behind him. Tony had seen some awful things in his past. He’d seen men lose limbs; he’d watched a wailing mother clutch a child’s lifeless body—that was the kind of shriek that came echoing up the hallway. Beef had done something terrible to someone.

  He vacillated for a couple of heartbeats, debating with himself. Should he run back the way he’d come and see what was going on with Beef, or should he investigate ahead? What if Addie was there with Beef and whoever he’d maimed or tortured? He left the doorway, took a step back toward the junction where they’d split up, and then a staccato burst of fire behind him and a bloom of agony in his lower back reminded him about the necessity of cover and keeping a cool head. He didn’t try to turn; he took the momentum from being shot and stumbled across the hall to a doorway on the opposite side.

  More shots rang out, but somehow, they missed him, tearing grooves in the walls and snapping through the air around him. Panting, grimacing in pain, he leaned against a rusted filing cabinet and trained his pistol on the doorway. This room was similarly stuffed with junk, so he didn’t watch his back; he just stared at the doorway and waited. Beef’s baritone bellow echoed from the hallway. He was shouting something—cussing someone out—but Tony couldn’t make out the words.

  Whatever Beef was screaming—maybe it was the person who’d shrieked moments ago—it made whoever shot Tony do something stupid; they approached the doorway and, though they tried to slice the pie and do it right, they were rushing. Tony saw a gun barrel, waited, and as soon as a shoulder came into view, he shot it. His pistol barked, the high-pressure ammo making it buck in his steady grip, and the shoulder he’d been aiming at blossomed a red flower of blood. The merc stumbled back, stifling a gasp.

  Tony pressed forward, leading with his pistol and firing two more rounds where he thought his enemy would be. He heard grunts of pain and, emboldened, pushed through the doorway to see a big woman with dark hair, black combat fatigues, and a half-face riot mask. He’d hit her pretty good despite her armor. She held her fingers to her gut, blood pulsing out between them, but her dark brows narrowed, and she tried to lift her gun to shoot him as he came through the door. Lucky for him, his first shot had messed up her shoulder, and the SMG hitched halfway up, giving Tony a split second to put a round right through her eye.

  He stumbled forward, falling to his knees beside her corpse, and with black tunnel walls closing in on his vision, he reached down and pulled her PAI chip, smashing it with his mechanical fingers. Red alerts were flashing on his AUI, and as he trained his pistol down the hallway, he asked Nora, “What’s the status? Why am I losing my vision?”

  “A precipitous drop in blood pressure. I’m compensating with your optics. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner. Tony, you have some medical alerts—”

  “Summarize!” Tony coughed, stuffing his pistol into his belt and prying the SMG out of the dead woman’s hands. He pulled back the bolt to ensure it had a round in the chamber, then yanked an extra mag out of her combat vest.

  “In summary, you are bleeding internally, and your nanites are struggling to close off the—”

  “Tell them to prioritize, and I’ll look for a med kit.” As soon as he said it, a thought occurred to him, and he started slapping the pockets on the woman’s vest and fatigues. In her hip pocket, he felt something rectangular and too bulky to be ammo; he ripped the zipper open and, to his relief, pulled out a small trauma pack. With his teeth and mechanical hand, he tore the packaging open, exposing two inhalers and an autoinjector.

  With a shaky hand and ragged breaths, Tony held one of the inhalers in front of his face, struggling to read the label—his brain wasn’t working right. “Nora, what is this?”

  “Synapse-9, a cognition and reaction booster.”

  “Good enough.” Tony put the inhaler between his lips and pressed the activation button. Cold mist blew into his mouth, and he inhaled sharply. Ice rushed through his mouth, into his sinuses and lungs, trailing fire in its wake. His vision brightened, almost painfully, and he had to gasp for Nora to turn down the gain on his optics. Everything snapped into focus. His heart was hammering, and that meant he was bleeding faster. He snatched up the autoinjector and read the label: RedHorizon – High-yield, short-term nanites for rapid coagulation and tissue repair.

  “Oh, perfect chrome, baby,” he hissed, nimbly slamming the plastic needle housing against his thigh and pressing the activation button. It clicked and hissed, and tingling itches spread through his leg. “Tell my nanites that help is on the way,” he grunted, then stood, cradling the SMG. He glanced down at the dead merc and forced himself to scowl, pushing away the sudden wave of sympathy. “Sorry it worked out this way, sis.”

  He stood there in the hallway for a second, looking toward the lights and then back to where he’d split up with Beef. “Nora, I was a little out of it. Did anything happen? What was Beef yelling?”

  “He threatened to rip a corpo’s spine out of his or her anus.”

  Tony arched an eyebrow. “Anything else?”

  “General screaming and cursing. It ended around the time you inhaled the stim.”

  “Right. Let’s go see what Beef got into.”