Screams of pain came up from below, and he had no doubt there would be broken bones, if not worse. But he knew Maddy was right. They couldn’t let the company be a target, and a strong showing here might mean he would face less opposition as he walked toward the target’s house. Word traveled fast, especially in run-down neighborhoods like this.
He let the people who ran get away, even though he could have easily caught up with them. Only the fools who were determined to keep fighting sealed their fate. He knocked them across the rooftop or tossed them off the building with the others. When he’d first received his cyborg implants, he’d been delighted at his newfound strength, his ability to thwart all those people who had once bullied him, but years of war and killing and walking across the battlefields of the maimed and fallen had bled the satisfaction out of him. Now, there were far more regrets than delights. Still, he did his job, because it was the only one he had.
Soon, only one opponent remained on his feet. The boy with the homemade bow and arrows. Dirt smeared his grimy face and hands, but it did not hide the terror in his eyes or the shake to his hands.
As Jasim strode toward him, he expected the kid to drop his bow and run. But he held his ground.
“You keep coming, and I’ll shoot.”
His bravery surprised Jasim, and he admired it, even if it was only likely to get the kid killed around here. Jasim wished he could take him away from the neighborhood or impart some message to him, some advice to help him survive to adulthood and find a better future. After all, that was what Jasim had gone to school for after the war. Teaching children. Helping them. But how could he reconcile that with his current job, one that demanded he not allow slights against his boss—or his boss’s ship? If nothing else, he should offer a few tips on how to survive in an unfriendly world. That way, the boy might be wise enough to run the next time.
When he didn’t stop advancing, the kid was true to his threat and fired.
Jasim caught the arrow out in front of him, before the tip would have bounced off his chest piece. He gentled his grip so that he didn’t snap the wood. Finally, the boy seemed to get an inkling of what sort of foe he faced. He lowered his bow. Still, he didn’t run. He stared defiantly.
Jasim stopped in front of him. “I have a couple of suggestions for you.”
The boy blinked. Apparently, that wasn’t what he’d expected to hear.
“First off,” Jasim said, “I recommend that when someone in combat armor enters your neighborhood, you run. Far and fast. You can’t spend the money you think you could get from selling his armor if you’re dead, eh?”
The boy’s expression grew mulish.
“But if you can’t run, because you’re a part of one of the gangs and they’re putting pressure on you…” Jasim lifted his eyebrows, wondering if that was the case, or if the kid just wasn’t that smart. “You better have some rust bangs.”
The boy’s expression changed, his face wrinkling in confusion.
“They’re sort of like grenades,” Jasim said, “but when they explode, they spit out a kind of acid that can eat through spaceship hulls, combat armor, and just about anything with a metal component. It doesn’t feel too good on skin either.”
“Where…”
“You’d have to find a military surplus store to get some around here, I imagine, but I’ve heard of people making homemade versions out of local ingredients.”
“What kinds of ingredients?”
“Well, you’d have to study some chemistry to learn that. Can you read? Do you go to school?”
The boy hesitated. “I did. But my mom needs… stuff, and you can’t make money around here from what dumb things they tell you in school.”
“You sure? I figure it’d be useful around here to know how to make rust bangs. Smoke bombs too. Those aren’t that hard to make. A little chemistry…”
Now, a speculative expression grew on the boy’s face.
Jasim wondered if he was planting the seed that school could be useful or if he was just making the kid think about muggings and robberies his gang could commit with rust bangs and smoke bombs.
“Teachers usually have certain things they have to teach you,” Jasim said, “but if you show an interest in something else and ask for help with learning about it, they’ll be happy to give that help.”
Jasim’s comm beeped, reminding him that Maddy was waiting for him. He held out the arrow to the boy to return it. He accepted it distractedly, as if lost in thought. Maybe he was imagining himself hurling smoke bombs.
Jasim almost told the kid his own story, of how he’d survived a neighborhood just like this, if not one that was worse than this, until he had been old enough to enlist in the imperial army. But where was the happy ending? It had gotten him off the streets, and he’d finished his degree after the war, but only to learn that nobody would hire a cyborg to do anything that didn’t involve brutalizing people. Almost ten years after he’d escaped his childhood, he was a thug, working in the same kinds of places that he’d grown up in.
“Thanks,” the boy said, scampering away, his arrow in hand.
Jasim left, having no way to know if anything he had said would make a difference to the kid. He walked to the edge of the rooftop and leaped down to the street. The pained groans of those he’d thrown off the building drifted to his ears, making him wince.
Another comm beep sounded.
“Antar?” Maddy asked.
“Yes?”
“You’re less than a half a mile from the target’s house. I’m transmitting a map.”
“Understood.”
The map popped up on the side of his faceplate, showing his location and the target’s address.
“Be careful dealing with him,” Maddy said. “It’ll be a lot more challenging than those scrawny thugs.”
“I know,” Jasim said, turning up an alley in the direction the map indicated. “I remember him from the Corps.”
“Ah. I’d wondered if you might.”
Jasim said nothing else. He didn’t look forward to coming face-to-face with someone else in red combat armor. Sergeant Matt Adams, a man who’d referred to Jasim as “Shorty.” A man who would have the strength to kill him. Jasim hoped it wouldn’t come to that, that Adams would agree that he was a year behind on the payments for his yacht and accept that it had to go back to the dealership, but Jasim remembered Adams’s temper, remembered that he liked to fight and that he liked to kill. He doubted very much that this would be easy.
Chapter 2
Jasim could feel eyes upon him as he turned onto the final street, old pavement crumbling underneath his boots. Ratty curtains shifted in glassless windows, and shadows moved behind partially boarded-up doors. Though aware of the watchers, he faced forward, not overly worried about them. His target was another matter.
Sergeant Adams’s home loomed at the end of a pothole-filled cul-de-sac, looking more like a warehouse than a dwelling. Jasim supposed a house wouldn’t have come with a large enough yard to park one’s luxury yacht in.
His instincts told him to leap up to one of the high second-story windows, work a shutter lose, and slip in that way, completely avoiding the target if possible. Indeed, he spotted a window where the shutter already stood open. Invitingly. But The Pulverizer, despite his ominous reputation, employed a system of collecting delinquent loans and valuables that obeyed the local laws on planets and moons that had them. Jasim first had to knock on the target’s door, inform him that his loan was past due, and ask for the return of the spaceship. If the target did not prove amenable, then he could use force. Murders were unacceptable unless they happened as a result of self-dense. Apparently, The Pulverizer had lawyers who could make charges disappear if the claim of self-defense was debatable and someone was left to press charges. Jasim had not tested that. He had no wish to test it here, either, and he eyed that open window with longing.
Bracing himself, he knocked on the wooden double-doors, the metal rivets lining the frame as large as
his fist. The walls on most of the buildings on the street were covered with graffiti. Adams’s place was old and dirty, but there were no signs of vandalism. Everyone in the neighborhood likely knew who and what lived here.
After waiting for a minute, Jasim knocked again. It crossed his mind to slip around back, leap the fence, and use his lock-thwarting repo kit to simply take the ship, but he’d already walked through the alley behind the compound and heard the faint hum of a forcefield. The brick and barbed wire were clearly for show, with more deadly security measures waiting unseen. It would be safer to walk through the house, out the back door, and into the yard.
But nobody answered the door to let him in—or oppose his wish to come in.
Jasim tried the latch, certain it would be locked. He had a kit that could neutralize technological as well as physical locks, and was halfway to reaching for it, but before he could pull it out, the latch gave way and the door creaked open.
“Huh.”
He waited for the telltale thud of footsteps from someone running toward him. All he heard was the buzz of flies. He sniffed before remembering that his helmet would filter out smells—along with any toxic substances that might be in the air. Still, as he walked into a cavernous warehouse-like room half-filled with stacks of crates, he began to suspect that he might not have to face Adams after all.
A metal door stood closed along the back wall—it should lead out to the yard—but Jasim turned toward a hallway off to the side, assuming it led to offices or maybe a living area.
The buzz of flies grew louder. Dim light filtered through the shuttered windows, but there were not any lamps on. There were not any lamps at all, or any sign that electricity was present in this part of the city. Adams must have a generator out back to power the forcefield.
Old wooden floorboards creaked under Jasim’s armored boots. Doors lined the hallway on both sides, some closed and others open. He passed a lavatory and an office, where a desk was piled high with what looked like bills, paper ones. He didn’t see a netdisc or any hint that the warehouse was hooked up to the sys-net. He opened two more doors, one to a kitchen area and one to an empty bedroom. The last door at the end of the hallway was open.
By now, he didn’t expect to encounter anyone. He was already feeling pleased, for The Pulverizer’s rules allowed him to take the yacht if it was present and the owner wasn’t, merely leaving a note that it had been repossessed by request of the title holder. When he walked into the back room, it was dark, and surprise jolted him when he almost stumbled over something on the floor. Flies flew up, one bouncing off his faceplate. Jasim barely noticed, his eyes focused now on the unmoving man sprawled before him.
Clad in nothing but his underwear, the man lay between the bunk and the door, bed sheets tangled in a heap near his feet. His gray eyes were frozen open in death, a pained grimace stamped on his face. Deep, bloody gashes had been cut all over his arms, legs, and chest. For a second, Jasim wondered if he had stumbled across some strange ritualistic murder—or sacrifice—to one of the obscure elder gods. But he didn’t have to look at the placement of those scars for long to realize what had happened. Someone had cut out the man’s—the cyborg’s—implants.
Though his stomach twisted, Jasim leaned down to push apart one of the gashes so he could be certain. Yes, a grayish implant responsible for strengthening a cyborg’s extensor digitorum muscle should have been in that spot, and it was gone.
Jasim leaned back, frowning. One of the man’s burly, heavily muscled arms stretched toward a corner of the room where a large, red metal box rested on the floor. An armor case, identical to the one that held Jasim’s armor when he wasn’t using it.
“Someone took your implants but not your armor?” Jasim muttered. Yes, the implants would be worth more, but the armor would be a lot easier to take and sell. Someone had to know exactly what he was doing to extract the implants without damaging them. Not to mention that someone had to be able to kill a cyborg, no easy feat, to gain access to them.
Jasim walked to the case and lifted the lid. The entire set of armor rested inside in pieces, neatly put away into the proper slots. Odd.
“Well, it doesn’t look like you’re going to object to me taking your ship back,” Jasim said quietly, looking down at the man’s face. Shaggy hair fell across the forehead, and a thick beard hid the mouth and jaw, but Jasim recognized him regardless. He hadn’t liked the man, but his squad had fought alongside Adams’s squad more than once. No question. This was Sergeant Matt Adams. His target.
All Jasim’s job required of him was to reclaim the yacht, and he could have headed into the yard and done that without looking around further, but he couldn’t help wondering what had killed the man. It was more than idle curiosity. Seeing one of his fellow cyborgs dead made him uneasy. He found himself looking around for threats, for something that might endanger him too. Even when they were clad in nothing but underwear, cyborgs weren’t easy to kill, and it was a foregone conclusion that Adams had been dead before the implants had been removed.
Jasim knelt to look at the body more closely. The pectoral gashes were long, but hadn’t gone through to bone and organs. Blood smeared Adams’s body and stained the floor, but there weren’t any bullet or blazer wounds, or any deep punctures.
Adams might have had a heart attack, but the man was only about thirty, so that seemed unlikely. Even though all the tinkering the imperial doctors had done to create their cyborgs had resulted in some metabolic oddities and a shortened lifespan—something the recruiting fliers hadn’t mentioned—they rarely dropped dead from heart attacks, at least not in their thirties. Few lived to old age, but as far as Jasim knew, that was because they were picked for dangerous jobs and met violent ends long before they were old enough to retire from service. The man who’d been the Cyborg Corps commander when Jasim had served, Colonel Adler, had been one of the oldest in the unit at nearly forty. Jasim wondered what had happened to him after the war. He would be closer to forty-five now. Was he still alive somewhere? What work had he found after the fall of the empire? Something more glamorous than repossessing people’s belongings?
Jasim rolled the body over, looking for deadly wounds on the other side. Adams wasn’t stiff, and it looked like rigor mortis had come and gone, so this must have happened a few days ago. He was surprised nobody in the neighborhood had been in to loot Adams’s belongings, especially with that window open and the front door unlocked.
Jasim didn’t see sign of broken bones or any suggestion that there had been a fight. He magnified his faceplate to examine Adams’s neck, ignoring the cuts on the sides. Was it possible someone had strangled him? It was hard to imagine someone even getting his hands around the thickly muscled neck. Even someone in combat armor would be hard-pressed to fight off the defenses of a cyborg long enough to actually finish strangling him. Could he have been attacked by a fellow cyborg? Maybe he’d rubbed more than the titleholder of that yacht the wrong way with his inability to stay current on his payments.
“What’s this?” Jasim murmured, leaning closer and touching the front of Adams’s neck.
There was a tiny puncture in the skin near a tendon. It almost could have passed for a pore, but the hole went deeper than that. If Jasim hadn’t magnified his faceplate and looked specifically at Adams’s neck, he never would have noticed it.
He leaned back on his heels. “Did someone poison you in bed, Sergeant?”
Once again, Jasim peered about the room, as if what or who had done the deed might be lurking nearby, but only flies buzzed around. Whoever had done this had come and gone. A stealthy assassin, or maybe even a drone that had been sent in with cutting tools. That might explain why the implants had been taken but not the armor. A drone would simply have orders to perform one duty, not loot a place for all its valuables. Usually, a cyborg would hear the soft buzz of something flying and wake up, but an empty bottle of vodka rested on the table by the bed. Adams might have been sleeping more deeply than usual.
Jasim sighed. If he were on a more civilized world, he could call the police, someone who could perform an autopsy, and he could find out what poison had killed Adams. But there weren’t police here. Just mafia thugs who enforced what passed for the law. And who anywhere would care that a former imperial cyborg had been killed? The Corps had been feared far and wide from its earliest inception, both by enemies and by loyal imperial subjects. They’d ruthlessly patrolled the empire, enforcing peace with violence, as they had been designed to do.
Jasim stood up. The word would get out soon enough, and the locals would swarm the place, taking Adams’s armor and anything else of value.
“An ignoble end, my friend,” he murmured.
He snorted softly. Friend? Surely Adams hadn’t been that. Jasim had avoided the man whenever possible. But somehow, death erased distaste, reminding him more of how they had been alike than how they had been different.
Jasim tapped the armor case in the corner, activating the hover ability. He didn’t like the idea of the locals fighting over it to sell it, so he would take it, along with the ship. The yacht had to go back to the dealership, but he would look up Adams, see if he had any living family, and return it to them if he did. Times were hard for most people now. Let his relatives sell the armor if they wanted.
Technically, the armor belonged to the empire, but after the final battle, there had been no supply sergeant left in headquarters to turn it in to—there had been no headquarters at all. As far as Jasim knew, all the cyborgs who had survived had kept their armor.
As he headed back through the warehouse, the armor case hissing softly as it floated behind him, Jasim commed the Interrogator. Chances were, what had killed Adams would remain a mystery, even if he tried to investigate it, but he knew someone who could find Adams’s family more easily than he could—assuming she didn’t charge a fortune.