Aphrodite's Tears Read online

  Aphrodite’s

  Tears

  The Fixer: Book Four

  by Andrew Vaillencourt

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  APHRODITE'S TEARS

  First edition. February 13, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Andrew Vaillencourt.

  ISBN: 978-1976957529

  Written by Andrew Vaillencourt.

  Also by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Hegemony

  Sullivan's Run

  The Fixer

  Ordnance

  Hell Follows

  Hammers and Nails

  Aphrodite's Tears

  Dead Man Dreaming

  Head Space

  Escalante

  The Fixer Omnibus

  Watch for more at Andrew Vaillencourt’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Andrew Vaillencourt

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Roland Tankowicz was once again in a bad mood.

  Astute chroniclers of the man’s emotional states might point out that he was often in a bad mood. Brave souls, possessed of courage in excess of intelligence, might go so far as to opine that all of his moods seemed to fall on a spectrum that ranged between ‘mild irritation’ and ‘homicidal fury.’ They would not be wrong, but this was a special case.

  Specifically, his irritated state was wholly the responsibility of external actors, and not a function of his more general grouchiness.

  “I’ll give you that one for free.” His voice could be likened to the sound of a giant piece of industrial machinery as he growled the words through the evening rain. “The next one of you to try that shit is going to die screaming.”

  The objects of his ire found themselves at an emotional and strategic crossroads. The seven young men dressed in black coveralls and hoods paused in mute wonder, minds boggling at what they had just witnessed and wishing with ardent furor that they had the time to engage in a conference to discuss it. In silent agreement, the men deduced that they did not, in fact, have this kind of time. Instead they gaped in slack-jawed stupidity, each waiting for another to do something brilliant or perhaps burst into some kind of spontaneous and effective action.

  Roland sighed. It was a sad testament to his existence that the easiest way to tell if folks were new in town was to observe the type of weapons they employed in their inevitable attempt to kill him. This felt like the sort of thing that said a lot more about his life and his choices than anything else, though this was a probably not the best time to reflect upon it.

  For instance, this stalwart crew of bravos was quite obviously not a local group. This was clear to Roland because he now sported eight neat little five-millimeter holes in his shirt. It was a new shirt and it was unique in that it was a nice dress shirt that he actually liked. Tailored to fit his bizarre proportions, the garment resided well within the twin categories of ‘stylish’ and ‘expensive.’ Or it had until a group of black-clad fools decided to make an attempt upon his life, at least. It was now ruined, and somebody was going to have to account for that to Lucia. Roland was a brave man who had seen violent action on twenty different planets, and he was not volunteering for that dangerous duty. Acceding to tactical necessity, the big man decided that one of these poor, stupid, soon-to-be-maimed morons was going to be the one to do it.

  His volunteer materialized in the form of frantic incoming bead fire from a dark shadow at the end of the alley. There was a disturbing constant in these interactions that remained a perennial mystery to the big man. A distressing proportion of these cagey killers and criminals, upon seeing exactly how inadequate small-arms fire was when applied to battling Roland, seemed convinced that employing more of the same would make a difference. Objectively speaking, there was no way that shooting Roland ten times or a hundred times was going to be any more effective than shooting him once. It simply did not matter. Roland’s skin was impervious to small arms, and his shirt could not get any more ruined than it already was. With a resigned sigh, Roland ignored the frenzied hail of hypersonic projectiles and charged.

  Roland’s size often led folks into the hasty assumption that he must be slow. This was an entirely understandable mistake for those unfamiliar with the man to make. Six inches shy of eight feet tall and as wide as a small car, moving with any kind of speed would necessitate strength and agility far in excess of what a reasonable person might think feasible for a man of such stature. If that same (likely doomed) individual knew that Roland weighed nearly a thousand pounds, he could be justifiably relied upon to dismiss the thought of so large a person covering a distance of say, thirty feet, in one half of one second.

  While the misapprehension might be entirely understandable, the person was likely to die horribly all the same. This hypothetical miscreant, being not so hypothetical in the wet alleyways of this particular Dockside Friday night, might have six friends with him as well. They would be no help to him, which would make him sad during the all-too-brief moment of clarity he enjoyed before Roland hit him.

  Roland’s hand struck the coverall-clad attacker in the chest. At the last instant, he opened his fist to strike with his palm. As an afterthought, he pulled the blow so as to not shatter the man’s ribs or sternum. Instead of a gruesome and instant death, the unfortunate thug accelerated from a standstill to approximately thirty miles per hour in the space of about an eighth of a second. The breath left his lungs with a whoosh and his feet separated from the ground with so much violence that he left his boots behind.

  Off into the mist and drizzle the man flew, until the unforgiving stoicism of a concrete wall arrested his flight and he crumpled to the street with a sloppy splash. His hood had slipped from his head during his transit, and a clue as to his origins became abruptly visible. Others may not have seen it, considering the rain and darkness, but Roland’s night vision was far better than average. The sight of it made him regret sparing the man’s life, though this was an oversight he could rectify later if he wanted to.

  The big man straightened, rolling his shoulders back and cocking his head from side to side as if it was stiff and needed a stretch. It did not, but Roland was not above showboating just a little. These men were about to pay the full admission price for their attempt on his life, and Roland figured they were thus entitled to the whole production.

&nbsp
; “Somebody,” he growled, “is going to have to answer for my ruined shirt.” He turned to assess the remaining six men. They stood in the alleyway, hunched against the slick walls with guns in their shaking hands. Their black workman’s coveralls were sodden and clinging to their bodies, black hoods pulled low to cast deep shadows over their faces. Roland needed very little light to see, so the effect was wasted on him. It was yet another deficiency in what should have been a textbook hit, if not for a single fatal flaw in the execution. These obviously professional killers had thought they were hunting a man. Their weapons were concealable yet lethal. They had picked an ambush point that was private and had only one exit. They had struck with accurate fire from more than one direction. If Roland had been anything other than what he was, it would have been a perfect assassination. Roland, however, was exactly what he had been made to be. Thus, it followed that the little squad of hitters was about to suffer a slew of career-ending injuries.

  The location of the ambush, selected so carefully to keep the ambush-ee from escaping, now served the same purpose against the ambushers. There was only one way out of the alley, and Roland was blocking it. Charitable individuals might choose this moment to point out that this situation was entirely unfair. There was no way this squad of assassins could have known that their target was the sole surviving member of a top-secret warfighter enhancement project. They could not know that his whole body was constructed of exotic techno-organic bone and muscle analogs driven by the same power cell used in large military vehicles. No one had told them that his skin was thickly armored, or that his neurological processes were greatly accelerated by the millions of nanomachines that swam around his manufactured body.

  Roland was a technological juggernaut birthed by the darkest corners of the industrial-military complex, manipulated and enslaved by a secret cabal of corrupt military and business leaders, and subsequently discarded when his existence became a liability to the government. Roland did not like to discuss such things, and the Planetary Council would have him imprisoned or destroyed if he did, so it was unsurprising that a bunch of lightly armed killers of indeterminate origin found themselves ignorant of their own inadequacies.

  Bereft of any other course of action, the remaining men opened fire in unison with their sidearms. Beads streaked across the alley in a fusillade not unlike the one their unconscious compatriot had just attempted. The shiny black shadows, slick with the rain, lit up like orange flashbulbs as the incandescent trails of ceramic beads lanced through the raindrops and bounced off Roland’s chest with showers of sparks and the hiss of steam. The rest of his shirt began to tear away in smoking bits as a hundred direct hits abraded the cloth from his body. It exposed the flat black color of his dermal armor mesh, and the darkness of it sank his form even deeper into the shadows.

  Roland shrugged out of the rags and leapt forward. The assassins scattered as he lunged, but they were far too slow. He caught a black-clad foe in each hand on his first pass, and sent each into the walls with far more force than was strictly necessary. Bodies thwacked against masonry with wet thuds and the dull pops of snapping bones. Roland was supposed to be pulling his punches these days, and the changes that had come to Dockside in the last few months were encouraging him to adhere to a lighter touch than in previous decades. However, he had a hunch about this crew, and if he was right, a few of them dying this night would leave the universe better off for his trouble.

  More beads exploded against his back. A few remaining assassins had slipped in behind him and were emptying their magazines at close range. The enterprising killers were seeking out weak points, with rounds striking him in the back of the head, his knees, and the creases of his shoulders. Roland spun a half turn and saw three men posted in solid shooting posture, methodically dumping ammo into him with professional accuracy and rhythm. They were close, so Roland stomped on the ground between the clustered group as hard as he could. A foot like a piledriver, driven by leg muscles that could drag sixty tons from the floor and backed by nearly a thousand pounds of mass, drove into the asphalt. The street lurched as a circle of radiating cracks darted away from Roland’s boot and nearby puddles erupted into geysers of water vapor. The shooters lost their footing because the ground itself heaved violently beneath them and both men crashed to deck in a tangle of limbs.

  The last man still standing decided to take his chances with escape and bolted for the mouth of the alley. Roland could not have this, so he scooped one of the fallen shooters from the puddling crater into a monstrous hand. With the flick of a thick wrist, the remorseless giant hurled the screaming man at his fleeing partner.

  The two full-grown men collided at speed, one flying through the air, and the other running with singular focus. Their heads smacked together like coconuts and the sound of it communicated to Roland that he may have hurled his missile with a touch too much energy. Neither projectile nor target moved once they came to a halt on the ground, and the poor lighting and the rain made it impossible to determine if the growing puddles beneath them were water or blood. Roland assumed it was blood, which was generally a safe assumption under the circumstances.

  The alleyway, so recently alive with the lights and sounds of a pitched battle, went dark and quiet once again. The dull white noise of accelerating rainfall muffled the distant groans of dying men, and for a minute Roland simply stood with his head cocked to one side. With his auditory gain turned up as high as he could, the big cyborg simply listened. It took a moment to filter out all the other sounds of the rainy Dockside night, but one by one he eliminated them and was left with nothing besides the breathing of his victims and the shuffling of those still capable of some small degree of movement. Soon, he heard a small whine and the immobile onyx statue became a darting black wraith. He scooped the first man he had downed from the ground and flipped him to his back, revealing a small explosive device clutched in a desperate fist.

  The man’s face, pale and drawn with pain from any number of horrible injuries, wore a small sanctimonious expression as their eyes met. That look changed to confusion when he saw neither fear nor shock in Roland’s. Thick fingers closed around the clutched grenade in the limp hands of the semiconscious man. The massive black paw engulfed the smaller hands, preventing the killer from releasing the spoon and triggering the device.

  Roland leaned in to put his face very close and grinned. “We figured you guys would show up eventually. Now, in a second I’m going to release that pin so you can blow yourself up. Before you go, I want you to die knowing that this little thing,” he squeezed the hand, cracking finger bones against the grenade they held, “won’t even scratch my paint.”

  Roland hoisted the man aloft, still trapping the explosive in a balled fist. He marched his gurgling captive over to a recycling container and keyed the lid open. The injured man, suddenly realizing what was happening, began to lurch and gasp, unperturbed by how much his thrashing aggravated his already serious injuries. The gasps took on a desperate, terrified wheezing tone when Roland lifted the man over the dumpster and held him there, dangling by his own mangled hand. Roland’s other hand closed around his neck and with a ruthless, merciless twist, the pitiless cyborg tore his doomed victim’s arm from his shoulder. A spray of arterial blood followed, and the heaving gasps of pain morphed into a tortured scream that for a moment drowned out the rain itself. Eyes bulging, the bleeding man could only stare in abject horror at the leaking nub of his own arm as shock and blood loss began to close the door on his cognitive faculties.

  Roland dropped the maimed man into the recycling container and tossed the removed limb on top of him.

  “Welcome to Dockside, pal.”

  Then Roland closed the lid with a metallic bang and stepped away. Six seconds later the grenade went off and the heavy metal lid of the dumpster cartwheeled forty feet into the air propelled by a gout of yellow flame and a noise like a thunderclap. It crashed to the pavement with a wet clang and Roland nodded in approval. Then he turned to the other downed
men to assess and clean up his mess. Of the remaining six, four were dead, one would not last long, and another looked like he might survive long enough to give some good intel. Or he would not give good intel and likely not survive at all. The choice would be his to make.

  The big man sighed, keyed his comm to Lucia’s channel, and pinged her. She answered quickly.

  “Roland! Where the hell are you? You’re late!” Lucia did not like to be kept waiting.

  “Sorry, Lucy. Not going to make it tonight. Something has come up.”

  There was a long pause. “How many dead and who’s crew was it this time?”

  “Five dead, two badly wounded, one likely survivor.”

  “Okay,” she responded, “I’m sending one of Rodney’s clean-up crews...”

  “No!” he almost shouted. “No regular crews. Send me Manny and Mindy. We’ll clean this one in-house.”

  “Roland...” Lucia’s voice had that ‘tell-me-what-the-hell-is-going-on’ tone to it. It was a dangerous tone, delivered by a dangerous woman.

  He interrupted her. “Better warn Manny, Lucy. The Red Hats are here.”

  This pause was longer than the last.

  “Oh, shit. Dammit. Timing really sucks on this. Okay. We are on our way.”

  Roland closed the channel with a sigh. Then he turned to the only surviving man uninjured enough to be useful to him. He was still unconscious, and a cursory examination made it clear that at a minimum he had a severe concussion. If the extra bends in his right leg were any indicator, it did not appear likely it was going to support his weight for a very long time either. Other than that, his breathing was regular and his pulse was fine. One could be forgiven for assuming this meant the man had been ‘lucky.’ Roland soon put the lie to that erroneous assumption.

  “Well, my little friend,” Roland growled at his oblivious foe. “We have about twenty minutes before my back-up arrives and Lucia makes me play in a nice, enlightened manner with you.” Basketball-sized shoulders slumped, “Let’s just see what I can get out of you before they get here, shall we?”