Aphrodite's Tears Read online

  Chapter Two

  Lucia Ribiero took one look at Roland’s disheveled appearance and threw him an irritated chuff.

  “Now you know why I never bought nice clothes before,” he responded to her glare with a sheepish shrug.

  “This is getting re-goddamn-diculous.” Her irritation was legitimate, but the half-life of clothing in his line of business had always been brutally short and there had been no reason to believe that improving the quality of his wardrobe would alter this. All the same, she did not want the big man to start dressing like a hobo again.

  She gave up on chastising him for the premature destruction of yet another pricey suit, and turned her attention to the carnage in the alley. Broken bodies and the charred remains of a recycling unit were strewn about in a random pattern, while greasy streaks of mixed blood and rainwater swirled across the pavement to pool in crimson eddies. A dark eyebrow rose over a pretty brown eye as the astute woman began to piece together the events of Roland’s evening. Her brain, home to millions of nanomachines not unlike Roland’s, began to work backwards from the available evidence to assemble various scenarios. Soon, she had narrowed the possibilities down to eight or nine most-likely versions and she huffed again with consternation at the implications.

  Lucia’s father had been one of the scientists who had built Roland, and then part of the renegade group that had freed him from government slavery. She had grown up blissfully unaware of this, for obvious reasons. She had always thought her father was just a successful biotechnologist with a couple dozen lucrative patents to his name. As an adult, she was content to be the vice-president of a beverage company and enjoyed a lifestyle that would be the envy of anyone from outside the posh Uptown districts. This carefully crafted existence crumbled abruptly when her father got kidnapped by a giant corporation bent upon bringing Roland’s technology back to the military. That was when her own augmentations asserted themselves, revealing a nervous system and brain almost entirely rebuilt with cutting edge nanotech. Lucia, they found, had the fastest reflexes in the galaxy with agility, balance, and proprioception to match it. The machines drove her own bone and muscle cells to the limits of their genetic potential as well. Underneath the tailored suits of the successful executive was the body and brain of a superhuman. Once she had started turning over rocks in the seedier zones of the New Boston Megalopolis, more than one large and strong man had learned to his chagrin that the lean one-hundred-and-thirty-pound woman was as strong as he was. Over a four-day period of frantic running and gunning, the career businesswoman had morphed into a fantastic field operative. After a whole year of missions, battles, and scheming had passed, those machines had further adapted and refined her skills to a razor’s edge of professional competence.

  “They were hunting you, huh?” She tossed the question to her oversized partner.

  “They thought they were,” he corrected. “I picked them up on The Drag back by Farragut’s. I let them herd me over here, just to see what they were up to. I figured they were moving me somewhere quiet to go for a takedown, and since I didn’t want to wake the neighbors either...” He shrugged with a small smile, “... I thought I’d go ahead and use their own cleverness against them.”

  “You missed at least two of them, I think,” she shot back.

  “I know,” he agreed. “I spotted one scout, but he never engaged. I thought there might be an officer of some kind out there. If there was, he never showed himself either.”

  Roland had learned in their time together that the most impressive of Lucia’s abilities was not her speed or strength. It wasn’t her marksmanship or martial arts prowess either, though both were suitably impressive. As good as Lucia was in a fight, the galaxy was full of augmented humans who were fast or strong or skilled in the arts of war. It was Lucia’s ability to process numerous data streams and trains of thought simultaneously that made her truly unique. When she focused, and when she kept her anxieties in check, she possessed a positively inhuman quantity of parallel processing ability.

  She was employing it now, and Roland could see her face twitch as she put it all together. She had figured out that the hit squad would have had a scout and a leader from their numbers and how they had maneuvered him into the alley. The condition of the recycler and the distribution of debris and gore told her that there had been an explosive in play. She found no craters or gouges in the surrounding walls, and this told her that there had been no large-caliber weapons used and that the men had not missed when they fired.

  “Professional group,” she said out loud. “No misses and no signs of wild fire. One of them had a bomb or something, in case they needed a fail-safe.” She looked again at the red smears on the walls, showing up as dark stained areas washed in ragged streaks by rivulets of rain water from overhead gutters. “You lose your temper a bit, dear?”

  Roland looked at his feet. “When I realized they were Red Hats, I may have overdone it a little, yeah.” He looked up. “I’d apologize, but I’m not really all that sorry.”

  “I hear ya, big guy.” She smirked at him. “I’m not going to give you to hard a time about that. We got a talker?”

  Roland gestured to a lone figure, sitting up against the wall and staring at them with a vacant, heavy-lidded gaze. “He’s not real chatty, yet. I think he’s warming up to me, though.”

  “Mindy will be here in a minute, then he’ll probably open right up.” Lucia seemed to take delight in the thought of that, which made Roland nervous. He decided to change the subject.

  “How’d Manny take it?”

  “Fine. More resigned than anything. He’s coming with Mindy.”

  Roland shook his head. “This is going to be very interesting.”

  Lucia winced at the thought of Mindy’s interrogation methods. “I’m just glad I haven’t had dinner yet.”

  “Sorry I ruined date night.” Roland actually was sorry about that. He had only ever dated one person in thirty years, so he took his responsibilities in this regard very seriously. Then another thought hit him. “You haven’t eaten yet? When did you last eat something?”

  Lucia’s body burned through energy at several times the normal rate. Keeping her adequately fed was a fairly daunting process, and the consequences of her getting hungry could be dire for any person fool enough to get between her and her next meal.

  “I’ll be fine, Roland.” She flicked the magenta streak of rain-soaked hair stuck to her forehead away from her eyes. It sat in stark contrast to her otherwise brunette pixie cut. Roland liked the way the rain was soaking her clothes to her body, faithfully portraying her athletic physique in contrasting blue and black shirt and pants. One year in, and the giant cyborg was still completely at a loss as to why a woman of her beauty, taste, wealth, and intelligence would ever slum it with a glorified goon like him. For whatever reason, he was not the sort of man who was going to spoil a good thing by asking too many stupid existential questions about it. Roland was more than happy to leave the deeper ruminations on love and relationships to the poets and philosophers and just trust that Lucia knew what she was doing. Lord knew he did not, so it was good that at least one of them felt confident.

  “What do we have so far?” Lucia pulled his attention from her body and back to business.

  “Very little. It’s a good-sized team, so this was not a scouting mission. They knew Manny would be here and that he was with me. They had enough intel to try and hit me first, but like most folks who aren’t from around here they underestimated my capabilities.”

  “We have a leak?” Lucia wondered aloud.

  Roland frowned. The expression clouded his already heavy-browed face in even deeper shadow, and cast his likeness in competing streaks of darkness and light under the inconsistent illumination of the alley. “I don’t know. It took them a good six months to find him. That’s not so fast that it rules out regular old hunting.” He rubbed his face with a giant gloved hand. “I’d hate to think we have a leak.”

  The alleyway lit up in that moment, harsh horizontally directed light burning everything into either stark illumination or blackest shadow. Lucia covered her eyes and squinted into the pair of blazing headlamps casting their garish beams into the tiny space. “Looks like Mindy and Manny are here.”

  She registered the hiss and click of doors swinging open and then slamming closed again. Two silhouettes obstructed the beams of light and Lucia removed her shielding hand when the searing radiance of the headlights swung backward and away from her eyes. When her night vision returned, she could see a young man of medium build standing at the entrance of the alley. He was aggressively average in stature. Neither big nor small. Not tall, yet not exactly short, either. His face was a deep tan and smooth, and he wore his black hair long and tied back. He was dressed simply in blue dungarees and a brown jacket. A satchel hung diagonally across his chest, and Lucia knew that it was filled with exotic electronics and other tools of his trade.

  Next to the young man stood a tiny blond woman. She was as pale as the man was dark, and her shape was as striking as his was average. The little woman had squeezed shapely legs into black pants so tight as to appear painful and her prodigious chest was barely contained by four brave buttons manfully holding a too-small dress shirt closed against the intense pressure.

  The young man’s face was cast in a bronze rictus of tight-jawed apprehension, and the woman was leering irreverently down the alley toward Lucia and Roland. The little blond spoke first as the pair walked into the rain-slick shadows. “Hey, Boss! Roland kill a bunch of people again?”

  Lucia gave the woman a look that communicated quite clearly that her humor was ill-timed. “Mindy, this is one of those times when a wise little assassin would stop talking.”

  The goofy visage evaporated at this
and the small woman had the good sense to affect an air of sheepishness. “Got it. Sorry, Boss.”

  Lucia turned to the young man, now staring with distant rage and transparent sadness at the bodies strewn about the street. “Manny? You okay, Manny?”

  “Yeah,” the dark-skinned youth said quietly. “I always knew they’d come. Usually I’d have moved on before they got to me, so I never had to see them. Feels weird to look at them now.”

  “Anybody you recognize?” Lucia was not sure this was a question she wanted an answer to, though she asked it out of necessity.

  “No. But it’s been a few years since I was home.”

  Roland spoke up. “Well, looks like it may be time to go visit. Are you ready for that?”

  Manny shrugged. “Who knows? Is that the type of thing anyone is ever ready for?”

  Mindy took a chance on speaking, and for a change, she kept a respectful tone. “Let’s sort out exactly who they are and how they got here without us knowing first, huh? If we are talking about taking the fight to them, then we need to do this right.”

  “You’re the expert on this stuff,” Roland conceded. “I was never much of a hunter.”

  “First, we pull IDs,” Mindy instructed, and Manny waved a dismissive hand at her.

  “There won’t be any. These aren’t Dockside hoods or even registered hunters. These are Balisongs.”

  When the women showed nothing more than confusion at this proclamation, Roland supplied the necessary details. “The Red Hats call their in-house death squads ‘Balisongs.’” When this did not seem to clear things up, he explained further. “A balisong is a kind of knife, made to look like a woman’s hand fan when closed. It opens to reveal a blade. It was a popular assassin’s tool in the far east and Polynesia a long time ago.

  Lucia looked askance at her large partner. “Each morning you wake up and can’t remember where you put your shoes the night before, yet somehow you have memorized the history of every weapon ever used by humans?”

  Roland shrugged. “Limited storage. I save my memory for the important stuff, obviously.”

  “Like ancient weapons?”

  “Don’t knock it, kids. I killed a heavy armature with a war-hammer once.”

  “I was there,” Mindy pointed out. “That was weird to watch.”

  Manny chose this moment to pipe up. “There won’t be any ID on them, and their fingerprints will have been burned off. We’ll need retinal images or DNA to identify them. Even so, if they are free-birth Venusians with no previous criminal records, then there will be no records of that stuff either.”

  Mindy wrinkled her nose. “What are the chances of them being free-birth Venusians with no records?”

  “Pretty damn good, to be honest.” Manny shook his head and said with gravity, “Balisongs are a carefully chosen group.”

  “All right,” Lucia threw her hands up in defeat. “Let’s get what info we can and clean up this mess. I can only assume that someone from Rodney’s crew will be sniffing around soon. I’d like for there to be no way for anyone to tell that a terrorist hit squad was here. We’ll take this one...” she tossed a disgusted look over at the wounded terrorist, still swaying and groaning against the wall, “...back with us for interrogation.”

  A brisk search of the dead men confirmed Manny’s suspicions. Mindy took retinal scans and DNA from each of them just in case, and then the team confiscated all of the crimson skull caps the assassins had worn. Roland scanned them for augmentations, but as they had all suspected, there were none to be found.

  With the search complete, the team hustled the nearly-unconscious Red Hat survivor into a waiting ground transport and headed back to their office. Roland stayed behind to await whoever came to investigate the gunfight.

  He did not have to wait long. The red lights of the transport had barely faded into the greasy darkness of the rainy streets when the splish-splashing of several pairs of boots clomped over to his alley. Roland was leaning casually against the wall with his arms crossed, and the approaching group of men met his laconic stare with expressions of frustrated incredulity. There were four of them, ranging in size from medium to nearly as big as Roland. All were dressed in shabby, ill-fitting suits with worn overcoats, and none of them looked comfortable wearing either. The changes to Dockside had come quickly, and so much of the newly-organized street muscle was still adjusting to the new paradigm. Dressing like professionals did not come naturally to this cohort. Roland could sympathize, since he didn’t like wearing suits, either.

  “Evening boys,” he drawled.

  The largest of the group sighed heavily in his direction. Rain pooled and ran off of his wide-brimmed hat in determined streams as he spoke. “Jesus goddamn Christ, Tank. What the hell happened here?”

  Roland waved his arms to indicate the carnage. “Bunch of foreigners tried to take me down with bead pistols. Now they’re dead.”

  “Foreigners?”

  “They look local to you?” Roland answered the question with a question.

  The man leaned over and scowled at one of the bodies in the alley. “They look like hamburger, Tank. You ever consider leaving one alive for questioning?”

  “I wasn’t feeling talkative. Whoever sent them will get the message just as clear this way.”

  “And here I heard you had gone soft.” He looked around at the mangled bodies and ruined faces of Roland’s deceased enemies and shrugged. “Sure as fuck don’t look soft to me...” he grumbled under his breath.

  “I’m all kinds of reformed now. Can’t you tell?” Roland was not big on jokes, and the man in the hat could not tell if he was supposed to take that comment seriously or not.

  He decided to ignore it. “Christ, what am I going to tell the cops?”

  That was another new element of the Dockside cultural landscape. The end of the turf wars with The Combine and The Brokerage meant that the local police were once again attempting to assert themselves in this little quarter of the New Boston Megalopolis. For the last several decades, the police had been very much an afterthought down by the Docks. Now without the big dollars of giant crime syndicates keeping them at bay, the boys in blue were more inclined to act like they were a real constabulary and not just another gang these days. This was a welcome shift for Roland, though it did not sit so well with the local crime bosses. Roland knew it would all get sorted out, and that it remained supremely unlikely Dockside would ever get a real police presence. He was simply happy to have any improvements he could get.

  “Tell them that a bunch of hitters from out of town came after me. Probably because I have more enemies than you have crabs. If they want to come talk to me they know where to find me.”

  “The boss ain’t gonna like this, Tank,” the man said with a look of deep apprehension.

  Roland grunted a laugh. “I don’t give two shits what your boss will and won’t like. Tell The Dwarf to stay the fuck out of my way if he doesn’t want to deal with it.”

  The man in the hat decided to ignore that, too. He addressed his men instead. “All right. Strip ‘em of anything interesting and then one of you call this in.” He turned to the big cyborg, still leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his bare chest. “You sticking around for the cops, Tank?”

  “Nope. Figured you guys could handle it. Tell ‘em where to find me if they want my statement.”

  “They won’t,” the man replied with conviction. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sometimes it was good to be The Fixer.

  Chapter Three

  The captured Red Hat Balisong regained consciousness abruptly. His senses swam into focus with a jolt and he lurched in an inadvertent spasm that sent electric shocks of intense pain through his right leg and most of his right arm. He gasped in agony and then went very still. Instinct told him that the pain would be less if he did not move, and a moment later his instincts turned out to be correct. The white-hot spikes of hurt subsided into shadows of their previous magnitudes and the small man once again began breathing in slow and shallow breaths. He took a pause to assess his surroundings, and as his memories began to organize themselves the injured assassin began to realize that his situation was dire indeed.