It turned to look at her. She found herself facing an expressionless armoured mask.
‘Is it here?’ the figure demanded. It had a low bass voice. There was something emotionless and cold in it.
‘I don’t know what “it’ is, but this is a really fucking unimportant facility.’ The figure just stared at her. ‘Look, you just tell me what it’s going to take for you to stop killing my people and we’ll do it, okay?’
‘Alcatraz, man?’ Hank tried. She could hear the terror in the ex-marine’s voice. The figure turned around to look at Hank.
‘I know that name. I am not him,’ he/it said.
‘What do you want?’ Amanda asked.
‘Access,’ the figure said.
‘We’re just going to leave, okay?’
The armoured figure said nothing but it didn’t make a move to kill them all, which Amanda put in the win column.
‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ Asher’s voice went very high pitched when he screamed, Amanda noticed. Amanda suddenly realised that the voice wasn’t just in her ear now, but in the cave as well. Both she and the armoured figure turned around to look at the piggy scientist. Amanda was surprised that the fat scientist was brave enough to get this close to the thing-in-armour. ‘What are you fucking talking to it for, you stupid bitch? Shoot it!’
‘Fuck that!’ Amanda said emphatically. ‘We are oscar mike.’
She turned and headed over to Alan, hoping that he was well enough to move. Hank was helping Safiya to her feet.
‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ Asher was screaming. The armoured figure was just staring at the two of them.
Amanda didn’t think that Alan’s back was broken. Not that it mattered, she didn’t think that she had any choice but to try and move him.
‘I’ll see you dead for this! I’ll have your family fucking murdered!’ Asher screamed at Amanda. A shot rang out. Asher collapsed to the ground, holding his stomach. He started crying and letting out little squeals of pain. Amanda looked at the smoking Hammer II heavy automatic in her hand.
‘What did I tell you, Asher? You’ve got to leave people with something to lose.’ She threw the Hammer to the thing-in-armour. ‘Looks like you disarmed me and shot Dr Asher here,’ she told him/it. The figure nodded. ‘Use him for whatever you want, we’re taking our dead.’ The figure considered this and nodded again.
Amanda and Hank helped Alan up. He was moaning, fading in and out of consciousness. They headed back to the main cave. She glanced over her shoulder. Her last view of the Tinman was him advancing on the squealing gut-shot Dr Asher.
Her face hardened into a mask of hatred.
You killed my people, she thought, this isn’t over, motherfucker.
Daimyo (a fragment)
He’d read all of the warrior philosophers. Sun Tzu, Musashi, Clausewitz. The practical stuff, whilst much of it was often common sense, was a useful grounding in strategies. The rest of it’s navel-gazing bullshit to try and rationalise away killing a lot of people, in this marine’s opinion General Sherman Barclay thought as he looked at the half-full crystal glass of single malt whiskey. There’s no decency in war. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re defending your country, the rest of time you’re proving to some intransigent that you’re a bigger bastard than they are. In short, if you were a soldier, you did what you were told. He was a four-star general and commandant of the, until recently, United States Marine Corps. He’d got the job as a result of the cluster-fuck in New York. It was a rank he’d never wanted, but now that he had it he found that he also didn’t want to do what he was told.
The screen on the wall of his study was showing a newsfeed from the Macronet. His story hadn’t been at the top of the program, but he knew it was coming. The lead story was still CELL related. He watched a tall, old man, with features that reminded him of a hunting bird of prey, walk out of a huge skyscraper in Frankfurt into an explosion of camera flashes. His security were pushing reporters and paparazzi out of the way as he made his way to the waiting eight-wheeled armoured Mercedes limousine.
‘The boardroom coup ousting of Karl Ernst Rasch, CEO of Hargreave-Rasch BioChemical, comes as no surprise to business analysts in the wake of his comments criticising their subsidiary company, the CELL Corporation. Hargreave-Rasch has had some turbulent years, culminating in a name change to distance themselves from alleged unethical medical experiments. Rasch publicly spoke out against the energy giant’s alleged use of Ceph-derived technology in its New York facility…’
‘And fuck you, too,’ Barclay said and muted the sound. He was sat at his desk, still in his dress blues, his service M1911 on the blotter paper in front of him. He had disassembled it and cleaned it. The drilled-in repetition of the process helped him clear his mind. The whiskey had helped him fuzz it up some. He rapidly reassembled the .45.
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, as a young Captain, he had talked to a special forces operator who had told him that if anyone ever pulled a pistol on him, he should just turn and run. The operator had been of the opinion that pistols were so inaccurate that if you added the stress of combat, people had next to no chance of hitting anything. After that conversation Barclay had made it his business to be the best damn combat pistol shooter in the Marine Corps. A skill he’d had to put to good use on more than one occasion.
He slid a magazine into the pistol and worked the slide to chamber a round. An empty gun was nobody’s friend. He left the pistol hot, the safety off. It was against Corps regulations. It was a special forces trick, they wanted to draw and fire rapidly and smoothly. After all, it wasn’t like he had to worry about kids or grandkids in the house. He didn’t even have to worry about a wife anymore. Susan had told him when she had left that the marines were his mistress and she had never been able to compete.
He held the M1911 up and let the side of it rest against the grey hair on his temple. The black metal was cool against his head. He put it down on the gun-oil stained blotting paper. Next to his pride and joy.
Barclay had grown up in New York in a hard, working-class, Irish-American neighbourhood in the Bronx. His dad had loved westerns and from his dad he had inherited a love of America’s frontier history. As a child his father had taken him to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, to see the grave of William Barclay Masterton, better known as Bat Masterton. Masterton had been a buffalo hunter, army scout, Indian fighter, a gunman and a lawman. He had been a contemporary of Wyatt Earp’s. A young Sherman Barclay had been struck by the coincidence of sharing the same name with Masterton, even if it was only the gunman’s middle name.
He had been a newly promoted first lieutenant when the gun had come up for auction. A .45 Colt Peacemaker owned by Bat Masterton his own damned self, complete with notches on the grip. What had tickled Barclay about the pistol most of all was that it hadn’t been the one used in Dodge City or in Colorado during the railroad wars. It was one of two pistols that Masterton had bought from pawnshops in New York when he was working there as a newspaper man and writer in the latter part of his life. He’d cut notches in them and sold them to people, telling them they were the pistols from his gun-fighting days.
It had taken every last penny of his savings and a loan that he’d lied to the bank about. Susan and he had only just got married and it was one of the worst arguments they had ever had, but he had bought the gun. Over a period of years he’d lovingly restored it, and then, because he hated useless things, he’d learnt to shoot with it. That hadn’t been easy. He suspected that throwing live canaries at a dartboard would prove to be more accurate than the damn Peacemaker.