Chapter 1: Not Prepared

The young man huddled on hands and knees behind the thick wooden table he’d overturned. Adrenaline pumped through him, causing his muscles to shudder with their need to move. With an iron will, he stilled his musculature. There would be a time for movement, but it had not yet come.

Lights flickered and danced far above him. There was an acrid odor, the strange scent of ionized air and the sickly-sweet smell of burning gunpowder. A breeze wafted lightly across his face and his ears heard the humming sound of an air conditioning system blowing recycled air from somewhere above and in front of him. In but an instant, his mind filed the odors and air currents away. His senses were preternaturally active, taking in every minute detail of his surroundings. His equally active mind was accepting all the data his senses could accumulate. In less time than it took his heart to beat, he was building a three-dimensional picture of the world around him through his senses. Order from chaos.

His body was curled in upon itself, but his muscles were taut. His eyes and head were moving, searching. A mild snarl curled across his face. A hint of violence hovered around his cheeks and in the corners of his mouth. His eyes, when they stopped, were cold and calculating, consuming the tidbits of data and weighing them.

He felt caught. He felt trapped. It was when he was at his most dangerous.

However, he had to admit to himself things were not looking good. He wasn’t completely certain he believed in God or any other Supreme Being but he was relatively certain that someone or something – Fate, God or some all-powerful hidden hand somewhere up the food chain – was not particularly fond of him.

Either that or he was just a magnet for trouble. Dealer’s choice.

‘Neither of which is going to get me out of this mess,’ he chided himself silently. He looked back at the two-meter slab of pure muscle lying nice and relaxed, catching some z’s on the ground behind him. The Marine looked almost angelic lying there, four greenish tinged darts sticking in the side of his neck.

If an angel were two meters tall, built of grotesquely large muscles and was missing any sign of pearly white wings. An argument could be made for a more demonic bearing just as easily though the lack of horns and tail were just as problematic.

His eyes narrowed at the four darts. Someone was a pretty good marksman. The fifth dart, tip bent and broken, lying within arm’s length of the Marine belied that statement. Four out of five wasn’t bad, though, until you considered the whole ambush angle.

For a moment, he considered grabbing the Marine’s weapon but discarded the thought almost as quickly. He was familiar with a wide range of Earth guns and was proficient with many of them – maybe even most. He’d studied as much as he could find of the Confederacy’s weapons – but he’d never actually held a stinger like the one holstered at the Marine’s side. He’d never actually fired it. He wasn’t even sure he could fire it. For all he knew, they’d keyed the Marines’ weapons to their specific fingerprints or DNA. The Dark Web contained more rumors than fact when it came to the Confederacy and its capabilities.

He blew a long breath as his mind began painting a very unflattering picture. There was a good chance this wasn’t going to end well.

The mild snarl turned cruel as his eyes narrowed. For them.

Almost without thought, he stilled his mind, preparing for what was to come. As his mind quieted, he started wriggling out of his clothing, careful not to allow any part of himself to show over or around the table. Though he didn’t consciously realize it, the need to change – to swap his street clothes for his working clothes – was almost purely psychological. For the past two years, he’d been so careful to keep Espanto and Calix separate that needing to be one or the other was simply a part of him. This was habit – though there was a slight tactical advantage to removing the outer layer of clothing. It could bind and hamper him marginally.

All in all, his conscious mind might have given up the marginal edge removing his street clothes gave him. Removing them wasn’t easy, after all. The tabletop wasn’t really built to hide a man just shy of two meters tall. The regular crack of shots tearing pieces out of the top of the table was bad enough. He didn’t need for anyone to get lucky with a piece of his anatomy.

The table was thick – typical saloon issue. Still, he knew from experience that he couldn’t expect the table to last forever. The shots tearing chunks out of the tabletop meant the table was getting thinner in areas. A shot in a thin area might just get through.

Not for the first time in the last few minutes, he wondered just how the hell he’d gotten into this mess. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He’d known he’d be fighting for his life eventually – the Confederacy is fighting the Sa’arm, after all – but he thought he’d have at least a slight break. Maybe that damned asshole up the food chain had just decided his recent few months of relative relaxation were enough.

‘You ready for this?’ Octavia had asked him not more than a few minutes ago. He’d replied he was ready. The ironic thing was he truly and foolishly thought it was true. He thought he was ready. He’d thought his days of fighting on the streets of Detroit, of protecting the Cholos, his family, had prepared him for what came next.

If this were any indication, then he certainly wasn’t ready. Not by a long shot. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be in this predicament.

Looking out as he slid his pants down his legs, revealing not pale, pinkish skin but black mesh leggings, he had to re-iterate his earlier sentiment: it wasn’t supposed to be like this. He didn’t even really want more concubines – or their dependents. The Sergeant in charge of the pickup had convinced him it was his duty to take more women – to take the most he could – in order to evacuate as many humans from Earth as possible. It made sense – too much sense – so, against his better judgment, he’d selected Heather, Julia and Yolanda. Yolanda, though, was a fair bit older than him and had two under-age daughters who’d been secreted in the pub – this pub. He’d come with her to get them. He and Yolanda were leading a rat-faced female sponsor and one of her concubines, all of them following a hulking Marine - the Marine who was now lying behind him, tranq’ed.

He should have been paying attention. He shouldn’t have let down his guard. He’d never expected hostiles to be in the tavern. He thought the Confederacy would have all of this handled. Wasn’t that their job?

Except now he was part of the Confederacy. Ipso Facto, this was his job. Damn it all to hell.

In the face of the gunfire, he’d sent Yolanda out to get help. He’d even barked at the rat-woman to go with her. Yolanda hadn’t wanted to go – but she did it at a dead run, the rat and her concubine following after, looking startled. He had hoped the cavalry would get here before he had to move but he wasn’t betting on it. If there were a Supreme Being, he/she/it was laughing at him, as usual. Also as usual, he was alone.

Taking a deep breath, he shook his head. Focus. Control. He could only hope there would be time for recriminations later. Right now, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered just then except the work ahead.

He chanced a peek over the top of the table but yanked his head back immediately. He was lucky. A bullet barely passed over him in one direction and the greenish blur of a dart zipped by in another.

He’d angled the table to hide him from both directions, but it was makeshift at best. If he didn’t figure out a way around this soon, they would flank him and he’d be done for. At best, he wouldn’t handle the darts any better than the Marine behind him and at worst he might come away with extra holes he really didn’t need.

He went over what he knew. The Hot Spot Bar and Grill had a long room colored with neutral shades of tan and yellow decorating the walls. Based on what he’d seen coming in and the brief look just now, the room was eighteen to twenty meters long beyond the table with a door indicating there was even more beyond that. The saloon itself wasn’t well lit. There was some flickering fluorescent or spot lighting in the shelving behind the bar and some equally flickering, well-placed hanging lights just above it. Thanks to minimal over-all lighting and tinted, thick, Plexiglas windows, the rest of the pub was mostly dim and hidden. He thought he might be able to use the darkness to his advantage. Darkness had always been his friend.

Information had been a pretty good friend, too.

The black tiles with gray flecks underneath him were dirty and sticky in places - the pub was dimly lit for more than one reason. He’d have to take it into account when he moved. The stickiness would make him marginally slower and the dirt could be slippery.

Behind him was the narrow entryway he’d come through. When he had entered, he noted it opened to the left with the long bar – either wooden or faux-wood – taking up that wall. He’d angled the table to protect him from both sets of enemies - the men behind the long, faux-wooden bar (he’d decided internally that the tavern wasn’t well-off enough to actually afford real wood, what with the current prices) were mostly in front of him now.

Mostly. The dart shooters were behind the bar and the bullet shooters were further down the long room. He counted three of the former and perhaps a half dozen of the latter.

Not good odds. He was lucky they considered the Marine to be the primary threat.

He pulled a pair of gloves from one set of pockets and a rolled-up mask from another. He pulled on the gloves and flexed the fingers, stretching to make sure the mesh was seated properly on his hands. Taking one last look around, he unrolled the mask and pulled it over his head, the hem snicking into place against the mesh shirt audibly. There was a thin polymer in the hem of both the mask and gloves that matched a polymerase in the neck. When he placed the hood on, a slight electric surge not much larger than static electricity sealed the polymer and polymerase, making the edge of the suit a series of long-chain molecules. A slightly different electric surge would break the chain and allow him to remove the mask later.

As soon as the mask sealed to the body of the armor, he found himself strangely at peace. NOW he was ready. Now was the time for action.

As the HUD turned on, confirming the three dartists but only showing four shooters, he found himself calm and relaxed. All the while, adrenaline was still pumping and his muscles were still flexing, preparing for another sortie. The gentleman he played when his armor was off or hidden sank into the deep recesses of the monster’s mind. It was time to go to work and what he thought of as his human self would only hinder him now. In the jungle, only those savages willing to kill made it out alive.

The black mesh outfit, hidden earlier under his now discarded clothing, was a supple black armor. From a distance, it resembled leather but up close you could see a sheen that resembled nothing so much as matted plastic. It was neither. A carbon fiber/polymer-latex resin composite fabric of his own design, the armor was impenetrable to small arms fire and distributed the force of any impact to a wider area along his body. He’d still feel impacts but anything short of a rocket-launcher shouldn’t disable him – and if they had rocket launchers, he was fucked anyway.

The armor also featured supports along the major bones in the arms, legs, hands, fingers, feet and spine as well as a protective cup around the genitals to ward off blows. There were also, mostly hidden from view, an amazing array of pockets where he kept other nasty little toys.

“The assailants appear to have barricaded both sets of doors - inner doors and vestibule doors,” a dispassionate voice said quietly almost as soon as his mask locked into place, activating the interwoven electronics embedded within the armor. One of those electronics was a link to one of the many alien AIs that seemed to exist around the Earth (also known as Sol 3 and Terra, occasionally, by its inhabitants and Earth-at, regularly, by their alien benefactors). It looked like the AI wanted to get in on the fun. “Three are currently sealing and affixing explosives and other counter-measures on the inner surface of the doors as well as the flooring surrounding the doors.”

He turned his head for a second and found three small, red diamonds tracking men hidden from his view behind him. He wasn’t sure if the HUD used heat-sensors, AI intelligence or some science he hadn’t encountered yet – probably all three with maybe some voodoo thrown in – but he’d never found it to be inaccurate. If there were three diamonds on the HUD, there were three people on the other side of that corner.

Damn. The three red diamonds meant not only did he have people shooting at him from the far side of the restaurant and people with tranquilizer darts on the other side of the wooden bar to the left, but pretty soon he was going to have company from the back. He had to move soon, or he might not ever move again.

He turned his head towards the bar and three more red diamonds marked the three other unseen men. Turning his head towards the table showed four more diamonds off in the distance. Small letters and numbers attached to the diamonds gave pertinent statistics like distance and heartbeat.

All in all, it seemed there were ten attackers and only one him. It seemed about right. He growled a bit at the unseen Supreme Being mucking up his life.

“How the heck did they get weapons and explosives past Confederacy scanners, Hermes?” he asked sub-vocally while he began mapping the room in his head.

The AI was not named ‘Hermes’, though it’d come to answer to the appellation. In truth, it had no name – or, at least, not a name as humans designated. To most Terrans, it was simply ‘the Earth-at AI’, ‘that damned AI’, and a few other more colorful and less savory names.

To Calix, though, the AI often sounded almost human even if Hermes’ inflection and word selection put the lie to his impression. Still, he found he had a bad habit of anthropomorphizing things – such as vehicles, armor, even computers (and, by extension, AIs). He called the AI after the Greek god Hermes – messenger of the gods. It seemed appropriate at the time.

He mapped things in his head more as a habit from before he’d gotten the new armor with its enhanced heads-up display (HUD) but it was equally as useful even with the added electronics. The HUD could only go so far. It could accurately track assailants and the surfaces of the room but it couldn’t – or, at least, didn’t – provide him any indication of what the surfaces were made of, how slippery they were and other tactical knowledge he felt he needed.

He’d wondered a time or two whether such information was available to be mapped on the HUD – but he’d never asked. He liked the manual method he used. The HUD – and the AI – were useful tools but he’d long ago learned the most reliable tools were the ones with which he’d been born.

He turned his concentration to the room. It helped to calm him. He could feel the fear, panic and worry receding, being pushed down into mental compartments and then locked away. He frowned as he realized there was some strain with compartmentalizing things. It could only mean...

He stopped himself. Survive the next few minutes then worry about the other issues. One problem at a time.

“The weapons and counter-measures were hidden in the flooring beneath this structure,” Hermes responded. “It appears there are one or more illicit voids under this section of the mall. Our scans and blueprints do not show any substructures below this section of the building.”

“In other words, you messed up,” the young man said as he began taking deep breaths. However, he was only paying partial attention to the voice, however. Most of his attention was spent gauging distances to the long, wooden bar and calculating how long it would take him to move to various places. He was adjusting his sense of space. The gunners at the far end of the saloon continued taking pot shots at the table but the shots were fairly rhythmic, meaning they may have become lulled into over-confidence of their superior numbers.

“That is not entirely accurate, Calix,” Hermes replied, his voice almost seeming hurt. Calix wondered absently if artificial intelligences were capable of having their feelings hurt. It led him into thinking how programming could simulate feelings – and then he shook his head to clear it.

After. He had to survive first. “I am not infallible. I could not be expected to know...”

“Well, it looks like you don’t want to come out and play,” Calix heard a high-pitched, nasally voice with a decidedly southern twang calling from the area at the far end of the tavern. They didn’t call this city Taylor-tucky for nothing. A significant percentage of the population had migrated here to look for work in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Since most of the people who settled in the city were from southern states, it had become a common joke that Kentucky had just moved itself to Taylor, Michigan. The fact wasn’t helpful in the least, but Calix let it wash over him none-the-less. He was of the opinion one couldn’t know too much about their opponents. “That’s too bad. Either you come out or we start reducing the number of civilians you were planning to take away from us.”

Calix considered the threat hollow – he doubted the idiots would kill innocent bystanders since the blowback would negatively impact the image of whatever group they represented – but he couldn’t be sure. There really were crazy people out there.

He should know. He was one of them.

“Hold that thought,” the young man softly responded to the AI It wasn’t lost on him the voice at the far end of the saloon was trying to draw his attention in that direction. It could only mean either the dart shooters were angling for a better firing position or the assholes at the doors were done with whatever Machiavellian hell they’d been tasked with and were coming his way. Maybe both. Either way, he needed to move his ass while he still could.

Calix centered himself, feeling calm wash over him. He gave himself to his senses. He entrusted himself to Espanto.

He quickly moved into a crouch, hands on the floor at the edge of the table and left foot partially forward. He took a deep breath and leapt, the table’s sturdy legs giving an assist. As he rose, he started twisting himself slightly so he could come down on his left shoulder. He did a Parkour roll, winding up on his right hip before rolling back to his feet. He heard the bullets striking the floor just behind him as he reached his footing but his eyes were only for the three men behind the bar, one edging towards his left and two further on his right, exactly where the red diamonds of his HUD said they’d be.

He continued upward, his legs uncoiling and driving him into the air as he leaned forward. His eyes took in the details of the bar, absently noting the dark, rich, wood-like veneer and mundane craftsmanship. The artistic details were stored in the back of his head to be looked at later. At that moment, he was more concerned the veneer meant cheaper wood beneath and probably not hardwood – hardwood was rich and putting veneer over the top of it would cheapen the whole thing.

The probability of cheaper wood paused him for less than a fraction of a second. Cheaper wood meant it would give some if he landed on it. Maybe his luck was turning up. A cheaper wood would not be as strong but would have a slight, natural spring to it that could help him if he bounced off it. His active mind added that to his estimations of the amount of pressure the bar could take, calculating the width of the bar, gap distance between the bar proper and the lighted shelving behind it, and the projected movements of his current three targets. In an instant, he used all of the data to formulate his plan of attack.

Additional bullet impacts also captured his interest as he measured the speed with which the shooter’s aim was being corrected. Meanwhile, his eyes also glanced at the doorway, trying to anticipate when it would be filled with hostiles. Everything he knew, everything he thought, and every estimation he made went into the computer of his mind, adjusting his plan, readying his muscles for what they’d need to do. His mind was scripting his movements, taking into account potential pitfalls or changes, how his targets would adapt to his movements and what he might need to do to counter those movements.

The mind planned and the muscles reacted ... but at a speed which made it look effortless. An outside observer would only see the poetry of the motion, never suspecting the intellect behind the movements.

The simplest truth was his mind was filled with moves and countermoves. His mind was constantly adjusting and preparing. In hand-to-hand combat, using muscle memory to allow your body to respond while out-planning and out-thinking your opponents was often the difference between life and death.

His hands contacted the bar even as he curled his legs into his chest. Leaning forward, he kong-vaulted the bar, correcting the additional spring he expected from the cheap wood even as he moved forward, and uncurled his legs towards the man with the dart gun on his left. The man, eyes wide, was trying to adjust to the unexpected dark figure suddenly appearing before him.

Sadly, the large, black man was far too late. Catching the man with both feet in the chest, Calix’s forward momentum kicked the man hard into the shelving behind him. The satisfying crash of broken bottles added to the cacophony of bullets and groans.

All things being equal, however, Newton’s laws usually must be obeyed. Striking the man had transferred most of his forward momentum to his prey, forcing Calix to fall earthward. It turned out to be a good thing as two darts suddenly appeared in the chest of the man he’d just kicked. The man slid slowly to the ground.

One down. If four darts took down a Marine, two should be more than enough for the guy he’d smashed into the shelving.

Meanwhile, Calix arched his back, letting his hands reach for the ground. For the barest of moments, Calix was upright but upside-down, his legs in the air as his hands supported him. Then, he turned slightly and flipped himself towards the two remaining dart shooters. He somersaulted in the air to get his feet beneath him and then spent a single heartbeat to swipe his hands together because the rubber matting behind the bar was slightly tacky from spilled liquids and who knew what else. It meant there would be slightly more drag on any part of his body which came in contact with the flooring and he’d have to account for the difference. The devil was ALWAYS in the details.

Calix saw the dart shooters’ eyes glance to their left for the briefest of instants and his eyes narrowed. Company was calling from the doorway behind him. Caught between two dart shooters, four gun-men a dozen meters forward and three enemies to his rear with unknown capabilities, Calix crouched down to minimize his vulnerabilities to the enemies both forward and back. As bottles and lights in front and behind him shattered, he knew he was just in time, too.

So, shooters forward and back made his plans shift marginally, ensuring the added variables were taken into account. He’d need to take care of the imminent threat from the opponents with darts first. He couldn’t be certain the pointed tips of the darts wouldn’t be able to penetrate his armor.