“Aghh! Hee… Ghh! Ghhk?! Gahh! Ighh…!”
“Come on, umri <die>! Umri! Idti pogibni uzhe <Fuckin’ bite it already>!”
There was a splorching sound, like pounding raw meat with a hammer and putting it through a grinder. The guy making the sound might feel pretty good about it, but those of us who had to listen weren’t necessarily enjoying the experience.
We were in a gray room that was unadorned and all too familiar. The men waiting their turn in a corner of the room looked downright bored.
“Bah! A full cyborg gettin’ riled up!”
“Aw, shaddup! Say what you want, my mods are all set!”
“Ooh, what? You squirmin’? You shakin’? Pathetic.”
“I don’t want to hear it from some creep who uses PNV to get a peek under folks’ clothes!”
The men—the enforcers—were a motley blend of different levels of cyberization. One guy had just a single arm that glinted chrome; another had lenses implanted in both eyes.
But two of the guys in the crowd stood out. Metal monsters with machinery buried from the top of their head to the tips of their fingers. Full cyborgs, no doubt. Military spec.
They were a step down from the absolute newest tech, but that didn’t change the fact that they were walking weapons. I was surprised the army let them take that stuff with them when they were discharged, but at the same time, the brain inside all the chrome wasn’t so different from the other brains around them.
“The boss likes that kind, too. ’Course, the only happy ending I get is to hang around while he does it.”
“Man, I’m sick of these cheap whores, though. I’d like to do it with a girl with a bit more class.”
“Ooh, ya mean like Miss Moscow?”
“Now, there’s a looker. Short hair, right? But a whore’s a whore. Same line of business, if you know what I mean.”
The full cyborg laughed, the sound interspersed with the crackle of static; I could hear him from where I was.
That’s right: me. Me, clinging to a hot-water pipe and climbing up the side of the building. Even if some of them had heat sensors, as long as I was holding on to the pipe, they’d never notice me—probably. I hoped.
—Now, then.
Much as I might not like the prospect, the preparations were all made, which meant there was nothing left but to do it. I glanced at my Sturmanskie, then pulled my sleeve down over the watch and reached for the window.
I happened to know that the glass in this building wasn’t bulletproof. Not that I was smart enough to tell one type of glass from another. Could you even tell just by looking? How different could they possibly be?
What I did know was that even if the glass were bulletproof, there wouldn’t be much point to it if it was filthy and cracked.
Holding on to the pipe with my right hand, I pushed off the wall and thrust my left elbow, covered by my body armor, into the window.
“The hell?!”
“Blin <Crap>!”
The new crack in the glass got the guys’ attention. This would be the deciding moment.
“S dnem rozhdeniya <Happy birthday>!” I shouted. I clenched my fist and used the momentum of my elbow strike to smash through the window with a little friend.
By which I mean…
“A grenade!”
No sooner had I heard the voice shout than there was a plack like someone getting slapped on the butt, and the grenade burst in a pale cloud of electricity.
That’s right: It was an electromagnetic grenade.
Me, I was just a meatbag, so I could use it without thinking twice. Lucky me.
I assumed the woman was organic, too—but, well, even if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t kill her. I needed her to work with me here.
I barely even listened to the screaming of the scrap heaps flailing inside as I let go of the pipe. No need to get involved with them. The client wanted a distraction? They’d just gotten one.
“You pieces of shit! You didn’t even take any defensive measures! Fine. Ya poshol, prikroi menia <I’ll go and you back me up>!”
“Da!”
I made two mistakes here. One was letting myself get distracted by the mechanical form that came hulking out of the window while I should have been focused on jumping down.
The other was picking a fight with two MIL-SPEC, military specification standard, full cyborgs.
“…Tsk!” I grunted as a sharp pain ran to my ankles when I landed—the snow cover on the ground was thinner than I had expected.
Still, I didn’t have time to appreciate this reminder of the blessings of being organic. As I ran, almost tumbling, there was a loud thud behind me.
The reason my pursuers could take that impact so casually was because they were literally built different than I was.
“Ooh, you’ve done it now, Janitor!”
“You’re freakin’ dead!”
Well, that was a pretty fair assessment of a guy being chased by two cyborgs, I thought.
And most Janitors who twisted their ankles jumping from the second story of a kommunalka subsequently died.
“Tsk! This is why I hate the guys with shock absorbers…!” I grunted, cursing the other guys’ spring legs as I rolled into a back alley piled with gray snow.
I thought I had a pretty good handle on Moscow’s alleyways. Thanks to His Excellency the Man of Steel, they were all the same.
No sooner had I hopped behind some cover, dragging one leg, than the concrete wall was shredded.
“Stand still, sobaka!”
I was all too aware that the griping cyborg was carrying an absurdly large machine pistol. Anyone who would happily carry—let alone use—a VAG-73 was either an idiot, ex-military, or both. The bullets that thing fired were basically rockets, each bigger than Stasia’s lipstick. And unless I was misremembering, it carried forty-eight rounds. Listen, you didn’t have to shoot somebody that many times to kill them. Especially not a meatbag like me.
The guy was currently unloading at the wall on full auto, so yes, I was as good as dead.
I was hoping he would be closer to the idiot end of the scale, but I hadn’t run into this alleyway banking on that.
He was a mafia enforcer. I’d known they were strong since I was fifteen years old.
“Davai!” I shouted, and twisted toward him, then pulled the trigger on my PPSh submachine gun.
A multitude of 7.6 mm Tokarev bullets went flying like water from a hose. They filled the narrow alleyway, sparking off the cyborg in front.
“Hngh?!”
“The hell do you think you’re doing, trus?!”
The second cyborg dodged his stumbling companion and squeezed past him, his armor scraping against the wall as he plunged toward me.
—That’s what you get for not doing some exercise, losing a little weight!
If I said that sort of thing to Stasia or Nora, they would have scratched me bloody. I dove around the next corner.
You know, I guess Mariya wouldn’t have been any happier. She spent all her time cooped up in her room. I detached the PPSh’s empty magazine.
I’d have to get Valery to drag Mariya out with us sometime. I flung the spent clip at my pursuer.
There was a distinct metallic crack, and the clip twisted into scrap in midair.
“Your hand grenades won’t work on us again, boy!”
“Whoops!”
If he thought that was a grenade I’d thrown at him, so much the better. I smiled under my balaclava and lunged around another corner.
That was ten shots—Captain Murometz would count the bullets like that, aiming to run them out of rounds.
Sadly, however, I was not Captain Murometz. I wasn’t actually sure if the guy had fired ten rounds or twenty, and besides, think of how much a VAG-73’s clip could hold. And there were two of them. After ninety-six rockets had come my way, I was going to be a pile of quivering flesh.
The only reason I was still alive was because I was hightailing it around these narrow alleyways, and I figured the guys would work out a way to deal with that pretty soon.
Of course, if they were a couple of idiots, it would be a different story. I’d been hoping—but, well, it was probably too much to ask.
One meatbag Janitor taking down two cyborgs head-on? You would need protection from the unscientific being they called God, or it would never happen.
Which meant that today, as always, I was just going to have to do what I could.