The younger guard had reacted by then and was reaching for his weapon. I pivoted and threw the older man at him. Maybe it was Callisto’s gravity, my unfamiliarity with the physical limits of my prosthetics, or a combination of the two, but his body went farther and faster than I’d intended. He hit the younger man, knocked him off his feet, and drove the both of them into the wall beside the door.
They landed in a tangle on the floor. The older man was fighting just to breathe and had a leg bent in the wrong direction, but the younger was still in the fight. I was already moving in as he unholstered his weapon. I grabbed his forearm with one hand and pushed against his knuckles with the other, twisting his wrist inward.
It was a standard disarming technique but, like the throw, but I put too much behind it. His wrist made a sound like gravel underfoot and the skin split like nylon fabric. As blood streamed from the jagged wound, he screamed. I reflexively bladed my hand and struck him in the throat. As he gagged and clutched at his neck with one hand, I shifted my balance and slipped behind him. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arm under his chin.
Carefully and deliberately, I applied pressure until he went limp. I then rolled him off of me and turned my attention to the older man. He’d fallen unconscious, though I wasn’t sure if it was from trauma or shock. I rolled him onto his side and pulled his jaw open to ease his breathing. I didn’t have to search to find his dataspike. It was in plain view behind his right ear. I pulled it off and crushed it with my heel.
I looked up at the lock on Solovyov’s door. It was a proximity-based card reader, nothing too difficult for my skeleton key, but exposing the physical port to use it would be tedious. I turned back to the unconscious man in front of me and rifled through his pockets. Sure enough, I found a key card to the apartment. His dataspike was tucked into the collar of his shirt, a clever tactic that almost convinced me he didn’t have one. It was an ultrathin design from this year, too flat to crush, but it was long enough to snap in half with my fingers.
I considered taking his weapon as well, but the objective here was to talk to Solovyov. If things went bad I could easily adapt, but bringing a gun to the meeting would be a guaranteed escalation of violence. It suggested a malign intent, more so than what I’d done to his security. At the very least, these men were still alive.
I stood and waved the card in front of the lock. It played a short tone, and I heard the magnets disengage. I slid the key into my pocket, entered Solovyov’s home, and locked the door behind me.
I was in a kind of foyer, a large oval-shaped room with halls to the left and right. Arranged in a semicircle along the walls were a series of portraits, one of which I recognized as Solovyov himself. They all seemed to be actual paints on panel. Faint hints of relief accompanied some of the thicker strokes of color. Something like that wasn’t particularly rare among the wealthy—the Black Kuei syndicate used art as a form of untraceable currency—but who the paintings depicted seemed out of place.
They were each of one subject and included men and women of varying ethnicities. I didn’t recognize any of the people except Solovyov. On the far right was his portrait, looking like he did in most photos of the Russo-Sino Armistice decades ago, but on the far left was an image of a child. The only one of the series, it was an image of a young boy sitting in a street among brightly colored plasticrete-block buildings. There was a deep cut along his cheek, and dried blood stained his face and clothing. His dark brown eyes stared out of the canvas with a look that was either the beginnings of a scowl or wince.
The boy’s portrait was subtly menacing and was probably why I went right instead of left. The hall led to a guest room with a collection of historic artwork. Small jade Buddhist statues and wooden topeng masks were locked inside minimalist display cases tastefully arranged around the space almost like a gallery.
This room had a view, looking out over the neighborhood. I took a moment to glance outside, checking for any sign of StateSec. It wasn’t likely, but Lera the receptionist could have noticed that I hadn’t yet returned and alerted someone. I saw nothing but quiet streets and tree-lined skyways in the perpetual violet twilight.
I heard voices from around the far corner. I put a hand on my pocket and checked my posture, repeating my cover to myself. I crossed the room and rounded the corner into an open kitchen. There were three men in black suits gathered around the center island. The empty plates told me why I had encountered these men so far into the penthouse. One of the men was in the middle of a story.
“She said she’s married, but she’s always sticking those tits out when I walk in the building, and I’m thinking ‘how married are you?’ One day I’m gonna—”
One saw me then and motioned to the others. The man who was speaking paused in mid-sentence, arm still raised with a glass of water in his hand. As far as they knew, they hadn’t heard anything about a trespasser, and I didn’t look the part, so who was I and what was I doing here?
“Excuse me…sir? I wasn’t told—”
“It’s fine. That’s alright, really. Don’t worry about it.” I flashed a smile at them, as I approached. I leaned against the island countertop in an open posture. “Should I be waiting somewhere else?”
The man with the drink looked at his buddies, then he set his drink down on the countertop and turned back toward me. “Do you have a meeting with Mr. Solovyov, sir?”
“I do. The guys at the door told me to go on in, but I seem to have gotten lost along the way somehow.”
The man to his left closed his eyes. It was something people often did when making dataspike calls as a way to see the AR more clearly. I knew he was calling the men at the door, but I wasn’t sure how he would react when neither picked up. I could wait for him to walk away and check on them, leaving me with just two people to deal with instead of three, but that would also mean I’d eventually have one man on alert out of sight.
“What was your name again, sir,” he asked. I decided the risk of taking on three at once was justified.
I snapped my arm up into a punch, then I rotated at the hip and twisted my upper body to strike through the man standing in front of me. My fist caught the storyteller just under the cheekbone. His head whipped back, and his body folded backward over the countertop. I didn’t fight the momentum, pushing off to jump over the island as I continued to twist in the air.
The man behind him shouted something, the beginning of a threat or some exclamation of shock maybe. I couldn’t be sure. I snapped my head to look over my shoulder as I spun, and as soon as I could see him, I drove my heel into his mouth. The kick knocked him off his feet and slammed his head against the floor. Teeth skittered across the white marble, and blood seeped from his ears as I landed.
The man on the call had his eyes open by then. I pivoted on my heel, stepping into a hammerfist at his head. To his credit, the man reacted fast enough to cross his arms to block, but it was a poor choice against an augmented human. His arms gave way like matchsticks and the back of my hand met his face. He stumbled back and tripped over the second man as blood poured freely from his nose and bubbled from his mouth through gritted teeth. I lay on top of him and pressed my arm against his throat. I couldn’t imagine the pain as he fought feebly to push me off with hands dangling at odd angles from his elbows. After a few seconds, his eyes rolled back under fluttering lids and I felt his racing heart slow.