One man was on overwatch for the Callahan team. He carried a two-bore Ruger Falchion anti-vehicular rifle. The mingling odors of fear-sweat and baby formula wafting off him triggered sense-­memories of someone holding a newborn infant. Roland guessed the man must have a kid back home. A kid he’s scared of leaving fatherless if some chromed out acid-head fillets him. That was useful data. He filed it away in the chunk of his brain least likely to lose that information over the next four seconds. Roland’s memory was real good in four-second chunks.

Over the next picosecond he caught equally informative whiffs of the others. It was enough to suggest that the two women in the main assault team were lovers, and they’d both had milspec sub-dermal armor implanted recently. The acrid scent of fresh sutures hung heavy in the air around them. Roland could also tell that one of the men in the assault party took heavy testosterone supplements, either because of a genetic abnormality or because he’d been assigned female at birth. The fourth man was moderately addicted to ephedrix and riding into battle on a high stimulant wave.

The last member of the assault team was the only one to give Roland any pause. He could guess the man’s height and weight (six foot five, two-hundred-forty pounds) from the sound of his footfalls. Roland could smell the Sig Sauer .500 submachine gun in his hands, but otherwise the man was a sensory blank. No sweat, no hydraulics, and black to thermographic sensors. The man was chromed. Not so heavily as Roland, of course, but the competent and well-armed squad he led might be enough to narrow the gap.

Where in the shitting shitshitshit did I leave that gun?

The static balance in the air changed as the overwatch team warmed up their sound cannon. The assault team was close now, barely a hundred feet out, waiting in the cover provided by several large boulders at the base of the rise that held Roland’s ramshackle home. He knew how this fight would go. They’d unleash the Callahan for a good five seconds while the kill-team moved into position and kicked in the door. Next the big bruiser and the two women would enter while the remainder of the assault team fanned out to cover the sides.

Textbook post-human kill-team tactics, he thought. He didn’t actually remember any of the fights this conclusion was based on. But he’d clearly lived through similar encounters. And if he trusted his body and hindbrain he would again.

Roland finished searching the apocalyptic ruin that was his kitchen sink. The pile of plates had been large enough to hide a short-barrel AR-10, but his gun wasn’t there either.