Roland smelled the familiar scent of anti-hemorrhagic nanomachines as they rushed to save the man’s life. He caught a slight sour whiff of the cheap clotting agents in the man’s blood. Roland guessed it was TrauMax brand, which was convenient. TrauMax had based their whole line off of a piece of Brazilian military wetware that itself was based on a crude synthesis of horseshoe crab blood. The organs worked well enough, unless you happened to be an amphetamine addict who’d suffered massive tissue damage. Then your TrauMax unit would flood your synapses with adenosine to knock you out, rather than risk pushing more amphetamines on your stressed heart.

Something in the smell of the man’s blood set off a powerful sense memory buried deep in Roland’s hippocampus—vines slashing his face, boiling jungle heat, and his fist connecting with the face of a heavily armed young woman. Her orbital bone broke under the blow, he smelled her blood meet the air and she dropped, dropped, dropped—the memory flashed by, free of context, in the time it took the other man to hit the ground.

It was frustrating to only remember the “what” of an action, and not the “why” or the “after.” It was like knowing how to ride a bike without remembering who’d taught you and when, only for everything. Roland found it somewhat unsettl–

A 12-gauge slug hit him in the thigh. It dug deep, hit reinforced bone, and stopped. The little machines in Roland’s blood were already cutting it apart by the time he stopped musing and bounded over to the other flank-man. Roland chucked the two-by-four hard as he ran. The wood impacted above the assassin’s temple with an audible crack, shattering the man’s sphenoid bone.

The battle drugs started to trickle into Roland’s synapses now, a cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, and epinephrine concocted to make violence as addictive as a fat rock of crystal meth. Roland instantly wanted more, and he knew he could trigger a greater dose by stomping on the downed man’s skull and ending his life. He fought down the urge and, instead, grabbed the man’s AA-32 combat shotgun and rolled for cover behind a red-rock boulder.

He was almost fast enough. But either the overwatch man had some aftermarket parts Roland hadn’t smelled or all the hardcore drug abuse had done long-term damage to his reflexes. Maybe no more crack binges, Roland thought as a massive two-bore slug blew most of his left shoulder out into the desert behind him.

Roland belted out several fuckwords as pain flooded the banks of his dampeners. And just that second, with truly exquisite timing, the Callahan crew swiveled their weapon around and poured sonic fire at him from above.