Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (18 page)

Snatching up a radio from one side of his belt and the Colt M1917 six-shooter with the other, MacAnders screamed, “The Colonel’s been murdered!”

Mal’s superhuman reflexes flipped him over the back of his chair, allowing him to dodge the first shot squeezed off by the frantic Corporal. His body landed low in a fighting stance, his arms elongating into knives even as they bulked up in size.

Bracing himself to leap across the room and disarm the little ginger-haired member of the United States Army, Mal is brought up short by Zuz beating him to the punch, literally, with a haymaker to the man’s jaw.

“Nice punch, Z,” said Mal, impressed with his friend’s out of character display of force.

“I think I broke my hand, Mal.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Mal, urging Zuz to head for the still open office door. “Someone’s set us up.”

Staring down at the unconscious form of Corporal MacAnders, Zuz ignored Mal’s urging and bent down to pick up the man’s discarded pistol.

“Now this is what I’m talkin’ about,” said Zuz through a cartoonish smirk, performing a ridiculous ‘action hero’ pose with the weapon.

Mal shook his head and pushed his friend towards the exit.

“Keep moving, Doctor Jones.”

The pair made it less than two feet before all hell broke loose behind them. A chopper, cheerfully identified as a Boeing AH-64D Apache attack helicopter, dropped down suddenly from the sky overhead to the wide space between the training facility’s buildings, and filled the wall of windows behind them

The cyborg didn’t need his computer to tell him the two pilots pointing at him from the vehicle’s cockpit were there for less than friendly reasons.

“Get down!” barked Mal, tackling his friend, shielding Zuz’s body from the torrent of high explosive rounds spitting out at a rate of 625 rounds per minute from the M230E1 chain gun mounted on the undercarriage of the Apache.

A hail of 30mm gun fire blasted into the room for a full thirty seconds, punching holes through walls, blowing apart furniture, sending papers, foot-long splinters of wood and shattered glass into the air, which quickly grew thick and unbreathable with dust and debris.

“Aw, hell,” came Zuz’s voice from beneath his half-human guardian. “I think you bruised my spleen.”

Yanking his friend up forcibly by the arm, Mal began ushering him toward the exit. He knew the Apache’s chain gun would need to cycle down and they’d have about two minutes before it could fire again.

“This thing felt a lot more impressive before they starting shooting at us with the canon,” said Zuz, tossing the century-old revolver across the room and stumbling along on unsteady feet.

Mal swore as he sensed the helicopter releasing its payload of two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, enhanced ears registering the sound of their solid-fuel rockets igniting and propelling the deadly air-to-surface projectiles rushing forward, guidance systems locking on with deadly accuracy.

With less than a heartbeat to react, Mal reached out, grabbing Zuz and the unconscious MacAnders around their waists and tossed the men from the room to the safety of the hall.

“This is going to hurt,” was the cyborg’s final thought before the twin missiles slammed into the side of the building in excess of nine-hundred miles per hour, exploding in a brilliant white flash, vaporizing everything in the room and a good chuck of the floor above it.

For the first time since he woke up on the cold steel operating table the day before, Mal was glad for the enhanced range of senses he’d been given. Although his eyes were completely blind and his hears were deaf from the burst, the computer center of Mal’s cyborg brain still allowed him a certain amount of awareness of the room around him. He could still “see” through pressure and heat variations felt in the nanotech “skin” of his living metal arms, which allowed him to take advantage of the cover of smoke packing the room from blazing floor to shattered ceiling.

A status report sounded off in his head even as he made his way to where he had hurled Zuz and the unconscious soldier to safety. The computer was reporting just under 7% of his body had suffered 3rd degree burns and that self-repair had already begun. The idea that microscopic machines were coursing through his veins was still mildly disturbing to the former Army Ranger, but he was quickly adjusting to it.

“At least I’ll never have to worry sunscreen ever again,” he thought, jerking the scorched office door open and allowing a flood of smoke to billow out into the hallway beyond.

Mal’s eyes were beginning to return to normal as he located his friend kneeling on the ground. A half-hearted attempt at a smile looked back at the cyborg, reassuring Mal that Zuz had escaped from the blast with little more than a couple of bruises.

“Get out of the building any way you can, Z. They’re after me and should leave you alone,” ordered Mal, relived his friend was alive and mostly unharmed.

“What are you going to do, Mal?” asked Zuz, wending his way through rubble in what was his best guest at the exit.

“Something very stupid,” replied Mal, waving his friend off.

Taking three deep breaths, Mal gripped the edges of the broken door frame and rocked back on his heels like a sprinter preparing to do the forty yard dash.

Locking the attack copter outside the second story window in his sights, Mal exhaled, “This is a bad idea…”

Mal propelled himself forward, legs pumping as he charged across the ruined, still burning wreckage of what was left of Lieutenant Colonel Denman’s office. Just beyond the bullet-riddled glass of the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the Apache was angling itself, guns forward, to begin another barrage of high caliber automatic gunfire. The cyborg threw his shoulder forward and doubled his speed as the multi-barrel of the Gatling gun took aim and began to spin in preparation for renewed assault.

The half-man, half-machine super-soldier coiled his muscled legs when his leading foot hit the last sliver of floor and fired himself out into the yawning, smoke-filled gulf of space past the flaming walls. Nearly a hundred steel-bodied rounds spat out from the AH-64D’s chain gun in the time it took Mal to cross the distance. The arc of his trajectory was enough to keep him clear of the searing stream of death.

The look of surprise on the faces of the pilots as they attempted to move their chopper out of the path of Mal’s leap warmed his heart, but they were too late. His vault carried him nearly thirty feet to slam into front of the helicopter, his clawed arms gripping its nose as the impact shook the craft, spinning it along its axis.

Before the pilot could straighten the Apache out, the cyborg’s fist dropped onto the bulletproofed safety glass shielding the cockpit, sending a spider-web of tiny cracks through it. The glass held and Mal’s computer informed him it would take him another ten seconds to penetrate it using blunt force and, reforming the fist into a yard-long spike, suggested an alternate approach.

The tempered glass of the windscreen offered little resistance to the thrust of brutal blade, which punctured both protective barrier and the body of the soldier beneath. The Apache’s co-pilot was killed instantly as Mal’s nanotech-forged armor pierced his heart.

Mal tore his hand from the soldier’s chest, coating the helicopter’s interior with arterial spray. The second soldier, a more wily veteran than his companion, drew his sidearm from the holster on his thigh and shoved it through the hole created by Mal’s attack, emptying its magazine into the bionic-warrior at point blank range.

Hot knives punched through Mal’s torso, his internal diagnostic announcing four bullets had struck him, perforating his kidneys, spleen and stomach. The now all too familiar itch of nanobots invading his non-robotic flesh spread over Mal as his cybernetic systems rushed to heal his wounds. A back hand from his free arm knocked the pistol from the remaining pilot’s hand, sending it free-falling to the pavement below.

“Omega class threat detected,” chimed the inhuman voice sharing Mal’s brain. “Project: Hardwired prime unit Designate Pyroclast fifty meters and closing.”

Mal looked up in time to see a half-track armored troop carrier slow to a stop and a half-human figure jump off the back.

“Recommended strategy: evasion,” finished Mal’s electronic conscience.

“Oh great, another one,” thought Mal as the newly-arrived government cyborg raise his arms and let loose with an uncontrolled burst of burning plasma.

Using his arms to brace himself, Mal kicked off from the spinning helicopter, diving out of the way as the burning wreckage of the Apache crashed into the ground, its explosion covering a twenty meter radius with burning debris.

Staring through the helicopter’s flaming ruin, Mal caught his first good look at Designate Pyroclast, even as he opened up once more with the twin-barreled plasma rail-gun mounted where a human’s left arm had once been. The man’s flesh, what little of it still remained, was burned and scarred beyond recognition—it almost seemed to run molten in some places where tubes and rods merged with meat. The body of the creature—and Mal was unable to process the cyborg as anything else—appeared to be held together by a series of metallic and carbon fiber-reinforced material, unable to remain whole on its own. A series of irregularly shaped venting pipes emerged at odd-angles from Pyroclast’s arms, legs and shoulders.

“What the hell is that thing?” Mal asked himself.

Failing to recognize the question as rhetorical, the computer continued its summarization.

“Designate Pyroclast’s main form of attack, the burst emitted by his rail-gun, is generated by the dense plasma focus machine mounted to his torso. The generator makes up 28% of his body mass.”

Six heavily armed GMRs joined the flaming newcomer, in groups of three on each of his flanks, firing at the wreckage in concentrated bursts with their MP5/40 submachine guns. The group seemed to operate on a wordless level as the subordinate units alternated firing to keep a consistent barrage of bullets blasting away at Mal’s location, keeping him pinned down.

“Enemy has been classified with a series of extreme mental instabilities, caused by extended exposure to the intense radiation emitted by his modifications. He was placed in stasis by Project: Hardwired lead scientist, Doctor Jean Ryan, until sufficient advances could be made on radiation shielding.”

As if on command, Pyroclast stepped forward, almost like a quarterback moving into a pocket to throw a football, and let another cone of plasma lance out from the weapon merged and melted onto his body. The super-heated material engulfed nearly a third of the maimed and mangled helicopter, turning it almost instantly into a mass of molten slag.

“Great. So he’s a nutjob with a nuke strapped to his back,” mumbled Mal. “You got any other bad news for me?”

“Three M113 armored personnel carriers approaching at high-speed from the northwest. Crew contingent approximately thirty-nine soldiers,” came the response Mal was dreading. A quick look over his shoulder confirmed the men were heading right for him, cutting off Mal’s most direct avenue of escape, and trapping him in a pincer between two very hostile groups of enemies.

“Any suggestions?” Mal asked himself without too much hope in an answer that wouldn’t involve getting killed.

“Engage non-enhanced troops.”

The response didn’t make Mal happy—the last thing he wanted to do was kill a bunch of innocent grunts just for getting in his way. Watching the vehicles growing closer with each passing second, Mal realized he was running out of time.

“Pull up a satellite image of the training grounds—there has to be another way out of this place.”

With his attention focused on the photograph being displayed in his mind’s eye, Mal failed to notice a pair of GMRs approaching from the opposite side of his rapidly vanishing cover behind the flame-consumed chopper. A stream of bullets stitching up his right arm spurred the cyborg into action and made his decision.

Mal charged the GMRs, deflecting another cycle of weapon’s fire with arms morphing into yard-long blades, and decapitated both men with a flick of his wrists. By the time the headless bodies hit the ground, their heads bouncing off down the blackened road, Mal had covered the nearly twenty yards of asphalt that lead to the entrance of the area of the training center containing the fake Middle-Eastern village called Medina Wasl.

From the information in his databases, Mal knew there were enough twists and blind alleys that would interfere with his hunters’ ability to target him, and that the buildings would be tough enough to slow Pyroclast down long enough for the super-soldier to make his escape into the desert beyond.

Mal leapt up at the corrugated metal entry gate and flipped himself over. Tracer fire from the government robot-men punched holes through it behind him as he went.

A strange buzzing in Mal’s head caused him to pause, ducking down an alley between the outer wall and first row of empty homes made of baked brick and concrete. He didn’t have time to wonder what it was as Zuz’s voice filled his ears.

“Mal? Are you there?”

“Zuz?!

“I took a chance and called your old cell number—the one that sent me the text,” replied Zuz, his voice full of self-congratulation. “I made it out to the car. Can you get to me?”

Leaning out to peak through one of the holes, Mal evaluated the situation. Pyroclast and the GMRs, along with the vehicles they had arrived in, had begun to move towards the enclosed training area Mal had escaped in to, but were cut off by the three thirteen-ton APCs. Soldiers in the forward turrets of each vehicle trained their twin-mounted M2HB .50 caliber Browning machine guns at the phalanx of government cyborgs.

The men of Fort Irwin didn’t look happy.

“I’m working on it, Z. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” replied Mal. “Stay safe.”

Mentally disconnecting the ‘call’ with Zuz, Mal watched as a solider approached the Project: Hardwired command group, made up of five men in what could best be described as ‘techie chic’ uniforms: short-sleeved blue button-up shirts, khaki slacks and loafers. Three of the five wore thick glasses and all carried black equipment cases of varying sizes, which the men were looking for a location to set up.