Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (23 page)

“What about you? That looks like a lot of blood—it looks like you were in a fight yourself,” she asked, doing the little hop and stretch short people do when trying to see over a crowd as she attempt to locate one of the on duty police officers that frequented the hospital. “We should have one of the doctors check you out, too.”

“I’m fine…the nanites have me back to 98% operating capacity,” responded Mal still lost in his thoughts.

“Excuse me?” Jensen said, finally able to catch the attention of the slightly rotund Officer North from his usual spot flirting in front of the nurses’ station. She waved him over frantically.

Mal snapped back to reality and looked around, seeing the cop heading towards him with resolve in his eye and donut on his chin.

“I have to go.”

Protesting, the nurse tried to get her hands around Mal’s arm only to stop, horrified at the inhuman way it felt beneath the wool material of the sweater’s long sleeves. The cyborg pushed his way down the hall and was outside before the huffing Officer North reached Nurse Jensen, asking if everything was okay.

Staring after the vanished man, Jensen nodded. She just hoped he stayed vanished.

Unsure if anyone was still pursuing him, Mal rushed across the busy car lot outside the hospital’s front doors, dodging vehicles and people with uncanny agility. Along the way to the purloined vehicle waiting for him with its doors still open from the hasty exit he’d made to get his friend inside, Mal had made his decision.

He was done.

“It’s time to stop running,” thought Mal, determined. He was tired of having to watch his back every second of the day, and tired of having his friends threatened—having them hurt. It was time to take the fight back to where it all began: Project: Hardwired.

CHAPTER 18

For the first time since the September 11th terrorist attacks, the US Bank Tower building was closed to the public.

At precisely one hour before the normal close of business at the tower, an announcement blared over the public address speakers requesting the immediate shutdown of all businesses operating at the location. A few minutes later, all residents were escorted from the premises by heavily-armed US government troops and informed that the facility would re-open the next morning.

When pressed on reasons for the abrupt evacuation and shut down of one of the largest business centers on the west coast, the soldiers, uniformed in a manner unrecognizable by even the most experienced of military veterans working at the facility, would only say it was a precaution against terrorist threat. More than one overly vocal tower resident were escorted off-site at gun point when they refused to vacate the area.

None of the civilians knew precisely what was going on at their place of business, but deep down they knew it was something far beyond what the Kevlar enshrouded men were telling them.

Tension was thick in the air and grew thicker as the minutes ticked away after the evacuation. As one hour passed and then two, everyone on duty grew anxious. They knew an attack was coming, but not when or how. The cadre of men stationed around the building were fully aware of who was coming and what he was able to do, and the tension quickly spread.

The attack came just as the sun began to kiss the horizon. Men on the periphery began disappearing, their radios hissing static and then nothing, their vital signs flat-lining on the monitors high up on the seventy-sixth floor in command and control.

“Target has breached the perimeter!” The GMR overseer’s voice screamed out across the radio waves. From his position seated behind a bank of computer screens, monitors were flashing more and more red as the lives of his charges were snuffed out. “Weapons free, deadly force authorized!”

In spite of the nearly impenetrable contingent of seventy Project: Hardwired soldiers, human and cybernetically-enhanced GMR alike, the living weapon known as Cestus had found a way to breach their defenses: the sewage tunnels lining the area were child’s play for him to enter a few blocks away. As the number of disappearing men hit ten, the cyborg took advantage of the resulting chaos and popped up in the midst of a group of the black-clad mercenaries. Two were decapitated and a third bifurcated from collarbone to groin before the men realized death had landed amongst their group.

With enemies surrounding him on all sides, Cestus gave his mind completely over to the programming that had been forced into his brain and the world turned red with blood and rage. He punched through the first unit of urban warriors like they were single-ply toilet paper in a shoddy gas station bathroom. Within seconds, men were dismembered and left lying in bloody pools covering the ground in his wake. The unyielding claws of his nanotech-driven arms showed no mercy to anything they touched.

Responding to the screams of the dying, a second and third battalion of Hardwired GMRs crashed down onto Cestus from every direction, guns blazing. Humanity repressed, the cyborg dove headfirst into the wave of men attempting to bar him from gaining access to the building and exacting his vengeance. His claws scythed out like the blades of a metal and flesh grim reaper, snuffing out life with each touch.

When it was over, the flesh and bone barrier made up of six dozen men lasted fewer than ninety seconds against the berserker fury of the super-soldier.

Covered in blood and cordite residue, and dripping with perspiration, Cestus was barely winded. Seventy men had been killed in the time it the it took to heat a convenience store burrito and it meant nothing to the government-spawned killing machine he’d become. It did nothing more than whet his appetite for death.

Pulling up a tactical update from his internal sensors, Cestus saw that nothing lived within a one hundred meter radius of the carnage surrounding the building. A blank spot in his readouts, corresponding with the building’s immense entrance, caught the super-soldier’s attention, drawing his gaze magnetically toward it.

The almost colorless blue eyes of the cyborg narrowed to razor slits, fighting against the darkness staring back at him from the shadowed skyscraper’s interior, struggling to pull clues from the twilight within. The computer augmented eyes of Cestus quickly deciphered the subtle movement of cloth and steel, identifying the next obstacle the head of Project: Hardwired had placed in the cyborg’s path.

Cestus smiled coldly as his eyes finally revealed to him the identity of the man standing across the battlefield from him: Fortified at the center-point of the lobby with an M246 SAW machine gun at the ready and flanked by thirty armed-to-the-teeth GMR warriors was Captain Marc Morrell, the sight of whom filled Cestus with a particularly intense need to kill. Reacting of its own accord, the cyborg’s body bulked up even further, thick armor plates formed across his chest and back, and his arms grew, lengthening to gorilla-like proportions, growing serrated flanges, blades along the forearms. Wicked knives extended out twenty inches from his hands and twitched in anticipation.

As the transformation completed, Cestus launched himself forward at the mass of enemies waiting for him inside.

“FIRE!” ordered Morrell at the top of his lungs, his SAW echoing his voice with a scream of more than 200 rounds per minute, perforating the ground around Cestus with a hail of hot lead.

The cyborg danced through the withering storm of high caliber rounds, ignoring the odd shot that glanced off the thick armor of his prosthetics. Bursting into a run directly toward the heart of the gunfire, Cestus leaned low, reached out with the gnarled talons of his hands to catch the thick nylon straps lining the back of a fallen GMR, and pulled the corpse up from its final resting place to act as an unliving shield for his advance. With the limp body flopping over one shoulder protecting the cyborg’s torso from incoming attacks, Cestus’ left hand reached up and tore the MGL-140 free of its restraining harness on the dead soldier’s side, and aimed into the center of the rapidly disintegrating plate glass lobby wall. Titanium-alloy fingers tightened on the trigger and let loose with a volley of 40mm tear gas shells, covering the front of the sieged building in a dense fog.

“Maintain fire!” Morrell screamed in response.

Thousands of rounds lanced holes of light through the gray cloud of smoke rolling into the lobby, trying to catch a lucky break and take down the advancing Cestus.

Tear gas mixed with gunpowder clouds and steam from red hot weapon barrels, transforming the once gleaming marble lobby into a hellish cavern lit only by flashes of gunfire and the fading light from outside. For more than a minute, the Project: Hardwired response team poured bullets into the growing fog bank blindly, having lost sight of Cestus seconds after their barrage had begun.

Eyes squinting against the burning chemical gas, Morrell finally removed his right hand from the trigger of his smoking weapon and held it upright, signaling his men to cease fire wordlessly. As one the robot-like GMRs stopped firing.

Ten long seconds passed in complete silence as the men waited to see if they’d stopped the rogue cyborg. Ten seconds that seemed to drag on for a week to Morrell. With the silence a thunderous drumbeat in his ears, the officer ordered a squad of five members of GMR Unit Upsilon forward with weapons at the ready.

Before the automaton soldiers disappeared into the foul-smelling gas cloud, Upsilon-Six called out “Something’s movi—” before his arms and most of his face were torn from his body by a shining silver flash from deep within. A microsecond later, Cestus burst forth from the densely packed gray mist, arms slashing out in front of him. Three GMRs dropped, the top halves of their skulls sliced cleanly from their heads.

Like puppets on a string, the remaining GMRs let their machine guns swing back on their side harnesses and drew electro-batons in near perfect unison. They charged Cestus as one and somewhere 75 floors up the controllers prayed it would be enough.

It wasn’t.

Cestus moved like a whirlwind through the attacking men, carving flesh and ignoring blows from the electrified weapons the May brothers had guaranteed Director Kiesling would nullify his threat. Men fell before him in droves, dead or dying, as he pushed his way towards the man responsible for taking Kristin from him.

Swearing aloud, Morrell decided it was every man for himself and swung his SAW around, aiming into the mass of his own men surrounding the crazed cyborg. Taking Cestus down once and for all was worth the cost of a few GMR lives—besides, Morrell knew the boys in the tech department could patch a GMR back to fighting capacity as long as its brain case was mostly intact. The soldier opened fire, shredding everything in front of him.

Dodging beneath the stream of armor-piercing rounds, Cestus dropped to his knees, snatched an MP5 from one of his fallen foes, and in one fluid motion let loose with a burst of shells that took Morrell in the right side of his chest, disabling his arm and causing the man to lose grip on his weapon with a shriek.

The empty space between them took Cestus three long strides to cross and backhand the wounded Morrell, knocking the giant machine gun away from him. Losing blood rapidly, Morrell attempted to gain some distance from the rampaging cyborg with a a snap kick to the chest that caught Cestus by surprise and spun him around on his heels. Morrell used the distraction to back away from his reeling foe. He jerked the 9mm Beretta 92FS from the holster on his thigh, thumbed it to semi-automatic and begin firing as fast as he could.

Dancing around the wounded man’s attack, Cestus stepped behind Morrell, shoved the serrated blades of his hand claws into the soldier’s back and ripped away seven inches of spinal column with a wet slurping sound.

Morrell flopped onto his back bonelessly, his mouth continuing to scream soundlessly as the final few breaths fled from between crimson-stained teeth.

“There will be more upstairs,” Cestus thought to himself as he watched Morrell’s vital signs fade away with his computerized senses, confirming the man’s death.. There would be more GMRs and at least one Prime Unit waiting, ready and eager to kill him. But it didn’t matter to the battle-hungry cyborg. He knew the lesser units were only a challenge in large groups, and even then all they could do was slow him down. As for the Primes like Gauss and the others, their enhanced abilities were no match for his own melee-specific capabilities in the tight confines of the skyscraper’s upper floors.

Outside or there in the lobby’s large open space—places where the Project: Hardwired pawns could act freely and without constrictions—had been their only real shot at stopping him.

Heading for the high-speed access to the top floors of the building, Cestus couldn’t believe they’d made it so easy for him.

The melodious ping of an elevator arriving on the floor and voice announcing “round two” over the building’s PA system cut Cestus’s internal celebration short, his instincts dropping him automatically into a defensive stance at the sounds.

The cyborg was prepared for anything except for what emerged from between the parted lift doors.

“Oh, my God.”

CHAPTER 19

Kristin Meyer, once love of Malcolm Weir’s life, strode out of the harsh fluorescent lighting of the open elevator and paused to smile at the dumbfounded super-soldier.

“Kristin?!”

If the situation had been one iota less serious or deadly Mal’s mouth would have dropped to the floor at the outfit his former lover was decked out in. As it was, it nearly knocked him off his feet.

With thigh-high stiletto-heeled black leather boots, a military-grade Kevlar corset, and covered in straps hung with weapons, Kristin’s outfit could only be described as high-tech mercenary by way of Victoria’s Secret, or Nazi stripper from Hell. Mal knew it was all done to gain a psychological advantage against him—the only thing worse would have been to dress her up as a slutty Catholic schoolgirl.

In contrast to her inviting appearance, the weapons in her hands, a Brugger & Thomet MP9 machine pistol in her left and a glowing steel katana with, according to his sensor readings, nearly forty-thousand volts crackling along its blade, gave off some of the worst mixed-signals the cyborg had ever gotten from a date.