The Orion Plague (6 page)

The uprated Humvee spat gravel from its tires
as it turned half a doughnut. Lockerbie aimed its nose down the
road where they had entered as Butler fired profligate bursts over
the back bumper.

Suddenly a wrecked sedan hurtled out of the
garage tunnel as if shot from a cannon. Behind it burst forth an
armored car of the kind SWAT liked to use for urban breach
scenarios.

“Butler!” Repeth called.

“I see it, Top,” he said as he swung the
Vixen rightward.

Tracers reached out from the armored car, .50
caliber heavy machinegun bullets that slammed into the Beast,
sounding like triphammer blows. Next to Repeth the four-inch-thick
crystal armor starred as a round struck it. Armored or not, a few
more hits to the vision plates would break through, and huge
bullets bouncing around the interior would tear them apart.

Lockerbie drove like a madwoman, slewing the
Beast back and forth as the armored car chased them. Butler mashed
his thumbs on the trigger of the Vixen, pouring penetrator fire
into the enemy vehicle.

Explosions blossomed along the front of their
target, controlled pops the size of hand grenades. The armored car
drove through the smoke and detritus, showing nothing but odd
square pockmark pixels along its front glacis.

“Reactive armor, Butler!” Repeth barked.
“Switch to Armorshock!”

“Right…” Butler toggled the selector switch.
“Running out of tungsten anyway.” He put his HUD crosshairs on the
enemy and fired.

Or he tried to. He couldn’t seem to make his
thumbs push down on the butterfly as he stared at one bloody ruined
hand hanging by a flap of skin. Then he slumped, grey and
unconscious. A piece of a spent .50 caliber bullet rattled down to
fall on the floor of the Beast.

“Shit, Butler’s hit!” Grusky cried.

“Keep that evasive, Lockerbie!” called Repeth
as she turned around in the passenger seat to help Grusky unbuckle
Butler from his turret harness. Frustrated, she pulled out her
knife and sliced the straps, dropping the gunner’s flaccid body to
flop into the interior. Grusky crawled over him and up into the
turret, wedging himself behind the gun.

A string of curses flowed as Grusky toggled
gun switches and tried to get his squadcomm HUD synched with the
targeting computer. “Screw it,” he finally said, flipping up the
eyepieces and shoving his face forward to look over the iron
sights. He could barely see through the gap where the Vixen
protruded through the turret shell. Lining it up on the pursuing
vehicle, he squeezed the trigger.

The gun spat briefly, then spun around with
an empty electric whine. More popcorn explosions blossomed on the
armored car as its reactive armor deflected the few tungsten
bullets with controlled micro-explosions. Cursing again, Grusky
finally found the ordnance selector and switched to Armorshock.
When his vision port cleared he fired again.

His first long burst was spectacular, but he
didn’t see it. The muzzle flash and smoke from the hundreds of
rounds hid the target immediately, showing him the limitations of
shooting manually. If he had been able to, he would have seen two
hundred Armorshock rounds dumping their electric capacitors
directly into the relatively insensitive reactive-explosive armor.
The entire front of the enemy vehicle detonated at once, taking one
of the front tires with it. At over fifty miles per hour the thing
rolled like a toy batted by a giant child.

Repeth snarled, “Turn around, Lockerbie.
Grusky, burn that thing.”

The Beast slewed sideways, then shuddered
into a one-eighty. “Sorry, Top, they’re out of it and I’m not going
to just murder them in their vehicle.”

Just then the side door of the armored car,
now become its top hatch as it rested on its flank, popped open. A
man-figure rose up, hefted a long thin weapon, pointed it at the
Beast.

Grusky fired reflexively. The Armorshock
rounds, though not designed for antipersonnel work, still had all
of their incredible supersonic velocity. They cut the figure in
half, and the weapon it held detonated in place, shaking the
armored car and leaving a small mushroom cloud as the Beast blazed
past.

“Keep going, Lockerbie. Get me just in sight
of the office building,” ordered Repeth harshly. “Grusky, keep
suppressive fire on that wrecked car this time.”

The Beast pulled to a halt as it rounded the
corner of the treeline and the Septagon Shadow complex came back in
sight. Above her Repeth heard Grusky firing short bursts at the
armored car wrecked on the road behind them. She grabbed her
grenade launcher with the three remaining rounds and stepped out of
the Humvee.

She could see antlike figures scurrying
around the buildings now that they thought the threat had departed.
Hefting the launcher, she used her HUD to give her a solution on
the window of the office where they had found Bill. Then she
deliberately fired the three shots.

In slow motion the fat shells seem to float,
up in an arc then down to drop at the pip. The explosions of the
grenades were completely subsumed in an enormous roar as the small
shocks set off the two antitank mines simultaneously. More than
forty pounds of C-4 lifted the roof of the office building into the
air. It also threw a lethal burst of shrapnel that scythed down the
human figures nearby like wheat.

She felt no remorse whatsoever.
You knew
what you were getting into
, she thought at the enemy.
Sow
the wind, reap the whirlwind
. “All right. Let’s take a look at
that armored car.”

As they drove nearer, Donovan tended to
Butler, trying to sew his nearly severed hand back on.

When they’d pulled up next to the burning
wreck, Repeth jumped out, dragging Bill with her. “Reload the
Vixen,” she growled at Grusky as she manhandled her prisoner, his
hands still tied. She looked down at the flimsy bindings, then
pulled out her cop handcuffs and slapped them on him. He looked at
her but said nothing. She wondered how strong he was, what his
healing method was, and made sure her PW10 was aimed at him at all
times.

“Is that a Shadow?” she asked, pointing her
chin at the charred upper half of a humanlike body. The head was
missing, but the torso was crisped and fried with electrical burns
throughout. Charge had apparently passed along the metal inside,
because she could see shiny laminates on the barbecued bones, and
other artificial materials that survived the fire.

Bill replied, “No. That was just an augmented
cyborg guard. A Shadow would still be trying to kill us.” He looked
around, shivering though it was not cold.

“Shit.” Repeth kicked at the body. “Everybody
come here. Leave what you’re doing for a minute.” She checked up
and down the road, hemmed in by the trees and fence, to make sure
no one was coming, then pointed to the thing on the ground.
“Everyone get a good look. This is a small taste of what we’re up
against. Cyborgs. Bill here says this guy was just a baby compared
to the real thing. But even he came through that wreck unscathed
and popped up with some kind of antitank weapon, and almost killed
us all.”

Repeth turned to Grusky, who had lost all his
color. She thrust her face up close to his. “The next time I tell
you to burn something and you don’t do it will be your last. We
clear?”

He swallowed. “Yes, Top.”

She stared at him for a moment more. She felt
her eye twitching as she shifted her gaze to her team. “It’s a new
game, people. Nanotech, biotech, now cyborg-tech. Our enemies are
not human anymore.”

“It’s like I told you,” Bill choked. “These
things can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be turned into Edens.
They will not stop. Ever. Until they are
dead
. Or we
are.”

“So put your inhibitions aside,” Repeth
reiterated to her team. She turned to shove Bill into the Beast.
“Let’s go. Back to base, post-haste.”

They strapped Rick down to a metal table
that matched the cyborg guard’s shiny forehead. His struggles
seemed completely useless as these men’s casually exerted strength
forced him into position. He felt like a child in the grip of
powerful adults, and remembered those Terminator movies he had
watched as a kid, trapped by his muscular dystrophy in his
wheelchair. He used to imagine he could be a Terminator, not a bad
one but a nice one, like in the second and third movies, with metal
bones and muscles that made his wasting disease moot.

These men were like those cyborgs, slightly
more emotional perhaps but the resemblance was obvious. He even
heard, or imagined he could hear, the whining of servomotors, the
creak of artificial tendons, the snick and screech of metallic
joints and mechanisms.

Here comes Frau Blucher, of course
, he
thought hysterically as the dumpy woman walked into his range of
vision. “Where’s Doctor Evil?” he asked aloud, humor his only
defense.

The woman cocked her head at him, birdlike.
Her right eye abruptly rotated around the axis of its pupil and
that orifice contracted like a camera lens iris. She smiled
mechanically. “Good afternoon, Doctor Johnstone. You see, I have
great respect for your academic achievements, once I learned who
you were and found your dossier. Bachelor’s at eighteen, Master’s
at nineteen, doctorate from the University of Johannesburg at
twenty-one, all while building one of the most effective
cyber-warfare programs ever devised. You gave us fits, with your
intrusions and misdirections and disruptions. In fact, it would not
be too much of a stretch to say that you were instrumental in our
present diminution of our power. So it is fitting that you should
be instrumental in restoring it.”

He had started feeling a bit better once she
started talking. At least it gave him something to focus on and a
playing field where he might compete. “You’re monologing,” he said
with as much cheerfulness as he could muster.

That head-cock came again. “What?”

“You know. When the hero is strapped to the
death machine the villain starts monologing. Blathering on about
how clever she is to have trapped him and how she is going to bring
about his slow and agonizing death.”

She raised an eyebrow and replied, “Ah, you
Americans and your sense of humor,” in a cartoonish Russian accent.
“You see,” she reverted to her own voice, “I’m not a robot, I can
laugh. Nor am I going to bring about your slow and agonizing
death.” She patted his arm sympathetically. “But there will be
pain.”

“Oh, that’s a relief.”

“You may not think so when it’s over.”

“Do I get to know what’s going on, or are you
savoring the suspense?”

“I am, a little. It’s enjoyable to have you
in my
clutches
, Dr. Johnstone.” She made birdlike claws at
him and smiled impishly.

He nodded, or tried to, since his head was
also pinned to the table. “Pardon me for asking, but are you a
Psycho too?”

“Too?”

“Well, I figured that guy they called the
Professor was. Nobody else I’ve seen around here qualifies, but you
can’t be an Eden. And you have some kind of cybernetic implant for
an eye. It would take a brave normal to undergo such an operation
without the benefit of augmented healing processes.”

Her smile was sardonic. “Perhaps we have
simply overcome the virus’ virtue effect?”

At first he thought she was joking again, but
her expression did not change. She seemed sincere. Rick’s blood ran
cold and his stomach tightened. If that were true then they had a
frightening advantage. All the healing power of the Eden Plague but
none of its strictures. Nothing to keep them from designing these
cyborg super-soldiers with the power of machines and the biological
advantages of immortal Edens. And the morals of robots.

“How did you do it?” he asked with genuine
curiosity.

“Oh, come now, Doctor. That would be
telling.” She made her thumb and forefinger into a circle and
placed it to her cybernetic eye in a kind of salute.

“I get it. I’m your
Prisoner
. Funny.
What’s your name, anyway?” he asked.
Keep her talking. As long
as we’re talking, she isn’t doing anything to me. And there’s
always a chance she might become sympathetic. She seems to want
my…respect? Approval? Or perhaps just my fear.

“You may call me Shari. I am the foremost
expert in bionic cybernetics in…well, in the world, I believe.
Certainly I have the most advanced program.” Her voice rose. “Even
your nuclear strike on our government did not derail my research,
and it is my advances that will bring us back to power and usher in
a glorious new age of
Die Übermenschen
!”

He stared at her. “You’re kidding,
right?”

She shrugged. “Kind of. Over the top?”

“No, not at all. Very inspiring.”

“Seriously…Rick…” Her demeanor became coy as
she ran her hand up his naked arm. His skin tried desperately to
crawl away from it. “I would like to have you on our side, rather
than stuck in that mindless quad of yours designing tiny
subroutines and planting worms. Oh, yes, we know about them, trying
to corrupt our network.”

Interesting…she didn’t mention my logic
bombs that will interfere with the servo-control programs.
He
kept any hope off his face and shrugged as if trying to conceal
disappointment. “Can’t blame me for trying.”

“Of course not,” she said, mock-soothing.
“But we would like your brilliance, not merely your compliance. To
get that, we will have to do a little tinkering,” she tapped his
skull, “up here.”

Fear shot through him then as he realized
that there was something worse than torture. Tampering with his
brain might do permanent damage to his mind. Over time the Eden
Plague might be able to reconstruct the organic functions of his
nervous system but it could not restore lost memories or
personality.