Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (12 page)

Zuz sneaked a peek over down at the soldier, even as the lift shot up towards the roof exit at high speed. He wanted to see the man’s reaction to the nasty surprise Zuz had left waiting for him four feet into the room.

He didn’t have to wait long.

Rho-Three advanced into the room, unrelenting in his attack on the cage containing his prey, trying to damage its motors enough to stop its rapid ascent out of optimal firing range. The Gomer was so focused on its attack that it failed to give much attention to the freshly greased track running perpendicular to its path; failed to notice the sound of a thousand-pound tractor engine being launched along the iron rails until it was too late to dodge.

Zuz smiled as he watched the cyborg mercenary get crushed by his first line of defense. He hadn’t expected it to work so well in real life after he’d gotten the idea from an old episode of ‘Scooby Doo.’

With a silent ‘thanks’ to Freddy Jones and the whole Mystery Incorporated crew, Zuz leaned back and started to activate his second round of traps as the elevator jerked to a stop at the roof access point. The sound of Rho-Two mounting the stairway, taking three steps at a time, reminded David Zuzelo that he wasn’t out of the woods yet.

*****

In the battle against the military cyborg, Designate Talos, things had quickly gone from “going pretty well” to “getting your ass royally kicked” for Malcolm Weir.

At first the fight was incredibly one-sided, with Mal’s extensive training in hand-to-hand combat coupled with the devastating melee focus of his cybernetic and nanotech arms proving to be too much for his smaller opponent.

A shuto-uchi knifehand strike to the jugular took Talos to his knees, follow up by a tetsui-uchi hammerfist that fractured his collarbone and a hiza-geri knee, shattering his nose with a satisfying crunch and spray of bright red blood. Mal’s attacks flowed with a grace and power he had never before felt, thanks to Project: Hardwired’s “upgrades.”

“Is that all you’ve got,” sputtered Talos, his mouth full of blood. “I thought you were supposed to be a tough guy, bro.”

Mal’s second series of attacks was even more vicious, and the small, metal-plated soldier with blazing crimson hair was unable to mount even the most basic of defenses against them.

The brawl was so brutally unequal, and Talos was taking such an unimaginable beating, Mal started to feel bad for the little soldier. Brutally unequal, that is, until the mechanimorph was hip-tossed into a forklift by Mal after a failed attempt at a rather clumsy ude-gatame straight-arm block.

For the briefest of moments, the fight looked to be over. Mal couldn’t imagine someone, even a billion-dollar government-built cyborg killing-machine, walking away after an impact like that. The steel frame of the yellow and black lift truck was pushed in on itself, and even its hard metal guard cage was contorted and bent into a pale mockery of protection. So powerful was the collision of flesh and steel that any ordinary man would have died instantly.

Regrettably for Malcolm Weir, Designate Talos was no ordinary man. The cyborg’s deep, resonating laugh and the sound of tearing metal announced the coming of a new world of pain to Mal.

“Wow,” came the rich voice of Talos from out of the steam erupting from the obliterated construction vehicle in a cloud too thick for even Mal’s enhanced senses to break through. “You really don’t remember anything do you. If you did, you probably wouldn’t have made that rookie mistake, eh?”

“Aw, hell,” spit Mal as comprehension sucker punched him in the figurative gut and a six-foot yellow rusted fork slashed out of the miasma of water vapor and hydraulic fluid mist and struck him in the literal one, sending the former soldier on an arc that took him twelve feet into the area and hurling twenty more across the now gloom-veiled room.

Mal hit the rear wall of the garage with a sickening thud, all of the breath in his body replaced by two broken ribs and three cracked ones. As a Talos’s shadow, now more than twenty feet tall, pushed through the shrouding, greasy-gray fog, and headed for him at breakneck speed, one thought stuck in Mal’s head: I hope Zuz is doing better than me.

Over two tons of man and machine hit Mal’s prone body, taking him through the roof of Zuz’s workshop and into oblivion.

CHAPTER 10

On the pitched, corrugated aluminum roof of the building, David Zuzelo stood over the smoking, still-twitching, and very much dead form of Rho-Two. He smiled to himself, happy to discover that fifty-thousand volts was more than enough to kill one of the pertinacious bastards.

He was also happy that “pertinacious” had been on his word-of-the-day calendar that morning.

Zuz dropped the rod attached to the junkyard’s live power-coupling and headed over to the edge of the room as surreptitiously as he could. A quick look at his cellphone notified the bald conspiracy theorist someone was still jamming all communication functions in the area, which meant he couldn’t contact the computer in Mal’s head to let the reluctant cyborg know the Gomers were dead and that he was out of immediate danger.

The sight of a seven-man squad of the infantry-class GMR cyborgs setting up in strategic position out in the heart of the junkyard made David laugh.

“As out of danger as one can be with a team of government assassins out to kill me, that is.” Zuz’s chuckle cut off as he spotted a rather conspicuous RV parked just outside the entrance to his hideout, covered from stem to stern in an uncountable number of silvery antennas. “There you are, my pretty.”

The brains in charge of the operation must have figured the runt and his men would be more than enough to handle him and Mal. Zuz couldn’t think of any reason for them to have parked their command vehicle in such an obvious spot.

Knowing his continued existence probably rested on taking out that heavily armored “recreational vehicle,” and with Mal tied up with the “hard job” of battling a Talos, Zuz decided he was going to have to do the “easy job” of crossing a three-acre junkyard swarming with armed and deadly half-machine soldiers bent on his death.

Scurrying down a camouflaged ladder at the rear of the building, Zuz concluded that he’d let Mal do the “easy job” next time.

And the hard jobs.

And any other jobs they came across.

“After all,” thought Zuz, leaping to the ground, “I’m a delicate flower.”

Sticking to the shadows of burned out Cadillacs, rusted out Fords, out and out dead Chevys, David Zuzelo made a beeline for the men who wanted him dead. Zuz was so focused on his task he failed to hear Malcolm Weir’s body blast through the old windows of the main garage building and crash into the back of his car, leaving a gaping hole filled with glass and blood where the hatchback door had been.

*****

Consciousness returned to Malcolm Weir less than a second before his uninsured collision with the Nissan Cube parked just outside of the grime-encrusted garage window he had been thrown through by Designate Talos.

Mal marveled the Japanese-made mini MPV was still mostly in one piece as he disentangled himself from its ruined rear end. Watching as a two-story robot with a gooey human center broke through the front wall of the building in front of him, intent on his destruction, Mal desperately hoped his own parts came from the same manufacturing plant.

Splinters of wood and glass and aluminum showered the area in a deadly rain, coating every inch in deadly debris. Looking around for an escape route, Mal cursed Zuz’s choice to make his home in a dump filled with ammunition for Talos. Why couldn’t he have lived in a nice, empty open field or on a boat?

Gutted cars and refrigerators and old industrial air conditioning units flew by Mal’s technologically-enhanced form and were tossed carelessly out of the way, crushed flat by, or absorbed into the ever-growing form of Talos.

Mal hazarded a glimpse behind him to see the government killer topping twenty-five or thirty feet in height with no signs of slowing down. He had to figure out how to stop the monster fast or there’d be no way out.

Ducking into an ancient school bus to catch his breath and avoid being stepped on, Mal found his relief to be fleeting as he came nose to barrel with the MP5/40 submachine gun of GMR Rho-Five.

Even more disturbing for Mal was a voice from the past emerging from the robot-like solider.

“Steve? Steve Douros?”

“Halt or be terminated, Designate Cestus,” echoed the voice of US Army Sergeant Steven Gus Douros coldly. Almost no trace of his Pennsylvanian accent remained in his words and Mal found no hint of recognition in his former friend’s face. A face almost entirely replaced with the same gleaming metal shared by all GMR-units.

Gleaming nano-tech arms snapped up in a sign of non-aggression. Mal was dumbfounded at the sight before him, positive that Douros had died in the same helicopter crash that started him down his current road.

“What happened to you, Sarge?” said Mal, backing slowly out of the bus, arms still raised in faux-surrender.

The sound of six more military weapons chambering rounds and preparing to fire halted Mal’s retreat, but no more so than staring into the glassy, uncomprehending eyes of a dead man. Mal allowed his internal computer system to inform him of the presence of seven GMR-units surrounding him, not able to rip his gaze from the sergeant.

“What did they do to him?” Mal demanded of his computer.

“Rho-Team, Unit Five, formerly known as Steven Gus Douros, retired first sergeant serving in Third Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. Classified unfit for service and discharged on an RFM approved by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Denman,” rambled Mal’s personal version of Wikipedia.

The man once known as Sergeant Douros signaled the rest of his team to close in and Mal sprung into action even as his computer continued its litany of facts.

“Diagnosed in a persistent vegetative state, Rho-Five was removed to the Project: Hardwired facility in Houston, Texas on the authorization of Director Gordon Kiesling.”

Mal burst into action even as a pair of the GMRs opened fire on him, launching himself to his left into a third Rho Unit and shoved his clawed metal fist through the protective Kevlar of its bulletproof vest, into its stomach and out its back. Pieces of spine dropped to the ground in a soup of human entrails and bits of tattered uniform.

In less than the time it took to sneeze, Rho-Four was dead and Mal was moving again, a trail of bullets from his would-be captors kicking up divots of asphalt all around him.

“Douros was an early test subject in the GMR Upgrade process led by Doctor Jean Ryan. Eighty-percent of his brain was replaced by cybernetic implants which allowed him to be controlled by the main Abraxas command protocol.”

“Is his like me? Is Steve still in there,” Mal leapt over Rho-One, dragging his six-inch claws through its neck and face in a geyser of gore, splitting its helmet in half. Four of the remaining five Gomers dropped their guns, allowing the weapons to hang freely from harnesses attached to their torsos, and unsheathed electrified truncheons that glowed blue and sparked evilly in the shadows of the junkyard. An elbow strike from above drove the eleven-inch forearm spike through the head of Rho-Nine, slicing its skull neatly in half and ending its pitiful existence.

“Negative,” came the computer’s response, punctuated by Mal blocking an overhand strike by Rho-Seven. Mal knew from previous experience the electricity would do little harm to him as long as it only made contact with his cybernetic arms. The nanotech of Mal’s left arm reformed itself into a shining, mirror-polished, three-foot long blade, a blade he used to slice Rho-Seven in half, from right shoulder to left hip. “Rho-Five’s originally personality construct was terminated with the surgical removal of his higher organic brain functions. Only involuntary systems remain.”

“Those bastards,” spit Mal, gutting two more of his robotic attackers with ease. He was glad the Gomers weren’t as tough as Gauss or Talos. “Where is Talos, anyway?” he quizzed as he faced off against the final GMR, Rho-Five, his former friend.

“Designate Talos inbound. Fifty meters and closing at a speed of twenty-two miles per hour,” Mal wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected just a hint of humor in the electronic voice. He was starting to hate the thing.

“Bloody great,” said Mal, charging into battle against Rho-Five, desperately trying to drown out the sound of a pissed-off four-thousand pound junkyard titan bearing down on him with death in its eyes.

*****

The decaying skeletons of long-dead luxury automobiles, the cracked and corroded frames of defunct exercise equipment, and the fast deteriorating shells of once-cutting edge televisions formed alleys of rotting plastic hope and high walls of decomposing oxidized dreams. It was deep in the midst of those alleys and walls that David Zuzelo had squirreled himself away.

Casting an eye around the tottering stack of balding steel-radial tires he’d selected as his lookout station, Zuz strained to hear the discussion coming out of the open side door of the Project: Hardwired operated communications rig less than ten feet away.

Zuz’s approach to the vehicle, while less than the ninja-like affair he’d hoped it would be, had been completely overlooked by the occupants of the twenty-foot long, nine-foot high, box-shaped transport due to the sounds of the pitched battle going on somewhere in the middle of the scrap-yard. Of course, the giant “trash mech” Zuz saw smashing its way through his formerly organized yard helped add to the sound pollution. It took every ounce of self-control he possessed to keep from yelling “Geroni-do-run-run-roni-moooo” when Designate Talos’s “Junkion” form came jogging past.

Talos had better be careful or he’d get sued by Hasbro for his new look.

Zuz just about shat himself when one of the communications officers appeared in the open doorway of the RV from hell, an unlit cigarette half-dangling from his lips and a pair of high tech binoculars clutched chest-level in his gloved hands.

From his position on the vehicle’s exit, the soldier, whose enormous chin caused Zuz to dub ‘Leno,’ pressed the field glasses up to his face and began talking back to an unseen partner hidden from view, “Ho-lee shit, Connors! You should this. I’ve never seen Talos so beefed up. He’s got to be thirty, thirty-five feet now. It’s nuts to see two Primes going at it for real.”