Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (13 page)

The cigarette slid lower and lower on the man’s lip, dropping down a bit with every sentence. Each exclamation threatened to cause the cancer stick to fall away completely, but it stayed attached as if by force of the man’s will.

“Designate Cestus is a badass for sure; it’s probably why they sent two of the big guns out after him,” a second solider, this one with flaming-red hair, cropped short to his scalp, poked his head out from behind the first. There was no choice for Zuz but to name him ‘Conan.’

That got the attention of both Zuz and Leno.

“Two?” the first soldier’s head snapped back around to face his friend, causing his seemingly-forgotten cigarette to flap like crazy as it held on for dear life.

Seizing the binoculars away from his teammate nonchalantly, Conan squinted out to watch the battle, “Designate Gauss is inbound. E.T.A. less than eight minutes with three squads of Gomers. We’re streaming a live feed of the op to him now. Even if Cestus takes Talos down before Gauss arrives, we’ll have enough data to hack his on-board systems and shut him down cold.”

Leno snatched the matte-black glasses back.

“You think?” he asked, not quite as confident as his comrade-in-arms. “So far, the new biotech the lab installed in him has ignored everything we’ve thrown at it. If I didn’t know better I’d say it was learning from every attack.”

Conan headed back inside, mocking Leno, “You’re an idiot, private. We’ll get him, it’s just a matter of time.”

“Shitshitshit!” Zuz scrambled away from the men in a panic. He’d heard enough about Gauss from Mal to know the man would tear them both a new hole if they were still in the yard when he arrived. The computer-engineer turned professional conspiracy buff was positive he didn’t want to see what happened when a batshit crazy cyborg with magnetic powers landed in a scrapyard filled with ferrous metals.

If they were going to survive, the pair needed to escape before reinforcements arrived. Even more immediate, Zuz knew the tech truck, and whatever it was trying to do to Mal, needed to be taken offline. They could not be allowed to shut him down.

Leaping to his feet after a fifteen foot crawl through detritus, Zuz hauled ass towards a section of the compound a short distance away that held some of his most-prized pieces: a half-destroyed 727 airliner, a pair of Korean-era army jeeps, and, the thing he was sure would be their salvation, a four-hundred and ten horsepower 1969 Caterpillar D9 bulldozer he’d purchased from a Hollywood auction house. The monster had been sitting in a production studio’s warehouse for over 40 years after having ‘starred’ in the 1974 film, ‘Killdozer!,’ and had been his pet restoration project for the past nine months.

At a forty-nine ton operating weight, Zuz was confident it’d make short work of the Comm-vehicle and the men inside. Zuz climbed up onto the machine’s tread and tossed open the door to the driver’s compartment before climbing in, feeling like the cavalry about to ride in and save the day.

That is, until the D9 decided not to cooperate with him.

Zuz tried and failed to hot-wire the beast’s ignition five times before giving up and retrieving the keys from his utility shed. Luckily, all of the Gomers he’d seen running around the yard like ants earlier had found something more important to do than shoot a middle-aged, balding former computer technician.

If the sound of gunfire and explosions on the other side of the compound was any indication, then they had just run into Mal and, in the parlance of the iPad generation, ‘shit just got real.’

The sound of an engine as big as a car roaring to life caused an insane grin to spill across Zuz’s face. He was pretty sure sitting in the driver’s seat of the ‘Killdozer’ was what it felt like to ride a thunder cloud.

Obliterating a line of tattered Chevys that were relics from the Great Depression, Zuz pushed the construction vehicle to ‘warp 9.’ The only thing more satisfying to Zuz than the feel of power rumbling beneath him was the look of Leno’s face as he emerged from his vehicle a quarter second before impact.

The unlit cigarette finally dropped from the soldier’s quivering lower lip as the ‘Killdozer’ launched itself over the dilapidated husk of a once bright blue Pacer and plowed into the mobile comm-station, pulverizing it beyond recognition.

Zuz’s scream of exaltation rang out over the clamor of the D9’s mammoth diesel engine, but he knew his work wasn’t done yet. He had nullified the computerized threat from the men in the mangled heap before him, but the pair had no more than five minutes to make good their escape or it was all over. Gauss was coming and with him guaranteed capture.

Pulling as close to a 180 degree ‘bootleg’ turn as a one hundred thousand pound bulldozer can do while going twenty miles per hour, he lowered the six massive hydraulic arms attached to the U-blade, and charged straight for the mechanical giant beating the snot out of his friend.

“OK , sweetheart! Destroy!” was his battle cry.

God, Zuz loved that movie.

*****

A steel and aluminum fist the size of a phone booth slammed into Mal’s back, even as he eviscerated Rho-Five. The sheer force of the blow, and subsequent full-body pain Mal experienced from it, kept the cyborg from dwelling overly long on the death of his former compatriot.

Rolling out of the way of a follow-up strike from the gargantuan hand of Talos, Mal resolved the best way to mourn for the soldier—the friend—who had been Steven Douros, would be to take down the bastards that turned him into a mindless automaton. To take down the men responsible for what happened to both of them.

Of course, Mal’s line of thinking continued, the only way to do that was to not get killed by the colossal walking pile of rust currently doing its damnedest to squash him like a grape.

A gout of flame spewing forth from the oxyacetylene torch merged with Talos’s right forearm punctuated just how unlikely survival was going to be. Heat from the fire lance blistered Mal’s back and caused his shirt to light up. The nanotech in his bloodstream set his healing into over drive, making Mal realize just how much he hated the itchy feeling the things gave him when they were active.

Not that the half-machine man was going to complain, though. Having an uncontrollable urge to scratch himself all over was better than dealing with the discomfort of third degree burns over forty-percent of his body.

Mal tore off his flame-licked shirt and hurled it in the human face of Talos staring out from the upper chest of his patchwork iron shell. The giant reflexively protected its face with a large hand, allowing the smaller cyborg to rush between its legs.

Thirteen inch long talons sprung from once human hands and tore through the cables, girders and rods supporting the titan’s legs. With the groan and screech of metal shredding like tissue paper, forty tons of man and machine folded in on itself, crashing hard enough into the ground to send a spider web of cracks radiating out from it. A fifteen foot high stack of flattened sedans was upended by the earthquake caused by the falling cyborg, dropping unceremoniously onto its head.

“That went better than I had hoped,” smirked Mal, a bit too sure of himself.

Recent events being what they were, he should have known things wouldn’t be quite that easy. Ignoring his better judgment, and the little alarm of warning going off from the computer in his head, Mal formed one arm into a meter-and-a-half blade of gleaming metal and vaulted onto the back of the prone Talos, planning to finish off the Project: Hardwired assassin with one stroke of the sword.

Well, “sword arm” or “arm sword” or whatever it was.

Before the forty-eight inches of indestructible top-secret titanium alloy could puncture the armored enclosure Talos’s flesh and blood form was hiding in, the entire structure lurched and jerked, reforming under his feet and tossing Mal back to the cracked and crevassed pavement.

“Oooh,” the air was knocked from Mal’s lungs and he felt pebbles and small rocks forced into areas he really didn’t want them in.

By the time Mal kicked up to his feet again, Talos was ready for him. Somehow, the over-sized cyborg had beaten him to a standing position. Mal was stunned that something so big could move so fast.

“Gotcha!” echoed Talos’s rich voice from deep within the junk titan he’d become as his left hand shot out and gripped Mal’s body, pinning his arms to his sides.

Mal was trapped in a hand as big as an industrial freezer. Even worse than the fact he was probably about to be crushed to pulp was that a little shit like Talos was going to do the crushing.

Grunting as the titanic appendage tightened its vise-like hold, Mal struggled to no avail.

“You were always Kiesling’s number one draft pick. Now, you ain’t shit, are you?” Talos leaned his body over so he could watch as he squeezed the life out of the renegade cyborg.

“Fuck you.” The words were less than a whisper. Mal tried to spit in his enemy’s face as a final gesture of defiance, but the pressure on his chest and lungs was too great and the wad of phlegm just slid down his chin and onto his neck.

“I’m going to enjoy breaking you in half, Cestus.”

The sound of something huge crashing through the piles of scrap metal startled both men, snapping their heads to attention. The crunching and banging was joined by the pulsating bleat of a behemoth diesel engine and the horrific off-key voice of David Zuzelo singing ‘Ice, Ice, Baby’ at the top of his lungs.

Hurling out from between a pair of wasted Volkswagen buses, the D9 bulldozer slammed into the side of Designate Talos with the force of a locomotive, and caused Malcolm Weir’s world to go sideways.

Mal wasn’t sure how long he lost consciousness, but it was at least a handful of seconds. One second, Zuz is driving a huge-ass bulldozer into Talos, and the next, at least according to Mal’s rattled brain, there was a mushroom cloud of dust in the air and the entire north-facing wall of the garage was gone, collapsed in on itself.

A scream of terror and pain from within the decimated building snapped Mal out of his near-concussive funk, sending him running towards the sound. He reached down to pull a grenade belt off the corpse of Rho-Five, blanking out the fact that it was body of his fallen friend.

Making his way head-first through the powdery-gray fog at a speed that would make an Olympic sprinter green with envy, dodging the shattered pieces of destroyed cars as he went, Mal demanded a status update from his internal computer.

“Systems operating at ninety-three percent. Minor cosmetic damage in twelve locations. Three fractures in the following bones: right tibia, right ulna, and right ulna. Repairs will be complete in four minutes three seconds. Recommend intake of one thousand eight hundred calories of protein and calcium to compensate for projected loss in bone mineral density.”

Mal could feel the cuts and scraps dotting his body begin to close up and heal over.

“Good enough,” thought Mal as he broke through the fog to see Zuz suspended a good ten feet in the air by what was left of Talos’s exoskeleton.

Both of the giant’s legs were gone, along with one arm and most of its chest. Talos himself was now nearly completely exposed, the metal cage he had been protected by was dented inward, its bars bent and broken. The bulldozer itself was destroyed, barely recognizable. In spite of the extensive damage, Talos was laughing as his one good arm held Zuz upside down by one leg.

“Once I rip your buddy’s legs off, I’m coming after you, Cestus,” bellowed Talos, shaking his prisoner in the air, eliciting another shriek from Zuz.

Faster than either Talos or Zuz could react, Mal leapt the twenty plus foot distance between the building’s ruined perimeter to his enemy’s chest, howling insanely as he did. Living metal hands sank into rusted steel armor to find enough purchase to brace the living weapon Mal had been turned into. An instant later, Mal had punched a clawed fist through the stomach of Talos, bounded across to where Zuz was being clutched by massive fingers and cut the man free.

Blood gurgled from between Talos’s lips as the two men dropped to the ground.

“This won’t stop me, Ces!” called Talos, swinging his massive arm at the fleeing pair like a club. “My Prime Unit is stronger than yours! You’ll never escape!”

“Fuck me,” groaned Zuz, eyes going wide as he saw Talos beginning to free himself from the wreckage by drawing its mass into his body.

Mal pushed his friend behind a half-standing piece of wall for protecting and turned to face Designate Talos, a determined look etched into his face.

“Hey, Talos,” Mal called back, raising his right arm and holding up his thumb and forefinger to mimic a gun. Eight metal pins hit the ground at Mal’s feet, released from where they were hidden in his palm. A smile tugged the corners of Mal’s mouth, “Bang.”

Talos looked down at where Mal was pointing and noticed a Rho-Five’s grenade belt sticking out of the shredded flesh of his lower torso. His human arms came free of his exoskeleton to claw furiously through the gore, trying to reach the explosives.

He was too late.

The concussive force of the multiple grenade explosions threw both Mal and Zuz clear of the building as nearly half of it was blown to hell. Mal covered Zuz’s body with his own, shielding the man from the rain of fragments and wreckage that followed.

Once it had stopped, Mal helped Zuz to his feet and the men stood in silence for nearly a minute, taking in the devastation.

Gripping Mal on his shoulder, David Zuzelo finally broke the silence.

“Mal, man, we have to get out of here right now,” Zuz squinted against the light and heat of the aftermath of the explosion. He could feel the flames singeing the fine hairs of his eyebrows and the fringes of his goatee. “The baddies have reinforcements inbound.”

Nodding in understanding, Mal’s hands motioned to his anxious friend for one more moment. “One sec, Zuz. I need to make sure shorty is down for the count. That’s not a bastard I want coming back for me.”

“Well, hurry up. Chatter over the wire says Gauss is en route with them, and I’m not sure either of us is ready for him to tag in.”