Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (24 page)

Living metal arms twitched and bulged, elongated spines flexing and mismatched plates rotating, as Mal forced his arms to relax into something more closely approximating ‘normal,’ hoping it would keep Kristin calm. The woman’s six-inch-high heels created a staccato drumbeat as she strode mindfully across the lobby’s marble and stone floor, weapons held tightly in each hand but, to Mal’s relief, kept low in a less-aggressive profile.

If he could keep her at ease, Mal was convinced he’d be able to work through whatever brainwashing Project: Hardwired had put her through. He was sure he could bring her back.

“Honey,” said Mal, moving forward to meet the woman in the lobby’s center. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

Kristin’s head cocked to one side, her golden hair falling in a stream over her shoulder, the weapons dipped lower into an almost casual position. Mal stepped forward, and reached his hand out to brush her chin lightly.

The merest hint of a smile started to form on her pretty face. Mal knew he could reach her.

“It’s okay, Kristin. I’m here now…we can go home.”

The smile grew and the lovely girl leaned in, nuzzling her lips on Mal’s neck, the fresh scent of the strawberry shampoo she favored filled his nostrils and sent goose bumps bubbling up across his skin. He could feel her warm breath and her mouth moved up to brush his hear.

Then she spoke.

“Is that right, Mr. Weir?” said Kristin in a deep, masculine voice not her own. “Come to save your pretty little girlfriend?”

There were no words for the amount of revulsion Mal felt at hearing the voice of Gordon Kiesling coming from the red-glossed lips of Kristin—lips he’d kissed countless times.

Off-balance, the possessed woman’s attack took Mal completely by surprise. Kristin’s energy-enhanced sword whipped out at chest height, burying itself deep in the thick scar tissue of Mal’s side where human flesh merged unevenly with the inhuman material of his cybernetic replacements. So fast was the attack that the blade lodged between a bone rib and Mal’s metal reinforced spine before the fluctuating electrical current kicked in, sending the cyborg’s body to his knees in painful spasms.

Mal’s computer system seemed unable to counteract the relentless flow of electricity flowing from the katana wedged in his body. It’s modulation seemed designed to disrupt his circuitry.

On the verge of blacking out, Mal felt the woman tear her weapon free in a graceful pirouette that turned into a cruel roundhouse kick, the dagger-like steel heels of her shoes drawing a bloody line across his face from ear to chin. Mal was quick enough to use the force behind the attack to roll out of the way a nanosecond before a second kick shattered the highly polished marble slab he’d been crouched on.

A scream of pain tore itself from Mal’s throat as the woman reversed her grip on the sword and sliced his back open, spraying the floor and the pale white skin of her exposed flesh with blood.

The shock from Kristin’s katana surging through his nervous system turned Mal’s muscles into unresponsive jelly, ignoring his every command to get up and defend himself. All he could manage as the woman stood over him laughing in a rich baritone was to half crawl, half slide away from her at a snail’s pace.

Mal flopped over onto his back, planting his right hand flat on the ground to raise himself into a seated position. A disappointed ‘tsk’ echoed above him as his computer initiated his healing factor, far slower than he would have liked.

“I’m disappointed, Malcolm…may I call you ‘Malcolm?’ ‘Mr. Weir’ seems so formal between friends,” said Kiesling’s voice. “I expected more of a fight from the our most advanced unit. You’re not going to let yourself get beat by a girl, are you?”

The warm feeling of nanites sealing wounds and rebuilding damaged tissue filled Mal, his head clearing even as his injuries began to vanish.

“Kristin, I know you’re still in there. Fight it.” Mal’s voice was weak and unsteady from the strange sequence of events.

Sword twirling in lazy circles in one hand, Kristin brought up her machine pistol with the other and took aim at the prone man half-sprawled out on the ground.

“I’m afraid Kristin doesn’t live here anymore,” answered the man’s voice.

Bullets belched out at high speed from the gun at the squeeze of Kristin’s finger, but Mal was ready for it and deflected the assault, smacking the armor-piercing rounds off course with his nearly indestructible living metal arms and uncanny speed.

Needing more time to come up with a plan, Mal kept talking as he danced through the rain of gunfire spitting at him from the MP9.

“Why are you doing this to us?” asked Mal, maneuvering through the deadly hail in an effort to get close enough to Kristin to disarm the woman. “What do you want from me?”

The woman laughed heartily, ejecting the empty magazine from the bottom of her fully automatic pistol. Mal used the pause to lunge in under her sword and slice into the nylon belt containing her spare cartridges, sending it scuttling across the ground out of the woman’s reach.

“Why I want ‘you,’ of course.”

Whoever had control of Kristin’s body decided to give up on the gun, dropping it. Grasping the katana’s hilt in both hands, she lashed out at Mal, who reflexively caught it in his hand. The glowing blue lightning field that danced along the sword’s length jumped into the cybernetic components of Mal’s nanotech prosthetic, rendering it numb and inoperable from the elbow down. The weapon seemed to have been created with Mal’s specific ‘improvements’ in mind and left them malfunctioning and unreliable with the tiniest of contact.

“Project: Hardwired has too much time, too many resources, and far too much of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money invested in your development to let you just walk out. We own you, soldier!” With that, Kristin’s body, controlled remotely from a floor hundreds of feet above, hurled herself at Mal, luminous blade slashing furiously.

At first, Mal was taken aback by the wanton disregard Kristin had for her own protection. She continually over-extended swings and thrusts, leaving her vital areas exposed. When the cyborg dodged a particularly violent backhanded chop and instinctively retaliated with a crippling open-hand strike to her chest, knocking Kristin flat onto her back, realization hit him.

The man controlling her had no need for defense. No need to dodge or defend against Mal’s attacks. The entire point of the exercise was to wear him down mentally as much as physically. So what if he killed the girl?

Kristin flipped off her backside and back up to her feet in a move that would have done Jackie Chan proud. Seeing the look of concern on the cyborg’s face, Kristin’s voice took on a reassuring tone even as she renewed her attempts to split Mal in half.

“This isn’t going to end well for you, Designate Cestus. Give up. Come back to the fold. Everything will be okay,” she said. “We can even give your girl back her life.”

Ducking out of the way of a diagonal cleave of Kristin’s sword that turned out to be a clever feint, Mal moved directly into a powerful elbow blow from the woman. Only his superior reaction time saved him from the back stroke of the sword that would have taken the top of his skull off.

“I’d be a bit more inclined to believe that if you weren’t trying to cut my head off and scoop out the insides,” Mal fired back, bounding over a horizontal slice intended to sever his spine just above the naval.

“You’ve got our intellectual property locked in there and it’s coming out…one way or the other.” The voice snapped and Mal realized whoever was behind the attack was getting frustrated. If he was lucky frustration would lead to carelessness and to a mistake Mal could take advantage of.

It was then Mal noticed the interface port melded into the skin at the base of Kristin’s skull.

“That’s how they’re controlling her,” he thought to himself. That would be the way he broke their control.

Mal asked his computer if it could hack into whatever was controlling Kristin. Disrupt its signal? Cut the puppet’s strings.

“Negative,” the computer responded dispassionately.

Another sword stroke narrowly missed dissecting Mal through his midsection. Whatever they did to Kristin, she wasn’t any faster than a normal human. Now that Mal had rebounded from the initial shock of her attacks, he could dodge her forever. But that did nothing to solve his problem—it just gave Kiesling time to send more reinforcements to stop Mal. And fighting Kristin was out of the question. He needed to find a way to shut her down without permanently harming or killing her.

“Can communication with their command programming be disrupted through the physical access port?”

“Affirmative.”

The computer’s confirmation spurred Mal into a flurry of action. In one fluid motion, Mal used a scooping block to parry Kristin’s sword arm, and twisted his body to last out with a fearsome side kick to her midsection, causing the woman to double over in pain. An open hand chop to her wrist sent the katana spinning across the room. Still out of breath from having the wind knock out of her lungs, Kristin fought feebly, kicking and cursing, as Mal snaked a hand around her neck, forcing her head to remain in place while the living metal of his other fist altered its shape, thinning out and elongating into a grim-looking six-inch spike lined with tiny connectors.

Kristin gasped out loud as Mal plunged the spike into the hardwired port at the top of her spine, his computer taking control over her mind upon contact.

The connection was instantaneous. Mal could feel the information data flowing from the computer implanted deep within his ex-fiancée’s brain, through the living circuits of his arm, and into his own mind. Direct access to Kristin’s brain allowed Mal to almost visualize the wireless connection controlling her—he could see its blazing trail streaming straight up into the building above their heads. Reaching out, Mal was able to touch the heart of the Abraxas-Array, burning its location into his mind. The face of Director Gordon Kiesling stared back at him through the data stream, grinning, before Project: Hardwired computer technicians closed it down, blocking the cyborg from the system.

Turning back to the woman in his arms, Mal probed deep, trying to locate and bring back Kristin’s base personality construct.

“Oh, no,” he stammered in disbelief.

Mal was horrified by what his direct link to Kristin’s mind revealed: the woman he knew was gone. Her mind completely wiped, reprogrammed one-hundred percent by the Abraxas-Array as it transformed her from a beautiful, kind woman into one of Project: Hardwired’s mindless GMRs.

For all intents and purposes, Kristin Meyer was dead. In her place, all that remained was an empty shell controlled by Kiesling and his group.

Tears welled up in Mal’s eyes, running freely down his face and onto his chest as he released Kristin’s still body and dislodged the connection his cybernetics had made with the interface to her brain, allowing her to finally fall to the ground. Mal backed away from the prone figure, heart threatening to burst out of his chest.

For a full thirty seconds, Mal was lost. The woman had been his world before everything had happened. She had been his life and his reason for going on. Now she was gone forever.

No! He’d find the men responsible and make them bring her back. They’d taken his mind and he was able to return. They could do the same for her.

And if they refused, he’d kill them all.

A quiet laughter snapped Mal out of his murderous thoughts.

“Oh, sweetie.” The evil, laughing voice of Kiesling taunted through playfully parted crimson lips. The woman twisted her body just enough for the cyborg to see a tiny pin fall free from the grenade in her hand and its safety ‘spoon’ spring loose. “Say goodnight.”

“No!”

Mal sprung for the explosive charge in the woman’s hand, crossing the distance in the blink of an eye. But even his preternatural speed wasn’t fast enough to stop fate and Gordon Kiesling’s revenge.

The computer enhanced brain of Malcolm Weir allowed him to watch her death in slow motion—an image that would replay itself over and over in his mind for the rest of his life. It started with a tiny pulse of red flame in her palms and expanded outward at high speed, throwing shrapnel in 360 degrees, rendering flesh and bone into a thick red paste, unidentifiable as having been a living woman. Kristin’s life was extinguished before the concussive blast and metal fragments punched into Mal, sending him tumbling uncontrollably across the room, bleeding from countless wounds.

Coming to a few seconds later, all Mal knew was pain. Pain from the explosion. Pain from fighting for his existence for twenty-four hours straight. And, worst of all, pain from seeing the woman he loved blasted into red vapor and chunks of lifeless meat at the whim of a gutless, power-hungry man. A man whose face and voice were now familiar to Malcolm Weir. A man who was, even now, hiding behind an army of soldiers and killers. A man who had taken everything from him. A man who wanted Designate Cestus at all costs.

He smiled. If they wanted Cestus, then that’s what they’d get. Malcolm Weir breathed his last breath, eyes closing.

Something else opened them back up.

Cestus started to climb to his feet but was stopped by a sound from the street beyond the building’s destroyed walls and a figure, silhouetted by the harsh outdoor lighting of the battle-ravaged courtyard.

“Hey, Cestus,” called a voice from outside, a voice Cestus immediate recognized as belonging to his least favorite member of the Project: Hardwired cyborg varsity squad, Gauss. “You forgot your car.”

The sight of Zuz’s crappy white car crashing through the reinforced glass front wall of the US Bank Tower’s main lobby forced an expletive to be summoned up from the pit of Cestus’s diaphragm, along with a healthy dose of dread. Those four letters and bringing up his arms to shield the human portion of his body were all Cestus could manage before the two ton magnetically-propelled cannonball slammed into him at just under sixty miles-per-hour, driving the cyborg against the back wall of the cavernous room with a thunderclap.

Struggling to get free of the twisted steel straight jacket and fallen masonry, Cestus watched hopelessly as Gauss stalked across the debris-strewn lobby floor towards him. The Project: Hardwired cyborg looked smug as he approached.