Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (26 page)

A small, less than manly scream and incoherent babbling—meant to have been an exclamation demanding to know how the cyborg super-soldier escaped, but came out more like a frightened one year-old trying to make words for the first time—was all the man could manage as he backpedaled away from the attack, flailing recklessly. In fact, the only thing that saved him from becoming the late-Gordon Kiesling was his less than dignified reaction and abject terror—that and tripping over the ever-present Ms. Roslan standing behind him and falling to the floor.

As it was, the stiletto claws of Cestus tore Kiesling’s shirt open and sliced a quartet of inch-deep grooves into the man’s chiseled chest and stomach. A hand’s breadth closer and the former Army Ranger would have gutted the man like a fish, from navel to neck, ending his career and his life.

A second attack from Cestus was thwarted by a short burst of four shots from somewhere behind the collapsed man, gunfire that glanced off his arms and shoulders, forcing the cyborg to pull his armored prosthetics in close to protect his body from damage.

“RUN!” screamed Roslan’s voice as she pulled Kiesling to his feet and continued to squeeze the trigger of her Glock, pushing it to expel tiny gouts of flame and gunpowder clouds in an effort to distract the enraged cyborg from his target. The determination in the woman’s eyes as she faced off against a billion dollar cybernetic assassin reminded the Project: Hardwired chief executive that he still owed his assistant a raise…a very, very big raise.

Kiesling allowed himself to be jerked off the ground and ushered to the operating suite’s exit, surrounded by a quartet of GMR units. The remaining eight computer-guided automatons rushed to surround Cestus in a delaying tactic to allow their boss to escape, hopefully lasting long enough for reinforcements to arrive and take care of the rogue unit.

“They’d better hurry,” thought Kiesling, trying to hold his shirt together and do something to halt the flow of blood from the wounds decorating his torso. “Weir is going to make short work of the Gomers and then come after me.”

“Where are the other Primes?” Kiesling demanded loudly, following quickly behind Ms. Roslan on the way to the nearest elevator bank.

“I’m here,” said Designate Gauss as the steel elevator doors parted, allowing him to exit. The cyborg was ready for battle, wearing sleeveless, reinforced body armor over his torso that still allowed his own cybernetically enhanced arms to work free from confinement. To Ms. Roslan, he said, “There is a chopper waiting for you all on the roof. It’s prepped and ready to remove you to a safe location off-site. Where is Weir now?”

Ms. Roslan started to answer, pointing back in the direction they’d come from, “He’s insi—” but was cut off before she could finish.

“Kill him, Gauss!” shouted Kiesling, nearly foaming at the mouth with rage. “Kill Weir and I’ll cut your leash.”

“What about the missing data files?” asked the chrome-plated cyborg, smiling at the idea of becoming a free agent.

“Fuck the files! I want Malcolm Weir dead!”

“It’s about time.” Gauss grinned evilly. His shining cybernetic eye flared like the sun for a moment, causing the electricity on three floors of the building to flicker and dim as he charged up. The magnetic field around Gauss increased to the point where all of the metal within thirty feet began twitching and leaning in the cyborg’s direction. “Get going…I don’t know how much longer the power is going to hold out with me amping up.”

So eager to watch the cause of his troubles taken care of once and for all, it took Ms. Roslan and three GMRs to move Kiesling into the elevator. He was still yelling out for Gauss to “Kill Him!” as the doors slid closed and the lift lurched into motion, heading for the top of the building, twenty plus floors up.

The sounds of fighting and gunfire and men dying spilled beneath the door to the surgical bay, filling Gauss with excitement as he waited for the elevator car to get far enough away from his magnetic ability’s sphere of influence to be safe, counting down from one hundred as he did.

When the count reached ‘zero,’ Gauss slammed his hands together with enough force that the resulting shockwave shattered every piece of glass on the level and shook the building’s structure down to its foundation.

Gauss screamed, wrapped himself in a nigh-invulnerable magnetic bubble, and charged through the wall separating him from his quarry, obliterating the barrier with less effort than it would take a normal man to swat a fly.

At last, Weir’s ass belonged to him!

*****

The room inside was silent, except for the breathing of the man at its center and the drip, drip, drip of spilled blood.

Every inch of Cestus glistened crimson with slaughter and he stood on a carpet of death, surrounded by the dismembered remains of eight men whose bodies had been corrupted by the same science that had perfected their killer. His eyes reflected only the light of unbridled violence. Cestus had accepted his role as a killer and embraced it fully. The fruits of his labor were spread out before him like a horrible banquet of annihilation and carnage.

A twitch of his wrist snapped the neck of the GMR he held out before him, suspended four inches above the ground in a grip of unbending steel. The man died with a gurgle that caught in his throat.

“Now for Kiesling,” said Cestus to no one in particular.

The tiny digitized voice in the back of Cestus’s mind decided to throw a monkey-wrench into his plans of mayhem by announcing it had detected a large fluctuation in the localized magnetic field of the building and that Designate Gauss was inbound.

“Is there anything you can do about that asshole, Computer?” Cestus asked the computer in his head.

“Initiating countermeasures. Negation field active,” it answered as an electrical charged flowed through the nanobots invading every cell of his body.

Cestus barely noticed the floor nearly buckling beneath him as Gauss blasted the wall before him to dust.

“How long will the negation field last?”

“Sixty seconds,” responded the computer.

“That’s all I need.” Cestus dropped the bloody carcass of the slain GMR he’d been holding to the floor and braced himself for Gauss’s onslaught.

So primed with power, each running footstep Gauss planted on the ground caused the heavily-reinforced floor to fracture and crack. The walls themselves seemed to flex outward in reaction to his presence.

“Kiesling sent me here to kill you, Weir!”

The two half-machine titans met in the middle of the room with a quick series of strikes and blocks, each cyborg feeling out the other. The first time they had met in battle, a freshly-awakened Cestus had been outclassed and overpowered by the sheer explosive power and vehemence of the other man’s attack; this time it was different.

Fresh and in full access of his abilities, Cestus found himself to be more than a match for Gauss—his speed was greater by a factor of two or more and allowed the super-soldier to easily dodge attacks from the magnetically-enhanced cyborg that might otherwise have blasted his bones to dust.

With each missed attack, Gauss became more and more angry, and his offense grew wilder as he realized defeating Cestus wouldn’t be the walk-in-the-park he’d thought it would.

“The only chance you had to kill me was when I first woke up,” taunted Cestus, easily dodging the increasingly uncontrolled attacks from his enemy. “Now I have full access to my programming.”

“So what?” snapped Gauss, a missed overhand strike that fractured the floor beneath their feet punctuated his disdain for Cestus and his programming. “Your little ‘Edward Scissorhands’ act doesn’t impress me. You’re nothing!”

“Wrong,” replied Cestus, shredding his opponent’s face with a backhanded strike that enraged the berserk cyborg even more. “They built me to take the other Prime Units down if any of you got out of control. I was made to kill you, Gauss…and Kiesling sent you here to die.”

Cestus dropped into a defensive stance and waited for the attack he knew would follow his enemy’s rage.

“LIAR!” roared Gauss, putting every iota of his power and energy into a haymaker that left him wide open and vulnerable when Cestus ducked under it.

Crossing his arms in front of his body, Cestus sliced upward with arms morphed into meter-long blades of titanium-carbon alloy, catching the overextended right arm of Gauss in their crux and tore it from his body.

Stunned, Gauss watched the amputated limb bounce across the floor, taking with it his capacity for magnetic-control. Cestus’s hand, morphed into a cruel fist of blades and spikes, tore into the shocked cybernetic-man’s stomach with enough force to splinter his spine.

The voices of both men lashed out in a duet of violence, pain, and fury.

“Take a look, Gauss,” said Cestus, rage fully on display across his face as he twisted the razor-blades of his fingers hard into the man’s gut. “Take a good long look into the eyes of the man who killed you.”

Any response Gauss had ended, dying in a crimson tinged froth upon his lips and a haggard cough. With a jerk and sickening suction sound, the living metal claw of Cestus came free, spraying blood and letting Gauss’s innards flop wetly to the floor in a hot cascade.

Gauss fell in mute horror to his knees staring at the ropey pile of his intestines on the floor before looking up to his conqueror one last time. The light from the cyborg’s eyes was already fading as Cestus leapt over his cooling corpse in pursuit of his true prey, Gordon Kiesling.

Entering the stairwell at full speed, Cestus took the last twenty flights to the roof four steps in a bound, taking less time that it would for a man to walk into the kitchen for a snack. He knew he had to hurry if he was going to catch Kiesling before the coward slunk away to hide somewhere out of the cyborg’s reach.

Reaching the last landing and the exit leading out to the building’s summit and heliport, Cestus leaned down and bowled through the metal reinforced door blocking his path without even slowing down. The super-soldier was ready for the automatic gunfire waiting for him on the fifty-foot flat expanse of roof, running in a mad-dash toward the dull black helicopter waiting to take off atop a raised platform in its center.

Four GMRs let loose with every bit of ammo they had in their MP5s as Kiesling made his way up five tiny steps towards the chopper. The two men locked eyes and knew they were in a race that meant death for one of them.

Cestus met the first GMR with a leap and dropped him with a pair of knees to the man’s chest, crushing his throat, shattering his collarbone, and collapsing his ribcage. The cyborg was dead by the time his body flopped to the ground. Spring up to his feet, Cestus decapitated the second GMR as the automaton opened fire and sprayed bullets in a mad dance of twitching death. Cestus grabbed the headless man’s body and spun it around, taking the last two roadblocks in their faces, killing them instantly.

“Kiesling!” screamed Cestus as he watched the director of Project: Hardwired climbing into the vehicle with his assistant close behind.

Swearing out loud, Kiesling turned just inside the helicopter’s tiny cabin and looked back and forth between the Cestus barreling in his direction and Ms. Roslan trying to climb on board. Making up his mind, Kiesling shouted for the pilot to go ahead and take off. He leaned down low towards the woman below and shoved her away from the aircraft, dropping her squarely on her backside.

“Gordon?!” she said, stunned by his sudden action.

“Get us off the ground NOW!” Kiesling yelled to the pilot. Catching Ms. Roslan’s attention, he ordered, “You only need to slow him down for a minute, Melissa…”

The woman’s eyes went cold as the vehicle with her boss—and her own rescue—began to lift off of the platform and move away from her position. Regaining her feet, Roslan turned towards the blood and gore soaked Cestus nearly upon her, gripping her gun tightly.

Cestus closed the distance to within feet, legs a blur beneath him, clawed arms wide apart ready for attack.

Ms. Roslan stepped meekly out of the way, arms raised in non-aggression, and allowed Cestus to bolt passed her unmolested. Momentum carrying his body towards the edge of the platform, Cestus watched as the helicopter slowly rotated away from the building, hovering ten feet up and twenty feet away from the roof and out in the yawning chasm of empty air that extended out over the Los Angeles skyline beyond. Without hesitation the cyborg launched himself into mid-air after the retreating aircraft, extending his arms to their full length. The cybernetic prosthetics groaned and stretched to over six fix, grasping out for the landing skids of the copter.

A scream tore itself from Cestus as time seemed to freeze with him hanging in air, unsure of whether or not he’d make it.

Miraculously, one clawed hand was able to hold on to the bouncing, rotating helicopter, while the other slapped the side and slid loose. Cestus dangled precariously by one hand, the ground screaming up at him from more than a thousand feet below. The chopper spun and dipped from the weight of the cyborg landing on its bottom-most structure, jerking out of the pilot’s control, nearly sending Gordon Kiesling bouncing out its still-open side hatch.

“He’s grabbed on! We have to shake him off!” Cestus heard Kiesling scream from somewhere right about his head.

“We’re off-balance and need to land, sir,” came the pilot’s reply, picked up over the sound of the helicopter’s diesel engine and its rotors.

The chopper tilted and started to descend, still jerking back and forth as Cestus swung freely underneath, threatening to send the man plummeting to his death on the earth below.

As the helicopter swung precariously close to the building as it dropped, Cestus made his decision to end it all right there, high up over the streets of L.A. before they landed. The cyborg grabbed the strut with both hands and used the bottom of the vehicle to kick himself into an arc, flipping into the belly of the chopper.

Kiesling was dumbstruck by the turn of events.

Seeing the murderous cyborg bent on taking his life suddenly appear less than a foot away from where he was standing sent Gordon Kiesling into a panic. He started to open his mouth to beg for mercy—to offer Malcolm Weir whatever he wanted to let him go—when Cestus cut him short. The cyborg’s arm morphed into a lustrous blade of silver, which shot forward, running Gordon Kiesling through at the center of his chest. The sword continued into the back of the pilot’s chair, through the startled pilot struggling to regain control of the flight stick, and into the instrument panel. A shower of sparks sprayed the cockpit as Cestus yanked his arm free.