Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (3 page)

Normally Mal would have left the attractive woman behind—she had, after all, been part of whatever group had brought him here and did whatever it was they had done to him—but the soft pop and whoosh of a grenade being fired from the other side of the fractured and fragmented wall caused his Ranger training to kick in and the world seemed to slam into slow motion.

Perception kicking into high gear, Mal could see the motion trails and air disruption of hot projectiles flying through the air around him, easily dodgeable. A quick look over his left shoulder showed the fast approaching grenade round, spinning fiercely even in the hour it seemed to take for a second to tick off the clock.

A clawed hand grasped the cowering woman’s shoulder and yanked her to her feet, forcibly dragging her along behind the soldier who was now moving at nearly an imperceptible speed. The living metal of Mal’s shoulder caused the wooden and glass door to vaporize under its weight, slowing his momentum not one iota and allowing him to bounce out of the workroom’s doorway even as the grenade exploded.

Flames licked out into the hall, followed by oily gray smoke and the smell of scorched plastic, quickly filling the corridor from floor to ceiling.

His powerful body shielding the woman from explosion and raining debris, Mal used one hand to turn her face toward his, leaving a grisly, clawlike handprint across her cheek, and demanded, “Who are you people? Where the hell am I?”

“Don’t kill me!” was all she responded; mascara and tears ran down her now soot covered face. All that followed was incoherent blubbering.

The grating sound of stone being ground to dust spat from Mal’s mouth as teeth ground themselves against each other in anger and frustration. He didn’t have time for this. Those “GMR” guys were going to realize he survived the room’s obliteration and come for him, guns blazing any second. Mal hauled the woman to her feet with an ease that surprised him: the arms, whatever they were, increased his strength dramatically. As long as his feet were planted, the super-soldier guessed he could probably lift a few thousand pounds without much trouble.

A quick once-over of the woman, whose nametag Mal saw was “Grace Talborg,” helped him decide “good cop” was probably the best interrogation technique to use. She was fragile and looked like she’d shatter if he breathed too hard on her.

“Look, Ms. Talborg,” voice shifting into comfort-mode as years of polite Southern upbringing took over, Mal held his hands up, palms out, to show he meant her no harm, “I don’t know what’s going on here, or where I am or why I’m here…please. Help me.”

Her response left much to be desired, at least from Mal’s point of view.

A gun pulled with amazing speed out from under her coat and a trio of bullets fired with amazing rapidity into his chest caused Mal to rethink his manners. The pistol was a tiny .22 caliber job and Grace wasn’t the most skilled of marksmen, but only his hyper-enhanced reflexes and speed allowed Mal to avoid taking a slug to his vital organs: two bullets flattened themselves against his chest armor, harmlessly, while the third pinged off the forearm he threw up to shield his face and ricocheted up to leave a nasty gash across his right cheek, burrowing a burned and bloody line into his face.

Grace moved to fire her weapon again but Mal was quicker and caught her hand in his increasingly savage looking one. All she could manage was a sharp intake of breath as a quick flex of the soldier’s gleaming chrome muscles crushed the gun in her hand, and the fingers around it.

“My, God,” croaked Grace as the pain from her pulverized hand slowly began to register in her brain. Mal didn’t give her time to scream as he did the chivalrous thing and head butted the woman into unconsciousness.

Smoke from the fire continued to billow into the passageway and gave everything a red hue. Mal’s sensitive hearing picked up the sound of sprinklers going off in the room next to where he stood. The sound of heavy booted feet stomping through water allowed him to identify where the armed group of men were—they hadn’t charged in right after the grenade went off, which was the only thing that had saved him from taking a barrage of bullets from behind as he dealt with Grace.

Eyes narrowing in an effort to block stinging smoke, Mal squinted to try and find an escape route before he was discovered. Down the hall and away from the rooms he had just vacated were a series of doors and a T-junction at the end, perhaps a hundred feet or more away. Bright light, a clear blue sky and glimpses of buildings showed through a nearly floor-to-ceiling window in the opposite direction. One way led deeper into the unknown, the other to a freedom, but he’d have to make his way past two rooms filled with men who were armed to the teeth and ready to kill him.

Shouts from within the fire-engulfed room announcing his discovery spurred Mal’s legs into action. He headed for the window and hoped there were no nasty surprises waiting for him from within the surgical suite’s shattered doorway.

“Target locked!” shouted a voice from somewhere within the rooms and a nearly perfect horizontal line of armor piercing bullets tore through the wall right behind him.

Mal spit out a curse and sent his legs pumping.

Moving at full speed after only a few steps, Mal was able to outrun the rain of death from behind. Unfortunately, as he approached the well-lit doorway of the operating room, a pair of the GMRs emerged, wielding stun-batons loaded with enough electrical juice to take down an elephant.

Mal was about to stop and reverse direction when the inner voice chimed out, “Melee mode engaged.”

The ever-present feeling of buzzing electricity grew to an uncomfortable pitch that ran from the fingertips of both hands in to his spine, causing Mal to almost lose his footing as he leaned his head down to rush the men. From the corner of his eyes, Mal watched as one arm molded itself into a nearly three foot long blade of glimmering steel, thrusting out from where his forearm had been. The other arm seemed to bulk up, metal plates flanging and flaring out, and his fingers elongated into five claws that would have made Wolverine shit himself with envy.

The GMRs were fast and raised their electrified clubs into position to strike him as the distance closed, but Mal was infinitely faster. The man on Mal’s left was split in half, from groin to collarbone, dead before he realized it, and flopped to the nylon gray carpet. Seemingly of its own accord, Mal’s bladed right hand shattered the second man’s club in its grip, completely unaffected by the charge it held, and ripped through his chest, the Kevlar vest offering no more protection than a cloth t-shirt.

The fight was over in less than a second and two of Mal’s unknown opponents lay at his feet, dead and nearly unrecognizable as having once been men. Barely breathing heavy, Mal stared at the implements of death his hands had become and shook with quiet emotion, ignoring the silent voice that spoke once more from somewhere deep inside his mind.

“Four hostile units approaching at six o’clock. Unit Designate Gauss considered preliminary threat,” it droned.

“What am I?” muttered Mal on the verge of collapse.

“You’re dead is what you are, Cestus,” came the response from the doorway to Mal’s left. A spinning hook kick from a steel-toed combat boot took Mal by surprise as it landed in the center of his back and drove him face-first through the opposite wall and into a darkened medical room.

All Mal could think as his head slammed into an examining table was that there was no way a normal man could have done that to him. It was impossible.

Whoever he was fighting, they were no more normal than he was.

“Gomer Units Theta-Nine, Theta-Ten and Theta-Fourteen, stand down, this asshole is mine.”

Wiping blood from out of his eyes, Mal looked up to see the man his voice called “Gauss” stride out of the haze-filled hall, silhouetted by the flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling behind him. Mal was shocked to see Gauss tear his shirt and Kevlar vest off with a quick motion, revealing a pair of slick, chrome metal arms underneath. Four two-finger thick bands of glowing material, spaced off every few inches, encased each arm.

Unseen, the three remaining Gomers sounded off in unison, “Standing down, sir.”

The stereo effect creeped Mal out, although it was quickly forgotten as cold metal fingers grasped his neck from behind and jerked him to his feet.

“I’ve been waiting to take you down since they brought you in, Cestus.”

A mouthful of spit and bile and blood accompanied a series of crushing blows to Mal’s chest. He was sure he felt at least three ribs crack during the attack. Metal arms or no, Mal wasn’t sure how much punishment he’d be able to take.

Gauss held Mal two inches off of the ground with an unyielding grip. “Let’s see how much your “badass Ranger training” helps you after I’ve ripped your spine out.” The man’s mouth literally frothed with his anger and spittle showered Mal’s face.

Chrome fist clenched so tight his fingers seemed to disappear into a seamless ball, Gauss delivered an uppercut that rattled Mal’s teeth and smashed him back through wood and drywall into the hall beyond. So furious was the blow that Mal found himself resting in a cratered floor on the verge of giving way to the level below.

In spite of his confusion and injuries, Mal decided he’d had enough. While he had no idea how exactly his new arms worked, he figured the best way to learn was to picture what he wanted and, as Gauss pushed his way through the half-collapsed office wall, Mal greeted him with two hands ending in five matching, six inch long blades each.

The two cyborgs rushed one another, each with death in his eyes. Mal was faster than the other man by far and left long gashes and bloody wounds on the man every time one of his claws connected. Unfortunately, Gauss was much fresher and far more powerful, with each fist strike or kick strong enough to pulverize concrete and shatter steel.

After one particularly intense exchange of attacks, Mal noticed Gauss’s blows didn’t have to connect to do damage. Whenever he threw a punch, the bands on his arms pulsed and seemed to amplify the man’s strikes.

Mal was feeling bone-jarring impacts from open-palm strikes that stopped four or five inches from contact.

Panting and spitting gobs of thick, dark blood, Mal thought, what the hell is going on here? How do I fight someone who doesn’t have to touch me to hurt me?

“Designate Gauss is equipped to affect, alter and manipulate magnetic fields in his immediate area,” responded the calm voice that Mal thought sounded more and more like something you’d hear while on hold.

At least it’s answering me now, Mal thought to himself as he blocked a leaping over-hand martial arts strike from Gauss that sent cracks throughout the floor beneath them and further threatened a collapse. If Mal didn’t figure something out soon, he was a goner.

“Initiating dipolar counter charge in five seconds,” the voice stated as a plan laid itself out for Mal.

“Four seconds.”

The ferocity of the battle increased with the countdown. If Mal understood things, angling his back toward the window was going to be his best chance of getting away, and that whatever was going to happen was going to be rather impressive in nature.

“Three seconds.”

Landing a particularly nasty cut down the face of Gauss that nearly took out his eye, the barest hints of a smile curled the edges of Mal’s mouth. Gauss stumbled back a few feet in surprise. He was shocked Mal was able to hurt him.

“Two seconds.”

Face flushing red Gauss put all of his power behind a strike he was sure would kill or incapacitate his opponent.

“You’re dead!” screamed Gauss and his arm pistoned forward with the force of a canon.

“Dipolar counter charge initiated.”

Hearing the words in his head and feeling the strange tingling in his arms, Mal lashed out with his own fist, directly into the path of the one Gauss had launched. The two hands, moving at rocket-like speeds, closed to within millimeters of one another before the reverse polarity field Mal’s arms were generating took full effect, halting their power.

The resulting explosion caused the smoke-filled air to clear and, in a semi-circle of devastation, destroyed ceilings, knocked down walls and punched through concrete floors. The concussive force blew the three Gomer units spinning uncontrollable down the hall, quickly followed by an unconscious Gauss.

Mal blacked out from the powerful discharge.

He awoke less than three heartbeats later to find himself hanging over seventy stories up in the airspace just outside of the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, surrounded by falling glass and debris. A cool wind massaged his body in some very intimate locations, reminding him of his lack of clothing. For a moment, just before mistress gravity reasserted herself on him, Mal felt just like Wile E. Coyote.

Mal wondered where he’d put his tiny ‘HELP’ sign.

“Y-Axis position: nine hundred sixty-three feet and falling. Time to ground impact, sixteen point three two seconds,” Mal’s inner voice told him in a flat, emotionless tone. “Chances of survival: zero point zero five nine one percent,” it added.

“Oh, hell,” was all Mal could manage before he dropped like a rock.

CHAPTER 3

When the security alarms began their shrill cackling, Gordon Kiesling cringed just a little—the sound reminded him very much of the way his mother-in-law cackled at the twice-yearly holidays of Christmas and Thanksgiving. During those times the only thanks Kiesling was giving came from the knowledge the old bat was old and would be dead soon.

As Kiesling reached for the intercom switch on his telephone, his tanned, manicured hand knocked over a pile of paperwork in transit, causing the handsome man to sigh. There were quite a few stacks of paperwork cluttering his desk, far more than he liked.

Although Kiesling absolutely relished the amount of power his position gave him—the power of money, the power of political influence, and the power to defend his country from threats both foreign and domestic—the man loathed the tedium that it came with. He wished to himself, not for the first time, the reports were as easily dealt with as terrorist cells. At least those he could have shot.