Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (8 page)

Face brightening, Zuzelo shouted, “Got it!” and bolted for a darkened corner of the room.

Although Zuzelo had disappeared into the shadows, surrounded by steel frames, piles of rubber and God knows what else, Mal found himself able to follow the man’s progress in spite of the lack of light. It seemed his upgrades included some sort of night vision along with everything else.

They’ve turned me into a living weapon…some kind of an ultimate soldier.

Mal shuddered at the thought, watching Zuzelo find whatever it was he was looking for and move back towards the light of the work area carrying something that turned out to be a rather vicious-looking sledgehammer with an enormous head and four foot long haft.

“And what the hell are you going to do with that?”

“We’re going to perform a series of scientific experiments to determine the make-up and capabilities of your new prosthetics,” Zuzelo dropped the head of the hammer down onto the concrete floor with a thud that caused Mal to grimace. Spitting in to his hands before taking up a baseball like grip on the tool’s handle, Zuzelo added, smiling wickedly, “Trust me. I’m a professional.”

“Trust you?” repeated Mal as he widened his stance and lowered his center of gravity in preparation. “This is payback for the choking thing, isn’t it?”

Zuzelo’s only response as he started his swing, “No comment.”

The hammer slammed into Mal’s braced right arm, just above the elbow. It should have pulverized every bone in the area. Instead, the force of impact knocked Mal from his feet and sent him bouncing roughly across the dirty, oil-covered floor to slam into, and knock over, one of the rusted steel art pieces Zuzelo had created from the salvage.

Mal slowly pushed himself up to a rather unsteady standing position, teeth still vibrating from the blow. Looking down, the cyborg noticed the living metal of his arm was unmarked, completely unblemished from the hammer strike. His eyes went wide and met with Zuzelo’s own astonished orbs.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” agreed Zuzelo, resting the hammer’s shaft on his shoulder. “Do you know what just happened?”

“You just hit me with a sledgehammer?”

“Besides that, Mal. Don’t you understand?”

Mal’s eyes bunched together and their lack of realization made Zuzelo shake his head in frustration.

“The amount of forced delivered by a sledgehammer is one half the mass of the hammer’s head times the square of its speed at the time of impact.”

“…and that is?”

“It’s approximately…” Zuzelo’s face scrunched up, eyes gazing towards the ceiling, and mouth silently working through what seemed to be a rather intense equation. Nodding, the engineer answered, “…a shitload.”

“A…shitload, you say,” grinned Mal. “Is that a technical term?”

“Yup,” replied the man, mirroring Mal’s smile as he dropped the heavy tool back to the ground and used its shaft as a cane to lean on.

“So what, pray tell, did you learn from that shitload?” requested Mal.

“Quite a bit, actually. You see this?” Zuzelo flipped the sledgehammer back up for the cyborg to examine. “It’s got a tungsten-alloy head. One of the hardest metals around—it’ll dent, even punch through solid steel.”

Mal gripped the hammer’s head in his right hand to examine it. He hardly felt its 35-pound weight in his hand.

“Go on.”

“The tungsten-alloy has a Mohs hardness rating of about nine—diamond has a ten.”

“So?” Mal responded, unsure of what Zuzelo was trying to say. Unconsciously, his finger had begun to gouge thin strips of material from the side of the sledge’s hammerhead.

“Look at your arm…I hit it full on with a sledgehammer made of one of the toughest substances around. It should be dented. Crushed. Damaged in some way.”

They both stared hard at the gleaming, unblemished surface of Mal’s living metal arm, stunned.

“It’s not even scratched…” came Mal’s voice in a half-whisper.

“Not even scratched,” repeated Zuzelo, knowingly. He grabbed Mal’s arm and pulled him over to an open area of the workroom that contained a dark metal worktable nearly 10 feet long, a number of dark red gas canisters, each standing nearly five feet in height, and a welding set-up of some kind. “Come over here. Let’s try something.”

Zuzelo popped on an old welder’s goggles and a pair of thick, dirty brown gloves. After a moment of fiddling with the machine’s controls, a bright white light emerged from the tip of the welder, and the engineer moved towards Mal.

“What the hell are you doing?” gulped Mal as he shielded his eyes with one hand.

“This is a gas tungsten arc welder. It burns at just over 3400 degrees Fahrenheit and slices through reinforced-steel like butter,” Zuzelo grabbed Mal’s hand dramatically, pausing for effect. “I’m going to try and cut your arm off, Mal.”

Mal found himself unable to move as Zuzelo jammed the pulsating blue-white flame of the GTA welder to the top of his forearm and began to slide it around. He could feel his mouth drop open, eyes tearing up as he stared a bit too long at the painful light of the high-powered torch.

“Surface temperatures have reached thirty-four hundred and twelve degrees,” came the until-now silent computer voice in Mal’s head. It felt almost reassuring. “Nano-drones affecting cool down. All systems within normal operating parameters.”

The metal ‘skin’ of Mal’s forearm began to move under the heat in the same way muscles move beneath normal skin, but the arc welder seemed to have no other effect upon it. No burns. No oxidization. No damage or carbon scoring at all. If anything, Zuzelo’s ministrations seemed to do nothing more than clean the dirt, blood and grime Mal had collected during his escape, and shine the metallic surface to an almost mirror-polish.

“Holy…”

“…shit!” finished Mal as his friend pulled the welding apparatus away and shut it down.

Licking his lips, eyes glittering darkly, Zuzelo set the welder down and strode back over to Mal’s side with purpose. He dropped both gloves to the ground at their feet, took a deep breath and grabbed on to the gleaming chrome lower arm. Both men gasped out loud at the action.

Zuzelo’s eyes went so wide Mal was afraid they were going to pop out of the man’s head. “It’s cool to the touch.”

“What?!”

“Yeah, it’s not even warm,” replied Zuzelo as he began to run his hand up and down the arm, tracing it’s every nook, cranny and groove. “It feels cold.”

“That’s my arm you’re molesting there, Zuz.”

Realizing what he was doing, David stopped and thought for a moment; staring hard at the man he rescued a handful of hours earlier.

After a few long moments of silent analysis, Zuzelo spoke, a seriousness Mal had never heard before filled his voice, “I don’t know what they did to you, Mal, but that is some top secret government researched alien shit going on there. You’re an X-file.”

Mal nodded.

“So what should we do now?”

“I have no idea,” the bald man answered, calloused fingers stroking his goatee thoughtfully

“Big help you are, Zuz.”

“What did you expect?”

“Well, I was kind of hoping you had something in mind more technical than just hitting me with things to see if something breaks,” spit back Mal.

“Like what?! You’re the first government cyborg I’ve ever run into, my friend.”

Mal slumped down to the floor and held his head in both hands, weariness and frustration finally getting the best of him. He looked up at his friend and pleaded, “I don’t know what to do. They’ve taken everything. Help me.”

Sighing, David Zuzelo scratched his head and nodded.

“Let’s go up to the computer bay and see if we can’t access whatever internal systems you’ve got going on there. There’s got to be something in there making everything tick and maybe, just maybe, we can hack into it.”

Zuzelo extended his hand down to his weary friend and backed it with the familiar, warm smile Mal had known for more than a decade, “C’mon.”

As the pair headed upstairs towards Zuzelo’s computer room, he asked, “By the way, what do you think your fiancée is up to?”

“Oh, shit…Kristin!”

CHAPTER 7

Seated at the head of a large conference table, Gordon Kiesling was already three Vicodins into his headache by the time Representative Michael Fountain had arrived from Washington, DC. Stroking the bottle in the pocket of his still crisply-pressed pants, Kiesling felt the need to increase that number every time the Congressman interrupted the meeting with one his snide little comments. He may have been Washington’s liaison with Project: Hardwired, but Fountain’s attempted Columbo act was getting on the director’s nerves almost as much as his cheap gray Men’s Warehouse suit.

Seriously, thought Kiesling to himself. Brown shoes with a gray suit? They should be allowed to kill the man on principal alone.

“…is beyond me,” cut in Fountain’s voice, snapping Kiesling back to reality with its over-excitable San Diego cadence.

The last time Kiesling had heard a bass voice as whiny and annoying as the Congressman’s was from Darth Vader at the end of ‘Revenge of the Sith.’

“Are you listening to me, Director Kiesling,” came Fountain’s poor attempt at gravitas.

“With rapt attention, Representative Fountain,” replied Kiesling, his smile filled with the whitest teeth this side of a Hollywood blockbuster. “As to why we haven’t been able to locate Designate Cestus, I’ll leave that answer to our head tech on the project.”

Chair half spinning far enough around to get the politician’s face out of his peripheral vision, Kiesling gestured to the now sweat-drenched Carl Anderson. “Please explain to the Congressman and to all of us, Mister Anderson, why we are unable to locate the prodigal Captain Malcolm Weir? If my memory serves me correctly, and I have Ms. Roslan there to ensure it always does, the first thing Doctor Ryan’s lab boys do with every single Project: Hardwired recruit is surgically implant a sub-dermal tracking device. Beyond that, I’ve seen POV video from Designate Cestus in his mission logs. Shouldn’t we be able to access his cameras by now?”

To say Carl Anderson shrunk beneath the withering gaze of his boss and his boss’s boss would be an understatement. His entire body seemed to go flaccid and threaten to collapse in on itself. For several excruciating seconds, Anderson was unable to speak. The perspiration stains beneath his armpits grew to engulf his entire Wal-Mart purchased pale blue polo shirt, and Kiesling was convinced the man’s breathing had stopped altogether.

“Mister Anderson?”

A hand on Anderson’s shoulder and the sultry voice of Kiesling’s executive assistant brought the man back to life. “Tell them what you told me, Carl. It’s OK.”

Smiling up at the lovely Ms. Roslan, Anderson exhaled a deep breath, turned to lock eyes with his boss, and launched into his explanation

“You’re one-hundred percent correct, sir. We should be able to track Designate Cestus up to within six feet of his location—closer than that when we’ve got one of the Sentinel-class satellites keyed into his signal and located in geostationary orbit. And you’re right again about the point-of-view camera systems installed in the occipital lobe of each of the prime units, such as Designate Cestus or Gauss. We viewed footage from Designate Gauss earlier—watched his fight with Cestus upstairs…”

“Yes, yes! I know all of that, Mister Anderson,” interrupted Kiesling, growing more and more annoyed with the little engineer with each passing second he rambled on. “Now tell me something I don’t know. Tell me why, with all of the little toys you tech boys love so much, we cannot locate the damned Cestus unit? Tell me.”

Kiesling’s voice nailed Anderson to place. The poor man’s eyes darted to each face in the room, trying to gain some sort of support or sympathy from those present. Unfortunately for Carl Anderson, none of the thirteen people seated around the large mahogany table would hold his gaze—not Security Chief Doherty, nor the May Brothers from the weapons lab with their matching goatees, or even Anderson’s best friend from the computer lab, Hal Hefner. No one met his pleading, desperate eyes. The only thing that held him in place, kept him from bolting from the room in terror, was the firm, reassuring grip of Ms. Roslan. The feel of her nails, polished a deep red, sliding along his shirt, and the intoxicating smell of her perfume wrapping Anderson like a warm, protective, lavender-scented blanket, helped him press on in the face of his employer’s anger.

“Um…right, Kiesling, sir. Director Kiesling, sir, that is,” Anderson cleared his through and jumped head first into the rest of his debriefing before the head of Project: Hardwired allowed the obvious range in his face to explode. “With the Abraxas Hub still down, we can’t see anything. We couldn’t find the man if he were standing on the other side of that door there.”

“When our network goes down in Washington, we just have someone in IT reboot the system,” chimed Fountain. “Can’t someone just flip a switch and turn the computer back on?”

Ms. Roslan jumped in to cut the Representative’s line of thought off, “The Abraxas-configuration is infinitely more complex than your little office PC, Congressman Fountain. The secondary node here in the building takes up an entire floor, and the main Abraxas Hub in Houston covers a city block. It’ll take a near army of technicians three days to get the system back up, and a week before it’s running at full capacity.”

“They have twelve hours,” ordered Fountain, with crossed arms and as commanding a scowl as he could muster.

“Twelve…” started Anderson, stunned.

“Hours…?” finished Ms. Roslan, furious. “Are you insane, man? This isn’t the Enterprise and he’s not Scotty!” she spat, jerking her thumb down at Anderson.

The little engineer shrunk down again, uncomfortable at being the focus of everyone’s attention once more, and a tad hurt by the sexy executive assistant’s comment. Anderson knew he wasn’t a Kirk, a Spock, or even a Sulu, but had always pictured himself as the ‘Scotty’ of the team: often being able to beat even the most insane of deadlines imposed upon him by the powers-that-be. If he was forced to be a “red shirt,” he wanted to be the one that survived.

Fountain interrupted Anderson’s Roddenberry-dreams.