Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern Read online

  The Cestus Concern

  Weir Codex Book 1

  by Mat Nastos

  Copyright 2013 by Mat Nastos

  Cover Painting by Mat Nastos and Thomas Boatwright

  Cover Design by Michael DeVito

  Edited by Arlene Taylor

  WORKS BY MAT NASTOS:

  WEIR CODEX

  The Cestus Concern: Weir Codex Book 1 (novel)

  The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2 (novel: November 28, 2013)

  DONNER GRIMM ADVENTURES

  Man With The Iron Heart (novel)

  CHRONICLES OF THE WALKER

  Cora and the Clockwork Men (short)

  AEGISTEEL EMPIRE

  The Last Immortal (short)

  The Old Sergeant (novelette)

  FENRIS CASE FILES

  Frank Versus The Vampire (short)

  NON-FICTION

  Comic Book Marketing 101

  NOW ON DVD

  Stinger

  Bite Me, Fanboy

  Publisher’s Note

  This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination, and any similarities to actual persons, living or dead, places, locales or events are entirely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  PRAISE FOR

  THE WEIR CODEX

  BY MAT NASTOS

  The Cestus Concern

  “With The Cestus Concern, Mat Nastos crafts his most daring and imaginative work to date. Thrilling and action-packed, Cestus moves at a breakneck pace. Nastos continues to show why he is the next great voice in sci-fi.

  —Rob Liefeld,

  Creator of Deadpool, Cable, Youngblood and X-force, and founder of Image Comics

  “Equal parts Terminator, Frankenstein and Universal Soldier, Nastos reinvents the classic motifs, creating something truly exciting.”

  —Adam Lance Garcia,

  Author of Green Lama: Unbound

  “Nastos has crafted a novel that is crying out for a comic book or movie adaptation. Just when you thought you'd seen everything cyborgs had to offer - from Robocop to Wolverine - Nastos plants one firmly on your jaw with this!”

  —Express News & Reviews

  “The Cestus Concern is intense, adrenaline powered action that never slows down from the first to the last page.”

  —The Examiner.com

  The Cestus Contract

  “Mat Nastos is one of the most exciting writers working in the field of adventure fiction today. Every page is an adrenaline rush and by the end of the story, you're left breathlessly anticipating the next. If you're not reading Nastos, you're truly missing out.”

  -Barry Reese,

  Award-winning author of The Rook, Lazarus Gray and Gravedigger

  “It was the best 80’s action movie I’ve read in a long time.”

  -Derrick Ferguson,

  New-Pulp author of Four Bullets for Dillon and The Adventures of Fortune McCall

  PRAISE FOR

  OTHER WORK

  BY MAT NASTOS

  Man With The Iron Heart

  "It's rare when a book takes both the front line experience as well as the supernatural elements so readily associated with World War II and the Nazi party and turns them into something seamless and intriguing. "Man with the Iron Heart" does that exceedingly well and the characters live, scream, fight, and die right off the page, not content with just leaping."

  - Tommy Hancock,

  Award-winning author and publisher of Pro Se Press

  “The Man With the Iron Heart's tight and snappy prose takes grounded supernatural mysticism, a charming cast of very human characters and then hurls it all into an adventure that revels in the unapologetic grandiosity of classic action movies!”

  - David A. Rodriguez,

  Writer of Finding Gossamyr and Lead Writer for Skylanders: SWAP Force

  Dedication:

  To Alden, one of my oldest and dearest friends, for going to see way too many questionable movies with me in high school.

  Contents

  Cover

  Front Matter

  Praise

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Preview: The Cestus Contract

  Back Matter

  CHAPTER 1

  It has been said being born is one of the most painful and traumatic events in a person’s life. For Malcolm Weir, being reborn was far worse.

  The first thing Mal noticed as the warm, floating feeling only an especially heavy dose of morphine can give started to fade was the telltale itch in all ten of his toes and the balls of his feet.

  Strangely enough, the itch didn’t reach his hands. From the middle of his pecs, into his shoulders and down through both arms, there was an odd buzzing feeling, almost as if the Army Ranger was holding a faulty power cord in his hand—not quite the pain of electrocution, but an uneasy feeling that lay just below the surface and culminated in a pinprick discomfort in each of his fingers.

  As consciousness returned, a number of other tidbits of information began to register in Mal’s brain, the most troublesome being that his head felt as if a thick railroad spike had been inserted into it just below the base of his skull, and whatever caused the ache seemed to steal away his ability to move his head freely.

  His mouth was dry; so dry, it felt as if Mal had been sucking on cotton balls and Brillo pads for days, his tongue cracked and devoid of even the slightest hint of moisture. Mal couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to drink.

  Panic and worry struck with the force of a hammer between his eyes as the man realized he couldn’t remember anything at all. Mal had no idea where he was or how he got there. The worry quickly turned to fear as the soldier found himself unable to open his eyes.

  Where am I, thought Mal, as his darkness seemed to suddenly swirl with chaos and terror? What happened? Why can’t I see?

  Frantically, Mal reached up with his left hand to touch his eyes, barely noticing the feel of metallic and leather arm restraints tearing apart from his movement. His outstretched finger struck his face with more force than he intended. The tip felt numb, almost as if his hands were wrapped in a wet sock. A shaking hand traced the outline of the tape cover his eyelids as the sounds around him returned all at once as if someone had switched them on like a radio.

  A woman’s voice near his right shoulder caused him to jump and to rip out half of his eyelashes along with the sticky substance that robbed him of sight.

  “Oh, my God! He’s awake!” came the startled throaty voice of the woman. Mal guessed she was middle-aged. He could also tell from the way her words echoed out across the room that he was in a fairly large area with tall ceilings.

  “He should have been out for at least another four hours while the upgrade was being processed.” The voice sounded annoyed more than concerned. Directly into his ear, and louder than
Mal would have liked, he heard, “Designate Cestus, please return to diagnostic mode. Medical override five-two-six-alpha-nine.”

  For a split-second, the strange words took control of Mal’s befuddled mind and he dropped back down to the position he awoke in, flat on his back, with arms calmly to his side. The urge to obey was quickly dispelled by an increased electric-shock sensation flowing from the back of his head into his chest and down into Mal’s hands.

  He had no clue why her command affected him so and didn’t want her to try it again. Mal flapped his arm in an effort to shoo the woman away from him.

  “Let me up,” he whispered.

  “Shit…he’s ignoring the override.” The annoyance transitioned into audible and obvious worry. “Monitors show the AI has been corrupted. We’re going to need to restrain him!”

  “I’m on it!” snapped another, much deeper male voice, this time from somewhere down near Mal’s left foot.

  Mal’s eye finally came unstuck, but the lights in the room were too harsh, too bright for him to be able to see properly. Everything was a painful white blur. A shadow fell across his face, blocking some of the light, for which Mal was most thankful. Two large hands began pressing down on his eerily numb shoulders, trying to stop him from rising. In spite of the reduced sensation his back and arms were experiencing, Mal could tell he was lying on a hard bed or table of some sort. The cold touch of metal along his spine suggested it was probably the latter.

  “Hold him down!” screeched the woman. Mal decided she sounded like his Aunt Nancy, an even more disquieting fact than waking up on an operating table, blind and numb. God, he hated his Aunt Nancy.

  “Damn it, I’m trying!” yelled the Southerner with increasing agitation. The man pushed harder, trying to keep Mal on the table. “Hit him with a shot of Midazolam, quick!”

  Mal fought against the power of the man attempting to hold him down. With a quick twitch, his right arm came free and started to push his body into an upright position. As the motion caused his head to tilt out of its supine position, a new pain exploded in the back of Mal’s skull, threatening to split it in half.

  “Got it,” the woman shouted from across the room!

  Not wanting to wait around and find out what exactly “Midazolam” was, Mal shot his left hand out in an effort to get his male captor away from his body. From Mal’s perspective, it was only a half-hearted backhanded slap. However, a grunt from the man and a loud crash a long distance away revealed it to be something more.

  The woman screamed as she observed whatever Mal was unable to see, “Bradley!”

  Mal ignored the sounds of the woman’s footfalls heading for the body of “Bradley,” and reached up with now-freed right hand to figure out what was holding the back of his head down to the table. Groping blindly, the confused man felt wires leading into a solid casing of some kind. It was hard and warm to the touch, and pulsed with the same shock of electricity Mal felt in his arms.

  Most disturbing of all, however, was that the whole thing seemed to be attached to a metallic plate mounted on the back of his head. Mal screamed in horror and pain as his hand gripped the slightly vibrating rod and yanked it from his head. He could feel the tip of it sliding out through the rear of his skull and his entire body jerked upright as he nearly retched from the experience.

  “What have you done?” Mal howled.

  The sounds of electronic equipment overloading and shorting out filled the room, along with the acrid smell of burning plastic and wiring.

  Cupping the back of his head and its newly exposed hole with one hand, Mal reached up with the other to remove the remaining tape from his right eye. In the background his ears picked up the woman—a nurse?—as her shoes slapped against the hard floor of the room. Mal was finally blinking his way back to the land of the sighted when the sound of cracking glass and a shrill alarm filled the room.

  The woman’s voice, filled with worry and anger, fired off, presumably into an intercom somewhere behind the table Mal sat on. “Emergency! Send Gee-Em-Ars to surgical suite eight! We have a rogue unit! I repeat: we have a rogue unit!”

  Mal’s bare feet were dropping down to the cold floor of the operating room as a reply came over the speakers hidden somewhere in the ceiling, “GMRs in route. Stand by for assistance.”

  Spinning to face the nurse, as well as locate an exit, Mal’s still squinting eyes were finally able to take in the room itself.

  The pale cream room was just as Mal had feared: an operating suite about forty feet long by twenty-five or so wide. While the room itself was well lit, the area where he had been lying on a slightly inclined hydraulic surgical table was flooded by a series of four high-powered operating lights, mounted on a frame directly overhead.

  A giant robotic arm, decorated in the same off-white color of the walls, reached out and engulfed the bottom quarter of the table, looking as much like a giant mechanical crab claw as the scanning device it probably was, with twin sensors above and below. A bank of blue glowing flat-screen monitors extended down from the ceiling and was linked to Mal by a mismatched multicolored series of cables and tubes which pierced his body at a number of locations.

  Dominating the immediate area, though, was an evil looking rack of computers that was now smoking, sparking and seemingly on the verge of exploding. Mal’s eyes lingered for a moment on the large bundle of cables that terminated with the large, glistening spike he had just removed from his skull. His hand started up to touch the hole left behind from the extraction when movement over the confused man’s left shoulder caught his attention.

  One wall seemed to be fashioned entirely of glass and, although he knew it was impossible, Mal could sense a number of people were watching him from the other side. Somehow he knew there were four human heartbeats in his immediate vicinity, all but one beating well-above normal rates.

  Aside from the large, crumpled form of Bradley near one of the exit doors, the only other person Mal saw in the room was the woman who stood near an emergency call box. She was a harsh looking woman in her mid to late thirties, with light brown hair pulled tightly back into a bun. So tight, in fact, was her hair tied back that it caused the skin of her face to be stretched tight over her skull, which only increased the sharp appearance.

  Even at nearly thirty feet away, Mal could read the small white name-tag pinned onto the blue hospital scrubs the woman was wearing. It read “Rebecca Clark, MD.” When Doctor Clark’s eyes finally locked onto Mal’s, he could tell she was as confused as he was. Well, almost. At least she knew why he was standing, stark naked, in a cold operating room instead of being fully clothed and sweating like a pig with his battalion on maneuvers in Afghanistan.

  “Wh—where am I?” stammered Mal.

  “You are in surgical suite eight, Designate Cestus,” replied Doctor Clark nervously as she took a step forward to the patient she had been working on. “Everything is all right. Please stand down and return to the table.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” Mal snapped back, anger building in his chest. “My name is Captain Malcolm Weir, Third Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment.”

  Holding her hands out in front of her body, the female doctor responded calmly, “No. You are Designate Cestus; we’re at Project: Hardwired. Everything is fine…your programming has just gone a bit haywire and we need to get you back onto the table to get it fixed.”

  “There’s been a mistake,” the words tore themselves out from between Mal’s clenched teeth. “I’m a Man. Look at me!”

  Malcolm Weir gestured wide in an attempt to show the doctor how wrong she was and was surprised at her reaction. “You look, Designate Cestus. See what you are.”

  Confused and shaking, Mal stared down at his body to see what she was talking about. What he saw caused his world to shatter.

  A spider’s web of scars, long healed over, crisscrossed his chest and ran down his sides. The scars’ state and pale white appearance spoke volumes as to just how long Mal had been blacked o
ut. It would take a very long time, many, many months for wounds such as the ones he was looking at to close up and heal like that.

  He had been out for a very long time.

  What happened to me, he thought, eyes going fuzzy around the edges as they glazed over with tears?

  Moving his hand to trace a finger over the network of off-white tissue is when Mal finally noticed his arms. What he saw stole the breath from his chest.

  His arms, hands and upper chest were covered in metal. At first, Mal thought he was wearing some sort of armor made up of uneven, interlocking chromed plates, but where the armor met his flesh there were strange puckered scars and the metal itself seemed to merge with his skin. Whatever had happened to him, whatever it was, the armor was part of his body.

  Clark’s calm, self-assured voice rolled over Mal’s shaking form, “You are Designate Cestus. You are property of Project: Hardwired and were brought in for a system upgrade when you were damaged,” she moved closer to the man, oblivious to what was building inside of him with every word she spoke. “Something compromised your AI and shorted out our system. Now I need you to return to the table.”

  With the truth slamming into him with the force of a freight train, Mal let loose with a primal scream—a scream of rage and despair and terror all rolled into one; a scream that, for a moment, drowned out even the noise of the still-sounding alarms.

  The desperate man began to tear at his own flesh with fingers of metal, trying to rid himself of whatever had been done.

  “Stop! You’ll destroy your implants!”

  Mal’s eyes became the hate-filled eyes of a predator as they focused on the tall woman. A second scream seemed to propel the man in a leap that covered the nearly twenty foot distance between he and the doctor, the sudden burst of movement tore the tubes and wires from what remained of his human flesh, and left a fine mist of blood and IV fluids in his wake.