The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2 Read online

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 23

  Afterword

  Back Matter

  Preview: Man With The Iron Heart

  The Cestus Contract

  Weir Codex Book 2

  by Mat Nastos

  Copyright 2013 by Mat Nastos

  Cover Painting by Mat Nastos and Thomas Boatwright

  Cover Design by Michael DeVito

  WORKS BY MAT NASTOS:

  WEIR CODEX

  The Cestus Concern: Weir Codex Book 1 (novel)

  The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2 (novel)

  The Cestus Corruption: Weir Codex Book 3 (novel - 2014)

  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 (novella)

  FENRIS CASE FILES

  Frank Versus The Vampire (short)

  NON-FICTION

  Comic Book Marketing 101

  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 Shotaro Ishinomori, a genius I never met but whose work has influenced my entire life.

  Special Thanks:

  To my Beta Readers: Sia Beaton and Arthur Gibson - you two are the best!

  To my Springboards & Inspirations: Nicholas Nastos, Athena Nastos, Jimmy Jay, Amy Jensen & the Jensen sisters, Julia Barrett, Barry Reese, Van Allen Plexico - without you guys I never would have been able to finish this book!

  To my Victims: Mark Kalita, TJ May, Chris Brady, Chris Donlin, Tim Roddick and Kyrun Silva - I’m sorry I could only kill you guys once :)

  CHAPTER 1

  New York City.

  It had been nearly a month since anyone had tried to kill Malcolm Weir. Nearly a month since he’d escaped from the downtown offices of the top secret government agency that had stolen away a year of his life. Nearly a month since the newly freed cyborg had been forced to keep watch over his shoulder in fear of retaliation.

  It had also been nearly a month since Malcolm Weir, former black ops agent better known as Designate Cestus to the men who had destroyed his entire world, had been able to get a good night’s sleep. As a former US Army Ranger, Mal was used to having his enemy in front of him. Used to knowing an attack was coming and being prepared for it no matter what shape it took. And that was precisely what troubled the powerfully built cybernetic warrior the most: the not knowing.

  The month of peace had done more to give the thirty-five year-old Mal an ulcer than had fifteen years serving in the military and more than sixty combat missions.

  For a man used to living surrounded by violence, the illusion of peace, the illusion of security, put him on edge. Mal had heard it best said by his former C.O., Lieutenant Colonel Michael Denman: ‘With war, things would only get better. In peace, things could only get worse.’

  That thought, powered by the sort of OCD that had led to two divorces and a spotless military record, was what encouraged Mal’s left foot to uncontrollably tap out an erratic tempo that drummed along somewhere in excess of a hundred beats a minute as he sat wedged into the very last seat in the very last car of the PATH train heading under the Hudson River on its way into Manhattan.

  The entire twenty-eight hundred mile trip from Los Angeles had worn Mal’s nerves down to the nubs and the final few had been the worst. With his large, six-foot two-inch frame crammed tight onto the tiny vinyl bench seating of the commuter train packed with rush hour traffic and chugging along at 12 miles per hour, the man was convinced conditions were perfect for an ambush by his hunters.

  As formidable as the bionic enhancements the scientists at Project Hardwired had given him were, Mal wasn’t sure even they would be able to help him survive an attack in the confined concrete Hudson River Tunnel that ran one-hundred feet below the river between Hoboken and the island of Manhattan.

 
Mal tried to reach out with his computer senses to scan the radio waves and cellular transmissions in his immediate area to see if he could pick up any suspicious activity and failed. Not that he truly expected a different result. He’d attempted the trick a hundred or a thousand times over the past four weeks without success. When the Abraxas Array had been destroyed in his attack on Project Hardwired headquarters in L.A., the computer wetware in his brain had lost a number of its more interesting features—the ability to wirelessly connect or take control of other computer systems being the one he missed most. Grabbing bits of information from someone’s cellphone was something that had saved his life more than once while on the run from his former government handlers.

  He’d also lost all access to the zetabytes of information stored across the millions of nanobots flowing through his body and the twin super-alloy metal arms he’d be fitted with more than a year ago when the government had turned him into the mind-controlled robotic assassin known as Designate Cestus.

  Now his access to those abilities and that data—data the government still very much wanted to scoop out of his head in the most painful way imaginable—was gone and all Mal had left were a nagging headache and a backside numb from sitting actionless for seventy-two hours. He had to do something, and fast, or his brain was going to save his pursuers a lot of trouble by exploding all by itself.

  Massaging the three-day-old stubble that had sprung up during the course of his public transit-powered trek from the West Coast with one gloved hand and bracing himself against the window with the other, Mal let his gaze roam across the sea of humanity that filled the subway car to capacity. His icy blue eyes, considered striking by most, held a look so intense in his search for suspicious movement or surreptitious attention that anyone foolish enough to meet them quickly took their own attention elsewhere.

  When his quest came up as empty the eighth time as it had the previous seven, Mal half-growled under his breath, plunging his hand deep into the inside breast pocket of the old black leather jacket whose seams threatened to split with every motion. The action, accentuated by the vehicle’s juking and jiving, elicited a tiny yelp from the elderly woman who had been the only passenger brave—or foolish—enough to sit down next to the brooding man.

  In response to a rather enthusiastic bump into her side, the blue-haired woman exclaimed, “I BEG your pardon!”

  Barely noticing her as the object of his rummaging finally found its way into his hand, Mal excused himself and exited his position on the bench. The crowd parted for Mal, who lunged forward with a small cellphone clutched tightly in his hand, moving toward the door between cars at the front of his cabin; as far underground as they were traveling, and with the bulk of the Hudson River flowing above them, the tiny open space outside at the car coupling was his best chance at getting a signal.

  A hard yank on the handle jerked the subway train’s door open and allowed Mal to slide outside, giving him unhindered access to the tiny platform between cars. Mal braced one hand over his ear to help drown out the thunder bouncing off the walls all around him and pounded out a series of numbers onto the cellphone in his hand.

  Instead of the usual ringing, Mal’s ear was greeted with the grating sound of a lost connection. Wincing, Mal watched the tiny words ‘no signal’ flash across the top of his phone’s screen. He slapped the phone with his index finger to end the call, sending a spider’s web of tiny cracks veining out across its screen and drawing his attention to the abused device.

  Mal’s eyes opened wide in astonishment as he noticed the scratches his frenzied dialing had caused. Deep grooves and divots covered its surface in an irregular pattern. The cyborg raised his right hand up in front of his face and saw the cause: his impatience and irritation had driven the billions of nanobots that controlled his cybernetic arms to go crazy, elongating his fingers into over-sized claws that could tear through steel or concrete like paper. Even as he watched, small blades were beginning to slice apart the motorcycle style leather gloves he was wearing into pieces, with spikes and ridges showing at the knuckles and tips of each finger. If he didn’t calm himself down his arms would bulk up and shred through the arms of his jacket like Bruce Banner through a pair of under-sized purple pants.

  He could only imagine how the old woman would react to a government-created super-soldier ‘Hulking’ out in front of her.

  Closing his eyes and breathing in deeply through his nose in an effort to slow his racing heart, Mal leaned back with half of his body outside the confines of the train’s cabin and the other pressing against the wall of its interior. After a few seconds of meditation Mal was able to bring himself back under control—something which had become much more difficult to manage in the weeks following his escape.

  The uneasy feeling of being watched slowly intruded upon Mal’s attempt at quelling the berserker fury he held inside, raising the tiny hairs along the back of his neck and throwing his fight or flight instincts into overdrive. Techno-organic muscles flexed and expanded, lengthening the cyborgs arms by nearly four inches, bulking them up to gorilla-like proportions. Mal dropped low into a defensive stance, his fingers already in the midst of transforming into cruel foot-long knives when he caught sight of what had triggered his reaction.

  Laughing softly to himself, all tension fell away from Mal’s body and his robotic arms shifted back to normal in response.

  Standing less than a foot away was a young child, head cocked to one side as he stared wide-eyed at Mal.

  “Yes?” asked Mal with one eyebrow raised inquisitively.

  “Are you a ‘rassler?” squinted the little boy in a white trash accent that would forever peg the child as coming from the backroads of Pennsylvania. “You look like a ‘rassler…didn’t you fight Man-Mountain Marko on the teevee last week?”

  Mal looked down at the gangly child with a pronounced, over-sized Adam’s apple boobing up and down just below his gaping mouth, and flashed what he hoped was a warm, human smile from behind the tiny white smartphone held up to his face. The resulting look must have fallen well short of what the scruffy, sleep-deprived cyborg had aimed for because the boy’s mother let out a half gasp.

  Interjecting herself between the disheveled man and her son with a protective hand, the too-young mother pulled her son away and hissed, “Benjamin Franklin Gilbert the Third, you leave that…nice…man alone and come over here.”

  The girl’s voice struggled with the word ‘nice’ and Mal could read a number of other far less flattering adjectives in her eyes. Catching his reflection staring back from the large glass window opposite his position along the wall of the subway cabin, Mal found himself unable to argue with any of the more creative descriptions he imagined were floating unverbalized in the back of her throat.

  The figure Mal saw was tall and incredibly broad shouldered, cloaked in the sort of worn leathers, threadbare blue jeans, and faded work boots you’d find in the dankest of biker bars. Young Benjamin’s ‘rassler comment probably wasn’t far off the mark in terms of his sheer size or the way he moved. A growth of salt-and-pepper hair covered most of his face in a look that was somewhere beyond well-groomed and closer to ‘unweeded,’ and Mal’s bright blue eyes peered out like frozen embers from within sunken pits.

  Mal had to admit he was a mess.

  “Arriving at 33rd Street Station,” came a woman’s voice over the train’s public address speakers. With the announcement arrived the first signs of an outside cellular signal, causing Mal to eagerly punch in a 10-digit Southern Californian telephone number and anxiously jam the cell against his ear.

  Pulling into the brightly lit 33rd Street PATH station, the subway’s doors slid open to allow a stampede of humanity to flow out of its belly and disrupt the grim cyborg’s self-analysis. Mal allowed himself to be moved along with the mob out onto the dirty platform that stank of body odor, urine, rust and the stale oppressive air that had followed them from the depths of the rail tunnel.

  Striding along with the crowd, it t
ook Mal ten seconds before he found a break in the bodies large enough to allow him to escape and press his back against one of the flat iron pillars spaced out at fifteen-foot intervals down the center of the platform, dividing the line between east and west bound traffic.

  Mal smiled as Benjamin and his mother wandered by him heading for whatever eventual destination they had, but was distracted by the sound of a familiar voice in his ear.

  “This is Zuzelo.” The voice, cautious in tone, rolled out of the tiny speaker in Mal’s phone. If the setting had been more private the cyborg wouldn’t have bothered making such an obvious display of using the tiny device: he’d have just connected to it directly through the cybernetics in his head. Instead, he had to pretend to be one of those hipster douchebags that lived on their bluetooth headsets, something that just added another level to Mal’s annoyance quotient.

  “Hey, Z. How you doing? They let you out yet?”

  “Mal!” Zuz’s demeanor lightened considerably once he recognized his old friend’s voice. “They sent me home yesterday and I’ve got a smokin’ hot nurse checking in on me.”

  “No disrespect, Z, but your mom really isn’t all that hot,” chuckled Mal, turning his back as best he could for privacy against the mass of civilians disembarking from an arriving subway train around him.

  “Screw you, Mal. Screw you.”

  Mal could almost feel the spit from the remark come through the phone line.

  “Did you get the info packet I sent? It was a doozie getting it out of the hospital without anyone noticing…I’m pretty sure those bastards from the government had my room at the hospital under surveillance the whole time,” said Zuz.