Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern Read online

  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.

  “Yes, Executive Director Kiesling,” Melissa’s voice flowed out of the tiny black speaker box that sat next to an over-sized phone with more buttons than had right to exist on one device. Her tone was even and relaxed, as it always was. Melissa Roslan was the result of a million years of executive assistant evolution—smart enough to never question things she shouldn’t, sexy enough to throw off the middle-aged politicians Kiesling was often forced to deal with, and just perky enough to not be annoying. She was always dressed impeccably, with her blond hair pulled back into a sharp pony tail, her skirts perfectly wrinkle free no matter the time of day, and the dull black Glock she kept in her top draw always well-oiled, loaded and ready to go.

  The perfect accessory for a man like Executive Director Gordon Kiesling of Project: Hardwired. No slouch himself, Kiesling was a tall, handsome, fit man in his mid-forties with just enough gray in his jet black hair to rank well with voters on either side of the political divide. He was a man who had been groomed with a great destiny in mind and leading Project: Hardwired to success was but the first step.

  “Melissa, what’s going on with the alarms? Did Dr. Ryan’s boys upstairs blow something up again?” Kiesling chuckled to himself at the comment. The last “mishap” caused by Doctor Jean Ryan’s team had resulted in mass flooding on ten floors of the building from something they had done to the sprinklers. He’d instructed his assistant to have them removed from his office the very next day, fire marshals be damned. There was no way he was going to have another custom-tailored suit ruined.

  The intercom popped and buzzed once more as Melissa’s voice came over it once again, “No, sir. There’s some sort of trouble in surgical suite and one of the Cestus team has requested GMR assistance.”

  “The ‘Cestus team?’ Wasn’t that unit just going through routine maintenance after Kabul?” It must be some sort of operator error, thought Kiesling to himself. After all, the program had been running like a well-oiled machine for more than eighteen months—once they had worked out the issues with the earlier “Rebirth” units. Sure, those had been a mess, but it had been cleaned up.

  “The unit Designate Cestus was undergoing reintegration with Abraxas-1. There had been…complications during its return from the assignment in Kabul.”

  “Complications?” That wasn’t a word the head of a multi-trillion dollar top-secret government project liked to hear in relation to his department. Words like that tended to be followed by ones like “reassignment” or “termination,” neither of which Gordon Kiesling wished to experience. Eyes narrowed in concentration and jaw set solidly, the governmental overseer launched into the one kind of action his kind was best at: delegation. “Dispatch a GMR team to the location and lock it down…have one of the
Prime units tag along just in case. Give me a full project report on Designate Cestus and his “complications,” ay-sap.”

  The door to Kiesling’s office slid open as his assistant strode in on five-inch black heels that matched the charcoal pants suit she had worn that day, arms loaded with files. He had to do a double take from her back to the intercom unit—he hadn’t realized she was no longer at her desk.

  Dropping the stack of stark white folders onto the only clean spot on her boss’s desk, Melissa said curtly, “GMR team Theta is en route to surgical suite eight with Designate Gauss in command. They’ll report back to you as soon as the location has been secured. Here are the files you requested. You’ll find details of the operation in Kabul along with status reports for the Cestus unit from the past nine months.”

  Kiesling marveled for a moment at the woman’s uncanny efficiency and damn near psychic ability to anticipate his every command. Without waiting for his response, the woman had spun on her heel and headed back to her own office.

  Kiesling called out, “And, Ms. Roslan…”

  “I’ll send one of the interns in with your coffee, sir.”

  He was still smiling as the young woman disappeared into the bright fluorescent lights of her outer office and the connected reception area, the door closing silently behind her.

  The late afternoon sun spread long bands of light across the heavy red cherry desk dominating the center of the office. The light added no extra warmth to the well air-conditioned room due to the heavy tinting on the windows—tinting that would have kept any onlookers from peering into the high security floors run by Kiesling’s special project division. Not that they had many onlookers there on the 71st floor, outside of a few ratty pigeons and the odd news chopper that would buzz by on one breaking news story or another.

  No surprises were revealed to Kiesling by the first pair of folders; they contained basic background information on Malcolm Weir, the man now referred to as ‘Designate Cestus’ there at Project: Hardwired: standard bio, exemplary service record, medical files from when he was first brought in eleven months earlier, and so on. As executive director and sole head of the division, Kiesling was intimately familiar with the background files of all twelve of the Project: Hardwired Prime units. After all, he had been the one who approved the addition of each of the men long before they were eventually brought under the project’s aegis.

  Weir had been the perfect Hardwired candidate and a model operative. The second batch of files, bound with “Eyes Only” tape and covered in “Top Secret” stamps, ran through each of the nineteen missions he’d undertaken in the nine months since he’d been on active duty—nearly double the assignments of any other unit.

  Kiesling whistled in admiration as he flipped through pages upon pages of mission logs, photos, maps and more from the Weir’s time out in the field, and wished he had the budget to build ten more like the soldier.

  The final folder, labeled “Under Review” across its cover, was what Kiesling had been searching for: the incident report and follow-up from Kabul.

  According to the documentation, Cestus had been operating at peak performance for a Prime unit prior to the operation—above peak if his team’s reports were accurate. Hell, he even exceeded Gauss’s results in every joint excursion they were tasked to. It was the reason Dr. Ryan had pushed so hard for Weir to be upgraded with the new nano-tech. The reactive A.I. of the nano-drones made the “living” metal of the soldier’s arms into some of the most deadly weapons on the planet for the types of covert missions he specialized in.

  Before he received them, the man had been a beast, thought Kiesling. With them, Designate Cestus had become Goddamn Death incarnate.

  The comfortable office chair creaked with Kiesling’s 185 pounds of muscle and slid a bit on the clear plastic floor protector it rested on as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his cluttered desktop. One hand shifted a black wireless mouse back and forth, causing the large flatscreen monitor nestled on one corner of the workspace to flicker on, while the other smacked the folder down and quickly turned to the next page.

  “Twenty kills within one minute of insertion,” marveled Kiesling. He wanted to view POV footage from Kabul to see the “complications” in real time, but was dismayed to have a blue error screen staring back at him from the glowing monitor. Intercom button tapped quickly by his long, tapered middle finger, Kiesling leaned back in his chair and asked aloud, “Melissa, something’s wrong with my computer. It’s telling me the system is down. Can you please tell me how it is possible for a billion dollar quad-redundant computer system to be ‘down?’ Is there maintenance I wasn’t informed of?”

  A long silence was the only answer that came back over the intercom. After a moment of drumming his fingers on the highly lacquered wood of his desk, Gordon Kiesling became agitated. Melissa knew how much he hated to be kept waiting…for anything!

  “Melissa,” the volume of his voice rose just as its octave dropped in annoyance.

  “I apologize, Executive Director. Reports are coming in from all over. The system has been breached and everything has gone offline. Word from all remote sites are in agreement- Chicago, Houston, Poughkeepsie…even the redundancies in Cardiff and Hong Kong, all report connection to the Brain Coral has been lost, sir.”

  The nervous tic he’d been working on to rid himself of for years returned and caused a vein to twitch angrily on the left side of his forehead, just off-set of his brow line. “Now, Melissa,” he forced the words through clenched teeth, “you know I find that particular nickname for the Abraxas-configuration to be inappropriate.”

  “Sorry, again, sir. I-Oh, my God!”

  An explosion rocked the building and plaster snowflakes covered Kiesling’s immaculate suit and perfectly coiffed hair. He sprang to his feet, chair spinning chaotically away from his desk before collapsing to the ground, as he heard the shock in his assistant’s normally calm voice.

  “Melissa?!” yelled Kiesling as he jogged for the door, which was thrown open just as his hand, shaking with adrenaline, reached for the handle.

  Obviously shaken, Ms. Roslan stood in the entrance, glasses slightly askew and a strand of hair uncharacteristically bouncing down in front of her face. Kiesling read the concern in her eyes.

  “Sir, you’re going to want to see this.”

  *****

  Standing in at the center of a group of scientists, engineers and security officers, Gordon Kiesling couldn’t believe what he was looking at on the small, silent black-and-white security monitors Melissa had ordered dragged into his office. It was unbelievable.

  No, impossible. It was impossible.

  But there it was: one of the most lethal weapons on the planet, a weapon HE was responsible for creating and overseeing, had gone rogue.

  The Cestus unit, Malcolm Weir, had somehow taken out their entire computer network, killed at least three of Kiesling’s operatives, including a pair of the earlier GMR base-infantry units, and was now attempting to escape the facility. The renegade cyborg had to be stopped before he could make off with billions of dollars in US government research and development attached to his body.

  He had to be stopped.

  Kiesling snatched a communications unit from Larry Doherty, the beefy security chief from New Hampshire, startling the man with the sudden movement.

  “Can Gauss hear me on this thing?”

  Seeing Doherty’s nod, Kiesling held the earpiece in place with one hand and brought the unit’s microphone up to his mouth with the other.

  “Designate Gauss,” he paused to allow the operative to acknowledge he was receiving. “This is Executive Director Gordon Kiesling, clearance omega-nine-aught-seven-three-nine-five. Unit Cestus has gone rogue. You will stop him at all cost: use of deadly force authorized. Confirm?”

  The ten observers watching the closed-caption monitors saw Gauss look up into the security monitors, nod and smile as his voice came in over the headset in their boss’s hand, “Confirmed.”r />
  In black-and-white, a miniature Gauss launched into battle against Cestus, wreaking havoc on the entire floor just above where they were being scrutinized. Kiesling groaned inwardly as walls and fixtures were annihilated by the battling duo: the damage would easily run into the millions when all was said and done. He was going to hate having to explain that to the senate oversight committee.

  While the battle continued above in real life and below on the screen, Kiesling asked Carl Anderson, the short, slightly rotund IT what the state of Project: Hardwired’s computer system was. The answer filled him with dread.

  “Gone,” responded the small man, his greasy light blond ponytail bounced about the back of his head as he did. Kiesling hated that nasty bit of horsehair almost as much as he hated the man’s ratty goatee, which always seemed to be shaved asymmetrically. “It’s all gone.”

  Forcing himself to take a deep breath to keep from tearing the tuft of hair out by its roots, Kiesling said as calmly as his building rage would allow, “What do you mean by “gone?” You’re talking about ten years of research…millions of man-hours. Can you recover it from the system?”

  Anderson shrank down into himself as his boss loomed over him, fists clenched and fuming. He licked his lips and looked around the room for someone, anyone to help. Finding himself alone in Kiesling’s sights, Anderson finally stuttered, “G-gone. As in “gone.” There’s nothing left. The system is blank…reformatted and gone. Just gone.”

  “If you say “gone” one more time, I’m going to have Mr. Doherty shoot you in the back of the head,” Kiesling nodded over to his now shocked-looking head of security. “Please, explain.”

  The terrified computer technician flipped his laptop around to reveal its screen, which seemed to show an ever-increasing line of numbers and letters scrolling down its face. “See here?” asked Anderson, “The system is showing a clean wipe of everything. Whatever Designate Cestus did while he was plugged into the system, it took down everything: active data, back-ups, programs…hell, he even took out the base operating system. Everything is go…deleted. But that isn’t the worst part.”