He could take them all now, stopping their heist and preserving the data. But for whom? If Winthrop’s whole artificial edifice was even now being toppled, the information would eventually be found, falling into the hands of whomever controlled Russia in the near future.
By waiting until they opened the vault, however, he could seize the data himself. If Winthrop fended off his attackers, he would be hailed as having preserved their strange little empire. If on the other hand things came crashing down, he would have that bargaining chip he wanted, something that could fit in a pocket that was nevertheless worth millions, if not billions, to the right buyer.
Or, as a last resort, it could be a peace offering.
Yes, that seemed the prudent course.
So he waited.
Seventeen minutes later the cracking glow disappeared. Dialing up his hearing and slowing his breathing to almost nothing, he waited for the distinctive clunking of the vault door opening. A pleased murmur of voices confirmed it, so before the congratulatory backslapping died down he restarted his respiration, took three deep breaths, and hurled himself around the corner.
His clothesline blow snapped the lookout’s neck as he charged forward. In front of him he saw three men and a tangle of equipment next to a three-foot-thick door standing wide open. They hardly had time to react before he had crushed each of their chests with hammer blows of his fists, leaving them flopping on the floor and choking on their own blood.
Dashing into the vault, Stone raced along the rows of safe deposit boxes until he deciphered the numerical system. He knew the box’s number, but had never been here, ad so wasted precious seconds until he found it. Now one of the modifications he had asked for came in handy.
Activating a combination of muscles in his hand, he extruded short ferrocrystal claws from his fingertips. He’d always been a comic book fan, and given his own size and long golden locks, Sabretooth had been his model and favorite.
In this case the razor-sharp, diamond-hard nano-grown substance allowed him to slice open the numbered face of the box to get at the hinged metal rectangle inside. In a moment the two cigarette-packet-sized hard drives went into his pockets.
Stone heard something then, and turned to see the thick door closing. Throwing himself forward, he managed to catch the heavy counterweighted portal and stop its forward momentum. Shoving back hard, he reversed its direction and then slammed it back against its stops.
Dashing outside, he found the remains of a man smashed between the multi-ton door and its equally heavy wall. Stone gave the man credit for an excellent try; had he been able to shut the vault door and perhaps weld it closed, not even his cybernetic strength would have saved him from being trapped until the authorities opened it again, probably with enough firepower to cause him a great deal of pain.
Sirens warbled in the distance, encouraging him to shunt aside his racing thoughts and put as much distance as possible between himself and the bank. Two minutes later he slowed, walking along a dim alleyway as emergency vehicles and police raced past. They would find an interesting scene. He’d rigged the thermic lance to blow its own fuel tanks just about…now.
His enhanced hearing easily picked up the muffled blast and the sound of a hundred windows shattering half a mile away. Moments later, the sounds of sirens multiplied exponentially as the city’s various security and safety forces came fully awake. Several separate police and paramilitary organizations, as well as district fire and rescue, scrambled or went on alert.
Fortunately he reached Rue Podkolokolny before they started setting up cordons and checkpoints. He stepped through the front gate of the Australian Embassy compound and walked up to the security booth straddling the inner fence. Behind the thick glass, the uniformed man eyed Stone with a certain amount of trepidation. Pressing the voice-transmission button he asked, “May I help you, sir?”
“I am here to claim asylum in the Free Community of Australia,” he replied. “I am in possession of certain information that will be of great interest to your government.”
The guard nodded, lifting his finger off the push-to-talk key and picking up a phone handset. A moment later, several men rushed past him to close the outer gate while two others let him through the inner one.
“Professor Stone?” The one addressing him was short and slight, with Asian features and a diffident manner. “My name is Calopus Nguyen, and I am the senior military attaché to this embassy. Please come in. I believe our interests may soon come into alignment.”
Stone smiled. “Nguyen, huh?” He wondered how much he was going to have to pay for his rehabilitation.
-17-
Alkina watched ten gas-powered cold rockets carry ten braided monofilaments across the wide street to strike the roof of the mansion below. As the noise had undoubtedly alerted the building’s defenders, all ten commandos immediately clipped a suspended brake onto the cable as it automatically retracted to tautness, and leaped into space without further orders.
Less than three seconds later their feet struck the roof and they let go of the fittings to pause like insects on its sloping surface. From there, they split into pairs and aimed for five different entries.
Four of these were windows. Each duo of commandos climbed over the edge of the roof like spider-men, and together seized the bars that covered an upper story window. A coordinated wrench ripped the wrought iron out of its fittings and they immediately fired shock grenades into the windows, closely following the explosives with weapons at the ready.
Alkina and Ritter did the same at a large skylight overlooking an atrium that reached from the four-storey roof all the way to the ground floor, forming the center of the mansion. Then they grasped the edge, hung briefly, and dropped.
Landing on the beautiful travertine floor, they immediately lifted their weapons and searched their sectors. While the others variously secured the Russian civilians or hunted for cyborgs, their job was to interdict this central point, coordinate, and reinforce if necessary.
An enormous figure at least seven feet tall and proportionally broad burst from a doorway and raced across the atrium, heading for an exposed internal stairway. Partway there, it realized it was not alone, turning blazing red eyes toward the pair even as it started to bring the heavy machinegun it cradled around in their direction.
Two different high-tech rounds slammed into it as Alkina and Ritter easily tracked their moving target. Hers comprised a sleet of nanocarbon flechettes sharp enough to slide into steel under the mere pressure of a human thumb. Those that struck something harder than human flesh lodged in the Shadow Man’s armored skin or metallic bones, demonstrating that something harder than mere steel composed the thing’s structure. Probably nano-assembled ferrocrystal, Alkina thought as she watched her projectiles sprouted from the figure like porcupine quills.
Ritter’s round, fired on the heels of hers, was a modified Armorshock shell. As it struck its target its insulating glass skin split and shattered, exposing its two kinds of protruding conductive spines, As soon as one of each contacted metal, its capacitor dumped an enormous electrical charge into the cyborg and then triggered a small shaped charge that sent a jet of molten copper into its target. For good measure it released ultra-short-life nano that sought out human nerve tissue and disassembled it at a molecular level.
The golem jerked and fell as electrical discharges played along its skin, igniting the clothes it wore. It slid several meters along the smooth atrium floor before coming to a stop, the light going out of its eyes.
“Well, that went surprisingly well,” Ritter muttered, jacking another round into his grenade launcher and sweeping his sector for more targets.
“If I believed in such things, I’d say you’re tempting fate by saying so,” Alkina responded. “Tangle it.”
“Will do.” He took a moment to unload and then reload a special tangler shell, then aimed carefully and fired at the fallen cyborg.
A glob of something flew rather slowly from the muzzle of his la
uncher and expanded rapidly to about two meters across. It struck the torso and lower extremities of the fallen Shadow Man and wrapped itself around, shrinking to enfold its arms and legs, leaving its head free.
Composed of ferrocrystal monofilaments wrapped in super-sticky polymers, it should keep the cyborg immobilized, or at least inhibited. Depending upon the relative densities and properties of the thing’s skin, its razor-sharp filaments might also slice into the thing’s skin if it tried to break free.
“Stay sharp,” she said, then approached it from above its head. In the background she heard the chuff and boom of several grenades going off, and the sound of conventional weapons fire.
Reaching into a pouch, she extracted an item prepared especially for cyborg capture. A hood made of a tough, flexible Kevlar-like woven fiber, its opening attached to a metal loop with a handle. Slipping it over the thing’s head blinded it, allowed it to breathe – assuming it needed to – and provided something to control its head with.
And, if need be, something to take its head off.
A deeper hammering sound suddenly manifested itself, and rounds tore through the inner wall of the second storey of the atrium, smashing ornamental railings and a large vase from its perch.
“Looks like the other one is still alive and kicking,” Ritter called, aiming his weapon in the direction from which the bullets had come. He drifted forward as if to help.
“Stand fast, Ritter. If eight of them can’t handle one more cyborg, adding yourself to the mix won’t help. Set up your demo pack.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t sound happy but he would comply. All of the commandos, but especially the team leaders, had tested extremely loyal and disciplined, as well as aggressive. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Squatting and setting his weapon down on the floor, he reached around behind himself and detached his combat pack, a small conformal thing that rested against his lumbar region. Opening it, he removed a shaped block of high explosive and placed it atop the low wall surrounding a decorative fountain. Then he activated a small detonator and attached it with a slotted spike. Now, one coded HUD command would take the building down.
“Come on, let’s get this thing loaded.” Alkina grabbed the hood handle with one hand and said, “Unstick him from the floor.”
Ritter ran a special zero-friction blade beneath the webbed cyborg, breaking or detaching the fibers from the surface on which he rested, then grabbed the thing’s feet.
“Cyborg, just in case you can hear me,” Alkina said conversationally as she lifted and dragged, “all I have to do is twist this thing around your neck just right and it will cut your head off. And if that doesn’t work, a command from my HUD will detonate a collar of explosive that should. So if you have any self-preservation programming at all, I suggest you keep that foremost in whatever passes for your mind, and if you play nice, you’ll soon be up on your feet again and working for a new and better boss.”
She had no idea if any of that was getting through, but it didn’t hurt to hope she could convince it to save them all some trouble. That fact that the mission called for bringing at least one of the cyborgs back alive and operating buoyed that hope.
As they half dragged, half carried the thing – it must have weighed two hundred fifty kilos – they heard a flurry of mixed gunfire, then a call came on the squad leader’s freq. “Can’t take him down without losing the hostages,” said the unidentified commando. “He’s locked down tight in some kind of a panic room or vault, with the civilians behind him. We’ve got one dead and three wounded already.”
Ritter glanced at Alkina, who nodded. He radioed, “Finch, you are authorized termination protocol. Fry them and get out of there. Don’t leave our comrade.”
She could hear the relief in the man’s voice. “Acknowledged. Engaging now.”
As the two leaders lumbered down the hallway toward the mansion’s front door, they felt the building shake and heard a burst of electric static on their radios. Pieces of wall showered into the atrium they had just vacated, and then came the call, “Termination complete.” If that assessment was accurate, the commandos engaging the Shadow should have fired a medley of grenades into the bolt-hole, killing everyone in it, cyborg and civilians alike.
Price of doing business, she thought without great concern. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
The remaining seven commandos swarmed down the stairs, carrying one body and helping several wounded. Two unencumbered ones grabbed shoulder each on the captured cyborg, and they opened the mansion’s front door.
Bullets clawed for them from behind a Mercedes limo parked in the driveway, and one of their team fell with a curse, hit but not badly due to his armor. Another dropped the comrade she was helping and took two steps, the third planted atop a stone railing that launched her into the air and over the long black automobile.
In the air, she drew a pistol and, aiming downward, shot the gunman twice in his helmeted head. The protective helm turned the shots but stunned him, knocking him to the ground as she landed lightly behind him. two quick stride brought her to point blank range and she put the gun to his ear and blew his brains all over the cobblestones.
“Limo!” Alkina said, pointing with her chin. “See if the keys are in it.” Unsurprisingly in this hyper-secure enclave, they dangled from the steering column. “Open the boot.”
The commandos stuffed the golem into the enormous trunk of the car, then helped the wounded into the back. “Ritter, drive to the rally point and get this thing packed. I’ll make my way on foot. Finch, stay with me.”
Ritter nodded, slipping behind the wheel himself, and they roared out the gate as it retracted automatically.
Checking her HUD, she realized fewer than seven minutes had passed since the first shots were fired, and the Russian police were just starting to wake up. Sirens wailed in the near distance, and an enormous explosion blew a fireball into the air three blocks away. The dead gunman laying on the cobbles at her feet must have been assigned to the external grounds security, to have responded so fast.
Switching to the command channel for the first time – there was no need to stick her oar in until now – she called for reports from the other seven teams. Number Three couldn’t be reached at all, even when she keyed in for a general broadcast. Pulling up an overlay, she determined that the fireball came from Three’s objective. Perhaps they had self-destructed rather than get taken alive. The blast had seemed too large for just one demo pack.
Walking now, Alkina coordinated her teams’ withdrawals. Covered by Finch, she strolled around the large office building from which they had descended, her mind more on command decisions than her personal situation. Her bodyguard pulled her down behind a wall as police vehicles zoomed by with flashing lights and wailing sirens. Once she was sure everything was going as well as could be expected, she brought her mind back to the here and now.
“Let’s go,” she said to Finch, pointing, and they ran and leaped for the low rooftop of the warehouse that overlooked the rally point. There she paused and sent the detonation code for Ritter’s pack, still set in the atrium of the mansion they had just quitted. She felt the rattle, but the tall commercial building blocked her view of the thing. Hopefully it would limit any investigation’s ability to collect evidence, and destroy any surveillance videos there might be.
If not…well, omelets and eggs, and all that, she thought.
Then she and Finch leaped down to the rally point, trusting the IFF in their HUDs to keep anyone from shooting at them as they did so. Quickly she took charge of the egress, ensuring the three cyborgs they had captured were placed inside crates and instant-foamed into place up to their necks, with the explosive collars still on them. Their rides back to Australia might be long and uncomfortable, but at least they would live.
Whatever life might mean to such creatures.
It’s one thing to have implanted cybernetics, she mused. It’s entirely another to be a cyborg, progra
mmable by machine code, limited in free will, and wholly dependent on the machines to sustain your life.
The golem they had taken apart in Australia had taught them a lot. One thing they had discovered was that the true cyborg was more machine than man. Probably if true artificial intelligence were possible, its builders would have dispensed with the organic entirely and simply created a robot. At present, though, such a thing, if built, would have been hardly smarter than an insect, able to respond to preset combat situations but not sophisticated enough to infiltrate, covertly assassinate, or bodyguard.
They’d lost twenty-one out of the eight nanocommandos, with forty more in various states of injury. Only a few bodies had been left behind, and none of those without the benefit of a demolition pack. Evidence would be there, if the forensic teams were sufficiently diligent, but if their mission – and the Americans’ missions – were successful, the Russians should be able to reconstitute their own government and be grateful for the assistance. Spooky had thought it unlikely they would make Direct Action’s role public. If they felt some perverse need to point fingers, their old scapegoats the Americans would probably take the blame.
And as for their little nanocrack problem…well, Ann chuckled to herself, this country would have to do something for itself, after all.
With all of the cyborgs accounted for, and the Russian ministers and their families freed or dead, Alkina gave the order to pull egress. With the severely wounded bundled back into their crates, the rest of her commandos took positions on the truck bed, weapons ready. She’d rather not have to shoot it out with the Russian police, but if they did, it would be no contest.
As it happened, the police force and fire brigades seemed far too busy to be concerned about one large truck and two accompanying SUVs. Fires raged and here and there more explosions flung debris into the air, perhaps from broken gas lines or charges that their teams had not, until then, detonated.
Cyborg Strike Page 15
