Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern

by Mat Nastos

  “Do it.”

  Zuz jumped a bit at Mal’s response.

  “What? Now?” choked Zuz at the thought. “While you’re driving?”

  “We’ll be fine,” retorted Mal. “I’ve got super reflexes, remember? I can handle anything.”

  Zuz was unconvinced. Wouldn’t it be better if they just pulled over somewhere and tried? Somewhere they weren’t doing nearly a hundred miles per hour?

  The laptop was opened and wedged in the space between the top of the dashboard and the windshield of Zuz’s side once he decided trying to convince Mal to stop the car somewhere was hopeless.

  Zuz fished around in the backpacked resting in the floorboard between his legs for a couple of seconds before locating the object of his quest: a bright blue computer cable.

  A red pocket knife appeared in Zuz’s right hand and he set about to stripping the outer covering from the cable. When he was done, the knife disappeared back into his pocket and he reached over to yank out the car’s cigarette lighter.

  “Never thought I’d use this thing again once I quit smoking.”

  Mal’s eyes went wide as he caught sight of what Zuz was doing in his peripheral vision. The man had inserted the stripped wires into the metal of the lighter’s casing. It all looked very bad to the renegade cybernetic soldier.

  “Wait…what are you going to do with that thing?”

  Attaching one end of the cord to a side input of his laptop, Zuz turned to Mal and advised, “You’re going to need to keep your head still for a minute while I get you hooked up. The connection isn’t a standard one, so I had to improvise.”

  “I don’t know that I want you sticking that nasty thing in my head, Zuz.”

  “Don’t be a pussy, Mal. It’s the only thing I have that will fit in your hole,” said Zuz, placing his knees in the seat so he could swivel to face Mal and get better access to the opening in the back of his head.

  “Do it fast,” said Mal, giving in, his voice sounding uncomfortable. “And, swear you’ll never say that to me again…ever.”

  In the heat of the exchange, neither of the men noticed a black Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor with the gold markings of the California Highway Patrol stamped on its white doors slide silently behind the battered Nissan.

  Oblivious to what was coasting in their wake, Zuz leaned across the car’s center console, wire in hand, and started try to set up the interface. Regrettably, the man slipped, slamming his friend’s head down into the steering wheel. The impact caused Mal to swerve across the road, giving probable cause to the police car trailing them.

  The bright lights, rotating red and blue, and the harsh blare of the police cruiser’s siren startled both men, snapping them to attention.

  “Civilian law enforcement vehicle approaching with a crew compliment of two California Highway Patrol officers, standard armament,” rang Mal’s computerized conscience. “Evasive maneuvers recommended.”

  “You couldn’t have spoken up BEFORE the cops snuck up on us, eh?” Mal lectured his internal system aloud, more for Zuz’s benefit than anything else.

  “Aw, hell, Mal. What are we going to do now? Out run ‘em?”

  “You want me to try and out run them? In this hunk of junk?” Mal gave his friend his best “are you freakin’ crazy” expression, more than a tad shocked by the suggestion. “I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen apart yet.”

  The sirens pulsed shrilly once more, this time accompanied by one of the officer’s calling out over their vehicle’s loudspeaker, “Please pull to your vehicle to the right, sir.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “The nice officer said to pull over,” responded the cyborg. “We’re going to pull over.”

  Mal’s head did its best impression of an owl, turning right and left to check the traffic around him.

  “You’re not going to kill them are you, Mal?” asked Zuz, worried, the coloring draining from his face at the thought.

  “Not if I can help it,” was Mal’s response as he reached up to pull down the Nissan’s turn signal level and proceed to maneuver the car through the other automobiles to a clear stretch of roadside.

  Threadbare tires nearly vibrating off their wheels as they rolled over the rumble strip and bounced to a stop on the freeway’s shoulder was more than enough to kick Zuz’s agitation level up to the boiling point.

  “He’s going to ask for your license—you don’t have a license or any type of ID at all,” Zuz was rubbing his head so fast Mal was convinced the man was going to start a fire. “What are you going to do when he asks for one? Are you going to stab him in the thorax?”

  Chuckling at the idea, which his internal computer seemed to be in complete agreement with, Mal shook his head and put his hand on his nervous friend’s shoulder, “I’m not stabbing anyone in the thorax, David. We’ll just see what they want.”

  By the time the cop car had pulled to a complete stop behind them and the driver had climbed out of it, Zuz was nearly ricocheting around the inside of the Nissan.

  The fidgeting stopped when the officer rapped on the driver’s side window with the back of his leather-gloved hand, indicating Mal should roll it down.

  Keeping his eyes locked on the view straight ahead of him, Zuz leaned over and whispered to Mal out of the side of his mouth, “Don’t worry—I’ve got a plan.”

  The statement caused Mal more concern than the police officer did. Mal quickly lowered his the glass and took a look at the uniformed cop standing less than six inches away. He did his best to block out his computer’s recommendation to drive one of his living metal talons through the door and disembowel the potential threat.

  “Hi, Officer…” Mal read the name “Tillman” embossed on the man’s badge, “…Tillman. I know I was going a little fast.

  Officer Tillman’s blond right eyebrow shot up while his left moved down.

  “A “little fast?” Sir, you were doing almost a hundred and swerving all over the road,” interrupted the tall highway patrolman, sliding a clipboard that had been trapped in the crook of his armpit. The man’s uniform was pressed to perfection and not a spot of lint could be found anywhere on it. His boots were spit polished and the sun glinted off his polarized Ray-Ban shades. Mal noted that even the hair on top of public servant’s head was perfectly set, giving off the impression of a Ken-doll.

  Flipping up the clipboard’s protector to ready a new traffic ticket, Officer Tillman finished in a clipped, precisely metered tone, “License and registration, sir.”

  Mal reached up and removed the automobile’s registration from its hiding spot behind the sun visor folded over his head, using his right arm in hopes the officer wouldn’t notice the unusual bumps and lines of its living metal armor. The last thing they needed was Officer Tillman getting jumpy and shooting into the car from his elevated position. Sure, Mal could probably survive a couple of bullets, what with his new healing factor, but the same couldn’t be said for his completely human friend.

  Before Mal could hand over the paperwork, Zuz leaned over almost into his lap and started talking in a voice that had skittished itself up almost an entire octave.

  “Officer, this is all my fault,” announced Zuz, winking to Mal in an attempt at reassurance that failed miserably.

  “Excuse me?” Officer Tillman warily leaned his face down into the window to identify who was speaking to him, resting his arm on the roof of the vehicle.

  “Yeah, I was dropping “Jager Bombs” this morning with homies this morning,” slurred Zuz in a painfully exaggerated fashion. Both the cop outside and Mal sitting next to him grimaced a little at his choice of words. Zuz was way too Caucasian to be using the word “homies” comfortably in casual conversation. “And I got the munchies, dude…Officer Dude. Mal here volunteered to give me a ride.”

  The cyborg glared angrily back at Zuz as the man smacked him in the chest to accentuate the point. He decided to let it slide this time, on account of getting his friend’s home blown up a
nd all.

  Officer Tillman slid back the sleeve of his left arm and glanced down at the face of his bright silver diver’s watch. The dial read 11:16 A.M.

  “It’s only eleven in the morning, sir. Isn’t it a bit early to be drinking?”

  The cop stepped back and ran his gaze along the outside of Zuz’s car, tilting his polarized Ray-Ban sunglasses down to the tip of his nose so he could take in all of the damage done to the car in the past twenty-four hours.

  “Are those bullet holes?”

  “I live in a pretty rough neighborhood, Officer,” called Zuz back through the open driver’s side window.

  A flick of the wrist and Officer Tillman snatched the registration document out of Mal’s hand.

  “I’ll be right back, gentlemen,” said Tillman as he turned and headed back towards his fellow officer waiting parked half a car length behind them. “Wait here and please stay in your vehicle.”

  Mal’s mouth formed a veritable smorgasbord of silent expletives directed at Zuz, who seemed far more pleased with his performance than he should have been. Once the cop was safely out of earshot, Mal launched into the tirade he had been holding back.

  “That was your plan? ‘Oh, hey, officer dude, I was drunk.’ What goes on in your head that thinks ‘drunk’ is a good plan?” ranted Mal, annoyed and baffled at his friend’s line of thought.

  “It was better than stabbing him in the thorax,” muttered Zuz, mostly to himself.

  “Say ‘thorax’ once more and I’m going to stab you in yours. Be quiet for a second, they’re calling us in now,” Mal reached up to adjust the rear view mirror so he could watch Officer Tillman hand over their registration to his partner to radio back to their dispatcher. “If we’re lucky, the Project: Hardwired guys don’t want to involve the local sheriff’s office and we’ll just get a citation.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been real lucky so far, Mal.”

  “Damn it,” swore Mal, his heightened senses allowing him to detect a spike in the second officer’s heart rate from inside the police cruiser. A quick glance in the rear view mirror revealed Officer Tillman approaching the Nissan, unholstering his Smith & Wesson M&P40 pistol and sliding its safety into the ‘off’ position.

  “What is it,” started Zuz before Mal pushed his head down below the car’s window line, causing him to yelp in a rather effeminate manner.

  “They’re on to us. Officer Tillman is on his way back with his gun out and his partner is radioing in for back-up,” said Mal, unbuckling his seat belt. “Stay down until this is over.”

  Seeing the panic on his friend’s face as he jerked the car door open and started to slide out, Mal joked, “And don’t worry, this one’s only got a little gun.”

  “Get down on the ground!” The barrel of Tillman’s pistol jerked up to point at Mal.

  Raising his hands in as non-threatening a manner as he could manage, Mal slammed the car’s door with his hip and moved slowly toward the advancing officer.

  “There’s been a misunderstanding, Officer Tillman,” said Mal in a calm voice, continuing to move forward.

  “I repeat, get down on the ground or I’ll be forced to shoot you!” ordered the cop, taking careful aim at Mal’s bare chest, confident there was no way he’d miss at the ten foot gap between them.

  Mal’s body blocked the late morning sun for a moment, giving the patrolman a good look at his cybernetic limbs.

  “Your arms,” stuttered Tillman. “What’s wrong with your arms? Stay where you are or I’ll shoot!”

  “I don’t have time for this,” growled the super-soldier, sending the living metal of his arms the command to enter melee combat mode and bulk up to nearly twice the size of their relaxed state.

  Mal charged the cop, sending a spray of rocks and dirt splattering against the white paint of the parked Nissan.

  To his credit, Officer Tillman was able to discharge his weapon twice before Malcolm Weir was on him, the first of which went wide and shattered the driver’s side window of the Cube. The second pinged harmlessly off of the titanium alloy of Mal’s shoulder and spiraled off into the thick brush lining the freeway’s edge.

  Tillman’s finger was starting to squeeze off a third shot as Mal reached him and a nanotech powered bionic backhand smashed into his jaw, shattering it and rendering the man mercifully unconscious.

  Mal caught the fallen cop’s crumpled form and dropped him safely to the ground a few feet from the solid yellow line marking off the beginning of the freeway’s slow lane.

  It wouldn’t do to have the unfortunate public servant become the victim of vehicular manslaughter after Mal had worked so hard to not kill him.

  “Ten double zero!” a voice from nearby grabbed Mal’s attention even as the computerized hitchhiker in his head reminded him the patrolman’s partner still needed to be dealt with.

  The remaining officer was almost halfway out of the patrol car, screaming into his radio, by the time Mal turned his attention to the man.

  “Officer! Officer down! Send back-up!”

  Mal braced himself with a hand on the car’s roof and used the car’s trashed rear end to springboard himself across the fifteen foot gap to Tillman’s vehicle, drive his unyielding fist through its windshield, and clip the surprised cop in the side of his head, rendering him unconscious.

  Mal stood still for a moment, staring at his fist as it came free of the hole he’d punched in the windshield, amazed at what had just happened. In less than five seconds he’d taken down two armed members of the highway patrol without breaking a sweat.

  Emotion overwhelmed him for a moment and his still-human knees nearly gave out as he realized he’d never get his old life back.

  In the blink of an eye, his fear and despair turned to rage, and something inside of Mal snapped. A primal scream exploded from the cybernetic warrior. Before the scream ended, Mal slammed his fist into the patrol vehicle’s hood. The force of the strike punched through the cover and split the engine block nearly in half, sending steam and shattered metal shards flying.

  A grim mask covered Mal’s face as he turned back to Zuz waiting for him in the Nissan. Mal wondered if there was anything at all left of Malcolm Weir or if only Designate Cestus remained?

  Reaching his getaway vehicle, Mal tossed open the passenger’s door and ordered Zuz to drive. The determination setting the cyborg’s jaw was more than enough to keep Zuz from arguing.

  “Always let the wookie win,” Zuz thought to himself as he jammed his foot down onto the accelerator and the car peeled out into traffic.

  “Here,” said Zuz, holding up a scrap of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it.

  “What’s this,” asked Mal, taking the paper in his hand.

  “I found Lieutenant Colonel Michael Denman while you were playing with the ‘Ponch’ and ‘John’ back there.”

  Mal’s eyes lit up at the news.

  “Yeah? Where?”

  “He’s right here in Southern California, stationed at Fort Irwin out in San Bernardino County,” said Zuz. “We can be there in an hour.”

  “Fort Irwin? What’s the old man doing out here?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s his number,” Zuz zigged in and out of traffic as he spoke. “Should we give him a call and find out?”

  “No,” said Mal grimly. “I don’t want any surprises waiting for us when we get there.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A quartet of boxy black Cadillac Escalades, detailed to a gleaming finish an hour earlier and massive V8 engines idling quietly in unison, sat waiting outside the entrance to the US Bank Tower. The four sunglassed drivers, each nearly as bulky and massive as the vehicles they were operating and dressed in matching black suits blatantly announcing them as covert government operatives, seemed completely oblivious to both the red-painted ‘no parking zones’ they were parked next to and the miles of bright yellow ‘crime scene’ tape covering the area.

  The normally crowded downtown Los Angeles sidewalk in front of the active bus
iness center had been a virtual ghost town since the automobiles had arrived ten minutes earlier. As if warned off by the collective unconscious or by ten thousand years of dealing with self-important government thugs, the foot traffic normally ever present along the northeast side of West Fifth Street had moved across the road.

  Behind the dark polarized lenses of their glasses, the eyes of all four men darted back and forth, tracking and taking note of every person or vehicle moving past their location. Each man kept one hand up to the radio wires trailing down from their left ears and the other hand clamped tightly around the MP5s slung over his shoulder.

  “Veeps in motion, people,” barked the driver standing near the third armor-plated SUV in line, signaling his fellows through his headset.

  Driver three moved away from his still running luxury sports utility vehicle, striding across the glass covered, bloodstained courtyard Cestus had fallen into less than twenty-four hours earlier, only to halt halfway between street and the grand entrance to the US Bank Tower. After a quick visual sweep of the immediate vicinity convinced him the single janitor in charge of clean-up was non-hostile, the security guard signaled to the building with a wave of his hand.

  The malfunction of Designate Cestus and explosion at Project: Hardwired’s hub had put everyone from the highest echelons of command to the lowest interns on edge. Because the boys in tech still had no idea what exactly went wrong or who was behind the disaster, the powers-that-be had declared the protection of Director Kiesling to be the top priority.

  The security detail accompanying Kiesling as he exited the fractured high-impact glass of the cavernous lobby surrounded both him and Ms. Roslan in a wall of flesh and bone and high-caliber weapons. Almost twenty men escorted the pair to the cars waiting to spirit them away to a meeting with the US Secretary of Defense.

  Sliding into the rear of the Escalade along its polished leather seats, Gordon Kiesling had to admit that, in spite of the trouble it was causing, he did enjoy the increased security and attention the escape of Designate Cestus had caused. The extra guards, bulletproof cars and openly displayed automatic weaponry made him feel incredibly presidential.