by Mat Nastos
“We were able to set up a CASEVAC point at an abandoned hotel about a mile from where you went down, but communications broke down and we lost track of you boys. I can only guess that you were ambushed on your way to the dust-off location.
“Regardless of whatever happened after the crash, by the time the black hawks arrived to pull you boys out, the extraction point was a hot mess. All three of you were torn to shit. Word was Sergeant Douros was already down with a bullet through his ACH. Staff Sergeant Jay was wounded, spitting blood, and barely able to stand.
“From what the medics told me, you should have been dead, Weir. You’d already lost an arm, and your torso was shredded—one lung was collapse and most of your spleen and one kidney were blown to hell. You’d taken an insane amount of shrapnel to your chest, neck and face from an IED.
“The evac team said it was a free-fire zone when they arrived and that you were still kicking, surrounded by dead hostiles. You’d propped yourself up in front of your men, with your M16 set to rock-and-roll, still trying to fight when they pulled your team out.
“Once the docs had you and your men stabilized, you were all packed up on a C-17, pretty as you please, flown to Edwards Air Force Base and taken to the hospital there.
“They did their best to patch you up, but you were messed up—worse than dead, really. Paralyzed and stuck in bed, eating through tubes and kept going on life-support—conscious, but that was it.”
“What about the other two men from my unit—Douros and Jay?” asked Mal after digesting the information he’d been given.
Colonel Denman exhaled a slow, deep breath of sadness and responded.
“Sergeant Steven Douros was a vegetable. Unresponsive, no brain activity,” Denman dropped his eyes as his continued, voice cracking. “Staff Sergeant James Jay died on the table in surgery a day or two after you were brought stateside.”
Reaching down onto his desk, Denman picked up a pale folder filled to the bursting point and bound with a red rubber band. Tossing the documents to Mal, he added, “It’s all here in the reports.”
Mal passed the thickly packed folder to Zuz without looking at it and nodded for Denman to continue.
“One day, about two weeks after you boys got back in the world, I had a had a couple of the boys fly me out to the air base—told ‘em it was a training mission.
“That’s where it all got weird.
“You see, when we got to the hospital, you were gone. All three of you. And the medical staff couldn’t tell me how, where or why. Just that’d you been removed on orders from somewhere up the food chain. Somewhere over their pay grade.
“Official word was handed down to me when we got back to base. You were all classified “removed for medical reasons” and being pulled from the Rangers…all three of you. Including Staff Sergeant Jay. And that’s the bit that struck me all sorts of queer. I had always thought dead was dead and there was no reason to set up an RFM for a dead man.”
Denman slammed his fist down, still upset by what happened and his inability to find out why.
“Any idea what they did with me? Where they took me?” Mal asked, his own frustration echoing Denman’s.
“No idea at all, son. All I could figure out was that you were gone and it was on the order of some asshole from Washington named Kiesling.
“When I tried to investigate I was shut down—with extreme prejudice.
“Hell, that’s how I got stuck out here,” snorted the Colonel. “Supervising training and as far out of the way as possible. Someone wanted to make sure no one was looking too closely at your case. After banging my head against a wall of red tape, I had to give up and leave it alone. I was told it was that or my career.”
“Hey, Colonel,” interrupted Zuz. “This report mentions a fourth man wounded in the operation and classified as RFM along with the others. It says he disappeared from the hospital at about the same time as Mal and the two men from his unit.”
Denman thought for a moment before his face lit up in remembrance.
“Yeah,” the old soldier said, sitting back down at the chair behind his desk. “He was a member of the evac team sent in to pull Mal’s unit out of the hot zone. The man was wounded in during the escape. Near as I could find, he died…the same as you, Mal.”
“Do you remember the man’s name,” asked Zuz, flipping through the thick manila records folder, searching for more information.
Zuz held up a familiar photo for Mal to see as Denman finally answered.
“Captain Marc Morrell.”
“Captain Morrell isn’t any more dead than I am, Colonel,” spat Mal through his teeth. “Morrell is still alive.”
“What?”
“He’s alive, got a house out in the burbs, a two-car garage,” confusion and anger fought for dominance in Mal’s head. “The best part is: he’s married to my ex-fiancée.”
“When you get yourself into shit, you sure do make sure it’s deep, don’t you, Captain?”
“I’m in it over my head this time, sir.”
“You need to get your girl out of there. Get her somewhere safe and hunker down for a bit. We’ll see if we can figure it out together, son,” Denman reached down and punched his thick finger hard into the white intercom button on his phone. “Get your ass in here, Corporal, we’ve got trouble.”
“This means a lot, Colonel Denman,” stammered Mal, grateful. “I didn’t know who to trust.”
Mal lost the Colonel’s response as his internal computer began screaming out in alarm, alerting the super-soldier of an impending attack.
Before the cyborg could react to the warning, the soft pop of a bullet punching a hole through glass filled his ears and he watched as Colonel Denman’s head exploded into a fine red mist.
CHAPTER 14
Gore covered nearly every inch of space in front of Colonel Denman’s desk, sent there by a high caliber sniper’s bullet blasting its way through the soldier’s head. Realizing what happened, a shriek tore itself from Zuz’s throat as he looked down to find himself covered in blood and brains and tiny fragments of skull.
Mal held up his metal hands, now coated crimson in the cooling plasma of his friend. The cyborg’s computerized brain continued its alarm, notifying Mal a split second before Denman’s assistant burst through the door.
Taking in the sight before him, Corporal MacAnders saw the headless corpse of his boss and snapped, assuming the two unexpected visitors were Colonel Denman’s killers, caught in the act.
Snatching up a radio from one side of his belt and the Colt M1917 six-shooter with the other, MacAnders screamed, “The Colonel’s been murdered!”
Mal’s superhuman reflexes flipped him over the back of his chair, allowing him to dodge the first shot squeezed off by the frantic Corporal. His body landed low in a fighting stance, his arms elongating into knives even as they bulked up in size.
Bracing himself to leap across the room and disarm the little ginger-haired member of the United States Army, Mal is brought up short by Zuz beating him to the punch, literally, with a haymaker to the man’s jaw.
“Nice punch, Z,” said Mal, impressed with his friend’s out of character display of force.
“I think I broke my hand, Mal.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Mal, urging Zuz to head for the still open office door. “Someone’s set us up.”
Staring down at the unconscious form of Corporal MacAnders, Zuz ignored Mal’s urging and bent down to pick up the man’s discarded pistol.
“Now this is what I’m talkin’ about,” said Zuz through a cartoonish smirk, performing a ridiculous ‘action hero’ pose with the weapon.
Mal shook his head and pushed his friend towards the exit.
“Keep moving, Doctor Jones.”
The pair made it less than two feet before all hell broke loose behind them. A chopper, cheerfully identified as a Boeing AH-64D Apache attack helicopter, dropped down suddenly from the sky overhead to the wide space between the training
facility’s buildings, and filled the wall of windows behind them
The cyborg didn’t need his computer to tell him the two pilots pointing at him from the vehicle’s cockpit were there for less than friendly reasons.
“Get down!” barked Mal, tackling his friend, shielding Zuz’s body from the torrent of high explosive rounds spitting out at a rate of 625 rounds per minute from the M230E1 chain gun mounted on the undercarriage of the Apache.
A hail of 30mm gun fire blasted into the room for a full thirty seconds, punching holes through walls, blowing apart furniture, sending papers, foot-long splinters of wood and shattered glass into the air, which quickly grew thick and unbreathable with dust and debris.
“Aw, hell,” came Zuz’s voice from beneath his half-human guardian. “I think you bruised my spleen.”
Yanking his friend up forcibly by the arm, Mal began ushering him toward the exit. He knew the Apache’s chain gun would need to cycle down and they’d have about two minutes before it could fire again.
“This thing felt a lot more impressive before they starting shooting at us with the canon,” said Zuz, tossing the century-old revolver across the room and stumbling along on unsteady feet.
Mal swore as he sensed the helicopter releasing its payload of two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, enhanced ears registering the sound of their solid-fuel rockets igniting and propelling the deadly air-to-surface projectiles rushing forward, guidance systems locking on with deadly accuracy.
With less than a heartbeat to react, Mal reached out, grabbing Zuz and the unconscious MacAnders around their waists and tossed the men from the room to the safety of the hall.
“This is going to hurt,” was the cyborg’s final thought before the twin missiles slammed into the side of the building in excess of nine-hundred miles per hour, exploding in a brilliant white flash, vaporizing everything in the room and a good chuck of the floor above it.
For the first time since he woke up on the cold steel operating table the day before, Mal was glad for the enhanced range of senses he’d been given. Although his eyes were completely blind and his hears were deaf from the burst, the computer center of Mal’s cyborg brain still allowed him a certain amount of awareness of the room around him. He could still “see” through pressure and heat variations felt in the nanotech “skin” of his living metal arms, which allowed him to take advantage of the cover of smoke packing the room from blazing floor to shattered ceiling.
A status report sounded off in his head even as he made his way to where he had hurled Zuz and the unconscious soldier to safety. The computer was reporting just under 7% of his body had suffered 3rd degree burns and that self-repair had already begun. The idea that microscopic machines were coursing through his veins was still mildly disturbing to the former Army Ranger, but he was quickly adjusting to it.
“At least I’ll never have to worry sunscreen ever again,” he thought, jerking the scorched office door open and allowing a flood of smoke to billow out into the hallway beyond.
Mal’s eyes were beginning to return to normal as he located his friend kneeling on the ground. A half-hearted attempt at a smile looked back at the cyborg, reassuring Mal that Zuz had escaped from the blast with little more than a couple of bruises.
“Get out of the building any way you can, Z. They’re after me and should leave you alone,” ordered Mal, relived his friend was alive and mostly unharmed.
“What are you going to do, Mal?” asked Zuz, wending his way through rubble in what was his best guest at the exit.
“Something very stupid,” replied Mal, waving his friend off.
Taking three deep breaths, Mal gripped the edges of the broken door frame and rocked back on his heels like a sprinter preparing to do the forty yard dash.
Locking the attack copter outside the second story window in his sights, Mal exhaled, “This is a bad idea…”
Mal propelled himself forward, legs pumping as he charged across the ruined, still burning wreckage of what was left of Lieutenant Colonel Denman’s office. Just beyond the bullet-riddled glass of the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the Apache was angling itself, guns forward, to begin another barrage of high caliber automatic gunfire. The cyborg threw his shoulder forward and doubled his speed as the multi-barrel of the Gatling gun took aim and began to spin in preparation for renewed assault.
The half-man, half-machine super-soldier coiled his muscled legs when his leading foot hit the last sliver of floor and fired himself out into the yawning, smoke-filled gulf of space past the flaming walls. Nearly a hundred steel-bodied rounds spat out from the AH-64D’s chain gun in the time it took Mal to cross the distance. The arc of his trajectory was enough to keep him clear of the searing stream of death.
The look of surprise on the faces of the pilots as they attempted to move their chopper out of the path of Mal’s leap warmed his heart, but they were too late. His vault carried him nearly thirty feet to slam into front of the helicopter, his clawed arms gripping its nose as the impact shook the craft, spinning it along its axis.
Before the pilot could straighten the Apache out, the cyborg’s fist dropped onto the bulletproofed safety glass shielding the cockpit, sending a spider-web of tiny cracks through it. The glass held and Mal’s computer informed him it would take him another ten seconds to penetrate it using blunt force and, reforming the fist into a yard-long spike, suggested an alternate approach.
The tempered glass of the windscreen offered little resistance to the thrust of brutal blade, which punctured both protective barrier and the body of the soldier beneath. The Apache’s co-pilot was killed instantly as Mal’s nanotech-forged armor pierced his heart.
Mal tore his hand from the soldier’s chest, coating the helicopter’s interior with arterial spray. The second soldier, a more wily veteran than his companion, drew his sidearm from the holster on his thigh and shoved it through the hole created by Mal’s attack, emptying its magazine into the bionic-warrior at point blank range.
Hot knives punched through Mal’s torso, his internal diagnostic announcing four bullets had struck him, perforating his kidneys, spleen and stomach. The now all too familiar itch of nanobots invading his non-robotic flesh spread over Mal as his cybernetic systems rushed to heal his wounds. A back hand from his free arm knocked the pistol from the remaining pilot’s hand, sending it free-falling to the pavement below.
“Omega class threat detected,” chimed the inhuman voice sharing Mal’s brain. “Project: Hardwired prime unit Designate Pyroclast fifty meters and closing.”
Mal looked up in time to see a half-track armored troop carrier slow to a stop and a half-human figure jump off the back.
“Recommended strategy: evasion,” finished Mal’s electronic conscience.
“Oh great, another one,” thought Mal as the newly-arrived government cyborg raise his arms and let loose with an uncontrolled burst of burning plasma.
Using his arms to brace himself, Mal kicked off from the spinning helicopter, diving out of the way as the burning wreckage of the Apache crashed into the ground, its explosion covering a twenty meter radius with burning debris.
Staring through the helicopter’s flaming ruin, Mal caught his first good look at Designate Pyroclast, even as he opened up once more with the twin-barreled plasma rail-gun mounted where a human’s left arm had once been. The man’s flesh, what little of it still remained, was burned and scarred beyond recognition—it almost seemed to run molten in some places where tubes and rods merged with meat. The body of the creature—and Mal was unable to process the cyborg as anything else—appeared to be held together by a series of metallic and carbon fiber-reinforced material, unable to remain whole on its own. A series of irregularly shaped venting pipes emerged at odd-angles from Pyroclast’s arms, legs and shoulders.
“What the hell is that thing?” Mal asked himself.
Failing to recognize the question as rhetorical, the computer continued its summarization.
“Designate Pyroclast’s main form of att
ack, the burst emitted by his rail-gun, is generated by the dense plasma focus machine mounted to his torso. The generator makes up 28% of his body mass.”
Six heavily armed GMRs joined the flaming newcomer, in groups of three on each of his flanks, firing at the wreckage in concentrated bursts with their MP5/40 submachine guns. The group seemed to operate on a wordless level as the subordinate units alternated firing to keep a consistent barrage of bullets blasting away at Mal’s location, keeping him pinned down.
“Enemy has been classified with a series of extreme mental instabilities, caused by extended exposure to the intense radiation emitted by his modifications. He was placed in stasis by Project: Hardwired lead scientist, Doctor Jean Ryan, until sufficient advances could be made on radiation shielding.”
As if on command, Pyroclast stepped forward, almost like a quarterback moving into a pocket to throw a football, and let another cone of plasma lance out from the weapon merged and melted onto his body. The super-heated material engulfed nearly a third of the maimed and mangled helicopter, turning it almost instantly into a mass of molten slag.
“Great. So he’s a nutjob with a nuke strapped to his back,” mumbled Mal. “You got any other bad news for me?”
“Three M113 armored personnel carriers approaching at high-speed from the northwest. Crew contingent approximately thirty-nine soldiers,” came the response Mal was dreading. A quick look over his shoulder confirmed the men were heading right for him, cutting off Mal’s most direct avenue of escape, and trapping him in a pincer between two very hostile groups of enemies.
“Any suggestions?” Mal asked himself without too much hope in an answer that wouldn’t involve getting killed.
“Engage non-enhanced troops.”
