by Mat Nastos
Cestus felt the presence of his captor a split second before a shadow leaned in, shading him from the blinding lights above. Unaided by his cybernetic enhancements, it took Cestus’s irises a moment to adjust to the change in light. Blinking a few times to clear his vision, the cybernetic warrior stared into the eyes of the architect of his misfortune.
The cyborg recognized him immediately from the images he’d drawn through his connection to the Abraxas computers during his fight with Kristin downstairs. The man’s pale blue eyes were unforgettable, burning into Cestus like ice.
Gordon Kiesling, executive director of Project: Hardwired smiled warmly down at Cestus from his position. The man’s hair was still perfectly groomed, and the top three buttons of his custom-tailored linen shirt were open, exposing a rather impressive amount of thick blond chest hair. Cestus noticed a woman standing just behind the man holding the folded blue material of his missing jacket.
Somehow, the hatred Cestus held toward the man doubled when he finally spoke.
“Well, I must say it is an honor to finally meet the man behind Designate Cestus, Malcolm. I’ve been a fan of your work since you joined us here at Project: Hardwired,” said Kiesling, smacking the thick manila folder in his hand.
“Malcolm Weir is dead,” spat Cestus. “You killed him a year ago. Just like you killed Kristin.” Cestus’s eyes bored a hole into Kiesling. “Just like I’m going to kill you.”
Looking around the brightly lit surgical suite—a pale colored room almost identical to the one Cestus had regained consciousness in the prior afternoon—Kiesling chuckled, gesturing at the dozen heavily-armed GMRs surrounding the stainless-steel operating table the cyborg had been strapped down to.
“Come now, Malcolm. There’s no escape for you this time.” The thick gold and diamond class ring on Kiesling’s pinky-finger reflected the stark white light shining down from the fixture above the men as he motioned towards a mousy blond in thick black glasses and green surgical scrubs half covered by an overly starched cotton lab coat. “Dr. Ryan here knows more about what you are—what you can do—than you do. She’s responsible for creating all of the Abraxas Prime Units. She also designed the negation-restraints that are keeping your cybernetics powered down.”
“How did this all happen?” asked Cestus, continuing to test his cybernetics to gauge the extent of their inoperable state.
“Excellent question, Malcolm. Excellent question, indeed!” cheered Kiesling. He half turned to the aforementioned Dr. Ryan. “Now, Dr. Ryan, in the simplest words possible, please explain to myself and Malcolm here what exactly went wrong.”
“As you are aware from my briefing, the nanites we used in his upgrade were experimental—we’d never done anything like it before,” said the woman, stepping further into Cestus’s field of vision. “We assume their AI kicked in and took over, grabbing every piece of information in our networks before wiping out the Abraxas servers completely. Really, it’s truly amazing. His tech has continually performed above and beyond our initial estimations.”
Kiesling clapped in a manner that, remarkably, carried more than a little sarcasm with it. From his position flat on an operating table, waiting to have his head removed, Mal appreciated the man’s ability.
“That’s fantastic to hear, Dr. Ryan. Now, how do we fix it?”
Clearing her throat, Ryan gave her appraisal of the situation and her solution.
“We’ll have to run a scrubbing program to recover all of the lost information from the trillions of nanocomputers making up the unit’s limbs, brain and nervous system,” she paused and looked down at Cestus with the merest hint of sadness in her eyes. “The process will destroy his programming and his mind. It’ll be a clean slate and need to be reinstalled.”
Smiling, Kiesling asked, “And the original personality construct of Malcolm Weir? Will it be recoverable?”
“Oh no, Director Kiesling,” replied the doctor, “The organic portion of his brain will be completely burned out. He’ll be a vegetable and ready for a new artificial intelligence to be installed.”
“Excellent!” Kiesling was now beaming with excitement. Things could go back to the way they were supposed to be and he’d be able to rid himself of the politicians for a while. He reached down and patted Cestus on his head. “We’ll get our favorite assassin back.”
“Why me?” asked Cestus.
“‘Why’ you?” repeated Kiesling, finally understanding. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?” The director turned towards the woman who had engineered Malcolm Weir’s transformation. “Is it possible, Dr. Ryan?”
The woman thought for a moment and then nodded.
“The massive download of information from the Abraxas mainframe into the nanobots of Designate Cestus must have caused a feedback loop that shorted out his memory. Essentially, his brain was rebooted and everything since his recruitment was lost.” Ryan leaned in close, shining a silver-plated penlight into the captured cyborg’s eyes, testing his reaction. “My guess is he doesn’t remember anything after the trauma of the accident in Iraq a year ago.”
“This whole situation has got to be a real mind-fuck for you, doesn’t it? Not knowing what you’ve missed this past year?” asked Kiesling, crossing his arms in consideration of his prisoner’s plight.
“Let me up and I’ll show you how much it pisses me off.” The veins in Cestus’s neck and bare torso bulged, his muscles testing what strength they still had against the computer-controlled restraints holding them at bay. They held fast.
“Tut-tut, Malcolm. There’s no need for any of that. If you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare, I’d be happy to fill in the blanks for you,” teased Kiesling. Tilting his head toward Ms. Roslan, he asked, “Do we have time for a story before we report in to the Secretary of Defense?”
“We’ve got a few minutes before we have to leave, sir.”
Kiesling reach out and took a large folder from his assistant and flipped through it for a moment before looking back to where Cestus was laying. The man took a theatrical breath before beginning.
“You were all supposed to die in the crash, Malcolm,” Kiesling gave a half-hearted chuckle at the idea. “Trust a group of Rangers to do everything they’re ordered to do except die.”
“What?!” Cestus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What did you say?”
The cyborg was stunned at what his captor told him next.
“We’d gone as far as we could with the GMRs and beta units. Working from the corpses of organ donors or soldiers killed overseas and sent home weeks before they were finally sent to Dr. Ryan’s crew. We needed better subjects for the final phase of the project. Elite soldiers, preselected, who would survive the conversion process.
“The only thing standing in our way was the current bleeding-heart liberal administration. They wouldn’t give us the go-ahead to recruit healthy soldiers—so we elected to go out and make our own candidates.
“The Abraxas-Array chose the subjects itself, based on extensive medical and psychological evaluations. It picked from SWAT members and military men—sifting through SEAL teams, CIA operatives, Marines…” Kiesling paused and gestured overly dramatically at Cestus. “Army Rangers.
“You were all the best of the best. All we needed was for you to be removed from active duty.
“You, Captain Malcolm Weir, were the last man selected by Abraxas. From there it was easy enough to get you stationed out in an active war zone and in position for one of our international partners to shoot down your chopper.
“It was supposed to be an easy operation. A ‘crash and grab’ as it were. All you had to do was stay at the crash site. Instead, you got up and walked away. Even worse, you called for help and survived long enough for the army to rescue you.”
“Everything that happened—to me…to my men—it was all your doing,” stated Mal flatly.
Kiesling eased up one with one leg to half-sit on the table Cestus was confined to. It was a gesture of familiarity the cyborg didn’t appre
ciate.
“We had a heck of a time trying to catch up to you after that,” sighed the man, disregarding the interruption. “It took us weeks to have you and the remaining men of your unit brought stateside and relocated to Edwards Air Force Base.”
“My men and Captain Morrell?”
“Yes. And the good Captain Morrell,” nodded Kiesling. “He was a lot easier to bring into the fold than you were, in spite of your injuries. Good man…he knows how to follow orders. You, on the other hand, took quite a bit more persuading.”
“But why involve Kristin? What did she have to do with any of this?” Cestus demanded, straining against the harnesses holding his body inert.
“It was your fault, really,” started Kiesling, shrugging his shoulders in an overly exaggerated fashion. The man was putting on a performance, as much for his own benefit as for the captive cyborg’s. “We had to threaten your girl to get you to finally agree to submit to the project as a Hardwired Prime applicant. Even then, I didn’t completely trust you to stay with the program, so I had her converted into a sleeper agent…just in case.”
A tiny voice sounding in a particularly dark corner of Cestus’s mind nearly caused a smile to crack the otherwise stoic mask he’d forced onto his face.
“System reboot in progress,” it said.
Oblivious to what was happening less than a foot from where he was sitting, Kiesling continued his tale.
“Once we got you under control and the lovely Dr. Ryan here patched you up, you were a perfect soldier.”
“Until the incident in Kabul,” added Ms. Roslan.
“YES, Ms. Roslan…Until the incident in Kabul. Thank you for the interruption.” Kiesling rolled his eyes at Cestus, feigning embarrassment at the disturbance. “Women!”
“What happened in Kabul?” asked Cestus in a calm voice that hid the frenzy he had building just under the surface.
“I’m afraid that’s going to have to be a tale for another time, my friend…not that you’ll be around to hear it.” Looking down at his five thousand dollar Breitling watch, Kiesling stood up from his seat next to Cestus and stretched lazily. “Dr. Ryan, the patient is all yours. Let’s go, Ms. Roslan. You know how the Secretary hates to be kept waiting—it could mess up our whole day.”
A gravel-filled voice halted Kiesling’s exit in its tracks. “Kiesling…your day is about to get a whole lot worse.” Inside, Cestus heard the words he’d been waiting for. “System reboot complete.”
“I’ve had enough of your stalling,” said Kiesling, annoyed, waving for Dr. Ryan and her crew to get to work. “Any final words before we burn out your brain, Captain Weir?”
Cestus smiled up from beneath furrowed brows, a smile filled with death. An audible ‘click’ filled the room as the glowing indicators on the cyborg’s restraints shut off all at once.
“I just unlocked my cuffs.”
CHAPTER 21
It could be argued that since childhood Gordon Kiesling had worn an impenetrable armor of absolute self-control and confidence. It had allowed him to achieve many great things in his life: captain of the soccer team in junior high school, quarterback and prom king in high school, youngest partner at the most influential law firm in Washington D.C., all the way up to becoming the executive director of one of the most powerful top secret organizations in the entire world. He was known—had always been known—as someone who could stare down trouble, to conquer fear itself, and always come out on top.
Not a few of the many opponents who had tried to crack Kiesling’s armor had joked that the only way through it was with a pound of Kryptonite and a whole lot of divine intervention. No one had ever questioned that Gordon Kiesling was invincible.
No one, that is, until Cestus broke free.
Every bit of that unbreakable armor, unwavering self-confidence and absolute control failed him completely at the ringing thud of high-tech restraints and titanium-alloyed manacles dropping to laboratory floor, and at the sight of Designate Cestus—a man Kiesling himself had ordered transformed into one of the deadliest killers ever to walk the face of the Earth—leaping for him with nanotech-forged living metal talons aimed for his throat, hungry to end his life.
A small, less than manly scream and incoherent babbling—meant to have been an exclamation demanding to know how the cyborg super-soldier escaped, but came out more like a frightened one year-old trying to make words for the first time—was all the man could manage as he backpedaled away from the attack, flailing recklessly. In fact, the only thing that saved him from becoming the late-Gordon Kiesling was his less than dignified reaction and abject terror—that and tripping over the ever-present Ms. Roslan standing behind him and falling to the floor.
As it was, the stiletto claws of Cestus tore Kiesling’s shirt open and sliced a quartet of inch-deep grooves into the man’s chiseled chest and stomach. A hand’s breadth closer and the former Army Ranger would have gutted the man like a fish, from navel to neck, ending his career and his life.
A second attack from Cestus was thwarted by a short burst of four shots from somewhere behind the collapsed man, gunfire that glanced off his arms and shoulders, forcing the cyborg to pull his armored prosthetics in close to protect his body from damage.
“RUN!” screamed Roslan’s voice as she pulled Kiesling to his feet and continued to squeeze the trigger of her Glock, pushing it to expel tiny gouts of flame and gunpowder clouds in an effort to distract the enraged cyborg from his target. The determination in the woman’s eyes as she faced off against a billion dollar cybernetic assassin reminded the Project: Hardwired chief executive that he still owed his assistant a raise…a very, very big raise.
Kiesling allowed himself to be jerked off the ground and ushered to the operating suite’s exit, surrounded by a quartet of GMR units. The remaining eight computer-guided automatons rushed to surround Cestus in a delaying tactic to allow their boss to escape, hopefully lasting long enough for reinforcements to arrive and take care of the rogue unit.
“They’d better hurry,” thought Kiesling, trying to hold his shirt together and do something to halt the flow of blood from the wounds decorating his torso. “Weir is going to make short work of the Gomers and then come after me.”
“Where are the other Primes?” Kiesling demanded loudly, following quickly behind Ms. Roslan on the way to the nearest elevator bank.
“I’m here,” said Designate Gauss as the steel elevator doors parted, allowing him to exit. The cyborg was ready for battle, wearing sleeveless, reinforced body armor over his torso that still allowed his own cybernetically enhanced arms to work free from confinement. To Ms. Roslan, he said, “There is a chopper waiting for you all on the roof. It’s prepped and ready to remove you to a safe location off-site. Where is Weir now?”
Ms. Roslan started to answer, pointing back in the direction they’d come from, “He’s insi—” but was cut off before she could finish.
“Kill him, Gauss!” shouted Kiesling, nearly foaming at the mouth with rage. “Kill Weir and I’ll cut your leash.”
“What about the missing data files?” asked the chrome-plated cyborg, smiling at the idea of becoming a free agent.
“Fuck the files! I want Malcolm Weir dead!”
“It’s about time.” Gauss grinned evilly. His shining cybernetic eye flared like the sun for a moment, causing the electricity on three floors of the building to flicker and dim as he charged up. The magnetic field around Gauss increased to the point where all of the metal within thirty feet began twitching and leaning in the cyborg’s direction. “Get going…I don’t know how much longer the power is going to hold out with me amping up.”
So eager to watch the cause of his troubles taken care of once and for all, it took Ms. Roslan and three GMRs to move Kiesling into the elevator. He was still yelling out for Gauss to “Kill Him!” as the doors slid closed and the lift lurched into motion, heading for the top of the building, twenty plus floors up.
The sounds of fighting and gunfire and men dying s
pilled beneath the door to the surgical bay, filling Gauss with excitement as he waited for the elevator car to get far enough away from his magnetic ability’s sphere of influence to be safe, counting down from one hundred as he did.
When the count reached ‘zero,’ Gauss slammed his hands together with enough force that the resulting shockwave shattered every piece of glass on the level and shook the building’s structure down to its foundation.
Gauss screamed, wrapped himself in a nigh-invulnerable magnetic bubble, and charged through the wall separating him from his quarry, obliterating the barrier with less effort than it would take a normal man to swat a fly.
At last, Weir’s ass belonged to him!
*****
The room inside was silent, except for the breathing of the man at its center and the drip, drip, drip of spilled blood.
Every inch of Cestus glistened crimson with slaughter and he stood on a carpet of death, surrounded by the dismembered remains of eight men whose bodies had been corrupted by the same science that had perfected their killer. His eyes reflected only the light of unbridled violence. Cestus had accepted his role as a killer and embraced it fully. The fruits of his labor were spread out before him like a horrible banquet of annihilation and carnage.
A twitch of his wrist snapped the neck of the GMR he held out before him, suspended four inches above the ground in a grip of unbending steel. The man died with a gurgle that caught in his throat.
“Now for Kiesling,” said Cestus to no one in particular.
The tiny digitized voice in the back of Cestus’s mind decided to throw a monkey-wrench into his plans of mayhem by announcing it had detected a large fluctuation in the localized magnetic field of the building and that Designate Gauss was inbound.
“Is there anything you can do about that asshole, Computer?” Cestus asked the computer in his head.
“Initiating countermeasures. Negation field active,” it answered as an electrical charged flowed through the nanobots invading every cell of his body.
