Serena found her way to the next vehicle. The soldiers were swapping out their cyberenhancements. “You sure about this stuff?” one of them said. He was the one replacing his breastplate with the aerogel. “It’s lighter than air, which I appreciate.” He held out the molded piece of aerogel and watched it float in front of him. “But the question is, will it stop bullets?”
These were legitimate questions they had a right to ask. She didn’t sense they were questioning her authority, just the nature of any untested first-use field tech. “The nano inside it reacts to force intelligently, adjusting the amount of resistance as needed in any one area. It’s about a hundred times as safe as the old material.”
“What about masking our heat signatures?” another of the soldiers asked, slipping on his thigh and shin plates, made of the same material.
“The nano handles that as well,” Serena explained.
“All right then. Looks like we’re ready to rock,” the last of them said, slamming the bay shut. “Time for our disappearing acts, gentlemen.”
“Always wanted to play the part of the invisible man,” another soldier said, as they painted their faces in the nexgen camou paint she’d designed for them. She watched their heat signatures disappear by glancing at the monitors tracking their night-vision goggles.
As the cyber-enhanced warriors deployed themselves, slipping away into the night, Serena stepped inside the vehicle with the monitors she’d been eying from outside. “Report,” she said.
“We’ve got people deployed at all levels, high up in the trees, on the ground, hell, under the ground.” The techie seated at his terminal continued pointing at different monitors to illustrate his points as he talked. “We’ve got three-hundred-sixty degree coverage around the cabin. We’re also deployed so each of the men can give coverage to one another.”
“That’s fine,” she said, “but there’s no no-one-left-behind policy this time out. Soldiers get wounded or killed, that’s not anyone’s concern until the mission is complete. Only then do we mop up our own. Understood?”
“Then what’s the point of having them cover one another?”
“So they can get different angles on the creature, ones where he may be more vulnerable than the one he’s showing the soldier he’s attacking,” Serena explained without a drop of emotion in her voice. Maybe that’s what sent the chill racing up his spine.
“The men won’t like that. They take care of each other first. The mission always comes second.”
“The best way for them to take care of each other is to catch and tranq our quarry. Otherwise, they’ll all be dead anyway.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. The others, monitoring her conversation, put their eyes back on their monitors rather than risk her reading their faces. A bit late for that in any case, but she could do with no more explanations.
***
PRESENT TIME…
The wolf took full advantage of his hyped up speed to survey the enemy before unleashing his barely bottled wrath. He kept to their blind spots, always darting away when they felt a gaze or a breath upon them, reacting faster than they could. But it was harder than he’d expected. Could they have their own enhancements?
His night vision was detecting cool spots where there should have been heat radiance. Just Kevlar shielding? Weapons? Or something else? And his sixth sense suggested there were more of the soldiers than he was seeing. But he was having trouble keeping anything in his consciousness that wasn’t directly in range of his eyes or five baser senses.
The convoy of twelve trucks suggested they’d bought no shortage of their own hi-tech toys and snares. Maybe more than a match for the ones he’d left them. But the occasional screams suggested his old fashioned deadfalls and spring-loaded traps had foiled at least some of them.
He’d counted fifty, maybe sixty soldiers. But once again his sixth sense told him there were others he couldn’t see. The ones he could see were deployed to make taking them all out in one charge impossible.
These weren’t typical soldiers. He didn’t smell fear on them. And they moved too well, even sans a command structure. If it weren’t for his hyped up wolverine senses, he would not have known they were even out there.
And they knew what they were up against. At least one of them was packing a flame thrower. There wasn’t much point in those unless one was looking to erase all evidence of there ever having been a rogue science project underway out in the woods. Others had weapons meant to penetrate even his thick hide. And a lot of those weapons he didn’t even recognize. The presence of so much nexgen, off-the-books tech in one place spoke the loudest as to their knowing more about him than he did about them.
Enough surveying. He was giving them too much time to deploy their tech toys. Time to strike.
***
The trail leading back to Michael wasn’t exactly hard to follow for Jane. The paw impressions were deep enough to suggest his weight had more than quadrupled. How the nano had pulled that off exactly would be a subject for further investigation. As would the werewolf’s roar coming at her from up ahead. It would have shattered her eardrums had she not already been wearing ear protection in anticipation of launching a grenade or two off her shoulder. From the number of human screams that followed in the wake of that sonic blast, she’d guess he had managed to shatter more than one set of eardrums. Another nice piece of adaptation on Michael’s part. It was very possible that the nano hive brain was smarter than both of them put together.
There was no need for stealth with all the noise and commotion. Between the weapons fire, and the trees shattering under the duress of the werewolf or the explosives, she could have been playing a marching tune and no one would have noticed.
She picked up her pace accordingly, tried not to trip over the fallen trees and dead bodies coming at her in no particular order. She hadn’t paid this much attention to her feet since her days of playing hopscotch on hot New York City sidewalks. Ducking the trees still flying through the air, and the body parts coming at her like shrapnel was proving the even bigger challenge.
Under the cover of darkness, she ran her eyes over the dead bodies for clues as best she could. The next generation night vision helped; it translated what she was seeing into something other than shades of green thanks to the computer assist to reassemble the picture from the shades of green into something more serviceable to an MD/PhD. That, of course, played up the luridness, but she couldn’t deny a smug sense of satisfaction coming from the degree of carnage. These men hadn’t just been killed with one stroke, they’d been eviscerated with the same sense of economy.
One troubling outcome she hadn’t expected, the bodies were slowly reviving, getting their zombie groove on. Not healing, just determined to get back into the battle from their current dazed state, holding their spilled organs in one hand, and their weapon in the other. There was only one explanation. Some of the nano had spilled on to them; it would have taken just a scraping from a finger-nail. This outcome was simply not an option. She couldn’t afford even one of these bodies getting back to the lab.
Making one very painful decision, she ditched the rocket launcher and the shells some place where she could come back for them when good sense returned, and she picked up the flame thrower one of the fallen special ops soldiers had been kind enough to bring along. Someone had figured they might need more effective evidence disposal than just burying the dead bodies. She thanked her illusive counterpart, and set upon her own private zombieland with the flame thrower.
Michael’s Afghanistan story, roasting marshmallows off of flaming alive Afghani soldiers came back to haunt her as she got a taste of what it was like to be him firsthand. She was wrong thinking it would help knowing the bad guys were, well, bad.
The zombies were firing at her, at one another, at darting animals, usually hitting anything only with dumb luck. Being dead didn’t improve their aim any. She adjusted the flame’s heat on the flame thrower when she noticed the bodies were taking a little to
o long to burn. The tanks were quickly depleted, secondary to Michael’s efficiency at leaving dead bodies in his wake now that he was in werewolf form.
Time for plan B.
She had to center herself enough to order those nanites to commit suicide by self-dissolving into the bloodstreams of their hosts. Cute trick considering the war effort hadn’t diminished any in the distance for all the fallen soldiers and she couldn’t hear herself think. If she could get calm and collected now, she’d give a Zen master a run for his money.
Jane considered possible workarounds. Maybe she could forge a psychic link with Michael if nothing else. Maybe in his amped up state he could detect her weak psychic emissions, even if she couldn’t concentrate at projecting the telepathic signal as well as she’d have liked to. Then again, in his current steroid riddled state, he wasn’t likely to process what she was thinking. He had shown, moreover, no ability to control the nano in his own body prior to the change. So what made her think he could do it from wolf-boy state with his higher brain functions even more in arrears? Still, she liked the option of playing Zen master even less. Fine, she’d try both, see if anything happened.
She tried visualizing the zombies de-animating. And she held that image in her head to the exclusion of all else. One by one the bodies started falling. It occurred to her there had been a third option all along. It was highly possible that the nano in her own head was conducting the message transfer to the nano in the zombies. The theory seemed affirmed when she noticed the bodies doing the falling formed a distinct circle about her out to a range of thirty yards. It appeared she’d found the nano’s broadcast range.
The more immediate task out of the way, she double timed it to Michael’s location. When she got there, she realized she had a far bigger problem on her hands.
***
Michael struggled against the strands of the netting. He should have been able to rip through them easily. But they were the kind of high tech cabling that could suspend the Golden Gate Bridge with far fewer strands. He hadn’t been able to bite his way through them, and the acid of his drool was taking far too long to eat its way through.
Someone got an RPG into him, an unexploded shell that had yet to go off, just like the one that took Pete’s life. He’d often thought he would have liked to have switched positions with him. Was the nano reading his mind and trying to make his wishes come true? If so, that definitely gave new meaning to getting his mind under control. Let’s worry about healing the body first, buddy, the mind later.
In his rage, he glared at the ring of soldiers and their self-satisfied expressions, even as he lurched at the cables. He must have hit that fever’s pitch for the laser feature in his eyes to kick in. Because the next thing he knew those soldiers he was glaring at were going belly up, leaving their lower bodies behind as their upper bodies fell over. And the strands holding him in place had been sliced through, all in one stroke.
He lunged at the woman standing, staring at him defiantly with eyes just as cold as his was hot, with a form just as sleek and sculpted as his was hairy and bulky and brutish. She looked like an action figure doll, a little too sexy for kids, and a little too skimpily clothed for anything but adult fantasies. She could have been a robot they forgot to turn on by how unmoved she was by his charging for her. He opened his jaws and closed them, expecting to severe her into two clean pieces at the waist. But instead he found himself biting air and she still hadn’t flinched. A hologram of some kind. He should have figured that when he couldn’t pick up a scent, when not even the howling winds out here managed to rustle her hair.
Without a doubt, he would need to get back to thinking fast under pressure, wolfman guise or not. He couldn’t blame the transmogrification on the dulling of his mind. Just the opposite. The only thing that felt changed was there was far more sensory input reaching his brain than ever before from the amped up senses and jacked up reflexes. He had more intel coming to his mind in less time that he should damn well have been able to make better use of. Only… Only, he was a bit focused on tearing them limb from limb. Maybe the savagery in the gene makeover was something he’d have to learn to contend with, or at least balance better.
Both smelling another female, and seeing her heat signature from behind the tree, he turned to give her his full attention. She looked just like the holo, which had since had the decency to disappear. Was she the source of the transmission, using the holo as a body double to give her some reaction time to get to hell out of there? Smart. He’d be happy to put her little experiment to the test, see how far she got with the ploy. The instant he leaped off all fours, as far as he could tell, the only time she had remaining was the time gravity took to bring him down on her jugular.
Femmy—he’d go with Femmy for now; Femme Fatale just seemed a little too on the nose—pulled out a side arm he hadn’t seen because its cold steel left no heat signature. He felt its even colder lead shot penetrating his brain right between the eyes, felt himself fall to the ground like a stone. That’s right, Jane was the immortal one; Michael was just the cocky one, it was all coming back to him now. Maybe the wolf genes were playing more hell with his mind than he cared to admit; a little too much impulsive charging headlong into danger, far too little forethought.
He skidded along the damp rich earth imbued with enough moss and mulch to enliven any garden and to make for one very comfy permanent resting place. At least he’d gotten the rest of the soldiers; just this one had gotten away from him. Strange, even with his sight dimming and his brain transmission slowing, he saw her pull the RPG out of him. That didn’t seem right for a nemesis. It was only then that he realized, Femmy was Jane. He’d just tried to kill the love of his life. Wolf genes definitely not good. Let’s try something different next time. If there is a next time.
***
SHORT WHILE LATER…
“Come on, buddy, change back. I’m sure not dragging some werewolf with the body mass of a Mack truck back to the cabin just so I can tuck him in.” She dug the bullet out of his brain. “There, that should speed things up.” She pocketed it as a memento. “I’ll see what I can do about getting an engagement ring forged out of the metal,” she said, staring at the shell. “We’ll let that stand by way of an apology.”
She left his limp body to go through whatever accelerated healing process it needed to go through and made the best of her time assessing the fallen enemy. The first thing she did was track down that hologram; it was gone now, but the source of the transmission still had to be around. Best guess, that was the woman in charge, the one they had to worry about most. And that was her keeping an eye on developments in the field to feed back into her computations as to how to come at them better next time. Only why make her identity known at all? Unless it was an avatar and looked nothing like her. Unless, once Jane identified who she really was, it would put the fear of God into them, which could only serve their nemesis’ purposes, compromising Jane’s and Mike’s own thinking by lacing it with a bit too much fear. Come on! Where the hell is that thing!
It’s brains over brawn this time, Jane. Wolf Boy isn’t going to be any good sniffing it out. He can’t smell high tech.
“Yes, I can,” Michael said, reading her mind. She craned her neck to find him standing by her side, a fraction of an inch inside her blind spot and outside of her peripheral vision. He’d sneaked up on her without her knowing, no mean trick considering he was now back in human form. He reached down and picked up the device. Rotated it in his hands. Then he crushed it between his palm and his fingers.
“Michael! I could have studied that to tell us something more about our adversaries.”
“No need. I scanned the interiors. I’m downloading the intel to your hive mind now.”
She gulped. Apparently his learning curve was coming along just fine. If he was getting smarter in a hurry, he was also getting a hell of a lot more deadly in a hurry.
“Did you smell anything, see anything that…?”
“Yeah. These soldi
ers were all cyber-enhanced. Just not as advanced as us.” He ripped open the chest of one of the combatants on the ground, splitting the rib cage open with his bare hands to expose the artificial heart within. “Notice the Kevlar running inside them, just beneath the skin, protecting the sensitive organs? It’s not surgically implanted, it’s grown, a localized genetic modification you could probably explain better than I could.”
“Not off the top of my head, I can’t,” she said, realizing her high-pitched voice hadn’t been fully under her control.
He twisted off the guy’s head, right off, held it up like a coconut, and split it open to match, scooped out the brain inside. “The skull is some hi-tech alloy I can’t exactly make out; harder than any helmet, that’s for sure.” He handed her the skull so he could concentrate on splitting the brain down the middle. “See the corpus callosum, coordinating right and left hemispheres? It’s souped up to handle transmissions at a hundred times normal speed, allowing for coordination that would make a Zen master envious. Any soldiers with this enhancement can analyze a situation critically, using the left hemisphere, and come up with creative solutions and do all the out of box thinking they need to with the right hemisphere, all in real time. I don’t know if you realize, but the typical human can only balance left and right hemispheres two minutes out of every twenty-four. These guys have quite the advantage.”
He stood up, looked at her, expecting some kind of reaction. He got one. “Michael, what the hell happened out here before I could get to you?”
“You don’t want to know. All in all they had the upper hand all around. It was sheer dumb luck I survived without killing you.”
“Why did you lunge for me?”
“I thought you were the ice queen.”
“You’re referring to the hologram. But…”
“Yeah, she’d have to get inside my head to do that, wouldn’t she? Feeling safe yet?” He grabbed her by the arm and led her back towards the cabin.
Nano Man Page 10
