by Mat Nastos
The war hadn’t been theirs and it troubled Mal.
Mal’s wandering mind allowed his body free reign as he fled the blood-soaked scene, leaving it far behind. Before he knew it, the cyborg found himself once more pushing his way into the bowels of the Manhattan underground transit system, merging into the flow of a million commuters going about their business below.
Once he was hidden amongst the seemingly endless stream of humanity moving through the subway tunnels, a shaken Mal made his way into one of the less-than-sanitary lavatories and locked himself into a cramped stall. The cyborg sat and stared at the thin line of blood trailing down his hand and along the gleaming silver metal of the arm it was attached to.
Mal couldn’t believe he had nearly killed that bank guard on the street. There was no call for the viciousness of his attack—no reasoning behind his reaction at all. The man posed no physical threat to the billion-dollar cybernetic man…Mal could easily have taken out an army of out-of-shape New York City police officers without breaking a sweat. A minimum wage security guard was less than nothing to him. Heck, a girl scout would have been as challenging.
“So what happened?” Mal wondered to himself grimly, wiping as much of the crimson fluid off of his hands and from the sleeves of his jacket as he could.
It was almost as if he was losing control of himself. As if the headaches were allowing his former programming to take over once more. Whatever had been happening to him since the Abraxas-Array went down was causing Mal to revert back into the unthinking killing machine his government handlers had created. If he didn’t do something soon then Malcolm Weir would disappear once more, leaving behind only Cestus.
He was losing it.
Fast.
Reaching into his pocket and removing the scrap of paper where he’d written the ten-digit number for Amy Jensen’s office, Mal knew he had to find Congressman McGuinness as soon as possible or risk losing himself forever.
Mal needed to find a phone and he needed to find it right away. Any delay at all could add to the blood he already had on his hands.
CHAPTER 4
Washington, D.C.
Seated behind a low mahogany table near the center of the chamber, Representative Michael Fountain of California looked up at the four men staring down at him from their elevated position in the room and realized how much he hated being on the wrong side of an inquiry. He missed the better chairs up behind the big desk, the water pitchers filled with ice—the one he had within arm’s reach now had been at room temperature when it was delivered, with no sign of ice—and the ability to fire off snarky remarks without fear of being thrown in jail or fined for them.
Sarcasm and wit were frowned upon when you were the one being investigated.
What made things even more intolerable for the fifty-seven year-old congressman with a thinning-gray comb-over and ill-kept beard was the fact that the man responsible for the mess Project Hardwired had become—the man behind the billions in wasted tax payer dollars, the recent loss of life, and the entire Designate Cestus disaster—former Director Gordon Kielsing, had left Fountain with the problematic clean-up.
Well, if the California-native was being honest, ‘left’ probably wasn’t the best choice of words for it. The once-powerful Kiesling had been brought low by the renegade Malcolm Weir and for all intents and purposes was considered deceased by the government.
Of course, Fountain and a select few members of his staff knew the real truth. Thinking of Kiesling’s new ‘assignment’ brought the hint of a smile to the politician’s thin lips.
Pasty white hands flattened away the wrinkles forming around the belly of Fountain’s brand new suit and patted down the thin blue tie his assistant, the coolly beautiful Ms. Melissa Roslan, had assured him were the required fashion statement for an upwardly mobile politician. Leaning forward to answer his inquisitors’ latest round of badgering, Fountain prayed no one could see that his rotund center was being held back by a rather uncomfortable girdle worn at the behest of Roslan who protested that white, fat and gray were not a good look for anyone wanting to make an impression. He could still taste the dye that had gotten into his mouth when the nice Filipino ladies had colored his beard the day before.
“The orders for the additional upgrades to Designate Cestus, and the budget overrun they incurred, were authorized by Gordon Kiesling after a mishap with the operative in Afghanistan. I believe we’ve discussed this at length already, Senator Pezzula.”
Senator Joe Pezzula of Arizona was, in Fountain’s eyes, a petty little man with a Napoleon Complex. Standing at just over five feet six in height—five foot nine if you believed his official biographer—and with the sort of over-large cranium you’d find on a bobble-head doll, the man had been at odds with Fountain for a decade. The governmental pissing matches between Arizona and California were legendary on Capitol Hill, almost as bad as the ones between New York and New Jersey.
The DC grapevine had been more than happy to inform Fountain that his longtime rival had called in a lot of favors to guarantee his position as chairman of the oversight committee in charge of the final dissolution of Project Hardwired. And the thought of having to answer to the imp from Phoenix rankled the larger, meatier Congressman to no end. Making things even less comfortable was the veritable mob of extra bodies crowding around the edges of the room or sitting in the rows of seats behind the proceedings. There were more attorneys flittering around than Fountain had ever seen in one place.
Fountain could see the sheer pleasure beaming out of Pezzula as the man fired back from his place in between his three hand-picked accomplices up on their pedestal.
“You seem to place a lot of emphasis on the failings of Project Hardwired on former Director Kiesling and Designate Cestus’s mission to Afghanistan. What happened in Kabul, Representative Fountain? Where did it all go wrong?”
Fountain flipped through a stack of papers barely held together by a white folder stamped with more red ink than a bad high school English paper. After a second, the middle-aged man passed the documents to Ms. Roslan and leaned forward to speak clearly into the microphone planted in the table before him.
“The Kabul incident, Senator Pezzula, was before my time as liaison to Project Hardwired, so I’m going to have my assistant, Ms. Roslan, walk you through the information we have.”
Roslan stood, smoothing down the front of her tightly tailored jacket and walked over to the group of men positioned behind the large, raised table opposite her, waiting for permission to speak.
“Go ahead, Ms. Roslan,” replied the Senator from Arizona.
“Thank you, Mr. Senator,” Roslan’s clear voice rang out with confidence and authority, foregoing the use of a microphone. The beautiful woman was used to making herself heard in a group of loud-mouthed men looking for attention. “If you will, please direct your attention to the screen.”
Snatching up a remote control device from the tabletop, Roslan punched a button causing a bright white screen to slowly slide down along the empty wall to her left. With another press of her thumb, the lights in the room dimmed and a wall-mounted project unit began to flicker images for all to see.
Grainy images moved silently across the screen. Images seemingly filmed from the point of view of an unseen operator. The movements were fluid, graceful. Dark at first, it soon became clear that the scene was a military compound of some sort, seen at night. The hidden cameraman slid in and out of shadows, in an obvious attempt to avoid detection. By nature of the style of architecture in the low buildings, along with a spattering of signs written in the flowing symbols of the Naskh script, the setting was in an Arabic locale.
The view eased past heavily armored vehicles, stacks of ammunition crates, and enough weapons to arm a battalion of soldiers. Those watching could tell they, through the auspices of the cameraman, were looking for something.
Quickly bored by the visuals laid out before him, and eager to return to the task of lambasting his political rival, Senator Pezzul
a quipped, “Yes, my son loves the ‘Call of Duty’ video games, too…but what does this have to do with the matter at hand? Is this how your boys in Project Hardwired were able to waste so much money in such a short period of time, Michael?”
Before Fountain could reply, the camera stalked up to the back of a young Afghani soldier leaning against the corrugated metal siding of a hastily constructed lean-to structure, smoking a cigarette and unmindful of the danger behind him. Wicked looking metal arms finally came into view, maneuvering towards the Arab’s neck with foot long claws growing out of them.
“This is no game, Senator Pezzula,” remarked Roslan without taking her eyes off of the events playing out before her.
The kill, lightning fast and brutal, took everyone in the room by surprise, silencing the politician from Phoenix in the process. An inverted shu-do chop, backed by the inhuman strength of Cestus’s arms, decapitated the youth fast enough that the final puff of smoke from his cigarette pulsed out of the ruined remains of his neck. It was brutal, efficient, and seeing the crowd’s disgusted reaction to the violence made Michael Fountain smile in pleasure.
“Serves the sanctimonious bastards right,” he thought to himself as he watched Cestus silently disposed of the still-cooling corpse.
“What you’re seeing, senators, is the POV-cam of Designate Cestus. This video was taken during his covert operation into Kabul last year. He was on a smash-and-grab mission to break up a terror cell that had been plaguing U.N. forces in the area for months. It should have been a simple task.”
“It’s barbaric,” commented the man in the seat to Pezzula’s left up on the stage. It was Alexander Kotkin, the democratic senator from Texas and one of Pezzula’s closest friends in Washington D.C. The men were of one mind—a mind that seemed to be owned and operated by Pezzula more often than not. “And this is what you people did for eighteen-months? Build your Frankenstein’s monsters to murder children on foreign soil? What would the founding fathers say about that, Representative Fountain?”
Angered by the man from San Antonio’s attack, Fountain nearly leapt from his seat in rage. “They’d say the same thing the men who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima would have said: that what we do we do for the cause of peace. We do it for the continued freedom of America, you sanctimonious little…”
Ms. Roslan shook her head. The last thing they needed was for the new head of Project Hardwired to play into the hands of the House Insight Committee and lose his temper. She hoped he could reign himself in long enough for what was going to happen next up on the large display.
“Watch yourself, Fountain,” growled Pezzula at the blustering man. “You’ll find yourself in contempt of this hearing if you aren’t careful…and we’d all hate to have that happen.”
Behind the debating men, the video continued to play, showing Cestus continue his trek through the enemy compound—his body count growing with every step. As he turned to finally enter the largest building in sight, a brightly lit three story building of concrete and steel, the feed began to shake. Lines of pixelation began to stream across the formerly clear picture. A heartbeat later, the entire picture filled with the raging snow of an interrupted television signal.
“That is where everything stops.”
“What do you mean ‘stops,’ Ms. Roslan?” Kotkin asked, drawn back away from the brouhaha between the two feuding politicians.
“All telemetry from Designate Cestus—vital signs, video feed, tactical data, all of it—went black. Designate Cestus was out of touch with his C&C operator for exactly six minutes.”
Senator Pezzula wouldn’t allow his flunky to steal all of the spotlight for himself and jumped in to the conversation from his seat. “What happened? Did he say anything in the debriefing?”
“No, sir. The Designate Cestus personality construct had no recollection of what happened during those three hundred and sixty seconds. There was a complete gap in its memory and nothing could be recovered when he returned to base. The six minutes didn’t exist for it.”
A loud guffaw filled the large room, echoing from corner to corner. Senator Kotkin picked back up on his tirade, now including Ms. Roslan in the boisterous attack.
“How exactly does a veritable legion of eggheads and over-paid leeches lose track of a billion dollar killing machine, Ms. Roslan? Too busy sucking on the tax payers’ teet, little lady?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed a bit at the man’s snide comments dropped from on-high. The remarks gave her a rather significant urge to pull the compact Glock-26 she carried in a holster on her thigh and put an end to the Senator’s current term in office. Roslan wondered what the exact Latin term for killing a politician was…she assumed it was pesticide, but made a mental note to research it once the hearings were over.
A surprising source came to Roslan’s verbal rescue as Joseph Pezzula put a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Calm down, Alex…none of this is Ms. Roslan’s fault. She is just a highly polished cog wasted on a broken machine.” Pezzula turned to Roslan and nodded to her respectfully. “Please, my dear, do continue with your report.”
“Thank you, Senator Pezzula,” Roslan was as annoyed with Pezzula’s blatant attempt to win her over with compliments as she was with Kotkin’s venom—at least he had the decency to be honest with his position on things. “The T-Op division was able to identify a narrow band transmission beamed into the area just prior to the unit going offline. Our best guess is that whatever was in that coded transmission resulted in Designate Cestus going offline.”
“And what was in that coded transmission, Ms. Roslan?” In spite of his difference to Roslan as a woman, Senator Pezzula’s patience with the entire proceeding was wearing visibly thin. The question he wanted to ask was: and why is the United States government paying so many smart people to be so stupid?
“Unknown, sir,” responded Ms. Roslan calmly. She was fully aware that her career as much as that of everyone involved was on the line and her answers would be the basis for whatever happened next with the investigation. She would maintain her composure even if her new boss was unable to control himself. “Neither the source of the transmission nor its meaning were identified at the time of the operation.” Realizing Pezzula would try to use that statement as an excuse for interruption, Roslan quickly added, “The burst lasted less than one hundredth of a second and was bounced off of a private communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit. As far as we could determine, the transmission was made up of only seven words.”
“What were those words, my dear?” Ms. Roslan was surprised by the sound of a much calmer voice asking the question. Looking up, she realized the quiet-until-now Senator from New Jersey, Robert Inman, had been finally woken up enough by the proceedings to chime in.
“‘This is the way the world ends.’”
“Excuse me?” Senator Inman’s face scrunched up behind his bushy graying eyebrows at the sound of her words.
The woman repeated herself, more slowly to guarantee every member of the committee heard her clearly.
“Is that a threat?” The long-haired democratic representative from New Jersey asked in a voice that cracked halfway through the question.
“It’s from a poem,” said Roslan. “‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Elliot…the broadcast itself was taken from a reading the man had done of the piece later in his life.” The woman removed a small electronic playback device from the half-opened briefcase resting in front of her and held it aloft for everyone in the room to see. “Let me play it for you, Senators.”
Depressing the ‘play’ button with her thumb, Ms. Roslan started the recording for the congregation to hear. The men all sat back in their seats and listened to the ancient, fuzzy and echo-filled recording from nearly seventy-five years earlier. It held all present entranced as the tired and weary voice of a long dead poet enunciated each ominous word for them over and over again.
For nearly a minute everyone in the room remained silent, pondering the meaning behind
the message that had been played for them. To an outside observer it would have seemed like none dared to speak their thoughts aloud.
It was the husky voice of Ms. Roslan that finally broke the silence.
“The blackout and coded transmission were the reasons behind the unit being brought back to Project Hardwired for a system diagnostic and upgrade. Dr. Ryan believed she would be able to pull out whatever may have been hidden within the transmission, as well as install new safeguards against future system intrusion.”
“And where is Dr. Carly Ryan now?” Pezzula had recovered enough from the demonstration to find his voice.
“Dr. Ryan is currently unavailable,” answered Fountain before Roslan could respond. Seeing the unbelieving looks his investigators passed amongst themselves, the congressman quickly added, “She’s been reassigned to head up the biotech unit of my Tiamat project, Senator Pezzula.”
Sensing blood in the water, Kotkin jumped into the fray. “You had best un-reassign Dr. Ryan and get her ass here to Washington on the double. If not, you may find yourself reassigned to federal prison, Mr. Fountain.”
The blatant disrespect Kotkin showed by foregoing the use of Fountain’s elected title was not lost on anyone in the room, least of all on the congressman himself. He was tired, he was frazzled, and most of all he was angry at being blamed for the mistakes someone else had made. In that instant, he decided enough was enough. It was time for Fountain to take a stand.
“With all due respect…,” was all Fountain could manage of his retort before a commotion from just outside the giant double doors of the hall filtered into the room, seizing the attention of everyone within.
“You can’t go in there while the hearing is in session, sir!”
“I need to see Representative Fountain, now!” answered a high-pitched voice in response.
