The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2

by Mat Nastos

  The first victim of the man’s tantrum had been the early 18th-century gilded walnut French armchair that had graced the representative’s outer reception area, followed by red and gold Giles Joubert writing table from the same period. From there, Fountain’s outburst had been directed mainly at the living—including the new intern from Berkeley with the unfortunate name of Aidan.

  Interestingly enough, at least for Melissa Roslan, was the fact that Anderson’s murder of the project’s head of weapons development, TJ May, never once entered into her new supervisor’s mind.

  The flurry of curses and insults ended abruptly Fountain glaring at Roslan with eyes nearly bugging out of their sockets and the thin gray hair from his comb-over flopping wildly out of position at the top of his head, looking very much like an old, flaccid spider climbing the side of the man’s face. The woman caught herself before she chuckled as she realized he was awaiting a response from her.

  “Excuse me, Senator?” quizzed Roslan, trying to hide the fact that she hadn’t been fully listening to the man who had taken over Project Hardwired.

  “I’m getting blamed for the mess you and your people left behind, Ms. Roslan and you’re going to help me get out of it,” raged the middle-aged politician. “Damn Gordon Kiesling and his incompetence. The man couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper bag. So, what are you going to do about it?”

  Controlling the glare she felt building up inside of her, along with the urge to pummel the out of shape legislator to death with the heel of her $600 black Jimmy Choo Novas, Roslan responded, “I’ve put together a situational over-view detailing the remaining assets of Project Hardwired, along with any open issues. Perhaps we should begin there, Representative Fountain?”

  “Give me the Cliff Notes version, Ms. Roslan. What is our best plan of attack?”

  Quickly removing a flat tablet computer from her satchel, the woman looked through a series of files. Finding what she had been looking for Melissa began to list off what she saw as their best course of action for finally apprehending the renegade cyborg that had done so much damage.

  “We could pull one of the remaining Hardwired Prime units out of stasis. Three of the original units have remained under control of the back-up Array the tech-division was able to cobble together after Abraxas went down: Ballista, Phalanx, and Claymore. All were early models and not as affected by the collapse as the second or third generation Primes. None relied on the system callbacks of the later designs.”

  “No! I can’t imagine pulling those horrors out of mothballs is a good idea, especially after reading through the mission files for Designate Siege.” Fountain handed back the thin black computer to Roslan with a scowl on his face. “From what I understand, it took nearly a hundred million dollars and six months to clean-up the botched job in Hama last year. The thought of that monster running loose in Manhattan gives me the shivers.”

  “It is true the earlier Hardwired Primes were a bit more…unstable than the later designs. However, they were light years ahead of what had come out of the division Dr. Ryan had been in charge of previous to that. They created some real monsters there.”

  “What previous division would that be? I haven’t been given any records for what Dr. Ryan had been working on prior to the cyborg project,” asked Fountain, his curiosity piqued by his assistant’s statement.

  “Not surprising, sir,” answered Roslan off-handedly. “All files for Project Lazarus were sealed by presidential order. The only reason I am aware of it at all is because former Director Kiesling and I were part of the team that helped close it down two years ago. From what I understand there is still an active investigation going on with it.”

  Fountain was put off by the idea that any information at all had been kept from him. Pressing matters with finalizing the Project Hardwired shut down may have his schedule tied up for the foreseeable future, but the Californian lawmaker swore to himself that he’d find out more about what the good Dr. Ryan had been up to before she had come to his attention. After all, she was handling his own ultra secret project in Colorado and Fountain didn’t like the idea of secrets being kept from him about members of his team.

  Moving on, the man continued, “You mentioned three other rogue Prime Designates. What is the current status on those units?”

  Opening a series of files, Roslan confirmed. “Designate Prophet was terminated and returned for analysis thirty-two hours ago by a third-party strike team. They are now tracking Designate Flux in the Sedona area of Arizona.”

  “And the third renegade?”

  “Designate Caliber?” Roslan opened the case files on the last of the missing Project Hardwired Prime operatives. Her eyebrows went up. What she read on the screen was very interesting. “We believe he made his way to Manhattan as well. You may want to take a look at his file, sir. I think it’ll interest you.”

  Fountain faked a yawn into the back of his hand as he took the electronic device from his underling. One of the things he’d been taught during his time in politics was to never let an ambitious underling get too cocky. It was best to downplay anything a woman like Melissa Roslan came up with…the congressman was convinced she was far more deadly than her previous boss and former director of Project Hardwired, Gordon Kiesling, had been. She needed to be watched at all times.

  The tablet nearly fell from his hands once Fountain had begun to peruse its contents. Blasted woman was right.

  “We need to locate Designate Caliber ay-sap. If your files are correct, he could be the key to taking our boy, Weir, down once and for all.”

  Roslan agreed with his statement. The ties between the two were deep and one could easily be pitted against the other without Weir knowing what was happening.

  “Are any of the teams already on the ground in New York capable of taking down a Prime?”

  “No, sir. All we have are the five tracer squads,” pulling up another round of files, Roslan quickly corrected herself. “Make that four squads. Beta encountered Designate Cestus in the subway systems and three members were lost in the skirmish. Even with Caliber’s lower combat rating, there’s no way any of the remaining operatives would stand a chance against him. Dr. Ryan built the Primes to stand up to armies if they had to…nothing we have in play is in their league.”

  The older man sat back in his seat and ran the new information through his mind. There had to be something they could do. Something short of dropping a couple of tactical nukes on one of the most populated cities in the country. Not that he was opposed to it on principal, he just wasn’t sure he’d be able to get away with it in the current political climate.

  “What about this team that took down Designate Prophet? Who are they? From the reports, he was one of the more formidable combat units. How did an outsourced mercenary team take him down on their own and without the collateral damage we’ve seen with internal attempts?”

  A strange look played across Roslan’s perfect features at the question.

  “That would be Grail, Senator Fountain. He and his Templars have been most…effective on the operations we’ve released to them.”

  “If his record is that good, why haven’t we already assigned him to handle the situation with the annoying Mr. Weir?”

  “Grail may be a bit more…unorthodox than you are used to, sir. He isn’t always the easiest of contractors to deal with.”

  Breezing through the mission logs pulled up on the tablet by his executive assistant, Fountain smiled wide, showing off the yellowed teeth of a lifelong smoker. Difficult or not, he liked what he saw in this ‘Grail.’

  “Do it. Get me Grail, Ms. Roslan. We’ll have this mess cleaned up before the week is out.”

  Retrieving her tablet, Roslan nodded to her supervisor.

  *****

  The harsh red canyons just east of the Arizona tourist town of Sedona rippled with a chaotic, uncontrolled energy—an energy severe enough to fuse the thin layer of sand spreading across ancient boulders to glass. The area, normally rich in the hidde
n fauna of the desert, had become a true wasteland with the coming of a monster.

  Standing at just over six-feet in height and covered in spines that emerged from harsh ports found every four inches in his cracked gray skin, the cyborg codenamed Designate Flux crackled with enough free-flowing electricity generated by the Tesla-class reactor woven into his skeleton to power a small town. The energy covered him in a fluctuating cascade of blue and white light, and it seared each step he took into the ground beneath his feat. He was a man-made demon, created by the scientists at Project Hardwired, and a horror to behold.

  Confused and disoriented by his original personality’s reawakening at the precise moment the Abraxas Array had been destroyed, the man who had once been called Corporal Christopher Brady by friends and family found himself drawn to the area on pure instinct alone. His former memories called out to him and led him to a place of peace and comfort to help drown out the horror of what had been done to him.

  Sedona had been the childhood home of Chris Brady and it was there that he returned.

  For the creature who was now but a faded image of what he had once been, the trip home would be anything but the peaceful respite he longed for. Instead, death was coming out of the heavens on metal wings.

  *****

  High above the glowing devil striding across the desert floor below, a strange vehicle broke through the thin evening clouds, powered by a quartet of silent rotors mounted to its under-carriage. As large as a railway box car, the vehicle’s powerful engines produced almost no sound to give away its presence in the sky, and no operating lights illuminated the dull ebony color of its carbon-fiber skin. The only markings anywhere on the usual conveyance’s hull were a pair of stylized red crosses painted on the top and bottom of the small stabilizer wings mounted just past the spinning fans that kept it aloft.

  Dubbed the ‘WarHorse’ by the team of men operating it, the vehicle’s right-hand wing tipped low to allow the glass canopy housing it’s pilots to get a visual on the scene, and their target, on the ground beneath them.

  Inside, two men, dressed in standard black and green military garb, their faces almost entirely covered by goggled helmets, sat at the forward flight controls of the vehicle, each with a tight grip on the yokes mounted in front of them. Standing directly behind the pair and taking up most of the remaining space in the tiny cockpit was a most unusual figure.

  “Status report, Mr. Davidson,” demanded Grail in a voice rich with an upper class English accent. His features—thin lips, sharp nose, light brown hair that fell into a tight widow’s peak on his high forehead, and intelligent gray eyes, only reinforced the man’s British nature. Taken on its own, his face would have been right at home behind a professor’s title at any ivy league school in the world.

  From the neck down, is where things took a peculiar turn.

  Clad from throat-to-toe in an odd mix of ancient medieval style armor and more modern, high-tech devices, the man braced one thick gauntlet on the cabin’s roof for support. Tungsten-carbide alloy plates of deep green, inter-spaced with titanium chainmail at his joints, made up the majority of Grail’s uniform. A tunic of black with the same red cross of the WarHorse running down its length covered his torso and hung to his mailed knees. Thick armored combat boots and a knee-length emerald cloak and hood completed his uniform.

  Grail was every inch a futuristic knight right down to the full, bucket-style helm he cradled in the crook of his arm.

  Responding from the pilot’s seat on the left hand side of the cockpit, Davidson responded, “Target spotted at two points off the starboard bow, sir.”

  Nodding, Grail gripped the helmet he had been holding with both hands and pulled it onto his head. A loud ‘click’ echoed through the cockpit as it locked magnetically into the rest of his armor. The Grecian style slits in the faceplate glowed a bright red and a hum began to pulse out from the armor, whose now-activated systems would increase Grail’s strength and speed by a factor of ten.

  “Very good,” came the inhuman sound of the knight’s voice through the electronic synthesizers mounted in his helm. “Open the aft drop hatch, Mr. McGann. We will be stepping outside to deal with our prey.”

  Without waiting for the confirmation he knew would follow, Grail left the cockpit to his underlines, moving through the compact, crimson-lit hallways of his ship. Purpose blazed in the armored man’s every step. He had come to the heart of Arizona to kill a monster. The rear-hatch of the WarHorse slid open with a loud hiss and hum as Grail approached through the packed cargo bay. The cool air of the vehicle’s climate-modulated interior was sucked into the still-warm night of the Sedona sky, pulling the crisp green cloak of the knight with it.

  A mail-gauntlet hand pulled a series of weapons mounted to the wait next to the exit: a silver spear with a broad leaf-shaped head mounted on its seventy-two inch shaft, and a heavy module that mounted onto the back of the gauntlet on Grail’s right arm that extended from elbow to the back of his fist. The final piece of equipment was the JPI-Falcon jet pack the emerald warrior slung across his back and quickly belted to his waist. With it’s twin concentrated hydrogen-peroxide powered jets, the JPI-Falcon was not as powerful as the combat flight packs the Templars normally used, but it would enable Grail to reach his opponent on the three-hundred feet below without requiring the WarHorse to land and placing his men at risk.

  An added bonus was the rather impressive entrance use of the pack would allow Grail to make.

  Punching the comm-device situated to the left of the exit ramp, Grail’s synthetic voice said, “Exiting now. Await further instructions.”

  “Shall we take him down, sir?” asked Grail’s second-in-command, coming out of the shadows of the WarHorse’s rear cargo bay to join his boss. Tim Roddick, a large man with hair buzzed to the scalp and arms as thick as the truck of an oak tree, had been in Grail’s employment for long enough to know what the answer would be: his boss almost always approached a target alone. With his mind stuck half in the distant past, very few things excited the high-tech knight more than the thrill of personal combat. Dealing with the killing machines created by Project Hardwired had been a particular joy for Grail. It helped focus the warrior’s delusions of being a modern day George facing off against his own personal dragons.

  “Negative, Templar-One,” responded Grail. The leader of the mercenary unit launched himself from the back of the low-flying vehicle. “This one will face our prey alone and as a man. As our Lord intended.”

  While the thought of sitting things out on a combat run rankled some of the newer members of Grail’s forces, it didn’t make much of a difference to the pragmatic Roddick. He’d get paid whether or not his boss did all the hard work on a mission. At forty-three, he was beginning to feel the wear-and-tear of his younger, more gung-ho days.

  “Let the boss get his rocks off beating down some whacked out government Frankenstein,” thought Roddick. “After this job I’ll have enough to pay off my boat.”

  Three more mercenaries, all outfitted in the same green and black of the other men, joined Roddick at the opened hatch. If they couldn’t get in on the hunt themselves, at least they’d have a good view of the boss in action. Grail was a master at armed and unarmed combat, and an absolute treat for the young men in his crew to watch. They all strove to be half the warrior Grail was.

  With the wind blasting past and the ground quickly rushing up to meet him, Grail let himself fall for nearly one-hundred feet before he clutched the twin control struts wrapping around his torso and ignited the miniature jet engines harnessed to his back in a series of quick, modulated pulses. Each of the consecutive explosive blasts jerked his entire body with tremendous force, slowing his descent. A final thrust, released fifteen feet above the maroon rock of the Sedona canyon floor, held Grail aloft for nearly three seconds, the boom from its exhaust snatching Flux’s attention away from his pursuit of comfort in the harsh landscape of his once-home.

  Grail cut the jets and let himself fall the
remaining distance with a bone-rattling impact that kicked the red Arizona dust high into the air. Planting the tip of his spear into the ground before him, Grail announced himself loudly. “Designate Flux, you have been called back to the arms of the masters you have betrayed. Take our hand and all will be forgiven. You will be welcomed back as the hero you were.”

  Flux turned, surprised at the sound of an enemy appearing so close to his position. How had this man in green gotten so close without being picked up by the cyborg’s cybernetic senses? It didn’t matter: the cyborg, driven mad by the collapse of the Abraxas Array a month early, had been created to obliterate anything, or anyone, who stood against him. This silly man in medieval dress would be no different.

  “Please, do not make this one destroy you,” Grail’s mailed gauntlet remained open in invitation to Flux even as the rest of his body coiled like a steel spring, ready for the attack both men knew full well would come.

  A white-hot fork of lightning erupted from the outstretched arms of Flux, leaping to the motionless form of the armored man. The impact and accompanying thunderclap burned the shadows away from the darkened valley. For a moment, the two figures were linked by a tether that shown brighter than the sun itself.

  The insane eyes of Flux went wide as the illumination vanished and he saw his opponent standing stock still, unfazed by the power of the cyborg’s attack.

  “You have disappointed us, sir,” sighed Grail, his open arm finally dropping to grasp the now white-hot shaft of the weapon in front of him. “We had hoped to avoid your destruction.”

  Muscles, aided by the micro-muscular enhancements in Grail’s armor, launched the knight forward and covering the distance between the two foes in the blink of an eye, taking Flux by surprise. Something in the newcomer’s armor blocked all of the cyborg’s attempts at scanning its systems, rendering Flux essentially blind.

  An overhead strike, backed by the momentum of the leap, brought the searing spear down in a devastating blow that shattered the bones in Flux’s upper arm and shoulder, and nearly took the mentally-unhinged machine-man to his knees. Grail followed up his initial attack with a pair of horizontal attacks, one to each side of his enemy, breaking four ribs in the process. Pressing the assault, Grail lunged forward, hoping to take Flux in the heart with the tip of his weapon and end the combat.