The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2

by Mat Nastos

  “‘Former?’” Zuz was intrigued by Carl’s statement.

  “Yeah. Although I wasn’t formally fired, per se, one of my co-workers did try to shoot me in the face with the gun you probably found in my car.”

  Zuz slipped the weapon out of the spot he had stored it in the rear waistband of the sweatpants he was wearing. He flashed it broadly to Carl before tossing it towards the desk behind him. They both flinched as the Glock fell short of its intended landing place and crashed to the floor with a loud bang.

  “That’s the one,” nodded Carl, glad the gun didn’t go off.

  “And what do you want, Mr. Anderson?” Zuz finally remembered to return to his shaky impression of Agent Smith.

  Seeing the black shape of the weapon used in the attempt on his life brought the seriousness of Carl’s situation back into focus for him. These people were not his friends—in fact, the computer tech had been a member of the group trying to bring them to justice up until the recent turn of events forced Carl on the run. He needed to win Zuzelo over to his side…and through him Malcolm Weir…or Carl was going to wind up dead.

  “I need your help,” started Carl, attempting to lick moisture back into his lips as he did. “The government is trying to kill me.”

  “Why should I believe you, Mr. Anderson?” Zuz stared as fiercely as he could at Carl, trying to get a read on the man.

  “Stop with the Matrix routine, Mr. Zuzelo,” spit Carl, growing more annoyed with the man and his questions. “You’ve got the documents I stole from Hardwired in my bag…everything is in there. Names, dates, locations. There’s enough in there to send half of Washington to prison.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that. We already know more from the data downloaded into Mal’s systems,” lied Zuz. He hoped to push the trespasser into revealing everything the little man knew. “Give me one reason not to leave you here for Mal to deal with once he’s finished his work in New York.”

  An audible gulp leapt from the bound man’s throat. He’d had extensive experience monitoring the ferocity of Designate Cestus’s killing prowess on the numerous missions he’d managed for Director Kiesling and Project Hardwired. Carl had been the lead computer tech for all of the Primes and none had been more vicious or efficient than Cestus. The last thing he wanted to do was face off against an enraged cyborg with blood on his mind.

  “But that information is old…a whole lot has happened in the past month,” sputtered Carl, falling face first into Zuz’s plot in an effort to salvage his chances at surviving the encounter.

  “Yeah, like what?” asked Zuz as he did his best to hide the excitement growing in his belly.

  “Hardwired was dismantled after the explosion. Kiesling is dead, the entire staff is being reassigned…” Carl’s features grew hard as he recalled the attempt on his life by TJ May. “Or terminated.”

  “You’ve got nothing that helps us,” laughed Zuz, pretending to be bored by the conversation.

  “I can show you how to find them,” said Carl, hopefully.

  “Find who?”

  “Whom,” corrected Carl with a helpful smile.

  “Who whom?” asked Zuz, confused.

  “You said ‘find who’ when you should have said ‘find whom.’ It’s a common mistake.”

  “You really want to get tasered again, don’t you?” Zuz glared at the sweaty man tied to the chair in front of him. “Find whom?” he repeated slowly.

  “The other Primes. I can give you the location of the other renegade units…the ones who went rogue when Designate Cest…” A withering scowl from Zuzelo had Carl reconsider his choice of words. “When Malcolm destroyed the Abraxas Array. I know where his friend is.”

  “‘Friend?’ What friend?”

  Carl Anderson smiled widely and began to spin his tale for a captivated David Zuzelo. Fifteen minutes later Zuz was on the phone, bouncing uncontrollably in his seat as he waited for Mal to answer the call from New York.

  “Mal!” shrieked Zuz when his friend’s voice played out over the line.

  “What’s wrong, Z?” Worry sounded in the cyborg’s voice.

  Unable to contain his excitement, Zuz blurted out, “Chris Donlin is still alive!”

  CHAPTER 13

  New York City.

  “What did you say?!” demanded Mal, shaken by the statement Zuz had made over the cellular connection they shared.

  “Lieutenant Chris Donlin is still alive.”

  The words smashed Mal between the eyes and blasted into his brain. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing—wouldn’t have believed the words if they had come from anyone other than David Zuzelo.

  Chris Donlin alive? How was it possible? According to what Colonel Denman had told Mal, every member of the ranger team the cyborg had been a part of in his last mission to Dahuk, Iraq, was dead, Chris among them. The reports were that he was killed in the initial ambush on the unit’s Blackhawk helicopters in the rolling hills just outside of the city limits. Only Mal and two others had made it out of the wreckage alive, and they were both dead now, too.

  How could Chris still be alive?

  “Are…are you sure?” Mal asked his friend at the other end of the call, not entirely convinced. Unsure if he wanted to be convinced because of what it would mean. “Colonel Denman told us Chris died when we went down in Iraq. They never even recovered his body.”

  Without taking a breath, Zuz recapped the past few hours with Mal, starting with Carl Anderson finding the hideout and moving forward from there at top speed. By the end of the story both men were out of breath.

  “It could be a trap,” said Mal, cautiously. He wanted to believe what Zuz was telling him, but it all sounded far too good to be true. “How do we know the Project Hardwired brass didn’t send him?”

  “The little guy’s story checks out pretty good to me. Besides, if the government knew I was here, I’m sure they’d have sent in Seal Team Six and not a nerd with borderline Asperger’s Syndrome.”

  Mal heard the stranger protest the insult somewhere behind his friend in the background.

  “Hey! I’m standing right here!”

  “Not only are his name and picture being bounced from every local and federal law-enforcement agency as being wanted for high-treason and murder, but the documents he brought with him are amazing,” Mal could hear the excitement in the elder nerd’s voice. The last time he’d heard Zuz this excited was when the Star Wars prequels were announced. Hopefully this bout with excitement didn’t end as poorly as that had. “He’s got technical read-outs on all of the Primes like you—all 12 of them. He’s got internal correspondence, details of black-ops missions the Primes took care of during almost all of Project Hardwired’s operation. Lists of employees…and information on the woman responsible for originally designing all of the cybernetic systems used in you guys.”

  “Dr. Carly Ryan?” The name had become a thorn in Mal’s brain since he first heard it.

  “He even knows how to find her.”

  Every fiber of Mal’s being wanted to have Zuz force this Carl Anderson to tell them everything he knew about the witch directly responsible for turning him into an abomination given form. One small part of him wanted to find her and make her pay for the tortures that had been inflicted upon his mind and body. The part of his mind where the Cestus programming writhed spoke to him softly of killing her…how easily it could be done.

  It wasn’t the viciousness of the thought that snapped Mal out of his rage, it was how much he wanted to go along with it. How he wanted to feel her warm blood against his skin as he crushed the life out of her. How he wanted to look into her eyes as the light was extinguished by death.

  So easy.

  Mal shook himself free of the dark thoughts, shuddering to himself.

  No. He wasn’t the monster Project Hardwired had tried to turn him into. Cestus was no longer the master of Mal’s mind and it never would be again if he had anything to say about it.

  The only thing that matt
ered at that instant was helping his friend. Helping Chris Donlin gain the same freedom Mal had achieved.

  “Tell me about Chris…about Lieutenant Donlin. What did they do to him? Is he like…me?”

  The long pause that followed his question worried Mal immensely. It wasn’t like Zuz to stop talking for any reason short of exceedingly bad news.

  “Tell me, Z.”

  Zuz signed into the phone receiver, surrendering himself to what he would have to tell his best friend next.

  “No. He’s not like you, Mal. He’s worse.” Zuz spoke slowly and respectfully. “He was an earlier subject of Project Hardwired. They recovered what was left of his bod from the burned out helicopter ruins in Iraq a week or so after you had been extricated. He was already long dead when they found him.”

  “My God,” the room began to blur around the edges for the cyborg. Chris Donlin had been a good man, and a great friend…he didn’t deserve whatever those bastards had done to him.

  “Yeah. He was a test subject for the implants the rest of you would eventually receive. They replaced half his brain with a bio-organic computer system and used it to bring back as much of the soldier as they could, but he was never the same.”

  The news blasted Mal between his eyes. Even if he found Chris again, there was a good chance his friend was already gone. His body might still be alive and functioning on a basic biological level, but everything that had made up the good man that was Lieutenant Chris Donlin from Berwick, Pennsylvania, could be long gone. Killed out in the wilds of Iraq a year before with only a pale shadow remaining. What if all that was left was a killer robot with his friend’s face?

  What then?

  Mal’s eyes narrowed. His friend had been a hero and he deserved better than what had been done to him. He’d track Chris down and if the tiniest piece of his friend was still there, he’d bring the man home.

  But if he was gone…Mal choked for a moment at the idea before steeling himself to the reality of it all. If Donlin were truly gone, with only a monster left behind, then Mal would end it.

  “Alright, Z, what’s the plan? How can I find Chris before the government does?”

  “I’m going to send the program Mr. Anderson here devised in order to track Project Hardwired’s Prime Units with. It should be able to track Donlin to within a few yards.”

  “Wait a minute, Zuz,” the concern in Mal’s voice was evident. “Are you sure we can trust the guy? I mean, he’s part of the group that turned my life into a living hell and spent most of the past month hunting us down.”

  Zuz paused for a moment to consider his friend’s concern.

  “Yeah, Mal…I think we can. He’s in shit as deep as we are and I’ve checked his data. It’s good.”

  “Ok…send me the program.”

  Mal felt the data transmission flow into the computerized portion of his cerebral cortex almost immediately. Entire new overlays of information began to overlay across his optic nerves. Once the download was complete, he was aware of the presence of his friend, and fellow Project Hardwired victim, inside the New York City limits. Chris was less than three miles away from his current position according to the readouts he was receiving from the newly reconfigured sensors.

  “I hate to admit it, but the kid is a real code whiz…light years beyond me. He might even be able to help us crack the encryption on the information your system hijacked from Hardwired’s computers,” said Zuz into the phone as quietly as he could. He may have thought Carl Anderson was a computer genius, but there was no way he was going to admit it to the little shit. There were just some things he wouldn’t do.

  Zuz’s words were still ringing in Mal’s ears as the computer tracker led him to a large warehouse district on the eastern side of Manhattan. His senses picked up Donlin’s signal, leading him to the alley just off the main thoroughfare, just between two buildings. Although Mal would have been able to guess his friend’s location without computer aid as a sea of red and blue flash lights confronted him upon his arrival.

  Sirens, scrambling men in blue uniforms, and the sound of periodic gunfire assaulted Mal’s senses. He didn’t think it’d be unreasonable to guess that every police officer within five miles was on the scene and, odds were, after Chris.

  Jogging past the mass of law-enforcement cars and trucks to a building nearly a block away on the same side of the street, Mal left the street and moved into the shadows between the giant storehouses. With all of the uniforms down choking the streets below, the cyborg had to get to a higher vantage point to get a better read on the situation.

  “Up, up, and away,” muttered Mal to himself, flexing the living metal of his arms. Two beats later he was scaling the cheap aluminum siding with the use of his cybernetic claws.

  Reaching the top gave the cyborg a clear view of the pandemonium of the alley way below him. It also revealed to Mal the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated upon Lieutenant Chris Donlin by the butchers of Project Hardwired.

  “My God, Chris…what did they do to you?” The sight of his former comrade-in-arms and once friend was more than enough to send Mal’s mind reeling.

  CHAPTER 14

  Zuzelo’s description of what had been done to Mal’s friend fell far short of the horrifying reality. The once-man was now far more machine than human. What little flesh remaining on Donlin’s form was warped, scarred and grown back around the dull gray metal of his cybernetic enhancements. Where Mal’s own augmentations were refined and mimicked the look and movement of the living body, the pathetic creature in the center of the melee was anything but natural.

  The major muscles of Donlin’s thighs were all that remained of his legs. Entwined with black cables, hydraulic rods and titanium-steel bones, they left the cyborg standing on three-toed platforms that resembled heavy duty tripods more than feet. His torso was an unidentifiable mass of meat, constantly moving pistons, and vents spewing an oily steam with each step Donlin took.

  Things only got worse from there.

  As with Mal’s own appendages, neither of Donlin’s original arms remained. They had been, instead, replaced by weapons systems far less elegant in design than those given to Designate Cestus. His right arm in a massive, four-fingered gauntlet—no flesh remained at all. Only a twisted mass of wires and rubber tubes controlled its operation. On the left side had been mounted a nine-barreled Gatling gun that spewed forth a legion of fifty-caliber rounds supplied to it by a belt-fed ammunition pack on the monster’s back.

  To Mal, that left the most sickening travesty of all: at the top of the atrocity of Designate Caliber’s body was the friendly face of Chris Donlin, unscarred and almost whole, staring back at the men he killed. From the front he almost looked normal, aside from the insane, red-rimmed eyes embedded into dark, haunted sockets.

  The view from behind would haunt Mal for the rest of his days.

  The rear of Donlin’s head was gone—as far as Mal could see, there was no natural bone at all. The man’s face has been stretched out over a metal skull with a blinking, glass-encased computerized brain whose cables and connectors seemed to run haphazardly down the cyborg’s neck and into the core of his body.

  Mal choked back bile and tears at the sight before him. There was very little left of his friend and his own system’s analysis confirmed his observations. Less than twenty-five percent organic material made up the mass of what Project Hardwired had created.

  A series of dull ‘pops’ snapped Mal’s attention back to the scene laid out at the base of the building beneath him. A veritable army of police officers and SWAT team members—thirty-four if his internal sensors were correct…and they always were—had trapped Donlin—Designate Caliber in the middle of a long alley. Men approaching from either side had the berserk cyborg pinned in between them. Along the tall canyon formed by the walls of the alleyway clouds of smoke billowed, from a series of tear gas canisters that had been fired off by the cops as the advanced on their suspect.

  Through the yellow fog, unaffected b
y the blistering chemicals released into the air, burst a torrent of high speed rounds, fired from the whirling, hissing arm cannon attached to Designate Caliber’s left side. A thousand rounds punched through the mist and into the oncoming crowd of law enforcement agents, leaving glistening holes in both men and mist. Within three seconds, more than a third of the advancing policemen were down, either wounded or dead. The remaining men returned fire to little effect on the high-tech maniac facing them.

  Seeing the bloodshed squeezed an inaudible curse from Mal’s throat.

  Friend or not, the creature’s murderous frenzy had to be stopped before he decimated the law enforcement forces deployed in front of him. There was no telling how far Caliber’s rampage would go or how many innocent lives he would take if he was left unchecked.

  Vaulting out into the yawning space above the skirmish erupting in the alley below him, Mal wished he had been armed with something more than sharp pointy claws. Being the only one to bring knives to a gun fight was never a good thing.

  The air Mal leapt into was thick with the smell of gunfire—an acrid combination of thick earth, hot sweet metal, and burnt hair that stuck to the back of the cyborg’s throat. Muscles, reinforced by nanotechnology, softened the three story landing, cushioning Mal’s impact with the ground and pulling him into a tight defensive crouch just behind a group of SWAT members on the edge of the tear gas cloud flowing through the length of the alley.

  Ignoring the cries of surprise from the men behind him, Mal proceeded to take down the densely packed unit of men with a quick succession of punches and kicks, fracturing bones, shattering gas masks, and causing a general mayhem in their midst.

  Five men down with only minor injuries and no deaths. Things were already looking up for the cyborg.

  “Amy would be so proud,” thought Mal as he dodged gunfire that seemed to come at him from all directions at once. He silently thanked the engineers at Project Hardwired for increasing his speed and agility along with the less than savory ‘upgrades’ they had performed on his body.