by Phil Wrede
Cyber-Knife: Apex Predator
Book 1 in the Saga of Cyber-Knife
by Phil Wrede
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
Acknowledgments
About
© 2017 Phil Wrede. All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
First Edition
ISBN 9781520389578
Cover illustration by Matt Muse. Illustrations © 2017 Matt Muse.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to Amy,
without whom this literally wouldn't have happened
CHAPTER 1
The part-man, part-machine warrior known as Cyber-Knife had spent his entire life waging war against the enemies of peace and freedom. The military had supplemented his memory with an infinite-capacity hard drive that contained the entirety of human knowledge and culture, so even if the worst happened, the essence of his species would survive. He could not imagine falling in battle himself, and neither could the rest of America. He was Earth’s greatest hope; he wouldn’t do something as lame as die half a world away, in the grips of the artificial invaders, the unfeeling instruments of incalculable brutality to which the military had given the antiseptic designation ARN, which stood for Autonomous Resilient Nonhumans. The rest of humanity, in turn, had settled on a simpler descriptor: alien robot ninjas. Regardless of their name, they had lain waste to the entirety of the planet billions of humans once called home.
A lasting victory wouldn’t come easy to either side, not now, with each force entrenched deeply. Cyber-Knife stood on the wing of a hover chopper, a black needle floating on a cushion of air above the charred remains of what once were the jungles of Vietnam. Cyber-Knife took a deep breath. The nanotech implanted in his lungs cleansed most of the carbon monoxide from the air, and the rest of the particles from the noxious vapors got redirected throughout his body, to become energy for his cybernetic power cells. He thought of the world that hadn't known peace in generations, the legions of men and women before him who had fought and sacrificed to give humanity a chance, and of MOM, the Maternal Operations Matrix that had kept a careful watch over him from his inception. He'd fought hundreds of battles, but they had birthed for this one, bred him for it. It had come time to end the war.
He exhaled, releasing the few deadly chemicals his body couldn't process back into the air. Smoke rose from his lips. His oil-black eyes gazed off into the distance, towards a disgusting spire that tore out of the ground like a tumor. Even amidst the post-nuclear jungle, it looked ominous and gross, a three-sided tower thousands of meters tall, slick and black. The alien robot ninjas had made their home in that spire; it was the eye of the storm of death and destruction they'd unleashed upon the world. "Game on, motherfuckers," he whispered, stroking the plasma pistols strapped to his thighs. Shadows made his cheeks look gaunt for a second as the moonlight wobbled around his face.
His blonde hair whipped around with the air kicked up by the chopper’s engines, serving only to accentuate his muscular jaw, immobile and regal in the light of night. The dimple in the middle of his chin - its base established through careful genetic manipulation, enhanced by the best engineers in the world, and honed and tested across innumerable battles - made him somehow seem more human. His creators had sought a small mark of imperfection amidst his chiseled physique and cybernetic arms, to enhance his appeal among the people he was meant to save. His right arm was fully metallic, from shoulder to fingertips, but the left was flesh from the elbow on down.
Cyber-Knife leapt off the hover chopper, its dim grey running lights catching his lustrous hair in a sort of halo. For a moment, he became all too visible, the light bouncing off his brown skin, his full six-foot, four-inch, two-hundred-fifty pound frame on display. For a moment, he looked like an angel. The angel of death.
He rolled as he hit the ground, pulling his sword from the sheath on his back. The metal rang as it slid out, several feet of sharp, shining death waiting at attention. It looked bizarrely anachronistic against Cyber-Knife's high-tech skinsuit, metal arm, and the chopper as it skimmed silently away into the darkness of night. The technicians had offered to retrofit it, make it fit in better with modern sensibilities, but Cyber-Knife would have none of it. The sword had a classic golden hilt, and decorated with jewels where it met the blade. The sword had traveled from thousands of years in the future, to save the world from what it would become. This sword was Excalibur.
Cyber-Knife had never visited this jungle before, but the records in his mind told him what to expect. Generations of unremitting warfare, each conflict more desperate than the one that came before, had given rise to rampant, irradiated overgrowth, prone to lethal stampedes from plant and beast alike. If the jungle held hazards for interlopers in the past, their potency had increased a hundred-thousandfold. Fortunately, Cyber-Knife was not just a tourist. If the jungle fucked with him, he’d fuck it right back.
He steadily crept through the underbrush, pausing in his trek to give a wide berth to the mutated thornshrubs and mantraps. The enemy had long ago learned to use the environment to its fullest advantage. No matter how hard he tried, Cyber-Knife could not win this war in an afternoon, or a day. Always better to do a job right than quickly.
The ground rumbled and the brush around him shook as he looked overhead. Against the strange green-tinted blackness of the night sky, an ungodly wailing sound rushed up on him from behind and raced past as one of the enemy's airborne troop carriers traveled across the pockmarked hellscape. Black, boxy, and simple, like an onyx coffin flipped over on its long side, with a furious red eye blazing forth where a human craft might have a cockpit, the carrier's engines blasted a landing site in the ground, scattering irradiated dirt and plant life in its wake. It set down less than three hundred yards from Cyber-Knife, and light flooded into the jungle as it deployed its lethal cargo.
"Class Ones," he hissed into the night, identifying the dozen matte black robotic ninja warriors that rushed forth from the belly of the beast. They were the most common of the enemy's infantry, and the ones he most frequently met in combat. Like Cyber-Knife, they could fight with skill in close quarters and at range, with weapons integrated into their combat chassis, but they outsized him by a good meter, and hundred pounds. In the palms of their hands, they had generators that could produce either projectile bursts or concentrated blades of plasma. With their red eyes, like that adorning the landing craft, sweeping the circumference of their narrow heads, and green cannons at the ends of their arms, they reminded Cyber-Knife of the Christmases humanity had celebrated before the war, the warm times of holiday and family that none of the children living on Earth had ever experienced. He swore that, before his war ended, he would reduce every Class One he saw to carbon slag, forming the grandest lump of coal the world had ever seen. He would place it before the enemy leaders before he ripped off their fucking heads.
These thoughts filled him with a rage the likes of which he'd never experienced before; he had not expected the blinding fury that rushed through his veins. All of his stealth and tactical training rushed to the ba
ck of his mind as a tidal wave of vengeance crashed across his synapses. Before he knew it, he found himself charging through the jungle like a madman.
The Heads Up Display system integrated into his cybernetic eyes targeted and tagged each of the Class Ones as they stepped out of the carrier; the fiber optic sensors integrated into each strand of hair on his head would allow him to track them regardless of their distance, or his line of sight. Twelve little red boxes snapped into sight, twelve targets desperately in need of obliteration.
Clear of the foliage, Cyber-Knife leapt through the air, howling an inhuman war cry as he swung Excalibur, cleaving the heads of two robot ninjas from their bodies. A version of the energized plasma that they employed as weapons also served to power their systems, and a sick green goop sprayed from the cables that no longer cradled their heads, like little fountains.
Cyber-Knife landed with his sword in a guard right below his eyes. Despite his endless training, lifetime of combat experience, and the slew of information contained in his hard drive, standing in front of his enemies for real curdled the juices in a small, still-emotive part of his stomach. The Class Ones, for all their weaknesses, could still fight two dozen soldiers to a standstill. Cyber-Knife could engage twice again as many of them without breaking a sweat.
The still-functioning Class Ones stared back at Cyber-Knife for a moment, silently processing this newly-arrived threat. Then, in unison, they raised their arms and began blasting away at him with their plasma cannons. As expected.
Cyber-Knife pivoted up on his free hand and launched himself into the air, his mechanically assisted muscles propelling him close to the ragged jungle canopy. As he dropped towards the ground, he twisted and spun, executing what MOM called Maneuver Four. The Class Ones' shots went wide, or knocked into each other and splatted away in every direction except towards him. He sliced another through the chest, pivoted, and charged towards another pair, turning them into alien robot ninja shish kabob almost immediately. He flung his fourth and fifth victims to the ground and they made satisfyingly squishy sounds as he removed Excalibur from their torsos, their plasma cores streaking green against the gleaming metal.
Cyber-Knife would have screamed as he felt something hot cut across his back, but the sensors running through his pain receptors intercepted the signal and prevented his vocal cords from vibrating, cutting off the sound before it began. He turned around to see a robot ninja with a machete-like plasma blade blazing from its arm, the green energy pulsing, more alive than the robot itself.
“I'll save you for last,” Cyber-Knife hissed as he sheathed his sword, drew his pistols, and gunned down the six remaining robot ninjas with blindly fast shots. The barrels of his plasma pistols steamed with excess heat from the speed of his assault. The rest of his enemies collapsed to the ground, liquefied metal pooling out onto the ground, as the one that'd landed its attack stood alone. Cyber-Knife could've sworn it trembled.
“Nighty-night,” he whispered as he whipped out Excalibur again and drove it into the alien robot ninja's chest, all the way up to the hilt. He leaned in close to the Class One and grinned like some satisfied predator as he drew the blade all the way up through its chest and ripped its head apart. His hollow black eyes made his smile all the more terrible. Some of the scorching plasma from its freshly-exposed systems splashed on Cyber-Knife's face, but the fast-acting nanites in his bloodstream immediately went to work repairing the wound. The cut on his back had nearly closed. Cyber-Knife didn't scar.
This batch of enemies lay sprawled apart in pieces; he couldn't call them dead, as they'd never lived, but that didn't change a thing. Small as it'd been, he'd won the first battle of the war’s last days. It was a good start.
Excalibur buzzed a little in his hand. “I can’t say for certain whether your end will come from your exuberance or arrogance, but it shall be one or the other, I am sure.”
Cyber-Knife looked down at the sword and narrowed his eyes.
The metal blade rang as it addressed him: “Be smart, fight swiftly. The longer it takes for them to notice your killing, the longer we stay alive.”
Cyber-Knife grunted with irritation as he went to sheath Excalibur.
“Don't dismiss me! I've traveled through thousands of years, dozens of temporal portals, and endured countless atrocities; all to one day help you save the world!”
Cyber-Knife heard what could very possibly have been a twig snapping and ducked down in a moment of alarm. “You want to try to keep it down?” he half-whispered.
“Oh,” Excalibur grumpily replied, “you can throw a fit of brutality, but as soon as I start to speak my mind -”
“You listen here,” Cyber-Knife started, furiously pointing at Excalibur, “you want to save the world? Then get on board, or get out of the way. I'm fucking Cyber-Knife. Your incomprehensible prophecy says we save the planet. Together.”
“Spoken like a warrior of truly questionable value,” Excalibur said.
Never in the limitless stores of his memory could Cyber-Knife have imagined hearing a living weapon sound so smug. Excalibur jumped in his hand, drawing his attention past his shoulder. More Class Ones had begun to make their way through the jungle, towards the downed carrier ship. They were led by a Class Two, which skittered across the ground on seven spindly limbs, any of which could blast out a laser beam that made his plasma pistols look like squirt guns. Class Twos outmassed Class Ones by a good three hundred percent; you didn't want them to get in close if you valued your life. You didn't want to take them on at range, either, but at least that would probably lead to a quick death. The closer they got, the more the alien robot spiders came off like particularly sadistic children, wanting to play with their prey before killing it.
“Still think you have something to prove?” the sword asked.
Cyber-Knife took a second to let his pride battle his intellect. Pride came out on top. “What do I get if I win?”
“My undying respect. Which is kind of an honor, from one who knew King Arthur. Go kill your alien robot ninjas.”
Cyber-Knife slid Excalibur back into its sheath. He spread his hands across the ground and crept quietly back behind some brush.
The three Class Ones arrived at the ship's landing site first, sweeping the area like overeager hunters on their first time out. Cyber-Knife didn't move, despite his violent urges, and after a few long moments of exploration, the Class Ones determined there wasn't an immediate threat and silently beckoned the Class Two into the area. The Class Two looked over the debris left from their counterparts, pounded its legs, and gestured into the darkness surrounding them; the Class Ones, hesitating ever so briefly, fanned out in search of whatever might be out there.
As they crossed through the burn line around the ship, and into the twisted plants that fought to cover the unfriendly ground, the Class Ones' pace slowed. With every step they took, sophisticated software determined optimal weight distribution, foot placement, stance, and a thousand other variables that could increase their tactical advantage against any foe, known or unknown. Unfortunately for them, all that advanced behavior hadn't precluded Cyber-Knife's sensors from following their every movement the instant they'd stepped into his line of vision. The enemy had designed its Class Ones to hunt, and they'd hunted humanity across the globe; only now, a dozen of their number had been abruptly silenced, leaving only mutilated pieces spread across the ground. The predators had become the prey, and they hoped an added emphasis on caution might flip the odds back in their favor. They didn't realize they faced humanity’s super-enhanced predator, one capable of fighting them on his own terms.
A Class One stepped too close to Cyber-Knife's hiding place; his arms whipped out and grabbed the robot ninja about its ankles. Cyber-Knife yanked against the thing with such force that he ripped its legs from its body. As its torso crashed to the ground, he smashed it to bits with those very same legs, little spurts of plasma splashing against nearby plant life, melting it instantly.
The violenc
e of Cyber-Knife's initial attack drew two more Class Ones towards his position immediately. He scrambled backwards, further into the shadows, just as they came upon their recently-dispatched comrade.
The remaining Class Ones looked at each other, deep in conversation on some level only comprehensible to pure machines. When that talk ended, they activated their plasma blades in unison and began methodically cutting through anything nearby large enough to hide a threat. In an instant, Cyber-Knife recognized their behavior: clear out the area, expand the space to be searched, rotate through until that was clear, and repeat. His escape had carried him clear of the first two stages of their search, but they'd come upon him on their third. He had just a few moments to act.
He swallowed once, drawing on the knowledge of a lost tribe humanity had once called, “The Ventriloquists,” then clicked his tongue against the back of his throat, throwing his voice past the robots. They whipped around, freshly on the alert for a new threat. Cyber-Knife only needed a moment of distraction; he drew his plasma pistols from their holsters and fired a shot from each one. The blasts cut through the Class Ones' heads, and they slumped to their knees, still and quiet.
Cyber-Knife got a chilly feeling in his gut, that this had been too easy, and maybe a ploy by the Class Two to flush and make him vulnerable in his own distraction. He heard a high-pitched whining sound a short distance away, and instinctively pressed himself as close to the ground as he could. Fortune rewarded his prudence when a quartet of furious-looking red lasers cut through the air above. Sure enough, the Class Two had a bead on him.
Cyber-Knife rolled along the ground, kicking up a stunted little dust cloud behind him as he moved. The lasers whined again as the Class Two fired, and whether by luck or design, the beams hit a dry patch of dead plants. A fire leapt up among them, and in almost no time at all, began to spread. Whatever cover the nearby jungle could provide him would turn to ash in moments.
