One more minute of sprinting and dodging brought him within sight of his goal: the Harbour Bridge. Racing along the elevated roadway that approached it, and seeing the man followed him still, he flung the Uzi away as soon as he reached the edge of Dawes Point, and crossed to the bridge proper above the water. The weapon performed a long graceful ballistic arc that ended in a splash. Considering what waited at the other end, he did not want anyone making any targeting mistakes, and if he ended up in official custody…better to be without it.
The demands he had made upon his body took their toll and he slowed, breathing heavily. Cradling his useless arm made his running ever more awkward as the pain and injury made itself felt. Spooky had ignored both for a time, using Dadirri techniques, but every body had its limit, especially as the nano and Eden Plague tried to heal him without the benefit of extra nutrients, or sufficient water.
Pushing aside the hunger and thirst he jogged onward, glancing over his shoulder from time to time to make sure the other did not get too close. He moved over to the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, which eased the outraged honking that accompanied him.
By the middle of the bridge his body began to betray him, so he slowed further. Gritting his teeth against a blossoming cramp and the fire in his side, he tried to conserve his strength, timing his arrival for the moment when he would inevitably be overtaken.
Holding the phone to his lips, he reported his position and situation, describing his nemesis, and his own clothes for good measure. Behind him he could feel the implacable thumping of heavy boots on the walkway, and Spooky considered the possibility that he would have to leap over the railing and into the water, as a last resort.
He hoped the man’s armor was heavy, and that he would not swim well.
One hundred meters from the end, he could see two SUVs parked, backs to him, blocking one lane of outbound traffic. Somehow they had come up the wrong way and managed to set up at the designated spot, and Spooky blessed those same ancestral gods now as he stumbled toward them. Eighty meters…sixty…he could hear the pounding, pounding of feet, could imagine he felt the man’s hot breath upon his neck.
Putting on a desperate burst of speed, he held the distance until forty meters, thirty, twenty…ten…not since he had hiked out of Vietnam into Cambodia with his dying father on his back had he been so close to physical collapse.
As he passed the nearer SUV, a passenger door opened on the father one. Spooky collapsed into it, pulled the armored slab closed and turned to look over the back seat.
At the same time the rear gate door of the other vehicle flew up. Spooky could not see what awaited the pursuer, but he suddenly stumbled and jerked to a halt, lightnings arcing along his body as he grabbed for the guardrail. Hanging heavily onto the metal, sparks from ricochets showed where shock projectiles, fired from the back of the SUV, missed the metal-faced man to strike the surrounding bridge structure.
Like a Frankenstein’s golem, the figure turned and tried to get away, then sagged. With one final convulsive effort he rolled himself over the railing and fell.
Leaping out of the SUV, Spooky walked unsteadily to the edge in time to see the weighty splash as he impacted the water twenty meters below. He watched for long moments as nothing surfaced, until the Direct Action operatives in the SUVs called to him, warning of police on their way.
“Take me to Headquarters,” he instructed once he’d climbed back in.
A draw, then, really. He’d killed a couple of minor foot soldiers in his enemy’s ranks, and he had gotten away from the ace in the hole, the real hit man. As his two armored SUVs drove sedately away from the scene toward his stronghold, he wondered who had initiated the attack.
The obvious answer was Ariadne Smythe, who had tried to thwart him before, so that’s where he would start. Even if she was not behind this, she would have to go, if he was to take over as Markis had asked him to.
A more interesting question was, from where had they obtained a full nanocommando? He’d made the non-replicating, partial-power version of nano widely available to the Free Communities governments, for the Space Marines and other appropriate military forces, but this man had possessed speed, strength and endurance akin to Spooky’s own.
Perhaps even superior to it.
That limited the possibilities, and pointed at the US Tiny Fortress program. Either someone in Direct Action had betrayed him and given away some of his prized nanites in his absence – or his enemies had acquired another, maybe better version, from the US.
Which if true, led to another unsettling question: was it the Americans official doing, or had it gotten away from them, perhaps via a rogue agent?
The fact that there was only a single superman involved was a good sign, however. If the nano was self-replicating, it could have been used to infect any number of attackers. Instead, there had been only one.
Spooky hoped that meant it could only be used on a single individual.
Now forewarned, he began to plan how to deal with this new threat.
***
Ten minutes later a fully clothed man walked out of Sydney Harbor and into Dawes Point Park, a small swatch of grass and trees tucked beneath the Harbour Bridge. A few onlookers gazed curiously at him as he squelched by in soggy boots, jeans and hoodie, but only hours later did one of them think to report the incident to the police, after seeing the evening news.
A normal human being, even a nanocommando, might have pulled out a phone and made a call. This man merely activated an internal mechanism, electronically dialing a number from equally electronic augmented memory.
“Eliminator,” he sent in a synthesized internal voice. No noise emanated from his body. Instead, an internal generator sent a mobile network signal that was interpreted at the other end as sound, so to the woman listening it seemed she was carrying on a normal conversation.
“Is it done?”
“Negative. The target was wounded but escaped.”
“Sodding hell. Not such a piece of piss as you thought, eh?”
Walking down the park’s access road, the man remained silent, with nothing to say.
“Return to base, then.” The connection closed.
The hit man’s next call was to his team, calling for vehicular pickup as soon as they were done with cursory cleanup efforts at the attack scene. At least they would remove the bodies and equipment. Despite the screw-up that let the target slip away, he had confidence they could do a simple job like that and avoid the dragnet. Since most Australians were Edens now, crime, and therefore the need for police resources, had dwindled enormously.
He waited in an alley until the Land Rover came. As he climbed into the back seat, its frame settled perceptibly on its wheels. “Return to base,” he repeated his boss’s instruction to the driver, then closed his eyes and opened the files in his head, already planning his next move.
The chips in his head and their programming forced him to take his instructions from the owner of that voiceprint, but he was not a robot. Rather, his conscience had simply been burned out of him through brutal and ecstatic conditioning, raw pain and pleasure pumped into his nerves and brain, and the guardian code hovered in the background all the time, watching.
But the human brain is a complex and devious thing, and he had found over several missions that he had a lot of leeway when his instructions were not specific. If he was told to terminate a target at a certain place and time, but no more, then he might have complete freedom to choose the method. Usually many caveats were placed on him, such as “avoid collateral damage” or “do not be identified as a Shadow,” but as in any deal with the devil, there was the spirit of his instructions and there was the letter.
Not that he intended to violate either any time soon, but no amount of conditioning could burn out a man’s basic biological drives – survival, freedom, sex…revenge. That’s why he had made sure it was he who had been given to the Australian bitch, whose goals aligned so nicely with his own.
Markis was o
utside of his reach for now, and Larry Nightingale. Skull was dead, more’s the pity, and so was Zeke Johnstone. That left Spooky, who he’d come so close to today. Well, he’d have another chance, he swore.
When the Land Rover pulled up to the Central Authority compound’s gate, he pulled his metal face off, revealing a bland visage of flesh very similar to the one he’d started life with. The reconstructive efforts of Eden Plague and nano had allowed for extensive surgeries and implantations, but they had a certain memory that tried to rebuild what was there before. That face used to belong to a man named Miguel Carrasco, former Texas Ranger, former security contractor, former and current rapist.
He dreamed of showing his targets that face before they died.
Without the metal mask that armored him, he could pass for human. With it, he need fear little but a lucky shot to an eye, and it also had its uses as a weapon of surprise and terror.
Except Nguyen had not been terrified, and hardly surprised. The Carrasco cyborg knew the man would be very slippery, but he’d thought the plan foolproof. In fact, if the damned idiot on the winch had not screwed up, it would have been as simple as reaching up and pulling his target’s arms and legs off as a cruel child dismembers an insect.
An insect…that’s what Nguyen was. A very quick, very dangerous insect.
A pain began to grow between his ears and the metal man looked up to find that the vehicle had already entered the underground parking garage of the Central Authority complex and parked. The two pickup men had left him sitting there, probably eager to get as far from him as possible. He saw one of them turning in the keys at the dispatch window.
Another insect.
He then promptly forgot about him.
The pain told him to report to his cell, linked to a simple verbal command that had routed itself to him via the wireless network. Because he had never been told not to, he had built up quite a database of words in that specific voiceprint. Perhaps, when the time was right, he might be able to use the recordings to construct a method of countermanding the real orders, by talking to the chips in his head with that voice.
Survival was a given. Freedom was his plan. Revenge was a long-term goal. The last drive, sex, waited for him back in his cell, he hoped. Unless the bitch denied him his reward because of the screw-ups of others. Well, one day perhaps, she would reward him with herself.
Against her will, of course. Nothing else was as much fun.
-5-
Once the surgery to reattach Spooky’s arm muscle ended, and he filled his veins with as much nutrient solution as he could stand, he put on his uniform, and with it his Major General Nguyen persona. Never underestimate the power of symbols, he thought.
Then he went through Direct Action HQ like a whirlwind. He did not bother to keep Brigadier Alkina at his side. His decision to trust her must stand, absent evidence to the contrary, but he could not assume she was as competent as she appeared.
Perhaps I raised her up too quickly.
Instead, he sent her to check on a list of specific items that he deemed the most likely weak points in the organization: certain persons, especially, that might have been turned, some physical portals, and virtual ones as well. That was scut work, though, to free him to look at the things he wanted to, and set them in order. Once he had done that, he began to implement his coup.
“Open the door,” he ordered at the entrance to his nanocommando containment facility. Within it resided the five men he had captured after they kidnapped the South African children and flew an airplane here, intending to defect. Living repositories of combat-boosting nanites, they were also targets of a measure of his sadistic proxy revenge, a pleasure carefully metered out and never overdone.
Since his friends Daniel Markis and Larry Nightingale would not avenge the crime… Very satisfying. Revenge really is a dish best served cold.
The time for all that had passed, though. He realized that such indulgences must be put aside as distractions. Now, everything must serve the objective of seizing and ruling Australia, for the goal of saving Earth and the human race.
Once inside the huge armored laboratory vault, he walked down the row of tanks that held them. A nameplate identified each one.
Holden. Lumpkins. Bullion. Campbell.
Huff. He ran his hand along this last, tracing its inscribed letters.
A strategist would say now was not the time for experiments, but Nguyen had always gotten a lot of mileage out of doing the unexpected.
“Controller,” he addressed the watching white-coated technician at the mental induction console, “load them with package 9-1-0, authorization X7&54#N99.”
“That will require your thumbprint and retinal scan, General,” the tech said apologetically.
“Very well.” He walked over to the control board and made the necessary verifications, then watched as the man keyed in the instructions. “You may go now,” Nguyen said.
With a nod that was almost a bow, the controller slipped out of the room via its single entrance.
What most believe to be its single entrance, Nguyen thought.
The tanks hummed and indicator lights blinked, small notice of the orders downloading into their well-prepared, well-conditioned brains. Over the last months, part of the work done here had been to put to use some of the Septagon Shadow files that had come his way. Not the cyborg physical enhancements – he didn’t have the resources for that kind of engineering yet, and nanocommandos had been quite sufficient for his purposes. Rather, the much easier installation of chips in their brains, and the pain-pleasure conditioning that went with them, gave him his final, ironic revenge.
They had already given him their nanotechnology. Now these men were bullets in his gun, human guided missiles in his launcher.
Sitting down at the console, he put in a different set of instructions and then waited.
First, a panel in the brushed-nickel wall swung back, a hidden door revealing a tunnel lit by glow strips on the ceiling.
Next, all five containment machines opened their clamshell tops to reveal naked men. Moments later they began to wake up, sit up, and climb down.
Once they came to attention before their respective nameplates, Major General Nguyen stood up to address them. Their eyes tracked him like machines, or like dogs staring at a beloved master.
“Gentlemen,” Nguyen said, “how do you feel?”
“One hundred percent, sir!” they all responded in unison.
“What is your prime imperative?”
“To complete the mission, sir!” Again, as one.
“Why do the wild geese fly?”
“To find the sunset, sir!” This last question was merely a test of their programming, something to reveal any glitch.
“Proceed to the next phase, gentlemen.”
As one they turned to enter the dimly-lit tunnel. Nguyen followed them, and watched as they proceeded to a small chamber containing the skinsuits and commando armor they had been captured in. They dressed, only leaving off their HUD helmets for now.
“Wait here until the next phase, gentlemen. There is food and water, and you may rest. It will not be long.”
“Yes sir!”
With that, Nguyen retraced his steps to the containment tank chamber, closed the machines, entered one final command in the console, and left the vault to prepare his people for the long-awaited operation. He passed the word, and set the kickoff time for six hours from now, confident that his previously laid plans would come to fruition.
Through the complex, more than two hundred non-Eden Direct Action operatives were injected with the most potent version of commando nano available, something Nguyen had reserved for himself alone – until now. They donned skinsuits and armor, and HUD helmets based on the American design, modified and improved in accordance with his own instructions. They drew lethal weapons of myriad sorts, enough firepower to take over a small country.
Or a large one, if properly targeted.
Soon they reported all
ready: Nguyen’s own private army, built for this day from a careful selection of human material, chosen for their willingness to follow ruthless kill orders. About half of them were Outliers – Psychos – mostly the front line cannon fodder, with chips in their heads and deadman charges next to their hearts. If he must lose storm troops, he preferred to thin out his competition.
Bullets in his gun.
Nguyen then called Ann Alkina into the control room, the only person he felt he could fully trust to watch his back. This moment, when he was ready to let slip his dogs of war, might also be his most vulnerable.
“Everything is ready, General,” his deputy said as she entered. Her eyes swept across the various workstations and the operations chiefs who sat at them, concentric semicircles reminiscent of an old space launch mission center.
Nguyen nodded, and reached for a microphone attached to his board. Choosing a communications path known only to him, he spoke the code words, “Cry havoc.”
He knew that below him in the secret chamber of the vault, another door had opened, and his five infiltrators now raced down a tunnel to find a nondescript van that would convey them to a point near their target: Central Authority, the hub of the Committee of Nine, and its most politically powerful piece.
But as Mao said, all power comes from the barrel of a gun. Sometimes Nguyen preferred a quote from Dune: “The power to destroy a thing is the power to control it.” Either way, he was now employing power to seize more power.
“Now, Brigadier Alkina, I wish you good luck.” He stood, nodding to her, and turned to go.
“Wha –” Alkina clamped down on her objections in the presence of subordinates, and then stood rooted as Nguyen shot her a no-nonsense look, and then shut the door behind him.
A good test of her subordination and submission, he thought. It’s hard to go back to being number two when you have a taste of the top job. Her reactions will be instructive.
Cyborg Strike Page 5