Putting those worries behind him, he raced down the corridor to the nanocommandos’ preparation hall. Two hundred faces turned to look at him as he crossed to his own locker and pulled out his skinsuit. Stripping down, he rapidly dressed in the same dark mottled armor as the rest. Once he pulled on his HUD helmet, he was indistinguishable from them on the outside.
Within the system, though, he took charge with a little Shakespeare. “Ladies and gentlemen, let this fair action on foot be brought.” He sent the go code to confirm his verbal instruction, and followed the stream of camouflage out the doors and into the underground hangar.
Within the enormous covered space rested ten heavy VTOL aircraft, more advanced versions of the old US Osprey tilt-rotors. In this case the blades spun enclosed within rings set at each of the four corners, attached to wings that would allow for fast cruising in airplane mode.
At twenty-five commandos per, the vehicles quickly filled, even as the hangar’s ceiling split and rolled back, opening the chamber to the cool night sky above. Pilots spoke clipped phrases and soon the first VTOL lifted straight up, followed one at a time by the others. Nguyen’s was last, and only half full, providing more maneuverability and less exposure.
Once they cleared the roof line, the ten birds shot forward in nap of the earth mode, skimming low over the hills northwest of greater Sydney. Central Authority’s own complex rested almost a hundred kilometers away, a bare fifteen-minute flight.
As soon as he was able, Nguyen connected his command HUD with a geostationary satellite hanging in orbit above Australia. His codes overrode its functions, turning it into his own personal eye in the sky and communications relay. Within moments his HUD lit up with detailed information on air and ground traffic, as well as the encrypted feeds from all of his commandos’ HUDs.
All of his commandos. He focused its display on his five dogs of war.
By ground vehicle it had taken those men ninety minutes to get in position, perfectly coordinated with his follow-up assault. Carefully calculating time and distance, he waited until the correct moment and sent them in.
Watching as their tiny icons raced across the hillside above Central Authority, he envisioned their true speed across the ground, speed that would hopefully startle and completely overmatch any attempt to thwart them from reaching their initial goal.
He knew that they moved as a team toward one of the emergency exits of the building that housed the vertical access to the basements and vaults. They would even now be shooting out lights and cameras, and with the strength of fifty men, would tear into the building with minimal difficulty.
Of course, such an audacious attack would draw immediate action from the security forces, which would converge on the source of the incursion like antibodies on an invading plague.
All according to plan.
“One minute!” Nguyen heard the call over the aircraft’s PA, and got ready to disembark. Perfect timing.
Using their night vision systems, the ten heavy VTOLs came to their hovers in preselected positions above steep slopes, shielded from any anti-aircraft weapons by the crests of the hills between them and the complex. Central Authority security had, of course, come to the conclusion that nothing could land there, and so the area was only lightly covered by defenses.
One machinegun opened up from the ground, tracers reaching into the night sky, questing for the low-flying aircraft. Response came immediately: four separate missiles from enthusiastic VTOL gunners destroyed the emplacement with deadly precision.
At the same time the command to jump was given, and powerful infrared floodlights came on beneath the hovering craft. Invisible to ordinary eyes, the HUD faceplate sensors showed the glow below bright as day, allowing the nanocommandos to easily leap the five to ten meters to the ground.
***
Alarms blared down the underground corridors, jolting the cyborg out of his well-deserved sleep. As his brain and much of his body were still human, rest and recuperation were essential, but he could override that need without difficulty. He checked his internal diagnostics and was satisfied with ninety-eight percent efficiency.
He pressed his ear against the door, picking up a lot of information via bone conduction to his very sensitive audio pickups. What he heard did not reassure him. Panicked voices, frantic calls for response, and reports of air vehicles, missiles, and infantry.
The scale of the crisis made his decision for him. His programming imperatives made preserving and obeying his principal his most important priorities, though not always his most immediate. For now, absent instructions to the contrary, he had a lot of leeway.
So he used it.
His minders thought he was locked in, but had no real concept of what they dealt with. The two-inch steel door would resist his strength, for certain; but he had other advantages than pure power.
First, he locked his mask into place, hopefully ensuring the defenders would recognize him as an ally. Then he extended his blade from its sheath between his radius and ulna.
With his wrist bent, it protruded like a foot-long sword from a slot left for that purpose. His ferrocrystal skin braced the equally high-tech blade as he used its molecular edge to cut the embedded lock out of the reinforced concrete wall. A moment later he shoved the door to the side and was out, retracting the weapon.
Racing down the corridor, he dodged most of the frantic minions, occasionally shoving them aside. Some blanched at his appearance, others seemed to ignore him. One began to raise a pistol toward him, so he tore the thing out of the man’s hands, taking two fingers with it.
Finally he reached Ariadne Smythe’s office. The chaos was just as evident there. Whatever was going on, they were not prepared, an were not handling it well, he could tell. He pushed past a decorative assistant that looked more like a male model than an administrator, and stepped into the woman’s office.
“What do you want?” she snapped as she held a phone handset to her ear.
“You must prioritize my response,” he answered mechanically, deliberately keeping any humanity out of his voice. It served him to have them believe he was a mere product of programming. “Shall I join the defense, or shall I assist in your escape?”
Smythe covered the mouthpiece for a moment of thought, then said, “Join the defense, but if it looks like we will lose, come back for me.”
“As you wish.” The cyborg turned and headed for the fighting at a dead run.
***
As soon as the troops were down, the VTOLs turned and assaulted over the hill, triggering rocket pods that ripple-fired salvos of projectiles into the enemy complex. Fire, smoke, and explosions turned the ground there into a burning hell. Nose-mounted electric Gatling guns reached out with tracers to cut long rips into the sides of the buildings.
Return fire came from the besieged defenders. An anti-aircraft missile, its firer lucky or skilled, took one bird in the nose, filling its cockpit with flames and killing the pilot and copilot before it fell heavily to Earth and tore itself apart with the momentum of its spinning lift blades and turbines. Other birds took less critical damage, but they had accomplished their collective mission, an expensive distraction, and so they withdrew to land a kilometer away on the nearest level ground.
Beneath their retreating cover, two hundred nanocommandos flooded across the kill zone. Enough enemy weapons remained that they did not come away unscathed. Several figures spun into the air, limbs flailing, as antipersonnel mines exploded, blowing feet apart. Heavy machineguns hammered grazing fired at waist level, pre-sighted to skim along the flat open ground. Grenades flew, spraying shrapnel.
In response, the attacking forces fired their own grenade launchers, rockets and automatic weapons. Guns normally served by crews, .50 caliber and larger, were wielded easily by each commando, giving one the firepower of five or ten. Soon they silenced the defending bunkers.
Watching on his HUD and picking his way carefully across the ground – it would not do to lose a foot to a mine in hi
s moment of triumph – he saw about a third of his force spread out according to plan, racing along the perimeter to surround the complex from the hill crests above. Their job was not to attack, but instead, to intercept any escaping personnel.
Another third spread out to quarter and search the surface buildings and to eliminate any further resistance. It would be much easier to do now that they could take them from the flanks and rear.
The final third ran for the central building to follow his five special men in.
***
They used to call it marching to the sound of the guns, the cyborg thought as he did just that, though in this case the marching was more like a jog. He could have gone faster if not for his secondary priority of not killing the defenders he ran past. No matter, there were enough dead that he easily got away with the occasional bone-crunching body check, insufficient to cause his watchdog chip to react.
This also allowed him to scoop up two assault rifles, ammunition and grenades, so when he finally found the fight, he was able to do some good.
Rounding a corner, he saw the backs of the security forces, and watched as one of their heads splattered against the wall alongside him. A pair of his grenades went over their shoulders, and he followed them closely, much more closely than any mere human could have. He did take the precaution of raising an arm to cover his eyes.
He felt his clothing shred as shrapnel tore through the air in front of him, but his metal skin turned the flying shards and then he was in. Two black-clad enemy commandos scrambled to their feet at the far end of the room. The blast must have knocked them down but their armor had turned the metallic sleet.
Quick as cats, the two lined up on him and fired their weapons, but he was already jinking left, causing the majority of the bullets to miss. His, however, did not, hammering the faceplates of first one, then the other. “Bulletproof” was always relative when helmets were involved, and the clear HUD-capable shields could not stand more than a few hits. Once a round penetrated, it ricocheted off the inside of the skull-bucket and turned something survivable into pure death.
Each enemy death shot a surge of pleasure though his cerebral cortex, not enough to interfere with his functioning, but enough to reinforce his desire to kill and kill some more. Nanocommandos, he thought, based on their speed and accuracy. They would have beaten normal humans as easily as he beat them. That means my quarry is near.
Another of the black-clad enemies fired at him from the cover of a corner, and he returned fire until his weapons ran out of bullets. In a blur of motion he crouched, set the weapons down, took out two grenades and popped their rings out with his thumbs and launched them in arcs that should bounce around that corner. Then he reloaded the assault rifles and picked them up again, ready to fire.
All of this took one point one seconds.
As he raised his guns up again, he saw the grenades fly back at him. The nanocommando must have been alert enough to bat them back in his direction, or perhaps even catch and throw. He turned his back and crouched, letting the twin blasts wash over him, protecting his few vulnerable places – his eyes, nostrils, throat, armpits and slivers of groin where his armored skin had to articulate to be able to move.
Standing up, his clothing fell off of him in scraps, and he charged the corner. The enemy weapon came out on the end of a hand and spat forth a full auto burst, unaimed. Several of the shots spanged off his skin but no mere bullets made for routine antipersonnel use was going to take him down.
The man did not retract his hand fast enough, and, dropping one assault rifle, the cyborg’s hand closed on the nanocommando’s armored wrist and pulled. Most of the enemy came around the corner in a flying whip, though several bones had broken and the arm had been thoroughly dislocated. He continued the body’s flight until it came to a brutal end against the concrete wall of the corridor, as if a man had taken a chicken by the neck and slammed it onto a stump.
A double dose of pleasure skipped along his nerves. He’d found that the more up-close and personal was the kill, the more of a jolt it gave him.
Leaving the bodies behind, he ran along the corridor, searching for more enemies. A hundred meters along, he realized he was heading down a dead end. The cyborg was just about to turn around when his sensory control processor shut down. Suddenly he found himself a disembodied brain floating in a sea of nothingness, except for a digital display. At the top of the status message flashed two words: SYSTEM OVERLOAD.
***
On his display Nguyen could only see two of the five remaining. The others might be too deep underground to get a clear signal through, or they might be dead with their transmitters knocked out. Five against the heavy defenses of the complex constituted suicide.
As the plan dictated.
Nguyen sent a coded signal before he lost the two he could see. It raced at the speed of light to the men, in the process of being trapped and gunned down by the enemy’s security forces.
Its first effect was to trip one-second delays while the radios retransmitted the signal in order to reach deeper into the structure. This functioned as intended, and nearly simultaneously, all five of his dogs of war, whether living or dead, exploded. The first bursts seemed almost gentle to those nearby, more like pops accompanied by roars of escaping gas. Then came the much larger thermobaric fireballs.
The first blasts had ruptured tanks full of volatiles implanted in the suicide commandos’ torsos. The second ones, ignited by multiple devices in their armor, pushed the fuel-air mixture into every crevice, blowing open doors, sending flame through air vents, expanding to maximum volume in a way impossible for conventional explosives.
A significant portion of the underground complex, along with its defenders, was instantly immolated, allowing Nguyen’s assault forces to easily overpower what few defenders remained, and round up the noncombatants.
In one night, in just a few hours in fact, he had broken the back of the Central Authority of the Committee of Nine, lifting Direct Action to a place of prominence in the shadow government of Australia. Mopping up their operatives from their scattered offices and minor facilities would be easy – assuming they did not simply flee. Even now, Ann Alkina should be transmitting an offer of amnesty to all of the ordinary personnel who stayed in place, accepting their new master.
As soon as the other sections of the Nine heard about it – were graphically informed about it, that is – they would fall into line, he was sure. General Alkina would take over the day-to-day running of Direct Action.
General Nguyen himself, of course, would take over a reorganized Central Authority.
The existing power structure could be useful, which was the reason he would spare the bureaucrats and functionaries. They would not protest too much at the change in leadership, and he would move just as swiftly in the political arena to consolidate his power.
From the barrel of a gun if need be.
Nguyen stood in the midst of the hellish landscape, and resolved to himself: never again. Though a triumph, such blunt, unrefined methods spoke more to failure than success. To win without fighting is the epitome of strategy, Sun Tzu had said, and this fell far short of an acme.
Never again.
He would fit his steel hand with a velvet glove, and seize Australia by the scruff of the neck, bending it to his will.
All for the good of humanity.
***
Seventeen seconds of eternity later the cyborg regained his eyesight and hearing as he rebooted. The rest of his senses came back a moment later. Sitting up, he found himself without any specific damage but with stress notations and reduced capability across a wide variety of systems. Some of him now ran on backups.
Looking around, he noticed the corridor had been badly damaged, with chunks of concrete lying all over the floor, reinforcement bar sticking out of the walls, parts of the roof caved in, and all of the lights out in his section. Flame has traveled along the ceiling as well, burning the overhead material and the recessed lighting. E
xtended spectra allowed him to penetrate the dust and smoke until he was able to make out what had happened.
Where the bodies of the three nanocommandos had been, now he could find nothing but craters. It looked to him like twenty kilos of semtex or C8 had been detonated there, vaporizing the bodies, though that was clearly impossible. Hell, it must have been in the bodies, he thought. Clever, Spooky, clever. Almost got me. It must have been something new, and ten times as powerful, to fit into nanocommandos and not impair their functioning.
If all of the attacking nanocommandos were so equipped – and he had to assume there were dozens, if not hundreds – then Central Authority was doomed. The black-clad attackers had to be going through this fortress like shit through a goose, and one damaged cyborg simply wasn’t going to turn the tide.
As soon as his hybrid brain-chipset agreed with this assessment, his minder code insisted he reprioritize and preserve the life of his principal. Because he’d already decided on that himself, he was already heading toward Ms. Smythe’s office, and avoided any warning pain.
Fewer of the defenders clogged the corridors this time, and he didn’t have to harm any of them at all before he reached his goal. Bursting through the door, he did not wait for acknowledgement before saying, “We must exfiltrate immediately, ma’am.”
Smythe stared at him, obviously startled by her naked metal golem’s appearance, but she had not gotten to her position by freezing under pressure. “Agreed,” she responded, and stepped from behind her desk to follow him. In her hand she carried a compact pistol.
“Follow me,” he said, and paced himself to her jog. It was only a short distance to the VTOL hangar, where the two slim flying darts waited with their internal rotors already spinning. A pilot sat in each, waiting for their passengers to load.
Cyborg Strike Page 6