As soon as the explosion passed, she leaped upward, catching the lip of the opening. The hatch cover itself had embedded itself in a nearby building, now gleaming under the harsh glare of industrial arc lamps. Several screaming people ran away from the blast.
One didn’t, and opened up with an AK on full automatic. Bullets ripped chunks out of the wall around the heavy steel lid, a natural enough mistake in the confusion: misidentifying the threat. Repeth heaved herself out of the manhole, somersaulted, and simultaneously pulled out the PW5 on her thigh. Its tiny Needleshock rounds put down the gunman and three other guards that were staggering to their feet.
Must have been a roving patrol. Just luck they were nearby: bad luck for them, good for me.
Behind her she heard Muzik follow her onto the cold new asphalt. Checking her HUD, she bolted in the direction of the laboratory and its heavily fortified computer system.
Her information, supplied no doubt by an insider, said that all the Septagon data was kept in two places only.
One copy was discreetly hidden in a Moscow bank safe deposit box, on a multi-terabyte hard drive no bigger than a game console. Updated weekly in case of disaster, it was Winthrop Jenkins’ personal insurance policy, unknown to others in the cyborg program.
Not unknown to the CIA. Repeth knew that defections to the US and other free nations had increased an hundredfold since the Septagon coup. The cyborgs might be able to control the apparatus at the top, but the Russian people had never submitted easily to foreign domination, rising to defeat enemy after enemy that tried to invade them, ending with Napoleon and Hitler.
That data would be taken care of by a different team of unusual special operatives – a crew, if the truth ever be known, of former bank robbers that the US government had scared straight and put to work for their country. Repeth mentally saluted them and wished them well.
The only other cache of data was here, data drives within an isolated vault. Fortunately for Repeth and Muzik, the ground of the town-turned-base was soggy, tundra-like, and thus basements had not been built for the new construction. In the quick conversion, Septagon had opted to fortify an existing building.
The building they sprinted for now.
PW5 pistol in one hand, PW20 .50 caliber heavy slugthrower in the other, Repeth led the charge. The handgun popped intermittently, one shot per human being she saw. Her HUD datalinked with the chip in her brain and the one in her mechanical eye to identify targets as they presented themselves, like a video game on the screen inside the faceplate.
Down two blocks and over one brought them within a street’s length of Building W, the lab. “Wish we could have come up closer,” Repeth remarked.
“Wishes, fishes. Up we go.”
She had almost emptied her pistol’s fifty-round magazine by that time, so she quickly changed magazines and replaced the weapon in its thigh holster. Then she looked up to the top of the two-story warehouse between them and their goal, and jumped.
Muzik followed her through the air as they arced up and over the brick parapet of the old building. They both alighted heavily, and Muzik had to pull a foot loose from a soft spot in the old wood of the roof. “Watch that, we could fall through.”
“Got it.” Sidling sideways, she followed a brace beneath the surface, visible in the IR as the material sagged slightly around it, and showed a different temperature as well. Moving forward, eventually she caught sight of the laboratory, with its five-meter fence and lights blazing like white suns. Her HUD spotted motion everywhere and marked two dozen targets. She saw a pair of light armored vehicles parked within view, BTR-90s she thought, and prioritized all her weapon fire. Then she put her EMP projector in her left hand and readied her PW20 in her right.
Glancing at the HUD ranging readout, Repeth said, “Set your thrusters for sixty-five meters, and aim for that left air intake. EMP the left BTR in the air. I got the right, then pick off personnel.”
“Roger,” said Roger.
Old joke, new circumstances. She jumped.
Compressed gas shot out of her boots as her feet left the parapet, giving Repeth the extra distance she needed to clear all the obstacles and land on the laboratory roof. It would have been nice to have more than one booster and one landing charge, but this ironman suit of hers was already overloaded with gadgetry.
Her HUD showed Muzik a fraction of a second behind her and off to her left. She fired her PW20 nine times in two seconds, letting her computer targeting system do all the work, while concentrating on the EMP cannon in her other hand. When she was as close as she was likely to get she triggered it straight into the turret of the BTR-90 armored vehicle.
All the lights on the vehicle exploded and the turret spun sideways, its electrically-powered chain gun spitting shells into the night. She saw it cut down one of its own soldiers, then fall silent with a last lone pop. Smoke began to pour from its engine compartment and troops bailed out, frantically beating at flaming uniforms.
Someone yelled as she and Muzik were spotted in the air, and a burst of tracers reached into the sky far from their position.
Too much to hope, not to be seen.
Both came down with a burst of retro-thrust to slow them, otherwise they might have broken through at least the top surface of the roof. As soon as she gained steady footing, Repeth holstered her EMP cannon and ripped a large air intake cover off its mountings and discarded it to the side, revealing a second layer a meter down consisting of welded steel plating – in effect, an armored roof. She reached to her back-rack and extracted a self-opening thermite cutter frame. Popping its clamp, she let it expand its slinky-like shape until it formed a circle a meter across.
Dropping it, she let it settle on a featureless stretch of steel, then stepped back and crouched, facing away. “Ready?” she called over her comm, as Muzik should have done the same near him.
“Ready. Fire in the hole.”
End of Cyborg Strike preview.
***
Books by David VanDyke
Plague Wars Series
The Eden Plague - Book 1
Reaper’s Run - A Plague Wars Novel
The Demon Plagues - Book 2
The Reaper Plague - Book 3
The Orion Plague - Book 4
Cyborg Strike - Book 5 (Summer 2013)
Comes The Destroyer - Book 6 (Fall 2013)
Stellar Conquest Series
First Conquest - Book 1 - Contained within the anthology Planetary Assault
Desolator - Book 2
Tactics of Conquest - Book 3 (Fall 2013)
Other Works
Unfettered
Low Justice
For more information visit http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Books by David VanDyke
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Epilogue
Cyborg Strike preview
The Orion Plague Page 29