The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2

by Mat Nastos

  “Yeah. Is this correct?” Mal asked, trying to cut off the conspiracy theory laden rant he could hear building in his best friend’s voice. Of course, based on what they’d both experienced over the past month-and-a-half, David Zuzelo had every right to be paranoid. As far as the pair knew, the government really was still out to get them.

  “Yup,” answered Zuz. “Representative David McGuinness of New York.”

  “A United States Congressman?” Mal whistled.

  “Yeah, he’s a pretty big muckety-muck in D.C. so try not to kill him.”

  “That’s not fair, Z,” said Mal feigning a hurt tone in his voice. “I don’t just go around getting people killed all willy-nilly like. Heck, you’re still alive. You know…mostly.”

  “Dude! You blew up a nuclear-powered cyborg right next to me,” bellowed Zuz in a voice loud enough to more than a few eyebrows in the crowd of New York-bound passengers surrounding Mal. “And then…And THEN…your girlfriend—”

  “EX-fiancée,” corrected Mal.

  “Whatever. Your ‘ex-fiancée’ shot me three times! If it hadn’t been for my own catlike reflexes and superhuman constitution, I’d be pushing up daisies right now. You even killed my car, you fucker!”

  Zuz’s outburst caught Mal unprepared, causing a rather hearty laugh to bubble up from somewhere deep within as an image of his friend formed in the cyborg’s head. More than a tad thick in the middle, bald and with more gray in his goatee than black, David Zuzelo was about as far from superhuman as Mal could imagine. And the only thing even more out of shape than Zuz from their recent series of ‘adventures’ was his car.

  Still laughing, Mal protested, “I swear, it wasn’t my fault! Gauss dropped it on me!”

  “Just don’t kill him. The good Congressman’s name and location were the only leads I was able to pull out of that mess Hardwired put into your head before it all went on lock down last month. He’s all we got, so don’t—”

  “Don’t kill him. I know, I know,” Mal finished his friend’s sentence.

  From nearby, a flash of movement caught Mal’s eye. He watched as a flurry of bodies rushed towards the edge of the nearby platform in a frantic dash.

  “Hold on a minute, Z…something’s up,” interrupted Mal, moving towards the commotion to get a better look at what was going on.

  “Stay out of trouble, Mal. You don’t need Big Brother figuring out where you are,” came Zuz’s voice, but Mal was already in motion, the cellular device forgotten even before he had dropped it to the ground in his haste to divine what was going on.

  The cyborg pushed his way through the quickly increasing group of people crowding around something just out of his sight. Mal reached out with his enhanced senses to sift through the growing din of voices and echoes of high speed trains.

  “He fell…” came one voice.

  “Help him up,” commanded another.

  “I can’t reach him…someone grab my legs,” grunted a third.

  “TRAIN!”

  The fourth was cut off by the rumble of 462 tons of steel and glass hurtling towards the terminal at just over fifty miles per hour.

  A woman’s scream tore Mal from his conversation with Zuz, spurring him to action at the speed of thought. Head snapping towards the frantic, high-pitched sounds, the cyborg’s eyes quickly took in the full scope of the dire situation: Benjamin Franklin Gilbert lay sprawled out across the tracks, ten feet down from a trio of men trying to reach him. In the distance, a pair of stark white lights grew larger as an express vehicle sped towards them without slowing down.

  “Oh, shit…the kid!” exclaimed Mal, tossing people out of his way in a mad dash.

  “Eastbound passenger train approaching target at fifty-five miles per hour. Time to impact, four point five seconds. Chances of target’s survival: zero,” informed Mal’s internal computer without emotion.

  Mal’s expletive-filled response was drowned out by the crowd’s commotion and the blaring horn of the train rocketing down the cold subway tunnel, bleating a beeline towards the child who had fallen upon its tracks.

  “MOVE!” Mal screamed as the PATH express train broke out of the darkened tunnel and into the open cavernous area of the station. Metal on metal shrieked with no signs the vehicle’s operator had taken notice of the child he was bearing down on.

  Sprinting at his top speed, the cyborg could feel the train bearing down on him from behind—even his cybernetically enhanced body couldn’t outrun a subway car. Neck and neck with the train, with young Ben Gilbert bruised and crying less than twenty feet away, and a pair of men restraining the child’s mother from throwing herself down onto the tracks with him, every muscle in Mal’s body constricted and tightened. Powerful legs pushed hard enough against the ground to crack the concrete for a meter around, catapulting Mal into the air.

  The cyborg wasn’t sure what was louder: the squeal of the train or his own primal shout as he rocketed out in front of the imminent death hurling hungrily toward the fragile life caught unmoving in its path.

  Mal was not a religious man, despite having been raised in a fervent Southern Baptist family, so he was surprised at how quickly a prayer formed on his lips as the arc of his leap carried him forward and the rusted gray tracks of the New York City subway rushed up at him.

  “Our Father which art in Heaven…”

  The prayer was cut short as Mal slammed into the ground. Grunting from the pain of the impact, the super-soldier let his momentum carry him forward to scoop Ben up in his arms and, shielding the child with his body, somersault over the electrified third subway rail to land on the next track a split second before they were crushed by the train.

  Rolling up into a half-crouch, Mal’s period of internal celebration and round of mental self-congratulatory drinks was cut short by the blistering lights of a second train, moving in the opposite direction, staring him in the face less than a heartbeat away.

  “FUCK!” cursed Mal and the child in his arms at the same time, both realizing they were about to be crushed into a fine red paste beneath the steel rims of the subway’s wheels.

  Mal pushed the boy out of the way, attempting to follow with a blind leap of his own but was too late. The leading edge of the train knocked the wind from his body, spinning Mal’s body end over end, and pitching him like a rag doll into one of the iron support girders lining the tunnel.

  Bruised, battered, bashed and bloody, Mal decided to just lay on the nice cool grime-coated ground for a moment and let the nanobots in his system take care of his wounds—until, that is, a distant subway whistle suggested it might be a better idea to rest somewhere else. Mal concluded he was going to avoid public transit for the rest of his life: subways were just too stressful for someone with his delicate nature.

  Mal climbed slowly, painfully to his feet and limped over to make sure Ben was okay. He was greeted by a very unhappy child who promptly kicked the cyborg in his shin.

  Scowling, Mal looked down at Ben and glared.

  “Don’t make me kill you,” he grumbled, picking up the crying child and holding him tight in his arms.

  That’s when Mal noticed the stares. Nearly one hundred New York City commuters were staring at him in stunned silence, in complete awe of the miracle they had just witnessed.

  Chaos exploded as Mal, ever the showman, gave a thumb’s up to the gawking crowd. A cheer tore through the growing mob and Mal knew he was in trouble.

  Both sides of the normally dimly-lit MTA platforms went up like the forth of July with the harsh light from cellphone mounted camera flashes burst all around, washing over Mal as he handed the terror-filled Ben up to his blubbering mother’s waiting arms.

  “Damn it,” Mal murmured to himself as he clambered up from the dirty tracks and bolted for the subway’s exit ramp, clearing the turnstiles in a fluid leap.

  All Mal could think of as shouts chased him out into the humid Manhattan morning sunlight was, “Zuz is going to have a field day when he hears about this.”

&nb
sp; CHAPTER 2

  Sitting on an uncomfortable mattress covered by a comforter which could only be described as a vulgar shade of mucus, surrounded by the sort of cheap, tawdry furnishings only found in one of the crappier lower Manhattan east side hotels, Mal was pretty sure his current situation was as close to Hell as he’d come in a long time.

  And that included falling from an eighty-story building and nearly being crushed by a giant cyborg covered in trash.

  It wasn’t the low cost, cash-only dump he’d been forced to occupy due to his need to stay off the government’s radar. And it wasn’t the pounding headache he’d been dealing with for nearly every mile since he’d passed over the Californian border a few days earlier. It wasn’t even the nagging itch he felt just under his skin as the nanites flowing through his veins healed the damaged caused by his recent head-on encounter with a subway train.

  No, what had driven Mal into the bleakest, blackest of moods was the relentless laughter pounding into him from out of the tiny speakers of the hotel’s ancient rotary-dial telephone.

  “Hey, you made the news…again,” guffawed Zuz over the phone line into Mal’s quickly reddening ear. “At least it wasn’t for nuking an army base this time, right, Mal?”

  “Laugh it up, fuzzball,” groaned Mal, rubbing the palm of his hand as hard as he could into his eye socket in an attempt to push the pain out through the back of his head.

  The discomfort in Mal’s voice was obvious enough for the man on the other end of the call to pick up in spite of the great distance separating them. Zuz could tell there was something very wrong with his normally even-keeled friend.

  “What’s the matter, Mal? Tell the Zuz what’s up?”

  A fine dust sprayed the room, sent into the air by more than 300-pounds of cyborg flopping back onto the dingy bed he had been sitting on. If he had been in a better mood, Mal would have given greater attention to the silent computerized voice sharing the rear-end of his brain as it listed off the numbers and types of dust mites and other parasitic microbes that had been disturbed by the action. As it was, he just wanted to close his eyes and wait for his head to explode from the migraine bomb that must have been planted deep within his brain.

  He decided that was probably the government’s plan all along: kill him with a head grenade.

  The laugh drawn forth by the bad pun came out closer to the sound of a drowning water buffalo and worried Zuz even more. When he received no response from his old friend, Zuz asked, “Mal? Are you ok?”

  “You mean aside from having just been hit by a train?”

  Mal decided the light raining down on him from the bare hundred-watt bulb hanging from overhead was way too bright for his current condition. A flick of his wrist sent a cybernetic arm elongating to nearly six-feet in length to shatter the offending bulb with a nine-inch razor sharp claw. It was childish, he knew, but the little bit of action and subsequent darkness helped the cyborg’s attitude improve ever so slightly.

  It was Zuz’s turn for a laugh that wasn’t quite a laugh. “C’mon, man. I’ve seen you take way more damage than that and come away laughing. There’s more to it than you’re letting on. What’s wrong?”

  Sighing, Mal gave in to his friend’s polite badgering. He knew it was the only way he’d eventually get some rest. “I’ve been having horrible headaches, Z…and they seem to be getting worse the further away from Los Angeles I get.”

  “Do you think there’s a malfunction somewhere? You did get banged up pretty good last month.”

  Scenes of gunfire and fighting and killing flashed through Mal’s head—the briefest of recaps of what had happened to the cyborg during his escape and then liberation from Project Hardwired.

  Wow, thought Mal, had it really only been a month since he woke up to find his life shattered? It seemed like so much longer.

  “I’ve run diagnostics across all my systems and everything comes up within normal operating parameters. I did find some odd error logs stored in the root system that show failed callbacks to the Abraxas mainframe. Once it went down I lost some functionality, but it all seemed to be external. The gears inside all appear to be chugging along just fine.”

  “Hmmm,” said Zuz, trying to logic his way through a series of events that had been completely messed up from the get-go. “Have you had any luck accessing the data-dump that knocked you loose?”

  “Nothing. I’ve tried hundreds of times—maybe thousands—to unlock the Hardwired files in my head, but nothing.” Mal tried once more to have the computerized portion of his mind pull up and open the files he knew were stored there, that were stored across every one of the billion or so nanodrones that made up his bionic prosthetics and acted like a cloud-drive to hold the zetabytes of information that had been downloaded into his systems. “Is that what’s causing my headaches you think?”

  Mal could almost hear Zuz nodding in agreement from the opposite end of the country.

  “We know that whatever happened to you—whatever caused you to come out of their conditioning—downloaded a lot of information into your systems. Way more than they were designed to handle. It might be some sort of overload. Maybe the computer brain they gave you can’t keep up with it all,” guessed Zuz. “Could be brainal leakage…”

  Mal ignored Zuz’s joke completely, another sign he wasn’t at the top of his mental game.

  “I don’t know…hopefully the good Congressman McGuinness can help me figure that out. If he was one of the top guys at Hardwired—one of the men who helped form it—he should be able to tell me more about exactly what got jammed into my head.”

  “That’s why you’re there. Find the bastard and make him spill the beans,” agreed Zuz. “If he doesn’t know the encryption keys for the stuff in your head, I’ll bet cash money he is in close contact with someone who does.”

  “So what have you got for me?” asked Mal, altering the conversation’s course away from the possibility that his head might really be getting ready to explode. “How am I going to get to McGuinness? You said you had a plan…a contact here in the city. Who is it?”

  “Do you remember Amy Jensen?”

  “From school?” asked Mal. “Cute girl—a bit snobby…amazing rack?”

  “Yeah,” smiled Zuz across the line. “Great boobs. That’s her.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, unlike either of us, Amy made something of herself,” continued Zuz.

  “Wait a minute. I resent that. I was a Captain in the United States Army…a ranger. One of the most highly trained members of the armed forces. I like to think of that as having ‘made something’ of myself,” said Mal, more than a little insulted by his friend’s remark.

  “Dude, you’re unemployed and homeless,” rebutted Zuz, feeling incredibly smug.

  Mal couldn’t argue with the computer engineer’s assessment of his current situation. “Fair enough. Continue.”

  “Well, Amy is a lawyer working out of the DA’s office there in Manhattan and we’ve stayed in touch over the years…she’s written some guest posts for my blog. Anonymously, of course.”

  “Of course.” The statement had Mal both encouraged to have someone in a good position to help him make contact with McGuinness and incredibly worried that the woman had anything at all to do with Zuz’s conspiracy-powered website. Zuz was a great friend: incredibly loyal, and highly intelligent, but at the same time he was also more than a little…off. Not that Mal was one to throw stones. After all, he was an escaped former killer for a clandestine government black ops project. “How much does she know?”

  The long pause that followed his question worried Mal immensely.

  “Everything,” came the answer from Zuz a few very long seconds later.

  “Like ‘everything’ everything?” asked Mal in a concerned whisper.

  “Well…uh…yeah.”

  Mal shook his head. “Are you sure that was the best idea, Z? I mean, even if old Amy is on the up-and-up and wants to help us, it could mean trouble for her.
”

  “I know, Mal,” came Zuz’s answer over the line. “But she lawyered it out of me. You know I was never all that good with women.”

  The self-analysis by his friend was enough to bring the first real smile to Mal’s face in weeks. It was true. David Zuzelo could never hold up against the whims of a woman. By the time college was over, the man ended up with nearly a hundred pieces of Tupperware because he’d wind up buying sets from every semi-attractive co-ed that showed up on their doorstep selling it. He almost ate himself into diabetes because he couldn’t say no to girl scouts or their delicious cookies. There was no way Zuz would stand a chance against an intelligent female lawyer with great boobs. No way at all.

  “There is one minor hitch, though,” said Zuz, interrupting from the safety of his hiding place in the wilds of California.

  “What kind of a ‘minor hitch,’ Z?”

  “The only way Amy’ll help us is if you meet her in person. After everything that’s been going on about you in the news, she wants to talk to you. To see for herself.”

  Nodding to himself, Mal couldn’t fault the woman’s reasoning. The government had placed him on the FBI’s most wanted list within hours of Project Hardwired’s destruction. In the weeks that followed, the government’s Department of Homeland Defense had gone through a lot of trouble painting the renegade cyborg as a terrorist on par with Tim McVey or the Unabomber. The fact Amy Jensen was willing to talk to him at all was a sign she was on their side…either that or it was a trap and the government would have an army waiting to take him in or worse.

  Zuz seemed to hear the unspoken question running through his tortured friend’s mind. “I trust her, Mal. She’ll help us…she’ll help you if you let her.”

  “Ok, Z,” sighed Mal, doing his best to override the paranoia that had help keep him alive and free for the past month. “Should I call her from the phone here in my room?”

  “God, no,” scolded Zuz. “The only reason you can call me is because I’ve got the signal bouncing all over the globe. The last thing we want to do is alert the Feds that you’re talking to Amy.”