by Phil Wrede
Almost in unison, the other two yelled, “You don't get to order us around!”
Maximilian clenched his exoskeleton's fists open and closed, frustrated almost to the point of being furious. “I got promoted nearly half an hour before the two of you. Seniority is seniority, so follow my fucking orders and get back to tracking Cyber-Knife before he -”
His tirade was cut short by a barely coherent crackling sound, the snap of Cyber-Knife's internal plasma blaster letting off a shot. It smashed into the left knee of Dinesh's suit, instantly melting the joint and circuits into a slaggy lump. Cyber-Knife was illuminated momentarily by the green light; he looked like some kind of demon, twisted upside down on the ceiling.
Denny cut loose with an extended burst from his machine gun, overwhelming the chamber with echoes from not only his gunfire, but the clanking of the casings of expended rounds as they clattered against the floor. Dinesh stomped in a furious circle, pivoting around his now immobile leg and waving his arms like a petulant child.
“God-shit-fuck-dammit-fuck-motherfucker!” Dinesh screamed over the sound of the .50-caliber machine gun.
The whirr of the gunfire died down. “I think I got him,” Denny whispered. “I can't not have gotten him.”
The computing towers ringing the trans-dimensional door hummed to life, the blue eyes perched at their topmost points glowing with singular purpose. “Well, that answers that question, doesn't it?” Dinesh replied. “He's figured out how to worm into the most secure sector of the network!”
“Fall back to the door,” Maximilian ordered. “Make him go through us to get what he wants.”
The damaged suit made a dreadful sound as Dinesh dragged his now-immobile leg behind him on the way to the door. Denny stayed close behind him, defaulting to standard operating procedure in lieu of having an actual idea.
We can't just shoot everything in sight,” Maximilian continued.
“No, but we can sure as hell bring the ceiling down and bury this subbasement. The building won't even take that long to rebuild, we're so far down underground,” Dinesh said.
Up above, Cyber-Knife's eyes widened. He didn't think that they'd really destroy a military building just to stop him. It was a hospital, for fuck's sake! Not even alien robot ninjas played at that shit!
“'Acceptable losses,'” Dinesh observed.
“Why the fuck not?” Denny said, his first-ever recorded use of profanity shocking his colleagues into staring at him agape. “I always did want to go out in a blaze of glory.”
“EMP time, then.”
“There should be a switch near your right hand, both of you,” Dinesh said. “It's the fail-safe; the electromagnetic pulse that will overload our suits, his cybernetics, and the trans-dim circuit. He’ll be trapped, on this side of the door, with not a single functioning piece of... enhancement.” He spoke his last words with a strange mix of pleasure and envy.
“It creates a cascading pulse effect,” Denny added, “so only one of us has to flip the switch. The EMPs on the other two suits will trigger automatically in response to proximity.”
“Then, why the fuck are we standing around? Let’s trigger the detonations and get this over with already,” shouted Maximilian.
“Do you want to go looking for a body in this room, on foot, without so much as a flashlight to guide the way?” Dinesh asked.
“Not to mention climbing out of one of these things sans any mechanical assistance,” said Denny.
“Fine,” Maximilian said, grudgingly. “Denny, Dinesh, I need you to flush him out. Chase him to me, and with a little luck, he’ll fall into my outstretched hands without a scrap of life left in him.”
Denny and Dinesh obediently lit up the ceiling - the whole room, really - with bursts from flamethrower and machine gun alike. Cyber-Knife crept back towards the seam between the chamber’s wall, and its ceiling, hoping to buy himself a little more time, and his enemies some exhaustion, of both their energy and their ammunition. Within moments, they could all, predator and prey alike, see that this plan was doomed to failure.
“Fuck this,” grumbled Maximilian, activating the EMP switch under his hand. The back of his exoskeleton let off a shower of blue sparks, and the other two followed suit immediately after, one in white, and the third, red.
The lights disappeared first, but soon, everything went dark in Cyber-Knife's head - his vision, his HUD, the constant stream of information that his computer fed him. He couldn't tell at first, but he lost his grip on the ceiling, and fell all the way down to the floor. He felt the impact, most certainly, felt each and every bone in his body snap as he bounced off the floor and lay still. The pain overwhelmed him, like a bright red light growing in his core and radiating out through the tips of his fingers and toes. He couldn't scream, and couldn't even have heard himself if he had.
He didn't panic, though, because they thought they'd won. The generals were stupid enough to think that the technology inside him was the only thing that made him dangerous. They'd bred killing into him, from the DNA strands on up. They couldn't take that away from him by frying some electronic circuits, and they certainly couldn't stop him with Hnid's teachings still in his mind.
He felt his lungs wheeze, felt shards of bone prick against and cut gashes in his bruised muscles, but he blocked out the objections of his physical body. His mind was what would enable him to survive this day; he would shape reality to match his desires. Before, he would have been content to escape, even to quietly slip away, but after this, there would be vengeance.
Excalibur had fallen from its sheath when the EMP blew, and it had fallen to the ground nearly a hundred feet away from where Cyber-Knife eventually landed. It had cried out for its friend a dozen times, but with no success. Excalibur had almost assumed the worst, but then, Cyber-Knife stirred.
He couldn't move like the most dangerous warrior humanity had ever produced - he had no deliberation or awareness in his movements. Yet, somehow, Cyber-Knife was moving, on his feet and closing the distance between himself and the generals, who were still struggling to free themselves from the metal shells they'd sacrificed to keep him their prisoner a little longer.
Cyber-Knife reached the general with the machine gun arm first, pulled himself haltingly up that arm, stopping halfway along his climb to catch his breath. “Cyber-Knife, what are you doing?!” Excalibur cried out. “You have to get out of here!” He couldn't, or wouldn't, listen.
On shaky legs, Cyber-Knife mounted the top of Denny's exoskeleton, standing on the bar that served as the machine's ad-hoc collar bone. General Denny looked up at Cyber-Knife as he thrashed against what he knew now was his high-tech tomb. He wasn't going anywhere, and Cyber-Knife made sure he wouldn't ever again when he punched straight down with speed that should've been impossible for a man without mechanically assisted muscles. He burst the general's head with the impact of his fist, spraying the insides of General Denny's head all over the cockpit of his beloved machine. Excalibur could only think of one word to describe the terror in the general's voice: medieval.
Cyber-Knife tumbled off the freshly de-piloted exoskeleton, and Excalibur noticed that he seemed to be moving more assuredly now, but due to what, the sword couldn't really say for certain. “Cyber-Knife!” Excalibur yelled again, but like before, the commando didn't respond. There was still pain in his stride, but it appeared like it lessened with every step he took.
Cyber-Knife gripped the left leg off Denny's mechanical exoskeleton and heaved against it. He only managed to drag its foot across the ground, giving off a horrendous metal-on-metal shriek that bounced all up and down and across the chamber. The two surviving generals yelled ever louder, ever more panicked, and Cyber-Knife tightened his grip on the exoskeleton - bending the metal beneath his grip - and threw all his muscle power at it again, yelling furiously.
This time, he lifted the enormous mechanism clear off the ground and held it over his head for just an instant. As it dipped, he swung it aro
und like some kind of improvised baseball bat, smashing it into Maximilian's suit and spraying shards of metal, glass, and plastic everywhere. The debris cut across Cyber-Knife's face and hands, opening up new wounds where an instant ago it didn't look like such a thing was possible. With a second swing, he knocked Maximilian's mechanical legs out from under him; the crash the machine made as it hit the ground was only dwarfed by the sounds Cyber-Knife made as he struck home with his newfound weapon over and over and over again. Excalibur couldn't hear the general's screams over the smashing sounds, and the sword was glad - it was pretty sure it didn't want to.
Cyber-Knife must have overcome the effects of the EMP within moments, Excalibur decided, and done so exclusively through the power of his mind. He must've just forced his cybernetics to come back online! The generals had made their last remaining move and lost.
Only General Dinesh remained, and to his credit, he'd actually managed to unhook himself from half of his safety harness before Cyber-Knife was upon him. All Cyber-Knife had to do was jump, and he landed atop Dinesh's suit, staring down at him with a cold sort of disdain. “P-please,” was all Dinesh was able to sputter out.
Cyber-Knife flipped, spinning into the darkness and back down again along the suit's flamethrower arm, breaking through the fuel line and spilling all of it along the ground. Dinesh toppled, and Cyber-Knife danced mockingly out of the way.
He grabbed the other arm, the one with the scythe, and dragged the whole exoskeleton over to the computers attached to the portal. The whole cockpit had crumpled around the general, who clearly wasn't going to be escaping without external mechanical assistance.
Cyber-Knife kicked at the machine's chestpiece, knocking free a plate of armor and revealing its nonfunctioning power core. “Looks like you need a jump,” he growled, before thrusting his hand into the mechanism and sparking the battery to life with some current from his internal plasma cannon.
He slammed Dinesh's scythe into the power cables driving the trans-dimensional gateway. The door snapped to life, creating a kind of eerie sucking sound in the middle of the room, and the damaged electronics of the general's suit started to to feed back on themselves. Sparks of current jumped all across the metal; a few burned the general's face.
“The reaction should find a way to sustain itself in a minute,” Cyber-Knife said, “which is about fifty seconds longer than that body'll be able to sustain you.” Already, the current had started arcing up through the metal frame; the general shrieked arrhythmetically as the electricity shot in and out of his body.
The intermittent yelps quickly gave way to one large sustained cry of pain as the entire construct turned into a big conductor, every inch of which was shortly covered in harsh bolts of lightning. Just as the general began to approach what could generously be called “extra-crispy,” Cyber-Knife brought his leg down in a harsh, swift kick, snapping the rod connecting the general's exoskeleton to the scythe. Fortunately, the energy reaction had, true to Cyber-Knife's prediction, stabilized, so the transdimensional gateway could remain open without an ancillary power source feeding it.
Cyber-Knife picked up the scythe, still red-hot from all the electricity, and stared viciously into Dinesh's eyes, seemingly oblivious to the skin cooking on the tips of his fingers. It was all Dinesh could do to weakly wheeze in Cyber-Knife's direction.
“Let it be known, from this day forward,” Cyber-Knife growled through gritted teeth, “that Cyber-Knife is no longer an obedient weapon under the control of a runaway military machine, but a deadly and independent agent, who will utterly obliterate anyone or anything who tries to manipulate him. In short, I am not your pawn anymore, and I have a message for anyone who thinks they can fuck with the ultimate fucking killing machine, now or in the future.”
Cyber-Knife leapt up and swung the scythe around in an arc, burying it in Dinesh's chest and slamming it through the body of the metal exoskeleton. Dinesh coughed out his last words: “You fucking cunt.” Blood exploded from his charred lips, and he tried to glare defiantly as Cyber-Knife, but he just sort of fell open limply and died.
A rumbling noise sounded from inside the machine's chest, the sort of sound that only ruptured, unstable power cells make. Cyber-Knife took a few steps back, looking uncertain for the first time since he struggled up after the EMP detonation, and instinctively reached for Excalibur on his back. Of course, the sword, his trusty companion, wasn't where he expected it to be. Excalibur cried out to him one more time, and finally, Cyber-Knife turned around, frantically scanning about for it.
It wasn't to be - the exoskeleton's core went critical, exploding outward like a star going nova, knocking Cyber-Knife over with the force of its blast and into the gateway. He held onto the edges for a moment, and his eyes actually locked onto Excalibur before he vanished, but then, he did, and Excalibur was left alone as the energy feeding the portal flickered, then cut out entirely.
CHAPTER 9
What was left of General Dinesh turned to what remained of General Maximilian; between the two of them, they didn't even have enough of their original parts left to make a complete human being. Maximilian bobbed along on a floating couch - literally, a large padded seat hovering five feet above the ground - and all four of his limb stumps were capped with capsules of regenerative fluid. The general had been offered cybernetic replacements for his severed limbs, only to have that option dismissed straightaway. So, the medics were trying an experimental new treatment on him: if it worked, they'd have finally coaxed the human body into regrowing its own limbs, and if it didn't, his options would be no worse than they'd been before. Dinesh's head floated around on a metal-and-leather couch, much smaller than Maximillian's; he was hooked up to an apparatus that gave him full control of his movement and even simulated his voice. Full-body regeneration was still a concept out of science fiction, and he had chosen this stopgap measure until the replacement body of a suitable volunteer could be selected. He was excited to feel young again.
“Are you certain about this, Maximilian?”
“I don't see that we have a choice.”
“Cyber-Knife chose to maroon himself on a dead and empty Earth. Let him have it, for all the good it can do him.”
“You truly want to take your eyes off the ultimate killing machine before you've seen his body chopped up into a billion pieces? You can sleep well at night knowing he's out there, somewhere, and probably plotting his revenge?”
The only sound in the hallway was the electronic clicking of Dinesh's respirator for a good long while. “Point well taken.”
The guards at the end of the hallway stiffened at attention when they recognized who was approaching. “Generals,” the taller one on the left said, “I can honestly say I never expected to see you down here.”
“Desperate times, son,” Maximilian replied, “call for uncanny measures.”
The shorter one on the right took two steps away from the access interface. “If you'd be so kind to -” and cut himself off in midsentence as he realized neither general had a hand remaining with which to engage access protocols.
Maximilian pushed himself up the back of his anti-grav couch, slipping his head into a hard-mounted cybernetic cradle. “Don't worry, soldier; the eggheads prepared us for this contingency.” He closed his eyes in furious thought for a few moments before a perfectly articulated robot hand popped out of the couch's base. It extended on a metallic arm and came to rest on the door's palm print reader. The reader chimed immediately.
“Th-thank you, sir,” the shorter one stammered. “Now I need you to identify yourself via voiceprint.”
Maximilian raised his voice and almost shouted, “General Maximilian Gerhardt Onobope McAllister, authorization code one-two-three-four-five-fuck-you.”
MOM’s voice responded, “Authorization accepted.”
“You really don't have a head for numbers, do you, General?” Dinesh remarked.
“If my vocal authorization matches, who the fuck gives a shi
t what my access code is?”
The taller guard finally broke in, “General Dinesh, sir, we just need your retina scan and voice print for final confirmation.”
“Then it's a good thing the bastard left me my eyes, isn't it?” the general muttered as he floated up to a newly opened panel. A brilliant red light shined across his face as fast as the flash of a camera. He wobbled in midair from the shock of it all, but only for a second. As he regained his balance, he said, “General Dinesh Barton Dinh Fong Yeltsin, authorization code three delta, fourteen omega, ninety seven wounded animals cry for help.”
MOM’s voice echoed through the hall again: “Thank you, generals. You may now enter the chamber.”
They could hear the sound of the round door's locks disengaging as they slid into the wall with a thump each time, rattling the building's structure. It, in turn, rolled into the wall, creeping forward slowly and letting the light from the hallway leak in short inches at a time. The guards averted their eyes, as their security clearance wasn't high enough to allow them to know the contents of the room they were tasked with guarding.
The room was taller than the hallway, by a few orders of measure, but every inch of it was used. From floor to ceiling, it was packed with innumerable rows and columns of plastic and metal containers, each one labeled with an incomprehensible barcode. The spaces between the shelves were barely wide enough to allow a single ambulatory individual to advance; as they crossed into the room, Maximilian heard the metal edges of his couch screech against the shelving.
A weasely little man emerged from the shadows between rows, with the few remaining wisps of hair atop his head slicked back in mad refusal to accept the fate to which his genes had condemned him. His skin was greasy and freshly pockmarked; he smiled as he caught sight of Dinesh and Maximilian, and his teeth looked like two rows of tiny fish as they caught the light just right. He wore the olive green of the military, and the decorations on his sleeves marked him a colonel. His breast was adorned with ribbons that neither of them recognized.