Cyborg Strike (17 page)

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-storey 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, 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.”

Simultaneous white-hot eruptions of high-tech
thermite shot burning debris into the air, and before it fell
Repeth waded into the smoke and dropped to the steel armor plate
with a heavy clang. In front of her she could see a precise round
hole cut by the breaching frame.

“EMP grenade!” she yelled into her suitcomm,
detaching one of the devices from her back-rack and tossing it
armed down the hole.

The electromagnetic pulse would have little
effect on normals, so she quickly sent two Needleshock grenades
after it and then fired a burst from her PW20 for good measure.
Then she dropped feet first down the hole, knees bent and trusting
to her armor and cybernetics.

She stood up in hell.

Something had caught fire, some kind of
volatile chemical. Her helmet automatically switched to a
forced-air feed good for fifteen minutes, and then she had ten
minutes of internal oxygen in a rechargeable pack next to her
lungs. Once breathing ceased to be a worry, the heat made itself
felt.

Repeth’s HUD was completely overwhelmed, her
external sensors blinded, so she chose a direction and walked until
she ran into a wall. Moving rapidly to her right, she found what
she thought was a door and mule-kicked it.

Now she could see an opening, and she charged
through it, finding herself in a room with stainless steel tables
and refrigerator slabs: a morgue.
Formaldehyde
, she thought.
I dropped right into a room full of embalming fluid, and ignited
it with my own grenades.

She found her lower extremities still on fire
from the liquid she had waded through. Unfortunately her armored
hands were not dexterous enough to operate the fire extinguishers
she could see, so she told her suit to inject painkillers and
ignored the flames. They would burn themselves out of fuel.

A door across the room opened and she raised
her PW20, aiming a burst into the portal even before she could see
a target. Apparently affected by the heat, the weapon fired three
rounds and then jammed.

Cursing, she slung it again. She could try to
clear it later. Instead, she charged the entrance. The first figure
through had fallen, struck by at least one of her shots, but the
next took the full brunt of her rush.

And bounced her back.

Shock blossomed within her psyche as she
scrabbled on the tile floor and almost fell, knocking over a table.
Her suit stabilizers, still set for flight, jetted gas to help keep
her upright, but her vision was fixed on the figure that had sent
her reeling.

Large for a man, his size was not the issue.
An implacability filled his movements, and his face seemed plastic,
mask-like. He moved fast, almost as fast as she.

Cyborg. Shadow Man.

Snarling, she brought her EMP cannon up and
fired it even as he launched himself toward her. She felt the
charge pass from her palm contacts, through the conductors in her
glove, and into the weapon. A bright flash confirmed its
discharge.

Her suit jets fired again as the heavy weight
impacted her chest and drove her backward, but then the thing fell
to the floor, face-down and senseless. Now it seemed like a
manikin, a human robot that had been turned off.

She brought her armored foot down on its
neck, stomping repeatedly until its reinforced spine had detached
and its head lolled. Then she turned off the stabilizer jets,
afraid they would betray her by interfering with some intended
maneuver.

The whole exchange had taken only seconds,
and the adrenaline surge sang through her body as she turned back
to the doorway to confront another golem. This one held a heavy
weapon, a short-barreled high-caliber slug-thrower of some sort,
perhaps an automatic shotgun. It hammered fire toward her and she
felt herself spun around by its impacts. Going with the momentum,
she rolled down behind a heavy stainless steel table and then came
up lifting.

Three hundred kilos of stainless flew across
the room to drive her enemy back, knocking his weapon off target
even as he fired. Her impression was that these things did not have
quite her speed, but were tougher in their natural state, with some
kind of armor laminated into or onto their bodies themselves.

They might be stronger, too, and seemed to
feel no pain.

Her fifteen-second countdown reached zero on
her HUD, and she fired the EMP charge just as the thing roared to
its feet. Lightning played across its surface, crawling along the
steel table it held onto, and it staggered, but did not go
still.

The metal grounded it
, she thought,
diverted some of the charge.
While it remained weak and
slow, she holstered the EMP cannon and grabbed the same table to
lift it above her head, bringing its blade-like edge down on the
center of the thing’s body with all her augmented strength.

The impact made a perceptible dent in the
Shadow Man’s rib cage, but then it clamped on to the table with
claw-like hands and refused to let go.

Fine, you can come with it
, she
thought, and swung the piece of furniture in a brutal arc that
ended with both the table and the Shadow Man flung across the room
and into the chamber of formaldehyde flames that still burned
behind her.

Then she slammed that door, dropped its
locking handle and set another heavy table against it, then
another, to let it burn.

By this time another fifteen seconds had
passed, so she drew the EMP cannon and headed for the door,
wondering just how many of these damned things roamed their
factory. Once in the corridor, she turned left, hopefully in
Muzik’s direction. Better to stay near him for mutual support. She
had defeated two of the cyborgs because of the specialized EMP
weapon, but God help her if it ever failed to work.

Bullets ripped from a cross-corridor as she
passed, but she ignored their impacts. Her armor should be proof
against rounds up to standard 7.62, and anything heavier she hoped
to avoid, or at least survive to complete her mission. Right now
she had one objective, and it wasn’t shooting red shirts.

A burst of static on her HUD told her that an
EMP had just been triggered, and her shielded systems showed the
energy came from up ahead, through the doorway at the end of the
passageway. Speeding up, she aimed a front kick at the lock plate
and broke it at that point. The door itself flew through 180
degrees and its knob embedded itself in the wall to the side,
holding it fast.

Inside, she saw one enemy cyborg down and
another throw Muzik across the room to impact on a slab-sided steel
door.
OBJECTIVE MATCH
flashed on her HUD and she realized
this was the entrance to the computer vault.

But she had bigger problems.

Now that Roger was out of the line of fire,
she aimed and triggered her EMP, but nothing happened. Glancing
down at the weapon, she realized a rifle bullet had torn through
its outer casing and rendered its mechanism inoperative.

She had no time to think as the Shadow Man
accelerated toward her with freight-train speed. Bending her knees,
she fell backward even as the thing reached for her, and she lifted
the sole of her foot as her shoulders hit the floor, kicking
upward. This did not damage it, but sent the cyborg sailing over
her to embed itself in the room’s wall, buying her a moment’s time.
Rolling to her feet, she stripped off her left-hand gauntlet and
slapped her bare palm on the metal skin of the enemy cyborg’s
leg.

Nothing happened.

Fifteen seconds
, she thought angrily.
I triggered the EMP, expending the charge, but the weapon did
not function, and I lost track.

That was all Repeth had time to think as the
thing kicked out at her, but it still flailed half-inside the wall,
so she added her right hand to its leg, pulled and rotated as a man
swings a small child in fun.

Only this time, the cyborg wasn’t going to
enjoy it.