Cyborg Strike (18 page)

She aimed to slam its head into a heavy lab
bench, but it got its arms up in front and instead grabbed tight
onto the furniture. Now she merely had hold of a leg, while it had
an anchor point. It began to kick.

It’s stronger and tougher than I am,
Repeth reminded herself. Seven seconds remained on her HUD
countdown, which was about five seconds longer than she would be
able to hold on.

She let go. Her right hand dipped down and
grasped the PW20, which she thumbed to full auto even as she
performed a clearing procedure and reloaded with a fresh magazine,
the motions fast and machinelike from endless practice. When she
pulled the trigger, thirty heavy Shock rounds smacked into the
cyborg center mass, sparking discharges as the thing scrambled to
its feet. The barrage staggered it backward and it swayed,
disoriented and damaged from the .50 caliber electrical
bursts..

Quick-swapping the magazine, she got the
weapon lined up and pulled the trigger again even as the Shadow
Man’s hand closed on its barrel and twisted. Between two cybernetic
limbs, the PW20 bent first, specifically the barrel, and after the
first shot it jammed again. Repeth let it go.

The cyborg immediately swung the weapon like
a club, but Repeth ducked and lashed out with her foot to sweep the
thing’s ankle. This damaged neither fighter but did knock the
Shadow Man to his knees and cause him to drop the PW20. In turn he
shot forward like a wrestler, hands questing for a hold.

If ever he gets me in his grip, I’m
done,
she thought. Her advantages included speed, armor and
weaponry, while his were strength and the ability to take
punishment. Controlling his reaching arms, she gripped the naked
metal skin near his articulated wrist joint and let the raw
electrical charge explode through her palm contacts.

The cyborg stiffened to rigidity, glowing
eyes winking out. Not certain how long the thing would remain
disabled, she quickly took a grip on its skull by plunging her
fingers deep into its eye sockets. She could feel the human tissue
give behind the mechanical eyes as she pushed them into its organic
brain. Then, with the purchase the orbits gave her, she set a knee
against its neck and, with a roar of effort, ripped its head
off.

Gasping in her helmet, she whirled, checking
the room for further threats. Movement in the corridor alerted her
to more enemies coming. The only firearm she had left was her PW5
pistol, which she pointed as she crouched, popping off single shots
at the human guards working their way toward her. Ripples of
automatic fire came back at her, ricocheting around the room and
striking her armor in several places. One plucked at her ungloved
left hand, and when she looked down, her little finger had lost
most of its flesh, showing nothing but gleaming laminated bone.
Automatic pain control ensured she felt little of the damage.

Dodging behind a lab bench, she worked her
away around to where Muzik crouched, shaking his head. “Roger! You
all right?” she asked.

“Will be,” he mumbled. “Need a couple
minutes. Hit me in the head, and I think I bruised my spine. I’ve
got shooting sensations all along my extremities.”

“Hang in there,” Repeth said, rising up to
engage the guards. “Where’s your PW20?”

“Thing took it away. Broke,” he replied. “AK
over there.” He pointed toward a corner, and a Russian-made assault
rifle in the dead hands of a fallen guard.

Dropping back down, Repeth crab-walked over
to pull the AK from the dead man’s hands, taking his ammo pouches
as well. Stamping ruthlessly onto her conscience, she fired three
magazines on full automatic at the guards in quick succession. Her
only concession to lethality was to aim low, hoping the ricochets
off the hard floor would be less deadly.

The Russian guards were, after all, only
human.

Once they had been driven back, Repeth pulled
an electronic lock pick the size of a pack of cigarettes from a
slot within her armor, checking it first. Fortunately undamaged,
soon she had it slotted into the card-reader-and-number-pad lock on
the large steel door, where she pushed a button on its side. A red
light lit up to let her know it was doing its work. In five
seconds, the telltale turned green.

“Got it,” she told Muzik. “Can you cover
me?”

“Think so,” he grunted, rolling to his knees
behind the lab bench. Taking the AK and the remaining magazines
from Repeth, he rose up to rest his elbows on the black plastic,
the rifle pointed toward the open door. “Go,” he rasped.

Dashing into the vault opened, she was
surprised to see two techs cringing behind computer desks. The
lockdown must have gone into effect without letting them out. She
popped each one with the PW5 and let them flop on the floor in
electric convulsions. Then she started looking for hard drives.

As small as such things could be anymore, she
had to hope her quarry was recognizable and wasn’t hidden or
disguised. If it had been her she would have set up several decoys,
but then again, they certainly didn’t expect anyone to get this
far.

Of course her EMP grenade and her last
breaching charge would between them probably fry or destroy all the
chips in the room, but she didn’t want to gamble. As she searched
the room, she mentally kicked herself for shooting the techs.
Perhaps one of them would have talked.

Instead, she grabbed everything that looked
like a data drive and stuffed it into an outer pouch, and then
kicked all the computers to smithereens. Stuttering AK fire from
the outer room reminded her that the whole base was probably
converging on their position. She’d have to accept the slight
possibility that the data would survive if they were to get out
alive. It wasn’t worth dying for.

First she threw the somnolent techs out of
the vault, then she set the breaching charge on the middle of the
floor. Exiting the room, she took out an EMP grenade and tossed it
back into the enclosed space, slamming the heavy door on it. The
electromagnetic pulse should wipe all magnetic media, and would
also set off the blasting cap embedded in the block of plastique
for a one-two punch.

Once she felt the blast through the closed
door, she moved away to take up a position at the entrance to the
outer room. Firing a shot at a dimly-seen target down the
corridor’s angle, she asked, “You good to move? Because we gotta
go.”

“Yeah,” Muzik said heavily as he got to his
feet. He handed her the AK as he moved from behind the table. “My
targeting and HUD’s all screwed up. Take this. I’ll follow
you.”

“Right. Going for an egress breach.” Her HUD
had mapped everything it had seen so far, and plotted a path toward
the nearest wall outer.

Repeth led them along a different route, AK
in her left hand, PW5 in her right. More than once enemy bullets
slammed into her armor, but it was easily tough enough to handle
such conventional rounds. The Russian propensity for keeping the
old Kalashnikov standbys in service was their salvation.

After shooting more than a dozen guards with
Needleshock, she ran out of the specialized ammo. Holstering the
pistol, she stomped down corridors with the AK firing single shots,
precisely aimed by her HUD caret. Seldom did she need more than one
round to put a target down.

At what the HUD predicted was an outer wall
she handed the AK to Muzik. “Hold the door. I’m going to break
through.” They’d only had one cutting frame each, so she was going
to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

A few powerful kicks broke the inner paneling
and then burst the ancient brick of its construction. Harsh white
light shone through, but she did not wait to survey their escape
route. She had to hope they could penetrate whatever cordon had
been set up, by dint of surprise. “Let’s go!” she barked, charging
outward unarmed.

Unarmed with a ranged weapon, anyway. Backed
up by cybernetic nerves and augmented muscles, the laminated bones
of her fists and feet made them into pile drivers, especially
armored as three of the limbs were. With Muzik to cover her, she
sprinted in a curving path even as she took stock of what they
faced.

An inoperative BTR-90 armored vehicle
provided cover to a couple of soldiers, their weapons spouting
muzzle flame as bullets quested for her augmented flesh.
Serpentine, she jinked and dodged, then leaped. One armored boot
slammed into the enemy’s AK, smashing it to pieces and breaking the
bones of the man’s hands and arms that held it. As she scrambled
for purchase atop the tank-like vehicle, she reached out and
snatched the barrel of the other weapon, twisting it like a plastic
hose.

The man made the natural mistake of pulling
the trigger, or perhaps her wrenching grab had mashed his finger
down on it. The tough Kalashnikov loading and firing mechanism did
its job only too well; not one but two rounds smashed into the
barrel blockage, and the swelling gas burst the stamped metal apart
along its seams, shredding the man’s face with shrapnel.

He would probably live, but unless he got
infected with Plague, he wasn’t going to be pretty anymore.

Repeth turned back to see Muzik following at
a more deliberate pace, firing his weapon on semi-automatic, single
shots. Several more infantry blazed away at her compatriot,
slamming full automatic fire into his armor. He staggered but did
not fall.

The two cybercommandos’ survivability seemed
amazing, but even as she leaped from the top of the BTR, she
remembered the North Hollywood shootout of 1997. A standard case
study for tactical police, two bank robbers in full body armor
using military-style automatic weapons had fought dozens of lightly
armed cops for more than twenty minutes, being struck hundreds of
times by pistol and shotgun rounds before finally succumbing.

Repeth’s and Muzik’s capabilities were at
least two orders of magnitude greater, lacking only firepower. As
long as their armor fended off the rifle bullets, the enemy would
need heavy machineguns or RPGs to take them down.

Unfortunately, she knew that eventually
someone would come up with such weapons.

Accelerating to over fifty kilometers per
hour within five strides, she launched herself flat like a
linebacker, knocking two soldiers senseless even as her hands
closed on one of the weapons. This time she did not twist its
barrel, but set it down gently on the asphalt and quickly stripped
the fallen men’s ammo-laden belts off. Loading the AK with a fresh
thirty-round magazine, she ran back toward Muzik. Once she had him
located, she hosed down the source of enemy muzzle flashes with
profligate bursts of ammo, driving back the guards.

Handing him one of the ammo-pouch belts,
Repeth checked her HUD and followed the flashing pip, trusting
Muzik to come along. She could hear his harsh breathing as it
triggered the voice-activated comm, telling her that he had been
badly injured. Between Eden Plague and nano, he should be doing
better. Perhaps his suit’s nutrient pump had been damaged, or maybe
a bullet had penetrated his armor and was lodged somewhere in his
body, inhibiting the healing.

“Roger, turn on your oxygen,” she instructed
him as they jogged down a darkened street. Their pursuers had lost
track of them for the moment, but people and vehicles still raced
around like a kicked-over anthill and they could be discovered at
any moment. Fortunately the nearest emplaced breaching charges were
just ahead.

“I might need it to swim down,” he mumbled
heavily.

“You have ten minutes internal for that. Use
the suit’s O2. You’re fading. Give yourself a stim.”

“Already did,” he responded. “Run out.”

Repeth swore under her breath. If he had
exhausted his stims, he must be already juiced to the maximum.
Something was seriously wrong, and she had to hope that the oxygen
would revive him and help him make it to the sub. Once there, she
was fairly certain he’d live.

“Here we are.” She grabbed his arm as he
almost lumbered past her. They stood near a blank wall on the side
of a street. “Back up.” She wrapped her arms around him, holding
him upright as he swayed. “Three, two, one, fire in the hole.” She
triggered the charge they had set on the ceiling of the drainage
tunnel below.

Gravel and asphalt fountained into the air
just as a truck rounded the corner at the end of the block in front
of them. The explosion threw a cloud of dust that rolled over the
two commandos, and Repeth held on to Muzik’s arm as she strode
forward, her sonar showing her where the hole in the ground
was.

“Grip the stock of that AK. I’ll lower you
down,” she said, and he locked both hands around the weapon’s tough
wooden butt. Not caring if she damaged the mechanism this time, she
took hold of its barrel and guided her partner until he stepped out
into the air above the hole.

He took a little hop and Repeth lowered all
two hundred kilos of him down into the darkness. Eventually she lay
flat on the street in the midst of the dust cloud as unaimed rounds
sparked here and there around her. Her right arm extended downward
into the hole as far as she could reach. His weight still dangled,
so she told him, “Letting go,” waited one full second, and then
released her grip.

She heard a clunk and a grunt from his comm.
“Clear,” he said, so she rolled forward into the hole and twisted
around, scrabbling against the sides until she found herself
feet-first, then jumped.

Five or six meters down she struck concrete
slimy with algae and detritus, and fell to her knees. Her own AK
seemed undamaged.

“Let’s go, soldier. Home stretch, just a few
hundred meters.” She wrapped her arm around his waist and he threw
his over her shoulders, and so they shambled. Any minute now the
reaction forces would find the hole in the street and follow.