Cyborg Strike (19 page)

If they were clever, they might race ahead
and try to block their outlet. She tried to increase their
pace.

Muzik mumbled something, then his legs went
out from under him. Barely conscious, it was clear he couldn’t go
on under his own power, so she clamped her hand on the top of his
back plate between his shoulders and started to drag him. Taking
her own advice, she told her suit to feed her pure oxygen and
triggered her first stim of the night.

With this blast of artificial energy, she ran
down the big pipes, the slime on the rounded bottom an aid this
time as she dragged Muzik along like a rag doll. In only a minute
or two she approached the large outflow grate.

Dropping her burden, she sidled up to the
barrier and looked through its bars, not seeing anything. With time
of the essence, she kicked the rusty locking pin, breaking it so
the hinged grill swung outward. The motion detectors had
undoubtedly told the enemy they were in the tunnels anyway.
Triggering the perimeter alarm wouldn’t matter much.

Racing back, she picked Muzik up bodily like
a tossed dwarf and charged forward to fling him ten meters out into
the water. Unexpectedly, a hail of bullets splattered the lake’s
surface before he sank out of sight. Then the fire shifted to the
tunnel mouth, tearing chips out of the inner edges of the
concrete.

She felt a sting and looked at her left hand,
and noticed she’d completely lost her little finger somewhere along
the way. If that was the worst of her wounds, she’d feel fortunate.
Then she noticed she couldn’t move any of the digits. Something had
struck her just right. Perhaps a bullet was lodged in the nerve in
her carpal tunnel.

Repeth realized she was drifting a bit
mentally, always a danger with the stims when combined with the
adrenaline of combat and inevitable fatigue. Forcing herself to
focus, she backed up, then took a run and dove flat into the
water.

Bullets slapped the surface around her, some
punching her in the back before she sank. Her sonar fed her HUD
images as she drifted downward, and a moment later she stood on the
bottom next to her motionless comrade.

Snatching him up, she trudged along the muddy
lake bottom toward the submersible. It seemed to take forever,
though it must have been less than five minutes. Fish investigated
her now and again, and she had to walk around what speared to be a
jumble of World War Two era T-34 tanks, either dumped into the lake
or perhaps abandoned there before the water rose.

Finally she reached the little vehicle. As
she triggered the one-time sequence that allowed them to ingress
without surfacing, she heard engines in the water. Looking upward
showed her nothing with her eyes, but her HUD displayed a predicted
location based on sonic triangulation. Somewhere above, a boat
already hunted for them, and where there was one, there would soon
be several, and probably aircraft as well.

The submersible flooded its inner
compartment, which allowed her to open the portal on top. Dragging
Muzik upward, she placed him atop the thing and then climbed in,
pulling him in after and laying him on the narrow bench-like bunk
in the rear. Then she dogged the hatch and hit the water evacuation
button.

Compressed air shoved wet lake out one-way
valves, in less than a minute leaving them dripping and cold.
Repeth removed Muzik’s helmet, placing her ear next to his pale
lips. He still breathed, and she started praying under her breath.
She’d gotten out of the habit lately but now seemed a good time to
start again.

Stripping his clamshell cuirass, she checked
his torso for damage. It wasn’t hard to find. An AK round had
sneaked through a gap and traveled between the hard armor and his
skinsuit, shattering the armor’s implanted nutrient pump. With
nothing to feed the Plague and nano, all the stims he shot up had
done little but help his metabolism spin its wheels until it
started to come apart.

Opening a compartment by her head, she pulled
out a preset IV and threaded it into his jugular. Its memory
plastic would gently squeeze its entire contents into him without
her assistance, and that was the limit of her ability to help him
in the close confines of the sub.

Lifting her faceplate, she took the time to
wrap her left hand in bandage, being careful not to even think
about triggering the electrical charge. Jill had no idea what shape
the mechanism was in. Pulling up her internals menu in her eye, she
scrolled though systems until she found that one, and shut it
off.

That task finished, she squeezed into the
pilot’s seat and powered up the sub. In a moment the screens came
on and she lifted off the bottom, carefully turning toward the west
and the opposite shoreline. She kept near the lake floor as her
passive sonar recorded the sounds of screws in the water hunting,
hunting.

An hour later the distinctive sound of active
sonar pings struck the hull, and she damned the efficiency of the
Russian military machine. Now they no longer merely had to worry
about running out of battery power, but also about being detected.
She quickly grounded the boat and shut down all but the
essentials.

“Sonobouy,” Repeth heard Muzik say from
behind her. She turned to look, seeing him blinking at the low
ceiling.

“Roger. Glad you’re awake. Thought you were
going to nap the whole way, and it didn’t seem fair.”

Muzik chuckled, then coughed. “Concussion, I
think. Nano doesn’t pass the meniscus, and Eden Plague heals the
brain very slowly. Damned cyborg punched me and I swear I saw
stars.”

Repeth clambered to sit facing backward, her
knees on the outside of his feet as he lay. “What do you know about
sonobouys?” she asked.

“Not much. Just that they can be dropped by
helicopter. No idea if they can see us sitting here.” The pings
still struck the hull like a metronome. It was disconcerting.

“Well the longer we sit, the more the
batteries run down. Eventually we’ll have to move.”

“Yeah. Can you see anything on the passive
sonar?”

“Just a few powerboats racing here and
there.”

“Nothing coming toward us? Or are they taking
up positions around us?”

She looked over her shoulder at the displays.
“Nope.”

“Then they can’t see us here.” Muzik closed
his eyes. “I think I’m going to sleep some more…” His head lolled
and he began to snore.

Good sign
, she thought. Checking the
batteries, she saw they had about eleven hours if they just sat
there, four hours of propulsion at their most efficient speed.
After that, they would have to risk the snorkel, or abandon the
craft and swim. They had no scuba gear, though, and even with their
advantages, swimming thirty or forty kilometers just didn’t seem
practical.

So in the classic tension-drenched style of
submariners everywhere, they had to hope and pray they could creep
out from under the hunters and slip away.

***

An encrypted landline rang next to Scott
Stone’s head. Awake instantly, he plucked it from its cradle
between two large fingers and held it to his ear. “Professor,” he
said.

“It’s me,” Winthrop Jenkins’ hoarse voice
bleated from the line. “Salmi Base just got hit. Some kind of
commando raid, a dozen or more. I got forty or fifty casualties and
the main computer vault has been compromised.” Stone could hear
gunfire and helicopters in the background.

“They wanted the data. What about the
backup?”

“I don’t know. I have my hands full here.
Alert the rest, lock everything down. You know the drill.”

“I wrote the drill. I’ll be on my cell.” With
that, Stone hung up and pulled on his clothes, listening to the
creaks and groans of the old mansion. Unlike the other ministers,
the Prime Minister had to be kept in his traditional residence. To
do otherwise would be to look weak in the eyes of the people and
the world, perhaps even invite a coup. To make up for it, there
were three cyborg minders and a cordon of fanatical Spetznaz for
security.

Stone called the number that dialed straight
into the internal radio of Kratz, the Shadow on duty. “Kratz, this
is Stone. Alert status one. Wake up Melcher, and lock the mansion
down. Get the civilians into the panic room. I have to go to the
Bank.”

“Acknowledged,” came the synthesized voice.
Now he could be confident that the Prime Minister and his family
would be hustled into their safety vault in case some kind of
attack was imminent. If necessary, they could be evacuated through
the new tunnel system he’d had built during the last few
months.

Picking up the landline again, he dialed his
counterparts in Skolkovo and Barvikha one after another, receiving
no answer each time. Then he tried to contact them directly through
the cell network to their internal radios. Both returned “unable to
connect” messages.

That told him all he needed to know. Someone
– the Americans, the South Africans, maybe the Australians, had
made their move.
Probably the latter
, he thought.
I told
Winthrop not to sell that Aussie bitch a Shadow, because it would
just lead back to us. Well, asshole, guess what just happened? And
they call
us
Psychos.

Time to cut his losses. If the Salmi base had
been hit and the program wrecked, and the Cabinet enclaves taken,
one Prime Minster would not a government make. He had to move fast,
on his own, which was just fine. A wise man always had fallback
positions and options, and he was nothing if not very smart.

He contemplated destroying his phone, but
decided to hold on to it for the moment. Easy enough to crush it
when the time came. Then he stuffed his getaway packet with his
extra passports and money in a cargo pocket and hustled down the
stairs.

In the front of the house, he hopped into one
of the Mercedes parked there, slowing next to the Spetznaz guards
as they hurried to open the gate. “Alert status one,” he called as
he roared past, for all the good it would probably do. One never
knew; perhaps his concerns were overblown and everything would be
back to normal in the morning.

Through sparse traffic he wove, his foot
mashed to the floor, hitting at least one hundred fifty KPH along
some of the straightaways before slowing to take corners at
seventy. Four miles to the bank, one of Moscow’s oldest and most
secure, the location of their backup data and, therefore, one
enormous bargaining chip. If his instinct was right, it was the
nexus of risk and opportunity tonight.

For Professor Scott Stone, anyway.

Pulling up at a side entrance, he parked and
immediately charged the portal. A heavy steel pull-down barrier
covered the door proper. He reached down with both hands and
lifted, grunting.

With a screech of metal it tore away, frame
and all. Tossing it aside, he then attacked the metal door, kicking
it several times until it bent enough for him to get a grip on. Ten
seconds later that lay on the sidewalk as well, and he ran
inside.

At this point the bank’s alarms should have
been sounding, proclaiming its violation loudly to the world, but
there was nothing. Switching to low-light and infrared vision, he
bolted down the corridor toward the stairs to the vault, his head
swiveling left and right as he looked for anything out of place. At
the top of the steps he froze, staring downward.

A flickering glow showed faintly from the
bottom, two flights below. Then he heard a movement from off to his
left. Looking over, he saw two bound figures lying on the marble
floor: security guards, apparently captured and wrapped in tape. He
could see their eyes strain into the darkness in his direction, but
without his enhancements all they saw was a shadow.

He chuckled to himself. Better than a Shadow,
actually. He’d never wanted the metal skin, the external armor, the
glowing eyes to terrify the sheep; he was far too pretty for that.
But he’d availed himself of all the other improvements the program
had come up with, all except for the brain chips, and he’d made
sure he stayed conscious for everything. There’d be no deadman
charges or mind control for the Professor. His fate would remain
his own.

Stone slipped lightly down the steps far more
quietly than someone of his size and weight should have been able
to, and held at the bottom. Slowly, he peered around the corner,
then eased back before the lookout ten feet away noticed him. He’d
had on NVGs but the goggles looked like older monocular models with
a narrow field of view. The man would have been better served just
taking them off and letting his eyes adjust to the night.

It wouldn’t matter, though, for him. The only
question for Stone was whether he could take the man down before he
alerted the rest of his comrades.

Then he paused for a moment, thinking.

No bank alarm meant whoever this was had
disabled it. Presumably they were professional enough to have also
rendered the silent alarm to the police inoperative as well. The
flickering he could see meant some kind of cutting torch, perhaps a
thermic lance hot enough to crack the vault.

He could take them all now, stopping their
heist and preserving the data. But for whom? If Winthrop’s whole
artificial edifice was even now being toppled, the information
would eventually be found, falling into the hands of whomever
controlled Russia in the near future.

By waiting until they opened the vault,
however, he could seize the data himself. If Winthrop fended off
his attackers, he would be hailed as having preserved their strange
little empire. If on the other hand things came crashing down, he
would have that bargaining chip he wanted, something that could fit
in a pocket that was nevertheless worth millions, if not billions,
to the right buyer.

Or, as a last resort, it could be a peace
offering.