Cyborg Strike (20 page)

Yes, that seemed the prudent course.

So he waited.

Seventeen minutes later the cracking glow
disappeared. Dialing up his hearing and slowing his breathing to
almost nothing, he waited for the distinctive clunking of the vault
door opening. A pleased murmur of voices confirmed it, so before
the congratulatory backslapping died down he restarted his
respiration, took three deep breaths, and hurled himself around the
corner.

His clothesline blow snapped the lookout’s
neck as he charged forward. In front of him he saw three men and a
tangle of equipment next to a three-foot-thick door standing wide
open. They hardly had time to react before he had crushed each of
their chests with hammer blows of his fists, leaving them flopping
on the floor and choking on their own blood.

Dashing into the vault, Stone raced along the
rows of safe deposit boxes until he deciphered the numerical
system. He knew the box’s number, but had never been here, ad so
wasted precious seconds until he found it. Now one of the
modifications he had asked for came in handy.

Activating a combination of muscles in his
hand, he extruded short ferrocrystal claws from his fingertips.
He’d always been a comic book fan, and given his own size and long
golden locks, Sabretooth had been his model and favorite.

In this case the razor-sharp, diamond-hard
nano-grown substance allowed him to slice open the numbered face of
the box to get at the hinged metal rectangle inside. In a moment
the two cigarette-packet-sized hard drives went into his
pockets.

Stone heard something then, and turned to see
the thick door closing. Throwing himself forward, he managed to
catch the heavy counterweighted portal and stop its forward
momentum. Shoving back hard, he reversed its direction and then
slammed it back against its stops.

Dashing outside, he found the remains of a
man smashed between the multi-ton door and its equally heavy wall.
Stone gave the man credit for an excellent try; had he been able to
shut the vault door and perhaps weld it closed, not even his
cybernetic strength would have saved him from being trapped until
the authorities opened it again, probably with enough firepower to
cause him a great deal of pain.

Sirens warbled in the distance, encouraging
him to shunt aside his racing thoughts and put as much distance as
possible between himself and the bank. Two minutes later he slowed,
walking along a dim alleyway as emergency vehicles and police raced
past. They would find an interesting scene. He’d rigged the thermic
lance to blow its own fuel tanks just about…now.

His enhanced hearing easily picked up the
muffled blast and the sound of a hundred windows shattering half a
mile away. Moments later, the sounds of sirens multiplied
exponentially as the city’s various security and safety forces came
fully awake. Several separate police and paramilitary
organizations, as well as district fire and rescue, scrambled or
went on alert.

Fortunately he reached Rue Podkolokolny
before they started setting up cordons and checkpoints. He stepped
through the front gate of the Australian Embassy compound and
walked up to the security booth straddling the inner fence. Behind
the thick glass, the uniformed man eyed Stone with a certain amount
of trepidation. Pressing the voice-transmission button he asked,
“May I help you, sir?”

“I am here to claim asylum in the Free
Community of Australia,” he replied. “I am in possession of certain
information that will be of great interest to your government.”

The guard nodded, lifting his finger off the
push-to-talk key and picking up a phone handset. A moment later,
several men rushed past him to close the outer gate while two
others let him through the inner one.

“Professor Stone?” The one addressing him was
short and slight, with Asian features and a diffident manner. “My
name is Calopus Nguyen, and I am the senior military attaché to
this embassy. Please come in. I believe our interests may soon come
into alignment.”

Stone smiled. “Nguyen, huh?” He wondered how
much he was going to have to pay for his rehabilitation.

Alkina watched ten gas-powered cold rockets
carry ten braided monofilaments across the wide street to strike
the roof of the mansion below. As the noise had undoubtedly alerted
the building’s defenders, all ten commandos immediately clipped a
suspended brake onto the cable as it automatically retracted to
tautness, and leaped into space without further orders.

Less than three seconds later their feet
struck the roof and they let go of the fittings to pause like
insects on its sloping surface. From there, they split into pairs
and aimed for five different entries.

Four of these were windows. Each duo of
commandos climbed over the edge of the roof like spider-men, and
together seized the bars that covered an upper story window. A
coordinated wrench ripped the wrought iron out of its fittings and
they immediately fired shock grenades into the windows, closely
following the explosives with weapons at the ready.

Alkina and Ritter did the same at a large
skylight overlooking an atrium that reached from the four-storey
roof all the way to the ground floor, forming the center of the
mansion. Then they grasped the edge, hung briefly, and dropped.

Landing on the beautiful travertine floor,
they immediately lifted their weapons and searched their sectors.
While the others variously secured the Russian civilians or hunted
for cyborgs, their job was to interdict this central point,
coordinate, and reinforce if necessary.

An enormous figure at least seven feet tall
and proportionally broad burst from a doorway and raced across the
atrium, heading for an exposed internal stairway. Partway there, it
realized it was not alone, turning blazing red eyes toward the pair
even as it started to bring the heavy machinegun it cradled around
in their direction.

Two different high-tech rounds slammed into
it as Alkina and Ritter easily tracked their moving target. Hers
comprised a sleet of nanocarbon flechettes sharp enough to slide
into steel under the mere pressure of a human thumb. Those that
struck something harder than human flesh lodged in the Shadow Man’s
armored skin or metallic bones, demonstrating that something harder
than mere steel composed the thing’s structure. Probably
nano-assembled ferrocrystal, Alkina thought as she watched her
projectiles sprouted from the figure like porcupine quills.

Ritter’s round, fired on the heels of hers,
was a modified Armorshock shell. As it struck its target its
insulating glass skin split and shattered, exposing its two kinds
of protruding conductive spines, As soon as one of each contacted
metal, its capacitor dumped an enormous electrical charge into the
cyborg and then triggered a small shaped charge that sent a jet of
molten copper into its target. For good measure it released
ultra-short-life nano that sought out human nerve tissue and
disassembled it at a molecular level.

The golem jerked and fell as electrical
discharges played along its skin, igniting the clothes it wore. It
slid several meters along the smooth atrium floor before coming to
a stop, the light going out of its eyes.

“Well, that went surprisingly well,” Ritter
muttered, jacking another round into his grenade launcher and
sweeping his sector for more targets.

“If I believed in such things, I’d say you’re
tempting fate by saying so,” Alkina responded. “Tangle it.”

“Will do.” He took a moment to unload and
then reload a special tangler shell, then aimed carefully and fired
at the fallen cyborg.

A glob of something flew rather slowly from
the muzzle of his launcher and expanded rapidly to about two meters
across. It struck the torso and lower extremities of the fallen
Shadow Man and wrapped itself around, shrinking to enfold its arms
and legs, leaving its head free.

Composed of ferrocrystal monofilaments
wrapped in super-sticky polymers, it should keep the cyborg
immobilized, or at least inhibited. Depending upon the relative
densities and properties of the thing’s skin, its razor-sharp
filaments might also slice into the thing’s skin if it tried to
break free.

“Stay sharp,” she said, then approached it
from above its head. In the background she heard the chuff and boom
of several grenades going off, and the sound of conventional
weapons fire.

Reaching into a pouch, she extracted an item
prepared especially for cyborg capture. A hood made of a tough,
flexible Kevlar-like woven fiber, its opening attached to a metal
loop with a handle. Slipping it over the thing’s head blinded it,
allowed it to breathe – assuming it needed to – and provided
something to control its head with.

And, if need be, something to take its head
off.

A deeper hammering sound suddenly manifested
itself, and rounds tore through the inner wall of the second storey
of the atrium, smashing ornamental railings and a large vase from
its perch.

“Looks like the other one is still alive and
kicking,” Ritter called, aiming his weapon in the direction from
which the bullets had come. He drifted forward as if to help.

“Stand fast, Ritter. If eight of them can’t
handle one more cyborg, adding yourself to the mix won’t help. Set
up your demo pack.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t sound happy but he
would comply. All of the commandos, but especially the team
leaders, had tested extremely loyal and disciplined, as well as
aggressive. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.

Squatting and setting his weapon down on the
floor, he reached around behind himself and detached his combat
pack, a small conformal thing that rested against his lumbar
region. Opening it, he removed a shaped block of high explosive and
placed it atop the low wall surrounding a decorative fountain. Then
he activated a small detonator and attached it with a slotted
spike. Now, one coded HUD command would take the building down.

“Come on, let’s get this thing loaded.”
Alkina grabbed the hood handle with one hand and said, “Unstick him
from the floor.”

Ritter ran a special zero-friction blade
beneath the webbed cyborg, breaking or detaching the fibers from
the surface on which he rested, then grabbed the thing’s feet.

“Cyborg, just in case you can hear me,”
Alkina said conversationally as she lifted and dragged, “all I have
to do is twist this thing around your neck just right and it will
cut your head off. And if that doesn’t work, a command from my HUD
will detonate a collar of explosive that should. So if you have any
self-preservation programming at all, I suggest you keep that
foremost in whatever passes for your mind, and if you play nice,
you’ll soon be up on your feet again and working for a new and
better boss.”

She had no idea if any of that was getting
through, but it didn’t hurt to hope she could convince it to save
them all some trouble. That fact that the mission called for
bringing at least one of the cyborgs back alive and operating
buoyed that hope.

As they half dragged, half carried the thing
– it must have weighed two hundred fifty kilos – they heard a
flurry of mixed gunfire, then a call came on the squad leader’s
freq. “Can’t take him down without losing the hostages,” said the
unidentified commando. “He’s locked down tight in some kind of a
panic room or vault, with the civilians behind him. We’ve got one
dead and three wounded already.”

Ritter glanced at Alkina, who nodded. He
radioed, “Finch, you are authorized termination protocol. Fry them
and get out of there. Don’t leave our comrade.”

She could hear the relief in the man’s voice.
“Acknowledged. Engaging now.”

As the two leaders lumbered down the hallway
toward the mansion’s front door, they felt the building shake and
heard a burst of electric static on their radios. Pieces of wall
showered into the atrium they had just vacated, and then came the
call, “Termination complete.” If that assessment was accurate, the
commandos engaging the Shadow should have fired a medley of
grenades into the bolt-hole, killing everyone in it, cyborg and
civilians alike.

Price of doing business
, she thought
without great concern.
Better to die on your feet than live on
your knees.

The remaining seven commandos swarmed down
the stairs, carrying one body and helping several wounded. Two
unencumbered ones grabbed shoulder each on the captured cyborg, and
they opened the mansion’s front door.

Bullets clawed for them from behind a
Mercedes limo parked in the driveway, and one of their team fell
with a curse, hit but not badly due to his armor. Another dropped
the comrade she was helping and took two steps, the third planted
atop a stone railing that launched her into the air and over the
long black automobile.

In the air, she drew a pistol and, aiming
downward, shot the gunman twice in his helmeted head. The
protective helm turned the shots but stunned him, knocking him to
the ground as she landed lightly behind him. two quick stride
brought her to point blank range and she put the gun to his ear and
blew his brains all over the cobblestones.

“Limo!” Alkina said, pointing with her chin.
“See if the keys are in it.” Unsurprisingly in this hyper-secure
enclave, they dangled from the steering column. “Open the
boot.”

The commandos stuffed the golem into the
enormous trunk of the car, then helped the wounded into the back.
“Ritter, drive to the rally point and get this thing packed. I’ll
make my way on foot. Finch, stay with me.”

Ritter nodded, slipping behind the wheel
himself, and they roared out the gate as it retracted
automatically.

Checking her HUD, she realized fewer than
seven minutes had passed since the first shots were fired, and the
Russian police were just starting to wake up. Sirens wailed in the
near distance, and an enormous explosion blew a fireball into the
air three blocks away. The dead gunman laying on the cobbles at her
feet must have been assigned to the external grounds security, to
have responded so fast.