Cyborg Strike (8 page)

Using their night vision systems, the ten
heavy VTOLs came to their hovers in preselected positions above
steep slopes, shielded from any anti-aircraft weapons by the crests
of the hills between them and the complex. Central Authority
security had, of course, come to the conclusion that nothing could
land there, and so the area was only lightly covered by
defenses.

One machinegun opened up from the ground,
tracers reaching into the night sky, questing for the low-flying
aircraft. Response came immediately: four separate missiles from
enthusiastic VTOL gunners destroyed the emplacement with deadly
precision.

At the same time the command to jump was
given, and powerful infrared floodlights came on beneath the
hovering craft. Invisible to ordinary eyes, the HUD faceplate
sensors showed the glow below bright as day, allowing the
nanocommandos to easily leap the five to ten meters to the
ground.

***

Alarms blared down the underground corridors,
jolting the cyborg out of his well-deserved sleep. As his brain and
much of his body were still human, rest and recuperation were
essential, but he could override that need without difficulty. He
checked his internal diagnostics and was satisfied with
ninety-eight percent efficiency.

He pressed his ear against the door, picking
up a lot of information via bone conduction to his very sensitive
audio pickups. What he heard did not reassure him. Panicked voices,
frantic calls for response, and reports of air vehicles, missiles,
and infantry.

The scale of the crisis made his decision for
him. His programming imperatives made preserving and obeying his
principal his most important priorities, though not always his most
immediate. For now, absent instructions to the contrary, he had a
lot of leeway.

So he used it.

His minders thought he was locked in, but had
no real concept of what they dealt with. The two-inch steel door
would resist his strength, for certain; but he had other advantages
than pure power.

First, he locked his mask into place,
hopefully ensuring the defenders would recognize him as an ally.
Then he extended his blade from its sheath between his radius and
ulna.

With his wrist bent, it protruded like a
foot-long sword from a slot left for that purpose. His ferrocrystal
skin braced the equally high-tech blade as he used its molecular
edge to cut the embedded lock out of the reinforced concrete wall.
A moment later he shoved the door to the side and was out,
retracting the weapon.

Racing down the corridor, he dodged most of
the frantic minions, occasionally shoving them aside. Some blanched
at his appearance, others seemed to ignore him. One began to raise
a pistol toward him, so he tore the thing out of the man’s hands,
taking two fingers with it.

Finally he reached Ariadne Smythe’s office.
The chaos was just as evident there. Whatever was going on, they
were not prepared, an were not handling it well, he could tell. He
pushed past a decorative assistant that looked more like a male
model than an administrator, and stepped into the woman’s
office.

“What do you want?” she snapped as she held a
phone handset to her ear.

“You must prioritize my response,” he
answered mechanically, deliberately keeping any humanity out of his
voice. It served him to have them believe he was a mere product of
programming. “Shall I join the defense, or shall I assist in your
escape?”

Smythe covered the mouthpiece for a moment of
thought, then said, “Join the defense, but if it looks like we will
lose, come back for me.”

“As you wish.” The cyborg turned and headed
for the fighting at a dead run.

***

As soon as the troops were down, the VTOLs
turned and assaulted over the hill, triggering rocket pods that
ripple-fired salvos of projectiles into the enemy complex. Fire,
smoke, and explosions turned the ground there into a burning hell.
Nose-mounted electric Gatling guns reached out with tracers to cut
long rips into the sides of the buildings.

Return fire came from the besieged defenders.
An anti-aircraft missile, its firer lucky or skilled, took one bird
in the nose, filling its cockpit with flames and killing the pilot
and copilot before it fell heavily to Earth and tore itself apart
with the momentum of its spinning lift blades and turbines. Other
birds took less critical damage, but they had accomplished their
collective mission, an expensive distraction, and so they withdrew
to land a kilometer away on the nearest level ground.

Beneath their retreating cover, two hundred
nanocommandos flooded across the kill zone. Enough enemy weapons
remained that they did not come away unscathed. Several figures
spun into the air, limbs flailing, as antipersonnel mines exploded,
blowing feet apart. Heavy machineguns hammered grazing fired at
waist level, pre-sighted to skim along the flat open ground.
Grenades flew, spraying shrapnel.

In response, the attacking forces fired their
own grenade launchers, rockets and automatic weapons. Guns normally
served by crews, .50 caliber and larger, were wielded easily by
each commando, giving one the firepower of five or ten. Soon they
silenced the defending bunkers.

Watching on his HUD and picking his way
carefully across the ground – it would not do to lose a foot to a
mine in his moment of triumph – he saw about a third of his force
spread out according to plan, racing along the perimeter to
surround the complex from the hill crests above. Their job was not
to attack, but instead, to intercept any escaping personnel.

Another third spread out to quarter and
search the surface buildings and to eliminate any further
resistance. It would be much easier to do now that they could take
them from the flanks and rear.

The final third ran for the central building
to follow his five special men in.

***

They used to call it
marching to the sound
of the guns
, the cyborg thought as he did just that, though in
this case the marching was more like a jog. He could have gone
faster if not for his secondary priority of not killing the
defenders he ran past. No matter, there were enough dead that he
easily got away with the occasional bone-crunching body check,
insufficient to cause his watchdog chip to react.

This also allowed him to scoop up two assault
rifles, ammunition and grenades, so when he finally found the
fight, he was able to do some good.

Rounding a corner, he saw the backs of the
security forces, and watched as one of their heads splattered
against the wall alongside him. A pair of his grenades went over
their shoulders, and he followed them closely, much more closely
than any mere human could have. He did take the precaution of
raising an arm to cover his eyes.

He felt his clothing shred as shrapnel tore
through the air in front of him, but his metal skin turned the
flying shards and then he was in. Two black-clad enemy commandos
scrambled to their feet at the far end of the room. The blast must
have knocked them down but their armor had turned the metallic
sleet.

Quick as cats, the two lined up on him and
fired their weapons, but he was already jinking left, causing the
majority of the bullets to miss. His, however, did not, hammering
the faceplates of first one, then the other. “Bulletproof” was
always relative when helmets were involved, and the clear
HUD-capable shields could not stand more than a few hits. Once a
round penetrated, it ricocheted off the inside of the skull-bucket
and turned something survivable into pure death.

Each enemy death shot a surge of pleasure
though his cerebral cortex, not enough to interfere with his
functioning, but enough to reinforce his desire to kill and kill
some more.
Nanocommandos
, he thought, based on their speed
and accuracy. They would have beaten normal humans as easily as he
beat them.
That means my quarry is near
.

Another of the black-clad enemies fired at
him from the cover of a corner, and he returned fire until his
weapons ran out of bullets. In a blur of motion he crouched, set
the weapons down, took out two grenades and popped their rings out
with his thumbs and launched them in arcs that should bounce around
that corner. Then he reloaded the assault rifles and picked them up
again, ready to fire.

All of this took one point one seconds.

As he raised his guns up again, he saw the
grenades fly back at him. The nanocommando must have been alert
enough to bat them back in his direction, or perhaps even catch and
throw. He turned his back and crouched, letting the twin blasts
wash over him, protecting his few vulnerable places – his eyes,
nostrils, throat, armpits and slivers of groin where his armored
skin had to articulate to be able to move.

Standing up, his clothing fell off of him in
scraps, and he charged the corner. The enemy weapon came out on the
end of a hand and spat forth a full auto burst, unaimed. Several of
the shots spanged off his skin but no mere bullets made for routine
antipersonnel use was going to take him down.

The man did not retract his hand fast enough,
and, dropping one assault rifle, the cyborg’s hand closed on the
nanocommando’s armored wrist and pulled. Most of the enemy came
around the corner in a flying whip, though several bones had broken
and the arm had been thoroughly dislocated. He continued the body’s
flight until it came to a brutal end against the concrete wall of
the corridor, as if a man had taken a chicken by the neck and
slammed it onto a stump.

A double dose of pleasure skipped along his
nerves. He’d found that the more up-close and personal was the
kill, the more of a jolt it gave him.

Leaving the bodies behind, he ran along the
corridor, searching for more enemies. A hundred meters along, he
realized he was heading down a dead end. The cyborg was just about
to turn around when his sensory control processor shut down.
Suddenly he found himself a disembodied brain floating in a sea of
nothingness, except for a digital display. At the top of the status
message flashed two words: SYSTEM OVERLOAD.

***

On his display Nguyen could only see two of
the five remaining. The others might be too deep underground to get
a clear signal through, or they might be dead with their
transmitters knocked out. Five against the heavy defenses of the
complex constituted suicide.

As the plan dictated.

Nguyen sent a coded signal before he lost the
two he could see. It raced at the speed of light to the men, in the
process of being trapped and gunned down by the enemy’s security
forces.

Its first effect was to trip one-second
delays while the radios retransmitted the signal in order to reach
deeper into the structure. This functioned as intended, and nearly
simultaneously, all five of his dogs of war, whether living or
dead, exploded. The first bursts seemed almost gentle to those
nearby, more like pops accompanied by roars of escaping gas. Then
came the much larger thermobaric fireballs.

The first blasts had ruptured tanks full of
volatiles implanted in the suicide commandos’ torsos. The second
ones, ignited by multiple devices in their armor, pushed the
fuel-air mixture into every crevice, blowing open doors, sending
flame through air vents, expanding to maximum volume in a way
impossible for conventional explosives.

A significant portion of the underground
complex, along with its defenders, was instantly immolated,
allowing Nguyen’s assault forces to easily overpower what few
defenders remained, and round up the noncombatants.

In one night, in just a few hours in fact, he
had broken the back of the Central Authority of the Committee of
Nine, lifting Direct Action to a place of prominence in the shadow
government of Australia. Mopping up their operatives from their
scattered offices and minor facilities would be easy – assuming
they did not simply flee. Even now, Ann Alkina should be
transmitting an offer of amnesty to all of the ordinary personnel
who stayed in place, accepting their new master.

As soon as the other sections of the Nine
heard about it – were graphically informed about it, that is – they
would fall into line, he was sure. General Alkina would take over
the day-to-day running of Direct Action.

General Nguyen himself, of course, would take
over a reorganized Central Authority.

The existing power structure could be useful,
which was the reason he would spare the bureaucrats and
functionaries. They would not protest too much at the change in
leadership, and he would move just as swiftly in the political
arena to consolidate his power.

From the barrel of a gun if need be.

Nguyen stood in the midst of the hellish
landscape, and resolved to himself: never again. Though a triumph,
such blunt, unrefined methods spoke more to failure than success.
To win without fighting is the epitome of strategy
, Sun Tzu
had said, and this fell far short of an acme.

Never again.

He would fit his steel hand with a velvet
glove, and seize Australia by the scruff of the neck, bending it to
his will.

All for the good of humanity.

***

Seventeen seconds of eternity later the
cyborg regained his eyesight and hearing as he rebooted. The rest
of his senses came back a moment later. Sitting up, he found
himself without any specific damage but with stress notations and
reduced capability across a wide variety of systems. Some of him
now ran on backups.

Looking around, he noticed the corridor had
been badly damaged, with chunks of concrete lying all over the
floor, reinforcement bar sticking out of the walls, parts of the
roof caved in, and all of the lights out in his section. Flame has
traveled along the ceiling as well, burning the overhead material
and the recessed lighting. Extended spectra allowed him to
penetrate the dust and smoke until he was able to make out what had
happened.