Cyborg Strike (6 page)

Then it became a weapon, his only one.

The cable was about a quarter inch across,
braided of steel, and so weighed enough to be used as a crude
flail. Holding about a meter of it with its head-sized clamped
loop, Spooky dodged forward even as the gunman ripped off another
burst.

He dropped to roll under the bullets, hanging
on to the cable all the while, and then swung it like a metal whip
in a whirling blow that caught the submachine gun’s magazine and
spun the weapon out of the man’s hands. Two quick strikes, forehand
and back, with his good right hand put the man down, skull
shattered.

The room he occupied appeared to be an
office, luxuriously furnished. Glancing out the window, he spotted
four men waiting at the bottom aiming guns, looking up. Bullets
followed his head as he yanked it back in out of the line of
fire.

No one with a hoodie.

Spooky wondered what the plan had been. Was
the metal-faced man wearing combat armor, a nanocommando deemed
sufficient to finish him off as he hung in the air from the cable?
They had suckered him well, driving him through the obvious escape
route and into their trap. Had the winch-man made a mistake? Or had
he been a glory hound, certain that he had his quarry helpless and
wanting to make the kill himself?

Those questions would have to wait. Crossing
the room to pick up the second man’s weapon, a submachine gun of
Uzi make, Spooky lay down and crawled to the interior door,
pressing his eye to the crack beneath. Nothing could be seen within
three or four meters distance, no feet waiting immediately outside,
so he rolled out of the way and reached for the knob. Opening it
slowly, he saw nothing and drew no reaction.

Obviously bringing him all the way up here
had not been in their plans, else they would have had more than two
men waiting, and that gave him his opening. The clandestine Direct
Action office rested within a building next to this one, a similar
ten-storey corporate structure that would lease space to anyone
with money. He recalled that a fourth-floor midair glass walkway
linked the two, and he now ran through empty halls on this Sunday,
searching for the way across.

Then he skidded to a halt.

While his attackers seemed to have made a
mistake, one obvious backup plan would involve the connecting
corridor, if they knew about his destination: a trap within a trap.
Suspended in the air, the bottleneck would surround him with glass,
with nowhere to go. If they were waiting at both ends…he might
survive a forty-foot drop to the pavement, but he would likely be
further injured, making him a sitting duck.

His left arm was still useless, but he had
gained a firearm. There must be at least eight ways out of the
building, two emergency exits on each side. Better to take his
chances on one of them, or perhaps break a window from the second
floor and make the easy leap to a grassy knoll in the
landscaping.

Pounding steps could be heard from the
direction of the main stairs near the elevator well in the center
of the building, so he ran for one side, perpendicular to the alley
wall of the winch, or that of the connecting walkway. Reaching the
end of the corridor, he found the exit steps.

Hearing the heavy tread coming after, he
turned at the stairwell door and aimed his Uzi down the corridor
the way he had come. Just one man followed him. The one with the
hoodie, and the metal face.

Spooky fired one burst, striking the man
center mass. As expected, this yielded no result, but he’d had to
try, in case his assumption about the armor was incorrect. He
snarled and leaped down the stairs.

Bigger, just as fast, probably tougher,
especially compared to his own injured state, and relatively immune
to bullets, his opponent had little to fear. The only thing Spooky
could do was run, escape. On the second floor he exited the
stairwell and hurried three doors down, desiring to get away from
anyone waiting at the exit below. A powerful kick snapped the lock
and he entered the office. Without pausing, he launched a heavy
lounge chair there with his foot, directly through the external
floor-to-ceiling glass.

Then he followed it.

Bullets ripped the air above him as he struck
the grass below and rolled through the shards, cutting his shoulder
lightly. Using his momentum, he spun to his feet and leaped ten
meters across an ornamental pond, prompting a burning agony where
he had been shot.

Behind him he heard the heavy thud of the big
man dropping to the ground and following. Without looking back, he
ignored the pain and accelerated, his legs churning faster than any
mere human.

An Olympic sprinter can briefly approach
forty kilometers per hour. Spooky sustained at least seventy as he
aimed himself down a nearby street to run alongside rolling cars.
As soon as he came to a red light, he used the level rear deck of
one to vault over the mass, landing on the hood of a taxi in the
front before stepping down and turning to avoid the cross
traffic.

This gave him a chance to glance back the way
he came, and he saw his pursuer still coming on, nearly as fast as
he. Spooky cursed the ancestral gods he did not believe in and
racked his brain for some way out of this dilemma.

Almost, he face-palmed himself for forgetting
the obvious, until now. Slowing his sprint, he reached out to
deftly snatch a phone from a pedestrian’s hand, drawing a shrieking
complaint. Making sure he was not losing ground as he wove through
traffic, he dialed a number from memory, then spoke a code phrase
once it connected, and a location.

Sirens wailed as the city’s police force woke
up to the mayhem. Spooky took a left, continuing to put distance
between him and his original drop-off location, ensuring that he
was not driven back into the arms of his attackers. Only the one
man still pursued, the dogged armored nanocommando.

Ahead he spotted police cars setting up a
roadblock, but too slowly, and all unready. Leaping over a vehicle,
he lightly brushed its flashing lights as he continued past. Yells
to stop followed, turning to cries of outrage as his pursuer ran
heavily between the blockers, sending two officers flying on his
way through.

One more minute of sprinting and dodging
brought him within sight of his goal: the Harbour Bridge. Racing
along the elevated roadway that approached it, and seeing the man
followed him still, he flung the Uzi away as soon as he reached the
edge of Dawes Point, and crossed to the bridge proper above the
water. The weapon performed a long graceful ballistic arc that
ended in a splash. Considering what waited at the other end, he did
not want anyone making any targeting mistakes, and if he ended up
in official custody…better to be without it.

The demands he had made upon his body took
their toll and he slowed, breathing heavily. Cradling his useless
arm made his running ever more awkward as the pain and injury made
itself felt. Spooky had ignored both for a time, using Dadirri
techniques, but every body had its limit, especially as the nano
and Eden Plague tried to heal him without the benefit of extra
nutrients, or sufficient water.

Pushing aside the hunger and thirst he jogged
onward, glancing over his shoulder from time to time to make sure
the other did not get too close. He moved over to the bridge’s
pedestrian walkway, which eased the outraged honking that
accompanied him.

By the middle of the bridge his body began to
betray him, so he slowed further. Gritting his teeth against a
blossoming cramp and the fire in his side, he tried to conserve his
strength, timing his arrival for the moment when he would
inevitably be overtaken.

Holding the phone to his lips, he reported
his position and situation, describing his nemesis, and his own
clothes for good measure. Behind him he could feel the implacable
thumping of heavy boots on the walkway, and Spooky considered the
possibility that he would have to leap over the railing and into
the water, as a last resort.

He hoped the man’s armor was heavy, and that
he would not swim well.

One hundred meters from the end, he could see
two SUVs parked, backs to him, blocking one lane of outbound
traffic. Somehow they had come up the wrong way and managed to set
up at the designated spot, and Spooky blessed those same ancestral
gods now as he stumbled toward them. Eighty meters…sixty…he could
hear the pounding, pounding of feet, could imagine he felt the
man’s hot breath upon his neck.

Putting on a desperate burst of speed, he
held the distance until forty meters, thirty, twenty…ten…not since
he had hiked out of Vietnam into Cambodia with his dying father on
his back had he been so close to physical collapse.

As he passed the nearer SUV, a passenger door
opened on the father one. Spooky collapsed into it, pulled the
armored slab closed and turned to look over the back seat.

At the same time the rear gate door of the
other vehicle flew up. Spooky could not see what awaited the
pursuer, but he suddenly stumbled and jerked to a halt, lightnings
arcing along his body as he grabbed for the guardrail. Hanging
heavily onto the metal, sparks from ricochets showed where shock
projectiles, fired from the back of the SUV, missed the metal-faced
man to strike the surrounding bridge structure.

Like a Frankenstein’s golem, the figure
turned and tried to get away, then sagged. With one final
convulsive effort he rolled himself over the railing and fell.

Leaping out of the SUV, Spooky walked
unsteadily to the edge in time to see the weighty splash as he
impacted the water twenty meters below. He watched for long moments
as nothing surfaced, until the Direct Action operatives in the SUVs
called to him, warning of police on their way.

“Take me to Headquarters,” he instructed once
he’d climbed back in.

A draw, then, really. He’d killed a couple of
minor foot soldiers in his enemy’s ranks, and he had gotten away
from the ace in the hole, the real hit man. As his two armored SUVs
drove sedately away from the scene toward his stronghold, he
wondered who had initiated the attack.

The obvious answer was Ariadne Smythe, who
had tried to thwart him before, so that’s where he would start.
Even if she was not behind this, she would have to go, if he was to
take over as Markis had asked him to.

A more interesting question was, from where
had they obtained a full nanocommando? He’d made the
non-replicating, partial-power version of nano widely available to
the Free Communities governments, for the Space Marines and other
appropriate military forces, but this man had possessed speed,
strength and endurance akin to Spooky’s own.

Perhaps even superior to it.

That limited the possibilities, and pointed
at the US Tiny Fortress program. Either someone in Direct Action
had betrayed him and given away some of his prized nanites in his
absence – or his enemies had acquired another, maybe better
version, from the US.

Which if true, led to another unsettling
question: was it the Americans official doing, or had it gotten
away from them, perhaps via a rogue agent?

The fact that there was only a single
superman involved was a good sign, however. If the nano was
self-replicating, it could have been used to infect any number of
attackers. Instead, there had been only one.

Spooky hoped that meant it could only be used
on a single individual.

Now forewarned, he began to plan how to deal
with this new threat.

***

Ten minutes later a fully clothed man walked
out of Sydney Harbor and into Dawes Point Park, a small swatch of
grass and trees tucked beneath the Harbour Bridge. A few onlookers
gazed curiously at him as he squelched by in soggy boots, jeans and
hoodie, but only hours later did one of them think to report the
incident to the police, after seeing the evening news.

A normal human being, even a nanocommando,
might have pulled out a phone and made a call. This man merely
activated an internal mechanism, electronically dialing a number
from equally electronic augmented memory.

“Eliminator,” he sent in a synthesized
internal voice. No noise emanated from his body. Instead, an
internal generator sent a mobile network signal that was
interpreted at the other end as sound, so to the woman listening it
seemed she was carrying on a normal conversation.

“Is it done?”

“Negative. The target was wounded but
escaped.”

“Sodding hell. Not such a piece of piss as
you thought, eh?”

Walking down the park’s access road, the man
remained silent, with nothing to say.

“Return to base, then.” The connection
closed.

The hit man’s next call was to his team,
calling for vehicular pickup as soon as they were done with cursory
cleanup efforts at the attack scene. At least they would remove the
bodies and equipment. Despite the screw-up that let the target slip
away, he had confidence they could do a simple job like that and
avoid the dragnet. Since most Australians were Edens now, crime,
and therefore the need for police resources, had dwindled
enormously.

He waited in an alley until the Land Rover
came. As he climbed into the back seat, its frame settled
perceptibly on its wheels. “Return to base,” he repeated his boss’s
instruction to the driver, then closed his eyes and opened the
files in his head, already planning his next move.

The chips in his head and their programming
forced him to take his instructions from the owner of that
voiceprint, but he was not a robot. Rather, his conscience had
simply been burned out of him through brutal and ecstatic
conditioning, raw pain and pleasure pumped into his nerves and
brain, and the guardian code hovered in the background all the
time, watching.

But the human brain is a complex and devious
thing, and he had found over several missions that he had a lot of
leeway when his instructions were not specific. If he was told to
terminate a target at a certain place and time, but no more, then
he might have complete freedom to choose the method. Usually many
caveats were placed on him, such as “avoid collateral damage” or
“do not be identified as a Shadow,” but as in any deal with the
devil, there was the
spirit
of his instructions and there
was the letter.