The Kabul Incident(14)

On a silver platter.

But where was Designate Cestus and why hadn’t he responded to the attacks outside.

A noise, the sound of metal scraping on stone, nearly voided Brazier’s bladder. The delicate pale yellow hair on the back of his neck stood on end, goosebumps riddled every inch of exposed flesh on his arms. He wasn’t alone. Something was alive and moving out in the predawn shadows of the building. The only light in the abyssal space of the room emanated from the electronic device clutched with white-knuckled claws and pressed against his chest.

“Cestus?” was what Brazier intended to call out but all that emerged was a squeak understandable only by canines.

The hard soled combat boots he’d been given scraped across the floor, making enough noise to worry the terrified computer tech, ushering him slowly towards where his monitor had shown Cestus’s own quest take him.

“Cestus?” Brazier called out in the harsh approximation of a whisper. His query was greeted only by the creak of a door opening in the dark. A sound echoed back to him from the dime-sized speakers mounted in the sides of his flat-screened computer, drawing his attention back to its surface.

Shining up from the screen of the tiny computer tablet, Cestus stepped through the final door and caught sight of something in the rear of the room that caught his attention. From his position, Brazier watched as the cyborg moved stiffly to the center of the hard concrete floor, covered in grime and old motor oil, and stop. The program monitoring every aspect of Cestus’s systems…everything from his heart rate and pulse, to blood pressure, eye movements, and reaction time…showed the cybernetic killer was completely at easy. He had gone into an almost rest-like state.

“I am here,” Brazier heard the super soldier’s voice ring out calmly over his radio headset.

Thinking the man was speaking to him, Brazier almost responded, but something held his tongue. After a beat, Cestus continued.

“Unit ready to receive further instructions.”

“‘Further instructions?’ What the hell is going on here,” Brazier asked himself. Whoever Cestus was having the conversation with was someone the engineer couldn’t see and was someone the cyborg had been expecting to meet. How was it possible?

“Transmit.”

A coded transmission blasted across Brazier’s monitor and headset simultaneously. For a second, the burst was a garbled mess of static and white noise that threatened to rupture the engineer’s eardrums with its intensity. Then, slowly, a voice began to push through the sonic cacophony. The voice of an old, tired man.

“This is the way the world ends…”

The voice stopped Brazier, just on the opposite side of the door leading into the cramped office containing Cestus. Fear locked every joint in his body.

A beep and the green flickering light of an active connection forced him to swing his head down in search of the source.

For a microsecond, the link to the communications satellite Project Hardwired had monitoring in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles overhead was wide open, allowing Brazier to get a lock on the transmissions source. In that microsecond everything crystallized for the Project Hardwired technician in a way that scared him to the core of his being.

Los Angeles. The signal was from Los Angeles.

Project Hardwired headquarters.

Brazier was stunned. If his readings were correct, the transmission was coming from the Abraxas Array itself. The coded signal, whatever it was, came from somewhere deep within the heart of the artificial intelligence that ran nearly every aspect of the top secret government organization. It made no sense.

A black kernel began to grow in the back of the mid-westerner’s mind. A thought that could very much get him killed if it turned out to be true. Was someone at Project Hardwired responsible or…

“Good, God,” thought Brazier, eyes going wide. Could the entire situation, the entire operation, have been fabricated by Abraxas-1? To what end, though? None of it made any sense.

The engineer needed to get communications back up and running so he could confirm his findings with someone at headquarters. He needed to tell someone.

A large silhouette moved into Brazier’s field of vision, cutting off the intense light pouring out of the tiny office room in the rear of the warehouse. Bracing himself, the engineer fumbled for the Beretta M9 pistol that had been forgotten in its place holstered onto his right hip. The imposing black shape slowly morphed into a form familiar to Scott Brazier. One whose presence, as intimidating as it could be was, reassured the rattled, battered man.

“Cestus?” The gun fell from Brazier’s trembling hand. He couldn’t believe he had almost opened fire on the man he’d come to save. “Thank God—!”