Bright silvered claws mounted onto titanium alloy arms flashed out of the darkness, gleaming knives made of pure moonlight, and tore through the Kevlar and ceramic polymer plates of the Improved Outer Tactical Vest strapped to Brazier’s torso. A second swipe from a blank-expressioned Cestus sliced a trio of deep gashes into the stunned civilian’s now bare abdomen, spilling its contents onto the hard, dirty floor at his feet.
“Civilian threat neutralized,” said Cestus. The words were cold and lifeless even as the warmth of Brazier’s blood coated the cyborg’s torso in a bright arterial spray.
CHAPTER 5
Oh-Four-Forty-Two: Ten Kilometers North of Kabul
FUBAR.
Staring down at the three seven-inch long gut wounds spurting blood to the tempo of his heartbeat made Scott Brazier take a moment to fully accept the perfection inherent in that word.
Fucked up beyond all recognition. That’s what Sergeant Height had defined the sentiment as.
Yup, that pretty much defined the situation for the lithe weapons engineer.
Gripping his stomach tightly in an effort to keep the contents of his belly from spilling onto the chilly ground beneath him, Brazier struggled to pull himself away from his attacker. Someone, somehow must have hacked the open link from the Abraxas Array into the computer mounted just above Cestus’s spinal column. Someone back at Project Hardwired.
The thought chilled Brazier even as his blood spilled freely to the ground.
There was a traitor in Project Hardwired. If only he could survive long enough for the communications line to reboot. Six minutes is all the it required. That’s how long it would take the system to reboot itself.
All he needed to do was stall for another minute.
“Who is doing this to you, Cestus?” Brazier asked, hoping to get some kind of answer from either the cyborg killer or whoever manipulated his strings from afar. A long trail of blood, black in the wan light filtering into the tight room, left streaks along the cracked warehouse floor behind the dying technician. The nails of his fingers cracked and broke as he pulled himself along with one hand, trying to reach the tablet computer knocked from his grasp during the cybernetic warrior’s assault. “You can resist it…you’re more than a just a machine!”
A blank stare was the only answer Cestus gave. But it was enough for Brazier’s racing mind.
Cestus wasn’t more than just a machine, was he? Not anymore.
It all made sense. Cestus was the perfect choice for an attack on Hardwired. In spite of his combat abilities, the alloy-armed soldier was the only Designate whose mind had been completed wiped and reprogrammed. Without a human personality to fight back on a non-logical level, the cyborg would have been unable to resist a few lines of codes being hacked into his command prompts by someone with a high enough security clearance to break into his system. A few more strings hidden in plain sight to control the wooden boy without anyone being the wiser.
Hands slick with quickly cooling crimson goo slid across the smooth surface of Brazier’s now-cracked computer.
“Yes!” thought Brazier. Communication should be back on line any second. He had a chance. Licking his dry, blood-caked lips, the engineer looked back over his shoulder, trying to hide his efforts to get an emergency signal out to Talborg…to Gauss…to anyone who might be listening.
“System reboot in ten…nine…” came the thin, female voice of Brazier’s electronic tablet.
So close!
Fingers forged from titanium-carbide alloy elongated with a twitch of the cyborg’s wrist. Blades nearly a foot in length slid into thin grooves along each of Cestus’s ten fingers, transforming them once more into the weapons of a butcher. A human grin half formed on the super-soldier’s face, forced out from somewhere outside of the cold, logical computer programming that formed the personality construct hard-coded into his electronic brain. The mind of Cestus had been replaced by something alien and far less human than what he had been before.
“Six…five…”
Stalking forward with the ease of a panther hunting its prey, Cestus towered over the engineer’s fallen form and raised its clawed right hand.
“This is the way the world ends…” he repeated to his quarry’s horror.
“Two…”
“Help me…” Those were the last words to escape from the blood-caked lips of Engineer First Grade Scott Brazier. The words fell even as his head dropped to the hard packed dirt floor of the tiny room. Freed from its position atop his thin shoulders, Brazier’s skull fell onto its side, eyes still blinking up wildly at the man responsible for his death.
“System reboot initiating…”