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Once the surgery to reattach Spooky’s arm muscle ended, and he filled his veins with as much nutrient solution as he could stand, he put on his uniform, and with it his Major General Nguyen persona. Never underestimate the power of symbols, he thought.
Then he went through Direct Action HQ like a whirlwind. He did not bother to keep Brigadier Alkina at his side. His decision to trust her must stand, absent evidence to the contrary, but he could not assume she was as competent as she appeared.
Perhaps I raised her up too quickly.
Instead, he sent her to check on a list of specific items that he deemed the most likely weak points in the organization: certain persons, especially, that might have been turned, some physical portals, and virtual ones as well. That was scut work, though, to free him to look at the things he wanted to, and set them in order. Once he had done that, he began to implement his coup.
“Open the door,” he ordered at the entrance to his nanocommando containment facility. Within it resided the five men he had captured after they kidnapped the South African children and flew an airplane here, intending to defect. Living repositories of combat-boosting nanites, they were also targets of a measure of his sadistic proxy revenge, a pleasure carefully metered out and never overdone.
Since his friends Daniel Markis and Larry Nightingale would not avenge the crime... Very satisfying. Revenge really is a dish best served cold.
The time for all that had passed, though. He realized that such indulgences must be put aside as distractions. Now, everything must serve the objective of seizing and ruling Australia, for the goal of saving Earth and the human race.
Once inside the huge armored laboratory vault, he walked down the row of tanks that held them. A nameplate identified each one.
Holden. Lumpkins. Bullion. Campbell.
Huff. He ran his hand along this last, tracing its inscribed letters.
A strategist would say now was not the time for experiments, but Nguyen had always gotten a lot of mileage out of doing the unexpected.
“Controller,” he addressed the watching white-coated technician at the mental induction console, “load them with package 9-1-0, authorization X7&54#N99.”
“That will require your thumbprint and retinal scan, General,” the tech said apologetically.
“Very well.” He walked over to the control board and made the necessary verifications, then watched as the man keyed in the instructions. “You may go now,” Nguyen said.
With a nod that was almost a bow, the controller slipped out of the room via its single entrance.
What most believe to be its single entrance, Nguyen thought.
The tanks hummed and indicator lights blinked, small notice of the orders downloading into their well-prepared, well-conditioned brains. Over the last months, part of the work done here had been to put to use some of the Septagon Shadow files that had come his way. Not the cyborg physical enhancements – he didn’t have the resources for that kind of engineering yet, and nanocommandos had been quite sufficient for his purposes. Rather, the much easier installation of chips in their brains, and the pain-pleasure conditioning that went with them, gave him his final, ironic revenge.
They had already given him their nanotechnology. Now these men were bullets in his gun, human guided missiles in his launcher.
Sitting down at the console, he put in a different set of instructions and then waited.
First, a panel in the brushed-nickel wall swung back, a hidden door revealing a tunnel lit by glow strips on the ceiling.
Next, all five containment machines opened their clamshell tops to reveal naked men. Moments later they began to wake up, sit up, and climb down.
Once they came to attention before their respective nameplates, Major General Nguyen stood up to address them. Their eyes tracked him like machines, or like dogs staring at a beloved master.
“Gentlemen,” Nguyen said, “how do you feel?”
“One hundred percent, sir!” they all responded in unison.
“What is your prime imperative?”
“To complete the mission, sir!” Again, as one.
“Why do the wild geese fly?”
“To find the sunset, sir!” This last question was merely a test of their programming, something to reveal any glitch.
“Proceed to the next phase, gentlemen.”
As one they turned to enter the dimly lit tunnel. Nguyen followed them, and watched as they proceeded to a small chamber containing the skinsuits and commando armor they had been captured in. They dressed, only leaving off their HUD helmets for now.
“Wait here until the next phase, gentlemen. There is food and water, and you may rest. It will not be long.”
“Yes sir!”
With that, Nguyen retraced his steps to the containment tank chamber, closed the machines, entered one final command in the console, and left the vault to prepare his people for the long-awaited operation. He passed the word, and set the kickoff time for six hours from now, confident that his previously laid plans would come to fruition.
Through the complex, more than two hundred non-Eden Direct Action operatives were injected with the most potent version of commando nano available, something Nguyen had reserved for himself alone – until now. They donned skinsuits and armor, and HUD helmets based on the American design, modified and improved in accordance with his own instructions. They drew lethal weapons of myriad sorts, enough firepower to take over a small country.
Or a large one, if properly targeted.
Soon they reported all ready: Nguyen’s own private army, built for this day from a careful selection of human material, chosen for their willingness to follow ruthless kill orders. About half of them were Outliers – Psychos – mostly the front line cannon fodder, with chips in their heads and deadman charges next to their hearts. If he must lose storm troops, he preferred to thin out his competition.
Bullets in his gun.
Nguyen then called Ann Alkina into the control room, the only person he felt he could fully trust to watch his back. This moment, when he was ready to let slip his dogs of war, might also be his most vulnerable.
“Everything is ready, General,” his deputy said as she entered. Her eyes swept across the various workstations and the operations chiefs who sat at them, concentric semicircles reminiscent of an old space launch mission center.
Nguyen nodded, and reached for a microphone attached to his board. Choosing a communications path known only to him, he spoke the code words, “Cry havoc.”
He knew that below him in the secret chamber of the vault, another door had opened, and his five infiltrators now raced down a tunnel to find a nondescript van that would convey them to a point near their target: Central Authority, the hub of the Committee of Nine, and its most politically powerful piece.
But as Mao said, all power comes from the barrel of a gun. Sometimes Nguyen preferred a quote from Dune: “The power to destroy a thing is the power to control it.” Either way, he was now employing power to seize more power.
“Now, Brigadier Alkina, I wish you good luck.” He stood, nodding to her, and turned to go.
“Wha –” Alkina clamped down on her objections in the presence of subordinates, standing rooted as Nguyen shot her a no-nonsense look, and then shut the door behind him.
A good test of her subordination and submission, he thought. It’s hard to go back to being number two when you have a taste of the top job. Her reactions will be instructive.
Putting those worries behind him, he raced down the corridor to the nanocommandos’ preparation hall. Two hundred faces turned to look at him as he crossed to his own locker and pulled out his skinsuit. Stripping down, he rapidly dressed in the same dark mottled armor as the rest. Once he pulled on his HUD helmet, he was indistinguishable from them on the outside.
Within the system, though, he took charge with a little Shakespeare. “Ladies and gentlemen, let this fair action on foot be brought.” He sent the go code to confirm his verbal instruction, and followed the stream of camouflage out the doors and into the underground hangar.
Within the enormous covered space rested ten heavy VTOL aircraft, more advanced versions of the old U.S. Osprey tilt-rotors. In this case the blades spun enclosed within rings set at each of the four corners, attached to wings that would allow for fast cruising in airplane mode.
At twenty-five commandos per, the vehicles quickly filled, even as the hangar’s ceiling split and rolled back, opening the chamber to the cool night sky above. Pilots spoke clipped phrases and soon the first VTOL lifted straight up, followed one at a time by the others. Nguyen’s was last, and only half full, providing more maneuverability and less exposure.
Once they cleared the roof line, the ten birds shot forward in nap of the earth mode, skimming low over the hills northwest of greater Sydney. Central Authority’s own complex rested almost a hundred kilometers away, a bare fifteen-minute flight.
As soon as he was able, Nguyen connected his command HUD with a geostationary satellite hanging in orbit above Australia. His codes overrode its functions, turning it into his own personal eye in the sky and communications relay. Within moments his HUD lit up with detailed information on air and ground traffic, as well as the encrypted feeds from all of his commandos’ HUDs.
All of his commandos. He focused its display on his five dogs of war.
By ground vehicle it had taken those men ninety minutes to get in position, perfectly coordinated with his follow-up assault. Carefully calculating time and distance, he waited until the correct moment and sent them in.
Watching as their tiny icons raced across the hillside above Central Authority, he envisioned their true speed across the ground, speed that would hopefully startle and completely overmatch any attempt to thwart them from reaching their initial goal.
He knew that they moved as a team toward one of the emergency exits of the building that housed the vertical access to the basements and vaults. They would even now be shooting out lights and cameras, and with the strength of fifty men, would tear into the building with minimal difficulty.
Of course, such an audacious attack would draw immediate action from the security forces, which would converge on the source of the incursion like antibodies on an invading plague.
All according to plan.
“One minute!” Nguyen heard the call over the aircraft’s PA, and got ready to disembark. Perfect timing.
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, and 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 fire 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 through 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 were 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 the display Nguyen could only see two of his five dogs of war 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 their radios retransmitted the signal in order to reach deeper into the structure. This functioned as intended, and nearly simultaneously, all five of them, 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 and accepted 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 had 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.
Where the bodies of the three nanocommandos had been, now he could find nothing but craters. It looked to him like twenty kilos of Semtex or C8 had been detonated there, vaporizing the bodies, though that was clearly impossible. Hell, it must have been inside them, he thought. Clever, Spooky, clever. Almost got me. It must have been something new, and ten times as powerful, to fit into nanocommandos and not impair their functioning.
If all of the attackers were so equipped – and he had to assume there were dozens, if not hundreds – then Central Authority was doomed. The black-clad commandos had to be going through this fortress like shit through a goose, and one damaged cyborg simply wasn’t going to turn the tide.
As soon as his hybrid brain-chipset agreed with this assessment, his minder code insisted he reprioritize and preserve the life of his principal. Because he’d decided on that himself, he was already heading toward Ms. Smythe’s office, and avoided any warning pain.
Fewer of the defenders clogged the corridors this time, and he didn’t have to harm any of them at all before he reached his goal. Bursting through the door, he did not wait for acknowledgement before saying, “We must exfiltrate immediately, ma’am.”
Smythe stared at him, obviously startled by her naked metal golem’s appearance, but she had not gotten to her position by freezing under pressure. “Agreed,” she responded, and stepped from behind her desk. In her hand she carried a compact pistol.
“Follow me,” he said, and paced himself to her jog. It was only a short distance to the VTOL hangar, where two slim flying darts waited with their internal rotors already spinning. A pilot sat in each, waiting for their passengers to load.
“I need twenty seconds,” he said, and bolted for the ready room door, leaving Smythe standing there. Seventeen seconds later he returned, dressed now in a flight suit and carrying two flyers’ helmets. He tossed another coverall at her. “Put this on.”
Normally Smythe would probably have taken exception to this kind of abrupt treatment, but the threat of death must have made her decide to forego her usual umbrage. She slipped the garment over her clothes and then received a helmet from the cyborg’s hand.
Next, the metal man took off his facemask and tucked it into his suit, revealing his human visage, relatively well preserved except for some bruising around the edges from the explosion. He walked over to tell one of the pilots to get out of his craft. The man did not argue, but ran over to take the copilot’s seat on the other bird.
Waving Smythe toward him, the cyborg took the primary control position and pulled on his flight helmet, bringing up his piloting overlay template and double-checking the aircraft’s status. Once Smythe had settled into the copilot’s seat of the little attack bird, he pressed the button that sent the signal to open the roof.
* * *
Surprise blossomed in Spooky’s racing mind as the ground began to move beneath his feet. It seemed a hill grew under him, and he ran downward to find stable earth. As soon as he could, he turned to see a squarish rupture, sharply cornered, doors with a thin layer of dirt and plants over them for near-perfect camouflage.
Something coming to the surface.
Nguyen backed away, looking around for his troops, but none were closer than half a football field, of any nation’s rules. With the HUD he called several to him, and marked the new threat on their displays. Then he hefted his own weapon, a heavy PW-20 loaded with Needleshock, worthless against most vehicles. He felt no great concern; any ground car or truck to emerge could be handled by his commandos or, if need be, by his aircraft.
Instead, one slim VTOL blasted skyward from the opened doors, then another. “Bring them down!” he ordered immediately, and several weapons of various sorts – anti-aircraft, heavy machinegun, Armorshock – let loose after them.
The lead vehicle took a missile into the engine housing, forcing its pilot to put it down immediately onto a hillside before he lost all control. Its twin lit up with the discharge of an electromagnetic pulse cannon, which froze all of its systems. Nosing over in the air, it tumbled when it struck the ground, coming apart by bits and pieces.
“You two check that one,” Nguyen said to the nearest commandos, pointing at the first crash, the biggest mess. Over his suitcomm he ordered, “All others on the surface within sight of it, converge on the downed craft and capture those in it.”
Then he ran.
As he was not the closest, he was far from the first to reach the crash site, and so was perfectly positioned to witness the death of one of his people. Too eager and insufficiently cautious, the man died in a burst of 20mm fire from the nose of the aircraft.
Its pilot had brought it in to pancake in some scrubby trees, and thus preserved most of its structure, apparently taking the opportunity to use the heavy weapon to shred the first grunt to walk in front of it.
Stupid, Nguyen thought. Never assume a weapon is not functional. Darwin wins again.
Neither he nor the seven or eight others approaching made the same mistake.
Because of his capture order, his people did not simply send in rockets to blast the fuselage, but one of them carried an electrical cannon, useful for dealing with a number of problems. Not only vehicles but also nano-infused personnel would fall to its overwhelming charge.
That commando fired its lightning bolt into the VTOL, and the aircraft’s electrically operated 20mm cannon burped one abortive burst before jamming. Residual lights inside the helicopter-like vehicle went out, and as the blue shimmers dispersed, all were plunged into darkness.
Switching to IR allowed Nguyen to see a figure moving weakly inside. “Leave it to me,” he ordered, and approached alone on cat feet, PW20 at the ready. Hopefully, a couple shots of the heavy nonlethal round would allow whomever it was to be taken into custody. He could always use brave, resourceful people on his own team, if he or she could be persuaded to give up any hard feelings.
The copilot he could see shuddered wounded, her visage hidden by the aviator’s face shield. Red blood soaked her flight suit, her breathing labored. The male pilot next to her sat unmoving in his seat, face down on the cyclic stick.
“Get the copilot out. She’s wounded, and I want her alive. Make sure she’s disarmed,” he instructed. Unfortunately he’d chosen his commandos for aggression and capacity for violence, not their ability to take prisoners.
Moving to the other side of the cockpit, he kept his own weapon pointed at the unmoving man slumped in the seat. Reaching for a piece of tubular metal wreckage, he used it to prod the body, seeking signs of faking injury or death. The chest did not rise and fall, so he tossed the rod onto the VTOL’s floor and fired one round into the figure’s thigh, where it burst with a spark.
No reaction. Satisfied, he turned to look at the team ministering to the injured copilot.
Spark?
Only Dadirri saved him, long hours ever alert to his old teacher Maka’s walking stick, blows that would come at him from every blind direction until he could feel them before they fell, merely by the way they disturbed the air.
Flexing at the waist, Spooky dropped his helmeted head below a powerful swing of the very tube he had just discarded and continued the motion, rolling and coming smoothly to his feet beyond, facing the aircraft. Firing instantly, he put five rounds into the chest of the figure even now rushing for him.
Mistake! He could see no effect, and by then the man got too close. Blocking another strike of the enemy’s improvised bat only rendered his own weapon useless, broken in half by a blow like a pile driver. Then he recognized the one he faced: from his size and speed, this must be his pursuer from the assassination attempt.
Pride nearly undid him then, temptation to have his vengeance, and to tell the others, this one is mine, though he believed he had long ago moved beyond such idiocy. Survival and victory came through outthinking and outfighting, not through heroic gestures.
“Kill him,” Nguyen ordered.
Weapons from the half-circle of onlookers ripple-fired, but their target changed direction suddenly, faster than expected, causing them all to miss. Bullets and rockets plowed the ground as the figure, still anonymous in his helmet, charged at the downed copilot and the two commandos giving her aid.
One instinctively rolled out of the way, weaponless and wise with discretion.
The other snatched up a grenade launcher, but even nanite speed failed to bring the weapon on target before the attacker shot his foot forward in a blurring, precise kick. The commando’s head snapped backward and lolled as his body tumbled, dead or dying.
More shots crossed his path and one Armorshock round struck with its characteristic discharge. The man stumbled, slowing, and other projectiles hammered him to the ground until he lay still.
Even more cautiously this time, Nguyen approached, not relying on any firearm. Rather, he held his hands in an open combat stance, and took light steps that would have impressed Kwai Chang Caine’s blind Kung Fu teacher.
Dadirri saved him again, as well as a lifetime of training, as incredibly, the man surged to his feet scarcely slower than before. His shattered helmet fell off of him.
Now Nguyen could see the visage of his attacker, which turned to face him. A face he knew, that he’d studied so long ago in his nephew Vinh’s intelligence dossiers. And he never forgot a face, even one he thought long turned into an Eden and therefore cured of his penchant for sick cruelty.
“Miguel Carrasco.”
“Spooky Nguyen.” The man’s voice sounded like something a machine would make, but his face showed a very human rage.
“What is this about?” he asked. “What did I ever do to you?” His racing thoughts already had concocted a theory, but if Spooky had any weaknesses, curiosity might be one of them, so he let the man talk rather than immediately ordering him killed.
“You wanted to kill me, there on the floor of the lab. I appreciate that.”
“Oh?” Spooky’s theory took a hard left turn. “You would rather have died?”
“Yes! But that do-gooder Markis and his tame bitch had me shot up with the Plague.” Carrasco’s face twisted with hatred and reflected agony.
“Ah. I see.” And now he did. “No longer could you take pleasure in rape and murder. What was it – nightmares? PTSD? Guilt?”
“It was pure hell. I swore I would find a way to get myself back and hunt you bastards down...and now, here we are.” Carrasco smiled. “Are you still a chickenshit gook slope who can’t face a man?”
Anger surged within Spooky, an emotion he thought he’d dispensed with long ago. It caused him to finally give in to that pride.
“Leave him to me,” he ordered his troops in a low, grating voice. They shifted uneasily, forming a circle. Spooky wondered what kind of a man would carry a grudge for more than a decade, when he could have rehabilitated himself in any number of ways. He also wondered what technology it was that allowed the man to operate with a dozen obviously fatal wounds.
More than a nanocommando.
Shadow Man?
Cyborg?
Carrasco’s attack confirmed his supposition, raining lightning blows powerful enough to break bones, using arms and legs sheathed in metal visible at wrists and ankles.
Spooky dodged and, when necessary, deflected the strikes with his own armored limbs. Even with such protection he was driven backward and laterally, a fighter in a ring.
Like a tiger after a bobcat the metal man came on, implacable, his eyes suddenly glowing a visible red, a demonic thing of deliberate terror. Each blow missed by mere millimeters as his quarry moved out of the way. “You cannot survive against me,” the nightmare voice crackled.
“On the contrary, you cannot survive at all,” growled Spooky, risking a strike to the man-thing’s knee. It felt like kicking a metal pole, and did not slow his enemy in the least. Apparently the cyborg felt no pain. Damaging that armored joint, or any other, would take a powerful blow from exactly the right angle.
“I’m going to rip your head off and shit down your yellow neck,” his enemy said.
“I think not,” Spooky responded from within his cold rage, unleashing a combination designed to set up the spinning mule kick that would break that knee. He arranged it perfectly, finishing with every ounce of his nano-enhanced strength and speed, driving his heel sideways into the man-thing’s leg.
Instead, he felt his own fibula snap and his tibia shatter, shocking him utterly as he stumbled and fell, pain shooting throughout his body. I am a fool, he thought as he scrambled in the dirt. I discarded all the lessons of Dadirri in the heat of my emotion, and started brawling. I deserve to die.
Carrasco stumbled too, his leg knocked from under him though not damaged as planned. He fell heavily, then rolled toward Spooky, reaching with clawed fingers, intending to finish the job. As he did, a blade shot out from the cyborg’s arm, spearing six inches into the smaller man’s calf, causing him to jerk reflexively and pull the leg back, leaving a gaping wound that poured blood and dragged an enormous flap of flesh.
This thing could kill me, Spooky realized with dawning belief. Belatedly, he recalled the first and most obvious lesson Maka had taught him: where one fails, many succeed. “Kill it!” he roared, somersaulting backward and out of the way on three good limbs.
A hail of firepower converged on the cyborg. Armorshock blasts immobilized him long enough for antiarmor rockets to chew chunks from his metal skin. Large caliber bullets probed for the few weak spots – the eyes, the throat, the elimination port – and tore into the less robust human-machine hybrid mechanisms beneath.
Once the firing diminished, a nanocommando strode forward with a short rotor blade from the downed VTOL and used it to chop the thing’s head from its shoulders. It took nine blows.
Sitting on the ground holding his leg wound closed, Spooky instructed, “Find tools in the wreckage. There should be fire axes, or perhaps something in the workshops – saws, cutting torches. I want this thing dismembered and the pieces locked up in hard cases for shipment back to Direct Action labs. Ritter,” he turned to one of the squad leaders, “load our wounded on a good bird back to headquarters and pick up whatever you need.”
“Yes, sir,” Ritter responded, calling over his comm for a VTOL dustoff.
Spooky looked at the ugly scene around him and repeated to himself: never again. Never again would he fight from an inferior position. Never again would he allow opposition to grow powerful enough to challenge him on the continent of Australia. If a subtly effective police state filled with drones would save Earth, then by the gods, he would create one. No Stalin, no Mao, no Attila or Khan would outdo him in implacable ruthlessness.
His next order of business was to find out where that thing that used to be Miguel Carrasco had come from. Soon, he swore, he would have his own cybernetics, and his own cyborgs.
Never again.
