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Alkina watched ten gas-powered cold rockets carry ten braided monofilaments across the wide street to strike the roof of the mansion below. As the noise had undoubtedly alerted the building’s defenders, all ten commandos immediately clipped suspended brakes onto the cable as it automatically retracted to tautness, and leaped into space without further orders.
Less than three seconds later their feet struck the roof and they let go of the fittings to pause like insects on its sloping surface. From there, they split into pairs and aimed for five different entries.
Four of these were windows. Each duo of commandos climbed over the edge of the roof like spider-men, and together seized the bars that covered an upper story window. A coordinated wrench ripped the wrought iron out of its fittings and they immediately fired shock grenades into the windows, closely following the explosives with weapons at the ready.
Alkina and Ritter did the same at a large skylight overlooking an atrium that reached from the four-story roof all the way to the ground floor, forming the center of the mansion. Then they grasped the edge, hung briefly, and dropped.
Landing on the beautiful travertine floor, they immediately lifted their weapons and searched their sectors. While the others variously secured the Russian civilians or hunted for cyborgs, their job was to interdict this central point, coordinate, and reinforce if necessary.
An enormous figure at least seven feet tall and proportionally broad burst from a doorway and raced across the atrium, heading for an exposed internal stairway. Partway there, it realized it was not alone, turning blazing red eyes toward the pair even as it started to bring the heavy machinegun it cradled around in their direction.
Two different high-tech rounds slammed into it as Alkina and Ritter easily tracked their moving target. Hers comprised a sleet of nanocarbon flechettes sharp enough to slide into steel under the mere pressure of a human thumb. Those that struck something harder than human flesh lodged in the Shadow Man’s armored skin or metallic bones, demonstrating that something harder than mere steel composed the thing’s structure. Probably nano-assembled ferrocrystal, Alkina thought as she watched her projectiles sprout from the figure like porcupine quills.
Ritter’s round, fired on the heels of hers, was a modified Armorshock shell. As it struck its target its insulating glass skin split and shattered, exposing its two kinds of protruding conductive spines. As soon as one of each contacted metal, its capacitor dumped an enormous electrical charge into the cyborg and then triggered a small shaped charge that sent a jet of molten copper into its target. For good measure it released ultra-short-life nano that sought out human nerve tissue and disassembled it at a molecular level.
The golem jerked and fell as electrical discharges played along its skin, igniting the clothes it wore. It slid several meters along the smooth atrium floor before coming to a stop, the light going out of its eyes.
“Well, that went surprisingly well,” Ritter muttered, jacking another round into his grenade launcher and sweeping his sector for more targets.
“If I believed in such things, I’d say you’re tempting fate by saying so,” Alkina responded. “Tangle it.”
“Will do.” He took a moment to unload and then reload a special tangler shell, then aimed carefully and fired at the fallen cyborg.
A glob of something flew rather slowly from the muzzle of his launcher and expanded rapidly to about two meters across. It struck the torso and lower extremities of the fallen Shadow Man and wrapped itself around, shrinking to enfold its arms and legs, leaving its head free.
Composed of ferrocrystal monofilaments wrapped in super-sticky polymers, it should keep the cyborg immobilized, or at least inhibited. Depending upon the relative densities and properties of its flesh, its razor-sharp filaments might also slice into the thing’s skin if it tried to break free.
“Stay sharp,” she said, then approached it from above its head. In the background she heard the chuff and boom of several grenades going off, and the sound of conventional weapons fire.
Reaching into a pouch, she extracted an item prepared especially for cyborg capture. A hood made of a tough, flexible Kevlar-like woven fiber, its opening attached to a metal loop with a handle. Slipping it over the thing’s head blinded it, allowed it to breathe – assuming it needed to – and provided something to control its head with.
And, if need be, something to take its head off.
A deeper hammering sound suddenly manifested itself, and rounds tore through the inner wall of the second story of the atrium, smashing ornamental railings and a large vase from its perch.
“Looks like the other one is still alive and kicking,” Ritter called, aiming his weapon in the direction from which the bullets had come. He drifted forward as if to help.
“Stand fast, Ritter. If eight of them can’t handle one more cyborg, adding yourself to the mix won’t help. Set up your demo pack.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t sound happy but he would comply. All of the commandos, but especially the team leaders, had tested extremely loyal and disciplined, as well as aggressive. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Squatting and setting his weapon down on the floor, he reached around behind himself and detached his combat pack, a small conformal thing that rested against his lumbar region. Opening it, he removed a shaped block of high explosive and placed it atop the low wall surrounding a decorative fountain. Then he activated a small detonator and attached it with a slotted spike. Now, one coded HUD command would take the building down.
“Come on, let’s get this thing loaded.” Alkina grabbed the hood handle with one hand and said, “Unstick him from the floor.”
Ritter ran a special zero-friction blade beneath the webbed cyborg, breaking or detaching the fibers from the surface on which he rested, then grabbed the thing’s feet.
“Cyborg, just in case you can hear me,” Alkina said conversationally as she lifted and dragged, “all I have to do is twist this thing around your neck just right and it will cut your head off. And if that doesn’t work, a command from my HUD will detonate a collar of explosive that should. So if you have any self-preservation programming at all, I suggest you keep that foremost in whatever passes for your mind, and if you play nice, you’ll soon be up on your feet again and working for a new and better boss.”
She had no idea if any of that was getting through, but it didn’t hurt to hope she could convince it to save them all some trouble. The fact that the mission called for bringing at least one of the cyborgs back alive and operating buoyed that hope.
As they half dragged, half carried the thing – it must have weighed two hundred fifty kilos – they heard a flurry of mixed gunfire, then a call came on the squad leader’s freq. “Can’t take him down without losing the hostages,” said the unidentified commando. “He’s locked down tight in some kind of a panic room or vault, with the civilians behind him. We’ve got one dead and three wounded already.”
Ritter glanced at Alkina, who nodded. He radioed, “Finch, you are authorized termination protocol. Fry them and get out of there. Don’t leave our comrades.”
She could hear the relief in the man’s voice. “Acknowledged. Engaging now.”
As the two leaders lumbered down the hallway toward the mansion’s front door, they felt the building shake and heard a burst of electric static on their radios. Pieces of wall showered into the atrium they had just vacated, and then came the call, “Termination complete.” If that assessment was accurate, the commandos engaging the Shadow should have fired a medley of grenades into the bolt-hole, killing everyone in it, cyborg and civilians alike.
Price of doing business, she thought without great concern. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
The remaining seven commandos swarmed down the stairs, carrying one body and helping several wounded. Two unencumbered ones grabbed one shoulder each on the captured cyborg, and they opened the mansion’s front door.
Bullets clawed for them from behind a Mercedes limo parked in the driveway, and one of their team fell with a curse, hit but not badly due to his armor. Another dropped the comrade she was helping and took two steps, the third planted atop a stone railing that launched her into the air and over the long black automobile.
In the air, she drew a pistol and, aiming downward, shot the gunman twice in his helmeted head. The protective helm turned the shots but stunned him, knocking him to the ground as she landed lightly behind him. Two quick strides brought her to point blank range and she put the gun to his ear and blew his brains all over the cobblestones.
“Limo!” Alkina said, pointing with her chin. “See if the keys are in it.” Unsurprisingly in this hyper-secure enclave, they dangled from the steering column. “Open the boot.”
The commandos stuffed the golem into the enormous trunk of the car, then helped the wounded into the back. “Ritter, drive to the rally point and get this thing packed. I’ll make my way on foot. Finch, stay with me.”
Ritter nodded, slipping behind the wheel himself, and they roared out the gate as it retracted automatically.
Checking her HUD, she realized fewer than seven minutes had passed since the first shots were fired, and the Russian police were just starting to wake up. Sirens wailed in the near distance, and an enormous explosion blew a fireball into the air three blocks away. The dead gunman laying on the cobbles at her feet must have been assigned to the external grounds security, to have responded so fast.
Switching to the command channel for the first time – there was no need to stick her oar in until now – she called for reports from the other seven teams. Number Three couldn’t be reached at all, even when she keyed in for a general broadcast. Pulling up an overlay, she determined that the fireball came from Three’s objective. Perhaps they had self-destructed rather than get taken alive. The blast had seemed too large for just one demo pack.
Walking now, Alkina coordinated her teams’ withdrawals. Covered by Finch, she strolled around the large office building from which they had descended, her mind more on command decisions than her personal situation. Her bodyguard pulled her down behind a wall as police vehicles zoomed by with flashing lights and wailing sirens. Once she was sure everything was going as well as could be expected, she brought her mind back to the here and now.
“Let’s go,” she said to Finch, pointing, and they ran and leaped for the low rooftop of the warehouse that overlooked the rally point. There she paused and sent the detonation code for Ritter’s pack, still set in the atrium of the mansion they had just quitted. She felt the rattle, but the tall commercial building blocked her view of the thing. Hopefully it would limit any investigation’s ability to collect evidence, and destroy any surveillance videos there might be.
If not...well, omelets and eggs, and all that, she thought.
Then she and Finch leaped down to the rally point, trusting the IFF in their HUDs to keep anyone from shooting at them as they did so. Quickly she took charge of the egress, ensuring the three cyborgs they had captured were placed inside crates and instant-foamed into place up to their necks, with the explosive collars still on them. Their rides back to Australia might be long and uncomfortable, but at least they would live.
Whatever life might mean to such creatures.
It’s one thing to have implanted cybernetics, she mused. It’s entirely another to be a cyborg, programmable by machine code, limited in free will, and wholly dependent on the machines to sustain your life.
The golem they had taken apart in Australia had taught them a lot. One thing they had discovered was that the true cyborg was more machine than man. Probably if true artificial intelligence were possible, its builders would have dispensed with the organic entirely and simply created a robot. At present, though, such a thing, if built, would have been hardly smarter than an insect, able to respond to preset combat situations but not sophisticated enough to infiltrate, covertly assassinate, or bodyguard.
They’d lost twenty-one out of the eighty nanocommandos, with forty more in various states of injury. Only a few bodies had been left behind, and none of those without the benefit of a demolition pack. Evidence would be there, if the forensic teams were sufficiently diligent, but if their mission – and the Americans’ missions – were successful, the Russians should be able to reconstitute their own government and be grateful for the assistance. Spooky had thought it unlikely they would make Direct Action’s role public. If they felt some perverse need to point fingers, their old scapegoats the Americans would probably take the blame.
And as for their little nanocrack problem...well, Ann chuckled to herself, this country would have to do something for itself, after all.
With all of the cyborgs accounted for, and the Russian ministers and their families freed or dead, Alkina gave the order to pull egress. With the severely wounded bundled back into their crates, the rest of her commandos took positions on the truck bed, weapons ready. She’d rather not have to shoot it out with the Russian police, but if they did, it would be no contest.
As it happened, the police force and fire brigades seemed far too busy to be concerned about one large truck and two accompanying SUVs. Fires raged and here and there more explosions flung debris into the air, perhaps from broken gas lines or charges that their teams had not, until then, detonated.
With this hellish landscape behind them, the little convoy rolled out the open village gate and into the cool Russian early morning.
As they rumbled down the road they passed vehicles speeding toward the enclave, and she contacted the other section. Their results were a bit worse; they had captured no cyborgs at all, and had had to blow five of their targets sky-high. It appeared they had received some slight warning, or perhaps had simply been more alert. However, in the end it did not matter. When they rejoined each other on the road, the commandos indulged themselves in a cheer that could be heard over the rushing wind of their passage.
Alkina’s one fear now was that the headless Frankenstein’s monster of the Russian government would react as it was designed to, following procedures to block roads and stop traffic in the event of any disturbance. Countering this concern was her hope that, between the American’s two operations and the generally angry mood of the citizenry, they would be slow to react.
Additionally, right now the twenty-four hour media and the internet should be full of information, misinformation and disinformation about what was happening, so that the bureaucratic nerves and muscles would be twitching in confusion. And as much as they needed to be, her people were ready to fight their way through to their extraction vehicle.
Only one checkpoint slowed them, but bursts of AK fire from their local escort took care of the half-ready army conscripts and they sped on past. Within an hour they pulled onto the runway where their enormous airplane waited, engines running.
Like a smooth-running clock, her people loaded their wounded and their dead, and then processed the three captured cyborgs. First, they ran them through a heavy industrial fluoroscope, obtained by the locals for just this purpose. The scan revealed small beads of explosives wired into the cyborgs’ cerebral cortexes, presumably their version of kill switches in case their masters wished to terminate them, but none of the large self-destruct charges that were Alkina’s primary fear. Loading explosive-filled golems onto aircraft would have been the height of folly.
Thus ensured, the three crates were wrapped in reinforcing cladding and hooked up to oxygen feeds. If the explosive collars, the foam and the heavy steel plates failed to contain them on the long journey back, as a last resort they could always be ejected out the rear ramp, to enjoy a fall from seven miles up.
Spooky planned this mission well, Ann told herself admiringly, and I love him all the more for it.
As the locals dispersed, their aircraft engines lifted them on roaring jets into the steely Russian skies of another red dawn.
* * *
Olsen stared into the hunting cabin’s fireplace and enjoyed another Aquavit. Three more days to go, he thought. Then I can leave, one way or another.
The lake swarmed with patrol craft since the Salmi base had been hit. Despite the countercoup in Moscow, the juggernaut that was the Russian military shuddered onward, fulfilling its standing operating procedure, trying to catch the culprits despite the fact that no one really wanted to.
Perhaps that was why it really did not surprise him when he heard footsteps on the porch, peculiarly light though the creaks were heavy, as if massive stone statues tried to tiptoe. He’d known the two operatives had been military, not Agency, just from looking at them, and when the big man had gotten into the truck those days ago, he couldn’t hide the way the vehicle settled on its springs.
Cybernetic augmentation. It was an open secret in clandestine circles, the coming thing, especially after the nano program had so many problems. He still wondered what he would say if such enhancements were offered him.
Olsen went to open the door, hunting rifle in hand. It was always possible that someone else awaited him. Occasionally poachers poached from each other, though normally only in particularly hard times.
He was glad to see the tired and drawn faces of his contacts. “Welcome back. You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” the woman with the bandaged hand said. “Got anything to eat?”
“In the cold cupboard.” He meant the propane-powered refrigerator, which contained such rude sustenance as could be expected in a hunting cabin. Olsen was far too good an operative to allow anything that would give him away to be found by an inquisitive visitor.
“Bread, jerky, vodka?”
“There are some cooked potatoes and butter in the bin below, and sour cabbage in the crock. Welcome to Russia,” he replied with a shrug.
The woman pulled out all the food and set it on the rough-topped table in front of the big man they called Stein. “I’m not complaining, mind you, but I would rather hear ‘welcome to Finland.’”
Olsen raised his tumbler of the Caraway-flavored liquor in salute. “You and me both, sister. Now eat. We’ll go whenever you’re ready.” The two just grunted as they stuffed their faces with the abundant rustic cuisine.
Once they had eaten all of his ready food, the woman said, “We’ll go in the morning, or tomorrow evening if you’d rather go at night. We need to rest and heal.” She flicked her eyes at her partner, and Olsen suddenly realized that the big man was almost out on his feet.
“Sure,” he said. “You guys take the bedrooms. I’ll sleep on the sofa.” He quickly cleared his few belongings out of one bedroom and watched as his charges went their separate ways to crash. “Sweet dreams,” he murmured, then hummed idly as he started making stew with the rest of the supplies, and set it to simmer on the propane burner for a while before he went to sleep.
In the morning he got up and turned the flame back on to warm the pot, expecting the two to eat heartily again. Tasting it, he threw some more salt in it and was about to stir it when he heard an angry moan from the bedroom.
Seizing his rifle, he pushed the bedroom door open to see the woman shaking the man and yelling. “Get up, you stupid bastard, you can’t die on me now!”
“What’s wrong,” were the first, painfully trite words on his lips, then he put the rifle down and moved to the bedside to put two fingers on the man’s neck. “No pulse.”
“No shit!” The woman quickly cleared the man’s airway, and then ripped “Stein’s” shirt open and began CPR.
Olsen pulled out a folding knife and cut away the shirt and the sleeves, exposing the man’s arms. After a minute or two of careful examination he finally said, “You’re too late.”
“What?” the woman asked between compressions. “How do you know?” Her face was wild, frantic, and unaccountably she frightened him. “Tell me!” she said, grabbing his collar with her right hand in a grip of steel.
Olsen swallowed. “Livor mortis,” he replied. “He’s been dead for five or six hours.”
His words thudded to the floor like bags of wet cement, and the woman suddenly collapsed next to them as a puppet might with her strings cut. A moment later she began to sob.
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling completely inadequate. “Something...” he refrained from stating the painfully obvious: something unexpected must have happened.
“What kills Edens, though?” she husked, rocking back and forth. Then she whispered. “It must have been the nano.”
“The nano? Like the combat nanites I’ve heard about?”
She glared at him, then relented. “Yes. I guess you’re cleared and now you’ve got need to know. If they get in the brain of an Eden, they try to repair any damage...and he got concussed on the mission. Badly.” She put a palm against her face. “I should have thought of it.” Tears leaked between her fingers.
“Listen, Miss Johnston,” he began.
“Jill. Call me Jill.”
“Okay, Jill, I’m Gus.” He sank down next to her and put his arm around her. She turned into his shoulder and began to sob. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Even if we had gone straight in to Finland, the only people who could have possibly helped him are an ocean away.”
“He was alive! He was talking to us last night.”
“I know.” He couldn’t figure out much more to say except, “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m the sorry one. I’m alive. People near me die. I’m jinxed.”
They sat there for some time, until Reaper was sobbed out. Eventually she pushed away from Gus. “Thanks, I’m okay now.” She went into the tiny bathroom to splash water on her face, avoiding looking at Roger Muzik’s corpse.
“Ah...what are we going to do?” Gus asked.
“Bury him?” Reaper suggested.
“Too many bears. They can smell a corpse and dig him up easily. Graveyards in this area have to be defended by night watchmen with rifles.”
Reaper pressed her lips together. “Then we sink him in the lake. He won’t float. Maybe someday we can recover him.”
“He won’t float?”
“Metal bones.” Reaper peeled enough of the wrapping off her left hand to show him her metal pinky finger, stripped of all flesh.
“Oh, jeez, that’s...”
“Hideous, I know. And it’s highly classified, so keep your mouth shut, all right?”
Gus nodded. “Yah, you betcha.”
“Okay,” Reaper sighed. “Let’s get him into the lake.”
