The Kabul Incident: A Weir Codex Novella Read Online Free PDF

men to attention with a series of hand gestures.
    “Now is as good a time as any…our time under cover of darkness is limited. Sunrise is in forty-five minutes,” added Talborg, eager to get her two cents into the conversation.
    The chrome eye of Gauss looked Cestus up and down, analyzing the cyborg fully. The two super soldiers stood nearly the same height, and were both broad shouldered and good looking. Cestus was the senior of the pair—he’d been in his late thirties at the time of his admission into Project Hardwired, a good ten years older than Gauss. Both sported tightly cropped military-style haircuts, and each was loaded with tactical paraphernalia and armaments from head to toe.
    “You know the drill, Slick…gear off,” said Gauss even though the two cyborgs had been on numerous operations together and performed the maneuver many times. “And lose the gun.”
    Observing from the sidelines as Cestus did as instructed, dropping every bit of equipment he had strapped to his back, caused Brazier to shake his head. Seeing the shiny new SCAR-H assault rifle hit the ground and send up an ashy cloud of dust increased his unease tenfold. The fidgety engineer couldn’t believe the cybernetic soldier was giving up his weapons so easily…not that Cestus really needed the gun—or any of the rest. The man was a living, breathing weapon on his own, and his computer-enhanced senses gave him senses well-beyond anything that could be issued by the United States government.
    Still, thought Brazer to himself, it never hurts to have a big gun on hand…just in case.
    “Range to target is approximately four-hundred fifty-one meters…” The ice blue eyes of Cestus were laser-locked onto the Afghani terrorist compound, nearly invisible to the normal humans in the party without the benefit of bionic upgrades.
    “I’ve got it,” groaned Gauss, stamping his feet like a thoroughbred waiting on the starting line. The man’s impatience was becoming palpable to all around him.
    “Wind speed is just under six klicks,” continued Cestus, going down some unseen checklist.
    “I know my job, Cestus…quit stalling.”
    Twin arms of mirrored titanium-carbon alloy slammed together, generating a shock wave around the tightly packed military group. Brazier watched in awe as Gauss began to build a magnetic field around his body, weaving it in and out in preparation for what was to come next. Tiny pieces of metal—zippers, d-rings, dog tags, even ammo straps—began to twitch and shudder, rising up in place to face the cyborg’s humming form. When the warble began to crescendo, a shining hand shot out towards Cestus, lifting him roughly a few centimeters off the ground before bouncing him back to the earth.
    “Get ready…Alley…”
    “Be prepared to compensate for the low atmospheri—”
    “…Oop!”
    Gauss cut Cestus off, jerking his hand skyward, palm up and fingers spread. With the motion, the sound spiked into a frequency more felt than heard by those present…a high-pitched squeal just out of the range of normal hearing. Along with the sound, the magnetic wave enveloped Cestus in a cocoon of energy and flung him out into the darkened abyss of space stretching out between the military unit and their unsuspecting foes. If Brazier didn’t know better it looked like the soldier was tossing a ball up in the air rather than sending a six-foot two-inch, three-hundred plus pound cyborg flying.
    “Fastball special.” The sheer insanity of what had just played out before his eyes hit Brazier hard. “Just like something out of a comic book.”
    Watching as Cestus landed, nearly five-hundred yards away with a tuck-and-roll and tiny mushroom cloud of dust, just beyond the outer perimeter of the insurgents’ high-walled compound, Brazier found himself smiling. As safe, secure, and comfortable as he’d felt in all the missions he’d monitored remotely from Hardwired headquarters back in California, the thin man had to admit