Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern Read Online Free PDF Page B

maintenance I wasn’t informed of?”
    A long silence was the only answer that came back over the intercom. After a moment of drumming his fingers on the highly lacquered wood of his desk, Gordon Kiesling became agitated. Melissa knew how much he hated to be kept waiting…for anything!
    “Melissa,” the volume of his voice rose just as its octave dropped in annoyance.
    “I apologize, Executive Director. Reports are coming in from all over. The system has been breached and everything has gone offline. Word from all remote sites are in agreement- Chicago, Houston, Poughkeepsie…even the redundancies in Cardiff and Hong Kong, all report connection to the Brain Coral has been lost, sir.”
    The nervous tic he’d been working on to rid himself of for years returned and caused a vein to twitch angrily on the left side of his forehead, just off-set of his brow line. “Now, Melissa,” he forced the words through clenched teeth, “you know I find that particular nickname for the Abraxas-configuration to be inappropriate.”
    “Sorry, again, sir. I-Oh, my God!”
    An explosion rocked the building and plaster snowflakes covered Kiesling’s immaculate suit and perfectly coiffed hair. He sprang to his feet, chair spinning chaotically away from his desk before collapsing to the ground, as he heard the shock in his assistant’s normally calm voice.
    “Melissa?!” yelled Kiesling as he jogged for the door, which was thrown open just as his hand, shaking with adrenaline, reached for the handle.
    Obviously shaken, Ms. Roslan stood in the entrance, glasses slightly askew and a strand of hair uncharacteristically bouncing down in front of her face. Kiesling read the concern in her eyes.
    “Sir, you’re going to want to see this.”
     
    *****
     
    Standing in at the center of a group of scientists, engineers and security officers, Gordon Kiesling couldn’t believe what he was looking at on the small, silent black-and-white security monitors Melissa had ordered dragged into his office. It was unbelievable.
    No, impossible. It was impossible.
    But there it was: one of the most lethal weapons on the planet, a weapon HE was responsible for creating and overseeing, had gone rogue.
    The Cestus unit, Malcolm Weir, had somehow taken out their entire computer network, killed at least three of Kiesling’s operatives, including a pair of the earlier GMR base-infantry units, and was now attempting to escape the facility. The renegade cyborg had to be stopped before he could make off with billions of dollars in US government research and development attached to his body.
    He had to be stopped.
    Kiesling snatched a communications unit from Larry Doherty, the beefy security chief from New Hampshire, startling the man with the sudden movement.
    “Can Gauss hear me on this thing?”
    Seeing Doherty’s nod, Kiesling held the earpiece in place with one hand and brought the unit’s microphone up to his mouth with the other.
    “Designate Gauss,” he paused to allow the operative to acknowledge he was receiving. “This is Executive Director Gordon Kiesling, clearance omega-nine-aught-seven-three-nine-five. Unit Cestus has gone rogue. You will stop him at all cost: use of deadly force authorized. Confirm?”
    The ten observers watching the closed-caption monitors saw Gauss look up into the security monitors, nod and smile as his voice came in over the headset in their boss’s hand, “Confirmed.”
    In black-and-white, a miniature Gauss launched into battle against Cestus, wreaking havoc on the entire floor just above where they were being scrutinized. Kiesling groaned inwardly as walls and fixtures were annihilated by the battling duo: the damage would easily run into the millions when all was said and done. He was going to hate having to explain that to the senate oversight committee.
    While the battle continued above in real life and below on the screen, Kiesling asked Carl Anderson, the short, slightly rotund IT what the state of Project: