Free Cyborg Strike by David VanDyke

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 was 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 his display Nguyen could only see two of
the five 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 the radios retransmitted the signal in order to reach
deeper into the structure. This functioned as intended, and nearly
simultaneously, all five of his dogs of war, 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