Cyberwolf: The Mechanic's Tale

Chapter 7: Zero's Warning

The warning came at dusk, when the Aurora Dome's artificial sun had finally surrendered to the city's perpetual smog and the Rust Belt's neon signs flickered to life like a thousand fever dreams.

Zero started screaming.

It wasn't a normal chirp or alert beep. It was a full-throated, mechanical shriek that split the quiet of the workshop like a knife through silk. The little storm rat launched itself from its perch on Kayden's workbench, its optical sensors blazing an urgent crimson, its small chrome body vibrating with a frequency that made the diagnostic screens flicker.

Eva was halfway across the shop before Kayden could register what was happening. She scooped Zero up and checked its sensor readouts, her face going pale.

"Override signal," she breathed. "Someone's trying to remotely activate my shop's systems."

Kayden was on his feet instantly, his chrome arm reforming into a defensive position without conscious thought---fifteen years of combat training firing through neural pathways that the chip couldn't fully suppress. His amber eye cycled through its modes: thermal, standard, scanning. The workshop was clear. No heat signatures outside except the ambient glow of the Rust Belt's infrastructure.

"It's not attacking," Eva said, reading the data flowing across her diagnostic screen. "It's probing. Scanning my network for something."

Zero stopped screaming. Instead, it did something Kayden had never seen before---it projected a holographic display from its chest cavity, a three-dimensional map of the surrounding district. Red dots pulsed at the edges of the display, moving in a pattern he recognized immediately.

Search formation. Grid sweep. The same pattern the Black Claw Division used for locating assets.

"Those are Black Claw patrol drones," Kayden wrote on the glass, his hand moving faster now, his communication improving each day. "SECTOR SCAN. LOOKING FOR SOMETHING."

"They're looking for you," Eva said. The words were flat, factual, but her copper eyes had gone hard. "They know you're alive. They know you're in the Rust Belt."

She was already moving---gathering tools, data pads, the small case of emergency medical supplies she kept beneath her workbench. Kayden watched her with his dual vision, noting the efficiency of her movements, the way her hands didn't shake despite the fear he could smell radiating from her pores.

"There's a back entrance through the old ventilation shaft," she said without looking up. "It leads to the maintenance tunnels beneath the factory district. We can---"

The main door of the workshop exploded inward.

Not opened. Not nudged. Exploded---a concussive blast that tore the reinforced door off its hinges and sent it spinning across the floor in a screech of metal on concrete. Smoke billowed through the opening, carrying with it the acrid smell of military-grade thermal charges.

Kayden moved before the smoke cleared. His chrome arm swept Eva behind him as he positioned himself between her and the breach, his prosthetic hand reforming into the plasma blade configuration he hadn't activated in days but remembered like breathing.

Through the smoke, a figure walked.

It moved with a predator's grace, lean and fast, nothing like the lumbering tanks Kayden had trained beside. The left side of its body was human, or had been once: a narrow face with sharp features, dark hair cropped close to the scalp, and a sneer that Kayden recognized from a hundred shared missions. The right side was pure Black Claw engineering---a sleek mechanical arm that ended in three retractable blades, each one gleaming with a fresh coat of synthetic diamond coating, and where the right eye should have been, a gold lens that burned with targeting computer intensity. The legs were both augmented, spring-loaded for explosive speed.

Codename: Claw.

Kayden's HUD flashed warnings he didn't need. He knew Claw better than most. They had been taken from their homes in the same year, trained in the same programs, punished in the same cells. Claw had always been faster, more aggressive, more eager to prove himself to the handlers. And when Kayden had been designated the superior asset, Claw's jealousy had curdled into a hatred that festered for years.

"Asset K-7," Claw's voice was a smooth, cold thing, unmarred by the damage that plagued other operatives. "You've been a very bad investment. The General doesn't like losing his prototypes."

Kayden's chrome fingers tightened on his plasma blade. The weapon hummed at operational frequency. His organic heart beat faster---not with fear, but with the recognition of an old rival.

He stepped forward, placing himself squarely between Claw and Eva.

"Stand aside, human female," Claw said, his gold lens shifting to Eva. "The asset has been contaminated. You are now a witness to a Black Claw operational breach. You will be taken for decontamination and memory restructuring. I'm told the process is painless. Mostly."

"You'll have to go through me first," Eva said. Her voice was steady. She had picked up a plasma wrench from her workbench---crude, improvised, utterly useless against military-grade armor. It didn't matter. She wasn't going to run.

Kayden wrote on the wall with his free hand, the letters appearing in the dust in big, deliberate strokes: SHE NOT PART OF THIS. I COME WITH YOU. LET HER GO.

Claw laughed. The sound was sharp, almost musical, completely devoid of warmth.

"You don't get to make deals, K-7. You lost that privilege when you crawled into a garbage heap and played dead." He flexed his bladed arm, the three claws extending and retracting in a hypnotic rhythm. "The General wants you back. Whole. Or in pieces. Honestly, I hope you choose pieces. I've been waiting for this for a long time."

The chip screamed at Kayden to submit. To kneel. To accept return to the only life he had known. The pulse at the base of his skull was overwhelming now, a wall of static and command designed to break any resistance.

But behind the chip's scream, something else was screaming too. Something older. Something that remembered moonlight and running and a mother's voice.

Kayden's organic hand closed around the back of his chrome neck, fingers finding the base of the chip. He could feel it---the device that had stolen fifteen years of his life, that had turned him into a weapon, that had tried to erase everything that made him human.

He pressed.

The chip flickered.

For one fraction of a second, the command signals that held his body in check simply stopped. And in that fraction of a second, Kayden was himself.

He moved.

The plasma blade carved a perfect arc through the smoke, aimed not at Claw's armored torso---too fast, too agile---but at the joint where his mechanical arm connected to the organic shoulder. A surgical strike. A disabled arm would level the playing field.

Claw was faster than Kayden remembered. He ducked under the blade, his augmented legs launching him sideways in a blur of motion, and counterattacked with his own claws. The three blades raked across Kayden's chrome chest plate, leaving deep gouges in the alloy.

"Slow," Claw taunted, landing in a crouch. "The chip really has done a number on you, hasn't it? Fifteen years of being a good little weapon, and now you can barely fight."

Kayden didn't answer. He couldn't. But he could move.

He feinted left, then drove right, his plasma blade shifting to a shorter, faster configuration. Claw parried with his claws, sparks flying as the two weapons met. They circled each other in the ruined workshop, destroying what little remained of Eva's equipment.

"Eva!" Kayden tried to scream, but his broken vocal synthesizer only produced a grinding howl. She understood anyway.

She threw the plasma wrench.

It wasn't a weapon. It was a distraction. She threw it at Claw's gold lens as hard as she could, a desperate, defiant act that forced him to flinch---a tiny, involuntary reaction that cost him a fraction of a second.

That fraction was all Kayden needed.

He closed the distance, his organic shoulder driving into Claw's midsection, taking them both to the floor. They rolled across the wreckage, Kayden's serrated blade searching for the seam between Claw's chest plating and his organic ribs. He found it---a two-inch gap that every Black Claw operative had---and pressed the blade in.

Claw howled. The sound was almost human.

"TRAITOR!" he snarled, his organic hand closing around Kayden's throat. "You were always the favorite. Always the one they praised. And now you throw it away for a scrap dealer?"

Kayden's vision blurred. The chip was fighting back, trying to reassert control, trying to turn his limbs against him. His chrome arm trembled as it tried to obey two masters at once.

But Eva was there.

She had picked up a broken piece of conduit from the floor. She stood over Claw's prone form and brought it down with both hands on the back of his chrome skull, once, twice, three times. Not enough to kill him---she wasn't a killer---but enough to make him loosen his grip.

Claw shoved her off with a grunt and scrambled to his feet, one hand clamped over the wound in his shoulder. Hydraulic fluid and blood dripped between his fingers. His gold lens flickered erratically.

"This isn't over, K-7," he spat. "The General will send more. Better than me. And when they drag you back, I'll be there to watch them wipe every last memory from your skull."

He triggered a smoke pellet from his wrist mount, and by the time the gray cloud cleared, he was gone.

Kayden lay on his back, chest heaving, his organic heart slamming against his ribs and his chrome heart pumping coolant through a system that was overheating badly. His vision swam with warning messages he dismissed one by one.

Eva looked down at him, the conduit still raised, her face streaked with grease and sweat and something that might have been tears.

"Get up," she said. "We're not safe here. He'll be back with reinforcements. We need to move."

Kayden looked at her---this woman who had picked him out of a garbage heap and given him a name and taught him that his heartbeat meant something. This woman who had just helped him fight a monster from his past.

He got up.