Cyborg Strike

  Cyborg Strike

  Plague Wars Series Book 5

  by

  David VanDyke

  Cyborg Strike

  Published by David VanDyke at Smashwords

  Copyright 2013 David VanDyke

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1--62626-019-1

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical or otherwise) without prior written permission and consent from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Books by David VanDyke

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Comes The Destroyer Excerpt

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my friends and fellow science-fiction authors Vaughn Heppner and B.V. Larson, for their tireless encouragement, for persevering and showing me the way.

  Thanks to my readers – my lovely wife Beth, my friends and fellow authors Ryan King and Nick Stephenson, and the members of our Friday Night Writes group for their excellent critiques; their feedback has made me a better writer and this book a better novel.

  Cover design by Humblenations.com

  Books by David VanDyke

  Plague Wars Series

  The Eden Plague Book 1

  Reaper's Run: A Plague Wars Novel

  The Demon Plagues Book 2

  The Reaper Plague Book 3

  The Orion Plague Book 4

  Cyborg Strike Book 5 (Summer 2013)

  Comes The Destroyer Book 6 (Fall 2013)

  Stellar Conquest series:

  First Conquest: Book 1 - Contained within the anthology Planetary Assault

  Desolator: Book 2

  Tactics of Conquest: Book 3 (Fall 2013)

  Other Works

  Unfettered

  Low Justice

  For more information visit David’s website: http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/

  Prologue

  Chairman Daniel Markis gazed out over the well-manicured green grounds of the Carletonville Research Laboratory, the low-key but heavily guarded home of the Free Communities Council central administration building. His office’s floor-to-ceiling plate glass window made it seem as if he could roll his office chair backward into open space, but the material was actually thick and bulletproof up to at least fifty caliber. The burgeoning nanotech industry had provided new materials of all sorts, and the tough stuff it was made of was just the first of many.

  A certain vulnerability to attack was the price he paid for the view. That gave Karl Rogett, his security chief, fits, the idea that one heavy weapon would decapitate the FC government. Then again, it gave the man something to do.

  Daniel shrugged to himself. All life was risk, and despite what people thought, the FC would not fall apart without him. Someone always stepped up and filled a power vacuum, and all of the council members were competent.

  His secure terminal beeped at him, the one that faced away from the window. He rolled the chair over to it, sliding his keycard into the slot. Pressing his fingertips to the scanner, he repositioned his head to let the laser simultaneously check his retinal patterns. Karl told him they would soon be installing a DNA sampler “based on Meme technology.”

  That phrase was becoming very common in research circles these days.

  In fact, humanity’s nemesis was perversely responsible for much of the progress in the world right now. Technology was just one aspect. Daniel considered Earth’s fragile newfound semi-unity to be far more important, and inspiring. He wondered if it would all fall apart once the threat abated.

  He also wondered whether it ever would abate – at least within his lifetime. If the intelligence info captured from the Meme scout ship could be believed, the enemy empire spanned thousands of worlds.

  How can we stand against that? And if we do, how long will it take to beat them?

  If it wasn’t for the vast distances involved, and the limitation of the speed of light itself, he would have given humanity no chance at all. Right now they were in a race: only nine short years until the next attack came. In that time, he had to organize the world to build some kind of military force that would not only beat this Destroyer super-ship of theirs, but defeat it decisively enough that Earth would retain enough capacity left to rise to the next challenge. A Pyrrhic victory that left them prostrate would merely delay the inevitable.

  On his terminal, he read a decrypted message from Cassandra Johnstone, his spymaster: a report he had been waiting for. In reply, he typed instructions for her and fired it off to her location in Antarctica.

  Daniel hoped she could pull off the operation she proposed. She was confident, but the opposition was formidable, and at least as clever as she was. If it wasn’t for a certain blind spot in the opponent…

  He wondered about Cass’ potential blind spots…and his own.

  He shook his head. Covert ops were a necessary evil, not something he relished. It made him chuckle to think that the most traditionally religious among his inner circle was also his most devious. A Jesuit he might have expected in the role, but not a southern Presbyterian drop-forged into a highly effective CIA field agent in pre-Plague Moscow.

  Himself, he believed in God, and right and wrong, but didn’t think too deeply past all that, which saved a lot of arguments with his agnostic scientist wife, Elise. He figured if God cared about Earth or the rest of the universe, He was sure a hands-off kind of deity, and expected people to take care of their own problems.

  Such as the Meme Empire.

  Which was one hell of a problem.

  That reminded him. He called up another file on the screen and perused it for at least a half hour, ignoring calls, and a couple of intercom buzzes from his administrative assistant Millie Johnstone. Eventually he decided on a course of action, and sent another set of instructions to his spymaster. This time, however, he followed it up.

  Opening his office door, he called, “Millie, could you get your mom on the secure line please?”

  From behind her desk, she looked like the spitting image of her mother Cass, especially as the Eden Plague had returned the elder Johnstone her youth. However, the daughter seemed to have no particular love of the world of spies, preferring to be the good right hand of Earth’s most influential, though not overtly powerful, man.

  “You know, you could just call her yourself.”

  “I can never get that stupid phone to work right. Just dial her up and transfer her, will you? Thanks.” Daniel backed into his office and closed the door, waiting for the beep that told him the line was live on the exotic-looking box: the custom-ma
de one with the rather ordinary handset that sat on one end of his desk.

  Finally the encrypted call came. “Cass? Yes, I sent you a secure message about the Septagon Shadow rogue cyborg program file. I want to turn it over to President McKenna.”

  “Is that wise?” Not surprisingly, Cassandra sounded skeptical. “The US clandestine services are still riddled with leaks and informants – some of them mine, that’s how I know. If you do that, you might as well just post it on the internet.”

  “I figured you’d do some work on it before we did that. Some redaction, a bit of exaggeration here and there…you know the drill.”

  Her tone brightened. “That’s not a bad idea. But they won’t like being used to pass disinformation.”

  “Well, that will be on them. I want to give it to him Eyes Only, US President. If he can’t keep it to himself, maybe we can trace the path of information and find out where it’s going.”

  “A stalking horse? Daniel, you’re learning!”

  “It’s just an idea, and I’m sure you and your people can refine and fancify it a lot…but that’s my plan. The why and what is up to me, the how is yours. And, even if it doesn’t bring our quarry out of the woodwork, it may prompt McKenna to prioritize the hunt with his people.”

  “Why? The US captured the Septagon labs and low-level researchers. We acquired almost all the information worth having, and got to study Rick as a living test subject before he went into space. If their top people got away, so what? The Free Communities will probably catch up in applied cybernetics in the next couple of years, especially with Australia pushing for the technology to be used in the Space Marine and Fleet programs.”

  Daniel chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, trying to put into words what was really just a hunch. Thinking aloud helped him structure his arguments. “Look…in the last decade we’ve seen three world-changing technologies developed: Meme-adapted biotech, Earth-grown nanotech, and the new cheap access to space through the cloned Meme fusion drives. I can’t shake the feeling that cybernetics will be equally important, and we can’t let a rogue entity develop it into something that we aren’t ready to deal with. Those prototype Shadow Men proved to be worth five or ten nanocommandos.” He sighed. “It’s an arms race we can’t really even afford to run, much less lose. It will distract from the real effort – preparing for the Destroyer. I’d much rather find them and take them down now, than wait for them to hit us at a time and place of their choosing.”

  “All right, all right,” Cassandra replied. “I’ll prep the file. I’ll make it lead the Americans to exactly the conclusions we want. And I’m sure you want me to tell Rick when the time comes.”

  “Tell Rick?” Daniel’s confusion seemed clear. “What does your son have to do with anything?”

  Cassandra’s eye-roll came through in her voice. “Just like a man. Daniel, he and Jill Repeth are still up there working on the space defense program. Jill is one of President McKenna’s favorite go-to operatives. As soon as you start this ball rolling, he will call for her to come down and join the hunt for Septagon Shadow, and Rick’s not going to be happy.”

  “Well, you’re his mother.” Daniel’s tone was falsely light.

  “And you’re his boss. He’s a Free Community of South Africa citizen now, not an American, and I swear to you, Daniel Markis, that I am not going to be the one to tell him Jill is dead, or worse. That’s on you.”

  He could hear her breathing rasp through the satellite phone line, and he took a deep lungful himself. “Fair enough. It’s on me, as you said. Now…about that other thing; the other guy.”

  “You still want to just ask him to come? I’d rather try to finesse it.”

  “Cass, you just want to win the spy game. He’s not a man to take kindly to that.”

  “On the contrary. I think he lives for it. And he’s your friend. He showed that when he returned the children.”

  “Yes…” Daniel shifted the receiver to his other ear. “But I’d rather not presume upon that friendship. Golden rule, and all that.”

  Silence reigned on the line for a long moment, then Cassandra went on. “Perhaps I can split the difference. How about if I let him discover you would like to talk to him? Then he can make up his own mind about whether it’s aboveboard, or a bluff, or a double bluff.”

  “Ad infinitum. All right, I can live with that. Anything else?”

  “Not now.”

  “All right. Have fun in the snow.” Daniel put the phone down, then turned back to watch the sun set warmly across the laboratory campus, thoroughly happy not to be in Antarctica.

  I shot two arrows in the air…they fell to Earth, I know not where.

  -1-

  Tran Pham “Spooky” Nguyen cinched his harness even tighter as the hybrid shuttle bucked him upward against the restraints for the umpteenth time. Two dozen other passengers rocked and jerked in time with him, all tossed synchronously by the buffeting as the spaceplane bled off speed in the upper atmosphere.

  One man vomited into a sick bag. Another didn’t quite reach get his to his mouth in time and some effluvium leaked past the thin plastic onto his stained and blackened coverall. The stench wafted through the bare-bones compartment and soon others were holding up sacks and filling them.

  Spooky breathed through his mouth and employed Dadirri mental techniques to decouple his senses from his bodily reactions, and closed his eyes to reduce the input he had to deal with. The shuttle would make landfall in Australia soon, and he had endured far worse things while stalking Viet Cong and Viet Minh in his native Vietnamese highlands.

  A Thuong Degar, commonly called a Montagnard by the French and Americans in the country, his mountain tribes had been persecuted by the lowland Vietnamese who had sold themselves to the Communist ideology. His father had taught him at an early age to kill those who would impose their ways on the highlanders, and he’d done it well.

  When the dope-smoking, communist-sympathizing, hippie American civilians forced his beloved Green Berets to abandon the fight, the young insurgent had kept on killing, using Cambodia as a base as the lowlanders burned villages and ethnically cleansed his tribal areas to expand their cash-producing coffee plantations. Eventually he had joined the so-called boat people and made his way to the United States as a refugee.

  Arriving in San Francisco, he found that same exotic coffee sold to those same aging self-righteous Jane Fonda generation peaceniks. As far as he was concerned, they drank the blood of his people. It was all he could do not to kill them too, but even as young as he was, he knew not all Americans were so stupid.

  In Greensboro, North Carolina he found the largest concentration of his Degar people in the US.

  In nearby Fort Bragg, he found his real home: the US Army Special Forces.

  The Green Berets.

  He enlisted, and they were glad to have him, especially after he demonstrated some of his skills. Combat missions all over the world had honed and perfected his special operations craft.

  Now Spooky could hardly recall his own previous life from behind the changes wrought by the Eden Plague, the nuclear near-apocalypse, and the coming of the Meme Demon Plagues on Earth. He’d changed so much…grown so much.

  An especially severe shock shook him out of his near-trance, and he heard the landing gear whine down and lock. If he’d had a window, he knew he would see Exmouth Spaceport, so named for the nearby town and gulf. No more yet than a flattened runway with temporary buildings, it was the site selected to serve as Australia’s main launching facility for the new fusion spacecraft made possible by the cloned Meme fusion bio-engines.

  Fifteen minutes later he did see it, as he walked off the spaceplane empty-handed. He’d stowed away on Orion with almost nothing, and he was bringing very little back with him, not even his own identity. Right now, he seemed just one of many returning technicians, who had been working hard to turn the mangled wreck of the warship into a usable orbital space station.

  In reality, he had pl
ayed a vital role in ensuring Orion’s costly defense of Earth had not turned from victory into an ugly coup attempt. Colonel MacAdam, commander of the Space Marines that Spooky had trained, had almost been blackmailed by into mutiny by Ariadne Smythe, the head of the secret Council of Nine, Australia’s Psycho-run shadow government. Had he done so, Orion and her nuclear weapons would have constituted a Damoclesian sword poised above all the other nations of the world.

  This would have been disastrous for the Earth. With no more than nine short years to prepare for the coming of the Meme Destroyer – reportedly an enormous space warship fully capable of living up to its name – humanity’s only chance was to remain united in purpose and in politics. There was just one man that could keep them together.

  Spooky Nguyen? He laughed to himself as he strode across the hot packed dirt of the roughly-fashioned runway toward the growing cluster of buildings. The siren’s song of ambition, of lust for power, keened somewhere in the background of his mind, but he ignored it. No, not me. At least, not yet. Perhaps someday he would rule an empire, but the ability to delay gratification was one of his many strengths – to take the long view. To do what was best for himself by doing what was best for those around him, thus elevating all.

  No, the one man who could keep the fragile alliance together, the concord that put an end to the nuclear exchanges and the infighting, that maneuvered the majority of the nations of Earth into contributing to the construction of the battleship Orion, was Daniel Markis.

  Spooky’s next mission he set himself, therefore, was to determine how to help Markis do it.

  Approaching the administrative structures near the prefab hangars, he ran his eyes over at least a dozen distinct clusters of activity throwing clay dust into the burning air. Each represented another hangar, or the site of some kind of permanent facility. Beyond them Spooky could see at least thirty ships – naval, cargo, and specialized construction vessels – rapidly improving the seaport or unloading materials. If he was any judge, within a year the world’s first true spaceport would be fully functioning.