The Hawaiian Special Forces

Chapter 27

The sound of a feline scream filled the air. Aoloa didn't really notice, however. He was more concerned with the blinding pain of having bits of muscle extracted from him surgically, without anesthetic.

He was strapped down on a metal table, his right arm cut open to the muscle, where a sadist... doctor... crazy woman... was tugging at it with some forceps. Monitors were attached to his scalp, shaved, of course, to analyze his response to injury and pain.

When the procedure had been explained to him, initially, it had sounded quite reasonable. Currently, he just wanted to kill his tormentor and flee, not necessarily in that order. As it was, the straps were proving remarkably effective at keeping him relatively motionless, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

"Reopening the incision, again," the cool, feminine voice of the doctor said. She had a Bronx accent. She'd been recruited from the US after some very promising research she'd conducted, and was now a German citizen. Not really noteworthy, except Aoloa would have preferred to hear German and pretend his tormentor was saying sadistic, vile things, instead of hearing a clinical analysis of what was going on. Doctor Mary Hanson had a wonderful bedside manner when she wasn't flaying open her patients.

"Preparing to take the bone sample," she said calmly, then fired up a drill that competed with Aoloa's strained screams for the loudest thing in the room. There was a slight consolation in the knowledge that bones don't have nerve endings, so the drill just vibrated his arm... until he heard, "Damn it! They're attacking the instruments, now!"

Aoloa was able to turn his head as all activity stopped, and see that the tip of the drill was smoking. The tip looked slightly melted, most likely from his nanites attempting to stop its violation of his upper arm.

She set the drill down an began replacing the bit, muttering to herself as she did. Once it was changed, she looked back at his arm to see the incision nearly sealed, again. "Can't we shut those damned things off?" she muttered in irritation.

This time, when she made the incision, her scalpel stopped cutting about halfway through. She pulled it away to see it, too, appeared melted. "That's it! I quit until we can get an override working. These things are interfering far too much."

As the nanites finished sealing the wound in his arm, the pain vanished with it, leaving Aoloa slightly hoarse, and decidedly exhausted. His restraints were released, and he shakily removed the pads stuck to his head. Jost assisted him to the cafeteria and didn't even complain about his dinner: three fresh bats.

After that, Aoloa stumbled to his room and collapsed in his bed. Sleep wasted no time in claiming him.

---

"You look like shit."

Aoloa glanced up at Jost, feeling exhausted. "I suppose I do." He'd spent nearly every waking moment for the past week in some sort of surgical procedure. Doctor Hanson had taking tissue samples from nearly every organ in his body, often cursing the effectiveness of his nanites in challenging her efforts. Attempts to disable or neutralize them had proven ineffective, as they simply rewrote their own programming to circumvent any viruses or other orders to allow him significant harm.

While his body was okay, the constant stress was wearing on him, mentally. The one thing that was still intact, however, was his appetite. The nanites demanded a lot of raw materials, and he was willing to shove most anything in his mouth to keep them happy.

"Good news, then! No medical procedures for you today!" Aoloa raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement, then resumed eating. "They want to do some analysis of your assistive computer, instead."

Aoloa had a feeling this wouldn't end well. In fact, he was positive of it. "Are you sure Doctor Hanson wouldn't like to play with me again?"

Gertrud gave him an odd look. "There's something wrong with you," she observed.

---

He was huddled in a ball, trembling, as his mind was filled with false images and sounds that he couldn't shut out, no matter how tightly he shut his eyes. His skin felt as if it was being stabbed by thousands of needles while bugs crawled over it.

He'd been enduring this for at least a half hour, when it suddenly stopped. Blinking his eyes, he saw absolutely nothing. He heard nothing. He felt nothing, either. "What?" he tried to ask, but couldn't even hear his own voice.

Suddenly, Colonel Wolf appeared before him as if he were standing. "Greetings, Aoloa."

"What's going on?" This time, he heard his own voice.

"We've gained control over your comms unit. We control everything you sense. It's actually a fairly significant vulnerability, don't you think?"

"One your own cyborgs suffer."

She nodded. "True, but we have taken some steps to ensure the UPS doesn't get access to the communication channels we use."

"This is why you agreed, isn't it? You wanted to learn how to hack our comms."

"We've learned much more than that. You've been a wealth of information. Unfortunately, you still have some annoying loyalties to your own kind. It would have been nice if you could have been a loyal German soldier." Aoloa eyed her warily, a sense of dread deep in his stomach. "Goodbye, boy."

Agony lanced through his awareness as his heart suddenly stuttered painfully in his chest. His consciousness faded as his body gasped for air.