Bright light stabbed down onto the broken concrete and scrubby plants. One helicopter gunship and then another hove into view. Information on the model of the gunships, their capabilities and armaments, played down the HUD. He could heard the pilots’ conversations with their control. They were CELL military contractors playing at being soldiers and getting paid more than real troops for their troubles. They were searching for an escaped nanosuit. Someone called Alcatraz. Who the fuck is Alcatraz? he wondered. Then he remembered the kid he’d pulled from the river. The wreckage of the USS Nautilus. The cold feel of the metal of the M12 against his head.
‘Shit. I’m dead,’ Laurence Barnes, who they called Prophet, said to himself, but he didn’t stop running. He activated the stealth mode and the lensing field bent light around him. To all intents and purposes he disappeared as the harsh blue light of one of the gunship’s searchlights swept across where he’d been.
He became a ghost.
‘Okay, I’m gone now.’
‘I think we both know that’s not going to happen.’
‘I have a life… a family.’
The CSIRA Black Body Council interrogator glanced at the file.
‘Not much of one, not from what you were saying.’
‘You think you know me now, Roger?’
Prophet froze the footage that the suit was showing him. He could see how it was going to play out. He was lying down in a sewer trying to mask his heat signature from the thermographics that the pilots in the CELL gunships overhead would be using.
He now knew who he’d killed. Roger, the interrogator. The guy that CSIRA or CELL or whoever had sent to debrief him in the wake of the clusterfuck that had been his recent operation in New York.
He remembered the disease, the quarantine. He remembered CELL being called in as a military contractor to enforce martial law in the city. He remembered how they had hunted him. And he remembered the Ceph. The same aliens he’d first encountered in the Pacific on Lingshan. Cephalopod-like aliens clothed in hi-tech war machines far in advance of humanity’s best military efforts. He remembered the suit melding with their technology. It hadn’t been the last time.
He had been in control for some of it, or some mix of him and Alcatraz had been, but now the memories were fragmented. The events played like two pieces of film of the same events running just slightly out of synch with each other, one superimposed over the top of the other.
It was worse than that. It didn’t stop the further back he went. He remembered Lingshan, but somehow he was also doing SERE training at Brunswick in Maine. He remembered Columbia, but he was ditching school and hanging with his friends. He remembered Iraq and at the same time reading comics, riding his bike, breaking into some kind of Sea World-style attraction. He remembered basic training and he remembered his Mom instilling the fear of god into him. The problem was that the mother he remembered, now superimposed on the hell of basic training, was white. Mrs Barnes had most decidedly not been.
There had been other signs as well. The fear as he’d lain down in the black water of the sewer — where had that come from? And Prophet’s skull felt fit to burst. The pain was a burning white light behind his eyes. He was sure there was blood trickling out of his ears under the suit, but then corpses don’t bleed. Maybe it’s the suit growing into my head to fix the problem, he thought. The suit should have been able to tell him what was going on, what was causing the pain, but the medical outputs seemed conflicted.
Prophet knew that none of this mattered. The only thing that mattered now was the mission. The only thing that mattered was what he knew. What he’d been shown on Lingshan, in the ice. He knew it was far from over. When he’d put the gun against his head that had been because of the disease, he told himself, he’d had no choice. He tried to ignore how much the cool metal of the gun barrel had seemed like a chance to rest.
The pain made him scream. Blackness claimed him.
Olfactory sensor overload. Information scrolled down Prophet’s vision, describing the chemical process of rot. It was biotelemetry telling him that he was sat in a stinking alley full of garbage.
There was someone else in the alley with him. Even as disorientated as he was, Prophet was shocked that he’d somehow managed to go from a nanosuited god-of-war to being blindsided in an alley. The man was well built, hair shaved at the sides, flat on top, green eyes but otherwise surprisingly non-descript. He looked to be in his early twenties. The jeans and t-shirt, despite the chill in the air, did nothing to disguise the man’s military bearing. Prophet could make out the bottom of the winged skull tattoo. The skull had a diving regulator in its mouth and the words Swift, Silent, Deadly underneath it.
‘Fucking jarhead…’ Prophet managed.
‘Screw you, you army puke,’ the other man said, without a trace of feeling.
The empty bottle he had thrown exploded against the wall of the alley. Prophet found himself alone. He pushed himself to his feet with difficulty. He staggered a bit but he could feel himself recovering. Presumably this was the suit working out how to deal with his bizarre situation.
Prophet became more alert with every step he took. He looked out of the alleyway. The alleyway led onto a rain-soaked boardwalk. Beyond the boardwalk was a beach, and then a dark rough sea.
The suit’s nav-systems had been trying to tell him for a while but it took the boardwalk, all the neon and garish casino fronts, to drive it home: Atlantic City. As if things weren’t bad enough, Prophet thought, I’m in Jersey.
It must have been late because there were very few people on the boardwalk. Still feeling a little disoriented, he decided that he wanted to see the ocean. He engaged the stealth mode, the lensing field ghosting him, and he crossed the street.
Glancing behind him, footage from a Macronet feed in the window of a bar caught his eye. He linked to the net with a thought, searched for the footage and had it downloaded to the HUD. He saw CELL military contractors brutalising and executing victims of the Manhattan virus. It cut to footage of Hargreave-Rasch board members being escorted through crowds of reporters. The headline read: Hargreave-Rasch’s board members to face congressional hearing over Manhattan Crisis.
Prophet figured that mismanagement was what they called war crimes these days. He believed that the board members should be punished for what they had done, but he didn’t hold out much hope. The system was too corrupt, and Hargreave-Rasch’s PR were already spinning the New York events.
He reached the beach without drawing too much attention to his hulking form. Mission, have to get back on the mission. For the first time in a long time the mission was his. He wasn’t doing what other people were telling him. And for the first time in a long time, he knew the mission was right. It was a simple matter of survival.
He was almost thinking straight now. The pain in his head had been a constant since New York, but the nausea and the acid burn in his stomach was gone. He’d always enjoyed looking at the ocean but tonight it disquieted him. He didn’t like water anymore.
‘You’re back again, huh, mister?’
Prophet turned to find himself looking down at a young girl, maybe ten- to twelve-years-old, smiling at him. She was dirty, her clothes were ragged, and she had dark hair and green eyes.
What was going on? Where’d she come from?! Then Prophet realised that he was somewhere new.