She nodded, tears in her eyes. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
‘I guess you’ve got other kids you’ve got to help, right?’ she asked through the tears, wiping her nose on her sleeve.
No. There’s the mission and only the mission, if your brother will let me.
He nodded, mumbled platitudes at her and then turned away. He made himself walk away by promising that he would come back and check up on her. There would have been tears in his eyes as he lied to himself, if he hadn’t been a walking corpse.
He all but staggered past the Green-Eyed Man from the alleyway, trying to ignore him. The man watched him pass. The expression in his eyes was unreadable.
‘Prophet?’
More voices in my head?
‘Prophet. I know you can hear me,’ The voice was familiar and it sounded like it had been trying to speak to him for some time. Prophet looked around at his surroundings and sighed. He’d lost time again. He was sat on a detritus-strewn beach. He wondered why the other guy never took him anywhere nice when he was in control as he watched a flock of scavenging seagulls take to the air. On the other hand, in the nanosuit, he guessed he was a little conspicuous.
‘Prophet, this silence helps neither of us. I think you’re in trouble and I think we can help.’
He recognised the voice now. Karl Rasch. The CEO of Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical. The company that had developed the living weapon that animated the distinctly unliving body he had stolen.
Hargreave-Rasch were also the parent company of CryNet Systems and CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics, the so-called “military contractors” who had spent a lot of time shooting at him in New York. He’d killed a lot of them, as well as a lot of Ceph.
‘I will find a way to break this comms link permanently,’ Prophet muttered. As he said it the HUD was already showing him options for the nanosuit’s comms as the suit’s heuristic systems went to work.
The Green-Eyed Man was back, looking intently at Prophet and listening to one side of the conversation. He was sat on a pile of driftwood, the seagulls ignoring him.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Rasch’s voice was cultured, educated, with a thick German accent. ‘You don’t sound well. We have the facilities to help you.’
‘It’s not over. I know what the Ceph are planning. We have no future…’ Prophet cursed himself. The Green-Eyed Man continued staring at him.
‘We can help you, we want the same things.’
‘Bullshit, you want to skin me. Use me, like your company always has.’ He remembered the argument he’d had with Psycho on Lingshan. The Brit had been convinced they were little more than test beds for Hargreave-Rasch’s experiments.
Rasch did not answer immediately.
‘You’re a soldier, Prophet. There has to be risks involved in that. There has to be somebody giving orders, and there have to be sacrifices. You — more than anyone — know what’s at stake,’ the old man said finally.
‘Yes, I do. I just don’t think that you’re the ones to deal with the problem.’
‘We want to deal with the Ceph as much as you do. And I need your help for that. There’s no future for any of us if the aliens take over.’
‘I want this planet to survive. You and your company just want to profit. Besides, are you sure there will be anything left of you after the Congressional Inquiry?’
There was a dry chuckle over the comms link. ‘I think we both know that’s not how things like that work.’
No, consequences are for poorer people, Prophet thought.
‘I’m not coming in. I don’t trust you, and I have a job to do. I know the Ceph are still active out there, and I know you’re looking for them as well.’
It was hollow machismo and Prophet knew it. The comms link went quiet again.
‘The way you integrated with the Ceph tech in New York may make you our greatest hope. I think you’re having problems. We’re not sure what happened. We’re not sure how your personality survived but we do think that it’s affecting you. A conflict with the remnants of callsign Alcatraz’s personality.’
You mean the mind that this body belongs to? Prophet looked over at the Green-Eyed Man. He was smiling at Prophet. The smile had little humour in it.
‘Being Hargreave’s puppet got people under my command killed. It got me killed. It got this poor bastard whose mind I’m riding around in killed, and as much as I enjoy your Victor Frankenstein impression, I’m not coming in. You know what I’m going after. If you say that we’re after the same thing, if you truly want the Ceph defeated, keep your people out of my way.’
‘You know that’s not going to be possible. I don’t have control over all of CELL’s people. Working with us will be the best way to accomplish your mission. I know there are some… wrong-headed elements in this company, but you can trust me. You need to come in. The Monster lived a lonely existence and came to a cruel end…’
The suit showed him the way to sever the comms link. He did so and then audited the suit’s internal systems, looking for any other ways that Hargreave-Rasch or CELL could contact, or worse, track him against his will, but he found none.
‘What am I to you?’ the Green-Eyed Man asked him. ‘The zombie that carries you around? A drone, a weapons platform that you’re the operating system for? What?’
Prophet put his head down and tried to ignore him. He heard the Green-Eyed Man laugh.
‘You think I’m going to go away?’ Suddenly the Green-Eyed Man was kneeling down next to him. ‘Know what I think? The suit becomes your skin. We’re superhuman, yeah, but the sensors still feed back everything directly to our nervous system once the suit fuses with flesh. We still feel every hit, every shot or knife wound, each fall or burn. Feels like we’ve died a thousand times, doesn’t it? That’s what I think I am to you. I’m armour. I’m here to soak that shit up. All the pain.’
Prophet finally looked up.
‘I think you’re here because you’re trying to hold on.’
He was just talking to the sky. The Green-Eyed Man was gone.
‘I know you’re in here.’ The voice had the surety of a fanatic. Prophet had heard its like before, in the Middle East, in Columbia.
He was in a small institutional room. It was bare except for a bed with restraints. The window was small and made of thick, reinforced safety glass. It was some kind of psych ward. He’d visited men and women who’d once been under his command in places like this before.
The woman strapped to the bed was gaunt to the point of cadaverous. Although washed-out, her features lacked the slackness of the long-term institutionalised. Instead she looked alert, intent, but there was more than a little madness in her eyes. She must have been in her late forties or early fifties, far too young for Alzheimer’s this severe.
He’d come to as if waking, alert, from a deep but dreamless sleep. He was in the corner of the room. The nanosuit’s stealth mode was engaged. The lensing field bent light around him. In theory it make him invisible.
‘Show yourself,’ the woman hissed. Apparently he wasn’t invisible enough to hide from Alcatraz’s mother. ‘And there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains. Because he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces. Neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.’
There was just something about quoting the Bible, Prophet thought, which meant you could always find relevance somewhere to your current situation.