‘I’m Proph…’ he started.
‘You used to be Laurence Barnes, didn’t you?’
‘I still…’
‘He’s dead. Maybe you died when you put the suit on, maybe when you put the gun to your head, but you’re dead now. You’re a ghoul inhabiting a stolen corpse, a demon possessing a body, a Frankenstein’s monster of animated dead flesh and alien technology.’
‘You sound like your mother.’ Prophet had meant it as a provocation.
He watched Alcatraz’s face harden.
‘Fuck that bitch.’
Yeah? Who are you trying to fool, kid? Prophet was pretty sure that wasn’t even how Alcatraz spoke. That was language learnt for the barracks. A front. Prophet shrugged.
‘So?’ he asked. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘For you to let go. To get out.’
‘What are you going to do with your life?’
‘What are you, my dad?’
He’d have needed beating into shape first if he had been under my command, Prophet decided. The conversation was starting to sound like the arguments he’d overheard between his sister and her teenaged kids.
‘It’s a serious question.’
‘What life?’
‘Semantics? Really?’ Prophet was becoming more exasperated.
‘No, that’s the thing, see? I’m not being semantic. I’m going to lay myself to rest. We’re both dead. We need to let go. We’re just a grotesque joke now.’
There’s more of your mother in you than you’d like to admit, isn’t there, son? Prophet thought but decided to keep it to himself.
‘Sorry. I need your body for something more important.’
‘Like what? We’re a corpse in a fucking suit.’
‘Did you just forget about New York? The fact that we’re being invaded by alien squid?’
‘That’s fucking over, man. I… we dealt with that shit.’
‘It’s not over.’ The Green-Eyed Man swallowed. Prophet looked at him hard. It was the sort of stare he’d given subordinates back when he’d been conventional army, 82nd Airborne, before Delta. Prophet tapped the side of his head. ‘Yeah, you’ve seen it, haven’t you, son?’ Alcatraz didn’t answer. ‘You fought hard. You did well. You were a good soldier… and I’m sorry — I really am — but your war’s over.’ The Green-Eyed Man opened his mouth to retort, but Prophet cut him off. ‘What do you think you’ve been doing? Visiting your sister? Your mother? Where are we now…?’
‘We’re here. You need to…’
‘Where are we in the real world? You’re saying goodbye, son. I’m sorry you died. I think you’ve more than earned your rest, but I need your flesh and you’re just going to have to take my word for it that it’s important. If you know what I know, if you’ve seen what I’ve seen, then you won’t even have to take my word for it.’
‘It’s my body,’ Alcatraz said quietly.
‘Do you want to fight this war?’ Prophet asked. More and more he himself was starting to realise that he didn’t want to fight the coming war either. He just didn’t see any other way.
‘It’s over,’ Prophet told him. ‘It was over before it began, and I think you know that. You’re right, this is your body, and I think that if you’d really wanted it you would have taken it by now.’
Prophet watched the knowledge settle in, the resignation. Tension leaked out of the other man. Prophet stood up. He smoothed down his uniform and then held out his hand. Alcatraz stared at the offered grip. Prophet couldn’t quite read the expression on the Recon Marine’s face. Finally Alcatraz stood up.
‘Alice?’ he asked.
The mission, Prophet thought.
‘I’ll look in on her when I can.’ He almost believed the lie himself.
Alcatraz nodded.
‘What’s your name, son?’
Alcatraz told him.
He was stood alone in a graveyard under a slate grey sky. He looked down at the gravestone.
A heuristic system: experience-based problem solving. In other words, learning. Just how smart is the suit? Prophet wondered. Then he corrected himself. How smart was the alien tech in the suit? The Ceph were a reactive species, they responded to external stimuli. Once something had happened to them they would change their approach the next time round, and the next, until they either succeeded or were destroyed. The suit had known there was something wrong with Prophet. Or rather, it had known there was something wrong with its CPU. Had it found a way to fix it, he wondered? Or had it made a choice between Prophet and Alcatraz? Prophet found that he didn’t want to think too hard about that possibility…
It was only then that he realised just how envious he was of Alcatraz’s peace, even if that peace was merely oblivion.
He thought back to something a senior NCO had told him during training: In a fire-fight, you find cover or you find religion. It didn’t seem that Alcatraz had had much of a choice.
He looked down at Alcatraz’s father’s grave. Then he turned and walked away, with the marine’s last words ringing in his ears.
‘They call me Alcatraz. Remember me.’
Archaeology
Amanda looked down into the darkness. It was total. The complete absence of light. Intellectually she knew there was light down there, somewhere, but it felt like she would descend into blackness forever. It was still, cold, and there was little air movement. The lights attached to the steel frame of the elevator illuminated the smooth rock wall of the shaft. The rock looked natural, but according to her briefing the shaft had been cut by the Ceph aeons ago.
Hundreds of feet above her was the Hermitage and the freezing temperature and thick snow of a St. Petersburg winter. The opulent decadence of an imperial culture was on display for all to see. It was a strange contrast with the darkness, the minimalist rock and what they had found here so deep below the Earth’s surface. She was starting to see a faint glow below her now.
The elevator carried her into the main site. The roughly hemispherical cavern was lit with portable lights. Amanda could hear the steady diesel throb of the generators. It was freezing down here, despite the freestanding heaters. Amanda wrapped her long coat around herself. The rock floor of the cave was a series of gentle rolling rises and indents that looked like they had been caused by water, and a number of small streams ran through the cavern.
The main cavern — or Site A — was a hive of activity. All across the rock floor men and women, clothed in layers and layers of threadbare clothing, chipped away at the rock with a variety of hand and power tools. As the elevator got closer to the cavern floor she could see seams of metal running through the rock. The seams didn’t look natural. They looked like they formed particular defined shapes. The best way that Amanda could think of describing it was that it looked like someone had fused circuitry with the rock. That, however, did not do the alienness of the tech in the ground justice. It was technology that had been there a long time before there had even been a humanity. Having lived through the crisis in New York, Amanda had a healthy respect and fear for the Ceph and their tech. Amanda could understand the need for Hargreave-Rasch to research the Ceph technology caches they were finding, but after her experiences in New York the alien technology made her very uncomfortable indeed.
The entire site was being watched over by CELL gunmen. There were two waiting for her as the elevator came to a halt and she stepped out into the cave.
‘Alan, Mikey, how’s it going?’ Amanda asked, her strong New York accent unmistakeable. She was genuinely pleased to see the two contractors she’d worked with for three years, up until she had been demoted and left out in the cold by her employer.