39.5 MHz (gov/nongov shared, land mobile)
Apparent signal source: CELL Field Command, Battery Park Interceptor: Anonymous (via Edward “Eddie” Newton, Radio Free Manhattan)
Voice 1: —is Cobalt Seven. Think he came this way. Spreading to search.
Voice 2: Yeah, uh, this is Cobalt Four. We got camera footage from the containment fence. Moving fast, man. Never saw anything like that before.
Voice 3: Fuck are we fighting here? Is he one of them?
Voice 4: That’s need-to-know, soldier. All you need to know is don’t take any chances. Lethal force, soon as you get eyes on.
Cobalt 4-A: You believe this mess, man? They took out everything: the EMAT teams, the doctors, our guys. There’s nothing left.
Voice 4: Stay sharp, people. Quarantine protocols. You see anything move in there, you kill it.
Dead Air—47 seconds. Following exchange appears to have been broadcast accidentally, possibly due to a jammed transmit switch.
Cobalt 4-B: So you think he took down that Ceph ship?
Cobalt 4-A: How the fuck should I know, man? I look like a Squid to you?
C4-B: I’m just saying, it wasn’t us. And if he did shoot it down, well . . .
C4-A: Well what?
C4-B: You know. The enemy of my enemy and all that.
C4-A: The enemy of my enemy doesn’t go around blowing the shit out of his own guys.
C4-B: There is that.
C4-A: Shit, man. Past few days, there’s lots of enemies to go around for every—hey, is that—?
C4-B: What?
C4-A: Over there, on the waterfront up on the roof. That a Squid?
C4-B: Yeah, one of those fuckers—
C4-A: grunts, or—
C4-B: No, look, there’s two of them.
C4-A: You sure? Looks—
C4-B: No, man, look, there’s definitely two. They just look like one big motherfucker because they’re in close like—
C4-A: What are they doing up there?
C4-B: They’re fighting, man. They’re fighting each other . . .
C4-A: What the fuck. Why would—
C4-B: Dude, the smaller one. I think it’s human.
C4-A: That’s just exoskel. They’re all blobs inside.
C4-B: No, man, I’ve got him scoped, he’s definitely—
C4-A: Holy shit, that’s our guy! That’s Proph—
C4-B: Cobalt Oversight! Cobalt Oversight! We have eyes on Primary! Repeat, we have eyes on—
Signal squelched at source.
Transmission ends 23/08/2023 09:38.
So this is how it is. No cutesy musical sign language, no guys with bumpy foreheads saying Resistance Is Futile or Kneel Before Zod, no sexy alien hive queens keeping our hero busy with butt sex while her minions turn our children into veal cutlets. No small talk at all, unless you count the sound it makes when it sees me: kind of a stuttering hollow croak, like a cheap voice synthesizer trying to gargle.
And then ET brings it, motherfucker.
In that first second I’m surprised by how human it looks. Sure, the legs have too many joints and the arms don’t have any—more like segmented tentacles with hands, like Doc Ock from Spider-Man—but there’s two of each, right where they’re supposed to be. Kind of a helmet on top with two compound clusters of orange lights where you’d expect eyes. It’s all metal, though, so I’m thinking either robot or armor.
And then it fires, point-blank, and I’m flat on my back and I should be dead but I’m not. In the next second it’s on me like a fucking panther and I can see the meat inside all that metaclass="underline" grayish, translucent, like a jellyfish. Dim brownish orange blobs deep inside that have to be organs, four thick fleshy tentacles flailing out the back. And one part of me’s thinking What the hell kind of armor leaves your guts exposed, but another part’s thinking Those guts are the last thing you’re ever gonna see, asshole—because I’m already down, man, without firing a shot, it caught me flat-footed and flipped me like a bug on its back. And it should be game over right there, but then it just—
Hesitates. Bobs its head, or whatever you call that wedge-shaped thing with the lights. We almost get the sense it’s sniffing the air, trying to get a fix on some strange new smell. And that little hesitation, that one or two seconds’ grace—that’s enough for a comeback. We grab that fucker by the horns, we jam—
I, of course. I mean I.
I grab that fucker by the horns, I jam my pistol into the gray goo and start firing. The thing pulls away, makes this whistling sound—cold, winter-wind sound—and I’m back up just like that, the alien brings its weapon up again but I block, I jab, I don’t even think about it. The suit’s got its own reflexes, force multipliers, motion multipliers. Turns a flinch into a right hook. It barely waits for me to move before responding, I could almost swear it’s moving me. I lift that alien motherfucker over my head and pitch it off the roof like I was throwing a Hacky Sack.
So much for the bogeyman, bitch. So much for the monster under the bed. So much for the thing in the closet.
I don’t know what Prophet was going on about. This suit is fucking awesome.
When we released the first CryNet Nanosuit four years ago, we described it as “battle armor perfected.” That wasn’t just our opinion: In a scant two months the N1 had become the armor of choice for military and paramilitary forces around the globe, winning an unprecedented 9.8 rating from Urban Pacifier and taking home Jane’s prestigious Platinum Award for Infantry Support Technology. All of which left we at CryNet with a bit of a problem: How do you improve on perfection?
This time, we perfected the soldier.
Not that we’ve ignored the hardware, mind you. Our latest offering comes with all the bleeding-edge features you’d expect from CryNet: rad-hardened ceramic epidermis, dynamic Faraday mesh for unsurpassed EMP shielding, state-of-the-art countercurrent heat-exchangers for thermoneutrality in firestorms and LOx spills alike. CryNet remains at the forefront of Moore’s law—and maybe a little bit beyond.
But anyone can engineer machinery. It is the soldier within that remains the heart of CryNet’s products and our highest priority. The human mind has always been the greatest strength of an augmented infantry—and also its greatest weakness. For no matter how sharp the intellect, no matter how great the courage, the men and women in these chassis are only flesh and blood. They can grow tired. They can quail in the face of overwhelming odds—and even the most dedicated can hesitate for that crucial half second that makes the difference between victory and defeat. They are human. Our technology shields them from outside threats, but it cannot protect them from their own frailty.
Until now.
For the first time, combat armor not only protects your soldiers but also improves them: immunizes them against fear and fatigue, keeps them razor-sharp around the clock, feeds real-time tactical telemetry from a thousand sources directly into the brain. CryNet has created something that is more than man, more than machine: something that shares the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.