by Peter Watts
HMG fire from the chopper. I lob a grenade into the sky and the pilot pulls back—an unnecessary reflex, that little pineapple doesn’t even come close, but it’s enough to throw the gunner off his aim. I hit the deck and roll behind a waist-high concrete planter holding a row of spindly stunted trees. The grenade bounces and rolls and blows out the windows of the deli.
Eight seconds, tops, before they flank me.
The charge bar tops up at six. I fade, roll away from the planter, get to my feet. I’ve noticed that the cloak lasts a lot longer when the suit isn’t pulling power for a lot of other things. I can stay invisible for forty-five seconds, maybe a whole minute if I just stand still.
Maybe almost as long if I just move very, very … slowly.
I amble sideways while the air fills with shouts of Lost the target and Shit he’s cloaked again. I line up my approach: five long steps to the edge of the crater on turbo, then maybe fifteen meters to cross the gap near the left edge. I amp strength to max and move.
I nail the launch: solid traction, boots leave the ground maybe twenty centimeters from the edge, and the moment I’m airborne I drop strength right back to baseline. I sail over that gap like a ghost.
And nearly blow the landing. My feet come down with no room to spare. I land just past the lip of the hole and wobble back and forth, windmilling my arms to keep from falling over. No time to worry about the sound of my boots on the pavement; if the rotors and the shouts and the random suppressing fire didn’t mask it I’m probably fucked.
But here I am, ten meters from the elevators, and all that stands in my way are three CELLulites left to guard the supplies. That running jump burned through two-thirds of my charge, but for the moment I’m still stealthed.
These boys are not convinced. Last time they saw me I was on the other side of the plaza, but I could be anywhere by now. I could be right in front of them. How would they know?
They’ll know soon enough. They’ll know in about three seconds, because the charge bar’s just started flashing red. I bring up the Grendel: not the best accuracy and a downright shitty clip size, but these tungsten rounds would stop a rhino and my targets are almost close enough to touch.
They see my face, and blow apart.
It’s not completely clear sailing after that. Their buddies can’t wait to lay down the law now that I’m back in their worldview, and the elevator doors are jammed. I have to finesse my way in, and it seems like I have to fend off a whole fucking platoon in the process. By the time I get those doors jimmied open, drop the twenty meters to the bottom of the shaft, and take care of anyone who tries to follow little Timmy down the well—we’re looking at a final score of somewhere around seventeen–zip.
Like I said before. That’s what you get when you work nine-to-five.
The bottom of the shaft is chest-deep in scummy water; a service crawlway leads off to the north, a half-flooded mess of ruptured plumbing, soggy cardboard crates, and the occasional pulpy corpse. Dim lights glow here and there in rusty little cages, antique bulbs with actual filaments inside. I bet they’ve been down here since the twentieth century.
There’s brighter light farther down the passage, though. I follow it to a hole torn in the ceiling, duck under an exposed I-beam, and climb a pile of cinder blocks and shattered tiles to another Ceph pod; it rammed down into this space at a forty-five-degree angle, and is half buried by collapsed ceiling and uprooted floor.
And it’s—bleeding, or something.
The pod’s ruptured in several spots. The stuff oozing from those wounds is the color of snot or old candle wax, and it’s everywhere: running in ropy strings along the hull, pooling on the screen, hanging in thick gooey stalactites from the breached ceiling. It moves. It—undulates. Or maybe that’s just the light: I look around for the first time and see the far end of the room, relatively unscathed behind me. A floor lamp, knocked on its side, throws light across the space at a low angle, full of contrast and long shadows. So, yeah: probably just a trick of the light. But I can’t shake the feeling that those giant hanging boogers squirm just the slightest bit, as if I’m looking at a thin-walled brood sac with some kind of half-seen larva incubating inside.
“That’s it,” Gould says on comm. “You gotta scan that stuff.”
Scan? But SECOND’s training wheels take their own initiative: broad-spectrum chemical sensors built into the fingertips, according to the graphical thumbnails popping up on BUD. I saccade the right dropdowns, switch to tactical—remind myself it won’t actually be me touching this shit—and lay on the hands.
The N2’s fingertips leave soft depressions in the alien snot. Almost instantly lists of ingredients start scrolling down my brain: chemical formulae I somehow recognize as organic even though I can barely remember high school chemistry. Amine groups. Polysaccharides. Glycolipids.
Why is this ringing so many bells?
It’s ringing bells for Gould, too. I hear him trying to keep his lunch down across a whole borough and a shitload of static. “Jesus, man, that’s—that’s people. Just melted down, just—just lysed. What the fuck is this?”
I remember pus spurting from squashed ticks. Odd that Gould doesn’t seem to know about that.
“I can’t do anything with this. We struck out. You better get out of there before CELL shows up. Back to Plan A.”
He doesn’t even say lab. Waypoints and objectives reset themselves anyway. Goddamn this suit is smart.
Going back up the elevator shaft is a nonstarter. I climb over the wreckage into the other end of the room: some kind of security or janitorial office, judging by the desk and the filing cabinets. A row of windows on the opposite wall looks out into what used to be the lower parking level; now it looks onto a slope of collapsed concrete, sloping up toward a thin slice of sky. The glass is caged behind one of those antiburglary grilles.
Yeah. Right.
I start up the slope. No comm chatter: That’s odd. Maybe CELL’s figured out that I’m hacking into their frequencies.
No rotor noise, either. That’s odder.
Almost there.
I stop. Look right. Nothing. Left. Nothing. Up: just sky.
Forward.
Oh shi—
It jumps down on me from nowhere, slams me facedown into the rubble, flips me over onto my back and pins me there. It’s a nest of naked black backbones spliced together into something that almost looks humanoid. It’s got backbones for arms, spiky segmented things that end in—hands, I guess you’d call them. Claws. I can’t get a good look at them, they’re pressed down against my shoulders but they seem way too big, like catcher’s mitts on a stick man. There’s another backbone where a backbone should be, connecting those arms to a set of armored robodog legs with too many joints. There’s something on top, a helmet for a head like the front of a bullet train with clusters of orange eyes on each side. There’s a blob of boneless gray tissue in the middle of it all.
It’s like my bogeyman from the roof, but different. Meaner.
I try to move but the fucker’s strong, man, I can’t throw it off and my gun’s been knocked halfway across the rubble. One backbone-arm pulls back like it’s winding up for a punch, and that long metal mitt just splits open to reveal more drills and needles and probes than a goddamn dentist’s chair on steroids. Something whirls from the middle of that cluster and spears me in the chest. The BUD jumps; my icons scramble; my eyeballs fill with static.
The N2 starts talking.
It’s not False Prophet. It’s not English. It’s not even human, it’s just—gibberish. Clicks, hiccups, these weird hooting sounds. And the shit I’m suddenly seeing on tactical isn’t making any more sense, green pastel suddenly flickering into orange and purple, alphanumerics turning into hieroglyphics, and what do you call those blobs you headshrinkers used to use before we laughed you out of town?—Rorschach blots. That’s it. The whole interface is fried and I’m stuck there for I don’t know how long, can’t be more than a few seconds but it seems like forf
uckingever.
And then False Prophet does speak up, and at least he’s speaking human even though I don’t know exactly what he’s talking about. He says:
Interface attempted. Tissue vector 11 percent.
Insufficient common code. Rejecting.
And the alien leaps off me and darts away like I was the bogeyman.
Gould comes back to me as the BUD sobers up: “You had it, man! You triggered sampling mode, but it didn’t—listen, Prophet, whatever you just did: Do it again!”
Right. Chase down the nice monster and sweet-talk it into skewering me a second time. That’s gonna happen.
“Come on, man, quit messing around! We don’t have time!”
Who am I kidding.
I grab my weapon and take up the chase. I put everything the suit’s got into speed; I sprint in turbocharged bursts, huff and puff in between with my own measly muscles while the charge builds back. And wouldn’t you know the alien’s back in my sights: now leaping along on two legs, now running like a cheetah on four, sometimes keeping to the street, sometimes scrambling up sheer walls like a caffeinated gecko. This thing isn’t biped or quad, it’s not a runner or a climber; it’s all of those things, it’s fluid, it morphs between modes as easily as I put one foot after the other. It’s almost beautiful, the way it moves. It is beautiful, and fast, but you know what? This fuck-ugly Nanosuit, this bulky pile of cords and chrome—it’s keeping up, it’s one step forward and three steps back but that forward step is a doozie and suddenly I’m close enough to bring the fucker down. I’m twenty meters back when it pulls a sudden right-angle turn up off the street and starts climbing the walls. I fire on the run, thank whatever gearhead designed the N2’s motion stabilizers, and I don’t know if it’s a lucky shot or old cement but suddenly the bricks are crumbling under the Ceph’s claws and it falls backward off the wall, live parts and machine parts both grabbing at the air, both coming up empty, and the whole bastard meat–machine hybrid crashes down on the asphalt not five steps from where I’m waiting. It springs back up almost immediately but I’m already blasting away at the soft parts inside the hard ones and I don’t care how fast your spaceships go, if you’re made out of meat you are not coming back from a point-blank encounter with a Grendel heavy assault rifle.
There’s enough Squid splattered across my front that I don’t even need to punch through the exoskeleton; all I have to do is wipe my hand across my chest and False Prophet pipes up, “Sample absorbed. Processing.” I watch the N2’s fingertips slurp up that alien gore like a sponge drinks a coffee spill. I can’t tell you how creepy I find this.
I find it so creepy I don’t even notice the other stalkers coming down the walls at me.
FAMILY VALUES
Leap Taller Buildings in a Single Bound
Start with a honeycombed coltan/titanium exoskeleton, for 32% greater strength than the N1 at half the weight. Wrap it in CryNet’s patented artificial muscle: an armored carbon-nanofiber composite storing elastic energies of up to 20 J/cm3, with electromechanical coupling that exceeds 70% under most battlefield conditions. Sheathe it all in a flexible doped-ceramic epidermis and a Faraday weave that shields against EMPs while still supporting telemetric throughput of up to 15 TB/sec. Put it all together and you have a combat chassis that laughs at almost anything short of a direct hit with a battlefield nuke. (In fact, in three out of five simulations, the Nanosuit 2.0 even withstood the point-blank detonation of a Lockheed AAF 212 Circuit-Breaker™!*)
And what fuels this unmatched combination of power and protection? Virtually anything. While the N2’s primary coupling is compatible with any BVN-series hydrogen cell, the suit also acquires and stores energy automatically from a wide range of ambient sources: kinetic motion, passive solar/thermal, and atmospheric microwave to name but a few. The standard-issue universal adapter allows recharging from virtually any hardline electrical source, domestic or military—and with CryNet’s optional Necro-Organic Metabolites plug-in (NOM), the N2 can even extract usable energy from battlefield carrion!
Was I just on too many hit lists? Were CELL and Ceph both gunning for me and it was just my great luck that both happened to track me down at the same time? Or were they dusting it up with each other, street-to-street, and I just got caught in the crossfire? I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me?
’Course not. You’re here to ask the questions.
That first wave of Ceph, though, I could swear they’re running from something. They scramble down the walls and the street in a wave—mean-ass stalkers, baseline bogeymen. I open fire out of pure reflex, take a few down, and they’re shooting back with those big fucking gunhands of theirs, but they seem to have other things on their minds. And now here comes CELL screaming around the corner in their Humvees, and all I’m hearing is It’s that suit guy, suit guy’s right here! and Blue Command, engaging target! and then I’m hitting the fucking ground, man, because suddenly the air is a shitstorm of bullets and RPGs. I don’t think they even notice the Ceph at first.
They see ’em soon enough, though. One of the Humvees goes up and suddenly the Ceph are getting lots of attention.
I’m on the ground, under cover, pinned down but not in anybody’s direct line of fire unless they’ve got a micronuke to take out the collapsed wall I’m hiding under. I cloak up and peek around a pile of cinder blocks; I’ll get shredded above the knees if I try standing, but at least both sides seem to be too busy shooting at each other to wonder where I’ve gone. I keep low to the ground, crawl for an H&M with its doors conveniently pre-blown off.
The suit continues to relay inspirational messages over comm: “Blue eighteen, this is Lockhart. Please confirm kill.”
Lockhart.
“Blue Eighteen. I said report.”
I make it to Lingerie. There’s an employees-only entrance beside the crotchless panties. Elvis leaves the building.
“Can you confirm your kill?”
He’s all over the channel, my nemesis, the voice of my destruction—but right now he sounds more like a distraught mother who’s lost her child in the playground.
“I’d say that’s a no, Lockhart,” and that snide dry delivery is such a close echo of what I was just thinking that I wonder for just a moment if False Prophet isn’t reading my mind. But no: It’s a woman’s voice, coming over the comm. A rotor keeps time behind her.
“Strickland, get off the comms. Blue Eighteen, do you—”
“They’re down, Lockhart. I warned you not to do this by squads. Prophet’s suited up, probably not even sane anymore. Anything less than a platoon, he’s going to go through them like a grizzly through Boy Scouts.”
I’m liking this Strickland chick’s attitude. I like the imagery, too.
Lockhart doesn’t. “You’re easily impressed, Strickland. Why don’t you go back to running around after Hargreave and let me do my job.”
“I am running around after Hargreave. He sent me down here to oversee retrieval of the suit. And I gotta say, so far it looks like your boys are falling down on the job.”
“We’ll get this sonofabitch. And we’ll do it without your help.”
“Hargreave doesn’t see it that way anymore.”
“Then the hell with Hargreave, too. He’s got no idea what we’re dealing with here.”
BUD feeds me a bearing: Strickland’s chopper is at ten and eleven.
“I’m not going to argue this with you on air, Lockhart. I’ll see you down there. Strickland out.”
Ten and ten. She’s going down. And now that I’m a solid city block from the latest Ceph-CELL dustup, I can hear that descending whupwhupwhup bouncing off the walls to my left. My nemesis and his nemesis are headed for a meet-up just a couple of blocks away. If I hustle I might just be able to learn something useful.
What? Oh. Yeah, it is kind of amazing how well I can remember all these details, isn’t it? But you know what really sticks in my memory? Just last week I remember not having anywhere near this good a memory.
I find a ringside seat behind a second-story window in a bombed-out brownstone. Lockhart’s Humvee is parked down the alley behind a Shoppers Drug Mart, like he’s run in for a pack of Trojans but is too embarrassed to go in the front door. Strickland’s chopper idles front-and-center in an empty lot behind a $uper$ave, sharing space with a carpet of weeds and a couple of porta-potties. The way its rotor slashes the air makes me think of a pissed-off cat, kind of lazy and lethal at the same time.
They face off in the no-man’s-land between, bracketed by a couple of CELLulites on perimeter watch. Lockhart’s maybe 190 centimeters, your standard flat-topped, bullet-headed, walking military cliché except for the fact that so many of us actually are flat-topped bullet-heads.
Strickland is a walking wet dream: mocha skin, half a head shorter than the man she’s going up against, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. But it’s pretty clear from the body language that Lockhart’s not in the mood to appreciate any of Strickland’s finer aesthetic qualities. I crank my audio on a bitchfest already in progress.
“—is to take him alive,” Strickland’s saying.
“The order is to bring him down,” Lockhart spits back. “I’ll argue the civil rights details when we’ve done that.”
“Alive is more useful.”
“Yeah? To who? The guy just massacred a couple of dozen of my men, Ms. Strickland. I’m taking no more chances. Prophet dies. Hargreave can have his corpse to play with.”
“Hargreave wants—”
“Hargreave wants the suit. He’ll get it.”
“He isn’t going to like this. And last time I checked, we both worked for him.” I get the sense of a high card being played.
He doesn’t even blink. “That’s where you’re wrong, Ms. Strickland. You work for him. I answer to the CELL Executive Board and the DoD. I don’t give a shit what some senile old shareholder like Hargreave may or may not like.”