by Peter Watts
Barclay shakes his head, and continues his rounds, and says nothing. Gould raises his hands, exasperated. I brush past him.
He pokes me from behind.
Suddenly I’m facing him; suddenly my fists are clenched. I can feel synthetic muscles cording up my forearms. Gould doesn’t even notice. He’s plugged something into my spinal socket, and he’s only got eyes for the readout: “Fucking military mind-set, man. If I can’t tell him, maybe I can show him.”
Yes, Gould, show him. Show him my black box and my deep-layer protocols, show him my secret antidote to the spore.
“I scammed this little reader out of the CELL lab when no one was looking. It’s not much, but at least we can access the op logs …”
And why don’t you show him what’s left of my heart while you’re at it. Why don’t you show him the great fucking hole where my left lung used to be.
“Wait a minute, that’s not right …”
Why don’t you show him that I’m fucking dead, Gould, since you couldn’t be bothered to fill me in on that little detail when you had the chance. Why don’t you—
“Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”
Finally he looks up, but he still doesn’t see what’s in front of him. He doesn’t see my face through the visor, he doesn’t see how close I am to putting his head through the wall. I don’t know what he sees, exactly.
But whatever it is, it’s bright enough to leave him blind.
“Man, what have you been up to today?” he murmurs, and there’s something like awe in his voice.
He grabs Barclay coming back the other way. “You have to go to Prism.”
“No.”
“I know how to beat the Ceph!”
That gets Barclay’s attention.
“I’ve been a complete idiot,” Gould says.
Barclay does not argue the point. “How, exactly, can we beat the Ceph?”
“Give ’em AIDS!”
“That’s not funny, Dr. Gould.”
“Lupus, then. Rheumatoid arthritis. That’s what this damn suit is—or at least, that’s what it’s turning into: an autoimmune disease!”
Barclay doesn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Uh-huh.”
“Dude, I am serious. I’m looking at the op logs right now, and you wouldn’t believe the places Alcatraz has been hanging out over the past few hours. I don’t have the equipment here to confirm this directly, but the only way this telemetry makes sense is if the whole damn suit is studded with receptor sites! I never even looked for them before, I mean why would I, why would you expect a battlefield prosthesis to—”
Barclay cuts in and to the chase: “Dr. Gould. So what?”
“The spore, Colonel! Didn’t I say that? This artifact”—he jerks his thumb in my direction, a gesture that takes in the N2 but somehow excludes the meat sitting inside—“can interface with the spore!”
There are wounded, there are dead on all sides. There are orders to be given to those still standing. But Gould has ignited the dimmest spark of hope in Barclay’s eyes. Barclay lets him run with it.
“The spore might not be a bioweapon after all,” Gould continues. “At least, not just a bioweapon, not the way we’d understand it. If these readings are right it might almost be a kind of, of portable ecosystem. No, scratch that: more of an external immune system. It basically retcons the local environment to make it Ceph-friendly. That means taking out potentially dangerous macrofauna, of course—”
“Us, you mean,” Barclay murmurs.
“—but I think it also filters out any microbes that might be incompatible with Ceph biology.”
Barclay grunts softly. “War of the Worlds.”
Gould blinks. “Huh?”
“Nineteenth-century novel,” Barclay says. “Martians invade Earth, kick our asses, but then they all die of the common cold. No immunity. The Ceph have been around a lot longer than we thought; who knows, maybe the bastards read it.”
“Uh, right.” Gould hesitates; lifers who read ancient science fiction don’t fit comfortably into his worldview. But he’s back up and running in the next second: “Anyway, the spore’s part of a synthetic metasystem, and the N2’s derived from technology designed to interface with that metasystem, so we can, we can—” He snaps his fingers, suddenly inspired: “It’s like gay rape in hanging flies!”
That shuts down conversation for about ten meters in all directions. Even the wounded stop moaning.
“Excuse me,” Barclay says after a moment, “I must have misheard. I thought you said—”
But Gould’s on a roll: “There are these insects, hanging flies. And sometimes a male will rape another male; just punch a hole right through the abdomen and ejaculate inside, you know? It’s called traumatic insemination.”
I don’t know what parts of me the Ceph have blown away and I don’t know how much else has been broken down to keep the rest of me going, but I know that at least my balls are still intact. I know this because I can feel them crawling back up into my abdomen.
“But the really cool thing is, this is actually a viable reproductive strategy! Because the invading sperm doesn’t just float around once it’s in there, it seeks out the gonads of the victim! It infiltrates the testes so that when that victimized fly goes out and inseminates a female, he’s actually injecting someone else’s sperm into his mate! It’s reproduction by proxy. You use someone else’s delivery platform to spread your genetic code!”
Barclay purses his lips. “Get the spires working for us instead of them.”
“Why not? When you come right down to it, we’re all made out of meat.”
Barclay looks at me, and looks away.
“But look, Colonel,” Gould says, “the thing is, the system’s nowhere near field-ready. According to the diagnostic logs, Pro—Alcatraz here tried to interface with some Cephtech earlier today and all the protocols locked up. The suit’s trying to resequence on its own the best it can, but it needs help. It needs Hargreave, we need Hargreave. He’s been three steps ahead of us the whole way. This”—Gould waves his stolen scanner—“this is basically a rectal thermometer. Prism’s a state-of-the-art hospital. It’s got hardware you won’t find anywhere else on the planet, stuff built specifically for the N2. We need to take Prism, by force if necessary, and if Jack won’t cooperate—well, that’s what you have interrogators for.”
It’s a thread thrown to a drowning man. It’s an oasis shimmering in the distance. Barclay is not the kind of man to let wishful thinking trump the facts on the ground, but we are all in such desperate need of good news.
For a moment or two I almost think he’s going to go for it.
But then he looks around at the huddled civilians under his protection, at the ragtag soldiers under his command, at the duct tape and chewing gum he’s using to keep it all together, and I know exactly what lesson from Strategy 101 is going through his head: Never fight a war on two fronts. The oasis is a mirage.
Barclay shakes his head.
Gould won’t let it go. “Colonel, listen—”
“I have been listening, Doctor. I can’t spare the resources for an assault against a fortified paramilitary installation, not under these circumstances.”
“But you have to—”
Barclay wheels on him, and the light in his eyes now is anything but hopeful. “What I have to do, Dr. Gould, is hold this location against a superior force that is perhaps ten minutes away from bringing the place down around our ears. What I have to do is keep a thousand civilians alive—including you, I might add—long enough to get them to safety. What I do not have to do is leave these people unprotected on the chance that your scientific theorizing isn’t just a clever dive down the wrong alley.”
His voice is dead level and cold as fucking Pluto. It doesn’t rise a decibel. Gould steps back as though he’s been slapped in the face.
Barclay turns to me. “I need you on defense. Put that suit to some practical use for a change. And you”—turning back to Gould—“are shipping
out with the rest of the civilians.”
Gould’s still got some spine left: “You need me here, Colonel—I’m the only one who knows what you’re up ag—”
Barclay waves Chino over from down the row. “Escort Dr. Gould downstairs. See that he gets away safely.” He walks away, tapping his tacpad.
Gould grabs my arm as Chino grabs his: “He’s wrong, man. Hargreave’s our only hope. You’ve gotta take it upstairs.”
Chino’s not a huge guy, but you don’t fuck with him. He wants Gould to move; Gould moves. But he manages one final appeal on the way out: “Go over his head if you have to! Tell them about the hanging flies! That’ll convince them!”
“Soldier.”
I turn at the sound. Barclay stares unwaveringly at me across three rows of collateral damage.
“You’re with me,” he says.
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion CSIRA Blackbody Council
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
Well, of course I didn’t have the gear to pick up that kind of micro-structure, even when I was working at Prism. I was more of a systems man, right? Leave the nanohisto stuff to the grad students. But even if I had the equipment, I’d never have looked for it. I mean, why would you expect the skin of a battlefield prosthesis to come loaded with receptor proteins? Why the fuck would anybody build something like that?
You know, I don’t think Hargreave himself knew what they were at first. That’s got to be a problem whenever you reverse-engineer foreign tech. You don’t really know how it works, you don’t know what all the parts do. You can copy it, piece for piece, but you don’t really understand it. It’s like, Hey, all these parts fit together to make the best artificial muscle we’ve ever seen! What do these nanohex thingies do? No idea, but when you leave ’em out the damn thing doesn’t work, so we better leave ’em in. And because you don’t know about Charybdis’s shall-we-say unconventional approach to microterra-forming, you’ve got no reason to expect that every piece of tech they ever built is going to have a spore interface right down at the molecular level. You just blindly cut and paste—and sure, you get a kick-ass piece of field armor, but you also get every square millimeter of the thing chock-full of receptor sites and who knows what signals they’ll send when the wrong enzyme cozies up to their substrate?
It’s not just the basic nanochem we’re talking about here, either. It’s the higher-level stuff, too, the neural meshes. Hargreave laid his own OS over the system, of course, he programmed that suit to his own specs. But you can be damn sure he didn’t program it to fry his own machines when they got too intimate with the deep-layer protocols. The N2, it doesn’t like people poking around down there. Like taking an angry cat to the vet. It hisses, it claws. Shorts out every server in the chain. Weirdest thing I ever saw. Something else Hargreave didn’t count on: The thing’s got its own agenda.
I pity the poor bastards who end up inside it. I’ve known two of them now. Decent dudes both, you know, Prophet and I go way back and he’s—he was—100 percent stand-up. Alcatraz, now, I only just met him. We hung out for maybe two or three days, off and on, seemed like a decent guy. Kind of cryptic. Once or twice I caught him looking at me—I assume he was looking at me, you know, I’ve never even seen his face?—and I got this, this weird bottled-up sense he was going to explode, but—well, you know as well as I do.
The thing is, Alcatraz, Prophet—two more different jarheads you will never meet. Prophet never shut up, he was always joking around, and Alcatraz—well, let’s just say, not much in the way of social skills. But put ’em in the N2 and even people that different start to—converge. EEG, voxprints, ACG gates, they all start looking the same after you’ve been in that suit for a while.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s just the system interface, doing what it does. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bum me out just a little, you know, for the guys inside. You may think the N2 turns you into God’s own jihadist, what with the induced bloodlust and the enhanced reflexes and the superconducting cognitive enhancements. But you’re just feeling and doing what the damn thing’s told you to. From the outside, sure, you look like an absolute ass-kicking wild man, but really you’ve been—
Tamed, I guess.
Tamed.
REARGUARD
I follow Barclay into a service elevator. We go down.
“Your friend,” he remarks, “is full of shit.”
I haven’t said a word all day. Right now it seems especially important to nod.
“He says he ‘escaped in the chaos.’ From Tara Strickland. I know Strickland, she was a decorated Navy SEAL before she went off the rails. You don’t just ‘escape’ from that woman. I figure she cut him loose.”
The cage jerks to a halt. The doors creak open.
“The question is, why?”
I follow Barclay into an observation gallery; it’s obviously been a dingy sub-basement hole for decades, but I’m guessing the shattered windowpanes are a recent development. We stand on a carpet of broken glass and look down on one of the loading platforms. Civilians crowd nervously beside a chain of subway cars. A dozen marines stand by just in case, but this crowd looks about as violent as a yard full of field mice.
Of course, that could all change in a split second if Squiddie crashed the party. I’ve seen little old ladies throw babies to the wolves when their lives were threatened.
“Look at these people,” Barclay says, and I’m not even sure he’s talking to me. “I grew up in this town. Any one of them down there could be family. And if it boils down here like it did at Ling Shan …”
He shakes his head, pushes through a slatted door at the far end of the gallery. We pass into some kind of control room from the last century. A pendant light hangs from the center of the ceiling, a rusted metal cone with a bare bulb shining from its center. A bank of ancient CRTs glows on one wall, serving up securicam images from around the station. Two grunts sit at an antique command console stretching the length of the room, all buttons and manual switches and actual hardwired lightbulbs embedded in painted schematics of the New York subway system. One of them slaps the board: “Goddamn it, nothing works in this place.”
I can sympathize. I thought this place was supposed to be brand new—it’s only been, what, eight years since Black Tuesday? And only five since they finished rebuilding the station. But the tech down here is one step away from smoke signals and tin-can telephones. Obviously the reconstruction wasn’t the grand and glorious megaproject they led us to believe; looks to me like they just rebuilt from the ground up. These sublevels have to be left over from the original.
“—was at Ling Shan, you know,” Barclay’s saying. “I saw Strickland—Tara’s father—I saw him die. When Tara heard she just … cracked. Drink, drugs, a string of—unwise command decisions. Dishonorable discharge. And now she’s queen bee at CELL, probably getting five times her old salary. Her father must be turning in his—”
Boom.
Dust drizzles from the ceiling. The overlight swings back and forth on its wire; the room fills with stretching swooping shadows.
“Shit …,” someone breathes. Something with claws and cannons lurches across one of the CRTs.
“They’re breaching the main hall, sir.”
Barclay clicks into overdrive: “Martinez, get down on the platforms and tell Dickerson to roll the first train out. Our clock just stopped.”
He turns to me.
“Stations, son. Main hall. Get up there and buy these people some time.”
I get. Squiddie’s running rampant by the time I get back upstairs. Grunts and Heavies stomp across the floor, shattering marble and mowing down Barclay’s men like wheat. Stalkers scramble along the walls and ceiling, gigantic steel roaches, leaping on the unfit and tearing them limb from limb. There are sandbag barricades everywhere—sandbags, Roger, can you fucking believe it?—and the guys who
take cover behind them do seem to be a bit better at staying alive but it’s not because a few burlap sacks full of dirt can stop a Ceph shell worth shit. It’s just that the Ceph haven’t noticed them yet.
Doesn’t take long for that to change, though.
Word from behind: The last of the wounded are out of the mezzanine. We fall back, regroup at the choke points on the stairs, hold fast a bit longer as the trains start to pull out of the tunnels below us. I’m asking myself, Barclay knows about the underground hives, right? He knows which lines are still intact and which ones have been ripped in half, these trains aren’t going to barrel off into midair and plunge down into one of those brand-spanking-new rifts that are all the rage these days? And I tell myself not to be an asshole, of course they know, just do your fucking job and stop second-guessing the chain of command. But then I keep not running out of ammo, I keep picking up new clips and new scopes and preowned BFGs that hardly even got fired before the Ceph turned their owners into bloody blobs, and maybe I should be wondering about whatever tactical genius decided the best resupply strategy was to hope that those few miserable assholes still standing after five minutes have lots of bodies to scavenge.
We fall back.
We fall back.
We fall back.
Most of us have been left behind, by now: on the stairs, in the hall, in pieces. But they bought us the time we needed; we few survivors are at the north end of the loading platform now and there’s not a civilian in sight. Squiddie’s pressing hard on our ass but down there at the end of the platform there’s one last train waiting, already half full, our names on the empty seats. Barclay’s back at my side, fighting with the rest of us, and he’s even more exhausted but he’s not scared anymore. He even sends me a smile, not much, just a half-second curl at the corner of his mouth that says We did it, son, we saved the civvies.