by Peter Watts
I’ve got to get out of here.
I duck down and fall through the hatch; hungry spores swarm after me like a comet’s tail, like a cloud of hungry mites. I try to stand; it’s hard, it’s almost impossible, it’s like being human again. I stagger against my own weight. Voices spill into my head: groundhogs and chopper jockeys talking over each other. Hargreave. Barclay. My name, over and over. Alcatraz. No.
I fall onto broken pavement, stare up at the sky. Cyclops Four is up there, fully loaded, dwindling.
Something else leans in, much closer. Its eyespots glow like suns. It picks me up as if I weigh nothing at all.
It’s not alone. The compound’s swarming with Ceph.
The spire detonates.
The cloud erupting from the top of that thing doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. It glistens, it sparkles: It’s just nanites talking to each other, spreading the gospel according to Hargreave all along the visible spectrum, but I don’t find that out until later. Right now it just looks as though an evil cancerous monstrosity has vomited a whole galaxy of stars into the sky, and it’s so beautiful I forget for a moment that I’m about to die.
And I think, in that same moment, the Ceph realize they are about to.
The grunt drops me without a second glance and leaps away at top speed; a white tendril swirls down like God’s finger, touches it in flight. The grunt melts, just liquefies in its armor. Its exoskeleton face-plants in a pile of joints and plating, bleeding clear viscous fluid from its seams.
Down the street a stalker scrabbles at the barricade, collapses in a puddle. Half a block farther on a pinger staggers, takes a wobbly step toward me, crouches for attack; but the blast never comes. It doesn’t give up; it draws itself back up to full height and continues its advance, slowly, deliberately, taking care with every step. There’s a kind of desperate dignity to the way it moves; for a second or so I almost feel sorry for it. A shell slams into its side and detonates, knocking it over. Whoops and cheers on comm; I raise my eyes to Heaven and see Cyclops Four coming in for another pass. Her port turbine gouts flames. She slews, wobbles to a stop ten meters ahead, hangs just a couple of meters above the ground and doesn’t dare to settle.
I can’t stand. I don’t have the strength. So I crawl, drag myself along the ground like a paraplegic toward that lowering tailgate, toward the shouting voices and waving arms. Something grabs me, hoists me off the ground as the ground begins to fall away. BUD’s charge alert downgrades to yellow; I feel my systems starting to firm up. Cyclops tilts into the sky. Someone passes me a cargo strap: I grab hold and look down across a battlefield of empty machinery, robot bodies dropped and discarded as if the things inside have just been raptured up to Heaven. They haven’t, though; I can see what’s left of them dribbling through the cracks in all those suits of armor, congealing in sticky puddles on the road.
Explosive catalytic autolysis I think, and somehow I know what that means.
I’ve seen bioweapons in my time. I was there when Egypt laid that pimped-out necrotizing fasciitis down on the Syrians, back at the start of the Water Wars: You could see it eat the meat right off the bones in realtime, like it was some kind of Discovery Channel time-lapse. Those poor bastards died in minutes; the wounds actually steamed because the Strepto’s metabolic rate had been cranked so high. They had to retcon a whole new suite of bacterial enzymes just to handle the heat.
Next to this, that was nothing. I’ve never seen anything kill this fast.
If this is what Hargreave’s capable of when his hands are tied, I say let him off the leash and get the hell out of the way.
Colonel Sherman Barclay in two words: Tired.
Scared.
Not of death—you don’t wear that many scars without making some kind of peace with mortality—but of failure. Scared because he’s presiding over the end of the world, and whole platoons are looking to him, and what if he isn’t up for it? We’re living through the mother of all doomsday scenarios, you don’t expect to win; but there are so many different ways to lose. Here at the end of his career Sherman Barclay has finally seen it all, and accepted that for him there is nothing left to see; and what he’s been fearing even since the End Days began—what he’s been fearing even more than Squiddie—is a bad death.
But you know what really got him scared, Roger? You know what he really fears, now that he’s just seen a whole platoon of Ceph turn into beef consommé before his eyes? I see it the moment they haul me into the VTOL: I see it in the look on his face as we dust off.
Hope.
Because wouldn’t you know it, Gould was right. Barclay knows that now; he doesn’t have to weigh the odds of a wild-ass theory against a cost of human lives anymore, he’s seen the N2 in action. This suit is a certified Ceph-killer, this suit could be the goddamn Black Death of Cephdom if we knew how to fine-tune the damn thing. This suit could turn the whole war around.
What do you do when you’ve finally resigned yourself to your own inevitable extermination, and someone offers you a way out? Any hope in a place like this almost has to be false; all it can do is shake your determination, tempt you with thoughts of after this is over when you should just be thinking about getting the job done now. Hope is distraction, hope is fear undercutting resolve, because hope gives you back that most terrible of battlefield commodities: something to lose.
Colonel Sherman Barclay is trying to decide whether he dares to hope.
Times Square dwindles behind us, a new wave of Ceph moving in to take possession. The Rapture doesn’t seem to be taking them; I guess Hargreave’s turncoat spore is all used up. Too bad he couldn’t have programmed it with a longer life span. Too bad he couldn’t have programmed them to replicate, like any self-respecting doomsday bug. We could’ve just sat back and watched smallpox take out the Europeans for a change.
But no. We now return you to your apocalypse, already in progress.
I’m not quite as dead as I thought; Hargreave’s hack didn’t actually need that much power but it needed it all at once, and there’s a limit to how many joules-per-second the N2 can give up. It didn’t faint on me because it was losing blood; it fainted because it stood up too fast. Now that it isn’t being suckled by a billion microscopic mouths, its charge level’s almost back in the green.
I could still use a top-up, though, and there’s a couple of outlets right here by the tailgate. I jack in and let the suit feed while Barclay goes forward. Two dozen haggard faces follow him up the aisle. A few others look back at me.
A couple of them even smile.
By the time I reach the cockpit myself, Barclay’s deep in argument with a familiar face on the far end of a video link.
“We tried to evacuate,” Gould yells on the screen, “you think we didn’t try? I told you, they swarmed us! Derailed the whole fucking train not halfway to Harlem! Now will you listen to me? We have to go to the Prism! It’s our only hope. If there are any answers, Hargreave will have them. I worked for that fucker half my life, I know him. He’s on top of this for sure. Someone has to go in there and bring him out.”
Colonel Barclay does not like civilians. He sure as shit doesn’t like this one, and if anything he likes Hargreave even less. But there it is again, whether he likes it or not.
Hope.
So he clenches his jaw, and takes a deep breath, and nods. He tells the pilot to change course for Prism.
The pilot laughs aloud. “Not a chance, sir. We took a lot of damage back there, I got multiple ruptures to the fuel lines, the pods, too—we’re bleeding fuel like a stuck pig.”
“How close can you get us?”
A couple of seconds, a quick backbrain calculation. “South end of the island. Maybe.”
“Do it.” Barclay turns to me as we bank to port. “Look at them,” he says.
I do: burns, bullet wounds, thousand-yard stares. Half these people should be in therapeutic coma. The rest should be dead.
“You’re it,” Barclay says.
And
you know something, Roger? It’s just as well.
I’m sick of wading through infernos wearing this superskin while other soldiers, better soldiers probably, burn like moths on all sides. I’m alone in here no matter how many people they send along for the ride.
“We can meet you on the other side,” Barclay continues. “Cover your exit. We’ve got good men and women on that train, they’re shepherding the civilians to safety. I’ll send a squad to meet you and Hargreave at the Queensboro Bridge.” His shoulders rise, fall; I can’t hear the sigh over the sound of the engine. “I’ll send Gould along, too. I suppose the man might have some—helpful insights.”
Something beeps and flashes red on the dash. “That’s it,” the pilot says. “We don’t drop him here, we don’t get home. I’ll go low as I can, but we’re down to fumes.”
Back down to the tail. Barclay’s ahead of me, slaps a button: the tailgate folds down like a drawbridge in front of me. Streamers of fire dance in and out of view to my left, blown back from the burning engine.
“Good luck, marine. Watch your ass.”
The East River rolls by a few meters below—black and oily in visible, a deep peaceful blue on thermal—and for a second I think it’s taking heavy fire. But no: Those are only raindrops.
The VTOL’s already banking back to shore by the time I jump.
I hit the surface straight vertical, perfect entry. The river closes over my head with barely a splash. Dead of night, pitch-black water, viz so low I can’t even see my own hand unless I push it right up against the helmet, and you know what?—
It doesn’t bother me a bit. No sign of the fear that’s plagued me ever since I was eight years old. Not a twinge.
Maybe I’m just getting used to it. Or maybe it’s a fringe benefit, courtesy of SECOND and the N2.
For a second that almost scares me more than water used to. Because I’ve been inside this beast for, what—twelve hours, now? Fifteen? And if it’s already got its tentacles buried so deep that it can edit out my phobias, what the hell will it have done after a day or two? After a week? I mean, what are we, what makes us unique, if not for our own personal fears and quirks? What if some mission algorithm decides that my personality’s an operational liability? How many more of these background edits does it take before I don’t wake up tomorrow, before something else wakes up that just happens to have my memories?
I’m not used to being such an existentialist wanker, you know. But all of this passes through my mind in the two seconds between the time I hit the water and the time I stop sinking. I hang there in that muddy black current for just a moment. Physics weighs buoyancy and momentum and gravity, and as I start to rise the dread just—drains out of me, somehow. The thoughts remain, that scary conclusion is still front and center, but it’s colorless. I can look at the prospect of being edited out of my own head and it really should scare the shit out of me, but it doesn’t anymore. I’m not even scared by the obvious reason why it doesn’t.
Because after all, I’ve got a mission to complete. And by the time I break the surface—ten, twelve seconds after splashdown—that’s really all I’m focused on.
To: Site Commander D. Lockhart. Manhattan Crisis Zone
From: Jacob Hargreave
Date: [header corrupted]
(See attached.)
Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about this, Lockhart?! Did you really think you could undermine me with the board that easily?!
Your days are numbered, son!
Archive: 28th March 2021
From: CryNet Executive Board
To: Lieutenant Commander D. Lockhart, Seattle Deployment Team
Lt. Cmdr. Lockhart,
We are in receipt of your opinions in this matter and have weighed them carefully.
We are also aware of the deeply personal nature of your grievance against the nano-suit program. We have no wish to re-open old wounds for you, but must point out that this personal element forces us to consider the possibility of your having a “vendetta mentality” where the new technology is concerned.
At present, although the US military has formally withdrawn from the N2 program, Pentagon funding for our research continues in force, and forms part of a substantial revenue stream for the company. Our client relationship with the Pentagon remains a cordial one and in these turbulent times, that is not something we take lightly. Your concerns notwithstanding, the N2 program will therefore advance (under close security supervision, you may rest assured) to Stages Seven and Eight.
We will inform you if this situation changes. Until then, you will please consider the matter closed.
Archive: 22nd March 2021
From: Lieutenant Commander D. Lockhart, Seattle
Deployment Team
To: CryNet Executive Board
Sirs,
I refer you to my previous correspondence regarding CryNet’s Nanosuit program, and specifically the continuance of research and funding under the new N2 protocol (Stage Six).
If early reservations among myself and other experienced military personnel on the original program were not previously sufficient, then I would have hoped that the debacle at Ling Shan would prove the validity of our case. Hargreave-Rasch’s proprietary nanotech has failed so many legal safety requirements now and so badly that the US military has withdrawn its personnel from all testing in protest. And our company’s success in acquiring new test subjects for N2 from among the US Supermax prison population and the troops of our developing world allies should be no cause for rejoicing.
Sirs, I am an American patriot, and a shareholding supporter of our corporate values. But what this country needs (and this company needs to support logistically) is a culture of well-trained and well-equipped modern soldiers we can be proud of—not a Frankenstein parade of psychopaths and dead men walking in tin suits whose technical systems apparently remain a mystery even to those who build them.
I respectfully reiterate my request that the N2 program be formally terminated.
Faithfully
Dominic H. Lockhart (Lt. Cmdr.)
PRISM
Rain hammers across my helmet. Lightning strobes on the horizon. Off in the middle distance a bright light turns in the sky like the eye of Sauron, sweeping land and sea: lighthouse.
I’m a hundred meters off the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. GPS puts Prism in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. A little over one klick northeast.
Hargreave’s back in my ear before I even make it ashore. “It’s good of you to come for me like this, Alcatraz, but you will need to proceed with caution. Lockhart has deployed his elite forces across the island. I’ll guide you as best I can, but my view from here is, shall we say, severely limited.”
The lighthouse rises in my sights like a terraced stone birthday cake: wide first layer with guardrail icing; narrower second; one big honking candle rising from the center. A wide stone stairway curves around the outer wall but even before I hit the shore I can see heat prints in the shadows of the first landing. I make three, line of sight; probably more inside the structure itself.
SECOND samples the airwaves: “You see that fly-by? Thought they were going to come in and strafe us.”
“Nah. Too shot up. Didn’t you see the flames? Be lucky if they manage five more minutes in the air.”
“Saffron Three and Eight, keep your comms clear. Run silent, perimeter sweep again—that tin fuck is coming, I can feel it.”
Daddy Lockhart, breaking in and squelching the signal.
“Yes, sir.”
I’m on the stairs now, flattened against the brickwork as Three and Eight clatter innocently past on their perimeter sweep, swinging their dicks. They hope I do show up. One of them had friends in Cobalt.
I wait until their voices fade, cloak for as long as it takes me to stick my head above the landing. Nothing but the backs of the Saffron Duo disappearing in the night. I don’t believe it. Lockhart’s an asshole but he’s not an idiot; he won’t have left the southern a
pproach unguarded.
Sure enough, other voices slow me to a creep as I circle the first landing. Somebody thinks they should be out fighting the Ceph, not sitting here in the boonies. Someone else would rather be home fucking his boyfriend.
Way overhead, Sauron’s eye flickers and goes out. For a moment or two the night belongs to fires burning across the water. I look up at the lantern, catch a bright cloud of heat radiating from the dead lamp and a smaller shadow in front of it, something cooler. I switch to StarlAmp.
Ah yes. An arm. A sniper rifle. Have to remember that.
The lantern reignites. Somewhere behind all that stonework, gears grind faintly back up to speed: The beam resumes its endless track around the horizon.
“Ah, shit. Must be another power surge.”
“I swear, Lockhart’s losing it, man. He’s taking this shit way too personal.”
“Easy to get personal when some cyborg asshole puts half your friends in body bags. I want that fucker dead as bad as he does.”
“There’s no way he’s coming.”
“Maybe he’s already here. He’s got a cloak, you know …”
I do, at that. I bring it up and move along the wall and there they are, just outside the lighthouse door: three beetle suits, blinded by Science.
“… he could be watching us right now …”
I could reach out and touch her. I am so tempted. I am so tempted.
Right up until a fourth merc comes around the corner and touches me first.
Touches isn’t exactly the right word. Blunders would be closer. I am cloaked, after all; the dumb fuckwit walks right into me and bounces back on his heels, flailing. His buddies laugh as he goes over. For about half a second.
“He’s there! He’s right fucking there!”