He came to moments later to see the twin rotors of a Chinook overhead. Time skipped a beat. He came to again to see a squat, powerfully built, shaven-headed soldier holding a General Purpose Machine Gun standing over him.
‘You’re all fucked up, mate,’ the soldier said in a broad London accent.
2 Days Later
‘Yes sir, one of the Delta Force operators survived and another is missing.’ Lockhart said into the secure sat phone. ‘Yes, sir, I am aware of Dr Asher’s recommendation but it is my belief that a sanction will just draw more attention to the situation and frankly Asher is a horse’s ass. That soldier fought hard and deserved to live.’ Lockhart listened intently to what was being said on the other end of the line. ‘I still have reservations about the whole program, but frankly I think Lieutenant Barnes would be an excellent choice if you’re still intent on going ahead with it.’ Lockhart listened again. ‘Thank you, Mr Hargreave.’
Lockhart folded the sat phone away and took another sip of his Bourbon as he glanced out the window of the corporate jet heading north. On the table in front of him was a folder labelled Raptor Team.
Schism
New York State, 2023
‘They call me Prophet. Remember me.’
The barrel of the M12 automatic felt cool against his head. He hadn’t had cause to fire it at CELL or Ceph recently. Pressure on the trigger. Heat. Almost too hot for there to be pain. There was the weirdest sensation of something moving behind his eyes, inside his head, but just for a moment. He remembered sinking to his knees. He was dead then, but his brain was still receiving information. Nobody ever talked about this because nobody ever came back. The ground tipped towards him but everything went black before he face-planted.
He remembered speaking to Hargreave. He remembered being interrogated some time later. No, that wasn’t him. He was dead. He remembered putting the bullet through his head. It was either that or he would have slowly turned into a Ceph, his body eaten by tumours and alien DNA, becoming an alien killing machine.
If he was dead then why was he running across the wasteland, a darkened New York behind him, the damaged skyline reaching up like so many broken fingers? His hands had been bloody before. He’d been little more than a boy, a junior officer, the first time he’d killed. It’d happened in Iraq. It’d happened very quickly and he’d done it over a distance of seventy feet. The first time up close and personal, the first time he’d felt warm blood on his hands, had been in Columbia. Now he had blood on his hands again, and this time he couldn’t feel the warmth through the nanosuit. The blood steamed a bit in the cold air. Information on its chemical makeup scrolled down his vision from the suit’s Heads-Up Display. He knew everything there was to know about this blood except whose it was and how they’d died. Though Prophet knew they must have died at his hands.
Bright light stabbed down onto the broken concrete and scrubby plants. One helicopter gunship and then another hove into view. Information on the model of the gunships, their capabilities and armaments, played down the HUD. He could heard the pilots’ conversations with their control. They were CELL military contractors playing at being soldiers and getting paid more than real troops for their troubles. They were searching for an escaped nanosuit. Someone called Alcatraz. Who the fuck is Alcatraz? he wondered. Then he remembered the kid he’d pulled from the river. The wreckage of the USS Nautilus. The cold feel of the metal of the M12 against his head.
‘Shit. I’m dead,’ Laurence Barnes, who they called Prophet, said to himself, but he didn’t stop running. He activated the stealth mode and the lensing field bent light around him. To all intents and purposes he disappeared as the harsh blue light of one of the gunship’s searchlights swept across where he’d been.
He became a ghost.
‘Okay, I’m gone now.’
‘I think we both know that’s not going to happen.’
‘I have a life . . . a family.’
The CSIRA Black Body Council interrogator glanced at the file.
‘Not much of one, not from what you were saying.’
‘You think you know me now, Roger?’
Prophet froze the footage that the suit was showing him. He could see how it was going to play out. He was lying down in a sewer trying to mask his heat signature from the thermographics that the pilots in the CELL gunships overhead would be using.
He now knew who he’d killed. Roger, the interrogator. The guy that CSIRA or CELL or whoever had sent to debrief him in the wake of the clusterfuck that had been his recent operation in New York.
He remembered the disease, the quarantine. He remembered CELL being called in as a military contractor to enforce martial law in the city. He remembered how they had hunted him. And he remembered the Ceph. The same aliens he’d first encountered in the Pacific on Lingshan. Cephalopod-like aliens clothed in hi-tech war machines far in advance of humanity’s best military efforts. He remembered the suit melding with their technology. It hadn’t been the last time.
He had been in control for some of it, or some mix of him and Alcatraz had been, but now the memories were fragmented. The events played like two pieces of film of the same events running just slightly out of synch with each other, one superimposed over the top of the other.
It was worse than that. It didn’t stop the further back he went. He remembered Lingshan, but somehow he was also doing SERE training at Brunswick in Maine. He remembered Columbia, but he was ditching school and hanging with his friends. He remembered Iraq and at the same time reading comics, riding his bike, breaking into some kind of Sea World-style attraction. He remembered basic training and he remembered his Mom instilling the fear of god into him. The problem was that the mother he remembered, now superimposed on the hell of basic training, was white. Mrs Barnes had most decidedly not been.
There had been other signs as well. The fear as he’d lain down in the black water of the sewer – where had that come from? And Prophet’s skull felt fit to burst. The pain was a burning white light behind his eyes. He was sure there was blood trickling out of his ears under the suit, but then corpses don’t bleed. Maybe it’s the suit growing into my head to fix the problem, he thought. The suit should have been able to tell him what was going on, what was causing the pain, but the medical outputs seemed conflicted.
Prophet knew that none of this mattered. The only thing that mattered now was the mission. The only thing that mattered was what he knew. What he’d been shown on Lingshan, in the ice. He knew it was far from over. When he’d put the gun against his head that had been because of the disease, he told himself, he’d had no choice. He tried to ignore how much the cool metal of the gun barrel had seemed like a chance to rest.
The pain made him scream. Blackness claimed him.
Olfactory sensor overload. Information scrolled down Prophet’s vision, describing the chemical process of rot. It was biotelemetry telling him that he was sat in a stinking alley full of garbage.
There was someone else in the alley with him. Even as disorientated as he was, Prophet was shocked that he’d somehow managed to go from a nanosuited god-of-war to being blindsided in an alley. The man was well built, hair shaved at the sides, flat on top, green eyes but otherwise surprisingly non-descript. He looked to be in his early twenties. The jeans and t-shirt, despite the chill in the air, did nothing to disguise the man’s military bearing. Prophet could make out the bottom of the winged skull tattoo. The skull had a diving regulator in its mouth and the words Swift, Silent, Deadly underneath it.
‘Fucking jarhead . . .’ Prophet managed.
‘Screw you, you army puke,’ the other man said, without a trace of feeling.
The empty bottle he had thrown exploded against the wall of the alley. Prophet found himself alone. He pushed himself to his feet with difficulty. He staggered a bit but he could feel himself recovering. Presumably this was the suit working out how to deal with his bizarre situation.
Prophet became more alert with every step he took. He looked out o
f the alleyway. The alleyway led onto a rain-soaked boardwalk. Beyond the boardwalk was a beach, and then a dark rough sea.
The suit’s nav-systems had been trying to tell him for a while but it took the boardwalk, all the neon and garish casino fronts, to drive it home: Atlantic City. As if things weren’t bad enough, Prophet thought, I’m in Jersey.
It must have been late because there were very few people on the boardwalk. Still feeling a little disoriented, he decided that he wanted to see the ocean. He engaged the stealth mode, the lensing field ghosting him, and he crossed the street.
Glancing behind him, footage from a Macronet feed in the window of a bar caught his eye. He linked to the net with a thought, searched for the footage and had it downloaded to the HUD. He saw CELL military contractors brutalising and executing victims of the Manhattan virus. It cut to footage of Hargreave-Rasch board members being escorted through crowds of reporters. The headline read: Hargreave-Rasch’s board members to face congressional hearing over Manhattan Crisis.
Prophet figured that mismanagement was what they called war crimes these days. He believed that the board members should be punished for what they had done, but he didn’t hold out much hope. The system was too corrupt, and Hargreave-Rasch’s PR were already spinning the New York events.
He reached the beach without drawing too much attention to his hulking form. Mission, have to get back on the mission. For the first time in a long time the mission was his. He wasn’t doing what other people were telling him. And for the first time in a long time, he knew the mission was right. It was a simple matter of survival.
He was almost thinking straight now. The pain in his head had been a constant since New York, but the nausea and the acid burn in his stomach was gone. He’d always enjoyed looking at the ocean but tonight it disquieted him. He didn’t like water anymore.
‘You’re back again, huh, mister?’
Prophet turned to find himself looking down at a young girl, maybe ten- to twelve-years-old, smiling at him. She was dirty, her clothes were ragged, and she had dark hair and green eyes.
What was going on? Where’d she come from?! Then Prophet realised that he was somewhere new.
He checked the GPS. Somewhere in Ventnor City. The information came scrolling down the HUD for the asking. A working class neighbourhood that gangs and drugs were slowly claiming, thanks to the Double Dip Recession. He couldn’t remember ever having been here before but the girl definitely seemed to recognise him.
He was stood in some trees out the back of a series of panel board houses that might have been nice places to live, once. The wooded area was scattered with old bottles, tins, needles and other drug paraphernalia. There was the remains of fire in a dip in the ground.
‘I’ve been reading my bible.’ The girl was talking again. ‘Momma was always said it was a good thing to do. A righteous thing. Before they took her away.’ The girl swallowed hard. She looked like she was about to start crying.
Prophet hadn’t had much interaction with kids. He’d been good with them when he had to be, when his friends started pairing off and starting families, maybe a little too strict but that was the military in him. They’d liked him, though, he knew cool stuff and could do cool things. But he had no idea how to handle this.
He remembered her. Alice, his little sister. His parents had had children way too late. He remembered being surprised that his dad hadn’t been shooting blanks at that age. He remembered how young Alice had been when Mom had been diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s. He’d wondered if she’d been suffering, undiagnosed, when she’d gotten pregnant in her forties. Maybe even earlier, when they’d had him.
The religious stuff had always been there. As an adult he’d become convinced that half of it was fear and half of it was his mother’s need to look down on and judge others. When the Alzheimer’s kicked in, well, then the real fun and games had started. He’d known it was the disease, but that didn’t matter much when you were just a kid, getting beaten on and screamed at about how you were going to hell. In comparison the Marines had seemed like a pleasant alternative.
No! That never happened! My name is Laurence Barnes, I grew up in San Diego. They call me Prophet! Prophet knew these to be false memories. They were someone else’s. Red warning signs were appearing on the HUD as the suit tried to understand what was going on in his head. He’d been in fire fights in over a dozen countries and here, in Jersey, confronted by a ten-year-old girl, who at some level he knew was his little sister even though he didn’t have one, he was having a panic attack.
‘Momma said that the bible had the answers. That’s armour you’re wearing, isn’t it, mister?’
Prophet forced himself to calm down. The pain in the dead flesh of his skull was nearly overwhelming. He could see white lights and wanted to scream.
‘You’re an angel, aren’t you, mister?’ He almost laughed and thought he felt like throwing up, if only he still could. The things he’d done made that question seem like an obscenity. ‘You’ve lost your wings. Is god angry at you?’
No, it just feels that way sometimes.
‘Alice!’ the harsh voice cut through the humid night air. ‘Where are you, you little bitch?! Get over here now or you’ll feel the back of my hand.’
Prophet didn’t like the sound of the voice. He stepped back and engaged the stealth mode. It was only then he saw how frightened Alice was.
Alcatraz had always tried to be hard where his mother was concerned. He’d had no problems about cutting her off after she’d been institutionalised. He’d always told himself that there’d been no guilt about never going to see her. Despite how she’d terrorised him growing up, Prophet knew this to be a lie.
When she’d ended up in the psych ward his, no, Alcatraz’s, dad had basically wasted away. He’d gone out with a whimper, not a bang. Alice had ended up in a foster home. There had been tear-filled conversations, with her older brother promising her that as soon as he was back home she could come and live with him.
‘Then I just went and died in New York. Sucks, huh?’ Prophet whipped around, looking for the source of the voice and seeing nothing. The weasel-faced man in the wifebeater, pyjama bottoms and, oddly, spats, must have heard something because he looked around to where Prophet was hidden. Deciding it was nothing he turned back to Alice. His bloodshot eyes full of anger. The girl was shaking with fear.
‘What’d I tell you?’ he demanded.
‘Which time?’ she asked, confused and terrified.
‘Are you trying to get fresh with me?’ He lifted his hand up as if to backhand her. She shrank away from it in a way that told Prophet she’d been hit plenty of times before.
‘Hey,’ Prophet said softly. The man froze. ‘Turn around.’ The man managed to control his fear long enough to do as he was told. He couldn’t see anything. He looked around and, still finding nothing, his fear was replaced with anger as he started to turn back towards Alice. Prophet made sure that the man saw him appear out of nowhere. The man let out a high-pitched scream. The scream was choked off as Prophet grabbed him by his chin and lifted him off the ground. The man soiled himself.
This I understand, this situation I can handle, the proper and correct application of fear and violence.
He could feel the man’s jaw crack and then splinter under his power-assisted fingers. The man was somehow still making whimpering and squealing noises as he drooled blood.
‘I could be anywhere and you’d never know,’ he whispered to the man. ‘You’re going to look after Alice and all the other children in your care to the best of your abilities. You will never raise a hand to them, or even an angry word. You will treat them with as much kindness as your resources will allow and you will stop drinking or doing whatever it is that turns you into a foul smelling, evil, little worm, because I will be checking. I will be checking frequently, and if I don’t like what I see I will remove limbs and solder the wounds shut. Do you understand me?’ The man didn’t answer. ‘I said, do you und
erstand me?’
‘I don’t think he can talk,’ Alice managed through the terror. At the sound of her voice Prophet felt the guilt wash over him. He’d forgotten she was there. This was just another bit of violence for her to witness. He dropped the man, who curled up into a ball and made whimpering noises.
‘Get out of here,’ Prophet said quietly. The man didn’t move, he just whimpered. Prophet took a step towards him and the man made a run for it, scrambling away on all fours.
Prophet looked down on Alice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘God will forgive him for his sins, and you.’
He felt like crying. He knew that this frightened young girl was concocting an elaborate fantasy around this strange figure she’d been confronted with. That he was an angel fallen from grace and that to earn his redemption he would watch over her and keep her safe. The awful knowledge that under the carboplatinum-reinforced coltan-titanium exoskeleton was the animated corpse of her older brother somehow made it all the more horrifying.
‘Did you mean what you said? Will you be watching over me?’
Prophet thought long and hard about lying. He desperately wanted to. He just wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t. She was far too nice, forgiving and naïve to survive in the situation she had found herself in.
‘No,’ he told her. ‘What I said was to frighten him into looking after you. It might work but probably only for a little while. You’ve got to be smart, keep your head down, keep out of his way and look for a safe way out as soon as you’re old enough, and I mean school not the streets, and Alice, you’ve got to learn to look after yourself, stand up to people. You don’t want to get in a fight if you can help it, but if they hit you, hit them back, harder. You understand me? God will understand.’ Or fuck him, quite frankly.
She nodded, tears in her eyes. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
‘I guess you’ve got other kids you’ve got to help, right?’ she asked through the tears, wiping her nose on her sleeve.
Crysis: Escalation Page 6