Prophet watched the knowledge settle in, the resignation. Tension leaked out of the other man. Prophet stood up. He smoothed down his uniform and then held out his hand. Alcatraz stared at the offered grip. Prophet couldn’t quite read the expression on the Recon Marine’s face. Finally Alcatraz stood up.
‘Alice?’ he asked.
The mission, Prophet thought.
‘I’ll look in on her when I can.’ He almost believed the lie himself.
Alcatraz nodded.
‘What’s your name, son?’
Alcatraz told him.
He was stood alone in a graveyard under a slate grey sky. He looked down at the gravestone.
A heuristic system: experience-based problem solving. In other words, learning. Just how smart is the suit? Prophet wondered. Then he corrected himself. How smart was the alien tech in the suit? The Ceph were a reactive species, they responded to external stimuli. Once something had happened to them they would change their approach the next time round, and the next, until they either succeeded or were destroyed. The suit had known there was something wrong with Prophet. Or rather, it had known there was something wrong with its CPU. Had it found a way to fix it, he wondered? Or had it made a choice between Prophet and Alcatraz? Prophet found that he didn’t want to think too hard about that possibility . . .
It was only then that he realised just how envious he was of Alcatraz’s peace, even if that peace was merely oblivion.
He thought back to something a senior NCO had told him during training: In a fire-fight, you find cover or you find religion. It didn’t seem that Alcatraz had had much of a choice.
He looked down at Alcatraz’s father’s grave. Then he turned and walked away, with the marine’s last words ringing in his ears.
‘They call me Alcatraz. Remember me.’
Archaeology
St. Petersburg, 2024
Amanda looked down into the darkness. It was total. The complete absence of light. Intellectually she knew there was light down there, somewhere, but it felt like she would descend into blackness forever. It was still, cold, and there was little air movement. The lights attached to the steel frame of the elevator illuminated the smooth rock wall of the shaft. The rock looked natural, but according to her briefing the shaft had been cut by the Ceph aeons ago.
Hundreds of feet above her was the Hermitage and the freezing temperature and thick snow of a St. Petersburg winter. The opulent decadence of an imperial culture was on display for all to see. It was a strange contrast with the darkness, the minimalist rock and what they had found here so deep below the Earth’s surface. She was starting to see a faint glow below her now.
The elevator carried her into the main site. The roughly hemispherical cavern was lit with portable lights. Amanda could hear the steady diesel throb of the generators. It was freezing down here, despite the freestanding heaters. Amanda wrapped her long coat around herself. The rock floor of the cave was a series of gentle rolling rises and indents that looked like they had been caused by water, and a number of small streams ran through the cavern.
The main cavern – or Site A – was a hive of activity. All across the rock floor men and women, clothed in layers and layers of threadbare clothing, chipped away at the rock with a variety of hand and power tools. As the elevator got closer to the cavern floor she could see seams of metal running through the rock. The seams didn’t look natural. They looked like they formed particular defined shapes. The best way that Amanda could think of describing it was that it looked like someone had fused circuitry with the rock. That, however, did not do the alienness of the tech in the ground justice. It was technology that had been there a long time before there had even been a humanity. Having lived through the crisis in New York, Amanda had a healthy respect and fear for the Ceph and their tech. Amanda could understand the need for Hargreave-Rasch to research the Ceph technology caches they were finding, but after her experiences in New York the alien technology made her very uncomfortable indeed.
The entire site was being watched over by CELL gunmen. There were two waiting for her as the elevator came to a halt and she stepped out into the cave.
‘Alan, Mikey, how’s it going?’ Amanda asked, her strong New York accent unmistakeable. She was genuinely pleased to see the two contractors she’d worked with for three years, up until she had been demoted and left out in the cold by her employer.
‘Good to see you, Cross,’ Alan said, smiling. The well-built American with the brown eyes and the short, cropped dark hair and the flat face went all the way back to SRT with her. She had talked him into joining CELL when he’d left the military police. She regretted that now.
‘Boss,’ Mikey said and hugged her. It wouldn’t have been so long ago that she would never have tolerated such a thing. Now, frankly, she couldn’t give a shit. Things had not been going terribly well career-wise since she’d left the army.
They exchanged news but it was the casual stuff, nothing about the current situation. Amanda knew them well enough to know that they were hiding something.
‘So what’s the boss like, this Walters?’ she asked. Mikey and Alan exchanged a look.
‘Asher wants to see you.’ Mikey told her. The Afro-Caribbean Brit wouldn’t meet her eyes. Security was supposed to be run by John Walters. He had a reputation as a competent, if unimaginative and overly rigid, commander. He’d inherited Amanda’s team after she’d been demoted. She had spent the last eighteen months as little more than a mall cop.
It was bad news, however, if Dr Asher, the dig’s overseer, was trying to control security as well. Security was supposed to create a physically safe work environment, but under an independent command, as security matters had to sometimes override the day-to-day running of the operation they were protecting.
Also, Amanda knew Asher’s reputation. He’d been a high flyer before the New York crisis but something had happened with a subordinate of his, a Nathan Gould, which had meant Asher had fallen from favour. Amanda had also heard mutterings that before he had fallen from grace his security detail had had to cover up some of his more unsavoury activities more than once.
‘I’d rather meet Walters first, if I’m going to be his two IC,’ Amanda told them. Again there was the exchange of looks. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Amanda demanded. Since New York she hadn’t really cared about her career. This was the first break she’d had since her demotion. She was looking forward to working with her old team again, because she felt that she’d taken the time to train them up into something better than the rest of the grunts and toy soldiers that CELL employed. Largely, however, she just wanted to coast until she could cobble together some kind of retirement plan. Though with the constant changes to the terms and conditions of what could laughingly be called her contract, retirement seemed to be getting further and further away.
‘Seriously Amanda, Asher makes things difficult for people who don’t do as he says, could you just talk to him first?’ Alan said. Amanda didn’t like the tone of his voice. He sounded beaten.
‘Is everyone alright?’ Amanda asked as she shouldered both her kit bags. Another look was exchanged. ‘Okay, tell me right now.’
‘It’s Sam,’ Mikey said. Mikey was a tough guy. He had been a military police officer in the British army, a close protection specialist, but he sounded upset. Sam had been the youngest member of her team. She had been forever playing catch-up. Unlike most of them she had come straight from civvie street. What she had lacked in competence she had more than made up for with being likeable, and she had been improving. At the time that Amanda had been removed from command of the team Sam had been showing a great deal of promise and had acquitted herself well, or as well as any of them had, in New York. Amanda felt her stomach drop. She wasn’t going to cry – she had learned long ago to never show weakness in front of others. When she got the chance she’d kill a bottle of vodka on her own and cry then. It was easier that way.
‘What happened?’ she asked controlling her emotions.
Mikey and Alan said nothing. The other two contractors would not meet her eyes. ‘Was it down here?’
‘You need to speak to Asher.’ Alan said. ‘He’s . . . er . . . well, he’s dealing with this morning’s situation.’ Amanda looked between the two of them. She felt her blood run cold.
‘Are there active Ceph down here?’ she demanded. There was no answer. She slumped against the metal cage of the elevator. The nightmare visions of New York that she had tried to ignore returned stronger than ever. Contractors from other teams blowing away those affected by the Rapture, the Manhattan Virus. Seeing her brother, infected. Half her team dead, torn apart by armoured aliens, and somehow this had all happened in her home town.
She wanted to tell them to get everyone out. Fill the caves with CELL spec ops teams or, better yet, flush the tunnels with fire. She knew from bitter experience that Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical, the parent company of Crynet Enforcement and Local Logistics, invested an awful lot more in its interest in the Ceph technology than it did in its personnel.
Dr Herman Asher found himself appalled at the appearance of the new head of security for the dig. The wiry-looking African-American woman’s hair had been shaved into some kind of Mohawk that had then been braided. Both ears were extensively pierced and she had a plug in the left. Her nose had a stud in it. She had on combat boots and bloused fatigue trousers and her CELL issue body armour, but the body armour was hanging open and he could see a white t-shirt. The t-shirt had the words London Calling and the Clash written on it, along with a picture of a man smashing a guitar on the ground. She had a tatty old long coat over the top of her body armour.
‘Miss Cross, what is the meaning of your appearance?’ Asher demanded.
‘Punk rock,’ Amanda told the bespectacled, grossly fat, piggy-looking dig supervisor. She had been thirteen years old when she had snuck into CBGBs on the Bowery in the Lower East Side for the club’s final ever gig. After New York, once she had realised that her career was over and she didn’t much care, she’d decided to go back to her old style. It reminded her that she had a personality outside of CELL. Right now, however, Amanda was more concerned with the twisted body of Lieutenant Commander John Walters that was lying on the floor of Site D.
Walters’ head had been twisted around a full hundred and eighty degrees. His chest cavity was a ruin. It looked like something had punched him in the rib cage, very hard. She reached into one of her holdalls and found a pair of surgical gloves and a pen. She inspected Walters’ chest wound and confirmed what she had expected.
‘He would have died from the blow to the chest but he was killed when his head was twisted around. Mikey, check the Grendel.’
Mikey pulled off his standard-issue gloves, which could leave fibrous trace on the assault rifle lying close to Walters, and pulled on the surgical gloves that Amanda handed him. He checked the magazine.
‘We’ve got six rounds missing,’ Mikey told her. It tallied with the spent casings on the ground. Amanda had a look around the small cave. There were at least three tunnels coming into it. Much of the cave floor had been chipped away and they were standing in trenches embedded with the alien technology.
Amanda looked at how the body had fallen and then around the cave. She pointed towards one of the tunnel entrances.
‘Alan, check around there, see if you can find the impacts.’ Alan switched on the flashlight attached to the mounting rail on the side of his Grendel assault rifle and went over to check the area Amanda had indicated.
‘I expect you to conform to basic CELL grooming standards at the very least,’ Dr Asher told her.
‘So?’ Amanda asked distractedly.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Dr Asher asked, feeling himself getting angry. Amanda sighed and looked up at the scientist. She didn’t think she was going to like the man. She had always wondered about people like him. Why would they try and make life difficult for people who were more than capable of beating the shit out of them? The piggy little scientist was flanked by two more of the security detail. One of them was Safiya, who’d worked with Amanda before. Safiya was third generation French/Algerian. She had been a police officer in Marseilles. The other guard was a weedy-looking buck toothed guy she didn’t recognise.
‘I’m going to assume for a moment that you’re not a complete idiot,’ Amanda told Asher. ‘That the body of your head of security lying right here hasn’t escaped your notice. And that this is the second corpse on your watch . . .’
‘On Sub-commander Walters’ watch . . .’ Asher began. Pass that buck, Amanda thought.
‘You don’t give a fuck about how I’m dressed. It’s a power play. It’s about establishing control. Let’s just skip it. You do your job, I do mine and we both try to piss each other off as little as possible.’
Asher stared at the woman. Once again he was at a loss trying to work out why these semi-literate grunts would even bother speaking, when all that was required of them was to do as their intellectual superiors told them to.
‘Oh dear,’ Dr Asher said, with mock sadness. ‘There seems to be some confusion. I will try and explain the situation in as simple terms as I can manage. You do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it, and you do it without question.’
Amanda looked up at him. There was no anger in her expression, just weariness.
‘No,’ she told him simply. Asher started turning a funny red colour. Amanda guessed that he wasn’t used to being told no by his subordinates. ‘Look, I tried the career thing in this fucked-up job, it didn’t work out for me. You’ve got nothing to threaten me with. You don’t like me? Send me packing, or even better have me fired, you pathetic little pig of a man.’ The bucktoothed member of Asher’s security detail endeared himself to Amanda by trying to suppress a grin. Asher was turning puce now, but he managed to get control of himself.
‘You have family in New York, don’t you, Miss Cross?’ Asher said, smiling.
‘I did until CELL had them evicted for whatever it is they’re doing there. Imagine how popular that will make me at Thanksgiving.’ Amanda didn’t like how this was going. She could not for the life of her understand why Congress had handed control of the ruined city over to CELL after the mess they had made during the quarantine.
‘I believe that they are in a refugee camp just outside of Sleepy Hollow. I can make life very difficult for them, as well as for the members of your team.’
Amanda stared at him. She felt the same cold rage that she always felt when someone threatened people that she cared about. Don’t blow, she told herself, bide your time.
‘Boss,’ Alan said returning. Amanda was grateful for the interruption. She’d been worried that she was going to say or do something really dumb and possibly quite violent. ‘I’ve got three bullets imbedded in the wall. They were tightly grouped. The other two rounds I can’t account for. I reckon they got shot down the tunnel deeper into the cave complex. I can go look for them.’ Amanda was already shaking her head.
‘No way. We go out, we go mob-handed.’ Alan looked relieved. ‘You said two.’ Alan held something up. ‘Seriously, what did I tell you about handling the evidence?’ Amanda asked, pained. Mikey was grinning. Alan looked embarrassed. Amanda took the object off him and examined it.
‘Impacted six-point-eight millimetre full metal jacket from the Grendel. Standard issue because CELL doesn’t know enough to issue low-impact rounds to the half-trained fuckwits they employ as grunts. It hit the cave wall,’ but even as she said it she knew something wasn’t right.
‘Thing is, boss, I found it right in the middle of the tunnel entrance,’ Alan told her.
‘Walters the kind of guy to panic?’ Amanda asked.
‘No, he was solid,’ Safiya said in English. Her accent was a mix of French and Algerian. ‘He wasn’t in New York but he’d helped clear out a few Ceph nests and he’d been on the sharp end in Sri Lanka with your 10th Infantry.’
‘Which ties with the tight grouping. So why didn’t he hit what he was aiming
at?’ She pointed at the tunnel entrance. ‘So something comes at him. He gets off two three-round bursts. He hits it but no blood?’ she looked at Alan. Alan shook his head. ‘It closes in the face of automatic weapon fire and not only overpowers a trained ex-soldier but twists his head round.’
‘So Ceph, right?’ the bucktoothed guy said.
Amanda glanced at Asher.
‘Anything you want to share, doctor?’ Amanda asked. Asher had a good poker face.
‘You thinking Stalker?’ Mikey asked.
‘No plasma burns, no shard wounds. Stalker would be my guess.’ She stood up. ‘Alan, how many of the detail down here?’
‘Now? Ten, including you.’
‘And from the old team, other than the three of you here?’
‘Daniels, Schmidt and Okobe. O’Donnel got crippled in a bar fight in northern Finland . . .’
‘Yeah, I heard about that, shame, good people when she could control her temper.’
‘Marceau got fired after that shit in Manchester. Couldn’t get work, couldn’t get welfare, he ate his own gun . . .’
‘Shit. I didn’t know about that. And Harrison bought it in Nigeria?’ Alan nodded. ‘Then three new guys?’
‘Including this bucktoothed motherfucker here,’ Alan said nodding at the fourth member of the security detail present.
‘Hello, bucktoothed motherfucker,’ Amanda said to him warmly. New Guy smiled and nodded. ‘I like him, particularly the way he just won’t shut up.’
‘Everyone calls me Hank, ma’am,’ the bucktoothed contractor told her.
‘Alabama?’ Amanda asked.
‘Hell no! Southern Georgia.’
‘You got problems with us coloured folks?’ Amanda asked.
‘Ignoring your racial profiling of me as poor whisky tango, only in front of friends and family back home.’
Crysis: Escalation Page 8