Something lands on the roof; metal clangs against metal. Airborne glances up at the sound and his face lights up. I mean, literally lights up; I could swear that dark skin brightened for just a second, but I blink and it’s gone. I hear scuttling sounds, but it’s dark up there; I can’t see anything but the ghostly dim shapes of rafters.
“Don’t worry about that.” He jerks his chin at the ceiling. “That’s the least of your problems.”
More sounds from overhead; a soft gritty patter of displaced dust drizzles down on us. Those rafters look like a rib cage. I flash back to a half-remembered Bible story from the Vision channel, something about gods and whales. I wonder for a moment if some alien monster hasn’t swallowed us whole.
“You are so fucked,” Airborne says, and his voice is—empty. Transparent. As if the man has already gone away, and left some kind of autopilot in charge.
“There’s no time,” it says, and I can see I was wrong; the man hasn’t gone away, not yet. He’s still trapped in those eyes, one red, one white, jerking back and forth in panicked little arcs while the chassis short-circuits around them. But whatever’s running the voice is still online, and it’s got priority now. “It’s up to you now, soldier. I can’t do this anymore.”
Suddenly those red-and-white eyes lock onto mine. They drill into me like restraining bolts, like spikes through my head. I really don’t like what I see in there and I try to look away, but no dice; I just about pass out from the effort. And he’s starting to glow again, there’s a kind of mesh lighting up his cheeks from inside, like honeycomb. Dude has one of those bioluminescent tattoos, you know, the ones where they inject the glowing bacteria? The more excited you get the more they light up—it’s a blood-flow thing, dissolved oxygen and whatnot—and this dude must be very fucking excited because that honeycomb is just about incandescent in his face, man, like those old lightbulbs with the filaments.
But I’m fading again. I can’t hold focus, I can feel myself passing out. I might as well have snowglobes for eyeballs, there’s so many floaters swirling around in there. The whole damn world disappears down a spinning tunnel, into a vortex of static with those wild wild eyes at the center, and that sad dead voice behind them saying This is the best I can do …
And something engulfs me from behind.
It’s like being devoured by an oil slick. Something warm and slippery wraps around my arms and legs and chest and at first it hurts holy fuck it hurts, but then the pain recedes and whatever steps up to take its place is really nice. Way better than morphine; it takes the edge off the pain but it doesn’t make you the least bit stupid.
My head clears. I experience new thoughts, I experience old thoughts in a whole new way. It’s unprecedented. (I can even roll worlds like unprecedented around in my head without feeling like an asshole, although I’m not sure how I feel about that.)
But it’s not just that my brain is firing on all cylinders again; like I said, it feels good. I figure it must be one of those new dopamine analogs you hear about, and then I remember where I heard about it: It was a MacroNet puff piece I caught out the corner of my eye for fifteen seconds two years ago. Either I really am dying and the whole life-before-your-eyes thing is way overrated, or this giant alien slug has just amped up my memory somehow.
My vision fuzzes and clicks into a kind of high-def crystalline focus that doesn’t quite seem real, you know that ultra-high rez you find in raw tactical sims and cheap video games. Alphanumerics start scrolling up across my field of view, boot sequences and tactical overlays, but they’re inside me somehow, you know? It looks subjectively like a head-up display but we’re not talking about your usual HUD: Something’s planting these glyphics directly into my head. More of a, a Brain-Up Display I guess. A BUD.
I’ve got my legs back, I’m upright, I can move again. I bring up my arm and there it is, the muscle suit, crawling around my forearm like an octopus as I clench my fist, flexing and tightening and accommodating every movement. It flickers as I watch; waves of light and darkness chase each other across my arm like storm clouds on fast-forward. Colors bleed along their edges—deep-sea green, stratospheric cerulean, who knows what the marketing boys are calling those parts of the spectrum these days. Suddenly my arm disappears, turns into liquid glass and just fades. A progress bar grows across my eyeball; a readout underneath tells me that CHROMATOPHORE INITIALIZATION SEQUENCE is 87 percent complete. When it hits 100 my arm fades back into view—just boring utilitarian gray again, laced through with a faint hexagonal mesh that looks a lot like Airborne’s tattoo (I guess ol’ Airborne doesn’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to accessorizing). Tactical says CLOAK OK.
I am Gabriel. I am Golem Boy, I am my own hope and my salvation. And even though I must still be a pile of shattered bones and torn-up viscera inside this magic armor, somehow I feel just fucking awesome. Even wild-eyed Officer Airborne kneels before me, hands raised in supplication.
Except that’s not what he’s doing at all, of course. He’s bolting me into this suit of his, tightening the last couple of lug nuts on my sternum. “Feels good, doesn’t it? I bet it does. Gets old fast, though. Believe me.”
Something’s changed about him. The spasms haven’t stopped, the tremors are as bad as ever, but that demon in his eyes, that panic—it’s gone, somehow. His face is dark; the tattoo’s gone back to sleep. The right eye is completely opaque now—a solid ball of scarlet, you can’t see anything in there anymore—but the left is almost peaceful. He fixes me with this sad, steady stare, and he says, “It’s alive, you know. Obsessed, you might say. It won’t move on until I do, it’s … viral. But it means well. Keep that in mind and you just might pull this off.”
Pull WHAT off, I try to say.
He answers as if I’ve succeeded. “Find Gould. Nathan Gould. It’s all I can do now, you’re all I can do. I’m sorry, man. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s all on you now.”
He can barely stand, he’s shaking so hard. There’s a rattle in his chest I’ve heard too many times before. He staggers, turns, takes in the filth and the dereliction looming on all sides. “Look at this fucking place,” he whispers, and even above the crackling of flames and the groaning of distant wreckage and all the faint faraway screaming, I can hear him perfectly. I swear I can even hear the beating of his heart.
“They used to call me Prophet,” he says. “Remember me.”
And puts a service pistol under his chin and blows his own head off.
ASSAULT AND BATTERY
Holy shit.
What do I, what just—
Fuck fuck fuck.
A cheery little overlay pops up while Prophet’s blood and gray matter trickle down my faceplate: CN COMBAT SOLUTIONS. NANOSUIT 2.0. Suddenly I can’t move. I’m in the middle of some kind of war zone, my entire squad has been massacred by a flying saucer from Zeta fucking Reticuli (there: I said it), the one guy who might have been able to give me some answers now ends at the mandible, and my magical new dream suit has stuck me in place like an ant in amber. Something’s stomping around on the roof, acting in no way scared or cautious or the least bit worried about being discovered. Which only goes to emphasize how very much I should be feeling all those things.
On the plus side—if you can call it that—I’m not dead. And according to the medical diagnostics racing across my field of view, I should be. My back is broken in three places. My larynx is crushed. My femoral artery is torn. There’s more blood in my lungs than air. The list goes on. Nanosuit 2.0’s rattling off diagnostic and wet-repair capabilities like I’ve never seen outside a full-blown VA hospital—and while it’s got me rooted in place like a garden gnome, it’s also pumping me full of antibodies and autocatalytic fibrinogen and a dozen kinds of engineered osteoblasts to knit my bones back together. All things considered, immobilized in a custom-fitted body cast is not a bad place to be right now.
Just as long as I’m not immobilized when the bad guys come calling.
Eventually the biotelemetry s
lows to a drizzle. Scenery peeks out from behind the stats; the BUD gives up all the visual real estate except for a dusting of ice-green icons scattered around the edge of vision. Nanosuit 2.0 reports that it has INTEGRATED NEW DNA PROFILE, and unlocks.
I can move again.
And something up on the roof is just waiting for me to do that. Every now and then it stomps on the iron sheeting just in case I’ve forgotten, like the bogeyman who pushes just a little bit harder on that one squeaky stair outside your bedroom door. He wants you to know he’s out there.
I know, already. I step over what’s left of Prophet—roaches scuttle away from my shadow, the place is infested with them—and scoop up his pistol. BUD snaps a tactical silhouette around its edges, serves up an ID: M12 NOVA AUTO LIGHT PISTOL.
Empty. I fucking hate it when people use the car and return it without any gas.
Stomp. Clatter. More dust settles from the rafters.
“Welcome to the end of the world, marine.”
It’s just a chip voice buzzing in my ear, but I jump anyway. I run my eyes over tactical, looking for some kind of comm link. Each icon brightens in turn as I focus on it. Saccadal interface. Cool.
“Everything’s online,” the voice tells me. “The N2 is functioning within normal parameters.”
Not comm. Suit AI. A bit of fuzz in the upper registers. Damaged speaker, maybe.
It sounds like Prophet.
“There’s been some minor structural damage to the intercostals and the Ballard-stack couplings; estimated time to suit repair is twenty-six minutes. Estimated time to host repair is unavailable at this time.”
Scratch that; it sounds like something trying to sound like Prophet. You can recognize the impression, but it’s not gonna fool anyone.
I look around for another gun, a knife. A board with a nail in it. My surroundings sink in for the first time: some kind of dockside warehouse. I’m in an aisle formed by two rows of big green shipping containers, stacked to each side, unmarked except for the red cross decaled across the door of each. No weapons. The floor’s littered with spent casings, so there could be fresh ammo nearby at least. The aisle dead-ends against a wall about ten meters in front of me. There’s a little fire flickering down there, a pile of smashed wooden shipping flats that’s just about burned itself out. Filtered sunlight spills over the top of the cargo pods to my left. It looks like there’s a way out down at the other end of the aisle, a gap between the pods and a stack of big wire cages that look like giant mutant shopping carts stuffed with rags. There’s a bad transformer or breaker box down there, too, judging by the buzzing.
I start moving. The thing on the roof starts moving, too.
I think it’s tracking me. I think—
I think those aren’t rags.
I don’t think that’s a bad transformer.
Fuck.
There are feet sticking out of those cages. Arms. Some look almost normal, some are wormy with rootlets and tumors. Something glistens from the shadows in all that clothing; before I’m close enough to make it out I already know it’s looking at me. And it is. There’s a nice clean bullet hole in the forehead right above it. Flies crawl and buzz and do little joyous loop-the-loops around the windfall.
I look down at casings scattered around the floor like leaves in fucking autumn. Standard military issue.
Not one of these people is in uniform. At least two are wearing surgical scrubs.
I’m running so short of headspace to process all the nightmares—hostile aliens, savior suicide, the Thing On The Roof, and now a massacre of goddamn civilians?—that I almost don’t notice the bright new icon blinking upper-left. All that registers at first is a sense of minor irritation, some vague tugging at the back of my mind. I stand there like a moron for a good five seconds before I notice the damn thing flashing at the corner of my eye. But the moment I focus, it jumps front-and-center and starts talking:
“Find Gould. Nathan Gould. It’s all I can do now, you’re all I can do. I’m sorry, man. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s all on you now.”
Text crawls across my eyeball—
Gould, Nathan.
89 South St #17, New York, NY
—and my first reaction is Are you fucking KIDDING? Who GIVES a shit?
But Prophet has charged me with a sacred quest, and maybe I can just turn around and walk away from that. But then again, maybe I can’t. The only reason I’m alive now is because of the man lying dead at my back; and my life came with a price tag attached. Besides. I’m cut off from my chain of command, my squad’s been exterminated, and I have no fucking clue why any of this is happening. Nathan Gould is a place to start, at least. He’s bound to have some answers. Let’s go talk to nice Mr. Gould.
What else am I going to do? Count the dead?
Except it turns out I’m locked in. The windows are barred and out of reach, way up near the ceiling. Every door’s been welded shut and backed up with weighted cargo containers. Some of the blockage is pure battlefield entropy but most of it’s been deliberately barricaded against whatever’s got the high ground outside. I climb over sandbags and body bags, I kick open shipping crates and rummage through lockers. I find two bodies in hazmat suits, I find overturned tables, I find microscopes and thermocyclers and those spinning things, what do you call them, centrifuges smashed and scattered across the fractured cement. I even find a couple of usable ammo clips, but wherever I go those scary metal footsteps seem to follow me around up there. Although they’re not exactly footsteps. It sinks in after a while; the rhythm’s all wrong.
But there has to be some kind of way out of here because after all, Prophet brought me in, right? Only I’m not finding it. And whatever cocktail the N2 fed into my brain is not all it could be, because the obvious answer has been stomping around over my head for the past twenty minutes and I was either too stupid or too chickenshit to see it.
But yeah. Eventually I figure it out.
And I swear to God, I can hear the bogeyman dancing an eager little jig of joy as I start climbing the stairs.
Broadcast Intercept (decrypted): 23/08/2023 09:35
39.5 MHz (gov/nongov shared, land mobile)
Apparent signal source: CELL Field Command, Battery Park Interceptor: Anonymous (via Edward “Eddie” Newton, Radio Free Manhattan)
Voice 1: —is Cobalt Seven. Think he came this way. Spreading to search.
Voice 2: Yeah, uh, this is Cobalt Four. We got camera footage from the containment fence. Moving fast, man. Never saw anything like that before.
Voice 3: Fuck are we fighting here? Is he one of them?
Voice 4: That’s need-to-know, soldier. All you need to know is don’t take any chances. Lethal force, soon as you get eyes on.
Cobalt 4-A: You believe this mess, man? They took out everything: the EMAT teams, the doctors, our guys. There’s nothing left.
Voice 4: Stay sharp, people. Quarantine protocols. You see anything move in there, you kill it.
Dead Air—47 seconds. Following exchange appears to have been broadcast accidentally, possibly due to a jammed transmit switch.
Cobalt 4-B: So you think he took down that Ceph ship?
Cobalt 4-A: How the fuck should I know, man? I look like a Squid to you?
C4-B: I’m just saying, it wasn’t us. And if he did shoot it down, well …
C4-A: Well what?
C4-B: You know. The enemy of my enemy and all that.
C4-A: The enemy of my enemy doesn’t go around blowing the shit out of his own guys.
C4-B: There is that.
C4-A: Shit, man. Past few days, there’s lots of enemies to go around for every—hey, is that—?
C4-B: What?
C4-A: Over there, on the waterfront up on the roof. That a Squid?
C4-B: Yeah, one of those fuckers—
C4-A: grunts, or—
C4-B: No, look, there’s two of them.
C4-A: You sure? Looks—
C4-B: No, man, look, there’s definitely two. They ju
st look like one big motherfucker because they’re in close like—
C4-A: What are they doing up there?
C4-B: They’re fighting, man. They’re fighting each other …
C4-A: What the fuck. Why would—
C4-B: Dude, the smaller one. I think it’s human.
C4-A: That’s just exoskel. They’re all blobs inside.
C4-B: No, man, I’ve got him scoped, he’s definitely—
C4-A: Holy shit, that’s our guy! That’s Proph—
C4-B: Cobalt Oversight! Cobalt Oversight! We have eyes on Primary! Repeat, we have eyes on—
Signal squelched at source.
Transmission ends 23/08/2023 09:38.
So this is how it is. No cutesy musical sign language, no guys with bumpy foreheads saying Resistance Is Futile or Kneel Before Zod, no sexy alien hive queens keeping our hero busy with butt sex while her minions turn our children into veal cutlets. No small talk at all, unless you count the sound it makes when it sees me: kind of a stuttering hollow croak, like a cheap voice synthesizer trying to gargle.