Crysis: Escalation (10 page)

‘It’s a serious question.’

‘What life?’

‘Semantics? Really?’ Prophet was becoming more exasperated.

‘No, that’s the thing, see? I’m not being semantic. I’m going to lay myself to rest. We’re both dead. We need to let go. We’re just a grotesque joke
now.’

There’s more of your mother in you than you’d like to admit, isn’t there, son?
Prophet thought but decided to keep it to himself.

‘Sorry. I need your body for something more important.’

‘Like what? We’re a corpse in a fucking suit.’

‘Did you just forget about New York? The fact that we’re being invaded by alien squid?’

‘That’s fucking over, man. I . . . we dealt with that shit.’

‘It’s not over.’ The Green-Eyed Man swallowed. Prophet looked at him hard. It was the sort of stare he’d given subordinates back when he’d been conventional army,
82nd Airborne, before Delta. Prophet tapped the side of his head. ‘Yeah, you’ve seen it, haven’t you, son?’ Alcatraz didn’t answer. ‘You fought hard. You did
well. You were a good soldier . . . and I’m sorry – I really am – but your war’s over.’ The Green-Eyed Man opened his mouth to retort, but Prophet cut him off.
‘What do you think you’ve been doing? Visiting your sister? Your mother? Where are we now . . .?’

‘We’re here. You need to . . .’

‘Where are we in the real world? You’re saying goodbye, son. I’m sorry you died. I think you’ve more than earned your rest, but I need your flesh and you’re just
going to have to take my word for it that it’s important. If you know what I know, if you’ve seen what I’ve seen, then you won’t even have to take my word for it.’

‘It’s my body,’ Alcatraz said quietly.

‘Do you want to fight this war?’ Prophet asked. More and more he himself was starting to realise that he didn’t want to fight the coming war either. He just didn’t see
any other way.

‘It’s over,’ Prophet told him. ‘It was over before it began, and I think you know that. You’re right, this is your body, and I think that if you’d really
wanted it you would have taken it by now.’

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.