“Come on, man, quit messing around! We don’t have time!”
Who am I kidding.
I grab my weapon and take up the chase. I put everything the suit’s got into speed; I sprint in turbocharged bursts, huff and puff in between with my own measly muscles while the charge builds back. And wouldn’t you know the alien’s back in my sights: now leaping along on two legs, now running like a cheetah on four, sometimes keeping to the street, sometimes scrambling up sheer walls like a caffeinated gecko. This thing isn’t biped or quad, it’s not a runner or a climber; it’s all of those things, it’s fluid, it morphs between modes as easily as I put one foot after the other. It’s almost beautiful, the way it moves. It is beautiful, and fast, but you know what? This fuck-ugly Nanosuit, this bulky pile of cords and chrome—it’s keeping up, it’s one step forward and three steps back but that forward step is a doozie and suddenly I’m close enough to bring the fucker down. I’m twenty meters back when it pulls a sudden right-angle turn up off the street and starts climbing the walls. I fire on the run, thank whatever gearhead designed the N2’s motion stabilizers, and I don’t know if it’s a lucky shot or old cement but suddenly the bricks are crumbling under the Ceph’s claws and it falls backward off the wall, live parts and machine parts both grabbing at the air, both coming up empty, and the whole bastard meat–machine hybrid crashes down on the asphalt not five steps from where I’m waiting. It springs back up almost immediately but I’m already blasting away at the soft parts inside the hard ones and I don’t care how fast your spaceships go, if you’re made out of meat you are not coming back from a point-blank encounter with a Grendel heavy assault rifle.
There’s enough Squid splattered across my front that I don’t even need to punch through the exoskeleton; all I have to do is wipe my hand across my chest and False Prophet pipes up, “Sample absorbed. Processing.” I watch the N2’s fingertips slurp up that alien gore like a sponge drinks a coffee spill. I can’t tell you how creepy I find this.
I find it so creepy I don’t even notice the other stalkers coming down the walls at me.
Family Values
Start with a honeycombed coltan/titanium exoskeleton, for 32% greater strength than the N1 at half the weight. Wrap it in CryNet’s patented artificial muscle: an armored carbon-nanofiber composite storing elastic energies of up to 20 J/cm3, with electromechanical coupling that exceeds 70% under most battlefield conditions. Sheathe it all in a flexible doped-ceramic epidermis and a Faraday weave that shields against EMPs while still supporting telemetric throughput of up to 15 TB/sec. Put it all together and you have a combat chassis that laughs at almost anything short of a direct hit with a battlefield nuke. (In fact, in three out of five simulations, the Nanosuit 2.0 even withstood the point-blank detonation of a Lockheed AAF 212 Circuit-Breaker™!*)
* Results may vary during actual combat.
And what fuels this unmatched combination of power and protection? Virtually anything. While the N2’s primary coupling is compatible with any BVN-series hydrogen cell, the suit also acquires and stores energy automatically from a wide range of ambient sources: kinetic motion, passive solar/thermal, and atmospheric microwave to name but a few. The standard-issue universal adapter allows recharging from virtually any hardline electrical source, domestic or military—and with CryNet’s optional Necro-Organic Metabolites plug-in (NOM), the N2 can even extract usable energy from battlefield carrion!
Was I just on too many hit lists? Were CELL and Ceph both gunning for me and it was just my great luck that both happened to track me down at the same time? Or were they dusting it up with each other, street-to-street, and I just got caught in the crossfire? I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me?
’Course not. You’re here to ask the questions.
That first wave of Ceph, though, I could swear they’re running from something. They scramble down the walls and the street in a wave—mean-ass stalkers, baseline bogeymen. I open fire out of pure reflex, take a few down, and they’re shooting back with those big fucking gunhands of theirs, but they seem to have other things on their minds. And now here comes CELL screaming around the corner in their Humvees, and all I’m hearing is It’s that suit guy, suit guy’s right here! and Blue Command, engaging target! and then I’m hitting the fucking ground, man, because suddenly the air is a shitstorm of bullets and RPGs. I don’t think they even notice the Ceph at first.
They see ’em soon enough, though. One of the Humvees goes up and suddenly the Ceph are getting lots of attention.
I’m on the ground, under cover, pinned down but not in anybody’s direct line of fire unless they’ve got a micronuke to take out the collapsed wall I’m hiding under. I cloak up and peek around a pile of cinder blocks; I’ll get shredded above the knees if I try standing, but at least both sides seem to be too busy shooting at each other to wonder where I’ve gone. I keep low to the ground, crawl for an H&M with its doors conveniently pre-blown off.
The suit continues to relay inspirational messages over comm: “Blue eighteen, this is Lockhart. Please confirm kill.”
Lockhart.
“Blue Eighteen. I said report.”
I make it to Lingerie. There’s an employees-only entrance beside the crotchless panties. Elvis leaves the building.
“Can you confirm your kill?”
He’s all over the channel, my nemesis, the voice of my destruction—but right now he sounds more like a distraught mother who’s lost her child in the playground.
“I’d say that’s a no, Lockhart,” and that snide dry delivery is such a close echo of what I was just thinking that I wonder for just a moment if False Prophet isn’t reading my mind. But no: It’s a woman’s voice, coming over the comm. A rotor keeps time behind her.
“Strickland, get off the comms. Blue Eighteen, do you—”
“They’re down, Lockhart. I warned you not to do this by squads. Prophet’s suited up, probably not even sane anymore. Anything less than a platoon, he’s going to go through them like a grizzly through Boy Scouts.”
I’m liking this Strickland chick’s attitude. I like the imagery, too.
Lockhart doesn’t. “You’re easily impressed, Strickland. Why don’t you go back to running around after Hargreave and let me do my job.”
“I am running around after Hargreave. He sent me down here to oversee retrieval of the suit. And I gotta say, so far it looks like your boys are falling down on the job.”
“We’ll get this sonofabitch. And we’ll do it without your help.”
“Hargreave doesn’t see it that way anymore.”
“Then the hell with Hargreave, too. He’s got no idea what we’re dealing with here.”
BUD feeds me a bearing: Strickland’s chopper is at ten and eleven.
“I’m not going to argue this with you on air, Lockhart. I’ll see you down there. Strickland out.”
Ten and ten. She’s going down. And now that I’m a solid city block from the latest Ceph-CELL dustup, I can hear that descending whupwhupwhup bouncing off the walls to my left. My nemesis and his nemesis are headed for a meet-up just a couple of blocks away. If I hustle I might just be able to learn something useful.
What? Oh. Yeah, it is kind of amazing how well I can remember all these details, isn’t it? But you know what really sticks in my memory? Just last week I remember not having anywhere near this good a memory.