I find a ringside seat behind a second-story window in a bombed-out brownstone. Lockhart’s Humvee is parked down the alley behind a Shoppers Drug Mart, like he’s run in for a pack of Trojans but is too embarrassed to go in the front door. Strickland’s chopper idles front-and-center in an empty lot behind a $uper$ave, sharing space with a carpet of weeds and a couple of porta-potties. The way its rotor slashes the air makes me think of a pissed-off cat, kind of lazy and lethal at the same time.
They face off in the no-man’s-land between, bracketed by a couple of CELLulites on perimeter watch. Lockhart’s maybe 190 centimeters, your standard flat-topped, bullet-headed, walking military cliché except for the fact that so many of us actually are flat-topped bullet-heads.
Strickland is a walking wet dream: mocha skin, half a head shorter than the man she’s going up against, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. But it’s pretty clear from the body language that Lockhart’s not in the mood to appreciate any of Strickland’s finer aesthetic qualities. I crank my audio on a bitchfest already in progress.
“—is to take him alive,” Strickland’s saying.
“The order is to bring him down,” Lockhart spits back. “I’ll argue the civil rights details when we’ve done that.”
“Alive is more useful.”
“Yeah? To who? The guy just massacred a couple of dozen of my men, Ms. Strickland. I’m taking no more chances. Prophet dies. Hargreave can have his corpse to play with.”
“Hargreave wants—”
“Hargreave wants the suit. He’ll get it.”
“He isn’t going to like this. And last time I checked, we both worked for him.” I get the sense of a high card being played.
He doesn’t even blink. “That’s where you’re wrong, Ms. Strickland. You work for him. I answer to the CELL Executive Board and the DoD. I don’t give a shit what some senile old shareholder like Hargreave may or may not like.”
“That’s majority shareholder. And former president of the CryNet board. You want to be careful what enemies you make here, Lockhart.”
He doesn’t answer for a moment. I wonder if maybe Strickland’s finally found a way in; enemies, after all, are something Lockhart must know a lot about. I bet he’s made more than his share over the years. And maybe he doesn’t have to think twice about pissing off Strickland—what could some uppity bitch do to an alpha dog like him, right? But somebody higher up is holding her leash. How many enemies can he afford to make, how many fronts can he wage war on at once?
“This conversation is over,” Lockhart says, and pisses all over Strickland’s territory by climbing into her chopper.
Come on, Strickland. You don’t have to put up with this shit. You can take him. You can. I know this territory, I’ve seen it before, you had to be twice as good to get half as far because of assholes like him. Go in there, throw that fucker out of your helicopter, bitch-slap him all the way back to that candy-ass Humvee of his and show him who’s boss. You’ve got Hargreave backing you up.
I mean, for fuck’s sake. You can stop this asshole, you can stop his whole private army.
You can.
Strickland shakes her head and climbs meekly into the cabin. The chopper lifts off.
That’s a very good question. I’ve asked it myself, more times than you know. I could have blown his head off then and there. Hers, too. Want to know why I didn’t?
I didn’t want to prove him right.
It’s what he told Strickland, you know? That guy just massacred a couple of dozen of my men. And I just about went off the deep end because I’m not fucking Prophet. I mean, Lockhart’s a complete asshole but I have to admit he’s got a point. I heard the comm chatter. Cobalt and Blue and Azure—Prophet took out half the goddamn rainbow before he and I ever crossed paths. Lockhart’s got every right to be pissed—just not at me. This whole thing’s a huge case of mistaken identity, and if I can somehow make everyone understand that I’m not Prophet, that all I did was inherit the man’s threads, then maybe we could all be on the same side again.
But while I’m feeling all outraged and hard-done-by, this voice in my head tries to tally up all the corpses I’ve made since I put on those threads, and it loses count.
The thing is, that’s not really me any more than Prophet is. Not that there aren’t a shitload of folks in this line of work who do fit that profile. You know that. Any job that gives you rank and a gun is going to attract its share of psychos and assholes who get off on throwing their weight around. But that’s not me, that—wasn’t me. I didn’t sign up to kill things, I signed up to fix them. I never—got off on this stuff before.
It’s the N2. It gets inside you. It changes the way you think, it turns you into—
Fuck, listen to me. I sound like some wife-beating drunk, making excuses: It’s not me, honey, it’s the suit talking . . .
Do me a favor. If I bring you flowers and promise never to do it again, just shoot me.
Testimony of Cmdr. Dominic Lockhart before the Senate Subcommittee Hearings on the Use of Military Nanotechnology, 18/02/2019, Sen. Meghan McCain presiding.
Excerpt begins:
Sen. Preteela M’Benga: Cmdr. Lockhart, on behalf of this subcommittee I would like to thank you for being here today.
Cmdr. Dominic Lockhart: Happy to be here, ma’am.
M’Benga: Commander, how long have you been an employee of Hargreave-Rasch?
Lockhart: I’ve been chief of CELL’s Urban Pacification Division for four years. Prior to that I was USMC.
M’Benga: And what is your current status?
Lockhart: In addition to my UPD duties I serve as a liaison to the US military when necessary. In those cases I report jointly to CELL and to the Department of Defense.
M’Benga: And this doesn’t present a conflict of interest?
Lockhart: With all due respect, Senator, the fact that I am testifying here today proves that it does not.
M’Benga: Aren’t you afraid of repercussions?
Lockhart: Repercussions, Senator?
M’Benga: If I’ve been correctly informed about the testimony you’ve prepared, you are about to do what we in the Senate call biting the hand that feeds. Aren’t you concerned that hand might bite back, if you’ll forgive the mangled metaphor?
Lockhart: No, ma’am.
M’Benga: May I ask why?
Lockhart: Without going into details, Senator, let’s just say that knowledge is power. I am in possession of certain knowledge concerning Hargreave-Rasch.
M’Benga: Knowledge beyond that you will be sharing with us today?
Lockhart: Yes, ma’am.
M’Benga: Moving on, then. The report you’ve presented is quite, er, comprehensive. For those of us who have not yet made it through the entire 864 pages, I wonder if you could distill the essence of your objection down to a concise sentence or two.
Lockhart: Gladly, Senator. I believe this country needs real soldiers. Not corpses in tin suits.
M’Benga: Excuse me, Commander. “Corpses in tin suits”?
Lockhart: You wanted concise, ma’am.
M’Benga: I did. Perhaps we’re not talking about the same project here. My understanding of CryNet’s program is that it involves placing live soldiers into battlefield prostheses, not the reanimation of corpses.