I mean, if we’re dealing with actual goddamn space aliens here—things that travel among the stars—then Gould’s wrong: We’re not the Aztecs to their Europeans, we’re the whales to their factory ships. We’re the palm trees to their fucking napalm. What I can’t figure out is why we’re getting in any licks at all.
“We still don’t even know where they’re coming from,” he says. “If they’ve got a ship in orbit, it’s cloaked against anything we’ve got. If they’ve landed already, nobody saw them come down. And God help us if they’re teleporting their troops in from out past Mars.” He snorts softly, a hollow chuckle, a gallows laugh. “However they’re doing it, they’re going by the book. First send the pox to soften us up, then send the conquistadores. At least the Mayans could see the damn galleons coming over the horizon . . .”
Houdini waves a listless tentacle at me from across the room. A glossy hardcopy catches my eye just to the left of his tank, a satcam enhance of a fractal coastline stripped of cloud cover: the eastern Chinese seaboard, stippled with text and contour lines. One of the labels is oddly familiar.
LING SHAN.
“Of course.” Gould’s noticed my interest. “I keep forgetting. Manhattan wasn’t exactly the first stop on the tour.”
There’ve been rumors. Some kind of covert op that went bad back at the start of the decade, just before the climate jumped the rails and turned the whole fucking planet upside down. You hear things, some of them pretty wild—but I don’t remember anything about space aliens.
“They had a—I suppose you’d call it a skirmish,” Gould tells me. “We’re assuming they encountered the Ceph. We’re hoping they encountered the Ceph; otherwise we’ve run into two hostile alien species within three years, and how do you like those odds? But Prophet—well, you met him. He was top-of-the-line, he wouldn’t have been running that team otherwise, but Ling Shan—changed him.”
He looks away for a moment.
“No,” he says at last. “I’m bullshitting you. The suit changed him. Your suit, now.” His shoulders rise, fall. “Prophet wasn’t—he may not have been entirely sane, there at the end. There’s a degree of integration that not everyone can handle. Probably nothing for you to worry about, not over the short term, but Prophet was hooked into that thing for—I don’t know how long, actually. He dropped right off the map after Ling Shan. Stopped trusting Hargreave entirely, figured out how to disable the tracking chip, and just—”
Gould kisses the tips of his fingers, spreads them as if blowing smoke to the wind.
“They sent a team in afterward, of course. No trace of any aliens, no trace of our guys, no trace of Prophet. The whole playing field had been slagged to glass.” He laughs a sad little laugh. “I was never able to find out which side did that, actually.
“I think Hargreave blamed me, in a way, even then. I mean I wasn’t Prophet’s handler, exactly, but I was there. Doesn’t matter how many lab tests you run, your prototype’s always gonna fuck up in the field, right? First rule of product testing. So there I was, in the same room with all those black ops need-to-know heavyweights, just a geek to keep an eye on the suit feeds and work out the bugs. When the suit goes dark, who else you gonna blame? I was the guy supposed to make sure that didn’t happen.
“It was bad enough we all thought he was dead, but then I started getting these messages. A vcard or a voicemail, totally untraceable, just out of the blue every two or three months: Having a blast, wish you were here, that kind of thing. I have no fucking clue why he reached out to me of all people. Nobody else heard squat from the man as far as I know, not even his handler.
“But now Hargreave’s thinking I was in on it somehow. Prophet was a top-of-the-line field man but there’s no way he had the chops to hack that suit on his own, right? I managed to convince him I hadn’t conspired to steal his secret technology—it wasn’t all that hard, actually, Hargreave-Rasch has machines that can sniff out a little white lie from your blink rate, among other things—but that still pretty much wrapped it up as far as the whole Prism gig was concerned.
“Anyway, at least we knew Prophet wasn’t dead at the bottom of a jungle canyon somewhere. But we never saw him, and he never came in, and I don’t know how much of these past three years he spent in that suit and how much he spent out of it. For all I know he never took the damn thing off, and that would be . . . well.”
Outside, the faint faraway sound of something colossal, falling over.
Gould shakes his head, gets back on message. “The point is, he wanted to come in now. After all this time. And I’m not working at H-R anymore but I guess I’m the only one he trusts. So he reaches out. Going to bring me something, he says, something to save the goddamn world. And here you are. You’re not carrying any gift-wrapped packages. You’re not handing me the key to some safe-deposit box. All you’ve brought me is that fucking suit.”
Find Gould. Nathan Gould. I’m so fucking sorry.
It’s all on you now.
The Geek from Prism hauls himself to his feet. It seems to take all the strength in the world.
“So,” he says. “Shall we get started?”
It’s something in the Nanosuit, of course. Deep-layer package in the memory substrate, is the way Gould puts it. He puts me back in the cradle, pokes and prods every interface the suit has to offer and probably punches in a couple of new ones for good measure.
“Fuck,” he says at last.
I’m impressed by how concise his executive summary is. I wait for a bit more detail.
“I can see it in there,” he says. “It’s a black fucking box is what it is. Classical electronic I can do. Quantum I can do. This molecular format, though—it’s unique to the Nanosuit, it’s proprietary. Maybe Prophet didn’t realize I’d parted ways with Hargreave-Rasch when he made the recording. Or maybe he just grabbed it in its native format. Either way, I can’t decode it here.
“We need to get you to an H-R lab. Prism’s over on Roosevelt Island, but it’s miles away. Plus they revoked my access when I got sack—”
An alarm goes off, right over my head.
When I peel myself off the ceiling I follow Gould’s wilder-than-usual stare to a monitor teetering on a pile of file folders: a compound-eye matrix of in-house securicam feeds. A column of Darth Vader wannabes creeps down a stairwell in one of those facets: they pile up stage left, bleed out of one window, spill across the hallway in the next one.
“Shit,” Gould hisses. “CELL.”
They carefully test each door along the hallway, leaning back against the wall, reaching out with one arm, placing limpets for maximum sensitivity. Occasionally trying a doorknob for tradition’s sake.
Gould spins me around; I’m surprised by the strength in that scrawny body. “They’re coming for me. They’re coming for us. Hargreave wants us dead.” Which isn’t exactly true. I seem to remember some fairly explicit orders that I be brought in alive. But I can’t begrudge Gould his ongoing attempts at motivational speaking.
Besides, it’s pretty obvious by now that being brought in alive is not going to lead to an especially happy ending, either.