Barclay shakes his head, and continues his rounds, and says nothing. Gould raises his hands, exasperated. I brush past him.
He pokes me from behind.
Suddenly I’m facing him; suddenly my fists are clenched. I can feel synthetic muscles cording up my forearms. Gould doesn’t even notice. He’s plugged something into my spinal socket, and he’s only got eyes for the readout: “Fucking military mind-set, man. If I can’t tell him, maybe I can show him.”
Yes, Gould, show him. Show him my black box and my deep-layer protocols, show him my secret antidote to the spore.
“I scammed this little reader out of the CELL lab when no one was looking. It’s not much, but at least we can access the op logs . . .”
And why don’t you show him what’s left of my heart while you’re at it. Why don’t you show him the great fucking hole where my left lung used to be.
“Wait a minute, that’s not right . . .”
Why don’t you show him that I’m fucking dead, Gould, since you couldn’t be bothered to fill me in on that little detail when you had the chance. Why don’t you—
“Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”
Finally he looks up, but he still doesn’t see what’s in front of him. He doesn’t see my face through the visor, he doesn’t see how close I am to putting his head through the wall. I don’t know what he sees, exactly.
But whatever it is, it’s bright enough to leave him blind.
“Man, what have you been up to today?” he murmurs, and there’s something like awe in his voice.
He grabs Barclay coming back the other way. “You have to go to Prism.”
“No.”
“I know how to beat the Ceph!”
That gets Barclay’s attention.
“I’ve been a complete idiot,” Gould says.
Barclay does not argue the point. “How, exactly, can we beat the Ceph?”
“Give ’em AIDS!”
“That’s not funny, Dr. Gould.”
“Lupus, then. Rheumatoid arthritis. That’s what this damn suit is—or at least, that’s what it’s turning into: an autoimmune disease!”
Barclay doesn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Uh-huh.”
“Dude, I am serious. I’m looking at the op logs right now, and you wouldn’t believe the places Alcatraz has been hanging out over the past few hours. I don’t have the equipment here to confirm this directly, but the only way this telemetry makes sense is if the whole damn suit is studded with receptor sites! I never even looked for them before, I mean why would I, why would you expect a battlefield prosthesis to—”
Barclay cuts in and to the chase: “Dr. Gould. So what?”
“The spore, Colonel! Didn’t I say that? This artifact”—he jerks his thumb in my direction, a gesture that takes in the N2 but somehow excludes the meat sitting inside—“can interface with the spore!”
There are wounded, there are dead on all sides. There are orders to be given to those still standing. But Gould has ignited the dimmest spark of hope in Barclay’s eyes. Barclay lets him run with it.
“The spore might not be a bioweapon after all,” Gould continues. “At least, not just a bioweapon, not the way we’d understand it. If these readings are right it might almost be a kind of, of portable ecosystem. No, scratch that: more of an external immune system. It basically retcons the local environment to make it Ceph-friendly. That means taking out potentially dangerous macrofauna, of course—”
“Us, you mean,” Barclay murmurs.
“—but I think it also filters out any microbes that might be incompatible with Ceph biology.”
Barclay grunts softly. “War of the Worlds.”
Gould blinks. “Huh?”
“Nineteenth-century novel,” Barclay says. “Martians invade Earth, kick our asses, but then they all die of the common cold. No immunity. The Ceph have been around a lot longer than we thought; who knows, maybe the bastards read it.”
“Uh, right.” Gould hesitates; lifers who read ancient science fiction don’t fit comfortably into his worldview. But he’s back up and running in the next second: “Anyway, the spore’s part of a synthetic metasystem, and the N2’s derived from technology designed to interface with that metasystem, so we can, we can—” He snaps his fingers, suddenly inspired: “It’s like gay rape in hanging flies!”
That shuts down conversation for about ten meters in all directions. Even the wounded stop moaning.
“Excuse me,” Barclay says after a moment, “I must have misheard. I thought you said—”
But Gould’s on a rolclass="underline" “There are these insects, hanging flies. And sometimes a male will rape another male; just punch a hole right through the abdomen and ejaculate inside, you know? It’s called traumatic insemination.”
I don’t know what parts of me the Ceph have blown away and I don’t know how much else has been broken down to keep the rest of me going, but I know that at least my balls are still intact. I know this because I can feel them crawling back up into my abdomen.
“But the really cool thing is, this is actually a viable reproductive strategy! Because the invading sperm doesn’t just float around once it’s in there, it seeks out the gonads of the victim! It infiltrates the testes so that when that victimized fly goes out and inseminates a female, he’s actually injecting someone else’s sperm into his mate! It’s reproduction by proxy. You use someone else’s delivery platform to spread your genetic code!”
Barclay purses his lips. “Get the spires working for us instead of them.”
“Why not? When you come right down to it, we’re all made out of meat.”
Barclay looks at me, and looks away.
“But look, Colonel,” Gould says, “the thing is, the system’s nowhere near field-ready. According to the diagnostic logs, Pro—Alcatraz here tried to interface with some Cephtech earlier today and all the protocols locked up. The suit’s trying to resequence on its own the best it can, but it needs help. It needs Hargreave, we need Hargreave. He’s been three steps ahead of us the whole way. This”—Gould waves his stolen scanner—“this is basically a rectal thermometer. Prism’s a state-of-the-art hospital. It’s got hardware you won’t find anywhere else on the planet, stuff built specifically for the N2. We need to take Prism, by force if necessary, and if Jack won’t cooperate—well, that’s what you have interrogators for.”
It’s a thread thrown to a drowning man. It’s an oasis shimmering in the distance. Barclay is not the kind of man to let wishful thinking trump the facts on the ground, but we are all in such desperate need of good news.
For a moment or two I almost think he’s going to go for it.
But then he looks around at the huddled civilians under his protection, at the ragtag soldiers under his command, at the duct tape and chewing gum he’s using to keep it all together, and I know exactly what lesson from Strategy 101 is going through his head: Never fight a war on two fronts. The oasis is a mirage.
Barclay shakes his head.
Gould won’t let it go. “Colonel, listen—”
“I have been listening, Doctor. I can’t spare the resources for an assault against a fortified paramilitary installation, not under these circumstances.”
“But you have to—”
Barclay wheels on him, and the light in his eyes now is anything but hopeful. “What I have to do, Dr. Gould, is hold this location against a superior force that is perhaps ten minutes away from bringing the place down around our ears. What I have to do is keep a thousand civilians alive—including you, I might add—long enough to get them to safety. What I do not have to do is leave these people unprotected on the chance that your scientific theorizing isn’t just a clever dive down the wrong alley.”