His voice is dead level and cold as fucking Pluto. It doesn’t rise a decibel. Gould steps back as though he’s been slapped in the face.
Barclay turns to me. “I need you on defense. Put that suit to some practical use for a change. And you”—turning back to Gould—“are shipping out with the rest of the civilians.”
Gould’s still got some spine left: “You need me here, Colonel—I’m the only one who knows what you’re up ag—”
Barclay waves Chino over from down the row. “Escort Dr. Gould downstairs. See that he gets away safely.” He walks away, tapping his tacpad.
Gould grabs my arm as Chino grabs his: “He’s wrong, man. Hargreave’s our only hope. You’ve gotta take it upstairs.”
Chino’s not a huge guy, but you don’t fuck with him. He wants Gould to move; Gould moves. But he manages one final appeal on the way out: “Go over his head if you have to! Tell them about the hanging flies! That’ll convince them!”
“Soldier.”
I turn at the sound. Barclay stares unwaveringly at me across three rows of collateral damage.
“You’re with me,” he says.
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion CSIRA Blackbody Council
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
Well, of course I didn’t have the gear to pick up that kind of micro-structure, even when I was working at Prism. I was more of a systems man, right? Leave the nanohisto stuff to the grad students. But even if I had the equipment, I’d never have looked for it. I mean, why would you expect the skin of a battlefield prosthesis to come loaded with receptor proteins? Why the fuck would anybody build something like that?
You know, I don’t think Hargreave himself knew what they were at first. That’s got to be a problem whenever you reverse-engineer foreign tech. You don’t really know how it works, you don’t know what all the parts do. You can copy it, piece for piece, but you don’t really understand it. It’s like, Hey, all these parts fit together to make the best artificial muscle we’ve ever seen! What do these nanohex thingies do? No idea, but when you leave ’em out the damn thing doesn’t work, so we better leave ’em in. And because you don’t know about Charybdis’s shall-we-say unconventional approach to microterra-forming, you’ve got no reason to expect that every piece of tech they ever built is going to have a spore interface right down at the molecular level. You just blindly cut and paste—and sure, you get a kick-ass piece of field armor, but you also get every square millimeter of the thing chock-full of receptor sites and who knows what signals they’ll send when the wrong enzyme cozies up to their substrate?
It’s not just the basic nanochem we’re talking about here, either. It’s the higher-level stuff, too, the neural meshes. Hargreave laid his own OS over the system, of course, he programmed that suit to his own specs. But you can be damn sure he didn’t program it to fry his own machines when they got too intimate with the deep-layer protocols. The N2, it doesn’t like people poking around down there. Like taking an angry cat to the vet. It hisses, it claws. Shorts out every server in the chain. Weirdest thing I ever saw. Something else Hargreave didn’t count on: The thing’s got its own agenda.
I pity the poor bastards who end up inside it. I’ve known two of them now. Decent dudes both, you know, Prophet and I go way back and he’s—he was—100 percent stand-up. Alcatraz, now, I only just met him. We hung out for maybe two or three days, off and on, seemed like a decent guy. Kind of cryptic. Once or twice I caught him looking at me—I assume he was looking at me, you know, I’ve never even seen his face?—and I got this, this weird bottled-up sense he was going to explode, but—well, you know as well as I do.
The thing is, Alcatraz, Prophet—two more different jarheads you will never meet. Prophet never shut up, he was always joking around, and Alcatraz—well, let’s just say, not much in the way of social skills. But put ’em in the N2 and even people that different start to—converge. EEG, voxprints, ACG gates, they all start looking the same after you’ve been in that suit for a while.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s just the system interface, doing what it does. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bum me out just a little, you know, for the guys inside. You may think the N2 turns you into God’s own jihadist, what with the induced bloodlust and the enhanced reflexes and the superconducting cognitive enhancements. But you’re just feeling and doing what the damn thing’s told you to. From the outside, sure, you look like an absolute ass-kicking wild man, but really you’ve been—
Tamed, I guess.
Tamed.
Rearguard
I follow Barclay into a service elevator. We go down.
“Your friend,” he remarks, “is full of shit.”
I haven’t said a word all day. Right now it seems especially important to nod.
“He says he ‘escaped in the chaos.’ From Tara Strickland. I know Strickland, she was a decorated Navy SEAL before she went off the rails. You don’t just ‘escape’ from that woman. I figure she cut him loose.”
The cage jerks to a halt. The doors creak open.
“The question is, why?”
I follow Barclay into an observation gallery; it’s obviously been a dingy sub-basement hole for decades, but I’m guessing the shattered windowpanes are a recent development. We stand on a carpet of broken glass and look down on one of the loading platforms. Civilians crowd nervously beside a chain of subway cars. A dozen marines stand by just in case, but this crowd looks about as violent as a yard full of field mice.
Of course, that could all change in a split second if Squiddie crashed the party. I’ve seen little old ladies throw babies to the wolves when their lives were threatened.
“Look at these people,” Barclay says, and I’m not even sure he’s talking to me. “I grew up in this town. Any one of them down there could be family. And if it boils down here like it did at Ling Shan . . .”
He shakes his head, pushes through a slatted door at the far end of the gallery. We pass into some kind of control room from the last century. A pendant light hangs from the center of the ceiling, a rusted metal cone with a bare bulb shining from its center. A bank of ancient CRTs glows on one wall, serving up securicam images from around the station. Two grunts sit at an antique command console stretching the length of the room, all buttons and manual switches and actual hardwired lightbulbs embedded in painted schematics of the New York subway system. One of them slaps the board: “Goddamn it, nothing works in this place.”
I can sympathize. I thought this place was supposed to be brand new—it’s only been, what, eight years since Black Tuesday? And only five since they finished rebuilding the station. But the tech down here is one step away from smoke signals and tin-can telephones. Obviously the reconstruction wasn’t the grand and glorious megaproject they led us to believe; looks to me like they just rebuilt from the ground up. These sublevels have to be left over from the original.