No, his voice is definitely fainter.
“The Ceph understand these things: They come upon life-bearing worlds and they set up their monitoring stations to watch nature grind out its wonders and they leave it alone. And every million years or so they drop by to see how their garden grows and let me tell you, my friend, they don’t much like the cancer that’s infested this place since the last time they were here. Here we are, growing out of control, destroying everything around us and too stupid to see that we’re destroying ourselves in the process.”
I have to strain to hear him now. He must be light-years away.
“We are metastasis made flesh, my boy. We are pestilence, we are the weeds in the garden, and we are not facing warriors at all. We’ve never seen their soldiers, and I pray we never do. This is a pruning expedition. We are getting our asses whipped by a bunch of gardeners who are improvising in the face of the unexpected.”
I can barely hear him at all. My whole universe is a whisper.
“And that is the only reason we have a hope in hell of winning.”
Gone.
I wonder how many pieces I’ve been cut into. I wonder how many pieces are thinking this.
(Cellular force overload, someone says at the bottom of a very deep well.)
All things considered, I think I’m thankful to be here. To be nowhere. A far cry from my Happy Place, but at least I can’t feel the drills and the needles anymore. I can’t hear my Creator and my Tormentor. I know I’m being disassembled somewhere, but at least I can’t see it happening. You learn to be thankful for what you get.
(Wake up.)
That’s not Hargreave. That’s—
(Wake up, marine.)
I know that voice. I shouldn’t be hearing it though, not now. Haven’t Hargreave’s lackeys cut it out of my head yet?
“Wake up, marine! This is no time for dying!”
It’s False Prophet. It’s False Prophet, I can see his face hanging there in the void before me. It’s nothing like the original, it’s barely even an imitation. Just pixels and polygons. A constellation, a thousand stars that just happen to look like a human face.
It’s the goddamn suit. The suit is shouting at me.
“Get your ass back in the fight!”
Go away. You’re dead. I saw you die.
“Back at you, soldier. You think that’s an excuse?”
Maybe this is SECOND in denial, just a dumb biochip reliving the good old days in an attempt to rekindle the flame with a partner who dumped it days ago. Or maybe it’s pretending to be Prophet because it accessed a psych database somewhere and decided I’d react better to something that sounded like it had a life. Shit, maybe it is Prophet—some warped-mirror cartoon of Prophet at least—cobbled together from loose talk and synaptic echoes long after the conscious meat blew itself to kingdom come. Maybe it’s insane, maybe it thinks it’s real.
Or maybe not. This could just be the oxygen-starved brain of Cyborg Asshole Mk2 making stuff up as it goes along, Tin Man’s version of a near-death experience: as meaningless as all those lights and angels the neo-agers go on about during their asphyx parties. Maybe there’s not even any brain left to starve, maybe it’s been dead for hours and all these thoughts are running along a net of carbon nanotubes. Maybe they’ve already cut open my helmet and puked their guts out from the stink of all the dead meat that’s been rotting inside for fuck knows how long . . .
What are you, in here with me? Are you alive? Are you even real?
“Enough of this shit, marine!” it bellows. “Enough!”
What the fuck are you? What the fuck am I?
I am awake.
Somewhere very close, alarms are singing. Multijointed robot arms quiver spastically overhead. The doctor with the optional Hippocratic Oath is not avoiding my eyes now, no sirree: He’s staring right into them, and he looks about ready to piss himself. Flickers of unfocused light and shadow play across him: reflections of outputs changing far, far faster than they have any right to. And although it should be impossible for anyone to retrodict those vague blobs and blips into anything even approaching the original image that cast them, somehow I find it easy. I can see the good doctor’s monitor reflected in his scrubs, in his mask, in those dark shiny pupils grown so huge you can barely see the irises around them.
I know it before he says it: “Some kind of overload! The suit’s—it’s rejecting the rip somehow . . .”
“Stop him!” Hargreave’s voice rises an octave. “Kill him if you have to, but don’t damage the hardware!”
What, no sad farewell? No fond final words for your latest son?
Doors slam open up past my head. I hear boots on bricks. “Headshots only!” Hargreave cries to the CELLulite leaning over me.
“Got it.” The CELLulite slides back the bolt on his pistol, lays the muzzle against my forehead. I keep waiting for SECOND to lay on the tacticals—AY69 AUTO, ENEMY COMBATANT, THREAT LEVEL: HIGH—but I guess they shut it down. I’m alone at last.
My executioner’s head explodes.
Then his buddy’s.
Then the man in the scrubs, and some hapless med tech I never noticed before now. Four shots, four kills. I turn my head, almost interested, while Hargreave seethes on the radio: “Tara, no! Tara, listen to m—”
She kills the channel and goes to work at the doctor’s station. Her fingertips come dark and shiny off the keys.
“CIA,” she says. “Special ops. Recruited three years ago now.”
I wonder what her code name was. Probably Deus Ex Machina. Or Belle.
“You’ve got me to thank for this whole shitstorm.” She barely glances up; her eyes, her bloody fingers are all about the controls. “I’m the one who ordered your squad in to extract Prophet and Gould in the first place. Best-laid plans, huh?”
My restraints pop open. Up in the left-hand corner of my eye, uplink icons wink back into existence.
Strickland’s at my side, her hand at my elbow, urging me to sit. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I’m a little bit surprised to see that everything’s still attached. I swing my legs over the edge of the gurney, roll to a sitting position. GPS and MODE SELECT come back online. A panicky amber light on the ceiling spins in its glass bubble, stabbing my eyes five times a second.
Little crosshairs pan across my field of vision and lock down on the heavy assault rifle one of the CELLulites dropped while he was getting his brains blown out. BUD serves up a subtitle: HEAVY ASSAULT RIFLE: GRENDEL/HOL. PT.
“Let’s go, man! The Ceph are coming and we’ve got to get Hargreave out.”
And she’s right. Suddenly, I’m there. All that fatalistic indifference I was feeling just a few minutes ago, that candy-ass que sera resignation to my own death? Fuck that. I’m back, baby. I’m strong, I’m stoked, I’m ready to kick ass all the way to the next millennium.
Nice to have you back, SECOND. I missed you.
No, I don’t think he was right at all. He got maybe halfway there, tops. But the fact is, even gardeners would’ve done a better job.
I mean, try and wrap your head around the magnitude of the imbalance here. Maybe you’re imagining us as a bunch of cavemen going up against a Taranis or a T-90 with reactive armor, but that’s not even close. Cavemen are people, too, Roger, they’ve got the same raw brainpower even if their tech is Stone Age. The Ceph are a whole different species. So let’s say Hargreave’s right and we’re not facing soldiers. Do you really think the world’s lemurs, say, would have a better chance against a bunch of gardeners? If a bunch of gardeners wanted to take out an anthill, would they attack the ants with formic acid and titanium mandibles? ’Course not. They’ve got sprays and poisons and traps and guns, things no ant has ever seen, things no ant could possibly defend against.