So why the Ceph gunships, Roger? Why the exoskeletons that walk pretty much like we do, and the guns that fire pretty much like ours, and bloody artillery for chrissake that does pretty much what ours does? Why are Ceph weapons and tactics so much like ours, hmm?
I don’t think they’re gardeners at all. I don’t even think they’re aliens. Not the real aliens, anyway. Not the real gardeners.
I think they’re hedge clippers and weed whackers, left in the shed to rust. I think they’re the dumbest of the garden tools, programmed to bump around the property mowing the lawn while the owners are away because after all, this place is too far out in Hicksville to waste real intelligence on. I think they have basic smarts because where they come from, even the chairs are smart to some degree—but nobody ever read them The Art of War, because they’re goddamn hedge clippers. So they’ve had to learn on the fly. Their tactics and their weaponry look like ours because they’re based on ours, because we were the only game in town when those cheap-ass learning circuits looked around for something to inspire them. And I think a lemur wouldn’t have a hope in hell against a bunch of gardeners, but he just might stand a chance in a war against the Roombas.
Organic? Are you fucking kidding me? Dude, even we’ve got CPUs made out of meat, we had neuron cultures wired into machines back before the turn of the century! Why do you think those blobs in the exoskels are any different? What makes you think the Ceph—whatever made the Ceph—what makes you think they even draw a distinction between meat and machinery?
Because I’m telling you, Roger, that line is not nearly as black-and-white as you seem to think.
Trust me on this.
Strickland sketches out the essentials while we make our escape. Hargreave’s a sick twisted motherfucker—“totally insane,” she says, “thinks he’s the only competent human being on the planet”—but Gould was right: He knows more about the Ceph than any other backbone around. It goes back farther than Ling Shan, farther than Arizona; apparently Hargreave’s known about the Ceph ever since he jacked some of their tech out of the Siberian backwoods in 1908. (Which would make Hargreave around 130 years old by now. Kinda surprised that didn’t prick up any ears over at the Census Department. Of course, Hargreave probably owns the Census Department.)
Tunguska is the word Strickland throws over her shoulder, as if it’s supposed to mean something to me. Turns out that was the site of a fifteen-megaton airburst back then, decades before the human race figured out how to make nukes. Two thousand square kilometers of forest flattened just like that. Nobody ever figured out for sure what it was: comet fragment, meteorite, microsingularity. Nobody ever found anything definitive, because Jacob Hargreave and Karl Rasch got there first and carted it all away.
And in all the long decades since, Hargreave has been walled away with the fire he stole from the gods, breathing on those dangerous embers all through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, patiently waiting for our technology to grow into something that could crack the codes and solve the riddles. Sometimes not so patiently; you have to wonder how much of our vaunted human technology really belongs to us and how much we were herded toward by some megalomaniac and his stolen box of miracles, working behind the scenes.
Not enough, judging by the past couple of days.
So three years back Hargreave engineers some ill-fated foray into a Ceph outpost in the South China Sea; the Ceph wake up and Tara Strickland’s father doesn’t come home. Hargreave’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since. He’s had a hundred years to get ready and three years early warning and he’s got some kind of plan to beat back the invaders; Strickland’s masters need to know what it is.
I know what it is. It’s a plan to rip me out of the N2 like ripping someone out of their own skin and nerves, throw away the parts you don’t need, and graft yourself into the rest. After that I’m not sure; but Strickland’s already foiled Part A, so I suppose it can’t hurt to find out. It might even save the world.
We rise again. The cargo elevator is a metal cube with a grillwork floor and no walls: I-beams and cable conduits and greasy white cinder blocks scroll sedately past as Strickland talks. “He’s holed up in the executive level. You’ll be running into heavy resistance. No one gets in to see him face-to-face; believe me, I’ve tried, and I’m his head of security. You’re going to have to break in.”
She doesn’t seem to notice the dead employee sharing the car with us. He’s got a very nice silencer screwed onto the end of his M12. He won’t be needing it.
The elevator lurches to a halt on some level not meant for open house: server cabinets, ammo crates, lockers. Another one of those rotating amber lights.
Oh, and cameras.
“I’ve locked down local wireless; you’ve got maybe five minutes before Hargreave breaks the lock and sets the dogs on you.” She snorts softly. “I guess that’d be on us, now. I’ll get up to the helipad and secure our transport. Bring him out and meet me on the roof. We fly him out, we take him away, we make him talk. Go.”
I cloak. I hear the elevator grind back into motion as I run invisibly past the securicams on my way to the stairwell.
No waypoints, this time. No helpful filepics or friendly voices telling me what to do. Just stairs and switchbacks and, two or three landings above me, low worried voices:
“Comms still dead in the skinning lab.”
“Where the hell’s Strickland?”
“Must be offline, too. I can’t get hold of her, anyway.”
“Shit. This isn’t good.”
It isn’t good, but it’s quick and it’s easy. They go down before either of them can draw a weapon or a breath. The silencer works like a charm.
I’m a shark circling a shipwreck. I work my way through befuddled mercenaries torn among so many masters—Lockhart, Strickland, Hargreave—that they were starting to suffer whiplash even before Strickland jammed their communications. I move up from spartan basement storage into rows of spotless offices, into conference rooms paneled in oak and leather. Each floor is more opulent than the last, each outfitted with darker grains and older antiques, each more anachronistic. The whole building is a time machine. Waypoints would be redundant here; the path to Jacob Hargreave is obvious. Just follow him back to the Victorian era.
It takes closer to ten minutes for Hargreave to undo Strickland’s sabotage; thirty seconds for the kill order to spread. By that time I’m already on the executive level. A tiny knot of armored mercs kills the lights and hunts me on thermal, but they’ve just spent the last thirty-six hours watching Golem Boy cut their numbers in half. Last night, maybe, they were jonesing for payback; right now I can track them by the sound of their knees knocking together.