Crysis: Escalation (8 page)

Prophet knew that none of this mattered. The only thing that mattered now was the mission. The only thing that mattered was what he knew. What he’d been shown on Lingshan, in the ice. He
knew it was far from over. When he’d put the gun against his head that had been because of the disease, he told himself, he’d had no choice. He tried to ignore how much the cool metal
of the gun barrel had seemed like a chance to rest.

The pain made him scream. Blackness claimed him.

Olfactory sensor overload. Information scrolled down Prophet’s vision, describing the chemical process of rot. It was biotelemetry telling him that he was sat in a
stinking alley full of garbage.

There was someone else in the alley with him. Even as disorientated as he was, Prophet was shocked that he’d somehow managed to go from a nanosuited god-of-war to being blindsided in an
alley. The man was well built, hair shaved at the sides, flat on top, green eyes but otherwise surprisingly non-descript. He looked to be in his early twenties. The jeans and t-shirt, despite the
chill in the air, did nothing to disguise the man’s military bearing. Prophet could make out the bottom of the winged skull tattoo. The skull had a diving regulator in its mouth and the words
Swift, Silent, Deadly
underneath it.

‘Fucking jarhead . . .’ Prophet managed.

‘Screw you, you army puke,’ the other man said, without a trace of feeling.

The empty bottle he had thrown exploded against the wall of the alley. Prophet found himself alone. He pushed himself to his feet with difficulty. He staggered a bit but he could feel himself
recovering. Presumably this was the suit working out how to deal with his bizarre situation.

Prophet became more alert with every step he took. He looked out of the alleyway. The alleyway led onto a rain-soaked boardwalk. Beyond the boardwalk was a beach, and then a dark rough sea.

The suit’s nav-systems had been trying to tell him for a while but it took the boardwalk, all the neon and garish casino fronts, to drive it home: Atlantic City.
As if things
weren’t bad enough
, Prophet thought,
I’m in Jersey
.

It must have been late because there were very few people on the boardwalk. Still feeling a little disoriented, he decided that he wanted to see the ocean. He engaged the stealth mode, the
lensing field ghosting him, and he crossed the street.

Glancing behind him, footage from a Macronet feed in the window of a bar caught his eye. He linked to the net with a thought, searched for the footage and had it downloaded to the HUD. He saw
CELL military contractors brutalising and executing victims of the Manhattan virus. It cut to footage of Hargreave-Rasch board members being escorted through crowds of reporters. The headline read:
Hargreave-Rasch’s board members to face congressional hearing over Manhattan Crisis
.

Prophet figured that mismanagement was what they called war crimes these days. He believed that the board members should be punished for what they had done, but he didn’t hold out much
hope. The system was too corrupt, and Hargreave-Rasch’s PR were already spinning the New York events.

He reached the beach without drawing too much attention to his hulking form.
Mission, have to get back on the mission.
For the first time in a long time the mission was his. He
wasn’t doing what other people were telling him. And for the first time in a long time, he knew the mission was right. It was a simple matter of survival.

He was almost thinking straight now. The pain in his head had been a constant since New York, but the nausea and the acid burn in his stomach was gone. He’d always enjoyed looking at the
ocean but tonight it disquieted him. He didn’t like water anymore.

‘You’re back again, huh, mister?’

Prophet turned to find himself looking down at a young girl, maybe ten- to twelve-years-old, smiling at him. She was dirty, her clothes were ragged, and she had dark hair and green eyes.

What was going on? Where’d she come from?!
Then Prophet realised that he was somewhere new.

He checked the GPS. Somewhere in Ventnor City. The information came scrolling down the HUD for the asking. A working class neighbourhood that gangs and drugs were slowly claiming, thanks to the
Double Dip Recession. He couldn’t remember ever having been here before but the girl definitely seemed to recognise him.

He was stood in some trees out the back of a series of panel board houses that might have been nice places to live, once. The wooded area was scattered with old bottles, tins, needles and other
drug paraphernalia. There was the remains of fire in a dip in the ground.

‘I’ve been reading my bible.’ The girl was talking again. ‘Momma was always said it was a good thing to do. A righteous thing. Before they took her away.’ The girl
swallowed hard. She looked like she was about to start crying.

Prophet hadn’t had much interaction with kids. He’d been good with them when he had to be, when his friends started pairing off and starting families, maybe a little too strict but
that was the military in him. They’d liked him, though, he knew cool stuff and could do cool things. But he had no idea how to handle this.

He remembered her. Alice, his little sister. His parents had had children way too late. He remembered being surprised that his dad hadn’t been shooting blanks at that age. He remembered
how young Alice had been when Mom had been diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s. He’d wondered if she’d been suffering, undiagnosed, when she’d gotten pregnant in her
forties. Maybe even earlier, when they’d had him.

The religious stuff had always been there. As an adult he’d become convinced that half of it was fear and half of it was his mother’s need to look down on and judge others. When the
Alzheimer’s kicked in, well, then the real fun and games had started. He’d known it was the disease, but that didn’t matter much when you were just a kid, getting beaten on and
screamed at about how you were going to hell. In comparison the Marines had seemed like a pleasant alternative.

No! That never happened! My name is Laurence Barnes, I grew up in San Diego. They call me Prophet!
Prophet knew these to be false memories. They were someone else’s. Red warning
signs were appearing on the HUD as the suit tried to understand what was going on in his head. He’d been in fire fights in over a dozen countries and here, in Jersey, confronted by a
ten-year-old girl, who at some level he knew was his little sister even though he didn’t have one, he was having a panic attack.

‘Momma said that the bible had the answers. That’s armour you’re wearing, isn’t it, mister?’

Prophet forced himself to calm down. The pain in the dead flesh of his skull was nearly overwhelming. He could see white lights and wanted to scream.

‘You’re an angel, aren’t you, mister?’ He almost laughed and thought he felt like throwing up, if only he still could. The things he’d done made that question seem
like an obscenity. ‘You’ve lost your wings. Is god angry at you?’

No, it just feels that way sometimes.

‘Alice!’ the harsh voice cut through the humid night air. ‘Where are you, you little bitch?! Get over here now or you’ll feel the back of my hand.’

Prophet didn’t like the sound of the voice. He stepped back and engaged the stealth mode. It was only then he saw how frightened Alice was.

Alcatraz had always tried to be hard where his mother was concerned. He’d had no problems about cutting her off after she’d been institutionalised. He’d always told himself
that there’d been no guilt about never going to see her. Despite how she’d terrorised him growing up, Prophet knew this to be a lie.

When she’d ended up in the psych ward his,
no, Alcatraz’s
, dad had basically wasted away. He’d gone out with a whimper, not a bang. Alice had ended up in a foster
home. There had been tear-filled conversations, with her older brother promising her that as soon as he was back home she could come and live with him.

‘Then I just went and died in New York. Sucks, huh?’ Prophet whipped around, looking for the source of the voice and seeing nothing. The weasel-faced man in the wifebeater, pyjama
bottoms and, oddly, spats, must have heard something because he looked around to where Prophet was hidden. Deciding it was nothing he turned back to Alice. His bloodshot eyes full of anger. The
girl was shaking with fear.

‘What’d I tell you?’ he demanded.

‘Which time?’ she asked, confused and terrified.

‘Are you trying to get fresh with me?’ He lifted his hand up as if to backhand her. She shrank away from it in a way that told Prophet she’d been hit plenty of times
before.

‘Hey,’ Prophet said softly. The man froze. ‘Turn around.’ The man managed to control his fear long enough to do as he was told. He couldn’t see anything. He looked
around and, still finding nothing, his fear was replaced with anger as he started to turn back towards Alice. Prophet made sure that the man saw him appear out of nowhere. The man let out a
high-pitched scream. The scream was choked off as Prophet grabbed him by his chin and lifted him off the ground. The man soiled himself.

This I understand, this situation I can handle, the proper and correct application of fear and violence.

He could feel the man’s jaw crack and then splinter under his power-assisted fingers. The man was somehow still making whimpering and squealing noises as he drooled blood.

‘I could be anywhere and you’d never know,’ he whispered to the man. ‘You’re going to look after Alice and all the other children in your care to the best of your
abilities. You will never raise a hand to them, or even an angry word. You will treat them with as much kindness as your resources will allow and you will stop drinking or doing whatever it is that
turns you into a foul smelling, evil, little worm, because I will be checking. I will be checking frequently, and if I don’t like what I see I will remove limbs and solder the wounds shut. Do
you understand me?’ The man didn’t answer. ‘I said, do you understand me?’

‘I don’t think he can talk,’ Alice managed through the terror. At the sound of her voice Prophet felt the guilt wash over him. He’d forgotten she was there. This was just
another bit of violence for her to witness. He dropped the man, who curled up into a ball and made whimpering noises.

‘Get out of here,’ Prophet said quietly. The man didn’t move, he just whimpered. Prophet took a step towards him and the man made a run for it, scrambling away on all
fours.

Prophet looked down on Alice.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘God will forgive him for his sins, and you.’

He felt like crying. He knew that this frightened young girl was concocting an elaborate fantasy around this strange figure she’d been confronted with. That he was an angel fallen from
grace and that to earn his redemption he would watch over her and keep her safe. The awful knowledge that under the carboplatinum-reinforced coltan-titanium exoskeleton was the animated corpse of
her older brother somehow made it all the more horrifying.

‘Did you mean what you said? Will you be watching over me?’

Prophet thought long and hard about lying. He desperately wanted to. He just wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t. She was far too nice, forgiving and naïve to
survive in the situation she had found herself in.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘What I said was to frighten him into looking after you. It might work but probably only for a little while. You’ve got to be smart, keep your head
down, keep out of his way and look for a safe way out as soon as you’re old enough, and I mean school not the streets, and Alice, you’ve got to learn to look after yourself, stand up to
people. You don’t want to get in a fight if you can help it, but if they hit you, hit them back, harder. You understand me? God will understand.’
Or fuck him, quite
frankly.

She nodded, tears in her eyes. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.

‘I guess you’ve got other kids you’ve got to help, right?’ she asked through the tears, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

No. There’s the mission and
only
the mission, if your brother will let me.

He nodded, mumbled platitudes at her and then turned away. He made himself walk away by promising that he would come back and check up on her. There would have been tears in his eyes as he lied
to himself, if he hadn’t been a walking corpse.

He all but staggered past the Green-Eyed Man from the alleyway, trying to ignore him. The man watched him pass. The expression in his eyes was unreadable.

‘Prophet?’

More voices in my head?

‘Prophet. I know you can hear me,’ The voice was familiar and it sounded like it had been trying to speak to him for some time. Prophet looked around at his surroundings and sighed.
He’d lost time again. He was sat on a detritus-strewn beach. He wondered why the other guy never took him anywhere nice when he was in control as he watched a flock of scavenging seagulls
take to the air. On the other hand, in the nanosuit, he guessed he was a little conspicuous.

‘Prophet, this silence helps neither of us. I think you’re in trouble and I think we can help.’

He recognised the voice now. Karl Rasch. The CEO of Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical. The company that had developed the living weapon that animated the distinctly
un
living body he had
stolen.

Hargreave-Rasch were also the parent company of CryNet Systems and CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics, the so-called “military contractors” who had spent a lot of time shooting
at him in New York. He’d killed a lot of them, as well as a lot of Ceph.

‘I will find a way to break this comms link permanently,’ Prophet muttered. As he said it the HUD was already showing him options for the nanosuit’s comms as the suit’s
heuristic systems went to work.

The Green-Eyed Man was back, looking intently at Prophet and listening to one side of the conversation. He was sat on a pile of driftwood, the seagulls ignoring him.

‘Is that a good idea?’ Rasch’s voice was cultured, educated, with a thick German accent. ‘You don’t sound well. We have the facilities to help you.’