Crysis Escalation - By Gavin G. Smith Page 0,2

weirder and weirder. Eighteen months of hitting Ceph incursion sites. Auckland, Wuhan, Tokyo, then, on his own, the last one beneath St. Petersburg. That was when even he had to admit he was forgetting what he was. What I once was, he corrected himself. And now only loyal Michael Sykes remained with him. Psycho, who’d rather nail his left bollock to the ground and crawl away from it than let a “mate” down. But Psycho didn’t understand, none of them had, it wasn’t a job, it wasn’t mercenary work, it wasn’t about loyalty to friends, and, sadly, it wasn’t about fucking over CELL. It’s about survival, pure and simple, us versus them, a very old equation, Prophet thought.

‘You’re listening in on your little whore-house soap opera, aren’t you?’ Psycho said. The tone in his voice said that he was out to needle Prophet. Prophet tried to ignore him.

‘What? You don’t want to talk to me? I’m pretty much the only other carbon-based life form you’ve got any contact with these days!’ Prophet continued trying to ignore him and Psycho lapsed into silence. And then let out a short, humourless laugh. ‘I’m sorry that you can’t nip downstairs for a quickie.’

‘I don’t want to be wasting time here either,’ Prophet all but growled. ‘Did you think this would be easy?’ He stood up and looked around the room. It was a large spacious attic, with exposed wooden beams. The building that contained the brothel had been built from locally quarried stone during one of Siberia’s gold rushes. It sat on the corner of a junction in the township. Nobody had ever quite got around to laying down a proper road and currently the streets were frozen mud. Prophet glanced out the window. He could see the glow of the garish neon sign reflected in the gently falling snow.

‘You’re not just wasting time, mate, you’ve lost the plot.’

This is where he brings up St. Petersburg, Prophet thought. He’d heard this song before.

‘You were out of control in St. Petersburg, you know you were. It was the last straw for Fire Dragon.’

Prophet knew that Psycho was right. The thing was, he had only realised it in retrospect. At the time it had all seemed to make sense. They were the bad guys. He had needed access to the Ceph tech. He needed information and he needed to upgrade the armour. He had to be strong enough for when they finally found what he was looking for.

‘And what’s with the Ceph tech? I know it won the day in New York but it’s changing you, mate. Turning you into . . .’

‘One of them?’

‘I was going to say something else.’

‘When did you get so soft?’

Psycho’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

‘Careful,’ the British soldier said quietly.

‘We’re fighting a war. I’m not human now. I am something else. You need to get used to that. If becoming one of them is what it takes . . .’ Psycho was just staring at him. ‘What do you want from me, Psycho?’ Prophet asked.

‘Something to say that we’re on the right track. Any evidence at all that it’s actually real.’

‘Tunguska was where Hargreave and Rasch originally encountered . . .’

‘I know.’

‘It has to be here.’

Psycho sighed and leant back against the wall, the top half of his nanosuited body disappearing into shadow.

‘We need to be thorough this time . . . take our time, search everything . . .’

‘There’s no intel, Prophet. We’re running missions based on wishful thinking now.’

Prophet whipped round to glare at the British soldier, the suit automatically running firing solutions and reflowing into a combat-ready configuration. All Psycho saw was the inhuman face of the nanosuit’s helmet. He knew his own suit was sending out identification signals. What worried him more than anything was that he was now sure that the face under the visor probably wasn’t much more human than the alien-looking suit.

‘After all this you don’t trust me? It’s there. It’s got to be there.’

‘You said that in Wuhan, Auckland, St. Petersburg. It doesn’t exist, Prophet. I think you know that. You need to wake up.’

Prophet was across the attic, forgetting that he had to be careful of people hearing his steps in the brothel below. He stood over Psycho.

‘No, there’s a threat . . . the Ceph.’

‘Are dead, understand?’ Psycho said evenly, looking up at Prophet. ‘There are no more aliens. We fought and won that war. The world has moved on but you’ve got stuck, mate.’

‘You don’t know what I’ve seen .