‘If it’s kin I guess I can understand.’
‘If I’d still been in the army it might have been difficult but frankly, fuck CELL . All they are to me is a rapidly shrinking monthly pay packet. In fact if you were in New York under Barclay I’m surprised you joined up with CELL .’
Hank shrugged.
‘Times is tough. I got kin as well.’
Daniels and Amanda nodded in agreement.
‘Let’s get these cameras up and running,’ Amanda said. She glanced down at the corpse. It would be sent up in the elevator like Walters had been, to be disposed of in the most cost-effective way possible. Until that happened it would be stored in one of the caves, one that wasn’t imbedded with Ceph tech, close to the main cavern. His next of kin would be notified via text over the Macronet, maybe. ‘Poor kid,’ Amanda echoed Daniels.
C site was a long thin cavern. The floor was crisscrossed with trenches, like all the other sites. One of the light rigs had been broken when the ground had shook and as result the end of the cavern opposite the exit was in darkness. The eight workers in here were staying close to the light and the exit that led to the tunnel, which in turn led to the main cavern.
Amanda didn’t know much about archaeology or recovering ancient alien tech that fused with rock, but the workers chipping away here didn’t look like they were doing a particularly good job. Several of them either were or had been crying. A number of them were still shaking badly and all of them kept looking into the darkness at the end of the cave.
The workers looked like poor locals who had been given minimal training and less pay. They slept down here on floor mats and in sleeping bags, huddled around the heaters in the main cavern. They looked at Amanda, Daniels and Hank like they were their prison guards.
We’re not the enemy, kids, Amanda thought as she and Daniels moved past, weapons at the ready, the flashlights attached to the barrels of the weapons stabbing into the thick, inky, seemingly total darkness. Hank covered them from further back.
‘Clear,’ Amanda said as they finished checking the cavern. The word felt like a lie. There were so many caves and so much darkness down here that whatever was killing people didn’t have to be very far away from them for it to be impossible to find.
Asher didn’t seem to understand that the dig workers were not going to be very productive just because he had told them to be and because it was their poorly paid job to be so. He didn’t understand why people couldn’t or wouldn’t just do what he told them to. He couldn’t understand that the fear, exacerbated by the dead bodies that they had all seen dumped just outside the main cavern, was going to impact on productivity. Asher couldn’t understand that in the long run he was more likely to achieve what he wanted by rolling up the operation, having the threat dealt with and then coming back. In other words, it didn’t matter how much of a martinet Asher was, they were always going to be more scared of the alien creature killing them silently than they were of him.
One of the workers had, in broken English, accused Amanda of using them as bait. If she’d had her way she would have evacuated everyone, and as de facto security chief it was her call under CELL operating guidelines, but the reality of the situation had prevented that. So she had to work with what she had. If she was honest, the worker hadn’t been wrong. Her best chance of finding the thing was when it was in the act of either killing people or trying to initiate the Ceph tech.
As she exited site C she glanced down at one of the workers. She was gaunt, haggard and probably not even out of her teens. The look the worker gave her back was resentful to the point of hatred.
It’s not me, she wanted to tell them, but she knew she was part of the problem now.
‘Boss?’ Daniels said, out in the tunnel leading back to the main cavern. Amanda didn’t like the frightened tone in the Brit’s voice. She looked around to see what was bothering him. The tunnel wall was glowing with shifting symbols made of neon light. It looked like the walls were alive with some sort of circuitry, clearly Ceph tech.
‘Another activation?’ Hank asked. He was covering one way up the tunnel. The tunnel lights, the ones put there by humans, started flickering. The three of them switched on their flashlights, though there was a lot of light coming from the alien-tech in the tunnel walls.
‘Mikey, where are your people, over?’ she said into the tac radio. Alan, Okobe and Safiya were getting some rest. Amanda was exhausted, she had managed to get some sleep on the flight from Lagos but she was nearing the end of sixteen hours on. Between a long shift and the nervous tension, she knew she was too fatigued to be thinking clearly. Amanda didn’t want to start on the amphetamines as she would never get to sleep when her shift ended and she didn’t want to go there again, at least not unless she had to.
‘Cross, what the hell is going on?!’ Asher demanded over the radio.
‘Doctor, get the fuck off this frequency! Mikey, report, over.’
‘We’re coming into… contact!’
Gunfire echoed through the tunnels. Two short bursts, then a longer less disciplined one. Then the gunfire stopped. Daniels was up and starting to move.
‘Wait!’ Amanda ordered. Daniels did as he was told. The beam on his flashlight was shaking badly as he covered the tunnel. Hank was covering behind them. Amanda let the Jackal drop on its sling as she grabbed the phone from her coat and switched it on. They had set the cameras to stream to the phone, but the cameras on B site were down. ‘B site. Now.’
The light illuminated the smoke from the cordite swirling in the air. There were spent shell casings on the ground and a lot of blood. The lights had been smashed as well. The beams from their flashlights and the glowing alien symbols in the rock were the only illumination. Amanda stared in horror. She wanted to be sick.
She had seen death before. She had seen a lot of it in New York, the horrors of the Manhattan Virus and the violence of the Ceph and in some cases her CELL colleagues. She had lost people before, but this assault had just seemed so easy for the Ceph bioform. Despite the weapons, the armour, the training and the experience, something had just snuffed out Mikey, Schmidt and Coyle like it was standing on bugs. Perhaps, to the Ceph, that was exactly what it was doing.
‘It’s gotta still be in here,’ Daniels said. The fat, middle-aged British ex-soldier was breathing hard, staring at Mikey. Daniels had always pretended not to like Mikey as the other Brit had been an ex-military police officer, like Amanda, and there was little love lost between enlisted men and MPs, but in truth the two had been close. The front of Mikey’s neck was a gaping red mess. The Ceph killer had nearly sawn his head off.
Amanda swallowed hard and tried to control the shaking, she just needed to cope long enough to give orders that wouldn’t get any more people killed. Her flashlight played across Schmidt’s body. He was laying half in and half out of one of the shallow trenches glowing with alien technology. His back had been broken. The angle that he was lying at looked horribly unnatural, to the point of obscene. Amanda could still make out the look of surprise on the German’s face.
‘H… help…’ The voice was weak. Amanda and Daniel’s flashlights played all across the floor of the cave. Only Hank remained calm, using his flashlight to search the back of the site. Daniels found him. It was Coyle. He was frothing up blood.
‘Daniels…’ Amanda started to warn the other contractor, but it was too late. Daniels had moved to Coyle and knelt down in the trench next to him.
Amanda shifted into the position where Daniels had been standing, trying to control herself. She had the feeling that there was something else in there with them. She felt a mounting terror that there was something just out of view, avoiding the light.
‘S’okay mate, we’re going to get you out of here. You’ll be fine.’
‘There’s nothing there…’ Coyle managed, his voice sounding wet, like he was trying to talk through a mouthful of liquid. Coyle started to shake uncontrollably. Daniels tried to hold him. The American contractor was vomiting up
frothy blood, then he lay still.
‘Cross, report!’ Asher demanded over the tac radio. ‘Get the rest of your men back to the main cave right now!’
‘Doctor, shut the fuck up!’ Amanda demanded. She could hear boots running through the tunnel towards them.
Daniels was staring down at Coyle. The blood on his hands looked black in the light of the flashlights. Coyle’s abdomen was little more than a red ruin.
‘Boss,’ Hank said quietly. He was just about able to keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘I think there’s something in here with us.’
Amanda felt her blood run cold. It felt like she followed the beam of Hank’s flashlight in slow motion. It was aimed just past Daniels, who was shaking like a leaf. Amanda saw nothing for a moment. Just the rock and the glowing neon figures of the alien symbols imbedded in it. The symbols didn’t look right. It was as if they were refracting off or through something. Amanda froze.
Daniels was frantically trying to get something he was holding in his hand to work. The emergency flare sputtered into life. It almost blinded Amanda and Hank with its phosphorescent, flickering glare. There was something wrong with the light from the flare. Just behind where Daniels was knelt over Coyle the flickering light was not behaving as it should. The misbehaving light moved. Daniels started screaming. He was lifted up into the air. There was more movement in the light and Daniel started spraying blood all over the cave.
‘Don’t you do it!’ Amanda was screaming. Amanda threw herself to the side as Daniels was flung at her.
Hank started firing. The staccato hammering of the Mk 60 medium machine gun in the enclosed space was deafening. The muzzle flash from the MMG created a strobing effect in the near darkness.
Amanda started firing as well, the recoil of the automatic shotgun hammering into her shoulder. In the confusion of flares, glowing alien symbols and muzzle flashes she had no idea what she was shooting at but she wanted a wall of fire between her and that thing.
Alan was suddenly next to her, his Grendel assault rifle at the ready. He was searching through the tech scope for a target but finding nothing. There was a popping noise as Okobe fired the underslung grenade launcher attached to his Grendel. The flare grenade exploded deep in the other tunnel that exited B site.
Amanda’s shotgun ran dry. Hank had already stopped firing. The air was thick with choking cordite smoke now. Their ears were ringing. Both the flares bathed them in flickering light. Okobe was reloading his grenade launcher. At the back of her mind some old training instinct was telling her that she should reload the shotgun. She ejected the magazine, stowed it and slid another home. She was just numbly going through the motions.
‘Boss?’ Alan asked. Amanda ignored him. She felt a hand on her shoulder. ‘Amanda?’ Her head shot round to look at him.
‘It’s got a cloak,’ she said. Alan looked confused for a moment. ‘A cloaking device. We can’t fucking see it.’
They had returned to the main site. Amanda was still shaking. She was almost spilling the coffee over herself. She didn’t want to watch the footage but she was forcing herself to. The shitty holo-projector was building the three-dimensional image from 2D footage, the final result was grainy and incomplete, but it showed them what they needed to see.
The dig workers had fled the moment the Ceph-tech had come to life. There was about fifty seconds of footage of the empty cave and then Coyle, Schmidt and Mikey had entered the cave cautiously, weapons at the ready. The beams of the flashlights on their weapons had caused the camera to flare. Despite his caution Mikey hadn’t even been aware of what had happened to him. It looked like some old horror film about demonic possession. Mikey’s head was yanked back. Then his throat had seemed to open of its own accord. Amanda paused the image and looked closely enough to see grainy imprints on Mikey’s face where the killer’s invisible fingers had gripped the head.
The camera flared again from the muzzle flashes from the Grendels, then an apparently invisible force picked up Schmidt and flung him into the camera.
That was the end of the footage. There was silence.
‘Did it know about the cameras?’ Alan finally asked.
‘I think we have to assume so,’ Amanda said.
‘How?’ Okobe asked.
‘What if it’s got our comms?’ Amanda asked.
There was silence. People looked around the diminished circle. Safiya had joined the surviving members of the security detail now. Asher was, after all, in sight of the entire team.
‘Would it even understand us?’ Alan asked.
‘They’re clearly intelligent,’ Amanda pointed out.
The few remaining workers in the sites outside the main cavern had refused to continue work. Amanda couldn’t blame them, either. The remaining security detail had escorted them back to the main cavern. Asher had spent some time screaming at them to get the workers back to work and how much they had failed. Nobody had shot him.
‘I’ve seen a cloak before,’ Hank told them. Eight eyes turned to look at him. ‘In New York we’d been trying to get the refugees out. We were working with elements of 4th Marine Recon. One of their guys, a fella by the name of Alcatraz, apparently got hisself some kind of experimental armour. It had a cloak but he was on our side. That marine was hell on wheels in a fight. Best weapon we had against those things.’ Alan and Amanda shared knowing glances. ‘What?’ Hank asked.
‘Tinman,’ Alan said. Okobe looked up at him. It got Safiya’s attention as well.
‘What’s Tinman?’ Hank asked.
‘Someone in some kind of experimental armour killed a fuck load of CELL contractors and Spec Ops guys. You heard of Dominic Lockhart?’
‘The guy who used to run the military side of CELL? The guy who fucked up the New York operation?’ Hank asked.
‘The guy who got blamed for fucking up the New York operation,’ Alan said. Amanda held her peace. She had her own opinion on Dominic Lockhart. ‘Well, this Tinman was supposed to be the one who killed him during an attack on a CELL complex. We’re right in the middle of an alien invasion and this Tinman turns on the very people who’re trying to do something about it.’
‘Look, Alan, I don’t want to get up in your face about this or anything, but CELL did things in New York…’
‘That the liberal media…’ Alan began.
‘Enough,’ Amanda said. ‘Hank, what’s your point?’
‘Whatever this Alcatraz or Tinman was about, he was about fighting Ceph. Asher said they’re reactive. They evolve from generation to generation in response to their environment. If they’d seen this cloak in action in New York then maybe their next generation will all pack a cloak.’
‘Some of the Ceph had cloaks in New York,’ Amanda said quietly. The others looked at her in horror.
‘There’s something else,’ Safiya said. ‘I overheard Asher speaking with one of the technicians. We were in site E. Asher had some kind of weird device that he hooked up to the Ceph tech fused into the rock itself. It was weird. The thing looked like their technology.’ Amanda thought back to how she had realised the Ceph tech imbedded in the rock had looked strange after the murders. ‘Asher said that it was all dead. That it had been infected by some variant of the Tunguska strain.’
‘So this thing is harming the Ceph tech?’ Okobe asked. His deep rumbling voice often made people think he was slow. Amanda knew that the quiet Nigerian just preferred to think long and hard about things. He was not infected with the westerners’ love of hearing their own voices.
‘So it could be the Tinman, then?’ Alan said.
‘How?’ Hank asked. ‘This Alcatraz was a Jarine, another throwback with a gun, just like me. He was hell on wheels in a fight when he was in the armour and he could kill swift, silent and deadly with the best of them, but he sure as hell wasn’t no Apex-Predator, invisible serial killer.’
‘Tell that to Dominic Lockhart and his men. He murdered fucking hundreds of CELL contractors. People just like you and me…’ Alan said angrily
.
‘Look buddy, I’m no fan of New York but what those CELL guys were doing…’
‘Enough,’ Amanda told them. ‘Forget about New York.’ She wished she could. ‘The fact is, it’s murdering our people. I don’t care whose side it thinks it’s on or what it may or may not have done in the past. It’s no friend to us. In the unlikely event we see it, we light it up.’
‘What do you want to do, boss?’ Safiya asked. Amanda could hear the fear in the other woman’s voice.
‘We bug out,’ Amanda said. ‘This is way above our pay grade. Even if we had K-Volts and Mikes, I wouldn’t want to fuck with this thing.’
‘Asher?’ Alan asked.
‘His career’s in the pan. He doesn’t want it to look like he’s fucking up this dig and he wants the glory if we catch or kill whatever this thing is. Hopefully he’s realised that this is beyond our collective capabilities, if not…’
‘I’ll handle the creepy fat fuck,’ Safiya said. The look of disgust overcame her obvious fear. ‘Anyone else noticed he smells of sour milk?’
‘If it comes down to a bullet I do it, you understand me? Nobody else, just me.’ There were grumblings around the circle. Nobody would meet her eyes. ‘I said just me. Understand?’ There were muttered assents. ‘Okay, let’s go and speak to him.’ Amanda made as if to get up. ‘No comms, understand me?’ she asked. They nodded and stood up. Amanda switched the magazine on her Jackal combat shotgun. Replacing the clip with the volt rounds she had been issued in New York. Each cartridge contained electrostatically-charged ball-bearings. She hadn’t used them. She was grateful for that now.
They were moving past the cave where they had stored the bodies when they heard the noise.
Alan had point, followed by Okobe, Amanda and Safiya, and Hank had the tail. They kept the flashlights off and moved as quietly as they could. They were relying on the light bleed from the main cavern for illumination. Amanda would have killed for even one pair of night vision goggles about now. The cave was wide and low. There were natural columns where stalactites and stalagmites had joined together.
Crysis: Escalation Page 10
