Crysis Escalation - By Gavin G. Smith Page 0,1

away with and headed out onto the airstrip to join his squad.

Outside, under the harsh sodium glare of the floodlights, the second heavy-lift aircraft was unloading APCs. More heavily armed and armoured CELL security personnel filed down the aircraft loading ramp into the freezing Siberian night. Whatever it was, CELL were going in heavy. Maybe it is another Ceph incursion after all, Walker thought. His fear of the aliens was suppressed under a sheen of narcotic courage as he joined his squad.

‘Your head in this game?’ his squad’s new CO asked as she checked her Jackal combat shotgun. The African-American woman had a strong New York accent. She wore a helmet, and a fleece cap under that, but Walker knew that her head was shaved down to the bone and he’d noticed that her ears and noses had holes in them from multiple piercings that had clearly been removed.

‘Locked and loaded, LT,’ Walker said, with a confidence the drugs were almost making him feel.

‘Outstanding,’ his new lieutenant said.

Rovesky Township, upper Podkamennaya Tunguska River, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, Russian Federation, 2025

‘I hate it when it gets in your eye,’ Eda said in her native German.

‘You’re just going to have to woman up, I’m afraid,’ Klaus told her, and then he sighed theatrically and mimed wiping his eye clean.

There was giggling from some of the other prostitutes present who spoke German. It wasn’t voyeurism, Prophet told himself as he listened to the translation of their conversation. No, it was, he admitted, but it had nothing to do with the sex in the brothel below his attic hidey-hole. He just about knew all the prostitutes’ stock responses now. It was their lives. He knew that Klaus was jealous of Vladimir’s cheekbones. He knew that Eda was still young enough to dream of a Pygmalion scenario. He knew who was secretly pregnant. Who were lovers. He heard their Macronet calls to their friends and family back home, the lies they told them, the tears after.

It wasn’t the bad old days of the slaving sex trafficking rings. Natasha’s House of Pleasure was registered and unionised and Prophet wouldn’t be surprised if he could trace ownership of the brothel back to CELL. They seemed to own everything else these days and the township existed to service their cobalt mine. Though Prophet was convinced that it was a front to continue their scientific investigation of the Tunguska Crater. However, thousands of years of social stigma against those who rented their bodies out for the enjoyment of others wasn’t going to be wiped away in a moment.

It was life that he listened to, spied on. It was something that the nanosuit had effectively cut him off from.

He didn’t think that conditions were great for the workers in the brothel, but what he found was that no matter how bad things got, even if a miner went “thatch” on one of them due to too many productivity enhancing drugs, there was always humour present. In that they were like soldiers. He had almost intervened the last time a client had gone “thatch” – fortunately the security had got there before the John had cut the guy too badly.

Still, he knew this was a distraction. The brothel, the coming down off the roofs to walk the frozen streets late-at-night. Looking through windows at people having lives, scraping by in this brave new economy. Somehow, when he saw people huddled around the glow of the Macronet feeds, like they would give warmth, all the stories seemed to be about the CELL Corporation these days. Crynet Enforcement & Local Logistics. Somehow the security consultant company – or mercenaries, to give them their older name – that had so badly bungled the Ceph incursion in New York had managed to pretend competence long enough to re-invent itself as an energy company. It was a rebirth worthy of a particularly corrupt phoenix, he mused.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ Psycho said from his corner of the loft. The other nanosuited soldier had been watching a feed from the Macronet on a portable screen. Something about CELL launching a satellite network to complement the work they had been doing to turn the ruins of New York into a vast facility for energy generation.

There was only Psycho left of his nanosuited team, Prophet mused. They’d all left him now. All gone their own way, died or been captured by CELL. Or just lost faith in the mission. Cupcake, Bandit, Fire Dragon and Lazy Dane, who had been getting