POSTHUMAN

Chapter Two

Daemons. The label alone was enough to make Marcus want to run over the hills and far away. What kind of sane person wanted to be branded with such a word? The connotations of its near homophone were worrying in the extreme. Gossip spread its wings and flew all about the streets, filling people's heads with a thousand wild thoughts. The terms 'posthuman' and 'daemon' occurred so often that Marcus had started to take notice. These foreign visitors were not just technologically advanced, but an entirely different subspecies to them.

        As Marcus understood it, he was Homo sapiens postquam sapiens – though this was gleaned from Marcus' limited knowledge of biology. What did being a posthuman really make these people from The Providence? There's another thing Marcus disliked, the name of their overarching organisation. The moniker summoned up images of religious zealots setting fire to everything, mental associations with crazed fundamentalism did little to engender posthumans; Marcus' quiet suspicion of The Providence and its motives was possibly the only voice of reason in the city after a month of national familiarity with daemons.

        Mayor D'Amico liaised extensively between The Providence and Washington D.C., gently persuading President Jasper Coleridge to agree to the posthuman programme. Marcus' quiet suspicion became a roaring fire of paranoid reproach. In the meantime, The Providence set about helping to clear out the necroes and ferals plaguing the outskirts of built-up areas.

Still a member of the National Guard, Marcus was obliged to be there but he needn't like the people he was being forced to work with. D'Amico's love affair with The Providence led to him insisting the daemons' Stormwatch (another forbidding title) set up their North American Command (NAMCOM) in New York City. Colonel Zane Cork and Commandant Judah Nimåfänger headed up both the posthuman programme and NAMCOM initiatives. Marcus can recall clearly his first time meeting Judah Nimåfänger: the National Guard had summoned him, and many others, to assist Stormwatch in the cleansing of Pike County.

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20th April 2111.

Pike County, Pennsylvania was just on the edge of the enormous, sprawling conurbation that was New York City in the year 2111 AD. The city was huge, covering nearly all of what used to be referred to as Metropolitan New York – which now existed within the boundaries of Greater New York. Pike County was the last stop before great swathes of land where the necroes and ferals went at one another with merciless zeal. This endemic war spilled over into the county, probably as a result of more necroes shuffling in to follow the herd. The wretched creatures could smell each other even better than humans could, which was pretty damn well, a bit too well for Marcus' liking.

        Marcus rode in an M4 Bull ICV, an armoured personnel carrier with a few wonderful armaments. Its armoured shell could easily become his fancy, armoured coffin if any ferals had gotten hold of heavy weapons – these things had happened before. These fears were abated as the ICV slowed to a stop; he could hear the engines of other carriers rumbling. The hatch opened, some sunlight added to the artificial illumination of his ICV. He and his squad departed their Bull and gathered at a mustering zone. Marcus could quickly tell National Guard from Genesis Corps by their small, noticeable insignia. There, on the left arms of the Stormwatch troops' combat uniforms: a vertically divided shield – a golden lightning bolt behind a white P on a blue field to the left, and a skyward blue blade behind a golden G on a white field to the right. Marcus's squad, he was a Staff Sergeant in the National Guard so entitled to nine subordinates, gathered in the area between their ICVs and the Stormwatch Mv6 Buster APCs.

        A man whose high cheekbones, flaxen hair and frosty grey-blue eyes made him look cruel in a very special way, strolled out to address the troops. He walked with the confidence of someone who knew they could kill a person in so many ways that it bordered on farcically simple. His body armour wasn't the Advanced Outer Tactical Vest of the US Army; he wore the much sturdier, and previously unknown, Superior Personnel Defence Vest. Whereas Marcus' weapon of choice was an MX34 battle carbine and his pistol an MX22 Pitbull, the commandant's assault rifle was the deadlier, and previously unheard of, Mv44 Grinder and his pistol appeared to be some sort of 'hand cannon'. Marcus felt thoroughly emasculated, and this daemon officer hadn't spoken a word. He wondered how wretched he would feel when the man opened his mouth.