Invulnerable. That’s the word. Invulnerable.
After all, Prophet took a shell to the chest wearing these threads, and he stayed standing. So yeah, I’m feeling like the last son of Krypton, and there’s a crashed alien ship just a few blocks away. Who wouldn’t want to check that out?
I know I’m being led by the nose. But the truth is I’d have probably headed over to take a look anyway.
Manhattan’s been carved into a jigsaw.
It’s not the aliens’ doing. It’s not even the random chaos of collapsing buildings and seismic tremors. It’s us. Ten thousand slabs of concrete have been slotted together and laid across the cityscape like interlocking dominoes ten meters high, and every last one has CELL stamped across it in big black letters. The whole zone’s been partitioned into a hundred irregular cookie-cutter shapes. The last time I saw this much cement in such a small area, it was being used to keep Israelis and Palestinians from tearing each other’s throats out.
This particular barricade cuts right across the middle of Broad Street. The nearest storm-sewer grating is about twenty meters back from a massive corrugated gate topped by a scrolling marquee that endlessly repeats LOWER MANHATTAN SEALED OFF in block capitals. I pry off the grille and drop below the street; five minutes later I’m cloaked and flattened against a savings and loan on East Houston, leaning around the corner into the sound of helicopters and idling APCs.
Way to go on the whole partitioned-containment thing, guys.
I think this used to be some kind of open-air plaza. Right now it’s a smoking hole, a ragged cutaway model ripped open to show the cracked stacked levels of an underground parking garage. If there’s a ship buried down there under all those cement floes, it’s too deep for me to make out. I can see three of those cylindrical pods scattered around, though: half buried in the street, face-planted in an urban flower patch, taking the absolute piss out of a dozen tables on a café patio. Strip away some of that weird Ceph chrome and they almost could have come off the backs of cement trucks.
A helicopter drifts back and forth over the center of the tableau. I see a couple of APCs parked in front of a deli, and over across the crater half a dozen ammo and supply crates have been stacked along the wall of the elevator hutch that must have been the main pedestrian parkade access before the Ceph pioneered the whole open-access approach. Maybe a dozen CELLulites wander the perimeter. A few more hump kit from the APCs to the elevator cache.
My cloak’s almost drained. I pull back around the corner as Gould natters on about checking the pods. “We’re looking for tissue samples, dead crew.”
Yeah, and the couple of dozen assorted mercs over there are looking for me, even with a flying saucer buried under their feet: “Keep your eyes peeled for that Nanosuit asshole. The way they’re talking, he’s more trouble than the Ceph.”
I cloak up, cross the ten meters to the OVERPRICED PARKING: IN ONLY ramp, hop the guardrail, and drop down behind the interlocked front ends of a Taurus and a Malibu that couldn’t seem to agree on traffic flow. I risk decloaking, let the charge rebuild while unsuspecting uniforms above my head fill the air with chatter.
“You picking anything up on the scanner?”
“Nah, looks like they ejected before impact. We’re just waiting for the cleanup crew.”
“If they ejected, where the hell did they go?”
“Good question.”
It is, too. I add it to the list as I recloak and start down the ramp; if the pods are a bust, maybe I can sneak into the crater from one of the garage levels. By the time the money shot comes I’m so far down that I almost miss it:
“Christ, that thing’s buried deep. Only way down is through the elevator shaft.”
Oh.
So the good news is, there may be a way to get Gould his samples: Could be it, man, a shot at rolling back the spore, maybe even the whole invasion. Rah.
Bad news is, it’s on the far side of the plaza in the middle of a crowd of trigger-happy mercs stationed right next to a fresh stock of ammunition, who have orders to shoot me on sight.
Worst news, though, is that I’m hearing at least four sets of boots approaching the bottom of the ramp ahead of me, and there’s no fucking way I can get all the way back up before my cloak runs dry.
I love it when the number of options dwindles to one. Really speeds up the decision-making process.
They hear me before they see me; the cloak is good, but it doesn’t mask the sound of boots charging down a concrete ramp at thirty klicks an hour. They stop talking, their guns come up, and suddenly I’m right there, laying shotgun blasts into all that Kevlar, bringing the Marshal down like a club on those shiny gray helmets, grabbing one of them by the throat and watching her sail through space until a convenient support pylon takes her from sixty to zero in no seconds.
Shouts from deeper within the garage. Panicked calls for back-up on comm. I’m coming for them. They know it.
But I’m not. I recloak, swap the Marshal out for a recently orphaned assault rifle and head back up the ramp. Strength is amped so I’m moving fast, but between that and the cloak every capacitor in the suit’s gonna run dry in about three seconds. Make that two: I pull a boosted jump over the reinforcements clattering down the ramp, six eager little sociopaths don’t see me coming and don’t see me go but that last mighty leap took me down to the fumes and I materialize from thin air as I pass above their heads. I don’t think they saw that I hope they didn’t see that, their eyes were down and focused on the forward charge, but no time to look it’s all in the past and I’m rising up to ground level now, I’ve got a chopper overhead and a whole shitload of hostiles coming around that crater (two, four, seven, eight, nine targets SECOND tells me, and lays neat little ranges and targeting triangles over each). I deke and I duck but it’s not enough to keep me from taking hits; and even though the suit can handle them it just kills the capacitor feed, the power bar stutters to a crawl on its way up the recharge trail.
HMG fire from the chopper. I lob a grenade into the sky and the pilot pulls back—an unnecessary reflex, that little pineapple doesn’t even come close, but it’s enough to throw the gunner off his aim. I hit the deck and roll behind a waist-high concrete planter holding a row of spindly stunted trees. The grenade bounces and rolls and blows out the windows of the deli.
Eight seconds, tops, before they flank me.
The charge bar tops up at six. I fade, roll away from the planter, get to my feet. I’ve noticed that the cloak lasts a lot longer when the suit isn’t pulling power for a lot of other things. I can stay invisible for forty-five seconds, maybe a whole minute if I just stand still.
Maybe almost as long if I just move very, very . . . slowly.
I amble sideways while the air fills with shouts of Lost the target and Shit he’s cloaked again. I line up my approach: five long steps to the edge of the crater on turbo, then maybe fifteen meters to cross the gap near the left edge. I amp strength to max and move.
I nail the launch: solid traction, boots leave the ground maybe twenty centimeters from the edge, and the moment I’m airborne I drop strength right back to baseline. I sail over that gap like a ghost.
And nearly blow the landing. My feet come down with no room to spare. I land just past the lip of the hole and wobble back and forth, windmilling my arms to keep from falling over. No time to worry about the sound of my boots on the pavement; if the rotors and the shouts and the random suppressing fire didn’t mask it I’m probably fucked.