But here I am, ten meters from the elevators, and all that stands in my way are three CELLulites left to guard the supplies. That running jump burned through two-thirds of my charge, but for the moment I’m still stealthed.
These boys are not convinced. Last time they saw me I was on the other side of the plaza, but I could be anywhere by now. I could be right in front of them. How would they know?
They’ll know soon enough. They’ll know in about three seconds, because the charge bar’s just started flashing red. I bring up the Grendeclass="underline" not the best accuracy and a downright shitty clip size, but these tungsten rounds would stop a rhino and my targets are almost close enough to touch.
They see my face, and blow apart.
It’s not completely clear sailing after that. Their buddies can’t wait to lay down the law now that I’m back in their worldview, and the elevator doors are jammed. I have to finesse my way in, and it seems like I have to fend off a whole fucking platoon in the process. By the time I get those doors jimmied open, drop the twenty meters to the bottom of the shaft, and take care of anyone who tries to follow little Timmy down the well—we’re looking at a final score of somewhere around seventeen–zip.
Like I said before. That’s what you get when you work nine-to-five.
The bottom of the shaft is chest-deep in scummy water; a service crawlway leads off to the north, a half-flooded mess of ruptured plumbing, soggy cardboard crates, and the occasional pulpy corpse. Dim lights glow here and there in rusty little cages, antique bulbs with actual filaments inside. I bet they’ve been down here since the twentieth century.
There’s brighter light farther down the passage, though. I follow it to a hole torn in the ceiling, duck under an exposed I-beam, and climb a pile of cinder blocks and shattered tiles to another Ceph pod; it rammed down into this space at a forty-five-degree angle, and is half buried by collapsed ceiling and uprooted floor.
And it’s—bleeding, or something.
The pod’s ruptured in several spots. The stuff oozing from those wounds is the color of snot or old candle wax, and it’s everywhere: running in ropy strings along the hull, pooling on the screen, hanging in thick gooey stalactites from the breached ceiling. It moves. It—undulates. Or maybe that’s just the light: I look around for the first time and see the far end of the room, relatively unscathed behind me. A floor lamp, knocked on its side, throws light across the space at a low angle, full of contrast and long shadows. So, yeah: probably just a trick of the light. But I can’t shake the feeling that those giant hanging boogers squirm just the slightest bit, as if I’m looking at a thin-walled brood sac with some kind of half-seen larva incubating inside.
“That’s it,” Gould says on comm. “You gotta scan that stuff.”
Scan? But SECOND’s training wheels take their own initiative: broad-spectrum chemical sensors built into the fingertips, according to the graphical thumbnails popping up on BUD. I saccade the right dropdowns, switch to tactical—remind myself it won’t actually be me touching this shit—and lay on the hands.
The N2’s fingertips leave soft depressions in the alien snot. Almost instantly lists of ingredients start scrolling down my brain: chemical formulae I somehow recognize as organic even though I can barely remember high school chemistry. Amine groups. Polysaccharides. Glycolipids.
Why is this ringing so many bells?
It’s ringing bells for Gould, too. I hear him trying to keep his lunch down across a whole borough and a shitload of static. “Jesus, man, that’s—that’s people. Just melted down, just—just lysed. What the fuck is this?”
I remember pus spurting from squashed ticks. Odd that Gould doesn’t seem to know about that.
“I can’t do anything with this. We struck out. You better get out of there before CELL shows up. Back to Plan A.”
He doesn’t even say lab. Waypoints and objectives reset themselves anyway. Goddamn this suit is smart.
Going back up the elevator shaft is a nonstarter. I climb over the wreckage into the other end of the room: some kind of security or janitorial office, judging by the desk and the filing cabinets. A row of windows on the opposite wall looks out into what used to be the lower parking level; now it looks onto a slope of collapsed concrete, sloping up toward a thin slice of sky. The glass is caged behind one of those antiburglary grilles.
Yeah. Right.
I start up the slope. No comm chatter: That’s odd. Maybe CELL’s figured out that I’m hacking into their frequencies.
No rotor noise, either. That’s odder.
Almost there.
I stop. Look right. Nothing. Left. Nothing. Up: just sky.
Forward.
Oh shi—
It jumps down on me from nowhere, slams me facedown into the rubble, flips me over onto my back and pins me there. It’s a nest of naked black backbones spliced together into something that almost looks humanoid. It’s got backbones for arms, spiky segmented things that end in—hands, I guess you’d call them. Claws. I can’t get a good look at them, they’re pressed down against my shoulders but they seem way too big, like catcher’s mitts on a stick man. There’s another backbone where a backbone should be, connecting those arms to a set of armored robodog legs with too many joints. There’s something on top, a helmet for a head like the front of a bullet train with clusters of orange eyes on each side. There’s a blob of boneless gray tissue in the middle of it all.
It’s like my bogeyman from the roof, but different. Meaner.
I try to move but the fucker’s strong, man, I can’t throw it off and my gun’s been knocked halfway across the rubble. One backbone-arm pulls back like it’s winding up for a punch, and that long metal mitt just splits open to reveal more drills and needles and probes than a goddamn dentist’s chair on steroids. Something whirls from the middle of that cluster and spears me in the chest. The BUD jumps; my icons scramble; my eyeballs fill with static.
The N2 starts talking.
It’s not False Prophet. It’s not English. It’s not even human, it’s just—gibberish. Clicks, hiccups, these weird hooting sounds. And the shit I’m suddenly seeing on tactical isn’t making any more sense, green pastel suddenly flickering into orange and purple, alphanumerics turning into hieroglyphics, and what do you call those blobs you headshrinkers used to use before we laughed you out of town?—Rorschach blots. That’s it. The whole interface is fried and I’m stuck there for I don’t know how long, can’t be more than a few seconds but it seems like forfuckingever.
And then False Prophet does speak up, and at least he’s speaking human even though I don’t know exactly what he’s talking about. He says:
And the alien leaps off me and darts away like I was the bogeyman.
Gould comes back to me as the BUD sobers up: “You had it, man! You triggered sampling mode, but it didn’t—listen, Prophet, whatever you just did: Do it again!”
Right. Chase down the nice monster and sweet-talk it into skewering me a second time. That’s gonna happen.