Gould pushes me back toward the door, indifferent to the teetering piles of crap we’re knocking over en route. “You gotta keep them out. You gotta take them out.” And I’m back in the hall, staring at a closed door, listening to half a dozen locks and deadbolts clicking into place on the other side.
Brave, brave man, Nathan Gould.
But he hasn’t abandoned me. A moment later he’s back on comm, my own personal Seeing Eye dog: “The stairwell’s blocked at this end of the hall, they’re gonna have to come out on the other side of the atrium. They’re still six floors up, you’ve got a few minutes . . .”
I call the elevator and jam a potted plant between the doors; if they’re dumb enough to try that approach they’ll have to rappel down the shaft. The hall opens out on the upper rim of a mezzanine, gloomy as a cave and with almost as many places to hide. But if Gould’s right, that door across the atrium is the only access point from the enemy’s approach. Good bottleneck, clear line-of-sight. This could be easy if I can just nail them before they have a chance to fan out.
Gould crackles in my ear: “Hey, I hacked their freq. The idiots are recycling their initialization vectors. They’re CELL, all right.”
I center my sights on the closed door across the space, hold my fire, crank the acoustic gain: sure enough I can hear quiet movement on the other side. I pan back and forth a bit, and double-take: soft sounds whispering at closer range, too, through the nearer walls of the atrium itself. CELL’s trying to flank me. I can hear footsteps, and whispers, and
—slithering—
And Gould in my ear breathing “Ohhh, no . . . oh, shit . . .”
And you don’t need volume enhance at all, to hear the screaming.
They hit CELL first. Even on the other side of that closed and distant door I hear them come through the walls. I hear the gunfire, and that otherworldly chittering; I hear shouts and panicked orders and the wet tearing sounds of bones being pulled from their sockets. Then the door bursts open on the far balcony, and all that blood and biosteel tumbles into view like a gory mudslide.
But by that time I’ve got my hands full with the Ceph that have come through the walls on my own side of the playground.
I don’t know how they got in here. I don’t know why they didn’t show up on Gould’s cameras. Maybe they’ve got cloaks. Maybe they just punched through floors and ceilings to get around, bypassed the halls and stairwells entirely. Brave, brave Sir Nathan isn’t any help—“Fuck man I’m outta here!”—and I’m not making it back to his girlfriend’s place anyway, not without a hell of a firefight. Squiddie owns this floor.
The cloak is my only edge. I think the Ceph might be able to see though it, but not very well; their aim is wild, and CELL targets are so very much easier to get a lock on. I’m not a big fan of unnecessary heroics. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then two families of very dear friends are busy beating the shit out of each other, and I’m not about to get involved in a domestic squabble. So I hide in plain sight. I slip from pillar to post. Sometimes one or two of the grunts turn my way, suspiciously sniff the air with those banana-slug tentacles, then return to the fray.
But just because I’m not an active participant in this melee doesn’t mean I can’t rack up a few experience points. You can learn a lot by watching. So I take a few notes as I sneak out the back way. I watch one merc shoot the leg off an exoskeleton and the squirming slimy thing inside launches itself right out of the harness and comes at her stark naked, flailing its tentacles like clubs. I watch another take out a monster from the stars with a shotgun, seconds before a different monster blows him away in turn. But most of all I see a fight that’s way more even than it has any right to be: creatures smart enough to hop among solar systems, duking it out with us backboned primitives in a dingy hallway like this was some kind of sock hop between the Bloods and the Crips. I see them fighting like us, and I don’t know why they’d do that. I see combat exoskeletons that leave the meat exposed, tentacles or antennae or fucking penises for all I know, flailing around completely unprotected.
Know what I see, Roger?
There’s got to be something I’m not seeing.
What do you think about that, Roger? You must have an opinion.
I wondered for a while if maybe those tentacle thingies were gills or lungs or something, had to stay exposed to the air to let them breathe. But that still doesn’t explain why you’d expose them to bullets; Jesus Christ, these guys hop among stars and they can’t invent chain mail? Countercurrent air pumps are too complicated for them? Doesn’t make any goddamn sense, running into battle with your junk hanging out.
But then I thought, maybe that’s the whole point.
You know about the Celts, right? The Gaesatae? There were these tribes back in ancient times, took on the Romans, might have even been mercs. And I shit you not, these guys literally ran into battle naked. Painted themselves up, spiked their hair to make them look all badass, but they’d leave their dicks flapping in plain sight. It was an intimidation tactic. Made the enemy feel all insecure or something I guess, you know, Holy shit these guys are so tough they don’t even need armor, we’d better just run away now. And there were even armor-using cultures back then that would deliberately leave their backs exposed, even if they loaded up their fronts with enough shielding to stop a battering ram. To keep you fighting on the battlefield, you know? You’re less likely to turn tail if it leaves you open for an easy kill. And Squiddie, well, most of that exposed meat is definitely dorsal, am I right?
Sorry, what did you call—Handicap Principle. Can’t say I ever heard of it.
Oh, right. You mean, like a peacock tail. Look at me, I’m so fit I can afford to drag all this dead weight around just to look impressive. Same basic thing, I guess. Except your peacocks are trying to impress their mates, and the Celts were trying to impress their enemies. I mean, it’s not very smart, but then again it’s a brain-stem thing, right? And I don’t have to tell you about the stupid shit our brain stems get us up to.
Maybe Squiddie’s not so different after all.
What? Oh, no: They ended up getting their asses handed to them. Scared the shit out of the Romans on first sight, but in the end it doesn’t matter how big your dick is: A javelin’s always gonna be bigger. So the moment someone stopped running and put them to the test it was all Hey, the Gaesatae have no clothes! Game over.
A shame we can’t repeat that bit of history, huh?
You know. Because I am remembering it.
Trinity
Dear Neville,
I hope our Lord is keeping you safe in these most trying of times. I have tried to contact you through more conventional means but the network has been down for some time in Manhattan and now my batteries have died. I have resorted to the old-fashioned methods our ancient brethren used, in the days before the technophiles and idolaters seduced us with their global networks and their Internet pornography (although I must admit that I find myself missing the satellite feed and Prayer Line that funds our ministry. Praise the Lord, who turns the Devil’s own tools to such righteous ends!).
It is day four and our mission here is beginning to make progress, although perhaps more slowly than I would have hoped. New York was full of wickedness even before the End Days began, which is of course why Satan chose it as his first stronghold (though I admit I would have expected him to start with Los Angeles or Fergus). Communists and sodomites are almost as thick upon the ground here as demons, and while recent events have caused many of the locals to repent, others even now resist our attempts to lead them to salvation (none so blind as those who will not see). Those damnable Anglicans, sensing an opportunity to spread their particular brand of liberalism, have also set up shop on the other side of the borough; many survivors encounter them first, and desperate for even the appearance of redemption, are fooled by their use of Christian props. I hear that even the ragheads have regrouped at a mosque over in Hamilton Heights! Fortunately they are wasting their time by launching jihad against Satan’s armies instead of converting souls (they know the easier enemy to beat when they see it, ha ha!), and we have had no direct encounters with them so far.