“The bad news,” he says, “is that we’re going to have to storm the post.”
He actually says we.
“I’m already halfway there,” he tells me. “The Harley doesn’t give a flying fuck about rocks in the road, I can thread this thing through a gutter pipe if I have to. I’ll wait for you there, but you gotta haul ass.”
I went to church religiously until I was fourteen. Never liked it much. Don’t expect to like it much now but I make the trip, find a decent vantage point to scope out the territory: a midrise apartment complex that looks like it’s been derelict since the Double Dip. The top floor gives me a perfect vantage point: Trinity’s steeple reaches up from across Broadway, a great stone dildo with a thousand ribs and projections urging the Incredible Fifty-Foot Woman to let go. The main entrance is a two-story arch, deep in shadow; but I have no trouble making out the two CELL grunts slouching in the shade.
I zoom the view and pan the terrain. Gould guesses the entrance is going to be rotten with motion sensors and smart guns and he’s right about that: I make three autosnipes in addition to the two hamburgers at the front before someone emerges from inside. The hamburgers jump instantly to attention. I prick up my ears, too: It’s—
“Sweet smoking Jesus, that’s Tara Strickland,” Gould says. “Used to be a Navy SEAL, went over to CELL after her father died. Try not to get killed by her. Try not to kill her, either; she’s big fish, she’s the goddamn Rosetta Stone if we can get her to talk.”
She’s talking now, tearing a strip off the grunts for slouching in a war zone. Then she disappears back inside, leaving her minions standing a lot straighter.
“Now, those assholes?” Gould says. “You can kill ’em all you want.”
So I do. Three shots total. Then I take out the smart guns. Two other hamburgers come charging out of the shadows and decide, too late, that discretion is sometimes the better part of valor. I take one of them out with a single shot; the other gets to cover behind a Ford pickup whose front bumper is festooned with the smiling face of Osama bin Laden and the words I’M STILL FREE: HOW ABOUT YOU? He knows he can’t get back to sanctuary without taking a bullet; he knows, as my grenade arcs down on top of him, that he can’t stay where he is. He bolts at the last second for an ad-infested bus stop shelter, manages one panicked yelp before the grenade goes off. He dies by the light of a flaming advertisement for Carmat Artificial Kidneys (ISN’T YOUR LIFE WORTH THE PRICE?).
I hit the stairwell and take the stairs ten at a time, make ground level in thirty seconds flat without hearing any rotors overhead, any boots below. I’m not quite sure I believe it; shouldn’t there be an assault helicopter coming over the rooftops by now? Shouldn’t someone be wondering why Asswipe Seven hasn’t called in? I can’t hear anything except this little voice in my head chuckling over the fact that we can’t even stop killing each other when we’re being invaded by space aliens.
It’s funny, you know, because it’s true.
I peek out, pan on zoom, again on thermal. I pull up my cloak and cross the street; I’m still half expecting a hail of heavenly lead but I don’t run into so much as a stop sign. I reach the bodies I’ve laid out across the asphalt, rob them of firepower and ammo that did them no fucking good whatsoever. I take some comfort in the knowledge that I will put it all to better use. I decloak in the shadows, let the charge build back up, fade again. Push one of those massive doors open just a little—solid bronze, I think, they looked like they were a couple of hundred years old—and sneak into God’s House like a shadow on its stomach.
And still nobody’s drawn any kind of bead on me. There’s nobody even here as far as I can tell. So I stand up and I look around, and—
And holy shit, Roger. It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know if I can even describe it. One second you’re in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and the next you’re on the floor of this great golden cavern, it’s dimly lit but somehow you can see everything even without the augments. You’d swear the ceiling reaches halfway to the stars; it rests on massive arches topped by these glorious stained-glass windows and they aren’t even broken, Roger, I swear not a single one of them is even scratched. The seats, the benches, what do they call those—yeah, the pews. Those have been ripped out. And sure enough a field hospital’s been set up in their place but even that’s gone now, nothing left but a few rows of stripped cots and a pile of empty crates with red crosses on them. The arches tower over everything like redwood trunks from the eighteen hundreds, you know, you see pictures online sometimes. And way off at the front behind the pulpit, about halfway up the wall are rows of life-sized statues in little alcoves, saints or martyrs or something. And towering over that there’s this enormous mother of all stained-glass windows: wide as any church I’ve ever seen, and twice as high, a great arch that’s all one window full of a hundred colors and a thousand facets. Must be five, six stories high and the colors are so rich they almost hurt my eyes, I almost forgot we had colors like that in the world. The light’s almost—I don’t know. Divine.
I feel like an ant in a kaleidoscope. I swear to God, Roger, that church was so much bigger on the inside, we could pack the whole city in there if we tried. And there’s more than enough room, because I’m the only one there. No CELL grunts, no whitecoats running around with beeping boxes, no hard-ass ex-navy bitches waiting to feed me my balls on a platter. I pump up the acoustics, I zoom every shadow, and there’s nothing but this insane, beautiful pocket universe I’ve stumbled into. I just want to stay there and let Armageddon go on without me.
No chance of that, of course. Because here comes Nathan Gould roaring up outside on his motorbike and he comes stomping into the place like a fucking barbarian. I don’t think he even notices the windows. He looks around and sees nothing, kicks one of the cots. “Shit. We’re too late.”
But he gives it the once-over anyway, starts poking around the desks and the tables up front, and the spell’s broken so I figure I might as well join him. After a few minutes he lets loose a whoop and holds up a sheaf of papers like it was the head of a vanquished enemy.
“They’ve relocated!” he says. “Moved across the way to Wall Street, looks like. Closer to the trunk line.” He jerks his chin at that magnificent windowed wall. “Down in the basement, under the stairwell. There’s an access tunnel, goes under the street. I can hack the security codes, but there’s bound to be muscle. What we need—”
He looks around, and nods to himself.
“—is a diversion.”
Time/Date of Incident: 23/08/2023
Nature of Incident: Security Breach
Location: Field Interrogation Facility, Wall Street, Manhattan
CELL Personnel Present: C. Abao, S.-H. Chen, H. Kumala, D. Lockhart, M. Parpek, B. Rawles, T. Strickland, L. deWinter
Others Present: N. Gould, Unknown
Reporting Participant: deWinter
Account of Incident:
I was carrying out duties assigned by CO Lockhart (installing/prepping NODAR interface for debriefing incoming rogue agent) along with Chen, Lieutenant Kumala, Parpek, and Dr. Rawles, when the incident occurred. We were operating in an active combat zone but we were guarded by at least 14 active CELL paramilitary both during initial deployment at Trinity and subsequent relocation. At approximately 1300 I overheard Kumala speaking to Special Adviser Strickland on encrypted channel. SA Strickland reported that the rogue operative had been sighted in the area and would be in custody soon. We therefore booted up NODAR and began ground-truthing sims. (We had to do this three times because of intermittent power failures during the first sequences, before Chen got a generator from the trailers.)