Hargreave delivers the eulogy as SECOND builds the connection. “Best I had, aside from Tara Strickland. What a waste.”
Reeves stares through me while his machine shakes hands. At least he still has eyes.
At least the spore left him with that much.
I’m heading for something Hargreave calls “the Hive.” Doesn’t that sound like fun. According to Reeves’s laptop it’s almost dead north. This subway tunnel curves northeast.
Close enough.
The tunnels arched and ancient and lined with patterned tiles that wouldn’t look half bad if someone stripped off about a hundred years of grease and black mold. Some stretches have grimy skylights behind ornate iron grilles, and the dim dirty light that filters down might even be natural. Others are lit by yellow bulbs in cheap tin chandeliers. I slosh past cracks and cave-ins and zigzag chains of derailed cars as Hargreave checks out Reeves’s data. I climb along tracks that used to be flat; now they’ve been wrenched into roller coasters. Sparking fluorescents and brain-dead signal lights flash at random, filling the passages with brightness and shadow and flickering bloody twilight.
I never walk alone. Hargreave whispers in my ear. Ceph infantry stalk along the tunnels and shoot on sight, hooting and chittering and clicking. I must be on the right track; their numbers climb the farther I go. Too many to take on at once; the suit isn’t flooding me with bloodlust so I guess it agrees. We cloak in fits and starts, and try to pass unseen.
It works for a while.
Something crashes down into the tunnel just ahead: a steel fist, a battering ram, a subway car punching through from an overhead line like Thor’s Hammer through a leaky condom. I don’t know what sent it down here, I don’t know if it’s accident or assault, I don’t know what set the fucking thing on fire. But there it is, forty meters dead ahead, a few hundred tons of torqued and screaming metal, belching flames and smoke. It spits pieces everywhere: shards of glass, ragged little shurikens of flaming metal, chunks of concrete ricocheting from the shattered wall. One of them must have hit me, because suddenly I can see my shadow dancing in the firelight like a big fucking arrowhead.
And all these armed and armored garden slugs see it, too.
They’re on me from angles I didn’t even know they had: from behind, from around the corner of the burning train, but from above, too, from overhead service catwalks I’ve been too fucking stupid to even notice all this time. They fire through grilles and gratings way too narrow for a clean return shot—and man, even the grunts I can get a bead on are way tougher than they have any right to be. I’m pumping off shots that blow good-sized divots out of reinforced concrete, and these fuckers just take it. Four, five shots to bring them down sometimes—even with all that unprotected meat showing—and I don’t have nearly enough ammo to go around.
There’s a service closet at my back, heavy door, double-locked, but a few wild shots from the Ceph take care of that before I even get there. I manage to duck back inside an instant before the armor setting bleeds out the cells. It gives me some cover, buys the suit a bit of recharge time. I fire around the corner often enough to keep the Squids from advancing too quickly, but they’re out there and I’m in here and this is not what you’d call a sustainable situation.
I switch to StarlAmp—light flickers in through the doorway but the corners of this little cave are still deep in shadow—and I spare a moment to survey the digs. There’s a pail in here, and a mop. A fuse box on the wall, jammed with breakers and switches and high-voltage cables. There’s a bloated corpse squirming with spore, some poor bastard who found a dark place to die. I flash back to all the other poor bastards before him, the Rapture-heads, the suicidal mothers, the bodies twitching in the street like frog’s legs jumping to an electric current—
And suddenly I see something else in here, too. I see a way out.
I duck back around the corner and hand out way more ammo than I should. Ceph scatter before my suppressing fire; I catch at least two of them right in the dorsal tentacles, blow a couple of those waving wormy things right the fuck off, leave them flapping on the ground while their owners dive for cover. Doesn’t even slow them down. Gotta hand it to the slugs; if someone blew off one of my limbs I don’t think I’d be quite so blasé about it.
And then I think: Predator–prey. And then I think: Nature documentaries.
And suddenly, for just that one brief instant, Ceph battle armor—the sheer idiocy of leaving all that meat exposed to enemy fire—almost makes a kind of sense.
Maybe it’s like those reef fish that have the big fake eyespots down near the tail, to trick predators into going for the wrong end. Maybe those big wavy tentacles are vulnerable by design, maybe they’re not gills or penises but cannon fodder. Maybe the whole point is to look vulnerable, to draw enemy fire to something that can be dropped and discarded the way a lizard sheds its tail, leaves the predator chewing on some scaly scrap while the primary target skitters away unharmed.
Now I’m not saying that kind of Animal Planet shit would necessarily work when you graduate to dustups that use actual honest-to-God technology. Any enemy smart enough to lob a flashbang or build an SMG is gonna figure that trick out pretty quick. But so what? Why go out of your way to shield something that only exists to be blown off in the first place? You don’t need it for anything, so you might as well allocate your resources to something that matters.
Apropos of nothing, of course. Just a friendly pointer in case you ever find yourself face-to-phallus with those slimy little fuckers in the near future.
But it’s just a flash, really, a little chunk of insight crammed into the space of an eyeblink. The brain plays with the theory but the body keeps the plan in motion. My suppressing fire has got the Ceph to back off a bit, given me a few extra seconds to put the pieces into place. I rip open that switch box, I rip out those cables, I loop them up and tie them together. And when I cloak at last, fully charged, and sneak back out into the tunnel, the Ceph don’t even notice—because they still hear me, trapped in that little room. They can still see my shadow moving in there, framed by the flickering blue light of shorted circuits. And by the time they get their nerve back and rush my defenses—by the time they discover that corpse wired up like a marionette, live cables under its arms, dancing a fifty-thousand-volt jig against the wall—I’m already behind enemy lines.
Galvanic reflexes.
I bet I’m the only one in my whole fucking squad who would’ve thought of that.
The ghost of Mitchell Reeves leads me on to an impassable cave-in where his living body planted canisters of C-4 before turning back to die a thousand meters farther upstream. I don’t know why he never detonated them: But I do, and when the dust and the wreckage have settled I crawl from the tunnel we made into one we didn’t: a place full of shadows and segmented machines and dim, sickly gray light.
I think it’s a cave at first, carved from the bedrock beneath Manhattan and almost as large. Great curving spinal columns of dark gunmetal arc across the vast space, orange eyespots glimmering from each vertebra. Massive towers of wheels and gears and sawtooth machinery loom ahead. A cave, a subterranean city. But then something rises out of a fissure ahead—a floating cannon, a flying abortion put together from gun belts and engine blocks, all its viscera welded to the outside of its hull. The usual flickering red levitators push it into the sky, and as I watch it rise I see there is a sky up there, grim and gloomy, but that is not the roof of a cave and this is no hollow beneath Manhattan. This is an open pit, and up around its edges I can see the towers of New York.