Then I’m flat on my back, and a horse has just kicked me in the chest.
A horse, or a high-caliber armor-piercing round. Tactical vectors back and highlights a target halfway up a faraway cliff face, too hidden in the local cover for a make. Not human, though.
“Ah,” Hargreave murmurs. “That’s interesting.”
No warnings on tactical.
“Stay absolutely still. If its dealings so far have been with ordinary soldiers, it thinks you’re dead. Act like it.”
I sacc’ suit diagnostics just to be sure. No redlights.
SECOND keeps a targeting triangle on the sniper as it emerges from cover. A single impossible bound and it’s covered half the distance. Another jump; it’s on the ledge with me, not ten steps away. It steps forward with that strange half-upright-half-panther gait. I swear it’s cocking its headpiece at me.
It was mainly grunts in the subway. I wonder how this carbine works point-blank against stalkers.
It actually works pretty well. But I’m guessing this means they know I’m coming.
Jack Hargreave fills my helmet with waypoints and mission objectives. I descend into the pit and he talks about ecology, and insect societies. I look up at a murky yellow sky and he rhapsodizes about evolution and coral reefs. He warns me that I am in a hive, that the level of infestation is high, that I have to be careful.
But all I can see are the thousands of infected rotting on the streets behind me, and I don’t want to be careful. I don’t give a flying fuck about infestation. There can’t ever be enough of these fuckers in my sights, not as long as I’ve got a weapon in my hands and ammo to feed it.
And oh, Roger, it’s as though all of fucking Cephdom has gathered here to grant that very wish.
I’m not crazy enough to take them all on head-to-head; there are stalkers here that jump like fleas and shoot like snipers, Heavies that barely feel a direct hit with a fragmentation grenade. I cloak and cover, I hide, I fight on the run and never in a straight line. But there are times. Times a bogeyman falls injured in front of me and instead of finishing the job with a burst of firepower I lift the fucker over my head and smash it against one of its own machines. There are time when I find cracks in the armor, and pry them open, and rip out that translucent gray Spam by the fistful. There are times I shoot to kill, and times I flip that gun around and use it as a fucking club.
They’re all the same to me, every stalker like every other, each grunt as faceless as the last. I don’t know if they’re clones or assembly-line robots, I don’t know if the suit’s just filtering out their distinguishing traits to keep my conscience dead, and I don’t care. But there’s one Heavy down here who doesn’t line up with the others. It doesn’t go down, it doesn’t give up, it doesn’t stop moving. It lumbers like a fucking cow but somehow it always manages to get out of the way of my grenades, somehow my armor-piercing rounds just never seem to get through.
And I swear, Roger, Ceiling Cat as my witness, this thing has as big a grudge as I do. It sees me airing out its buddies, sees the ranks thinning down, and it doesn’t chitter or burble like the other Ceph: it roars. I can outrun it easily enough—I’m the hare to its tortoise, and yes I am painfully aware of who won that particular contest, thank you very much—but somehow it always manages to get ahead of me after I leave it behind, always manages to rise up between me and my waypoints. It comes after me like a runaway semi, like I’d raped its mother, and it’s smart enough to play to my weaknesses. I could stay ahead of the fucking thing if I didn’t have to deal with some grunt or stalker on the side every time I turned around. But the Heavy keeps coming, runs me down, forces me to drain my suit. Then, once I’m bled down to moving at pathetic baseline human speeds—then those cannon arms shoot out missiles from an endless ammo belt that must reach into another fucking dimension, the damn thing never runs dry. I try to keep to the high ground and some stalker sails higher, raining down plasma and lightning. I take cover behind rockfalls and overturned dumpsters and grunts swarm me like giant lethal gnats.
I don’t know how it happens but it catches me in the open. A missile slams into the rock face just a few meters to my left—not a direct hit but close enough, close enough. The blast kicks me into the air like a tumbleweed in a windstorm; half a dozen redlights bloom on BUD. The world spins and then stops with a jolt, way too soon, way too high. I’m back on the ground but not that ground. I’m higher up. I’m on a ledge, an uplifted chunk of asphalt. There’s a car behind me. Yellow cab. More cabs than cockroaches in this burg.
From just out of sight, past the lip of the ledge, the sound of something pounding the ground.
Carbine’s gone. The scarab won’t do shit against this thing. I’ve got grenades but the Heavy just—
Oh, wait . . .
The charge level’s barely grazing 50 percent but it’ll have to do. I slap two stickies onto the front of the cab, set the timers so they don’t blow up in my face. Whatever the suit’s got to give, it gives now. Lord: Give me Strength.
I kick. The cab skids off the ledge and sails down in a beautiful arc that ends right on the head of that missile-spitting motherfucker. The sound of massive metal objects smashing together: just beautiful, Roger. Just fucking beautiful.
It doesn’t die. But it goes down, pinned under two thousand kilograms of Chevrolet’s finest alloys. I can hear the roars of my vanquished enemy, I can see the car swaying and rocking as the thing underneath struggles to free itself before the timers run down.
Doesn’t take much to set off a sticky. Even a footstep within a couple of meters is enough if you crank the sensitivity. And this bruiser, it’s moving that cab around like a goddamn seesaw. It’s half a second, tops, between the timers zeroing out and the whole damn vehicle going up in a ball of fire, HE, and gasoline. It’s almost too long. The Heavy’s actually tipping the cab up on its side by the time the stickies detonate, actually getting back to its feet when its feet get blown out from under it.
But you know what they say. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
After a while they stop coming for me. After a while they get harder to find. But Jacob Hargreave is still there, telling me what I have to do.
A riot of alien machinery sits in the center of the pit like some kind of nerve ganglion, radiating those massive spokes in all directions. The base of a Ceph spire rises from its center: the same spire I saw past City Hall. Most of the spokes look like the backbones of some colossal cyborg; three sprout a pair of leg-like spines from each segment. They look like the bodies of monstrous centipedes.
“Ah,” Hargreave says. “Yes. Well.”
I wait for something a bit more helpful. I wait for more Ceph to come pouring through the walls and tear me apart. All I see are spines, and pipes, and see-through panels here and there—portholes, almost—behind which clouds of spore swirl and seethe like coffee grounds. They’re not going anywhere, though. The flow is random, chaotic, like boiling water trapped in a pot: all wired up and no place to go.
“From the look of this feed, the spore loop’s running near dormant levels,” Hargreave says at last. “We’ll need to fix that. There must be triggers around here, but what they look like is anyone’s guess . . .”
Turns out those centipede spokes are key. So I follow one of them out of the spear, across the pit, back down to earth where it plunges into some terminal structure of plates and spines and glowing orange slots. I find the interfaces, I go through the motions. The plumbing trembles under my hand; the spore in the nearest porthole begins to surge back up the conduit, toward the machinery at center stage. One down, two to—