Simple, huh?
But you’re not gonna get a tight-ass like Hargreave to just come right out and explain it like that, are you? No sirree. That dude learned decades before you and I were even born that Knowledge Is Power. He’s been keeping his cards facedown for so long that I bet even spilling the time of day would make his shriveled little testicles crawl back up into his body.
Still. I figured it out, in between fighting off aliens and fucking with the plumbing. And now I’m standing there with Ceph bodies bleeding out all around me, spore flowing full-bore from all three substations, and Hargreave says: “Now we need to get you inside the central structure.”
It’s not like there’s a door in the base of the spear with a neon sign saying THIS WAY TO THE INNER WORKINGS. Hargreave suggests that I just blow the shit out of it—“Try to blast loose one of the spoke seals and use the resulting rupture to effect entry” is the way he puts it—and that seems kind of ham-fisted even to me, but I don’t have a better idea. So I line up an overhead joint that’s bleeding steam where spear meets spoke—must have taken a hit during the fighting—and I force-feed it a couple of sticky grenades from the L-TAG, praying to the goddamn Spaghetti Monster I’m not punching through a motherboard.
Boom.
The dust clears instantly, sucked into the hole I’ve just blown. Huh. Negative-pressure differential. This thing breathes. The tracheotomy wound is just big enough to let me squeeze inside, where I find—
—well, tentacles is what they look like.
It’s a kind of silo. Curved glassy panels on all sides, arteries of orange lava-light running vertically between them. I follow those arteries up along a vertical shaft ribbed with cross-bracing every ten or fifteen meters, like hoops of cartilage around a trachea. High up in that space lightning flickers: some kind of static discharge. Even higher: daylight.
But down here in the basement, spore seethes behind those transparent panels as if it were alive. As if it were really pissed off.
Hargreave says I have to get it from in there to out here. No obvious controls, no obvious hatches or access ports. No way through except, well, through.
Hey, it worked last time.
So I proceed to shoot the shit out of those panels, and the machinery—screams . . .
I don’t know how else to describe it. Maybe it’s an alarm, maybe it’s just the equivalent of metal fatigue, some kind of mechanical stress. Or maybe Ceph machinery is alive somehow, maybe I’m hurting it. Anyhow, it works: The air around me is thick with spore, I can barely see my hand in front of my face. Hargreave makes approving noises from the ass end of nowhere.
SECOND writes across my eyeballs—
Incoming Protocols Detected
Handshaking . . .
Handshaking . . .
Connected.
Compiling Interface.
—and even throws up a little progress bar so I can see Hargreave’s science fair project edging toward the blue ribbon. Little patches of orange light flicker across my forearms—some kind of photic interface—and for a moment there it almost looks as though we’re going to pull it off.
But then I guess the spore remembers: It eats backbones like me for lunch. And if we’re a little too tough to chew, it spits us out.
Something throws me against the wall. I rattle around on the floor for a moment like a pebble in a pickup; then the spire opens its throat and shoots me halfway to the goddamn jet stream. Suddenly my guts are in my boots; all I see is orange streaks and dark blurs. And then I’m out, the human spitball, shot into the sky like a watermelon seed. I hang there in midair for a moment, a tabletop Manhattan turning on all sides, God’s own middle finger jabbing up at me from a dark gray pit dead below. Then I’m coming back to earth and one hard fucking landing. I land back on the spire ass-first and off-center, like dropping onto a free-fall waterslide. I roll, bounce off into space again, grab some bit of alien corkscrew plumbing my body somehow knew was there even though my brain didn’t see it. I hang on for dear life: bait on a hook, thirty stories up. One precious handhold away from street pizza.
“Ah,” Hargreave says with mild disappointment. “More resistance than I expected.”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding.
“An immune reaction, I suppose you could call it. You’d better—uh—
“Just hang on a sec,” he says, and drops off the channel. He’s probably not even being ironic. Either way, fuck that advice: I haul myself back up onto the rim that bounced my ass off the spire, climb back up the vent as far as the slope will let me, scope out the angles. Just off to the left a twisted strip of some avenue ramps up from the ground like a ski jump, a tangle of I-beams and blacktop pushed into space by the erupting spear. It’s close enough to make a jump, if I can get a running start.
I make it, barely. Lose my footing on the very first step, stumble, keep going three long loping steps down a forty-degree angle and push off into space, flailing like an idiot. But I make the jump and land on solid asphalt, in no more pieces than I was before.
I start down the road to ground level. I’m almost there when static cackles in my ear and Hargreave’s back. There’s nothing fake about his tone this time. I can tell with his first word that he’s stressed; I can tell by the second that he’s scared shitless.
He tells me the Pentagon has decided on drastic measures. He tells me bombers are inbound from McGuire.
He tells me they’re going to put all of Lower Manhattan underwater.
Aquarium
Ever seen a sweeper in the field, Roger?
Street-Sweeper. No, not the trucks that clear out the gutters. The basic theory’s chimp-simple: Drop a bomb into a body of water offshore from your target, blow it up, let the wave do the dirty work. Cleaner than an airborne nuke, more devastating than a neutron bomb—UniSec even tried to sell it as environmentally friendly, if you can believe it. It’s only water, after all—with a few rads mixed in, sure, but at least there’s no aerial fallout. Pure, clean, natural water.
A twenty-meter wall of it moving at two hundred klicks an hour. Mother Nature’s Doomsday Machine.
That’s what your bosses set on us, Roger. That’s what we had to deal with.
I didn’t believe it at first. Thought there was something wrong with the comm link—I mean, the ol’ N2 can certainly be forgiven for losing a little EM gain after all we’ve been through together, right? So when I get comm back and the first thing I hear is Hargreave shouting about tidal waves I thought I must’ve misheard, you know, a fucking tidal wave? Are you joking, Jack? But the dude’s never been more serious about anything in his life. Because Manhattan has not been dealt enough shit yet, no Roger, it has not. And so there is a cleansing tsunami coming to flood out the aliens. Anything with a backbone that doesn’t have access to a pair of industrial-strength water wings has just been written off as collateral.
What do we know about the Ceph, Roger? I don’t mean whatever secret genetic insights the black labs have under wraps; what does every sad-sack sonofabitch on the street know about the Ceph? Well, we know that they need those exoskels to ride around in, which suggests they’re not great in earth-type gravity situations. We know that when you peel them out of those skels they really look a lot more like boneless sea creatures than like anything that ever walked on land. We call them Ceph because, you know, they remind us an awful lot of cephalopods. All of which strongly suggests a native lifestyle that’s at the very least amphibious, if not aquatic. So what secret weapon does the Pentagon use to take them out?