Man, what I wouldn’t give now, if that’s all it had been.
And just then someone cries out and I turn to that sound expecting more death and corruption but instead I see a big patch of bubbles boiling on the surface. At first I think it’s the dying breath of the Swordfish, belched up from the bottom of the Hudson; but the water keeps churning and I actually feel a flash of hope that one of the other subs has come to the rescue, that the cavalry’s breaching at our backs. I can see something dark and metallic just under the surface, red light rising from below, although some part of me says in a very small voice it doesn’t look like any conning tower I’ve ever seen.
And then it rises above the waterline, and it keeps on rising until there’s no water holding it up anymore and it’s still rising, big as a fucking house, it’s got its own personal storm front underneath where the water’s streaming back off its sides. I can’t make out jack shit except for two glowing orange hoops the size of merry-go-rounds and a black shape between them. But it’s pretty obvious that whatever this is, it’s not from anywhere around here.
And even that doesn’t get as much time to sink in as I’d like, because in the next second it clicks on its high beams and starts shooting.
My reflexes kick in. All it takes is the sight of that little line of splashes stitching across the water toward me. You can hear them below the surface, too, rapid-fire thwip-thwip-thwips getting louder, fading away, coming back the moment you break the surface to grab a breath and a gamble. You can’t get a bearing, of course. No time for that. You breach and breathe and catch the quickest glimpse of those lethal little tracers streaking down from somewhere overhead. Maybe you hear someone scream as they lose their own particular throw of the dice but then you’re back under again, hoping you don’t roll snake-eyes before you make shore—because, sure, you’ll be exposed on land but at least you’ve got solid ground under you, right? At least you can run for cover instead of floundering like wounded bait waiting for the sharks.
You let your brain stem take over, let your muscles decide for themselves when to zig and when to zag. Don’t think about what it is, that’s too big and there’s no time; think about what it’s doing. It’s using ballistics. Not phasers, not death rays. No infallible super-targeting computers, or you’d be dead already. It’s shooting projectiles. It’s spitting out lines of bullets, like it ordered its ammo from Ordnance “R” Us. Conventional weapons.
Of course, conventional weapons do just fine when your target is unarmed hamburger flailing around in open water. I hear the screams between the bullets and the bubbles. I can hear that airborne motherfucker mowing us down like dogs. But I keep rolling the dice, man, I keep breathing and diving and zigging and zagging, and they don’t get me. I make it all the way to the shore. I nearly kill myself on the debris slope, I’m stroking so hard I don’t see the rocks coming and a piece of half-buried driftwood just under the surface nearly takes out my eye but suddenly my feet are on the bottom, the rocks are slimy but they’re solid, and I’m scrambling uphill and I run smack into a sheer concrete seawall. In one split second I realize there’s no way I can scale it without grapplers or gecko gloves, and in the next I’m slipping on the slime and I go over backward as a line of divots explodes across the concrete right about where my head used to be.
I’m back in the water and those lights in the sky, those glowing eyes are sweeping off across the water in search of other targets. Someone’s yelling off to my left and it’s Leavenworth, man, you just can’t keep him down, we’ve obviously found us a niche where being a paranoid conspiracy freak actually pays off. And Leavenworth is waving and gesturing, something’s blown a hole in the seawall just a few meters along and he’s already diving into that breach and I’m right there behind him. We crawl through a little canyon of smashed concrete and tangled rebar that tries to gut you like a fish every time you move. There’s this stink in the air, not just the oil and the bodies and the shit in the harbor, something else, something—acrid. That’s the word. Like ammonia.
We come out in the middle of something that used to be a road, hunker down under a slab of upended asphalt like kids camping in a lean-to. But the Eyes in the Sky are swinging around for another pass, and they’ve got a clear shot at us from their current angle of approach. Leavenworth breaks cover and starts running for the only other piece of cover in sight, old wreck of a building past fifty meters of parking lot. I’m right behind him, got my eyes on the ground but it doesn’t help, I still see Leavenworth blow apart like a water balloon right in front of me. The ballistics are a fucking hailstorm now and we’ve just been massacred and suddenly there’s this stupid giddy voice in my head that won’t shut up, keeps saying Well at least Leavenworth died happy—vindicated at last, blown up by space aliens . . . and—
—And then there’s this, this kind of a thump, a tugging sensation, and I’m not running anywhere anymore. I can’t feel my legs. I’m facedown in gravel and there’s blood everywhere, it’s got to be mine because I can feel myself bleeding out, but—
But it doesn’t hurt. I don’t know if it’s shock or a severed spinal cord or if the pain just hasn’t crawled upstream yet but that’s it, man, I’m dying, I know I’m dying. And it doesn’t hurt at all.
I can still move my arms, though. And someone’s still screaming somewhere so I’m not completely alone, not yet, not yet. I heave over onto my back—vision’s shaky now, eyes swarming with floaters and there’s a red mist over everything, but if this is it then I want to at least go out looking my enemy in the eye, you know? And there it is, big as death, Armageddon in an airfoil and I still can’t see anything but a black shape behind blinding light but in my mind’s eye it’s got a hundred muzzles twitching and tracking, locking on, the fucker’s looking right at me and in the next instant a sonic boom goes off in my head.
And the Eyes stagger in midair, like something just kicked them in the face.
For a second I think That’s the weirdest recoil I’ve ever seen, but then I realize it’s the gunship that’s been hit. And whatever that ship uses for a pilot has just realized the same thing, it’s forgotten all about me and it’s spinning in midair, looking for whatever arrogant motherfucker had the audacity to fight back.
And there it is, pinned in the spotlight like a rock star.
It’s some kind of battlefield robot. It’s a cyclops with no face, no room for a face because that big bloody eye wraps halfway around its head. It’s like someone flayed one of those big Greek statues down to the muscles—because that’s all you can see, man, these bunched cords of muscle, gunmetal gray, almost oily in the searchlight, wrapped around a gleaming skeleton that pokes through here and there. You can see a spine. Something like a skull. There are knuckles and elbows and kneecaps and they gleam like chrome but you just know they have to be a thousand times stronger.