“Aren’t we?”
Ah, shit.
I nod. I don’t know how well it comes across from the outside, but Chino takes it as a yes.
We head out. Hargreave helps me pass the time, fills my eyes and ears with tactical intel on our destination. The main entrance to Hargreave-Rasch is blocked solid with rubble; the building itself is in lockdown. We might be able to get in through the parking garage, but the research wing is up on the eleventh floor and the stairwells and elevators are all locked out.
No problem, Hargreave says cheerily. The security console in the lobby’s still hot. Should be able to manage a systems reboot from there.
All things considered, we make good time. The wave may have smashed half of Manhattan down to the bricks, but it also pushed a lot of that wreckage into nice convenient moraines: a real cocksucker if they happen to be in your way, but if they’re not the streets are cleaner than they ever were when we backbones were running things. At least most of the bodies have been flushed out of sight. And those few corpses still tangled in trees, or skewered so far down signposts that not even a twenty-meter tidal wave could wash out the stain—even those are being taken care of. Ticks never sleep.
We come up from the south. I don’t know if our route has been uplifted or the Hargreave-Rasch block has dropped, but we’ve definitely got the high ground on approach: There’s a tumbledown escarpment of broken streets and buildings leading down to the south face. Hargreave wasn’t kidding when he said the entrance was blocked: collapsed and pulverized office towers jam the streets to either side and spill around into the space in front. You can barely see the tops of the southern doors under all that shit. The tactical wireframe shows another way in on the north side—at the bottom of a big cylindrical silo, like a castle turret, half embedded in the middle of the façade—and I think that’s actually the main entrance, but there’s no way we’re gonna get there from here.
There’s the parking ramp, though, off to the right, sloping down and out of sight right where it’s supposed to be. The only thing between it and us is about fifty Ceph on the ground and a dropship hanging overhead like a giant black scorpion.
“Oh, fuck,” Chino grumbles.
Even as we watch that scorpion drops another egg onto the playing field, shoots it into the ground like a meteorite. Any one of us earthlings would have turned to jelly on impact. The Heavy that emerges from that shell doesn’t look anything but eager.
I remember enemy combatants, hesitating at my scent. I remember a stalker trying to shake my hand at the crash site, I remember a horde of Ceph waiting in ambush at Gould’s apartment. And now here they are again, waiting.
Are they really just swarming through the city like rats, or is it me?
“Fine.” Chino heaves a theatrical sigh. “We’ll cover your approach. Go in and get your fix, man. But make it fast.
“And if you do get out of there alive, drinks are on you for the rest of your fucking life.”
37.7 MHz (gov/nongov shared, land mobile).
Source unknown (.mp6 transmitted anonymously to Cpl. Edward “Truth” Newton, USMC [ret.]). Identities of JACOB HARGREAVE and DOMINIC LOCKHART confirmed via voiceprint comparison with public archives.
Hargreave: Hazel section—what the hell do you think you’re doing? This is Jacob Hargreave! I order you to cease fire!
Voice (presumed Hazel Sec.): Blow it out your ass, old man! Tin man dies here!
Hargreave: You idiot! The suit, you idiot! You’ll destroy our only hope! Cease fire!
Lockhart: Take him down, gentlemen. Maximum force. I want this abomination ended now.
Hargreave: What are you doing, Lockhart?
Lockhart: I’m doing what the CryNet board should have done three years ago, old man. I’m pulling the plug on your obscene cyborg dreams.
Hargreave: You fool—you think you can hide from the future? We have no choice in this!
Lockhart: That dog won’t hunt now, Hargreave. The board sides with me this time—they’re not buying your bullshit anymore. I am in command here. Now you will stand down.
Chino and chums are as good as their word. They take the heat and I slip from cinder block to sewer pipe: cloaking as I cross the open spaces, uncloaking behind the shelter of a bakery truck or a pile of concrete, fading to black and sneaking to the next blind spot. Occasionally I pass too close to a grunt and it hesitates, sniffs, stutters trains of soft clicks into the air. I never let them see me, though, and they never press the issue. They’re too busy trying to kill my friends.
The ramp drops me below line-of-sight in an instant. I’m up to my knees in scummy water by the time I reach the corrugated door at the bottom. It’s jammed half open. I duck down and under. I’m up to my waist. The ramp continues down. I take another step. I’m up to my chest. The ceiling slopes down ahead of me, mindlessly parallel to the ramp beneath, and cuts off the airspace.
I wonder if maybe I’d be better off lending Chino a hand against the Ceph.
Jesus Christ, you fucking girlyman. It was twenty years ago. Get over it.
I dive under, and push forward. The water pushes back, dark and dirty and full of swirling shit. The harder I stroke the thicker it gets; it kills my momentum, turns my reflexes to tar. I look up but there’s no surface overhead, just pipes and cement crossbeams and a few silvery bubbles sliding around like mercury. My inner eight-year-old is shitting bricks; the rest of me just hopes we make it through before I hit the rebreather’s immersion limit.
After about two hundred years the water starts to brighten up ahead; shafts of dirty gray light stab down onto two-lane asphalt, finally sloping back up. Now the surface is back; now the water’s low enough to stand in. It never recedes entirely—this whole level’s flooded—but it’s only up to my knees. I stand and my inner eight-year-old goes back to sleep. Suit clock tells me the whole trip took forty-five seconds but I guarantee, Roger, at least five minutes went by every time that second counter ticked over.
Pylons and parking spots to one side; the cinder-block wall of a service closet to the other. Maybe sixty meters past that wall is a stairwell that should take me straight to the lobby.
I hear voices.
What the fuck. Hargreave said this place was sealed.
Can’t hear the words. The voices float around the corner, low and easy, clarifying as I approach: the usual idle bullshit about hardware and poon. Maybe Hargreave sent a couple of grunts to meet me.
“You hear that?”
I freeze. I cloak.
“I’ll check it out. Hold your position.”
Good plan. Split the party. Go off on your own.
Gotta be CELL.
It is. He sloshes around the corner, the muzzle of his MP5 waving around like a stoned bumblebee. He pans toward me, through me, past me—
—stops, and looks again.
I’ve noticed by now: The cloak isn’t perfect. It turns you to something clearer than glass, but if you keep an eye out you can see the occasional refraction artifact in bright light. Even in semi-darkness there’s the barest bit of motion shimmer you might be able to pick out. If you know what to look for.
Let me tell you, this goon is looking hard, and I see it just before he does: the wake I’ve been kicking up as I move, that insignificant little bow ripple still playing itself out across the water’s surface.