But by then he’s opened fire, and lensing artifacts are the least of my worries.
I’m hit, he’s dead, the echoes of our conversation are still ringing off the walls and I hear bodies churning through the water just around the corner. Can’t count on the cloak down here. There’s a big box of circuit breakers hanging on the wall beside an abandoned Prius. I put out the lights. Someone yells “Switch to thermal!” and SECOND ccs me some local comm: “He’s in the building. Repeat: Prophet is in the building.”
Game on.
I can see the stairwell. At least I can see a bunch of body-temp false-color heat prints clustered around the exact spot where the stairwell’s supposed to be. They had me pegged, they knew just where I was going. Fuck, did Hargreave set me up? Who else, this is his building after all, he lured me in here, he’s got eyes on—
“Roger that. Kill order is in effect.”
Not Hargreave.
Lockhart.
He got in here somehow, snuck his people right under Hargreave’s nose. Hacked the telemetry or something. Lockhart, you stupid asshole, not Hargreave.
I circle away from the stairwell. Not nearly as many CELLulites guarding the elevator, and a couple of those fan out into the level as I watch: They know that only an idiot would use an elevator under these conditions.
I’m too smart to be as smart as they expect; but I still leave two of them bleeding out in the disabled-parking zone. By the time I’m in the elevator and punching L, hostilities have spread beyond the local airwaves: Hargreave has broken into the freq, and he and Lockhart are having a slapfight all over the thirty-eight-megahertz band. Hargreave’s ordering Lockhart to stand down, Lockhart’s telling him to get stuffed. Lockhart says some not-very-nice things about me, too: abomination is the word he uses, I think. No big deal. Words will never hurt me.
Sticks and stones, on the other hand. Not to mention our old friends Heckler and Koch . . .
The elevator decelerates smoothly to a stop at the lobby level. I kick the cloak back into gear and boost armor, flatten myself against the side of the car, crouch down.
They almost take me out anyway, the moment the doors open. It’s the view that does me in.
I’m underwater. The whole damn building is. I look out into that lobby, that turret, that grain silo I saw in the wireframes: It’s glass, the whole thing’s glass, a single vast cylindrical space ten stories tall. I look past a great sweeping arc of windowpanes onto the bottom of a lake: wrecked cars, sluggish clouds of suspended sediment, dim shapes in murky green water. I look up, up; wave-bottoms slop against the panes thirty meters above me. There’s all sorts of shit floating around up there: office furniture and cardboard boxes and big wooden telephone poles snapped like toothpicks.
This whole damn building—and the buildings beside it, and the chunks of buildings jammed up in the streets between—it’s a big piecemeal dam, holding back a deep pocket of floodwaters north of 36th. We came in from the downstream side, and it was just our good luck that the whole pile of junk didn’t give way and wash us out to sea like logs down the crapper before we even got here.
I can’t help but wonder how long that luck is going to last. How long those windowpanes are going to last. Something creaks, way overhead: a billion tonnes of water looking for a way in.
And in those instants I’ve wasted staring like an idiot, they hose down the elevator with so much lead I take five random hits to the chest.
They don’t get through. They do knock me back against the wall of the elevator, though, and my head back into the game. Hazel Six has obviously called ahead for reservations, and invisibility isn’t much of an edge when every gun in the place knows you’re somewhere in a box two meters square. I crank the N2’s strength setting and jump into the lobby like a frog on a trampoline.
I take out two of those CELLulite fuckwits before I even hit the floor. But there are six left, my cloak is down, and public lobbies are not what you would call rich in available cover.
I bounce off the wall, make it to the back side of the security desk, come down hard on some merc who evidently thought he had dibs on the spot. The air is fucking incandescent with crossfire, and I’m almost wishing that these guys were better shots because half the rounds that don’t hit me are smacking into the windows. Spiderwebs are cracking through the glass everywhere I look. I can’t believe the windows haven’t shattered yet.
Fortunately, fragging CELL asses and covering my own is a full-time job. My inner eight-year-old can take a number. And believe it or not, when the dust finally settles and I am the Last Corpse Standing, that whole round wall of windows is still keeping the water at bay. Half a dozen panes are almost opaque, they’re so shot through with cracks; there are more trickles and rivulets and needles of spray than I can count. But there’s a whole orphaned chunk of the Atlantic leaning against those windows, and goddamn it, they’re holding.
Lockhart’s gone offline. Or maybe he’s just sulking because I wiped the floor with his toy soldiers. Hargreave keeps the flame alive, though, riding my ass to reboot the upper-level elevators from the main desk. I still can’t take my eyes off the windows, off all that dark heavy water piled up on the other side, but Hargreave nags reassuringly in my ear: No need for concern, super-nanoglass, guaranteed floodproof. Go on, get over to the desk, reboot the system. What could possibly go wrong?
I go over to the desk. A couple of brain-dead monitors flash test patterns at me.
Something goes wrong.
I hear it before I see it. Glass against metal; ice cracking on the surface of a frozen lake. A sharp, cutting sound, halfway between a crack and a ping.
Half a dozen windowpanes split from side to side. Water sprays in fine sheets of mist.
Something’s moving out there in the murk, something big. I can’t even make out a silhouette; it’s hidden behind the mud and shit swirling up off the street.
Just past the front doors, three cars lift majestically off the bottom, turn slowly end-over-end, then settle back down in billowing clouds of mud.
More windows crack. Two trickles upgrade to small waterfall status. Inner eight-year-old’s eyes go wide, watching the water run down the inside of the panes; but then motion catches my eye again and drags it back down to street level.
Something’s standing on the bottom, just the other side of the glass. It towers over the muddy cumulus boiling around its legs. It looks in at me—down at me—with one glowing vertical slit of an eye.
It crouches.
Every pane in front of the thing shatters in an instant. The ocean reaches in with big battering fists and takes me away.
The impact doesn’t knock me out this time. I wish it had.
I am deadwood, man. I am flotsam and jetsam. I am a fly on the goddamn jet stream, and I have no say at all in where I’m going.
Maybe that saves my ass, I don’t know. Maybe if I had managed to fight the current I would’ve ended up skewered on rebar or wedged under a bus until my rebreather gave out. But I’m just a speck in the current, carried by a million tonnes of water following the path of least resistance; and water tends to flow around the rocks in the road, not into them. It fires me through doorways already smashed open, shoots me down halls and out broken windows, swings me around corners like a rag doll but it doesn’t smash me into anything. Way down in some sub-basement it finds a hole in the floor, slings me around it like a turd in a toilet bowl, flushes me down into a breached sewer pipe. Corrugated steel blurs past on all sides, and it goes on forever before spitting me out into—