—I don’t know where, exactly. Water spills over my shoulders in a brown cascade, loses steam, subsides to a trickle. There’s a strip of sky overhead, fractured walls of dirt and gravel and bedrock looming on either side. Now that the deluge has tapered off I hear water running in rivulets down a thousand cracks and crevices. I’m at the bottom of a tiny canyon, a rift in yet another Manhattan street that’s buckled and split and left me exposed like a grub dug out from under a rotten stump.
And all I can think is I made it, I made it. Dragged underwater, underground, away from air and sunlight, that stupid eight-year-old whiner inside trying to scream his fucking head off but I gagged him, I kept him down, I held it together. Not so scary this time; not fun by any stretch but at least I didn’t panic, didn’t even verge on it.
The whole fear-of-drowning thing. I’m almost getting used to it.
I listen to water lapping against concrete. I hear gulls screaming at one another. It’s almost peaceful. I close my eyes.
“What a goddamn mess. Now of all times; those boardroom idiots.”
I keep my eyes closed. Maybe it’ll go away if I ignore it.
“Alcatraz, it seems I am facing a boardroom coup at the worst possible time. I can no longer control Lockhart or his forces. I am effectively under house arrest. And the Ceph are deploying in force. Until I can find some way to reverse this . . . palace revolution, our objectives are blocked. You must attempt to hold back the Ceph until I can stabilize the situation.”
Oh, must I now.
“Good luck, son—I will be in touch.”
Take your time, old man. Don’t hurry on my account.
Wait: Chino.
If he got caught in that flood he could be nothing but teeth and strawberry jam by now. I wonder if—
An icon pops up center-right on the BUD: comm log from a restricted band. I sacc’ PLAY.
“Alcatraz, if you can hear me—listen, man, I’m sorry. We can’t hold here. Repeat, cannot hold here. The Squids are just hammering us. I’m pulling the squad back to Central Station. Get there if you can, man—we’re going to need you.”
I check the timestamp: ten minutes before the dam broke. If they were lucky, they got clear in time. Weird, though. I didn’t know the N2 did voicemail. I wonder why I didn’t hear it live.
Wait a second: I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even sacc’ anything. All I did vis-à-vis Chino was think about the dude.
And you know, by this point I’m not even surprised anymore.
Pilgrimage
“This is Delta Six to base, we . . . backup now! . . . civilians in tow, wounded . . . engaging . . . some kind of alien armored . . . sonic . . .”
Rebar. Power lines. I-beams and buildings blocking the signal. Wherever Delta Six is holed up, I can’t hear shit down here.
I get off my ass and start climbing.
“Delta Six, this is Echo Ten.”
Echo’s coming through clear, at least. Bad news for Delta; huge difference in signal strength probably means huge difference in location.
“We are en route to your position, but the streets are blocked. It’s gonna take time to . . .”
I poke my head back above ground level. Delta Six’s signal firms up:
“We don’t have time, Echo Ten!”
Delta Six is losing it. Delta Six is screaming. And something else is screaming in the background, too, something that sounds a little like glass cracking on metal . . .
“You get here now or you’re just gonna be counting our fucking corpses!”
SECOND serves up waypoints and sat fixes and triangulated guesswork. Echo Ten is still out in the boonies. I might just make it, though.
Shit.
I check what’s left of my gear, ditch the scarab; the seawater’s fucked the firing mechanism. Everything else seems good to go. GPS puts me about three or four klicks from the action, depending on the waypoints.
I start running. The farther uptown the higher the ground: I wade the occasional stretch but when my feet hit solid ground they burn city blocks like firewood. The topography’s been radicalized up here: Buildings lean into one another, flat streets shaken into corduroy, whole blocks just kind of pushed back and piled up against the terrain behind. Madison Square Park is a steaming swamp—the tops of cabs and SUVs rise above the water like sunroofed boulders. One of the Staten Island ferries is jammed up at a crazy-ass angle against the buildings on the northern perimeter; I never realized before how huge those things are. You gotta wonder how many buildings that bad boy took out on its way uptown.
I keep moving as north as the terrain will let me. Delta Six fades in and out at the whim of whatever obstacles happen to be fucking with the freq at any given moment. Bad news from Central; something’s going on there and it’s not going well, but I can’t tell any more than that. Some kind of running battle seems to be moving east, and the news from that quarter is no cause for joy, either. But I still take heart because hey, at least the battle’s still on, right? They haven’t been squashed like bugs yet; at least some of them are still kicking after being in the thick of it for half an hour or more, and I’m thinking that’s no small accomplishment. I know what these guys are up against.
Thought I did, anyway.
Something’s making the ground shake, just a little. I see it more than feel it: ripples in puddles, like a stone’s been dropped when no stone has. My reflection shivering in some miracle windowpane that hasn’t shattered yet. Aftershocks, I think. I’m moving too fast to feel anything through my boots, so I stop for a few moments to get a sense of the seismo. Nothing. The ground’s rock-solid under my feet—which is, now that I think of it, even weirder.
Bompf.
Now that I did feel, just barely: a single pulse through the asphalt. A short sharp shock; not like any seismic rebound I’ve ever felt, and I pulled the Ring of Fire tour for a solid year. This felt more like an impact tremor.
An impact of steel against glass.
Delta Six isn’t talking. Or at least I’m not hearing them. I hope it’s just another radio shadow, but I pick up the pace anyway. GPS leads me up Fifth, around a corner, and smack-fucking-dab into a dead end.
Can’t really blame the system for not knowing a building had collapsed across the alley. The realtime updates haven’t refreshed since the wave—it takes a lot to swamp the GoogleSat servers but I’m guessing a sudden massive rewrite of the whole lower mainland’s geography might do it—and even plain old GPS gets iffy with all these leaning towers blocking out the sky. Nav’s been falling back on OLR and inertia for hours now, to take up the slack. But there it is: a pile of rubble that used to be an office tower, right between me and where I have to be.
The building it’s fallen against is still standing, though. There’s a loading dock off to one side that I don’t even have to force my way into; any one of a thousand shocks has blown the door off its rollers and halfway into the street. I’m up on the dock with a single bound.
A glassy ping.
Even louder, this time. And not an impact tremor, not the usual kind. If I was underwater I’d compare it to high-freq sonar, you know, like those tests that drove all the whales crazy a few years back. I’m not underwater, and air isn’t nearly dense enough to conduct a p-wave that intense anyway, but stilclass="underline" Whatever’s making that noise sounds like a submarine on steroids.