The smell of burning books.
We cross East 40th and into the ragged remains of a green space. GPS serves up BRYANT PARK: in better days a broad perimeter of trees around a central lawn. Kindling, now, and a trampled kill zone with no cover at all. The New York Library looms on the other side, a great stone edifice slotted with narrow windows fifteen meters high; a whole other set of windows, glassed arches eight meters tall, sits on top of those. I can see the faces jammed in behind them.
In the background, Barclay’s deploying reinforcements to our location.
Closer to home, the Ceph are doing the same.
It’s a mess. The library’s full of soldiers and civilians but we can’t even get across the goddamn street without some dropship raining Squids and hellfire onto our heads. We take cover in a converted apartment complex across the street and even in there I get my ass shot at, by fellow backbones no less: the requisite asshole from Retard Six thinks I look like one of them.
I don’t know how many got out of the library before the dropship bombs the shit out of it. I don’t know if any did; we’re coming in from the back, don’t have any kind of bead on the main entrance. But suddenly the whole place just goes up. The windows blow out, the ceiling crashes in, fire everywhere.
I didn’t even know stone could burn like that.
It doesn’t kill everyone inside, not immediately. You can hear faint screaming over the flames. We’re supposed to have cover by now—Charlie Company’s got a missile battery across the park but the guy manning it is either dead or taking a bathroom break, and whenever anyone tries to cut across the park they get mowed down from on high. We finally make it, get the turret back online, even take down that motherfucking dropship, but by then the voices have long since lost out to the flames.
We push on anyway, partly because Hey, there’s always a chance, but also because we’re taking heavy ground fire from behind and we’re literally being driven forward. We fight rearguard across the park, and a few marines—that guy from Retard Six, for one—even make it to the back steps with me. But the place is a fucking inferno; they’d be toast two steps past the threshold. I leave them to find their own way around.
First time I’ve ever been in a library in my life. I gotta say, Roger, I really don’t see the appeal.
There are places even I can’t go: stone glowing red, smoke so thick there just isn’t any point. I try thermal but it’s even worse, like being caught in a false-color blizzard. Lots of bodies, black no matter what wavelength you use to look at them. Steam rises from some of those mouths, from corpses still wet enough to boil inside. They sizzle on the floor like bacon. Some are charcoal already. They break and crumble and burst into pieces when you trip over them.
I hear voices. At first I think I’m hallucinating. But I follow them anyway, to some shattered stairwell where a freak cross-draft blows away enough of the smoke and the heat to keep the people huddled there from dying quite as fast. I turn a small hole in the wall into a bigger one and they stagger outside, coughing, to take their chances with the Ceph.
But it gives me an idea: Forget the people. Key on the habitat. Don’t waste time looking for life signs, look for those few, far-between places where life signs are possible. I toggle back to thermal and yeah, the psychedelic hurricane is still distracting as hell, but now that I know what to look for I can see dark patches here and there in the static, little sunspots of less-than-killing heat.
Roger, I got some of them out. Four marines, a few firefighters, maybe half a dozen civilians. Less than twenty all told, next to Christ knows how many who burned to death. I lost count of the corpses I passed in there, and I only covered a fraction of the floor space.
But I got them out. I got them out.
And for a little while, being dead isn’t so bad.
But only for a little while. Because yes, it’s nice to save lives for a change instead of ending them—but even that doesn’t really fill the emptiness inside.
And no, I’m not being maudlin. I mean that literally.
You think I don’t know? I’ll grant you I was a bit slow on the uptake back at Trinity, but I’ve had a lot of time to think since then. Hell, I’ve grown a lot more of whatever it is I think with, and you know what I remember? I remember those med techs in the basement saying I didn’t have a heart.
That hurt.
I’ll tell you what else I remember. Squiddie laying a bull’s-eye on my chest the moment I crawled up onto Battery Park. I remember knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that I was dying. I remember Prophet dragging me across the battlefield, stashing me in that warehouse, stripping himself out of this suit and bolting me into it. That took time. It wasn’t even dawn when I got hit; when I woke up it was midmorning.
Tell me, Roger, do you think you could hang in that long without a functioning heart? I know I couldn’t. So however shredded up I was back then, the ol’ ticker was still beating. Had to be. And then just a few hours later they scan me outside Trinity and it’s nowhere to be found.
Maybe it doesn’t even stop with the heart. Maybe my lungs are gone, too, by now. My liver? My guts? How much of me’s actually left—am I just a shell of bone and muscle around a whole lotta empty space? Put a zipper in front and I’d have one big honking extra allowance for carry-on, hmm?
You know what happened to them, Roger? (Ah, I see you don’t. Something else your masters didn’t tell you.) They got recycled. Because even this magical suit can’t do everything. It’s a nanotech miracle, it can turn blood into bone and water into wine, but it’s gotta start with something, capiche? Needs raw material. Can’t magic up mass out of nothing.
So the way I figure it, it had a lot of shit to fix and not enough bricks and mortar to go around, so it—triaged. Robbed Peter’s heart to pay Peter’s spinal cord. It can fill in for the plumbing, that’s dead easy. Alcatraz doesn’t need a bunch of pipes and pumps when CryNet Systems Nanosuit 2.0 is taking up the slack. But the central nervous system, now; that’s a whole different pile of pigeons. You take away that stuff and there’s no Alcatraz left to interface with. So this magic suit’s been hollowing me out all this time, mining my expendable biomass to repair the more important systems. Maybe it’s still at it, for all I know. Maybe it won’t stop until there’s nothing left but a brain and a couple of eyeballs and a mess of nerves hanging off the bottom.
Yes, I suppose that would be excessive. But maybe it’s got other reasons, maybe physical repair is just part of what it’s doing. It is a jealous skin, Roger, and it’s already been dumped once. Prophet had to literally rip it from his flesh and blow his own brains out to be free of the fucking thing. Maybe the suit doesn’t want to go through that again. Maybe it’s whittling me down so I won’t be able to—leave . . .
Just a machine, eh? Just a machine. Tell me, Roger, have you ever seen a machine that can do what this baby does? Do you know how it works? Because I can guarantee you that even Jacob Hargreave has only the vaguest goddamn clue, and he stole the damn thing.
Angry?
Not really, now that you mention it. I’m alive, after all—or at least, I’m not as dead as I would’ve been otherwise. On balance, it was a good trade. But it’s a stupid question, Roger, a meaningless question. You should know that by now.