Editing anger out of the equation is dead simple for something that can turn hearts into minds.
After all this I get to Central Station. I just don’t get to stay.
There’s a makeshift convoy outside the front entrance to the library. There are Ceph, too, but there are always Ceph. We’ve learned to deal. We shoot at each other all the way along 42nd, but for once the backbones have the edge; we’re closing on Central, we’ve got mines set up all over the place and defensive perimeters behind them, we own this neighborhood.
Except when we don’t.
Turns out the Ceph have artillery, or something like it. The western approaches are a gauntlet of mortar fire raining all around the station. Once we get inside—after we’ve dodged the shells, and shouted down the usual friendly fire from paranoid trigger fingers, once we convince them we’re all on the same side and get under cover and make it to the decon tunnel—before I can even sit down, a staff sergeant name of Ranier appears at my side and politely asks me to leave the premises again. Turns out Barclay’s laid down some countermeasures to take out the Ceph bombardment. He’s going to drop a building on them, or at least block their line of fire with one. But the plan’s gone off the rails; something tripped the safety breakers, the demolition charges need to be reset manually, and the guy Echo Fifteen sent to do the job is trapped across the street with half his leg blown away. Ranier doesn’t suppose that maybe I’d be willing to . . .?
He’s not quite that polite, of course. He’s just firm enough to make sure I can’t possibly interpret it as a request.
You know that line they feed you in boot camp, You can relax when you’re dead? Complete bullshit.
So now I’m back outside and by now the day is done and the night is young. Ranier’s considerate enough to call ahead and tell Echo Fifteen to expect me; he even asks them not to shoot at me by mistake.
You’re not going to believe this, but the hike down Park Avenue is almost—beautiful. The sky is a luminous orangey brown, big half-moon hanging over the skyline. I’m moving along one of those elevated rail lines where the subways break surface now and then, and I’ve got a great view. Ceph artillery arcs majestically overhead like comets in formation. They light up the whole zone, blue-white, radiant. A couple of them smack into the MetLife Building behind the station, and the electric ripples pulsing out from those hits look like fifty thousand volts of Saint Elmo’s fire.
The only real drawback is, if the Ceph got Ranier’s memo about not shooting at me, they’ve definitely circular-filed it. They’ve got their own turf right next door, their own perimeter, and it is sewn up so tight it squeaks. By the time I get through I’ve got a whole lot more respect for Echo Fifteen; there’s no goddamn way I would’ve made it that far without a cloak.
I find them a dozen dead Squids later, in a shot-up diner a few blocks down Park Avenue. They point me to their point man, Torres, stuck in a hotel three buildings farther down and five floors up. Torres is still clutching the detonator when I get to him, sprawled on the floor with ammo and blasting caps and a couple of Bren guns scattered around like empties. He looks like the lone survivor of a high-octane frat party.
“Hey, man, good to see you. Help yourself to some gear.” He’s in pretty good spirits for a guy trapped behind enemy lines with one leg out of commission. Must have been some primo shit in the empty hypo sticking out of his thigh.
We’re hunkered down in a corridor that runs around the edge of the floor, shot-up drywall at our backs, shot-out windows in front of us, and perfect line-of-sight to the target: ONYX Electronics, a twelve-story brownstone with a gaping four-story bite already taken out of it halfway up. It’s kitty-corner to our position, and the intersection between is a ninja’s wet dream: cover everywhere, cars, upended slabs of roadway, even a couple of subway cars teetering on rails hacked off at the edge of an overpass.
Torres takes it in with a wave of his hand: “As you can see, I have got myself a ringside seat. And I am well and truly pissed that the main event canceled after I went to all this trouble to get tickets. I think all the seismic activity must’ve tripped the breakers or something. I’d go back and reset ’em myself, but—” He pulls the hypo out of his leg, grins at me with a row of bleached teeth and one very stylish gold incisor. Little gemstone or optical circuit or something embedded in there. “We set three charges down in the parking garage. Once I get a green on all three, you’ve got a New York minute to get yourself clear, but man, just look at all the cover I made for you.”
He knuckle-bumps me. Must be older than he looks. “You can thank me later. Getting in should be easy.”
It is. So’s getting out again afterward.
Sitting on the fifth floor of a bombed-out Hilton, waiting for the guy in the magic suit to come back? Not so much.
Maybe one of the reasons I got in and out so easy is because every damn Squid in the neighborhood was gunning for Torres.
It makes sense. I mean, who knows how those spineless bastards think, but Torres was the one who planted the charges. Torres was the one with the detonator. Anyone—anything with a set of eyes on the ground could have figured he was the linchpin. Not to mention the weak link.
All I know is, about two seconds after Torres radios, “That’s it, man! Green across!” Echo Fifteen starts taking fire.
Torres calls back to Barclay: He’s arming the detonators but he’s under attack and needs covering fire. But the rest of Fifteen’s already gone rearguard under the Ceph assault. Barclay calls me up: Tag, you’re it.
’Sokay. I was in the neighborhood anyhow.
I’m barely out of the ONYX before I know how it’s going to end, how Torres is going to end. Right now he’s scared shitless because he’s still afraid to die, and he’s afraid to die because he still thinks he might live: “Ah fuck, they’re flooding the building! Covering fire, I need covering—”
But the only cover he’s got is me, and I’m down on ground level with my back to a shot-up taxi while Squiddie shoots at me along three separate vectors. By the time I take two of them out Torres has learned the facts of life, swallowed them whole, and processed them in what, thirty seconds? A minute?
He’s not calling for backup anymore. He’s not talking to us at all. He’s talking to them—
“Come on, you motherfuckers! Come on!”
—and fuck it, I don’t care what the odds are and I don’t care if there’s still something out there with a bead on me, I’m up and running, zig and zag and jump while Study’s ammo streaks past and Torres rages in my headset, one-legged Torres, Torres the gimp, and his last furious act of defiance and that rage, man, that absolute blood-boiling rage when you know you’ve done every last thing any soldier could and it’s not enough, the fuckers just keep coming and the most you can do is check out with your teeth buried in something’s throat.
I’m almost back at the building when I see him coming down to meet me.
He hits the pavement—I hear every bone shatter from ten meters away—and he bounces. He flips in midair, flops like a rag doll, comes down again, smears blood and guts across the asphalt as a fire hydrant catches him in the spine. It stops him dead, folds him in half like a broken branch.
Suddenly the freq is jammed with fucktards specializing in the blindingly goddamn obvious, Torres is down and We lost Torres and I know assholes, I saw him die, he’s right here in front of me. Even Barclay gets in on the chorus, We lost Torres, Alcatraz, you need to find that detonator.