But he’s wrong about that. I know exactly where the detonator is. I’m looking right at it. It’s clenched in Torres’s left fist. He hung on to it right down into hell and gone.
He brought it to me.
I pry his fingers open. I pull it free: the size of a staple gun, a pack of smokes. Torres died with his thumb pressed on the stud; ONYX stays standing across the street, even though all three lights are green. I squeeze the trigger the way a man would; nothing happens. Something’s jammed in there.
I squeeze the trigger the way Golem Boy, the way False Prophet would. Something snaps. I hear a click.
Across the square, ONYX rumbles.
It lights up at its base, flickers like sheet lightning. It shivers, from street level all the way up to that blue neon logo on the roof; it slumps in on itself. Sparks explode at its crown: ONYX Electronics shatters into three neon scribbles and goes dark. The whole damn building splits down the middle as it falls; light fixtures and torn wiring light it up from the inside.
And back on this side of the street, something’s following Torres down from the fifth floor.
It shatters the pavement in front of me as it lands: a tank on legs, cannons for arms, compound eyes like clusters of sodium spotlights. A Ceph Heavy, and if these garden slugs are even capable of anything approaching human emotion, this one is pissed. It doesn’t even bother shooting at me with those cannons; it backhands me with them instead, knocks me halfway across the street as ONYX collapses in a heap over its shoulder. I reach for my weapon but there’s a couple of tonnes of angry mechanized jelly in the way. The Ceph raises one of its cannons, aims. I stare down a muzzle big enough to fit my head into.
And one of those teetering subway cars, dislodged by the death throes of the building across the way, lurches down off its embankment and squashes my nemesis like a bug.
The Echoes give me a victory lap with pom-poms and cheerleaders all the way back to Central, cover my ass against the vindictive sniping of a bunch of Squids whose biggest gun has just lost line-of-sight. But when they send me around to the back entrance I get the usual grief from the usual hopped-up goon: the spotlight in the face, the gun barrel, the usual looks like them bullshit. I almost dance with the fucker on general principles—show him firsthand how much ice his yapping-poodle act cuts against a dead man wired into battle tech so far ahead of the curve he couldn’t see it with the fucking Hubble—but his CO calls him off. Nathan Gould, apparently, says I’m one of the good guys.
I let the poodle live. You’re no Sergeant Torres, asshole.
The wounded are stacked up along the halls before I even make it to the loading bay. Some civilian with more heart than brains—and a stage-one infection to boot—tries to get to his wife through a checkpoint marine and gets thrown back on his ass for his trouble. I hear screaming in the distance; a jarhead faces off against two medics in hazmat suits. There’s nothing wrong with me, man, I feel fine. This is bullshit. I pass a man on a cot muttering, Jesus, it’s eating me, I can feel it eating me. He looks fine to me.
I keep walking. The medics have it. The medics have it.
There’s that other kind of ambience, too, of course, the kind I’ve gotten too damn familiar with over the past day or so:
. . . there a man in there?
Sure doesn’t move like a man . . .
What, we’ve got robots fighting for us now?
I keep walking.
This is where all roads lead: a decontamination checkpoint manned by more hazmat humanoids, razor wire strung out across the bars and turnstiles that herded commuters back in better days. A couple of CELLulites cool their heels in a holding cage off to the left, arguing with the marine on the other side of the bars. I listen in while a med tech passes some kind of UV wand over the N2: used to be army, one of the mercs is saying. Nine years. Just like you. But the guard isn’t buying it: Whatever you were in the good ol’ days, you’re private now. RHIP revoked, assholes.
You tell ’em, Sergeant.
Interesting that CELL’s been reclassified to arrest-on-sight, though. Maybe Hargreave’s got his groove back.
Dr. Hazmat waves me through; the gate swings open behind him. Decon air lock on the other side sprays me with disinfectant and Christ knows what else. The far hatch hisses open a crack; I recognize the voice that wafts through. A little rougher, perhaps. A little more worn-out.
I push the hatch open and run smack into Chino—“Hey man, glad you made it!”—but he’s not the man I’m looking for. Colonel Sherman Barclay stands in a basement grotto of cracked marble and cement, surrounded by cots and supply crates and jacked vending machines. His eyes flicker in my direction, but he doesn’t miss a beat; he’s in the middle of instructing one Nathan Gould on the subtleties of civilian status in a city under martial law. From the set of Barclay’s jaw I’d have to say that Gould is proving to be a slow learner.
They both turn to me at the same time. Gould’s all hail-fellow-well-met; I think he’s just glad to have an excuse to get out of remedial class. Barclay’s a little more restrained. “Good to have you aboard, marine. My men speak highly of you.” He pauses, almost smiling. “Shit, most of ’em are downright scared of you.”
Really. I hadn’t noticed.
Colonel Sherman Barclay in one word: tired.
He hides it well enough from the troops. Turns that bone-deep weariness around and serves it up as the eye of the storm, the deep pool of calm in the middle of Armageddon. His men swarm around him like ants on uppers; he fields their questions and feeds them commands and he never breaks character once. Maybe one of the reasons he’s so exhausted is because of all the needy terrified grunts feeding off him.
It’s a good act, and it keeps his troops together in a cesspool that should by rights have us all shitting our pants and heading for the hills, but you can see the signs if you’ve got the right accessories. You can see the stress lines crinkling the eyes. You can thermal past the three-day growth of stubble and catch that involuntary tic at the corner of his mouth, that nervous little spasm nobody else seems to notice. He’s good, he’s very good, but he doesn’t fool Alky, False Prophet, and the Holy Ghost. We see right through him.
It’s okay, though. He’s holding it together, one weary-ass cocksucker outmatched and outgunned by monsters from the stars, and he doesn’t bitch about the fates or complain about his bosses, he just buckles down and does the fucking job as best he can. And after the Nathan Goulds and the Jacob Hargreaves and the Commander fucking Lockharts, it is a nice goddamn change.
And God bless him, he doesn’t even break character for Gould, although nobody here would blame him if he just hauled loose and belted the little geek into next Tuesday. No, he listens as we follow him through the huddled knots of refugees, down the endless rows of makeshift cots for the wounded, past the doors of prefab refrigerators and crematoriums waiting for the turnover. He listens as Gould tells him how to do his job: Gotta find Hargreave. Hargreave has the answers. Go to Roosevelt Island, bring him out, by any means necessary. Hargreave Hargreave Hargreave.