“—was at Ling Shan, you know,” Barclay’s saying. “I saw Strickland—Tara’s father—I saw him die. When Tara heard she just . . . cracked. Drink, drugs, a string of—unwise command decisions. Dishonorable discharge. And now she’s queen bee at CELL, probably getting five times her old salary. Her father must be turning in his—”
Boom.
Dust drizzles from the ceiling. The overlight swings back and forth on its wire; the room fills with stretching swooping shadows.
“Shit . . .,” someone breathes. Something with claws and cannons lurches across one of the CRTs.
“They’re breaching the main hall, sir.”
Barclay clicks into overdrive: “Martinez, get down on the platforms and tell Dickerson to roll the first train out. Our clock just stopped.”
He turns to me.
“Stations, son. Main hall. Get up there and buy these people some time.”
I get. Squiddie’s running rampant by the time I get back upstairs. Grunts and Heavies stomp across the floor, shattering marble and mowing down Barclay’s men like wheat. Stalkers scramble along the walls and ceiling, gigantic steel roaches, leaping on the unfit and tearing them limb from limb. There are sandbag barricades everywhere—sandbags, Roger, can you fucking believe it?—and the guys who take cover behind them do seem to be a bit better at staying alive but it’s not because a few burlap sacks full of dirt can stop a Ceph shell worth shit. It’s just that the Ceph haven’t noticed them yet.
Doesn’t take long for that to change, though.
Word from behind: The last of the wounded are out of the mezzanine. We fall back, regroup at the choke points on the stairs, hold fast a bit longer as the trains start to pull out of the tunnels below us. I’m asking myself, Barclay knows about the underground hives, right? He knows which lines are still intact and which ones have been ripped in half, these trains aren’t going to barrel off into midair and plunge down into one of those brand-spanking-new rifts that are all the rage these days? And I tell myself not to be an asshole, of course they know, just do your fucking job and stop second-guessing the chain of command. But then I keep not running out of ammo, I keep picking up new clips and new scopes and preowned BFGs that hardly even got fired before the Ceph turned their owners into bloody blobs, and maybe I should be wondering about whatever tactical genius decided the best resupply strategy was to hope that those few miserable assholes still standing after five minutes have lots of bodies to scavenge.
We fall back.
We fall back.
We fall back.
Most of us have been left behind, by now: on the stairs, in the hall, in pieces. But they bought us the time we needed; we few survivors are at the north end of the loading platform now and there’s not a civilian in sight. Squiddie’s pressing hard on our ass but down there at the end of the platform there’s one last train waiting, already half full, our names on the empty seats. Barclay’s back at my side, fighting with the rest of us, and he’s even more exhausted but he’s not scared anymore. He even sends me a smile, not much, just a half-second curl at the corner of his mouth that says We did it, son, we saved the civvies.
I smile back, although of course he can’t see it.
And then the ceiling crashes in.
Maybe it’s Ceph artillery. Maybe the place has just taken as much abuse as it can, and something gave way. But suddenly there’s rock and rebar and concrete everywhere, and anyone who still needs to, you know, breathe is coughing up dust and grit out of their lungs, and the viz is down to about three meters of pea soup. Barclay’s shouting “Move out, move out you assholes, don’t wait for us!” and I’m guessing that’s the first order in a long time that anyone on that train actually wants to obey and there it goes, our lifeline, our ticket home, our reprieve for the days or hours or ten fucking minutes until the next assault drops us right back into another no-win scenario.
And behind us, out of the murk, I hear things scuttling and clattering and climbing over all the bodies we left behind.
I don’t know how many of us are left. Eight or nine, maybe. Barclay, me, a handful of grunts I’ve never been formally introduced to. One of them remembers that there’s a couple of jeeps parked upstairs in the main hall, if the Ceph haven’t smashed them to shit.
All we have to do is waltz back up there and get them.
Sounds like a piss-poor idea to me. I’d rather take my chances in the subway tunnel. It’s a safe retreat—or at least if it isn’t, the higher-ups have their heads up their asses and we’ve just fed a thousand civilians to Squiddie—and we’d only be fighting rearguard, not wading back into a Ceph stronghold. But Barclay’s leading this charge, and he’s leading it back upstairs. Maybe he knows something I don’t. Hope so. He doesn’t strike me as an idiot. It’d be a drag to be disillusioned after knowing the man for all of an hour.
We lose another one going back up the stairs: Private First Class Andrea Gamji, her midsection shredded by enemy fire. I’m the last thing she ever sees; one second she’s staring up into this goddamn faceplate and the next she’s just gone, nothing at all left behind these dull frosted things she used to look out from. I rob her body and try to think of her as one of the lucky ones, keep my head down and dodge the incoming.
For about thirty seconds it goes better than I’d hoped. The hall isn’t swarming; the handful of Ceph in evidence seem to be mopping up, not digging in. Now that the backbones have buggered off, they aren’t all that interested in the territory.
They don’t seem to be expecting us. We take out two stalkers, three grunts, and a Heavy without losing a man. We don’t get cocky, though; the losses from Round One are scattered everywhere. Some of them are still moving.
Sure enough there’s a Bulldog parked just outside, visible through one of the holes blasted in the wall. Barclay details a couple of bodies to start it up and back it in, a couple more to check out the wounded, and radios for chopper evac. The rest of us exchange gunfire with the Ceph, and I can’t stop thinking about how thin their ranks are up here. These fuckers swarmed our position like fire ants not thirty minutes ago. Where are they now?
Easy answer: They’ve backed off to a safe distance to give their heavy guns a free hand to mop us up.
It comes through one of those three-story windows in the south wall, you know the ones where the glass sits behind a grid of iron bars. It tears through that mesh like it was tissue paper, jumps into the hall in a blizzard of glass, crashes down like some kind of red-eyed three-legged cyclops scanning for prey. Even inside the suit, my eardrums bleed from the sound.
I think: You again.
Through the ringing in my ears I can hear the Bulldog cough, start up, choke. I hear faint tinny curses from We Who Are About to Die. I give silent thanks once again to PFC Andrea Gamji, who bequeathed unto me the only weapon I know of that can take this fucker down.
I am Golem Boy, zombie, giant killer. I bring up the JAW and I pray to Allah that I can only die once.
There are details you know already: the body count. The men Barclay got out, the men he had to leave behind. You know that his call for chopper evac was turned down flat—too much traffic in Midtown during rush hour, I guess—or if you don’t know you fucking well should.