The ground bucks underneath us; the asphalt splits down Seventh like someone unzipping a duffel bag. A few of the guys yell incoming! and look around for airborne bogeys but they’re looking in exactly the wrong direction. The spire ruptures the center of the compound and punches into the air like a giant fist; electric auroras writhe along its sides. Humvees, blacktop, shattered sewer pipes—that whole thin crust of shit we call civilization—tumble and bounce down its flanks. A jeep flips over and nearly squashes a medic. Cyclops Four rears back, slews to starboard, skids back out of sight like a toy thrown by some spoiled and angry child.
I wait for the impact. It doesn’t come. The spire grinds to a halt, steaming.
“Cyclops Four, this is Barclay, can you still land? We are evac-ready, repeat we—”
“Colonel Barclay, I really must advise you against that.”
Hargreave.
Nobody speaks for a moment. The spire towers over us like a great twisted backbone: dull orange embers glow in twisted bands along its length. Volcanic DNA.
“Who the hell are you?” Barclay says at last.
“Jack Hargreave. Colonel, there isn’t—”
“This is a military channel.”
“—really time for introductions. You and all your men—”
“Get off this channel, Hargreave.”
“I would love to comply, Colonel, believe me. I have my own problems at the moment and I have no time for this bullshit, but I promise that if you let that chopper continue its approach you will be killing everyone aboard. Not to mention whatever remnants of your command remain on the ground. That thing has reflexes. You must deal with it first.”
Barclay has delivered no commands to Cyclops Four but I can’t help noticing that the sound of those engines seems to have faded a bit into the distance; someone up there is taking Hargreave seriously even if Barclay doesn’t.
But Barclay does, eventually. He stands there with his hands wrapped around the grip of his Majestic and you just know he wishes it was Hargreave’s neck. But when he goes back on the air, it’s only to say “Cyclops Four. Back off. Return to operational height.”
Barclay waits until the sound of the rotors fades away, never taking his eyes off the spire smoldering in our midst. He tweaks his mike. He speaks with slow, deliberate calm.
“So what, exactly, does our resident self-appointed expert suggest?”
“The spires are essentially an area-denial bioweapon,” Hargreave tells him. “Their current iteration seems designed to render a given area safe for alien habitation.” (A twitch at the edge of Barclay’s mouth: point to Nathan Gould.) “They have a baseline activation cycle for routine operations, but they accelerate that process in response to incursions of—well, of pests. Once the spire is up and running, it perceives the approach of any incompatible biosignature as an increased threat, and will discharge preemptively—at the cost of overall coverage, but even premature, er, ejaculation would be more than enough to infect all of your men.”
“Recommendations.” Barclay’s voice would freeze beer in the keg.
“You must neutralize the spire, of course.” Hargreave pauses like a stand-up comic timing a punch line. “Fortunately, I’ve provided you with the means to do just that.”
Suddenly everyone’s looking at me.
I’ve been here before. Last time it didn’t end so well.
Hargreave is all about climbing the spire and getting in from the top. Fuck that: I’m all about not getting shot out of that thing like a spitball if Hargreave’s hack goes south again, and that means having an escape hatch right down here at ground level. What’s really odd is that I find one. I circle the base of the thing, climb across torn-up pavement and plumbing, and of course there’s nothing familiar about it at all. It’s alien.
And yet not, somehow . . .
There’s a segment just a little off-kilter from the others, a slipped disk, a fused vertebra: whatever you want to call it. Most people wouldn’t even notice it; someone with an eagle eye might see a slight flaw in mass-production, a cosmetic glitch. I look at it and a familiar voice whispers, Access panel. I wait a bit but it doesn’t tell me anything else: not combination lock or key code or press and turn.
So I blast it open with a sticky grenade.
A stiff breeze tugs at me from the hole: pressure gradient, just like before. I bet these things are pneumatic, I bet they suck in a huge long breath to build up the pressure for the Great Spore Pukefest. Which means we’ve got time as long as it’s still inhaling.
When it stops, boys, head for the hills.
Inside it’s the same layout: the silo, the curved panels, the seething currents of spore. The same virtual vulture sitting on my shoulder, reminding me how little time I have, how vital it is that I compromise the settings for spore dispersal, how it’s so much more likely to work this time. I wonder about the hole I’ve just blown in the side of this thing—an open door between the spore in here and all that unprotected meat outside—but the pressure differential should keep everything contained. Assuming it lasts.
Besides, it’s not as though the whole area won’t be rotten with spore if I just stand back and do nothing.
So: the same smash and grab, the same blood-chilling cries from an alien machine in pain. The same dark blizzard of uncontained spore swirling around me, cutting my viz to zero, clinging to the surface of the Nanosuit like a billion antique keys in search of microscopic keyholes.
The same static discharge. The same tactical countdown:
Incoming Protocols Detected
Handshaking . . .
Handshaking . . .
Connected.
Compiling Interface.
But this time:
COMPILED.
RUNNING.
And suddenly, spore sparkles into snow, electric white. The air hums around me; it’s coming from the suit, it’s the sound of a cascade, of a million tiny voices learning a new song and teaching a billion others, of a billion teaching a trillion. It’s the sound of mimetic fission.
It’s the sound of a process that sucks power like New York on New Year’s. It’s the sound of an alarm going off in my head, red icons blooming across my sightscape, energy levels dropping like bricks off a cliff.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I duck down and fall through the hatch; hungry spores swarm after me like a comet’s tail, like a cloud of hungry mites. I try to stand; it’s hard, it’s almost impossible, it’s like being human again. I stagger against my own weight. Voices spill into my head: groundhogs and chopper jockeys talking over each other. Hargreave. Barclay. My name, over and over. Alcatraz. No.
I fall onto broken pavement, stare up at the sky. Cyclops Four is up there, fully loaded, dwindling.
Something else leans in, much closer. Its eyespots glow like suns. It picks me up as if I weigh nothing at all.
It’s not alone. The compound’s swarming with Ceph.
The spire detonates.
The cloud erupting from the top of that thing doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. It glistens, it sparkles: It’s just nanites talking to each other, spreading the gospel according to Hargreave all along the visible spectrum, but I don’t find that out until later. Right now it just looks as though an evil cancerous monstrosity has vomited a whole galaxy of stars into the sky, and it’s so beautiful I forget for a moment that I’m about to die.