I wait until their voices fade, cloak for as long as it takes me to stick my head above the landing. Nothing but the backs of the Saffron Duo disappearing in the night. I don’t believe it. Lockhart’s an asshole but he’s not an idiot; he won’t have left the southern approach unguarded.
Sure enough, other voices slow me to a creep as I circle the first landing. Somebody thinks they should be out fighting the Ceph, not sitting here in the boonies. Someone else would rather be home fucking his boyfriend.
Way overhead, Sauron’s eye flickers and goes out. For a moment or two the night belongs to fires burning across the water. I look up at the lantern, catch a bright cloud of heat radiating from the dead lamp and a smaller shadow in front of it, something cooler. I switch to StarlAmp.
Ah yes. An arm. A sniper rifle. Have to remember that.
The lantern reignites. Somewhere behind all that stonework, gears grind faintly back up to speed: The beam resumes its endless track around the horizon.
“Ah, shit. Must be another power surge.”
“I swear, Lockhart’s losing it, man. He’s taking this shit way too personal.”
“Easy to get personal when some cyborg asshole puts half your friends in body bags. I want that fucker dead as bad as he does.”
“There’s no way he’s coming.”
“Maybe he’s already here. He’s got a cloak, you know . . .”
I do, at that. I bring it up and move along the wall and there they are, just outside the lighthouse door: three beetle suits, blinded by Science.
“. . . he could be watching us right now . . .”
I could reach out and touch her. I am so tempted. I am so tempted.
Right up until a fourth merc comes around the corner and touches me first.
Touches isn’t exactly the right word. Blunders would be closer. I am cloaked, after all; the dumb fuckwit walks right into me and bounces back on his heels, flailing. His buddies laugh as he goes over. For about half a second.
“He’s there! He’s right fucking there!”
“Well now,” Hargreave says softly on the penthouse freq.
“That didn’t last long, did it?”
I make it easy for them. I jump clear of the blunder zone the moment Fuckwit Four goes over so I’m spared the blizzard of bullets that Swiss-cheeses the spot a heartbeat later, but I’m not especially quiet about it. It’s about two seconds before the line of fire veers over to the sound of my boots on cement. Half a second after that the cloak runs out of juice and I start taking hits. A couple even get through before I crank the armor setting, but I don’t think there’s much left inside to hit anymore; for all I know the slug just bounces around in there and rolls down my leg. (Sometimes, Roger, I think I can almost hear it rattle when I walk.)
“Oversight, this is Saffron Two! Enemy contact in Sector Bravo!”
I hit back, of course. I teach Saffron’s front line the timely lesson that payback against Cyborg Assholes is a lot harder to do than to brag about, but by then they’ve called in air support and backup boots. I throw some suppressing fire up the tower on my way; I don’t have a hope in hell of hitting that sniper, but at least I’ve thrown off his aim. I scoop up a Feline submachine gun from one of the fallen (shitty recoil, awesome rate of fire) and head up-island, trying to balance stealth against speed.
Waypoint options, not great. Roosevelt Island’s maybe 150 meters across: not many degrees of freedom there, not much cover, and from the look of it those buildings that are still standing were derelict long before Squiddie came calling. Something hulks in the middle distance so that’s what I head for, calling up GPS on the fly: RENWICK HOSPITAL, it says, but there’s not so much as a streetlight out front. No big surprise; every other hospital in the country went under during the Double Dip. But it’s a building, it’s cover, it’s dark on thermal so there aren’t any blue-eyed beetles waiting to light me up from the shadows. I hear shouts and comm traffic behind me; the faint sound of rotors drifting down from up ahead. In between there’s crab grass and trampled chain link and no cover at all except for Renwick Hospital. So I charge toward it, weaving and deking because that lighthouse sniper must have got his groove back by now, yes?, and I look up and—
And it’s not a hospital.
At least, it doesn’t look like one. It’s a castle, or something. A dark castle looming in the rain, backlit by lightning, three stories of ancient brickwork and square-toothed battlements, mats of ivy crawling around windows as empty as eye sockets. I stop dead for a second, look up through those gaping holes straight through to smoke and sky. I feel like I’ve passed through some kind of time machine. Or maybe this place has: a little piece of the eighteenth century that somehow managed to hang on into the twenty-first.
It looks haunted.
And then those old stones splinter with the impact of the .30-caliber present, and I’m diving inside.
Turns out it’s a hospital after all. I don’t find out until later, but the place was built to hold smallpox patients back in the eighteen-hundreds. The original smallpox, not that Cuban strain—anyway. It was even a historic landmark for a few years, back before Hargreave-Rasch bought the place out.
Originally it was a quarantine site, they stuck it way out on the end of the island because they didn’t want all those poor sick bastards laying waste to the healthy population. A place to hold people too dangerous for civilized company. I wish I’d known that at the time. I would’ve felt so much more at home in the place.
A lot of people died in there, too, of course. Hundreds at least, I’d bet. Maybe thousands.
If Saffron and Hazel had known that, maybe they’d have felt more at home, too.
It’s a shell. What’s left of the floor is a tangle of dirt and scrub and stunted saplings. Half the second-story floor is missing; beams crisscross the empty spaces overhead. Rusty iron banisters angle up the walls, stairways with no stairs to floors with no floors. The roof has long since caved in but the stone walls are still standing; they might even be thick enough to foil whatever deep-scan thermal the incoming chopper might be packing.
Not too many places to hide once you’re inside but you can’t get inside without going through a bottleneck or two: open doorways, empty window frames. I plant my last few stickies with as much care as thirty seconds of lead time will give me: just inside the main door, under a few empty windowsills.
Hargreave drops in with a few helpful words: “Lockhart’s set an EMP trap for you up ahead.”
Good to know. A bit busy right now, Jack.
“Given the way they’re rerouting the local grid it’s going to be a big one, maybe big enough to get through your Faraday mesh. Might fry the Nanosuit, might even fry your own synapses depending on how deep the interface—uh . . .”
Two passageways leading to other parts of the ruin, narrow and relatively intact: my last couple of stickies go there. I just hope the grunts get here before the chopper does. I’m as good as naked to an airborne thermal scan.
“Now there’s no way to bypass the trap,” Hargreave says, “but why would we even want to when we can we can trick it out?”
I jump up to one of the few spots on the second level with both a floor and a ceiling. Not a bad view of the southern entrance, either.
An icon blooms on GPS: a hydro substation over on the east shore. The tit from which Prism sucks—but there’s no time for that now, because—