Saffron is at the door.
Two beetles, flattened to either side of the main door, waving their Scarabs around like magic wands. Something bounces off the stoop, rolls into the middle of the hall. I close my eyes.
My eyelids light up blood orange. Flash grenade. I hear Saffron whoop and come through the door.
I hear the sticky detonate. Saffron turns into a bloody piñata.
I open my eyes. It must have been bright as the sun in here a second ago; now it’s all orange flames and black smoke. Hazel Eight and Saffron Five scream news of my treachery back and forth across the channel. A beetle dives in through the window to the left of the main door window and nails the landing, a beautiful roll that brings him back on his feet in a second with his rifle cocked and sweeping. His buddy dives through the right window; another sticky blows his leg off. The acrobat whirls to face the carnage, off-guard. I shoot him.
A muffled whoompf from behind; one of my hallway grenades has just brought the walls down on someone approaching from the north (Hazel, that’s it. Reinforcements from up-island. The northern claw of an ill-advised pincer movement.) So far no one’s even spotted me yet.
Then the chopper heaves in out of the night and lacerates my little attic hideaway with tracer bullets.
I hear it coming, just in time: amp up the armor setting for those few seconds of HMG fire, cloak and hope there’s enough charge left to keep me covered as I roll off the platform and fall back to earth. The Feline’s in my hand by the time I hit: I spray the room like a water sprinkler and the cloak wears off but that’s okay, that’s okay, by now there’s nobody here but us corpses.
One of them died clutching a Grendeclass="underline" half the firing rate, but twice the damage. The feline’s almost dry anyway. I swap out.
The chopper’s hanging just off the parapets up there somewhere, drifting back and forth along the building. Good news, I guess: It doesn’t know where I am. Can’t see through the walls. Just gotta make sure it doesn’t get line of sight on me again.
Here at ground level, the beetles have pulled back for the moment. Only a couple of the stickies are still live but they don’t know that, and they’ve learned their lesson. If I was them I wouldn’t risk rushing the place again, either. I’d set up a perimeter, make sure the Cyborg Asshole stayed inside it, and call in something heavy to bring the whole fucking place down on his head. An AGL, maybe. Hell, just call in an air strike and firebomb the place.
Time to be somewhere else.
I work my way sideways, keeping a wall between me and the chopper, keeping an eye out for heat prints and an ear cocked for comm. Can’t go this way; I stickied that route. Can’t go that way; beetles and choppers and CELL, oh my. There’s a window that opens to the northeast, wide-open path to a red-brick building maybe ninety meters away but I’d never get out before—
Something armor-piercing slashes a row of little divots across the stone at my back. I drop barely in time.
Gotta be more careful.
Okay, they know I’m in here. I can either wait to get bombed, or make a break before they bring in their big guns. They know that as well as I do.
Maybe I can use that.
I crawl back to the beetle I just disarmed; he’ll do nicely. Too bad I don’t have any more sticky grenades; that would be the ribbon on the wrapping. Doesn’t matter. I check my levels: Cloak’s fully charged. Twenty seconds guaranteed invisibility to beetles and choppers, forty if I don’t have to do anything fancy. And out there, all those cobalt-eyed cocksuckers just waiting for me to make a move . . .
Grendel Boy must weigh 120, 130 with his armor on. With the N2 backing me up I could throw him like a softball.
That’s what I do. One armored, badass, humanoid softball, blurring through smoke and rain and leftover flames, barely seen as it flashes past gaping stone windows in the dead of night but man that fucker’s moving fast, can’t get a good look under these conditions but it’s gotta be Prophet, just gotta be, I said he’d make a break for it and here he comes, boys, right through the window he’s coming right for us, and it’s
“Target in view! Southwest side, southwest side, he’s going for it—”
And by the time they figure it out—by the time the chopper stops strafing and the beetles stop shooting and everybody settles down enough to realize that the life-sized rag doll they’ve just reduced to sponge toffee is actually one of their own—I’m halfway to cover in the opposite direction, cloaked and running like stink. Shouts and shots fade behind me; I spare a glance over my shoulder and see the chopper swinging back and forth against the flickering brown sky like a fucking Nazgûl, black and hungry and slashing the air with rage and frustration.
I’m headed for the east side, about seven or eight hundred meters up the island. Nothing I run into on the way gives us very much trouble. Nothing gets a signal out.
The substation itself is almost anticlimactic. I don’t have to kick in the door, don’t even have to knock. The door’s wide open, a couple of CELLulites standing off to one side, snorting a bit of dopatrix and complaining about all the brownouts spiking through the grid. Also complaining about Lockhart, who has apparently sent them down here to get it all fixed.
“You wanna go in there and fix it from the console? It’s a death trap in there.”
“Let’s just get it done. Lockhart’s pissed enough as it is.”
They’re right about the death trap part, anyway.
I don’t know shit about running a municipal power grid but the monitors I find inside do show a lot of icons changing a lot of different colors over a lot of the board. Hargreave hand-holds me through the protocols, which after all can’t be all that difficult if those ropadopas outside were supposed to know them.
“Good. Now, Lockhart doesn’t know it, but the power systems he’s using for his EMP blast have to route through that station, and they’re pushing close to overload.”
Line up the red lights. Reroute the yellows.
“If you can trigger the emergency shutdown, it’ll kick his loop out, and when the systems come back up, they’ll disallow any major power surge. It won’t show up on his board—he jerry-rigged the breakers in the first place to get the extra power, so there’s no diagnostic circuit on his board—but when he hits the trigger, trust me: It’ll fail.”
Oh, I trust you, Jack. I trust you as far as I could throw a Bradley.
“Excellent! Now get out of there. CELL will no doubt have spotted the outage, they’ll be on their way to investigate.”
I wonder if he’s dim, or if he just thinks that I am. He told me about the trap, after all. The great Jack Hargreave steals magic from the stars and can’t even put two and two together? Doesn’t he get it?
They’re not supposed to kill me, not anymore. Not even the chopper sniffing me out along the rooftops, Azure Seven calling in from behind its eyes, the HMG in its nose twitching in anticipation. Not supposed to kill me, not really, not unless it gets in a really lucky shot. Lockhart has switched strategies—or maybe this was his plan all along. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that you don’t chase fish around the ocean. You wait until they swim upstream and ambush the scaly little fuckers in a bottleneck.
Azure Seven spots me at the substation. Azure Seven can’t do a damn thing about it, not without shooting up Prism’s power supply. He tries to hem me in and calls up more boots on the ground, but one of the CELLulites on electrical duty brought along an L-TAG he won’t be needing anymore.