Azure Seven goes down in fire and rain.
Okay, Lockhart, you miserable sonofabitch. You want to stop chasing me around this goddamn city? You want me to come to you instead?
Let’s do this.
Send me your cannon fodder. Send me your second tier. Send me your sad-sacks and your Saffrons, your fresh-faced mall cops who can’t shoot straight. Don’t make it too easy, though. Gotta keep me thinking it’s an uphill battle, can’t ever let slip that I’m being lured, directed, herded. Don’t worry, I’ll play along. I’ll mow down your boys and girls for you, do my part to keep it real. I’ll pretend to fight my way forward and you pretend to try and stop me and all the while that honey pot gets closer and closer and there it is, Lockhart, the outer wall, the edge of the kingdom, ten meters high and topped with razor wire. The edge of Jacob Hargreave’s Secret Kingdom.
Only one way through: a vehicle air lock big enough to hold two M1 Abramses shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s not inside the kingdom, it’s not out. It’s the gatehouse where all those who’d pass between must wait to be judged. It’s Limbo.
And it’s open at both ends.
I can look straight through into the outer compound. And why not? Ever since CELL planted its flag all the way down to the lighthouse, the whole damn island is Prism’s backyard. Why worry about arbitrary checkpoints inside the green zone?
I make it look good. I lurk out there in the rain, peeking around corners, going through the motions: thermal, StarlAmp, zoom. I step out in the open.
“This should be interesting,” Hargreave murmurs.
I go for it.
I dial up a fast sprint—no point making it too easy. It doesn’t change anything: I’m barely in the tunnel when a few tons of steel and concrete slam down directly in front of me. I skid, turn, bounce off the barricade: another hardened slab of steel and concrete crashes down and blocks my retreat.
I dial back the power, let the charge rebuild. Best-case scenario I’m going to be indulging in a few high-energy maneuvers in the next minute or two. Worst-case scenario I’m dead.
Deader.
Recessed nozzles along the walls, probably loaded with everything from halothane to nerve gas. (Nothing my filters can’t handle, worst-case I can always use the rebreather.) Recessed drainage gratings bolted into the floor. I pan the ceiling: a camera in every corner—
Shit. Lockhart’s going to know his pulse is a bust the moment he hits the trigger and doesn’t lose the video feeds. So much for the element of—
Something goes ping in between my ears. I taste copper.
The lights go out.
“Uh—wait a second . . .,” Hargreave says.
No little red LEDs glowing in the darkness past my helmet. The cameras are down. I’m not, though; my eyes are still full of icons and overlays. I can still move.
“Nothing to worry about, son. Just a small pulse, built up enough to kill the lights before the circuit blew. Nowhere near strong enough to penetrate your shielding.”
I hear voices whispering on comm, faint and riddled with static: Blast confirmed, they say. They’ve got me.
“There’s a drainage gate to your left,” Hargreave says. “Smash it out. Follow the pipes to the river. I’ll send you Lockhart’s location.”
They’re getting ready.
“Move!”
They’re coming in.
The inner door rises just a hair as the bolts unlock. Lockhart’s voice channel comes clear and strong through the crack: “Soon as you get line of sight, gentlemen, you hose him down. We’re taking no chances this time. I want that suit turned to scrap.”
But by then I’m already in the sewers.
I can hear them shitting bricks behind me. Their voices bounce down along all this unsecured plumbing, shout back and forth along frequencies they don’t know I know: Fuck he must’ve cloaked. He’s not cloaked he’s gone. Drain gate’s out. In the pipes. Saffron Ten be advised.
Tin man is loose. Tin man is inside.
“Flush him out of there! Bring him down!”
That’s Lockhart, supervising. Hargreave squirts me a way-point: I squirm left at the next junction.
“Do I have to do everything myself? You are elite soldiers! You are equipped!”
That’s Lockhart, venting. I see a mesh of light ahead, dim and gray and cold.
“Will somebody grow some balls and kill that tin fuck!”
I’m at the grating. The East River crawls past on the other side, broken into eddies and sluggish backwash by the concrete dock just upstream.
“He’s just one fucking man! What the hell am I paying you for?”
That’s Lockhart doing something I’ve never heard him do before.
That’s Lockhart, losing it.
He sees me coming for him, oh yes he sees.
He spies me on the pier and calls in another copter; I send it down to the sea in flames. His cameras catch me on the rooftops and he calls for his mercenaries; after a while there are no mercenaries left to answer. He sees me squirming up from underground like some kind of childhood bogeyman, before I shoot out the lens of his camera. He sees me in the gatehouse and stalking facelessly through the storage bay and by now he’s got to know I’m letting him see me, I want him to see me: each new sighting a little closer to his command, each new tag leaving him a little less room to run.
But he doesn’t run. He calls in every man on the chessboard, bishops and castles and Saffron and Hazel, he calls out along all the empty hissing wavelengths at his command. He calls on everyone right up to the sacred whoremother of God’s bastard Son but at the end of it all, the only one to answer that call is me: Alcatraz the Invincible, climbing the stairs to this sad and lonely little command center under a downpour of rain and ordnance and lightning bolts.
Behold, motherfucker. I stand at the door and knock.
The door blows off its hinges.
Lockhart blows back, Gauss gun cradled against his gut: “Come on. Come on! Show me the color of your guts, boy!”
The joke’s on him, of course. My insides and outsides are all the same color by now, all honeycombed and striated and gunmetal gray, and they barely feel the impact of Lockhart’s sabots.
“Fuck you, Tin Man.”
I don’t even bring up a weapon. I grab him by the throat and raise him high and I squeeze. At first I think he’s making those sounds, those hacking choking coughs, but no: It’s Hargreave, invisible and omnipresent as always. Hargreave, laughing.
I throw Lockhart through the window. He arcs down past two stories, clears the razor wire, hits the gravel road facedown not ten meters from the inner compound.
“Good work, son.” Hargreave’s voice pats me on the head. Down on the road, Dominic Lockhart drags his broken body by inches through the rain.
“Now let’s get you inside.”
There’s a gun in my hands.
“I’m opening the Prism entrance right now. Head on over here, as fast as you can!”
Part of me wants to shoot Lockhart in the back. Part of me wants me to stop. I don’t know which part is which anymore and I don’t give a shit. I don’t stop squeezing the trigger until the hammer clicks on empty.
I throw down the Grendel, pick up the Gauss. I keep it moving on my way across the inner compound but nobody tries to get in my way. Everything leads to this moment: Battery, Prophet, Gould. The Wave. The fucking suit. Ever since I crawled up on shore I’ve been stuck in the bleachers; this is the end zone. A jumbled pile of multistoried cubes looms up through the rain like giant building blocks; Hargreave waits in the tallest. This is the place where the answers lie. The end of the Yellow Brick Road. The man behind the curtain. Victory over the Ceph. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, my own resurrection from the dead. It’s all right in there.