I’d put them out of their misery myself, but the Ceph beat me to the punch.
I don’t know where they came from. Haven’t seen a Squid since I hit the island, but here they are: an intrepid little band of stalkers, eye clusters blazing, dorsal tentacles flailing, crashing through the walls and tearing out human hearts for all the world as though they’re on my side. There are only four of them—three after one of the CELLulites gets off a lucky shot—and I manage to take out another before diving into a convenient stairwell and dropping down a level. I back against a corner that offers decent cover and a slitscan view of the door above. I aim the SMG.
They don’t come after me.
Not an assault force. Not a measly four stalkers. Recon party at most; but advance scouts implies scouts in advance of something. Strickland was right: The Squids are coming to Roosevelt Island.
It would be a really good idea to get Hargreave out before that happens.
“So. Despite all the betrayals, all the pain, you are coming to get me out. Remarkable. Almost heroic, one might say.” No hysteria in that voice, no more anger. Just—weariness. Resignation. Something almost approaching amusement. “But I fear our tentacular friends have formulated a similar plan. You’d better hurry if you hope to beat them to it.”
Our tentacular friends are not back in the hall where I left them.
“Come. I won’t fight you anymore. I’ve even rescinded the kill order, for the benefit of any soldiers you may have left alive.”
There it is: a golden thread of waypoints. A trail of bread crumbs to the inner sanctum: down the hall, hang a right, hang a left. Knock.
“It is time to admit that loyalties are concentric. It is time to unite against the greater enemy . . .”
For some reason—only SECOND knows why—I finally believe him.
Marble columns. Double doors between them, ornately carved, brass-handled, high enough for a pinger to walk through without stooping.
I don’t knock.
The doors creak as they swing inward. They grind. You’d think that someone of Hargreave’s means would have been able to afford a can of WD-40.
Then again, maybe there’s no point. Maybe these doors don’t get used enough to matter.
Not just a room, through those doors. A cathedral. The great hall of some museum. A library. An endless carpet, three meters wide and red as clay, runs down the center of this vast space. On either side, rows of marble columns hold up dark skylights twenty meters overhead; suits of armor stand between them, mounted in glass cabinets. Massive bookshelves rise along one wall, barely visible in the dim distance; dark draperies go up forever on another.
“Theseus, at last. Welcome.”
His voice does not crackle over comm. It booms. It fills the room.
Breakers chunk overhead. The lights come on. The glowing face of Jacob Hargreave, four meters high, smiles sadly down on me from overtop a wall-sized map of the planet: an old Eckert projection in faded yellow and pale blue.
Not armor in those glass cases, I see now. Nanosuits. Prototypes. Antiques in their own right, even now; Moore’s law makes everything new old again.
“Scant reward for so much effort, eh. Crack the labyrinth, and you would at least expect to see the Minotaur before it kills you.”
Dwarfed by map and monitor, someone has arranged half a dozen overstuffed antique chairs around a massive wooden desk. Its surface is smooth and polished and utterly empty.
“Ah well, it seems only fair. Come, then. Masks off.”
The sound of old machinery, grinding into gear.
“I am here.”
The map on the wall splits down the center and pulls apart like drawn curtains. There is only one antique inside, and at first I do not see it.
“Shocked? I would be.”
See him.
“I’d revel in it, if I were you: that sudden jump of the pulse, the cram of flight-or-fight chemicals into the belly. So sweet while it lasts. But it’s been so very long since I felt any of it.”
So pristine in there, Roger. So, so antiseptic. Past the great chrome bars sliding back into the wall, the enameled walls gleam; the concentric tiles on the floor form a spiderweb with Hargreave’s capsule at the center. Life-support machinery chirps and hisses around it. Half a dozen umbilicals sprout from its ends and loop up into a low ceiling. Flatscreens scroll nutrient levels and biotelemetry like billboards running stock prices.
There’s a window in that capsule. It runs nearly the whole length of the cylinder; it leaves nothing to the imagination. The capsule is full of yellow-green liquid, like a public swimming pool too many six-year-olds have pissed in. The thing looking out from inside does not look like Jacob Hargreave. It barely even looks human.
“A century or more since my pleasures were anything but cerebral. I took the path Karl Rasch refused, the cold road to immortality.”
Its lips don’t move. The eyes above them are bright and hard as obsidian, and they don’t leave me for an instant.
“I can still hear him—cursing Tunguska and what we found there, screaming at me for a coward and a fool. I wonder which of us really was the coward.”
You ever see those bog men, Roger? On National Geographic, online, anything? The ones that died hundreds of years ago, somewhere in England or Ireland or something. Whoever killed them threw them into these peat bogs full of tannins, lignins. Natural preservatives. Bodies don’t rot in there. They shrink, they shrivel up. They turn brown and wrinkly like baked apples but they don’t rot, not for hundreds of years. You could fish them out of those bogs and they’d, they’d—
—They’d look just like Jack Hargreave, floating in his tank.
“And now so little time remaining.”
Oh, Jack. You’re not going anywhere, are you?
“I’d hoped to wear Prophet’s suit myself. Take on the weapons he brought us, wear his armor. Enter the labyrinth and confront the Minotaur. But now . . .”
Hargreave’s lips move at last. They tighten, split, pull back over toothless gums. He probably thinks of it as a smile.
“You. You will have to finish what Prophet began.”
Something flickers in all this brightness. I can’t tell what it is.
“Nathan? Are you there? Are you eavesdropping on my affairs again?”
And he is: There’s his filepic, up above my left eye. There’s his voice in my ear, faint and grainy and shot through with static: “Get out of there, Alcatraz!”
“No, wait.”
That flicker again. A bad fluorescent, maybe.
“Wait,” Hargreave repeats. “You need the final piece of the puzzle. There on the desk.”
Behind me. I turn and look out into the hall. That’s where the flicker is coming from. Not in here, not in this bright sterile oasis. Out there, among the towering bookcases and the marble pillars and the caged Nanosuits.
“Go!” the wizard urges from behind his curtain. “Take it!”
The surface of the desk opens as I approach: Panels slide back to reveal a shallow compartment, flat-gray, soft blue light glowing from the rim of a beveled disk in its center. A wooden cigar box waits for me there. I open it.
“This is m—your destiny now, Alcatraz. Use it.”
Close, but no cigar. A loaded hypodermic syringe.
“Stick it anywhere! Are you looking for a vein? How can you have spent so much time in that armor and still not realize that it knows, Alcatraz. It knows what to do.”
And Hargreave’s right. Because good old Alcatraz would have had serious second thoughts about shooting himself up with a hypo full of Formula X, but the suit knows what it wants. SECOND knows.