Then we swing onto 58th and you can see just how fat a chance that was ever gonna be.
The whole damn avenue is crisscrossed with Ceph conduits. They jut up out of the road, arc across five or ten floors of airspace, disappear into holes smashed through storefronts and skyscrapers. The street is a tangle of concrete and uplifted bedrock and giant jagged sawtooth alien plumbing, and as we come around the corner you can see the last of the dropships dumping their cargo in a big nasty line all across First Avenue.
They know we’re coming.
The first two Bulldogs are already jammed up and taking fire; one of them rolled before we rounded the corner and is over on its back, spinning its wheels. I’m doing what I can but East River Drive was smooth as fucking glass next to all this buckled asphalt and my crosshairs are bouncing across ninety degrees of arc until our driver hits the brakes. Except it’s not so much hitting the brakes as getting his rib cage blown to matchsticks by the shell the Ceph just lobbed through his windshield. I bail in the split second before it explodes, which isn’t nearly enough time to get out of the blast radius. Thank Christ for the armor option.
This is resistance like we’ve never seen before. The street ahead is crawling with alien grunts; stalkers leap from wall to wall like giant metal grasshoppers, taking their shots and bouncing away before anyone can get a bead. I count at least four Heavies lumbering up the street; their cannons flash like Gatling guns. Our whole damn convoy is scattered to hell and gone: three vehicles out for the count, their occupants either dead or taking cover; no sign of the others. Hopefully they saw the scoring on the walls and took a less scenic route.
I lose the convoy. They lose me: Too many torqued I-beams and shorting electrical networks to keep in touch over more than a block or two, and oh, here come the pingers. Always the life of the party. But somewhere between the blowing-shit-up and the not-being-blown-to-shit I make it to the upper reaches of a trashed office building. I’m not running away: I’m fighting uphill. Half a dozen Ceph drop modules are embedded way up in the executive levels and the grunts that came out are making the most of the high ground.
Half the fucking floor is in flames by the time we finish mixing it up, but it’s worth it. The altitude gives me my signal back and Barclay’s geek squad has been working overtime: Gould has loaned them my suit freqs and it turns out they can tap into the N2’s targeting subsystems to help pinpoint the air strikes the good colonel has managed to coax out of McGuire. Too little, way too late for most of us: Strickland’s heroic little convoy has been decimated.
Not exterminated, though. Not extinct, not yet. A few of us make it through all the way to Central Park.
Or as your friends at the Pentagon prefer to call it: Ground Zero.
Now, from the folks who brought you Swimming with Ceph, the new off-Broadway smash hit: New York Nukem.
The word comes down somewhere between East River Drive and Fifth Avenue. I can’t really put my finger on when, because I’m too busy getting shot at. But by the time I finally catch up with what’s left of Strickland’s convoy just outside Central Park, the news is really sinking in.
Strickland is furious. Barclay fought it tooth and nail. Gould says what do you expect when you keep putting psychopathic assholes in charge. (In his own fucked-up Gouldian way, I think he almost feels vindicated. A shame he never got a chance to meet Leavenworth.)
Me? I gotta say, I was kind of on board with it.
Maybe I’ve lost my sense of empathy. Maybe after a few years in the service you just get used to it, come to terms with the fact that life is cheap. Maybe SECOND’s programmed it out of me with all these nanoneurons infiltrating my cortex. Or maybe it’s just harder to care about the living when you don’t actually have a dog in that race anymore. But I listen to Strickland ticking off the outrages—What about the people? What about the surrounding boroughs? What about the fallout?—and if I had a voice I might shut her down with a question of my own.
What about the Ceph?
I mean, it’s not as though I’ve agreed with most of what the Pentagon has been up to lately. That sweeper they set off just about inspired me to resign my commission on general principles. But the fact is, it didn’t work. Nothing they’ve tried so far has worked—and when your back’s to the wall, scorched earth is not exactly unprecedented military doctrine. A tactical airburst over Manhattan might be the only way to contain this thing. Probably won’t be enough, granted; but if all else fails it’s worth a shot.
Of course, all else hasn’t failed. There’s still the Alcatraz Initiative. But the brass aren’t boots; they’ve got reports from the front lines but they haven’t seen this apocalypse for themselves. Chances are, all they know about the Tunguska Iteration is that it was invented by a half-crazed recluse pickled in formaldehyde, and Nathan Gould says it has something to do with homosexual rape in hanging flies. If that was all I knew, I wouldn’t have much faith in it, either.
We haul into Central Park under a yellow sky infested with sheet lightning. Nobody’s waiting for us. No reinforcements. No Ceph. No pilgrims.
Nobody.
We park in a field of scrub and crab grass. Dead silence except for the far-off rumble of thunder. “Where the hell is everybody?” someone wonders.
“Maybe they threw everything they had at us back on 58th,” Chino suggests. “Maybe they got nothing left.” He doesn’t even believe it himself.
No birdsong. Not even the crickets are talking.
Strickland looks around grimly. “Something’s wrong here.”
The birds haven’t left, though. We know this in the very next second, when they do. Great clouds of them rise suddenly from the trees in waves, dark as spore, utterly silent. They flap away to the east as the first tremors start to shake the ground.
The tree line—buckles. Treetops lash back and forth against a windless sky. They rise into the twilight as if on hydraulics; I can see brief explosions of blue sparks in the darkness around their bases. Power lines, I realize. Tearing apart as the ground rises there but not here, as cliffs grow from the woods as we watch, walls of raw fissured bedrock standing up from the earth, lifting the forest on its back. One of the Bulldogs hops two meters in the air, flips, lands upside down. The nearer copses are leaning toward us now, farther, farther, toppling over. Ridges of rock and earth rise and pile up and slide back down the sides of something very large and very old, waking up after a million years in the ground.
Those of us with vehicles floor them in reverse. Those on foot run like hell. Barclay’s in every headset, “Strickland? Strickland? What the hell just happened out there? We’re reading massive seismic disturbances, we’re reading—”
I can’t see the top anymore and the Thing in the Earth still rises smoothly from the ground. It must be halfway to the jet stream by now. A dozen little waterfalls cascade out into space and disintegrate into mist far over our heads.
“Sir, we are going to need an immediate airlift,” Tara Strickland calls in with admirable calm. “As well as armed air support. As many aircraft as you can manage. The situation has . . . changed . . .”
It’s the mother, the father, the whole damn extended family of all Ceph Spires. It’s the last page of the Book of Revelation, the end of the Mayan Calendar, the drowning of the world at Ragnarok, and it’s taken half of Central Park along for the ride. There’s a mountain towering over the skyline. I bet you can see it all the way to Canada.