The spire holds it up, all that mass stuck to one impossible pylon: a chunk of earth the size of a hundred city blocks, hanging over Manhattan like Everest balanced on a pool cue. The spire itself towers even higher, a dark twisted sculpture skewering the floating island about two-thirds of the way along its length. From down here, through the deepening gloom, it looks a little like the Statue of Liberty with brimstone highlights. If the Statue of Liberty was a couple of kilometers high and had a terminal spore infection.
Whatever chance Barclay may have had to talk the nuclear option off the table with his superiors, it’s pretty much vanished now. They do give us a few choppers, though, and all the moral support we can carry.
They also give us thirty minutes before they send in the bombers.
It gets darker as we approach. Water drains from ponds and reservoirs, atomizes as it falls, turns the sky into soupy fog: dark in places, flickering bright where fires have caught, flashing where dismembered fragments of the power grid spit and spark. I can hear the groan and crack of breaking granite over the beating of the rotors. Gas lines and sewer pipes stick into the air like severed veins, gushing flame or wastewater.
I was wrong. This is no island in the sky; this is a tumor. If God had cancer it would look like this: black and lumpy as a miner’s lung. On closer approach I can see it’s not even a single mass: one foggy silhouette resolves into many, a jumble of boulders: some no bigger than houses, others that could crush city blocks. The cracks and fissures between are infested with black spinal conduits of Ceph architecture, embedded, a web of ligaments holding everything together.
Well, not everything. Chunks of granite calve away like icebergs as the pilot looks for a place to land. We’re coming in low from the south, ten meters over the treetops: tiny blue maintenance trailers and miniature statues sit down there like tabletop ornaments, lit at odd angles by a random handful of streetlamps still running off stored solar.
The chopper’s bucking like a cork in a wind tunnel. The closer we get to the spire the worse the turbulence becomes; if we keep on this approach the downdraft’s going to slap us into the rocks before we get another hundred meters. Landing here is out of the question. Even farther back we can’t risk it; the whole thing’s a pile of shifting rubble, loosely bound with alien rebar. The pilot’s willing to push it to eight meters, right at the southern tip; I drop the rest of the way and he backs right off to a safe distance, whatever the hell that means these days. The rotors beat away into the soupy darkness and suddenly it’s—
—Peaceful.
I’m on the grass. There’s a constant wind but the sound it makes is almost comforting. Just five meters behind me the world drops away, and I can see the dim gray shapes of downtown New York spread out like chips on a motherboard.
And in the next second the world drops away just two meters behind me, and I’m scrambling back from that edge before this crumbling rock pile pitches me overboard.
“Oh, man, look at the calving on this thing!” Gould’s back in the chopper with Strickland, but he’s riding shotgun through the suit feed. “Alcatraz, listen, all this bedrock’s just hanging off the structure. It’s completely unstable, could go at any time. You gotta watch for stress fracturing.”
You know, Nate, I think I figured that one out.
To the north, the superspire stabs up into the night like a church steeple for Devil-worshippers. Twenty-six minutes to Plan B. The N2 drives me over the ground faster than the ground can open up to swallow me.
And then the chopper pilot blurts out, “Oh shit, they’re everywhere . . .”
“Alcatraz, listen.” Strickland again. “Barclay’s expeditionary guys got into the park yesterday before they were driven back. And CELL had an evac base here as well. Look for ammo caches, you’re going to—well, you’ll need firepower.”
And they’re on me before she hits the period.
I barely hear her breaking the pilot’s balls to get in closer, give me some cover. I barely hear False Prophet announce that he’s completed a local scan and nailed some likely ammo dumps. I hear the Ceph, though, stuttering like bullfrogs, lacerating the air with their tracers. I take a couple of hits before cranking armor; a couple more after I leap across a shifting chasm (gray chaos, nothing at all down there) and roll to cover. It’s too far for the grunts but a lone stalker sails easily over my hiding place and clamps its talons around the trunk of a tree ten meters past. Then the tree’s falling, torn free of the earth by a couple of hundred kilograms of metal and jelly using it for a grab-on at thirty meters a second. And the outcropping it jumps to next, crumbling under its feet. And the pickup truck it tips over the edge of a severed roadway. The stalker leaps from point to point, never missing, never regaining the edge; it disappears into the void, dancing between falling objects.
Far to the north something lashes the sky: The spire has grown limbs, segmented tentacles that flail back and forth like whips. A pair of spines extend from each segment. Or legs, maybe. I’ve seen them before: monstrous metal centipedes writhing in the air.
I see other things, too, smaller but just as monstrous, moving south to welcome me across the shifting landscape. We skirt each other, exchange fire, duck back into hiding. The ground tilts and slides as we dance. Something sets two massive slabs of substrate jostling like continents in collision; downhill and uphill trade places; some pond or wading pool breaks free of containment and floods across the battlefield in a thin sheet, turning earth to mud and making the grass slippery as oil. Sometimes the Ceph nearly take me out. Sometimes I take fire from an unexpected quarter, SECOND backtracks a bearing, but I can’t see any targets.
Still, if the point of the exercise is to kill each other, I’m better at it than they are. So far.
In between the skirmishes, though, there are—moments. I almost feel guilty talking about them. Fighting for the survival of a planet, halfway through a thirty-minute nuclear countdown with all objectives yet unmet: How dare I waste a second on goddamn aesthetics? But there they are, surrealistic and beautifuclass="underline" a dense blue carpet of tiny, perfect flowers, running down the middle of a pedestrian avenue. An ancient bronze statue standing atop a granite pedestaclass="underline" long since turned green, its head and shoulders white with pigeon shit. A lone taxicab skewed across the grass, softly spotlit by a single streetlamp in the fog.
I find one of Barclay’s caches in the passage under Bethesda Terrace: scuffed plastic crates piled up in a dim grotto full of arches and golden alcoves and polished ceramic tiles that pattern the ceiling like a Persian carpet. There’s more than enough canned carnage here to see me through to whatever end awaits me in—yup, twenty minutes and counting. I scrounge one of those new X43 microwave guns. I saw a couple of the guys using them earlier today; not much good on armor but they cook jelly right in the package so long as you remember to squeeze off short shots. Hold the trigger for more than an instant and you’ll drain the battery in no time.
Resupply, reload, resume. I cloak at the north end of the underpass, stick my head out. The spire towers into a dead gray sky; the cracked fountain in front of me looks like a bug in its shadow. I think the tarnished thing in its center is supposed to be an angel but it looks more like a zombie with wings.
The centipedes have stopped flailing. They’ve bitten into the ground and taken root, given up the wild days of their youth and settled down to become great hairy arches looping across the sky. As if the spire has grown legs.