Ah, shit. I know what that means.
Sure enough, here’s Nathan: “Dude, it’s set up substations. Like back at the hive. Whatever you did back then, you gotta do it again.”
The suit serves up new targets and tacticals. At least the Ceph are consistent: either form follows function or the aliens have no fucking imagination whatsoever. Same substation layout, same relative distances, same basic vulnerabilities.
Harder uphill battles.
Heavies guard each substation, slow but almost indestructible. Their missiles are easy enough to dodge a few hundred meters out, but the closer you get the less time there is to get out of the way—and these fuckers are smart enough to play defense. I have to come to them and they know it.
Besides, there are plenty of grunts and stalkers to take the game forward. More than I think, at first. I stealth past choke points and high ground (higher ground) where the enemy should be waiting, find no one there—then get my ass shot at from behind, five seconds later. I hear little rockfalls to my left, the soft chittering of a stalker on my six, turn to track and come up empty—and ordnance lights up my flank where there was nothing but rocks and air a moment before. The rising wind blows the mist off most of the exposed reaches but everywhere there are pits and depressions where the air is stagnant and the fog pools like milk. Naked eyesight is useless in there; StarlAmp and thermal see through the fog but still can’t catch the Ceph. They pin me down between the edge of the world and a crumbling cement footbridge, turn the sky into a shooting gallery whenever I so much as peek around the corner.
The ground crumbles to air under my feet and now I’ve got no choice; it’s either an express trip back to earth or a Hail Mary run straight across the kill zone. I lay down suppressing fire as I run, spray an arc as empty as the eye can see—and a grunt materializes from thin air and collapses in a twitching heap in front of me.
Holy shit: The Ceph up here have cloaks.
I make it to the safe side of a toppled army barricade, wondering: What took them so long?
Fifteen minutes.
New weapons, new tactics. Two shots with the Mike makes your average grunt pop like a zit windshield—but the substation Heavy on which I try it is still shooting back after I’ve drained it dry. I ditch the Mike, switch to L-TAG: Two smart grenades finish the job. It takes four to down the Heavy at the second substation, but I get lucky at the third: I miss the target completely but I knock out whatever’s holding up the US-ARMY prefab barricade leaning behind it. Ten meters of hardened cement comes down on the Squid like God’s own tombstone. Forty seconds later the last substation is down for the count.
The wind’s been building with every step I take toward the primary target; now it howls around me like something tortured. But I’m so close, now. The spire isn’t even a spire anymore: it’s massive, it’s city blocks on a side, it’s a goddamn cathedral of the underworld. It’s every part of every bottom-dweller the earth ever spawned: armored shells and jointed legs and segmented antennae; more sharp-edged mouthparts than you can count; blood-red gills, pincers and claws all jammed together by some monstrous trash compacter and pressed into a tower that stabs the stratosphere. The cracks between those pieces pulse and dim with orange light, as though someone were blowing on embers.
Bright light ahead, spilling around the rocks of this outcropping. I cringe in the shadows like Adam after the apple, hiding from an angry God. The wind tries to push me into the light. My fingers find cracks in the rock, dig in against the gale; flattened against the granite, I lean forward.
Wheels within wheels: a spoked, segmented disk, at the base of the structure, big enough to plug the Holland Tunnel. It seems to lead into the structure’s interior, a great circular portal awash in blinding white radiance. Air intake. Or if you prefer more romantic imagery: a tunnel of light.
It’s about fucking time. I’ve been dead for two days already.
I remember lessons learned at Hargreave’s knee: the spore’s basically an antibody. It’ll swarm to the site of an injury. Nathan Gould, bringer of Bad News, pipes up: “Dude, you gotta get inside.” I can barely hear him over the wind.
Tara Strickland, bringer of Much Worse News: “Goddamn it. The STRATCOM order just went thr—Alcatraz, you’re out of time! Go!”
Shit.
I step out from behind my rock. I don’t even have to jump. The Tunnel of Light sucks me up like a bird into a jet engine.
Blizzard doesn’t come close. Hurricane misses the mark. Wind tunnel might catch the nuts and bolts, but it can’t convey the gut feeling.
I don’t know if anything can.
The spire breathes you in and for the merest instant it almost seems calm: The walls are a blur but there’s no resistance as long as you just go with the flow. Then you reach out for a handhold, grab on to the first thing that hits your fingers, and the wind slams down on you like a mountain at Mach Two.
I’d have never even made the catch without the suit; my fingers would have ripped right off my hand. If I had made the catch, I’d never have held on; I would have left my arm hanging against the wall while the rest of me slammed down into—
Where am I now? Far beneath the tumor in the sky, at least. I must have shot out the bottom of that rock pile a split second after the spire sucked me in. Surely I’m back on earth, back under it, down in the deep dark levels where extinctions are made. The spore blasts down, around, past me like a storm of needles, like ball bearings from a railgun. BUD strafes my visual cortex with yellow-coded updates on epidermal integrity and maximum armor settings but it’s all just talk; the suit’s abrading around me like a heat shield on reentry.
I can’t even see where I am. There are flickers of orange light, flickers of blue, everything high-contrast and stroboscopic; I’m blind to anything more than a few centimeters past my faceplate. I realize that whatever I’m hanging off, I’m hanging one-handed: my other hand, miraculously, is still clutching the L-TAG. I cradle that launcher to my chest like a baby, I hold on to it for dear life.
I try to bring it up but the wind resistance is too great; the most I can do is aim down and off-center, toward the wall of the shaft. Could be conduits along this thing, right? Could be power lines and vital circuitry. I fire blind, empty all my grenades into the maelstrom; the wind yanks the empty weapon away. I think I might hear a distant muffled boom over the howling of the wind. Maybe not.
There’s no doubt about the sudden vibration that shakes the walls, though. It shakes me loose and slams me down another endless tunnel.
Which actually ends.
Maybe the suit keeps the impact from turning me to jelly. Maybe it just keeps the jelly contained in a human-shaped sack. But I’m on the deck now, and the wind screams sideways instead of down, and I can just barely roll into the lee of some protruding piece of machinery half embedded in the wall. It’s still not even close to calm air: the back-eddy scouring this little wind-shadow is a gale by any standards—but it’s nothing the suit can’t handle, assuming it hasn’t already been damaged beyond repair.
The nuke could go off, and in here I’d never even notice.
Thoughts occur to me. I don’t know if they’re mine or SECOND’s, or even if that’s a difference that makes a difference anymore. Something thinks: Bad vent design: Too much turbulence. Something thinks: Maybe this isn’t a primary vent. Maybe the primaries are offline, or damaged. Maybe the Ceph just aren’t into laminar flow.