A sentry called out a challenge and Battle responded. He must have gotten the password right because they were waved forward.
“This the place?” Battle asked.
A soldier with captain’s bars nodded. “Our instruments indicate a corridor parallel with the subway tunnel right beyond that wall.” He pointed to a section of wall on which shaped gelignite charges clung like gray leeches.
“Blow it,” Battle said.
“Yes, sir.”
One of the soldiers shepherded them back down the tunnel. The explosion wasn’t nearly as impressive as Ray had imagined it would be. There was a muffled thunk, and that was it. They went back around the bend and saw that the spotlights trained on the wall were now illuminating a nearly circular hole about two feet off the ground and six feet or so in diameter. Half a dozen soldiers surrounded the hole, automatic weapons pointed at it, ready for just about anything to come charging through. The dust stirred up by the explosion was still settling. Everything else was quiet and calm. "Kill those lights,” Battle snapped at the captain. “Do you want every damned mutant on Ellis Island to know we’re coming?”
“No, sir.” He gestured, and the spots were turned off. The corridor was now eerily illuminated only by the flashlights carried by a few of the soldiers.
Battle nodded. “All right. Shadow, you’ve been here before. What can we expect?”
“Right off,” the ace answered, “fear.”
Battle frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Bloat’s got some kind of spell”
“Spell!” Battle scoffed.
“Call it what you want,” Shadow said defensively. “It’s like a watchdog. After a while, it knows you’re there. It goes into your mind and finds what you fear the most. Then it shows it to you — but only as images, as phantoms that have no physical presence. They can’t hurt you, but if you don’t know what’s coming they can scare the Jesus out of you.”
All right, Ray said to himself. Phantoms. Images. Buzz-saw hands that can’t hurt… I can deal with it.
Battle nodded. “Right. Here’s the marching order. Black Shadow, you go first. Ray, you follow Shadow. I shall bring up the rear with Legion, Popinjay, and Cameo. Crypt Kicker will cover our backs. All right?” Everyone nodded. “Then let’s go!”
Black Shadow nodded again and, darkness draping him like a cloak, stepped through the hole in the Wall that led to Bloat’s domain.
Shooter or shootee? The android didn’t want to make the choice.
Using the Army’s lost plastic explosives, hoping to destroy equipment and not people, Modular, Man succeeded in mining the third tracked MLRS vehicle before a sentry spotted him. There was a shout and shots. Modular Man accelerated straight up.
Below him, below the arcing tracer rounds trying to find him in the night sky, the first vehicle blew up. An instant later one of the missiles ignited and blasted loose from the launcher. It hadn’t received any computer guidance and went straight up, its rocket flaming, before beginning to corkscrew wildly across the night sky.
Another rocket flamed upward, took a wild yaw, dropped into the Atlantic, and detonated. Seawater, carried by the brisk offshore wind, spattered over the sand spit.
The second vehicle exploded and all the rockets went off at once, not firing, just blowing up. A wave of pressure and heat swept through the android’s sensory scans. Sub-munitions lofted high, thousands of them, and fell to earth.
From above it looked like many strings of firecrackers going off at once. Firecrackers that killed.
Sand blew high, masking the target. Beneath the cloud, things kept blowing up, the cascade of concussion obliterating the sound of screams.
Modular Man headed for the second battery he’d been told to eliminate.
He didn’t want to think about what that was going to be like.
The second missile battery had moved by the time Modular Man got to its location. Probably just a random shift, unconnected to the Rox’s preemptive strike, but lucky for the crew in any case.
The horrid memory of Sandy Hook floated through the android’s mind. He couldn’t think of any way he could have kept the casualties down.
He’d become a shooter without ever meaning to.
He didn’t spend much time searching for the battery. Instead he returned to the Rox.
Once there he found out his tasks weren’t over. One of the strike groups was pinned down in Grand Army Plaza, after having attempted an attack on an ammo dump and instead having walked into a Special Forces ambush.
The battle was garish and weird, fought in an environment illuminated by searchlights, flares, and twisting spirals of tear gas, and filled with joker bodies sprawled beneath old, green statues of Civil War heroes. The android managed to extract the remnants of the team, he hoped without killing anyone himself.
It was, he suspected, just a matter of time.
There were other missions on Modular Man’s agenda, first an attack on a division of Apache helicopters parked at Teterboro Airport. He blew them up without being seen, and without (he thought) any casualties among the crews, who were sleeping under tents off at the far edge of the field.
He blew up more helicopters at the Coast Guard heliport in Jamaica Bay, then was ordered into an attack on the missile battery again, in what Kafka thought was its new location in Great Kills Harbor. Instead Modular Man found Great Kills Park filled with the ballooning plastic tents of a field hospital. He thought of sub-munitions cascading down on the hospital as they had on Ft. Hancock.
He couldn’t find the missile battery. He was happy to leave the hospital alone.
By that time it was dawn. An aerial view of the Greater New York Area showed, on all points around the vast foggy murk expanding from the Rox, towering plumes of smoke from fires still burning.
He thought of the massive U.S. war machine he’d witnessed in combat against the Swarm. He measured the damage done by Governor Bloat’s strikes against the military that he knew could be brought to bear.
Almost zero. A company or two of helicopters wrecked — there were battalions more. A few dozen missiles destroyed — there were thousands in inventory. A few ammo dumps blown up — millions of shells remaining. Maybe a few hundred Americans had been killed.
There were 250 million more.
Modular Man dropped onto the Rox, reported to Travnicek, was told to make himself scarce. He went to the intelligence group, where Patchwork and Kafka were still gathering information. Kafka was as far away from everyone as he could get in the small room. Patchwork, seen even through the bandages, was completely exhausted.
“The brass are really pissed,” Patchwork reported. "Zappa’s delayed any action until the ammunition from Clove Lakes can be replaced.”
The jokers seemed pleased. “We’ve shown ’em,” someone said.
“He’s talking about something called ‘shoot-and-scoot’ tactics.”
Kafka saw Modular Man and scuttled closer to him. “That could be a problem,” he said. “The artillery batteries set up, fire a few rounds apiece, then pull out and set up somewhere else. That means we can’t preempt them, because we won’t know where they’re going to be. And we’ll have a hard time retaliating, because they’re running away before we can get a fix.”
“Not fast enough for Pulse and Modular Man,” said one joker. He was grinning hugely with three rows of pointed teeth. “Am I right?”
Eyes turned toward Modular Man. “You’re going to lose,” he said.
There was a long moment of silence. Patchwork lifted her chin toward Modular Man, as if once again sniffing for his presence.
“I’ll do what I can,” the android said. “We caught them by surprise last night — they weren’t expecting you to have so many of their units located. But they’ll get better. Your strike teams are going to get killed or go to ground or get arrested. There’s only one of me, and one of Pulse, and Pulse’s energy is limited — during the Swarm invasion he ended up in a near coma with a glucose feed in his arm because he’d burned himself out fighting. My energy is limited as well, and I can’t be everywhere, and in any case Snotman can beat both of us with one hand tied behind him.”