by Peter Watts
It never tried to pull that shit again. Of course, I never tried to cross it again. It fed me objectives and I pretty much went along with them. And most of the time, why wouldn’t I? BUD points out the most likely local spots for cached ammo and I’m not going to weapon up? Hargreave offers my life back if I follow the parade and I’m going to go in the opposite direction? Why? Just to prove I can?
Still, what if I tried?
Of course, those were early days, before the N2 really got to know me. We have a much better relationship now. Now it would never lock me down against my will. It just makes sure I’m always willing.
You do know how this thing works, right? They’ve told you that much, at least?
We’re not talking about a meatport here, I’m not one of those new cybersoldiers with the spinal jacks. We’re talking about carbon nanotubes and room-temp superconductors. Synthetic myelin. Tendrils finer than human hairs burrowing into me, sniffing their way up and down my backbone, twisting up through that hole where the spine enters the skull.
You don’t wear the N2, you mate with it. You fuse. And it feels pretty good at first, let me tell you. It feels great—and after a while you start wondering why it feels so great. A neuron’s a neuron, right? When you get right down to it, what’s the difference between sending signals to my visual cortex and sending signals to any other part of my brain? BUD shows me unreal images; who’s to say SECOND doesn’t give me unreal thoughts, unreal feelings? A bit of icy calm to help you figure the angles before a big dustup? A bit of extra hate to help you mow the motherfuckers down in the crunch?
Dude. Spare me your pitying looks. You think you’re any better off than me? Did you get any say in how your brain was wired up? You think all that sticky circuitry you call thought just makes itself? Every effect has a cause, man: You can believe in physics or you can believe in free will, but you can’t have it both ways. The only difference between you and me is, I’m part of something bigger now. We’ve got a purpose, Roger, bigger than yours, bigger than your bosses’, so much bigger than you. So you might want to start asking yourself if the people behind those cameras are the sort of folks to whom you really want to pledge your allegiance.
Because there are other sides to be on, you know. And maybe it’s not too late to get on the right one.
You have to go down there, son.
Turns out I’m not the first guy he told that to.
There were these tremors, apparently. A dozen seismographs grumbling about something under City Hall, even before the ground opened up. So just a couple of days ago, Jack Hargreave sent a squad down into the subway. Their signals garbled. Their signals stopped. They haven’t come back.
Hargreave sends me down the same tunnel: a long dirty intestine lined with train tracks, torqued and twisted and torn open enough to let in occasional shafts of dirty gray light from overhead. I share the passageway with occasional ticks, but they’re headed the other way and they don’t bother me; their bladders are already filled to bursting. I imagine stomping on them and watching them go splat. Once or twice I indulge the fantasy.
Fifty meters in, the tunnel opens into a subway station. The walls are cracked and oozing, the overhead pipes burst. Puddles on the floor. Most of the lights have been smashed; a few hang from the wires at one end, sparking and flickering. There’s graffiti all over the walls, FUCK YOU and EAT THE RICH and THANK YOU LORD. Trash bins kicked over. Shotgun blasts and little high-caliber divots scattered like terminal acne over every surface.
Actually, it probably doesn’t look much different than it did before the invasion.
There’s a blood trail smeared across the tiles, around the corner, into a crumbling backstage service area. I find three bodies at the end of it: CELL, but not the usual mall-cop colors. Better armor, for one thing. Different insignia. More—understated.
“My men,” Hargreave murmurs. “I’d hoped …”
He sounds almost choked up. Almost sincere.
I give him a moment, scavenge the remains: frag grenades, laser scope, ammo clips. A scarab with a cracked handguard. One of those nice big L-TAG smart grenade launchers that grunts like me never seem to get their hands on.
“Casualties of war, I suppose. We all make sacrifices.” Hargreave has come to terms with his grief. I never knew the traditional minute of silence could be so therapeutic. “I don’t see Reeves here, though. Don’t see the scanning gear, either. See if you can find it; it might give us a little advance warning on what we’re heading into.”
I find him through a rusted fire exit, halfway down another tunnel where the loading platform is high and dry and the tracks themselves are knee-deep in the water table. Derelict train cars, knocked off their rails, sit in the water like gondolas in the world’s most butt-ugly Tunnel of Love.
Mitchell Reeves lies dead on the loading platform with two of his homeys, twitching under the ministrations of a pair of ticks. I waste some ammo on a bit of cheap visceral satisfaction, pry Reeves’s field laptop from his cold dead fingers. The tech’s proprietary from boards to buttons, but the I/O’s standard WiFi.
Hargreave delivers the eulogy as SECOND builds the connection. “Best I had, aside from Tara Strickland. What a waste.”
Reeves stares through me while his machine shakes hands. At least he still has eyes.
At least the spore left him with that much.
I’m heading for something Hargreave calls “the Hive.” Doesn’t that sound like fun. According to Reeves’s laptop it’s almost dead north. This subway tunnel curves northeast.
Close enough.
The tunnels arched and ancient and lined with patterned tiles that wouldn’t look half bad if someone stripped off about a hundred years of grease and black mold. Some stretches have grimy skylights behind ornate iron grilles, and the dim dirty light that filters down might even be natural. Others are lit by yellow bulbs in cheap tin chandeliers. I slosh past cracks and cave-ins and zigzag chains of derailed cars as Hargreave checks out Reeves’s data. I climb along tracks that used to be flat; now they’ve been wrenched into roller coasters. Sparking fluorescents and brain-dead signal lights flash at random, filling the passages with brightness and shadow and flickering bloody twilight.
I never walk alone. Hargreave whispers in my ear. Ceph infantry stalk along the tunnels and shoot on sight, hooting and chittering and clicking. I must be on the right track; their numbers climb the farther I go. Too many to take on at once; the suit isn’t flooding me with bloodlust so I guess it agrees. We cloak in fits and starts, and try to pass unseen.
It works for a while.
Something crashes down into the tunnel just ahead: a steel fist, a battering ram, a subway car punching through from an overhead line like Thor’s Hammer through a leaky condom. I don’t know what sent it down here, I don’t know if it’s accident or assault, I don’t know what set the fucking thing on fire. But there it is, forty meters dead ahead, a few hundred tons of torqued and screaming metal, belching flames and smoke. It spits pieces everywhere: shards of glass, ragged little shurikens of flaming metal, chunks of concrete ricocheting from the shattered wall. One of them must have hit me, because suddenly I can see my shadow dancing in the firelight like a big fucking arrowhead.
And all these armed and armored garden slugs see it, too.
They’re on me from angles I didn’t even know they had: from behind, from around the corner of the burning train, but from above, too, from overhead service catwalks I’ve been too fucking stupid to even notice all this time. They fire through grilles and gratings way too narrow for a clean return shot—and man, even the grunts I can get a bead on are way tougher than they have any right to be. I’m pumping off shots that blow good-sized divots out of reinforced concrete, and these fuckers just take it. Four, five shots to bring them down sometimes—even with all that unprotected meat showing—and I don’t have nearly enough ammo to go around.
There’s a service closet at my back, heavy door, double-locked, but a few wild shots f
rom the Ceph take care of that before I even get there. I manage to duck back inside an instant before the armor setting bleeds out the cells. It gives me some cover, buys the suit a bit of recharge time. I fire around the corner often enough to keep the Squids from advancing too quickly, but they’re out there and I’m in here and this is not what you’d call a sustainable situation.
I switch to StarlAmp—light flickers in through the doorway but the corners of this little cave are still deep in shadow—and I spare a moment to survey the digs. There’s a pail in here, and a mop. A fuse box on the wall, jammed with breakers and switches and high-voltage cables. There’s a bloated corpse squirming with spore, some poor bastard who found a dark place to die. I flash back to all the other poor bastards before him, the Rapture-heads, the suicidal mothers, the bodies twitching in the street like frog’s legs jumping to an electric current—
And suddenly I see something else in here, too. I see a way out.
I duck back around the corner and hand out way more ammo than I should. Ceph scatter before my suppressing fire; I catch at least two of them right in the dorsal tentacles, blow a couple of those waving wormy things right the fuck off, leave them flapping on the ground while their owners dive for cover. Doesn’t even slow them down. Gotta hand it to the slugs; if someone blew off one of my limbs I don’t think I’d be quite so blasé about it.
And then I think: Predator–prey. And then I think: Nature documentaries.
And suddenly, for just that one brief instant, Ceph battle armor—the sheer idiocy of leaving all that meat exposed to enemy fire—almost makes a kind of sense.
Maybe it’s like those reef fish that have the big fake eyespots down near the tail, to trick predators into going for the wrong end. Maybe those big wavy tentacles are vulnerable by design, maybe they’re not gills or penises but cannon fodder. Maybe the whole point is to look vulnerable, to draw enemy fire to something that can be dropped and discarded the way a lizard sheds its tail, leaves the predator chewing on some scaly scrap while the primary target skitters away unharmed.
Now I’m not saying that kind of Animal Planet shit would necessarily work when you graduate to dustups that use actual honest-to-God technology. Any enemy smart enough to lob a flashbang or build an SMG is gonna figure that trick out pretty quick. But so what? Why go out of your way to shield something that only exists to be blown off in the first place? You don’t need it for anything, so you might as well allocate your resources to something that matters.
Apropos of nothing, of course. Just a friendly pointer in case you ever find yourself face-to-phallus with those slimy little fuckers in the near future.
But it’s just a flash, really, a little chunk of insight crammed into the space of an eyeblink. The brain plays with the theory but the body keeps the plan in motion. My suppressing fire has got the Ceph to back off a bit, given me a few extra seconds to put the pieces into place. I rip open that switch box, I rip out those cables, I loop them up and tie them together. And when I cloak at last, fully charged, and sneak back out into the tunnel, the Ceph don’t even notice—because they still hear me, trapped in that little room. They can still see my shadow moving in there, framed by the flickering blue light of shorted circuits. And by the time they get their nerve back and rush my defenses—by the time they discover that corpse wired up like a marionette, live cables under its arms, dancing a fifty-thousand-volt jig against the wall—I’m already behind enemy lines.
Galvanic reflexes.
I bet I’m the only one in my whole fucking squad who would’ve thought of that.
The ghost of Mitchell Reeves leads me on to an impassable cave-in where his living body planted canisters of C-4 before turning back to die a thousand meters farther upstream. I don’t know why he never detonated them: But I do, and when the dust and the wreckage have settled I crawl from the tunnel we made into one we didn’t: a place full of shadows and segmented machines and dim, sickly gray light.
I think it’s a cave at first, carved from the bedrock beneath Manhattan and almost as large. Great curving spinal columns of dark gunmetal arc across the vast space, orange eyespots glimmering from each vertebra. Massive towers of wheels and gears and sawtooth machinery loom ahead. A cave, a subterranean city. But then something rises out of a fissure ahead—a floating cannon, a flying abortion put together from gun belts and engine blocks, all its viscera welded to the outside of its hull. The usual flickering red levitators push it into the sky, and as I watch it rise I see there is a sky up there, grim and gloomy, but that is not the roof of a cave and this is no hollow beneath Manhattan. This is an open pit, and up around its edges I can see the towers of New York.
Then I’m flat on my back, and a horse has just kicked me in the chest.
A horse, or a high-caliber armor-piercing round. Tactical vectors back and highlights a target halfway up a faraway cliff face, too hidden in the local cover for a make. Not human, though.
“Ah,” Hargreave murmurs. “That’s interesting.”
No warnings on tactical.
“Stay absolutely still. If its dealings so far have been with ordinary soldiers, it thinks you’re dead. Act like it.”
I sacc’ suit diagnostics just to be sure. No redlights.
SECOND keeps a targeting triangle on the sniper as it emerges from cover. A single impossible bound and it’s covered half the distance. Another jump; it’s on the ledge with me, not ten steps away. It steps forward with that strange half-upright-half-panther gait. I swear it’s cocking its headpiece at me.
It was mainly grunts in the subway. I wonder how this carbine works point-blank against stalkers.
It actually works pretty well. But I’m guessing this means they know I’m coming.
Jack Hargreave fills my helmet with waypoints and mission objectives. I descend into the pit and he talks about ecology, and insect societies. I look up at a murky yellow sky and he rhapsodizes about evolution and coral reefs. He warns me that I am in a hive, that the level of infestation is high, that I have to be careful.
But all I can see are the thousands of infected rotting on the streets behind me, and I don’t want to be careful. I don’t give a flying fuck about infestation. There can’t ever be enough of these fuckers in my sights, not as long as I’ve got a weapon in my hands and ammo to feed it.
And oh, Roger, it’s as though all of fucking Cephdom has gathered here to grant that very wish.
I’m not crazy enough to take them all on head-to-head; there are stalkers here that jump like fleas and shoot like snipers, Heavies that barely feel a direct hit with a fragmentation grenade. I cloak and cover, I hide, I fight on the run and never in a straight line. But there are times. Times a bogeyman falls injured in front of me and instead of finishing the job with a burst of firepower I lift the fucker over my head and smash it against one of its own machines. There are time when I find cracks in the armor, and pry them open, and rip out that translucent gray Spam by the fistful. There are times I shoot to kill, and times I flip that gun around and use it as a fucking club.
They’re all the same to me, every stalker like every other, each grunt as faceless as the last. I don’t know if they’re clones or assembly-line robots, I don’t know if the suit’s just filtering out their distinguishing traits to keep my conscience dead, and I don’t care. But there’s one Heavy down here who doesn’t line up with the others. It doesn’t go down, it doesn’t give up, it doesn’t stop moving. It lumbers like a fucking cow but somehow it always manages to get out of the way of my grenades, somehow my armor-piercing rounds just never seem to get through.
And I swear, Roger, Ceiling Cat as my witness, this thing has as big a grudge as I do. It sees me airing out its buddies, sees the ranks thinning down, and it doesn’t chitter or burble like the other Ceph: it roars. I can outrun it easily enough—I’m the hare to its tortoise, and yes I am painfully aware of who won that particular contest, thank you very much—but somehow it always manages to get ahead of me after I leave it behind, always
manages to rise up between me and my waypoints. It comes after me like a runaway semi, like I’d raped its mother, and it’s smart enough to play to my weaknesses. I could stay ahead of the fucking thing if I didn’t have to deal with some grunt or stalker on the side every time I turned around. But the Heavy keeps coming, runs me down, forces me to drain my suit. Then, once I’m bled down to moving at pathetic baseline human speeds—then those cannon arms shoot out missiles from an endless ammo belt that must reach into another fucking dimension, the damn thing never runs dry. I try to keep to the high ground and some stalker sails higher, raining down plasma and lightning. I take cover behind rockfalls and overturned dumpsters and grunts swarm me like giant lethal gnats.
I don’t know how it happens but it catches me in the open. A missile slams into the rock face just a few meters to my left—not a direct hit but close enough, close enough. The blast kicks me into the air like a tumbleweed in a windstorm; half a dozen redlights bloom on BUD. The world spins and then stops with a jolt, way too soon, way too high. I’m back on the ground but not that ground. I’m higher up. I’m on a ledge, an uplifted chunk of asphalt. There’s a car behind me. Yellow cab. More cabs than cockroaches in this burg.
From just out of sight, past the lip of the ledge, the sound of something pounding the ground.
Carbine’s gone. The scarab won’t do shit against this thing. I’ve got grenades but the Heavy just—
Oh, wait …
The charge level’s barely grazing 50 percent but it’ll have to do. I slap two stickies onto the front of the cab, set the timers so they don’t blow up in my face. Whatever the suit’s got to give, it gives now. Lord: Give me Strength.
I kick. The cab skids off the ledge and sails down in a beautiful arc that ends right on the head of that missile-spitting motherfucker. The sound of massive metal objects smashing together: just beautiful, Roger. Just fucking beautiful.