by Peter Watts
The ramp drops me below line-of-sight in an instant. I’m up to my knees in scummy water by the time I reach the corrugated door at the bottom. It’s jammed half open. I duck down and under. I’m up to my waist. The ramp continues down. I take another step. I’m up to my chest. The ceiling slopes down ahead of me, mindlessly parallel to the ramp beneath, and cuts off the airspace.
I wonder if maybe I’d be better off lending Chino a hand against the Ceph.
Jesus Christ, you fucking girlyman. It was twenty years ago. Get over it.
I dive under, and push forward. The water pushes back, dark and dirty and full of swirling shit. The harder I stroke the thicker it gets; it kills my momentum, turns my reflexes to tar. I look up but there’s no surface overhead, just pipes and cement crossbeams and a few silvery bubbles sliding around like mercury. My inner eight-year-old is shitting bricks; the rest of me just hopes we make it through before I hit the rebreather’s immersion limit.
After about two hundred years the water starts to brighten up ahead; shafts of dirty gray light stab down onto two-lane asphalt, finally sloping back up. Now the surface is back; now the water’s low enough to stand in. It never recedes entirely—this whole level’s flooded—but it’s only up to my knees. I stand and my inner eight-year-old goes back to sleep. Suit clock tells me the whole trip took forty-five seconds but I guarantee, Roger, at least five minutes went by every time that second counter ticked over.
Pylons and parking spots to one side; the cinder-block wall of a service closet to the other. Maybe sixty meters past that wall is a stairwell that should take me straight to the lobby.
I hear voices.
What the fuck. Hargreave said this place was sealed.
Can’t hear the words. The voices float around the corner, low and easy, clarifying as I approach: the usual idle bullshit about hardware and poon. Maybe Hargreave sent a couple of grunts to meet me.
“You hear that?”
I freeze. I cloak.
“I’ll check it out. Hold your position.”
Good plan. Split the party. Go off on your own.
Gotta be CELL.
It is. He sloshes around the corner, the muzzle of his MP5 waving around like a stoned bumblebee. He pans toward me, through me, past me—
—stops, and looks again.
I’ve noticed by now: The cloak isn’t perfect. It turns you to something clearer than glass, but if you keep an eye out you can see the occasional refraction artifact in bright light. Even in semi-darkness there’s the barest bit of motion shimmer you might be able to pick out. If you know what to look for.
Let me tell you, this goon is looking hard, and I see it just before he does: the wake I’ve been kicking up as I move, that insignificant little bow ripple still playing itself out across the water’s surface.
But by then he’s opened fire, and lensing artifacts are the least of my worries.
I’m hit, he’s dead, the echoes of our conversation are still ringing off the walls and I hear bodies churning through the water just around the corner. Can’t count on the cloak down here. There’s a big box of circuit breakers hanging on the wall beside an abandoned Prius. I put out the lights. Someone yells “Switch to thermal!” and SECOND ccs me some local comm: “He’s in the building. Repeat: Prophet is in the building.”
Game on.
I can see the stairwell. At least I can see a bunch of body-temp false-color heat prints clustered around the exact spot where the stairwell’s supposed to be. They had me pegged, they knew just where I was going. Fuck, did Hargreave set me up? Who else, this is his building after all, he lured me in here, he’s got eyes on—
“Roger that. Kill order is in effect.”
Not Hargreave.
Lockhart.
He got in here somehow, snuck his people right under Hargreave’s nose. Hacked the telemetry or something. Lockhart, you stupid asshole, not Hargreave.
I circle away from the stairwell. Not nearly as many CELLulites guarding the elevator, and a couple of those fan out into the level as I watch: They know that only an idiot would use an elevator under these conditions.
I’m too smart to be as smart as they expect; but I still leave two of them bleeding out in the disabled-parking zone. By the time I’m in the elevator and punching L, hostilities have spread beyond the local airwaves: Hargreave has broken into the freq, and he and Lockhart are having a slapfight all over the thirty-eight-megahertz band. Hargreave’s ordering Lockhart to stand down, Lockhart’s telling him to get stuffed. Lockhart says some not-very-nice things about me, too: abomination is the word he uses, I think. No big deal. Words will never hurt me.
Sticks and stones, on the other hand. Not to mention our old friends Heckler and Koch …
The elevator decelerates smoothly to a stop at the lobby level. I kick the cloak back into gear and boost armor, flatten myself against the side of the car, crouch down.
They almost take me out anyway, the moment the doors open. It’s the view that does me in.
I’m underwater. The whole damn building is. I look out into that lobby, that turret, that grain silo I saw in the wireframes: It’s glass, the whole thing’s glass, a single vast cylindrical space ten stories tall. I look past a great sweeping arc of windowpanes onto the bottom of a lake: wrecked cars, sluggish clouds of suspended sediment, dim shapes in murky green water. I look up, up; wave-bottoms slop against the panes thirty meters above me. There’s all sorts of shit floating around up there: office furniture and cardboard boxes and big wooden telephone poles snapped like toothpicks.
This whole damn building—and the buildings beside it, and the chunks of buildings jammed up in the streets between—it’s a big piecemeal dam, holding back a deep pocket of floodwaters north of 36th. We came in from the downstream side, and it was just our good luck that the whole pile of junk didn’t give way and wash us out to sea like logs down the crapper before we even got here.
I can’t help but wonder how long that luck is going to last. How long those windowpanes are going to last. Something creaks, way overhead: a billion tonnes of water looking for a way in.
And in those instants I’ve wasted staring like an idiot, they hose down the elevator with so much lead I take five random hits to the chest.
They don’t get through. They do knock me back against the wall of the elevator, though, and my head back into the game. Hazel Six has obviously called ahead for reservations, and invisibility isn’t much of an edge when every gun in the place knows you’re somewhere in a box two meters square. I crank the N2’s strength setting and jump into the lobby like a frog on a trampoline.
I take out two of those CELLulite fuckwits before I even hit the floor. But there are six left, my cloak is down, and public lobbies are not what you would call rich in available cover.
I bounce off the wall, make it to the back side of the security desk, come down hard on some merc who evidently thought he had dibs on the spot. The air is fucking incandescent with crossfire, and I’m almost wishing that these guys were better shots because half the rounds that don’t hit me are smacking into the windows. Spiderwebs are cracking through the glass everywhere I look. I can’t believe the windows haven’t shattered yet.
Fortunately, fragging CELL asses and covering my own is a full-time job. My inner eight-year-old can take a number. And believe it or not, when the dust finally settles and I am the Last Corpse Standing, that whole round wall of windows is still keeping the water at bay. Half a dozen panes are almost opaque, they’re so shot through with cracks; there are more trickles and rivulets and needles of spray than I can count. But there’s a whole orphaned chunk of the Atlantic leaning against those windows, and goddamn it, they’re holding.
Lockhart’s gone offline. Or maybe he’s just sulking because I wiped the floor with his toy soldiers. Hargreave keeps the flame alive, though, riding my ass to reboot the upper-level elevators from the main desk. I still can’t take my eyes off the windows, off all that dark heavy water piled up on the o
ther side, but Hargreave nags reassuringly in my ear: No need for concern, super-nanoglass, guaranteed floodproof. Go on, get over to the desk, reboot the system. What could possibly go wrong?
I go over to the desk. A couple of brain-dead monitors flash test patterns at me.
Something goes wrong.
I hear it before I see it. Glass against metal; ice cracking on the surface of a frozen lake. A sharp, cutting sound, halfway between a crack and a ping.
Half a dozen windowpanes split from side to side. Water sprays in fine sheets of mist.
Something’s moving out there in the murk, something big. I can’t even make out a silhouette; it’s hidden behind the mud and shit swirling up off the street.
Just past the front doors, three cars lift majestically off the bottom, turn slowly end-over-end, then settle back down in billowing clouds of mud.
More windows crack. Two trickles upgrade to small waterfall status. Inner eight-year-old’s eyes go wide, watching the water run down the inside of the panes; but then motion catches my eye again and drags it back down to street level.
Something’s standing on the bottom, just the other side of the glass. It towers over the muddy cumulus boiling around its legs. It looks in at me—down at me—with one glowing vertical slit of an eye.
It crouches.
Every pane in front of the thing shatters in an instant. The ocean reaches in with big battering fists and takes me away.
The impact doesn’t knock me out this time. I wish it had.
I am deadwood, man. I am flotsam and jetsam. I am a fly on the goddamn jet stream, and I have no say at all in where I’m going.
Maybe that saves my ass, I don’t know. Maybe if I had managed to fight the current I would’ve ended up skewered on rebar or wedged under a bus until my rebreather gave out. But I’m just a speck in the current, carried by a million tonnes of water following the path of least resistance; and water tends to flow around the rocks in the road, not into them. It fires me through doorways already smashed open, shoots me down halls and out broken windows, swings me around corners like a rag doll but it doesn’t smash me into anything. Way down in some sub-basement it finds a hole in the floor, slings me around it like a turd in a toilet bowl, flushes me down into a breached sewer pipe. Corrugated steel blurs past on all sides, and it goes on forever before spitting me out into—
—I don’t know where, exactly. Water spills over my shoulders in a brown cascade, loses steam, subsides to a trickle. There’s a strip of sky overhead, fractured walls of dirt and gravel and bedrock looming on either side. Now that the deluge has tapered off I hear water running in rivulets down a thousand cracks and crevices. I’m at the bottom of a tiny canyon, a rift in yet another Manhattan street that’s buckled and split and left me exposed like a grub dug out from under a rotten stump.
And all I can think is I made it, I made it. Dragged underwater, underground, away from air and sunlight, that stupid eight-year-old whiner inside trying to scream his fucking head off but I gagged him, I kept him down, I held it together. Not so scary this time; not fun by any stretch but at least I didn’t panic, didn’t even verge on it.
The whole fear-of-drowning thing. I’m almost getting used to it.
I listen to water lapping against concrete. I hear gulls screaming at one another. It’s almost peaceful. I close my eyes.
“What a goddamn mess. Now of all times; those boardroom idiots.”
I keep my eyes closed. Maybe it’ll go away if I ignore it.
“Alcatraz, it seems I am facing a boardroom coup at the worst possible time. I can no longer control Lockhart or his forces. I am effectively under house arrest. And the Ceph are deploying in force. Until I can find some way to reverse this … palace revolution, our objectives are blocked. You must attempt to hold back the Ceph until I can stabilize the situation.”
Oh, must I now.
“Good luck, son—I will be in touch.”
Take your time, old man. Don’t hurry on my account.
Wait: Chino.
If he got caught in that flood he could be nothing but teeth and strawberry jam by now. I wonder if—
An icon pops up center-right on the BUD: comm log from a restricted band. I sacc’ PLAY.
“Alcatraz, if you can hear me—listen, man, I’m sorry. We can’t hold here. Repeat, cannot hold here. The Squids are just hammering us. I’m pulling the squad back to Central Station. Get there if you can, man—we’re going to need you.”
I check the timestamp: ten minutes before the dam broke. If they were lucky, they got clear in time. Weird, though. I didn’t know the N2 did voicemail. I wonder why I didn’t hear it live.
Wait a second: I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even sacc’ anything. All I did vis-à-vis Chino was think about the dude.
And you know, by this point I’m not even surprised anymore.
PILGRIMAGE
“This is Delta Six to base, we … backup now! … civilians in tow, wounded … engaging … some kind of alien armored … sonic …”
Rebar. Power lines. I-beams and buildings blocking the signal. Wherever Delta Six is holed up, I can’t hear shit down here.
I get off my ass and start climbing.
“Delta Six, this is Echo Ten.”
Echo’s coming through clear, at least. Bad news for Delta; huge difference in signal strength probably means huge difference in location.
“We are en route to your position, but the streets are blocked. It’s gonna take time to …”
I poke my head back above ground level. Delta Six’s signal firms up:
“We don’t have time, Echo Ten!”
Delta Six is losing it. Delta Six is screaming. And something else is screaming in the background, too, something that sounds a little like glass cracking on metal …
“You get here now or you’re just gonna be counting our fucking corpses!”
SECOND serves up waypoints and sat fixes and triangulated guesswork. Echo Ten is still out in the boonies. I might just make it, though.
Shit.
I check what’s left of my gear, ditch the scarab; the seawater’s fucked the firing mechanism. Everything else seems good to go. GPS puts me about three or four klicks from the action, depending on the waypoints.
I start running. The farther uptown the higher the ground: I wade the occasional stretch but when my feet hit solid ground they burn city blocks like firewood. The topography’s been radicalized up here: Buildings lean into one another, flat streets shaken into corduroy, whole blocks just kind of pushed back and piled up against the terrain behind. Madison Square Park is a steaming swamp—the tops of cabs and SUVs rise above the water like sunroofed boulders. One of the Staten Island ferries is jammed up at a crazy-ass angle against the buildings on the northern perimeter; I never realized before how huge those things are. You gotta wonder how many buildings that bad boy took out on its way uptown.
I keep moving as north as the terrain will let me. Delta Six fades in and out at the whim of whatever obstacles happen to be fucking with the freq at any given moment. Bad news from Central; something’s going on there and it’s not going well, but I can’t tell any more than that. Some kind of running battle seems to be moving east, and the news from that quarter is no cause for joy, either. But I still take heart because hey, at least the battle’s still on, right? They haven’t been squashed like bugs yet; at least some of them are still kicking after being in the thick of it for half an hour or more, and I’m thinking that’s no small accomplishment. I know what these guys are up against.
Thought I did, anyway.
Something’s making the ground shake, just a little. I see it more than feel it: ripples in puddles, like a stone’s been dropped when no stone has. My reflection shivering in some miracle windowpane that hasn’t shattered yet. Aftershocks, I think. I’m moving too fast to feel anything through my boots, so I stop for a few moments to get a sense of the seismo. Nothing. The ground’s rock-solid under my feet—which is, now that I think
of it, even weirder.
Bompf.
Now that I did feel, just barely: a single pulse through the asphalt. A short sharp shock; not like any seismic rebound I’ve ever felt, and I pulled the Ring of Fire tour for a solid year. This felt more like an impact tremor.
An impact of steel against glass.
Delta Six isn’t talking. Or at least I’m not hearing them. I hope it’s just another radio shadow, but I pick up the pace anyway. GPS leads me up Fifth, around a corner, and smack-fucking-dab into a dead end.
Can’t really blame the system for not knowing a building had collapsed across the alley. The realtime updates haven’t refreshed since the wave—it takes a lot to swamp the GoogleSat servers but I’m guessing a sudden massive rewrite of the whole lower mainland’s geography might do it—and even plain old GPS gets iffy with all these leaning towers blocking out the sky. Nav’s been falling back on OLR and inertia for hours now, to take up the slack. But there it is: a pile of rubble that used to be an office tower, right between me and where I have to be.
The building it’s fallen against is still standing, though. There’s a loading dock off to one side that I don’t even have to force my way into; any one of a thousand shocks has blown the door off its rollers and halfway into the street. I’m up on the dock with a single bound.
A glassy ping.
Even louder, this time. And not an impact tremor, not the usual kind. If I was underwater I’d compare it to high-freq sonar, you know, like those tests that drove all the whales crazy a few years back. I’m not underwater, and air isn’t nearly dense enough to conduct a p-wave that intense anyway, but still: Whatever’s making that noise sounds like a submarine on steroids.
Or maybe like some kind of one-eyed monstrosity striding across the bottom of a flood zone.