by Peter Watts
I’m in the loading bay. I’m in the shipping manager’s office; just like the one I worked in back during my school days except the Golden Showers centerfold is full-motion 3-D now (the whole damn building’s dark but that golden girl keeps glowing and spreading her legs every time you walk past, and she’ll probably be doing it for the Ceph a year from now if those flatcells are as good as everyone says). I’m in some kind of dark hallway, a tunnel; maybe I hear the scuttling of little tick feet but nothing jumps out at me. Three lefts, two rights, one wrong turn into the ladies’ room and there’s an emergency exit sign shining in my eyes like a beacon of blood-red hope. I should be three blocks from the action, four at the outside. I kick out the door.
And wouldn’t you know it, the action has come to me.
You know that poem. Give me your tired, your poor. Your homeless, your wretched refuse. Give me your junkies, your yuppies, your headbangers, your white-collar tapeworms, your priests and your pedophiles.
Yeah, I may be taking a few liberties. But there they all are, a whole fucking avalanche of humanity, pouring around the corner from the Avenue of the Americas. A lot of them are bleeding—from the ears, the nose, some of them are even bleeding from the eyes. Almost all of them are screaming. And you know what my first reaction is?
Relief.
None of them are infected, you see. They’re scared out of their fucking minds, every last one of them is injured in one way or another—but behind the blood and the noise they all look human. No lumpy potato sacks full of tumors, no eye sockets jam-packed with squirming hamburger, no crazy-ass religious ecstasy or hallelujahs for the corruption of the flesh. The spore hasn’t got this far yet. These are just regular run-of-the-mill victims of war, scared to death and probably dead inside the hour, but next to what I’ve seen today this is nothing. I can deal with this. I’m glad to deal with this. This panicked endless mob washes around me, running, staggering, falling, and it’s all so familiar it’s almost like being home.
And then that sound hits again, that Crystal-Godzilla sonar, and even inside the suit I go deaf in the aftermath. People are still screaming, I can still see their mouths making the right shapes, but all I can hear is this weird low-pressure trough in the soundscape, this kind of dull roar sucking up every other sound in the wake of that single earsplitting PING.
A little girl’s eyes explode right in front of me. She can’t be more than eight. She doesn’t even stop running; she’s past me and gone in a gory New York second and I don’t even turn around because what kind of sick fuck would go out of his way to watch a blind girl get trampled to death?
This wicked little part of me that never seemed to exist before today, this curious little psycho that doesn’t feel and can’t stop thinking, wonders why just this one little girl and no one else. Figures it must be the size of the head, the diameter of the eyeball in relation to the wavelength or something. Harmonic resonance. But it also figures that pulse is gonna be taking out more than little girls at close range. I’m betting anybody within fifty meters is lying in the street with their skulls blown apart.
A Bulldog comes screeching around the corner on two wheels, the grunt on the roof gun hanging on for dear life and firing back at something farther up the avenue. He can’t keep it up; the vehicle crashes back down on all fours and he goes flying. The driver does his best to keep from collateraling the crowd but the Bulldog still manages to sideswipe half a dozen civilians on its way into the jewelry store across the street.
Something stalks into view around the corner. It stands eight meters tall if it’s an inch.
I’ve seen it before. But this is the first time I’ve seen it.
Three legs, double-jointed things with clawed metal feet; just one of those talons is almost as big as a man. The carapace is a cross between a cockroach and a B-2; a wedge, a great fucking arrowhead with cannons sticking out the front end like fangs.
Doesn’t use those big guns, though. Not at first. It crouches and this, this column rises out of its back: a red glowing cylinder, vertically segmented, like a space heater the size of a gazebo. It rises slowly, almost lazily. Think of someone pulling back on a crossbow before releasing the string.
PING.
Every window with so much as a splinter in the frame explodes. Cars and storefronts shriek for blocks in every direction. A blizzard of glass rains down on the street, dust and daggers and great jagged sheets; it skewers the living and the dead, takes off hands and limbs neat as a laser. It seems like hours before all that slicing and dicing tapers off; the towers of Sixth Avenue still have a lot of windows. By the time it’s over the living have fled; the dead are dismembered; and I’m the only one left in between.
The monster twists on those giant tripod legs and bends down to look at me.
It’s a smart motherfucker. It sees through my best tricks. I wrap myself in my cloak of invisibility and somehow it knows just where to fire. I hide behind pillars and billboards and it lobs some kind of plasma grenade into its blind spots, coolly flushes its quarry instead of stomping down streets and alleyways in hot pursuit.
It turns into a game of tag. I can take maybe a hit or two from that acoustic death ray without bursting like a grape—we share common ancestry, this pinger and I, and maybe we’re a little bit immune to each other’s venom—but I’m pretty sure that three blasts would lay me out and a fourth would kill me, assuming this monster didn’t just decide to squash me flat with one of those big clawed feet instead. And nothing I’ve got up my sleeve seems to do more than scratch the paint on its hood ornament. So I lob a sticky mine and fade back around the corner before I even see if I scored. I drop a proximity mine and dive through a manhole while three floors of office crumble to dust on the other side of the street. I start to see patterns: The pinger has a habit of strafing the air with high-frequency click bursts, especially when it can’t see me.
It’s echolocating. No wonder the damn cloak doesn’t work.
It’s not cat-and-mouse: it’s saber-toothed-tiger-and-mouse, it’s T.-fucking-rex-and-mouse. And that dinosaur may have me outgunned a hundred times over, and it may be able to beat my ass on the straightaway, but it’s a big fucking ship and those things turn slowly. It’s got cannons that even CELL would trade half its annual profit margin for, but it can only fire them forward. I can’t outrun the monster but I can outmaneuver it, dip and weave and jump from ground to rooftop and back again. It would have slaughtered me a dozen times if I hadn’t gotten out of the way a split second before it let loose.
And all the time I’m bobbing and dodging and running between its legs, I’m scratching the paint on the hood ornament. After a while the hood ornament falls off.
I start scratching other parts.
Now some of the other mice start poking their heads up, make the most of the diversion. The pinger charges down the street with its sights fixed firmly on my retreating ass, and a line of flechettes hemstitches across its flank from the carpet store across the street. Some brazen glorious asshole with nothing to save his balls but standard-issue camo and a pair of mirrorshades jumps down from the second floor and gives this felching tripod the finger, I shit you not, and takes off around the corner. The pinger takes the bait and chases that beautiful bastard onto the biggest spread of proximity mines you ever saw outside an Israeli payback party.
You know what happens when all those scratches finally strip paint down to the primer? You start scratching the metal.
It’s a running battle, man, it’s a long fucking battle, all of us mice against one big metal dinosaur, and it may be death by a thousand cuts but it’s the JAW that finally brings it down. A single rocket, right under the carapace where the legs plug in. It blooms, Roger, like a flower opening in the morning, it blooms into this great ball of crimson electricity like someone red-shifted the northern lights. The pinger groans, it staggers; it starts to fall, puts out one leg to brace itself and the leg just snaps clean off. That big metal mother goes down like a mountain sliding in
to the sea.
Delta Six love me to death. I’m the guy who scored the winning touchdown. They slap my back. They like my moves. They say they could really use me back at Central. They call me suit guy, and we shoot some well-deserved shit at those fucking Pentagon brass: Hey, lucky for us the flood wiped the Ceph off the board, yeah, things could be really nasty if those mofos were still around.
And then we hear something.
I don’t know quite how to describe it. A kind of breathy sound, a hooting sound, drifting over the rooftops and down through skyscraper canyons. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, an icy, undead whisper. I tell myself that all the hairs on my forearms have not just stood up.
Everyone falls silent as hunted rabbits.
“Dear God,” someone whispers when the sound has stopped. “What is that?”
The CO steps in before that shit can spread: “Stop standing there with your dicks in your hands, people! Sweep for survivors! Fifteen minutes, tops! Then we go find out what’s making that noise, and kick its ass!”
It’s gotta be a joke, of course. But the delivery’s so deadpan you’d never know it.
Broadcast intercept: “Radio Free Manhattan,” Pirate signal, 23/08/2023 17:52
1610 kHz (unsecured AM)
Source: CPL. EDWARD “TRUTH” NEWTON, USMC (RET.) (confirmed via voiceprint comparison with public archives)
Newton: Oh, man—this, you gotta hear. Remember that little wave swept on through the downtown a few hours back? All the work of those pesky tentacular invaders from another star? Well, we’re getting calls in from civilians across Midtown now, and what they got to say, you got to hear:
Voice #1: Jets, man! I heard jets! Saw the vapor trails. I been hiding out in this city for a solid week now, I know what the Squid airborne sound like. This wasn’t no alien aircraft, man, our own bombers did this to us!
Voice #2: Saw them for sure, Eddie. Air force jets, clear as day. Operational height, ’bout a minute before we heard the blast. It had to be them.
Newton: You getting this, people? That’s—midway through a marine evac operation, some pencil-neck at the DoD decides, just fucking decides, that we are all, from 16th Street on down, expendable assets or hey, just very good swimmers. Well, hell, yeah—why not? All the rich folks? They choppered out of here last week with the mayor and the DA. So what’s left that matters? Just us, people, the dregs and the working stiffs. Well, I got a message for all you dregs still alive out there. Remember this—and stay alive to tell the tale. And—hey, we got a call coming in hot off the grid. Hello caller—who we got here?
Williams: Yeah, Eddie, this is Wayne Williams again.
Newton: Hey, Wayne. Welcome back. How you doin’, man?
Williams: Yeah, we made it into Midtown. And, listen, there’s marines here, just like you said. I got one right here, and get this, Eddie—he wants to talk to you.
O’Brian: This is Gunnery Sergeant O’Brian, US Marines. You that Radio Free Manhattan asshole?
Williams: Sir, yes sir—I am exactly that asshole.
O’Brian: Then I got a job for you. Get this message out, stat. Colonel Barclay’s evacuation will still proceed, despite the flood. Repeat, the evacuation will proceed. Anyone wanting to get out of this city had better haul ass to Central Station. We have outlying squads across Midtown- make yourselves known to them, and they will help as much as they can. That is all. O’Brian out.
Williams: Holy fucking shit! Got that, people? Evac ongoing! Get your asses in gear. Now, we got reports earlier from Wayne and other witnesses up that way saying all this water shallows out around 23rd Street. Ain’t gonna be easy, the ground is seriously fucked up, but it’s the only way you got, so take a marine vet’s advice here—improvise, adapt, overcome. Get to Central Station however you can! And do not stop to shop for shoes. This is your ticket out of here, people. Don’t lose it!
Of course, getting there is half the fun.
I listen to my new friends as we head out, pick up a few insights. The local chain of command is down to a few rusty links by now. Army, airborne, USMC—hell, even the NYPD and the fire department have gone seriously entropic from the top down. What’s left is a mash-up of half a dozen uniforms and half a dozen jurisdictions, deserters and rogues and decent shits who would still do the right thing if only they could get a straight answer from an authorized CO. But over the past few days these lost souls have found their center, their father figure, their beacon of command in the Shitstorm of the Apocalypse.
I hear him on the ether as we slog past 29th and Broadway: “This is Colonel Barclay to all marine fire teams at the primary and secondary perimeters! I want a controlled fallback to the terminus by stages, regrouping as you go! Our objective is full evac of civilians and wounded, and we will hold this station until it’s done! You have at most one hour to make your way back here; after that you’re going to be walking home.”
He doesn’t sound like the Second Coming. He sounds like he thinks the world’s going to lie down on the job the moment he drops his voice below fifty decibels. But Chino’s vouched for the man, and every surviving jarhead and gravel-pounder seems to back him up: Sherman Barclay is the only reason the Ceph are still facing any organized resistance at all. Without him, we’d all be Lord of the Flies by now.
Central Station is well above the flood zone; everything north of 26th stayed high and dry. Too dry, actually: Carbon and clouds water down what’s left of the late-afternoon sun, and coming up Sixth we can see the storefronts glowing from five blocks away. A couple of the guys start coughing as we cross 36th—
“Smell that? What the fuck is that?”
—and I crank open my hepafilter to get a whiff for myself. Not the usual taste of a city on fire; I’ve smelled that a hundred times since I joined up, it sits in the back of your throat and stings your eyes like an old friend. The smell of this great burning is different, somehow. More—acrid. It’s not completely unfamiliar, though. I’ve smelled it once before, down in Texas during the Secession Riots. Mob was torching a publisher’s warehouse full of science texts.
Oh, yes. I know that smell.
“This is Charlie Seven. The western approach is compromised. We are pinned down at the library on Fifth and West 42nd. We’ve got dozens of civilians here. Requesting fire support to get ’em through to the station.”
The smell of burning books.
We cross East 40th and into the ragged remains of a green space. GPS serves up BRYANT PARK: in better days a broad perimeter of trees around a central lawn. Kindling, now, and a trampled kill zone with no cover at all. The New York Library looms on the other side, a great stone edifice slotted with narrow windows fifteen meters high; a whole other set of windows, glassed arches eight meters tall, sits on top of those. I can see the faces jammed in behind them.
In the background, Barclay’s deploying reinforcements to our location.
Closer to home, the Ceph are doing the same.
It’s a mess. The library’s full of soldiers and civilians but we can’t even get across the goddamn street without some dropship raining Squids and hellfire onto our heads. We take cover in a converted apartment complex across the street and even in there I get my ass shot at, by fellow backbones no less: the requisite asshole from Retard Six thinks I look like one of them.
I don’t know how many got out of the library before the dropship bombs the shit out of it. I don’t know if any did; we’re coming in from the back, don’t have any kind of bead on the main entrance. But suddenly the whole place just goes up. The windows blow out, the ceiling crashes in, fire everywhere.
I didn’t even know stone could burn like that.
It doesn’t kill everyone inside, not immediately. You can hear faint screaming over the flames. We’re supposed to have cover by now—Charlie Company’s got a missile battery across the park but the guy manning it is either dead or taking a bathroom break, and whenever anyone tries to cut across the park they get mowed down from on high. We finally m
ake it, get the turret back online, even take down that motherfucking dropship, but by then the voices have long since lost out to the flames.
We push on anyway, partly because Hey, there’s always a chance, but also because we’re taking heavy ground fire from behind and we’re literally being driven forward. We fight rearguard across the park, and a few marines—that guy from Retard Six, for one—even make it to the back steps with me. But the place is a fucking inferno; they’d be toast two steps past the threshold. I leave them to find their own way around.
First time I’ve ever been in a library in my life. I gotta say, Roger, I really don’t see the appeal.
There are places even I can’t go: stone glowing red, smoke so thick there just isn’t any point. I try thermal but it’s even worse, like being caught in a false-color blizzard. Lots of bodies, black no matter what wavelength you use to look at them. Steam rises from some of those mouths, from corpses still wet enough to boil inside. They sizzle on the floor like bacon. Some are charcoal already. They break and crumble and burst into pieces when you trip over them.
I hear voices. At first I think I’m hallucinating. But I follow them anyway, to some shattered stairwell where a freak cross-draft blows away enough of the smoke and the heat to keep the people huddled there from dying quite as fast. I turn a small hole in the wall into a bigger one and they stagger outside, coughing, to take their chances with the Ceph.
But it gives me an idea: Forget the people. Key on the habitat. Don’t waste time looking for life signs, look for those few, far-between places where life signs are possible. I toggle back to thermal and yeah, the psychedelic hurricane is still distracting as hell, but now that I know what to look for I can see dark patches here and there in the static, little sunspots of less-than-killing heat.