by Peter Watts
“Well now,” Hargreave says softly on the penthouse freq.
“That didn’t last long, did it?”
I make it easy for them. I jump clear of the blunder zone the moment Fuckwit Four goes over so I’m spared the blizzard of bullets that Swiss-cheeses the spot a heartbeat later, but I’m not especially quiet about it. It’s about two seconds before the line of fire veers over to the sound of my boots on cement. Half a second after that the cloak runs out of juice and I start taking hits. A couple even get through before I crank the armor setting, but I don’t think there’s much left inside to hit anymore; for all I know the slug just bounces around in there and rolls down my leg. (Sometimes, Roger, I think I can almost hear it rattle when I walk.)
“Oversight, this is Saffron Two! Enemy contact in Sector Bravo!”
I hit back, of course. I teach Saffron’s front line the timely lesson that payback against Cyborg Assholes is a lot harder to do than to brag about, but by then they’ve called in air support and backup boots. I throw some suppressing fire up the tower on my way; I don’t have a hope in hell of hitting that sniper, but at least I’ve thrown off his aim. I scoop up a Feline submachine gun from one of the fallen (shitty recoil, awesome rate of fire) and head up-island, trying to balance stealth against speed.
Waypoint options, not great. Roosevelt Island’s maybe 150 meters across: not many degrees of freedom there, not much cover, and from the look of it those buildings that are still standing were derelict long before Squiddie came calling. Something hulks in the middle distance so that’s what I head for, calling up GPS on the fly: RENWICK HOSPITAL, it says, but there’s not so much as a streetlight out front. No big surprise; every other hospital in the country went under during the Double Dip. But it’s a building, it’s cover, it’s dark on thermal so there aren’t any blue-eyed beetles waiting to light me up from the shadows. I hear shouts and comm traffic behind me; the faint sound of rotors drifting down from up ahead. In between there’s crab grass and trampled chain link and no cover at all except for Renwick Hospital. So I charge toward it, weaving and deking because that lighthouse sniper must have got his groove back by now, yes?, and I look up and—
And it’s not a hospital.
At least, it doesn’t look like one. It’s a castle, or something. A dark castle looming in the rain, backlit by lightning, three stories of ancient brickwork and square-toothed battlements, mats of ivy crawling around windows as empty as eye sockets. I stop dead for a second, look up through those gaping holes straight through to smoke and sky. I feel like I’ve passed through some kind of time machine. Or maybe this place has: a little piece of the eighteenth century that somehow managed to hang on into the twenty-first.
It looks haunted.
And then those old stones splinter with the impact of the .30-caliber present, and I’m diving inside.
Turns out it’s a hospital after all. I don’t find out until later, but the place was built to hold smallpox patients back in the eighteen-hundreds. The original smallpox, not that Cuban strain—anyway. It was even a historic landmark for a few years, back before Hargreave-Rasch bought the place out.
Originally it was a quarantine site, they stuck it way out on the end of the island because they didn’t want all those poor sick bastards laying waste to the healthy population. A place to hold people too dangerous for civilized company. I wish I’d known that at the time. I would’ve felt so much more at home in the place.
A lot of people died in there, too, of course. Hundreds at least, I’d bet. Maybe thousands.
If Saffron and Hazel had known that, maybe they’d have felt more at home, too.
It’s a shell. What’s left of the floor is a tangle of dirt and scrub and stunted saplings. Half the second-story floor is missing; beams crisscross the empty spaces overhead. Rusty iron banisters angle up the walls, stairways with no stairs to floors with no floors. The roof has long since caved in but the stone walls are still standing; they might even be thick enough to foil whatever deep-scan thermal the incoming chopper might be packing.
Not too many places to hide once you’re inside but you can’t get inside without going through a bottleneck or two: open doorways, empty window frames. I plant my last few stickies with as much care as thirty seconds of lead time will give me: just inside the main door, under a few empty windowsills.
Hargreave drops in with a few helpful words: “Lockhart’s set an EMP trap for you up ahead.”
Good to know. A bit busy right now, Jack.
“Given the way they’re rerouting the local grid it’s going to be a big one, maybe big enough to get through your Faraday mesh. Might fry the Nanosuit, might even fry your own synapses depending on how deep the interface—uh …”
Two passageways leading to other parts of the ruin, narrow and relatively intact: my last couple of stickies go there. I just hope the grunts get here before the chopper does. I’m as good as naked to an airborne thermal scan.
“Now there’s no way to bypass the trap,” Hargreave says, “but why would we even want to when we can we can trick it out?”
I jump up to one of the few spots on the second level with both a floor and a ceiling. Not a bad view of the southern entrance, either.
An icon blooms on GPS: a hydro substation over on the east shore. The tit from which Prism sucks—but there’s no time for that now, because—
Saffron is at the door.
Two beetles, flattened to either side of the main door, waving their Scarabs around like magic wands. Something bounces off the stoop, rolls into the middle of the hall. I close my eyes.
My eyelids light up blood orange. Flash grenade. I hear Saffron whoop and come through the door.
I hear the sticky detonate. Saffron turns into a bloody piñata.
I open my eyes. It must have been bright as the sun in here a second ago; now it’s all orange flames and black smoke. Hazel Eight and Saffron Five scream news of my treachery back and forth across the channel. A beetle dives in through the window to the left of the main door window and nails the landing, a beautiful roll that brings him back on his feet in a second with his rifle cocked and sweeping. His buddy dives through the right window; another sticky blows his leg off. The acrobat whirls to face the carnage, off-guard. I shoot him.
A muffled whoompf from behind; one of my hallway grenades has just brought the walls down on someone approaching from the north (Hazel, that’s it. Reinforcements from up-island. The northern claw of an ill-advised pincer movement.) So far no one’s even spotted me yet.
Then the chopper heaves in out of the night and lacerates my little attic hideaway with tracer bullets.
I hear it coming, just in time: amp up the armor setting for those few seconds of HMG fire, cloak and hope there’s enough charge left to keep me covered as I roll off the platform and fall back to earth. The Feline’s in my hand by the time I hit: I spray the room like a water sprinkler and the cloak wears off but that’s okay, that’s okay, by now there’s nobody here but us corpses.
One of them died clutching a Grendel: half the firing rate, but twice the damage. The feline’s almost dry anyway. I swap out.
The chopper’s hanging just off the parapets up there somewhere, drifting back and forth along the building. Good news, I guess: It doesn’t know where I am. Can’t see through the walls. Just gotta make sure it doesn’t get line of sight on me again.
Here at ground level, the beetles have pulled back for the moment. Only a couple of the stickies are still live but they don’t know that, and they’ve learned their lesson. If I was them I wouldn’t risk rushing the place again, either. I’d set up a perimeter, make sure the Cyborg Asshole stayed inside it, and call in something heavy to bring the whole fucking place down on his head. An AGL, maybe. Hell, just call in an air strike and firebomb the place.
Time to be somewhere else.
I work my way sideways, keeping a wall between me and the chopper, keeping an eye out for heat prints and an ear cocked for comm. Can’t go this way;
I stickied that route. Can’t go that way; beetles and choppers and CELL, oh my. There’s a window that opens to the northeast, wide-open path to a red-brick building maybe ninety meters away but I’d never get out before—
Something armor-piercing slashes a row of little divots across the stone at my back. I drop barely in time.
Gotta be more careful.
Okay, they know I’m in here. I can either wait to get bombed, or make a break before they bring in their big guns. They know that as well as I do.
Maybe I can use that.
I crawl back to the beetle I just disarmed; he’ll do nicely. Too bad I don’t have any more sticky grenades; that would be the ribbon on the wrapping. Doesn’t matter. I check my levels: Cloak’s fully charged. Twenty seconds guaranteed invisibility to beetles and choppers, forty if I don’t have to do anything fancy. And out there, all those cobalt-eyed cocksuckers just waiting for me to make a move …
Grendel Boy must weigh 120, 130 with his armor on. With the N2 backing me up I could throw him like a softball.
That’s what I do. One armored, badass, humanoid softball, blurring through smoke and rain and leftover flames, barely seen as it flashes past gaping stone windows in the dead of night but man that fucker’s moving fast, can’t get a good look under these conditions but it’s gotta be Prophet, just gotta be, I said he’d make a break for it and here he comes, boys, right through the window he’s coming right for us, and it’s
“Target in view! Southwest side, southwest side, he’s going for it—”
And by the time they figure it out—by the time the chopper stops strafing and the beetles stop shooting and everybody settles down enough to realize that the life-sized rag doll they’ve just reduced to sponge toffee is actually one of their own—I’m halfway to cover in the opposite direction, cloaked and running like stink. Shouts and shots fade behind me; I spare a glance over my shoulder and see the chopper swinging back and forth against the flickering brown sky like a fucking Nazgûl, black and hungry and slashing the air with rage and frustration.
I’m headed for the east side, about seven or eight hundred meters up the island. Nothing I run into on the way gives us very much trouble. Nothing gets a signal out.
The substation itself is almost anticlimactic. I don’t have to kick in the door, don’t even have to knock. The door’s wide open, a couple of CELLulites standing off to one side, snorting a bit of dopatrix and complaining about all the brownouts spiking through the grid. Also complaining about Lockhart, who has apparently sent them down here to get it all fixed.
“You wanna go in there and fix it from the console? It’s a death trap in there.”
“Let’s just get it done. Lockhart’s pissed enough as it is.”
They’re right about the death trap part, anyway.
I don’t know shit about running a municipal power grid but the monitors I find inside do show a lot of icons changing a lot of different colors over a lot of the board. Hargreave hand-holds me through the protocols, which after all can’t be all that difficult if those ropadopas outside were supposed to know them.
“Good. Now, Lockhart doesn’t know it, but the power systems he’s using for his EMP blast have to route through that station, and they’re pushing close to overload.”
Line up the red lights. Reroute the yellows.
“If you can trigger the emergency shutdown, it’ll kick his loop out, and when the systems come back up, they’ll disallow any major power surge. It won’t show up on his board—he jerry-rigged the breakers in the first place to get the extra power, so there’s no diagnostic circuit on his board—but when he hits the trigger, trust me: It’ll fail.”
Oh, I trust you, Jack. I trust you as far as I could throw a Bradley.
“Excellent! Now get out of there. CELL will no doubt have spotted the outage, they’ll be on their way to investigate.”
I wonder if he’s dim, or if he just thinks that I am. He told me about the trap, after all. The great Jack Hargreave steals magic from the stars and can’t even put two and two together? Doesn’t he get it?
They’re not supposed to kill me, not anymore. Not even the chopper sniffing me out along the rooftops, Azure Seven calling in from behind its eyes, the HMG in its nose twitching in anticipation. Not supposed to kill me, not really, not unless it gets in a really lucky shot. Lockhart has switched strategies—or maybe this was his plan all along. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that you don’t chase fish around the ocean. You wait until they swim upstream and ambush the scaly little fuckers in a bottleneck.
Azure Seven spots me at the substation. Azure Seven can’t do a damn thing about it, not without shooting up Prism’s power supply. He tries to hem me in and calls up more boots on the ground, but one of the CELLulites on electrical duty brought along an L-TAG he won’t be needing anymore.
Azure Seven goes down in fire and rain.
Okay, Lockhart, you miserable sonofabitch. You want to stop chasing me around this goddamn city? You want me to come to you instead?
Let’s do this.
Send me your cannon fodder. Send me your second tier. Send me your sad-sacks and your Saffrons, your fresh-faced mall cops who can’t shoot straight. Don’t make it too easy, though. Gotta keep me thinking it’s an uphill battle, can’t ever let slip that I’m being lured, directed, herded. Don’t worry, I’ll play along. I’ll mow down your boys and girls for you, do my part to keep it real. I’ll pretend to fight my way forward and you pretend to try and stop me and all the while that honey pot gets closer and closer and there it is, Lockhart, the outer wall, the edge of the kingdom, ten meters high and topped with razor wire. The edge of Jacob Hargreave’s Secret Kingdom.
Only one way through: a vehicle air lock big enough to hold two M1 Abramses shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s not inside the kingdom, it’s not out. It’s the gatehouse where all those who’d pass between must wait to be judged. It’s Limbo.
And it’s open at both ends.
I can look straight through into the outer compound. And why not? Ever since CELL planted its flag all the way down to the lighthouse, the whole damn island is Prism’s backyard. Why worry about arbitrary checkpoints inside the green zone?
I make it look good. I lurk out there in the rain, peeking around corners, going through the motions: thermal, StarlAmp, zoom. I step out in the open.
“This should be interesting,” Hargreave murmurs.
I go for it.
I dial up a fast sprint—no point making it too easy. It doesn’t change anything: I’m barely in the tunnel when a few tons of steel and concrete slam down directly in front of me. I skid, turn, bounce off the barricade: another hardened slab of steel and concrete crashes down and blocks my retreat.
I dial back the power, let the charge rebuild. Best-case scenario I’m going to be indulging in a few high-energy maneuvers in the next minute or two. Worst-case scenario I’m dead.
Deader.
Recessed nozzles along the walls, probably loaded with everything from halothane to nerve gas. (Nothing my filters can’t handle, worst-case I can always use the rebreather.) Recessed drainage gratings bolted into the floor. I pan the ceiling: a camera in every corner—
Shit. Lockhart’s going to know his pulse is a bust the moment he hits the trigger and doesn’t lose the video feeds. So much for the element of—
Something goes ping in between my ears. I taste copper.
The lights go out.
“Uh—wait a second …,” Hargreave says.
No little red LEDs glowing in the darkness past my helmet. The cameras are down. I’m not, though; my eyes are still full of icons and overlays. I can still move.
“Nothing to worry about, son. Just a small pulse, built up enough to kill the lights before the circuit blew. Nowhere near strong enough to penetrate your shielding.”
I hear voices whispering on comm, faint and riddled with static: Blast confirmed, they say. They’ve got me.
“There’s a drainage gate t
o your left,” Hargreave says. “Smash it out. Follow the pipes to the river. I’ll send you Lockhart’s location.”
They’re getting ready.
“Move!”
They’re coming in.
The inner door rises just a hair as the bolts unlock. Lockhart’s voice channel comes clear and strong through the crack: “Soon as you get line of sight, gentlemen, you hose him down. We’re taking no chances this time. I want that suit turned to scrap.”
But by then I’m already in the sewers.
I can hear them shitting bricks behind me. Their voices bounce down along all this unsecured plumbing, shout back and forth along frequencies they don’t know I know: Fuck he must’ve cloaked. He’s not cloaked he’s gone. Drain gate’s out. In the pipes. Saffron Ten be advised.
Tin man is loose. Tin man is inside.
“Flush him out of there! Bring him down!”
That’s Lockhart, supervising. Hargreave squirts me a way-point: I squirm left at the next junction.
“Do I have to do everything myself? You are elite soldiers! You are equipped!”
That’s Lockhart, venting. I see a mesh of light ahead, dim and gray and cold.
“Will somebody grow some balls and kill that tin fuck!”
I’m at the grating. The East River crawls past on the other side, broken into eddies and sluggish backwash by the concrete dock just upstream.
“He’s just one fucking man! What the hell am I paying you for?”
That’s Lockhart doing something I’ve never heard him do before.
That’s Lockhart, losing it.
He sees me coming for him, oh yes he sees.
He spies me on the pier and calls in another copter; I send it down to the sea in flames. His cameras catch me on the rooftops and he calls for his mercenaries; after a while there are no mercenaries left to answer. He sees me squirming up from underground like some kind of childhood bogeyman, before I shoot out the lens of his camera. He sees me in the gatehouse and stalking facelessly through the storage bay and by now he’s got to know I’m letting him see me, I want him to see me: each new sighting a little closer to his command, each new tag leaving him a little less room to run.