by Peter Watts
Someone says something about a service elevator, a way onto the Queensboro Bridge. I don’t know where it is and nobody’s feeding me waypoints but it’s easy enough to follow the herd. A little less easy, maybe, when the herd keeps getting thinned out from above.
The elevator turns out to be right where the bridge crosses the eastern edge of the island. Three CELL are crowded around the lower doors when I arrive, repeatedly stabbing the call button. They bring up their weapons the moment they catch sight of me; I bring up mine. We stand there waving our dicks at each other, wondering about appropriate battlefield etiquette at times like these. Countdown Girl says two minutes.
The elevator arrives. We pile in. Someone pushes UP, again and again and again. Someone else pushes CLOSE DOORS.
We start moving.
There’s one of those old speakers bolted to the frame, you know the ones that look like big square megaphones. There’s Muzak coming out of it, a Nine Inch Nails cover done entirely with violins and pan flute. Countdown Girl says one minute.
I bring up my Grendel and shoot out the speaker. One of the CELLs says, “Thanks.”
Then we’re on the bridge, and it’s every man for himself.
I’ve got every goddamn capacitor in the suit dedicated to speed—maybe twenty seconds at maximum sprint before the juice runs out. The bridge is taking fire from below, fire from above. Ceph tracers fill the air with streams of bright hyphens. The bridge is jammed with abandoned vehicles, some gutted, some still burning: cars, cube vans, semis. I think I see a pinger through the struts and girders, stalking down the oncoming lane; I know I see a gunship swooping in for another run.
Countdown Girl runs out of things to say.
Turns out the lady was a real mistress of understatement. The Prism facilities do not explosively self-seal. They blow sky-fucking-high, and they take the whole damn bridge with them.
It heaves under me, buckles in the middle. Fire boils up from below. All those great iron girders, the arches and trusses and studded yellow I-beams, crumple around me like origami. A tanker truck shoots by like a space shuttle and gets caught up in a web of burning metal. I try to keep running but I can’t even stand, it’s like balancing on the back of a harpooned whale. The bridge tears apart around me and I go over the edge, barely manage to catch myself on an exposed strut while an Airstream trailer sails past on its way to the river. I hang by my fingertips, too drained to haul myself back up, hoping against hope that the N2 manages to build back a charge before the spreading heat turns me to slag. I have a pretty good view of what’s left of Roosevelt Island, though. It’s hell on earth, it’s fire on the water. I can’t see a single recognizable feature through all those flames. When they burn down—if they ever do—there won’t be anything left but a mound of glass.
Explosive self-sealing. I wonder what the zoning permits look like for that.
I don’t wonder for long, though. One of New York’s yellow cabs drops from a nest of tangled steel, bounces, rolls down a forty-degree chunk of burning asphalt, and flicks me off the bridge like a gnat.
Will there be an afterlife, I wonder? Choirs of angels? Or a fiery pit? One unlearns these falsehoods over time, but the child who learnt to fear hell is never really gone. To tell the truth, I think I’ve had quite enough of afterlives as it is—this one has been pretty purgatorial.
Almost fifty years floating in supercooled jelly like some medical specimen, thoughts creeping like rats through the cramped silicon corridors of machines, trapped behind video screens and camera systems. Never sleeping, never resting, never ceasing to think about the world you no longer belong to.
No, if this is a taste of the afterlife, I think oblivion will do nicely.
—Unencrypted signal fragment intercepted at 0450 24/08/2010
37.7 MHz (gov/nongov shared, land mobile)
local source (Manhattan)
No Positive ID.
ERECTION
Viral. That’s the way Prophet put it.
I don’t know how to put it any better. I can feel it in me now, I can feel it in us: seeking out the old code, shaking its hand, seizing control and changing its mind. Spreading the good news, particle by microscopic particle. It’s changing me from the inside out: the Tunguska Iteration.
The good plague.
Maybe just a dream. I mean really, even with Cephtech, what are the odds that you can feel the reprogramming of individual cells? How is that even possible? Imagination, more likely, fueled by False Prophet murmuring at the back of my head that Nanocatalyst viability assessment is complete and the iteration is ready to deploy.
All I know is, the feeling fades as I rise from the darkness. I hear other voices, here at the bottom of the river. They’re not loud, but they’re distinct. I can hear them clearly over the hissing of my respirator.
“You were CIA all along? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Gould again. I swear, that fucker’s got to be my own personal spirit animal.
“Give me a fucking break.” Tara Strickland’s down here, too.
Pale daylight filters down through the muddy water. Another glorious Manhattan morning has begun.
“You want to help, help me find this guy,” Strickland says. “You’re so sure he’s the key to all this.”
“The suit is. Alcatraz and the suit, together. That’s the weapon.”
Ah, Nathan. So near, and yet so far. Would you talk about you and your right arm? Would you talk about Tara Strickland and her spinal cord?
“Uh-huh. Chino—anything?”
“Nothing, ma’am. Sweep complete. We’re working our way back along the shore.”
Chino. Dude. Good to hear your voice.
I roll over. The riverbed slopes upward, bare gray rock, current-scoured.
“I don’t think we—”
“There! That’s his signal!”
“We got him, Chino. Back to the vehicles.”
“Over here! This way! Over here!”
I crawl across the waterline. Gould and Strickland wave down at me from the edge of a torn-up underpass, fissured and buckled. Grids of rebar show through the gaps like sutures. The Queensboro bridge is a tangle of broken Tinkertoy at my back. Behind it, on the far shore, Roosevelt Island smolders like Pompeii after the fireworks.
So much for getting my life back. So much for rising from the dead. Help me, Obi-Wan Hargreave; you were my only hope.
You fucker.
Strickland’s already ringing up the chain of command by the time I jump up to rejoin the home team: Lieutenant Tara Strickland, seconded, special ops. Announcing the Return of the Prodigal Daughter, sir. Would like to go partying with the Ceph at their Central Park HQ. Wanna come?
Colonel Barclay is unconvinced. Much talk of foolish heroics and pointless suicide. Strickland counters by saying that Gould has convinced her we have a real shot at turning this thing around (I couldn’t swear that that was the best approach to take, but at least Barclay doesn’t turn her down flat). Strickland asks for air support; Barclay says he’ll get back to her.
Strickland doesn’t wait for that. We move out.
Gould tries to fill me in on the way. It’s not the smoothest narrative I’ve ever heard, punctuated as it is by uhhs and umms and Get down get down fucking Squids at nine o’clock!s. But it turns out the N2’s been tightcasting more than basic vitals and GPS coordinates. It’s been reading the voxels in my visual cortex. Or no, that’s not right: It’s been feeding the voxels in my visual cortex, lighting them up like LEDs on a flatscreen display, and that’s just as true for Prophet’s memories as it is for waypoints and weapons specs. And it’s been writing it all to the thirty-gigahertz band as well.
Nathan Gould has been spying on my dreams.
Prophet’s memories have told him more than they’ve told me. They’ve told him that the center of Ceph operations is under the Central Park Reservoir. Isn’t THAT a coincidence I think, and then: Hargreave. Hargreave and his corporations within corporations, their tentacles squ
irming down through the boardrooms and the back rooms and the generations, the butterfly flaps its wings in 1912 and a hundred years later neither crime nor depression nor all the developers in the world have managed to make a dent in that sacred green space.
What was it Hargreave said to Gould, just before the ceiling crashed in? “You think I’m based in this cesspit city because I like it here?”
Think about it, Roger. Think about how old New York is. The Europeans showed up what, five centuries ago? The Amerinds, thousand of years before that. All that time the Ceph have been sleeping under our streets and none of us even knew it. Almost none of us, at least; down through all those ages I bet at least one or two people must’ve wandered into the wrong cave at the right time, tiptoed among all those sleeping giants, maybe made off with a box of Kleenex or a bedside alarm clock or a fountain of youth.
Hargreave was an adult in 1908. I wonder how old he was then. I wonder if Tunguska was really the first time he stole fire from the gods. I’m thinking, what if Hargreave was around back when New York started clearing the squatters out of central Manhattan? What if Hargreave was there in the fifteen-fucking-hundreds, playing his backroom games to make sure that someday the biggest city on the whole damn continent would be sitting on the roof of the Devil’s summer cottage?
I have no idea why, Roger. It’s all just idle speculation bouncing around in the back of a Bulldog on its way to the final showdown. All I’m saying is, maybe Tunguska wasn’t the first time Hargreave got in and got out, and maybe Ling Shan wasn’t the second. Maybe Ling Shan was just the first time the owners woke up and found him in their bedroom.
But like I say, I don’t really get much chance to follow up on any of this because the Ceph keep distracting me. I’ve never seen more than one dropship at a time before: Four of them do a low-altitude flyby over the water before we’re off East River Drive. I’m on the turret but I don’t even try to light them up: they’re going too fast, the ride’s too bumpy for a bead, and I gotta admit a part of me’s hoping that if we don’t draw attention to ourselves they might not notice us, just head off to wherever they’re going and let us get to Central Park in peace.
Then we swing onto 58th and you can see just how fat a chance that was ever gonna be.
The whole damn avenue is crisscrossed with Ceph conduits. They jut up out of the road, arc across five or ten floors of airspace, disappear into holes smashed through storefronts and skyscrapers. The street is a tangle of concrete and uplifted bedrock and giant jagged sawtooth alien plumbing, and as we come around the corner you can see the last of the dropships dumping their cargo in a big nasty line all across First Avenue.
They know we’re coming.
The first two Bulldogs are already jammed up and taking fire; one of them rolled before we rounded the corner and is over on its back, spinning its wheels. I’m doing what I can but East River Drive was smooth as fucking glass next to all this buckled asphalt and my crosshairs are bouncing across ninety degrees of arc until our driver hits the brakes. Except it’s not so much hitting the brakes as getting his rib cage blown to matchsticks by the shell the Ceph just lobbed through his windshield. I bail in the split second before it explodes, which isn’t nearly enough time to get out of the blast radius. Thank Christ for the armor option.
This is resistance like we’ve never seen before. The street ahead is crawling with alien grunts; stalkers leap from wall to wall like giant metal grasshoppers, taking their shots and bouncing away before anyone can get a bead. I count at least four Heavies lumbering up the street; their cannons flash like Gatling guns. Our whole damn convoy is scattered to hell and gone: three vehicles out for the count, their occupants either dead or taking cover; no sign of the others. Hopefully they saw the scoring on the walls and took a less scenic route.
I lose the convoy. They lose me: Too many torqued I-beams and shorting electrical networks to keep in touch over more than a block or two, and oh, here come the pingers. Always the life of the party. But somewhere between the blowing-shit-up and the not-being-blown-to-shit I make it to the upper reaches of a trashed office building. I’m not running away: I’m fighting uphill. Half a dozen Ceph drop modules are embedded way up in the executive levels and the grunts that came out are making the most of the high ground.
Half the fucking floor is in flames by the time we finish mixing it up, but it’s worth it. The altitude gives me my signal back and Barclay’s geek squad has been working overtime: Gould has loaned them my suit freqs and it turns out they can tap into the N2’s targeting subsystems to help pinpoint the air strikes the good colonel has managed to coax out of McGuire. Too little, way too late for most of us: Strickland’s heroic little convoy has been decimated.
Not exterminated, though. Not extinct, not yet. A few of us make it through all the way to Central Park.
Or as your friends at the Pentagon prefer to call it: Ground Zero.
Now, from the folks who brought you Swimming with Ceph, the new off-Broadway smash hit: New York Nukem.
The word comes down somewhere between East River Drive and Fifth Avenue. I can’t really put my finger on when, because I’m too busy getting shot at. But by the time I finally catch up with what’s left of Strickland’s convoy just outside Central Park, the news is really sinking in.
Strickland is furious. Barclay fought it tooth and nail. Gould says what do you expect when you keep putting psychopathic assholes in charge. (In his own fucked-up Gouldian way, I think he almost feels vindicated. A shame he never got a chance to meet Leavenworth.)
Me? I gotta say, I was kind of on board with it.
Maybe I’ve lost my sense of empathy. Maybe after a few years in the service you just get used to it, come to terms with the fact that life is cheap. Maybe SECOND’s programmed it out of me with all these nanoneurons infiltrating my cortex. Or maybe it’s just harder to care about the living when you don’t actually have a dog in that race anymore. But I listen to Strickland ticking off the outrages—What about the people? What about the surrounding boroughs? What about the fallout?—and if I had a voice I might shut her down with a question of my own.
What about the Ceph?
I mean, it’s not as though I’ve agreed with most of what the Pentagon has been up to lately. That sweeper they set off just about inspired me to resign my commission on general principles. But the fact is, it didn’t work. Nothing they’ve tried so far has worked—and when your back’s to the wall, scorched earth is not exactly unprecedented military doctrine. A tactical airburst over Manhattan might be the only way to contain this thing. Probably won’t be enough, granted; but if all else fails it’s worth a shot.
Of course, all else hasn’t failed. There’s still the Alcatraz Initiative. But the brass aren’t boots; they’ve got reports from the front lines but they haven’t seen this apocalypse for themselves. Chances are, all they know about the Tunguska Iteration is that it was invented by a half-crazed recluse pickled in formaldehyde, and Nathan Gould says it has something to do with homosexual rape in hanging flies. If that was all I knew, I wouldn’t have much faith in it, either.
We haul into Central Park under a yellow sky infested with sheet lightning. Nobody’s waiting for us. No reinforcements. No Ceph. No pilgrims.
Nobody.
We park in a field of scrub and crab grass. Dead silence except for the far-off rumble of thunder. “Where the hell is everybody?” someone wonders.
“Maybe they threw everything they had at us back on 58th,” Chino suggests. “Maybe they got nothing left.” He doesn’t even believe it himself.
No birdsong. Not even the crickets are talking.
Strickland looks around grimly. “Something’s wrong here.”
The birds haven’t left, though. We know this in the very next second, when they do. Great clouds of them rise suddenly from the trees in waves, dark as spore, utterly silent. They flap away to the east as the first tremors start to shake the ground.
The tree line—buckles. Treetops lash back
and forth against a windless sky. They rise into the twilight as if on hydraulics; I can see brief explosions of blue sparks in the darkness around their bases. Power lines, I realize. Tearing apart as the ground rises there but not here, as cliffs grow from the woods as we watch, walls of raw fissured bedrock standing up from the earth, lifting the forest on its back. One of the Bulldogs hops two meters in the air, flips, lands upside down. The nearer copses are leaning toward us now, farther, farther, toppling over. Ridges of rock and earth rise and pile up and slide back down the sides of something very large and very old, waking up after a million years in the ground.
Those of us with vehicles floor them in reverse. Those on foot run like hell. Barclay’s in every headset, “Strickland? Strickland? What the hell just happened out there? We’re reading massive seismic disturbances, we’re reading—”
I can’t see the top anymore and the Thing in the Earth still rises smoothly from the ground. It must be halfway to the jet stream by now. A dozen little waterfalls cascade out into space and disintegrate into mist far over our heads.
“Sir, we are going to need an immediate airlift,” Tara Strickland calls in with admirable calm. “As well as armed air support. As many aircraft as you can manage. The situation has … changed …”
It’s the mother, the father, the whole damn extended family of all Ceph Spires. It’s the last page of the Book of Revelation, the end of the Mayan Calendar, the drowning of the world at Ragnarok, and it’s taken half of Central Park along for the ride. There’s a mountain towering over the skyline. I bet you can see it all the way to Canada.
The spire holds it up, all that mass stuck to one impossible pylon: a chunk of earth the size of a hundred city blocks, hanging over Manhattan like Everest balanced on a pool cue. The spire itself towers even higher, a dark twisted sculpture skewering the floating island about two-thirds of the way along its length. From down here, through the deepening gloom, it looks a little like the Statue of Liberty with brimstone highlights. If the Statue of Liberty was a couple of kilometers high and had a terminal spore infection.