The rumbling rose up again, but it did not come from this transport. Looking up the highway, she saw another come around the distant curve.
She backed away from edge of the road, stepping carefully among the debris, and turned east toward the river. With no tunnel access, she would have to swim. When she reached the water she stepped in and visually confirmed that the suit was correctly throwing holograms over the holes she made in the water.
Inflating small airbags, which ran down her chest from shoulder to hip bone, she settled into the water. The airbags compensated for the weight of the pack as she quietly breast stroked across the river.
The current carried her downstream as she swam. She would now be swimming directly over those prisoners walking down the tunnel. When she reached the island, she climbed out of the water over craggy boulders. Crouching low, she waited for excess water to cascade from her. While the suit covered over anything close to it, the water falling off would leave a visible signature. Shaking off the remaining excess water, she held her hand up. The suit compensated for the wetness still on her leaving her invisible again. Hopping up the boulders, she climbed a short concrete seawall to the pavement and made her way up 34th street, but when she reached 9th Avenue, she looked north several blocks to where the Lincoln tunnel emerged. A bit ahead of schedule, she felt that if she could learn something more about the Sthenos and their intentions, anything, then the time spent would be worthwhile. As she approached 38th street, she saw something she didn’t understand.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Down the street, a tall barrier shimmered in the late morning sunlight.
“Suit-Con,” she whispered to activate the suit’s voice recognition, “zoom five times.”
Her view of the barrier leapt forward. It had a similar pattern to cyclone fencing, but glittered as if crystal.
As she approached the fencing, she whispered, “Suit-Con, eliminate zoom.”
Beyond the fencing, emerging from the mouth of the tunnel, were a group of prisoners. Not those she’d seen earlier. They’d probably already moved into the city. These, freed from their chains, walked in a loosely formed group. Their faces held hopelessness.
As she approached, she found the entire length of the street lined with the glittering barrier. Its uneven lattice seemed to be more of a natural spiderweb of clear, thin tubes. The tubes appeared to be melting in the sun, just about to drip, but never did.
She watched the people move by. A Sthenos passed within a few feet, walking on its rear legs, monstrous in its height of perhaps ten feet. The middle appendages hung at its sides, while its elongated head swept back and forth scanning the prisoners. The creature wore a suit the color of fresh blood, which creaked as it walked. It stopped, dropped down onto four legs and looked in her direction. Stacy held her breath. Despite the stealth suit, she felt as though she were fully exposed. The Sthenos looked back to the men and women as it let out the low resonance again, imbedded with sharp clicks. The resonance vibrated in Stacy’s chest, and the clicks made the back of her neck sparkle with animal terror. At that moment, she understood in her gut why they’d come.
Prey.
She waited for the Sthenos and prisoners to pass before she moved on with quiet steps.
One block south of the barrier, she turned east on 37th Street. As she walked, the weight of the warhead burned into her legs. At each intersection, she looked north to see that she was keeping pace with the prisoners, who had continued along 38th Street, it’s entire length seemingly blocked by the glistening barrier. As she closed in on the Sthenos destroyer, its great spike towering against the blue sky, she guessed that it had landed near the New York Public Library, perhaps in Bryant Park, squarely in the heart of Manhattan Island.
At 6th Avenue the barrier on 38th Street turned north. She decided to continue down to 5th Avenue before turning north as well.
The empty street felt alien. She’d been in Manhattan before. Coming from small-town Colorado, she’d been unprepared for the crowds in one of the few areas on Earth that had maintained its density as the world’s population ebbed. People had walked shoulder to shoulder on sidewalks in a great river of humanity. The streets teamed with cabs and delivery trucks, the chords created by their variant fusion engines filling the air with resonant music.
Now she walked alone and invisible among the towering buildings, feeling as if she were surrounded by ghosts. Looking to her invisible hands, she felt a ghost herself. As she looked at where her arm should be, a loud clank sounded beside her. The bottle she’d kicked skittered out into the street, fell from the curb, and shattered in the gutter. Flushing with adrenaline, she crouched down.
Dammit Stacy.
A deep thrumming rose up in the distance. She ran to the crook of a staircase, knelt down, and waited. As the sound grew, a small, black ship, hovering on the same warping heat the transport had, sailed around the corner.
They’d wondered how sensitive the Sthenos would be to intruders this close to the landing zone. Now she knew.
Very sensitive.
The small transport hovered up to the area where the bottle had broken and green laser lines scanned in a grid across the sidewalk and walls of the building, spreading out and rotating. Stacy was caught dead center in the scan pattern. She looked directly at the Sthenos pilot, who wore a distinctly different helmet than the prisoner handlers.
Here’s where I find out how good these suits really are.
She became hyper aware of her breathing, remembering how Jeffery had detected Maxine King’s mercs. Even though the CO2 flaw had been dealt with, she wondered what faults the engineers hadn’t considered. The Sthenos pilot seemed to stare directly at her. For all she knew, it was trying to understand why she was sitting still and not running for her life.
Pulsing with the ship’s power source, the air filled with the sharp, clean scent of ozone. After a moment, she dared think that, if it could sense her, it would have done something by now, killed her or attempted to communicate. The grid of lasers appeared again and scanned over her. Beneath her and behind her she saw the grid land unhindered on the brick wall as the suit bent the laser light around itself.
The Sthenos turned the ship to the west and flew away, kicking out paper and dust from the gutters as it went.
She wasted no time in moving her position. She’d allowed herself to become distracted, which was totally unacceptable. She couldn’t fail to place the warhead, and she almost had.
Reaching 5th avenue, she looked north. Two blocks up, a wall of debris two stories high blocked the street. As she approached, she saw it consisted of loose brick, metal ducting, and other materials. It couldn’t be climbed in silence. Her HUD told her she had thirty minutes to plant the singularity warhead and begin her return trip. She could try and climb the pile slowly, but one broken bottle had the Sthenos on her in seconds. If they cornered her up there, the shifting debris would easily give her away. Climbing over wasn’t an option, and she couldn’t leave the warhead here, as it was still too far away to assure destruction.
Her gaze tracked up the ten story building to her left. The debris lay halfway up its side like a swelling wave, frozen in time.
If I can’t go over, I go up.
She walked around the back of the building. She wouldn’t be able to climb with the weight of the pack. Giving the street a quick check, she took it off. The pack became visible as it came away from her torso. Taking a flat disk from a cargo pocket, she drew a filament cord from its edge and attached it to the pack’s top strap. She clipped the spool to her hip and began climbing. The broad window sills made for a straightforward ascent, but even so, as she gripped the sixth floor sill, she felt her fingers slide. The empty air behind her back loomed. She adjusted her grip and held herself to the wall. If she fell she’d die, or at least break something bad enough that she’d wished she had died. Worse than that, would be the failure of the warhead. Where it sat, it would cut a crater in the hide of Manhattan but nothing more.<
br />
Reaching the top floor of the building, she had to lean her head back to look at its overhanging cornice. She felt her gloves pulling at the skin of her fingers as her grip slipped by micrometers. Looking down at the street over one hundred feet below, she saw the line of the thin cord pulling in the breeze. She turned her attention back to the stone cornice. Climbing was not her strong suit, and an expert dyno, as rock climbers would call the leaping transition, was well above her skill set. She looked to see if she could go around the cornice, but it ranged all the way to the building’s edge. She looked into the tenth floor window. She saw office furniture and a design table, now only a black sheet of glass without power. Breaking the glass to get inside wasn’t an option.
Do or die.
She looked up again, picked a target between two buttresses, huffed twice, and leapt.
Her heart went airborne with her, and she felt her entire body go effervescent with thrilling fear. Her hands caught the stone, and the gripping surface of her gloves held. Her body swung out and back, causing her grip to slip slightly. Her foot kicked the window, which thumped but did not break. Her forearms began to burn. She had to move fast. Her grip would last only a few seconds under her full body weight. Pulling herself up, she shot her arm forward, praying for something to grip. Her fingers brushed an edge, but couldn’t hold it. She slid back to hanging, her arms extend. Her shoulders began to burn. Gritting her teeth, she pulled with everything she had, reached with her right arm, and caught the edge with the last two joints of her ring and middle fingers. Her ring finger slipped free, tearing the nail away from the bed. As her middle finger began to slip, she pulled as hard as she could. The palm of her hand exploded with pain as she reached with her left hand, caught the edge, and brought her right leg up stomping into the buttress to create friction to hold herself up. Sliding her right hand forward, she locked a solid grip on the stone edge, pain flaring up her arm. Hauling herself over the ledge, she rolled off to the roof where she collapsed on her side holding her right hand. She held it up to look at it, but could not see it. Telling the HUD to throw a ghost of her on the display, she bent her fingers. The ring finger trailed behind the others, and pressing on the palm of her gloved hand, she could feel the tendon knotted in her palm. She’d snapped it.
She lay for a moment longer, drawing slow breaths. It would be no use to lean over the ledge to recover the warhead if she became dizzy and fell. After several slow, meditative breaths, she shifted to her feet. Staying off her right hand, she leaned over the edge. Pulling on the cord with her left hand, she tried to lift the pack, but with only one good hand, she couldn’t grip to pull it straight up. She drew her left forearm under the rope and pulled it left. Then she drew her right forearm under the line and drew that right, lifting the pack off the ground, the cord now passed from her belt, behind her left bicep, around her left forearm and over her right. Twisting to maintain the distance between her arms, she swept her left forearm under the extended cord again, and now had two wraps of the cord around her forearms. She twisted her body and swept her right arm under the cord, now three wraps and had lifted the warhead up four feet or so. She began going back and forth like a taffy pulling machine, wrapping the cord around her forearms and lifting the pack. By the time she had it within grasp of her left hand, she had her forearms wrapped in a thin sheet of the cord. She gripped the top handle and pulled the pack up and over. Sitting on her butt, she unwrapped the cord from her arms, laying it out in a careful ribbon so as not to tangle it before rolling it back up on the flat spool.
She pulled the pack on and walked across the silver weather-sealed roof. When the base of the Sthenos destroyer came into view, she whispered, “Oh my God,” and felt her willingness to place the warhead vanish.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
As the hour of departure approached, Jeffrey walked among the Wraiths. Ducking under a stubby wing, he ran his hand down its smooth belly, wondering how long its life would be. Would they succeed or fail? If even one Sthenos destroyer survived, it would likely come here. The crash site of the Lacedaemon would be an obvious source of the attack. Despite their encampments being distant from the crash site, Jeffrey assumed it wouldn’t take the Sthenos long to locate them. He’d already set plans in place in that contingency. They would break into small units and disappear into the wild, the last major military force splintered to nothing. In that state, he had no idea how they could possibly rise up to fight again.
As he stepped out from under the Wraith’s wing, he saw, spray painted in flat-black letters under the cockpit sill, Lieutenant Lila “Springbok” Okoye.
Those like Springbok caused him the most worry. Sending men like Master Sergeant Mikelson against such poor odds was easier. He, like Jeffrey, had at least lived the majority of his days. Most of the new pilots, however—
Hearing something shift above, he leaned back to see a crown of dark hair in the cockpit. He climbed the ladder and found Springbok staring at her instruments with haunted eyes.
“You okay?” He asked.
“I feel as though this is my last day.”
“And how does that hit you?”
She kept her eyes on the instruments, clearly not wanting to answer.
“On the Lacedaemon, when I asked you why you fly, you told me it was for the love of it, but there’s something else…”
Her luminous, dark eyes turned on him. “To prove my mother wrong.”
“Did it work?”
“I don’t think so. She said I wasn’t a warrior.”
“You’re not?”
“No. Warriors aren’t afraid.”
“You sure about that?”
She looked at him with suspicion.
Crossing his arms on the sill, he said, “When I was your age, I admitted to my flight commander, a pilot named Reggie Olds, that I was afraid. Holt-he said to me-,” he let his voice grow as gruff as Olds’ had been, “My great-great-some-such-damn-thing grandfather was a Brigadier General and a triple ace through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. I’m gonna tell you something he passed down, and you damn well better not forget it.” Jeffrey let his voice return to normal. “You want to know what he said?”
“Something about fearlessness?” she asked in a forlorn tone as if disappointed in herself.
“Not at all. He said that anybody who doesn’t have fear is an idiot.”
Hope glowed in her eyes. “You?”
Straightening his back, he looked away. “Yeah. I’m afraid of what’s coming, more for those like you than myself, but I’ve learned to keep going despite it. It’s a kind of liar’s dance. If we let fear lead, we’ll fail before we begin. We have to grip its hand, turn it, and shove it where we need to go.”
Her gaze returned to her instruments, her hand shifting the flight stick as if absently going through maneuvers in her mind. “I always thought bravery was fearlessness.”
“No.” He took hold of her shoulder. “Bravery can’t exist without fear. Facing what we’re not afraid of takes no will. Only when we’re scared to death do we show our true selves. Bravery isn’t about afraid or unafraid, it’s about what we do when we are unequivocally scared shitless.”
She laughed in an unsure way as she patted the instrument panel. “I wanted my mother to be proud of me.”
“Have you given this,” he touched the cockpit sill, “everything you’ve got?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“Well then, I can’t speak for her, but I’m damn proud of you.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Stacy should have had one more block of buildings between her and the New York Public Library and Bryant park, but all structures in nearly a quarter-mile diameter had been razed to the ground, leaving only foundations and rubble-filled basements. The trees of Bryant park were gone, either having been scraped aside or crushed into the earth by the wide stern of the Sthenos destroyer. Halfway up the ship, already twice the height of the tallest building in Manhattan, the mist of clouds had descended
down to what appeared to be secondary engine nacelles. Beyond the mist of clouds the ship narrowed and became vague in the high, colder air.
She looked back down to its broad base and felt dizzy. Large stabilization arms extended from the sides of the ship perhaps five hundred feet up. One was stabbed into the street near the building she stood on.
Surrounding the park boundary was the glittering, liquid fencing. In the fencing milled thousands of people.
“Suit-Con, five times zoom.”
She watched the faces of the people.
“A human shield.”
A human shield she had to ignore, if she could. She scanned the ruined foundations below and saw no suitable attachment point for a zip line. Not that she could if she wanted to. A fixed line might be seen, and she had no way to deliver it.
Several Sthenos walked among the people. With their metal rods crackling, they directed individuals toward a white wall, which had been erected against the side of the ship. If individuals did not comply, they were shocked. Sthenos at the wall moved the people through a doorway set in the, perhaps fifteen foot, metal wall. The walled area had no roof, only serving to partition the crowd from the interior.
After passing through the door, the people moved down a hallway where Stacy could just make out the tops of their heads. She saw a blue spark. A man’s arms came up as he took off his shirt. Nothing more. Her eyes scanned down the hallway where several Sthenos guards twitched metal rods, directing the unseen people along. At the end of the hallway Stacy could just make out the blonde crown of a woman’s head. The last Sthenos guard lifted her hair and swept a blade through it, leaving her with a spiked scalp. The Sthenos dropped the hair to the side.
The next doorway led to a larger, square area. One man stood in its center completely nude. A Sthenos touched its rod to his chest.
“Suit-Con,” Stacy whispered, “Zoom in ten times.” The HUD’s magnification leapt forward. Now she could see the man’s face and the rod at his chest. The tip of the rod pulsed a brilliant white, and he fell, either unconscious or dead. As she watched though, she saw his eyes move, wide with fear now, not dead, but paralyzed and aware.
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