Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  Ahead of us the bulkhead screen showed what was left of Staten Island and Brooklyn. We were approaching the headland at over five hundred miles an hour, the copters gaining on us. I saw a missile lock warning appear on the screen and then another.

  We were through the Narrows. I could see the copters clearly now on the screen. I recognised them as US Navy. A missile lock warning disappeared, presumably jammed, but I saw a blossom of flame from one of the copters as the remaining locked missile was fired. Chaff exploded from the sled and laser cut the air again. Ahead of us New York was a grey city of broken spires reaching out of the water.

  Rivid banked suddenly. Again the craft was at ninety degrees to the dark water. My audio implants dampened the sound of railgun rounds bouncing off the sled’s armoured body. The laser caught and destroyed the incoming missile and I heard the pointless return fire of the sled’s own railgun.

  Suddenly we were in New York. The light dimmed as we shot down lower Broadway, the ruined buildings too much of a blur to make out anything about them. I only barely caught the explosion behind us as one of the copters went up.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked, meaning the copter’s destruction.

  ‘One of the city’s SAM emplacements,’ Rivid answered. I wondered if they had a reason not to target us.

  Rivid weaved in and out of the partially submerged buildings as railgun rounds and exploding rockets covered us in debris. We played hide and seek through water-filled steel and concrete-walled canyons. We were chased under bridges made of collapsed skyscrapers. I was able to get a look at the lean, predatory, insect-like form of the copters following us, their forward-facing twin railguns reminding me of mandibles.

  In the middle of a rocket barrage Rivid mangled the front of the sled as he crashed through a pile of debris into a building. Fire chased us through deserted and destroyed offices and out the other side as we dropped back down into the water. He shot uptown again. The sled was slowing down; its handling seemed less smooth. There were still three of them on us. We’d seen other missile emplacements and various other defensive systems but it seemed that the inhabitants of New York were not going to provide us with any further help.

  ‘Jakob, my friend,’ Rivid’s voice slurred from the cheap loudspeaker. ‘Do you think this is our swansong?’ I assumed the question was pretty much rhetorical. I mean I could’ve asked to be let out, and the copters may not have noticed us, but that seemed unfair to Rivid, who was presumably only in this situation because of us.

  ‘You could let us out,’ I suggested, sounding like a coward and a hypocrite to my own ears.

  ‘You disappoint me,’ Rivid said. He sounded sad. ‘I thought we’d go out fighting, yes?’ Problem was I hadn’t done any. The last time I’d felt this helpless was during a disastrous night drop on Dog 4. We’d watched our assault shuttle being overtaken by other burning shuttles tumbling out of the sky. Shot down by Them AA emplacements.

  Rivid didn’t wait for an answer. He banked tightly around the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 34th Street. The copters were back on our tail, kicking in their afterburners, as we crossed Sixth Avenue. Rivid throttled down hard, the damaged engines screaming as he cornered north onto Fifth Avenue so fast he went halfway up the wall of a building in a wash of water. He shot up Fifth, throttled back and turned into a crumbling debris-strewn building that looked like it was once some kind of multi-storey car park. He gunned the protesting sled up a spiral ramp, using the weight of the armoured vehicle to knock ancient burnt skeletons of cars out of his path as he made his way to the roof.

  On the roof Rivid brought the sled to a halt.

  ‘This is your plan?’ I shouted.

  ‘There’s very little planning going on,’ Rivid had time to say as the first copter rounded the corner of Fifth some two hundred feet above us. I could hear the muted thunder of railgun rounds impacting on the sled’s armoured hull. Two, then three missile lock warnings appeared.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Morag shouted as she and a worried-looking Pagan came out of their trance. I could hear multiple supersonic bangs become one constant thunderous roar, my audio dampeners reducing the sound to a manageable level as Rivid fired the sled’s own railgun. I felt, heard and saw on the screen Rivid launch a surface-to-air missile as rockets exploded all around us and one finally hit. We were thrown about in our straps, and the sled shot back from the force and battered into a concrete pillar.

  My head ringing, I only just caught the copter that had hit us disappearing back around the corner of Fifth Avenue followed by the SAM. The explosion blew the side out of the building on the corner as the burning copter dropped into the waters beneath it.

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted. Morag looked terrified.

  Pagan glanced at her. ‘How many SAMs left?’ he shouted at Rivid.

  ‘That was it.’ There were still two more copters out there. ‘Still, not bad for a sled versus copter, I think?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ I said. I looked at the radar images projected on the bulkhead. The two copters were circling us using the surrounding buildings as cover. Presumably they were being a bit more cautious since Rivid had taken one of them out. I smiled, finding myself just across the road from the broken but unbowed and still impressive Empire State Building. In either direction I saw the bridges. They ran in a network all across Manhattan, spanning the canals of New York from the most structurally sound buildings. On Fifth I could make out small, fast-moving craft heading towards us from either direction.

  These would be Balor’s people. I’d heard about these tactics: they preferred to do their fighting in the sunken maze-like warrens of the city streets.

  Proximity warnings from the sled’s motion detectors showed there was movement all around us: from nearby buildings, on the bridges, climbing out of the water. The problem was they were probably just as pissed off at us as they were with the naval aviators. The only thing we had going for us was that the aviators were Fortunate Sons, else they’d be working for a living on the seas of Proxima at Barney’s.

  Then something beautiful happened. The first copter came low out of 35th Street just north of us. Missile lock warnings appeared and the hull reverberated to the sound of railgun rounds. From the top of the building on the corner of Fifth and 35th I could see something thrown off the roof. It seemed to blossom and expand as it fell. It took a while for my brain to understand what it was, surprised as I was by this low-tech approach. It seemed to happen very slowly as the high-tensile steel net opened and landed on the rotors of the copter, tangling itself in them. The copter seemed to hang there for a while. I watched it try and fold its rotors away and move to jet, but the blades were too entangled. The copter dropped, battering itself off the side of the building in a shower of rubble, before disappearing into the water beneath.

  Then I saw one of the most insane things I have ever seen. The final copter, its nose down, predatory, crept around the Empire State Building at about level with the sixtieth floor. I saw the missile lock warnings appear one after another. It was over Fifth Avenue now. Rivid caught what was happening on one of the sled’s external cameras and zoomed in so we could see perfectly. A figure exploded through plate glass sixty floors above the ground, about fifty-five storeys above the water. The three of us in the back watched in shock.

  The figure cleared the sixty or so feet to the craft and grabbed the fuselage of the copter. Rivid closed in on the figure. It did not look human but I recognised the monster clinging to the side of the aircraft. I could see the terrified face of the jacked-in aviator. I could see where the monster’s claws had dug into the copter’s armour, providing him with purchase. Balor leant back. In his free hand he held some kind of collapsible spear. I watched as he rammed it through the armour and into the cockpit. I saw the pilot scream. Balor pulled his spear out through the hole he’d made. The copter lurched violently and began to spin towards the east side of Fifth away from the broken-topped Empire State Building.

  We watched as Balor let go
of the copter and dropped, positioning himself into a dive and disappearing beneath the water. Achingly slowly, the copter seemed to cross Fifth and fly into another building, transforming itself into wreckage before it plummeted into the water, bent and broken. That more than anything drove it home to me that Balor was maybe more than just a scary-looking cyborg.

  ‘Uh, guys,’ Morag said. I looked at the bulkhead screens. I could see figures closing in on us from all sides. Moving tactically, surrounding us.

  ‘You can get out now,’ Rivid said. Was that disgust I heard in his voice?

  14

  New York

  Rivid had done his bit. We had to face the music. Out of the sled, the three of us down on our knees, covered by pros as we were searched and then secured. Then face down on ancient pitted concrete looking at webbed feet.

  ‘Find their heads, spike them and add them to the rest,’ said an impossibly deep and inhuman-sounding voice. It came as a relief when I realised that Balor was talking about the aviators and not us. A little while later I heard the sled leave. I was pleased. Rivid was a good guy and had presumably cut some kind of deal.

  ‘And them?’ I heard a female voice that was used to command ask. She had an American accent. Initially I found the growling that responded unnerving but I realised it was just Balor thinking.

  ‘Show me the girl,’ Balor’s voice answered. I heard Morag being dragged up for Balor to look at.

  ‘Leave her ...’ I managed to say before getting kicked in the ribs.

  ‘Shut up!’ Pagan hissed at me.

  ‘Get them on their feet,’ Balor ordered.

  We were dragged to our feet. Balor towered over me. He was around seven and a half feet tall, his face strangely angular and his mouth too big for even a head that size. His smile revealed rows of shark-like teeth. His height was in proportion to his muscled build, though as powerful as he looked he still gave off an air of wiry speed. His skin was blue, black and green overlapping scales, as much lizard as it was fish. I knew that his armoured skin and reinforced skeleton were capable of surviving the crushing depths of the freezing oceans of Proxima. He was dripping wet from his dive and the only clothes he wore were a pair of cut-off old combat trousers. His hair looked like dreadlocks made of black seaweed but my understanding was they were some kind of sensor aid to help with echolocation. His large, powerful, long-fingered hands ended in sharp vicious-looking claws. He carried the collapsible long-bladed spear I’d seen him use on the copter pilot, now no more than a cylinder of some super-hard metallic compound from the Belt. Strapped to his leg he had a very functional-looking diver’s knife. At his waist he wore what looked like a Benelli twelve-gauge shotgun pistol. It was a sidearm that only power-armoured troops and the largest heavy conversion cyborgs could use because of the size of its magazine.

  Of course the most striking thing about him was the eye. The eye had as many myths about it as the man himself. His right eye was a black pool, yet it still looked organic, despite the fact I knew it to be artificial. It was his left eye that all the fuss was about. The sharkskin eyepatch was engraved with an ornate knotwork design and seemed to cover half the left side of his face. You would assume that this would limit his peripheral vision but I could see he had what looked like small glass studs that circled his head providing him with 360-degree vision.

  ‘Put them in a cage,’ said the monster, pointing two clawed fingers at Pagan and me. I looked at the circle of hard faces around us. I didn’t know them but I recognised them. Balor had done his work well. He’d recruited from the best. They were dirty and ragged, but their kit, though old, was clean and well looked after. We didn’t stand a chance here but I didn’t want to be separated from Morag.

  ‘The girl?’ the American woman asked. Balor took his time looking Morag up and down in a way that made my skin crawl.

  ‘Bring her to me,’ Balor said finally, and turned to leave. It was the perfect time for me to shout no and start struggling but I knew that would have been a pointless gesture in this league.

  ‘Mr Balor sir?’ Morag said, her voice sounding somehow tiny and scared. Balor stopped and turned to look at her. ‘I really don’t want to be raped or eaten,’ she said. There were a couple of sniggers from the gunmen and -women surrounding us but most of them looked less than impressed, and although Balor’s strange features may have been difficult to read he seemed to be one of them.

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he rumbled. I was desperately looking around for an opening but finding nothing, when I saw someone I recognised. She was short but heavily muscled, a lot of upper-body strength. She wore tatty but still-functional armour and a telltale bandanna across unkempt short hair. She was carrying a Metal Storm gauss rifle slung horizontally across her torso.

  ‘I know you?’ I said, desperately trying to place her face.

  ‘Yeah, you know me,’ she said in a resigned manner. She sounded like she came from the Arizona coast. Then I placed her.

  ‘You were on the Santa Maria,’ I said. She seemed to consider this for a while. Balor was watching her. Everyone in the special ops community knew the significance of the Santa Maria, the cargo ship we were on when they tried to dump us into space.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I was,’ she finally acknowledged.

  ‘SEAL, right? I’ll have your name in a second,’ I said. Balor looked at the ex-SEAL and then back at me, his expression unreadable.

  ‘Cage,’ he reminded the people guarding us.

  ‘Our gear?’ Morag asked. I groaned inwardly. Balor turned to regard her for a moment, just long enough for the monster’s gaze to make her really uncomfortable.

  ‘Bring it to me,’ he finally ordered. ‘If there’s anything really good it’ll get split.’ Morag had inadvertently tipped them off that we were holding something worthwhile.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said with some feeling. On the one hand I wasn’t dead, which meant I’d lived longer than I thought I would with Rolleston on my trail. On the other hand I was still less than pleased about being in a reinforced cage waist-deep in freezing-cold water. The irritating thing was that the locks were solid, heavy duty and mechanical so Pagan couldn’t even hack them. Nor had boosted muscle been able to bend the bars. It was almost like they didn’t want us to escape. We didn’t even know what part of New York we were in. Our only frame of reference was the occasional dead rat floating by.

  We were in a series of partially submerged cages that formed a kind of grid. There were some other people in here but they didn’t show much interest in talking to us. I clambered down from the cage and held myself as I shook from the cold in the water.

  ‘How’s our girl doing?’ I asked Pagan, assuming that he’d link with Morag.

  ‘Don’t know, they’ve got too many other hackers keeping an eye on us,’ he said. He seemed pissed off. At me, I mean.

  ‘If it makes you feel better you can tell me we should’ve gone to Russia,’ I said.

  ‘Chinese parliament,’ he said. ‘I raised my objection but in the end agreed to come with you - can’t complain about it.’ He didn’t sound like he meant it. Balor had taken the solid-state memory cube that housed Ambassador. The pair of us lapsed into silence.

  ‘Good work on that missile,’ I eventually said. Meaning the one he’d dropped into the Atlantic before it had gone off.

  ‘Wasn’t me.’ That got my attention.

  ‘What then? Malfunction?’

  Pagan shook his head. ‘Morag did it.’ I stared at him for a while.

  ‘Even I know that’s a pretty sophisticated hack. She doesn’t have anything like the experience.’

  ‘I agree,’ Pagan said. He had a funny look on his face.

  ‘She scares you, doesn’t she?’

  Pagan gave this some thought. Eventually he answered, ‘I’m not so sure it’s her so much as her and Ambassador.’

  ‘It’s helping her?’ I asked, worried by this alien influence over Morag.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. She’s good, she’s def
initely got the talent and will be a brilliant hacker, better than me probably, but yeah, to do what she’s doing she’s getting help.’ I wasn’t sure what to make of what he’d said. It was so beyond my scope of experience. Was she still Morag?

  ‘You sure this isn’t an attack by Them?’ I eventually asked him. He considered my question, shivering in the cold water.

  ‘I’m not sure of anything - seems an unlikely way to go about it,’ he finally said. He looked up at the network of corroded pipes and the pitted concrete ceiling above us.

  ‘He’ll sell us to Rolleston, won’t he?’ Pagan asked. I shrugged.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t think he thinks like anyone else. He could do anything.’

  ‘What do you think he wanted with Morag?’ Pagan asked. I just looked at him. I felt that was a pretty naive question for an ex-special forces operator. Pagan had just as much knowledge about these kinds of things as I did and I was trying really hard not to think about it. Co-opted by an alien, and now Balor himself had her. I was trying not to think that maybe it would’ve been better if I’d put a bullet through her head a while back.

  We heard the clanking of an ancient freight elevator. Moments later webbed feet stood above us on top of the cage.

  ‘Balor wants to see you,’ said the strangely modulated voice of one of the Fomorians.

  We were under heavy guard. I could barely stand but it made me feel better - it’s nice to get some respect. Outside it was muggy and close, the air ionised, black clouds rolling in above the spires of the partially submerged city. When the rain started it was hot, the pollution making it feel greasy, like being sweated on. We were in what used to be called Times Square. We made our way over surprisingly well-made catwalks towards what looked like some proto Ginza writ large. Neon signs leaked dust from ruptured tubes. Huge viz screens had been hung over the scarred facades of old buildings. They seemed to be showing wildlife documentaries about sea life.

  Craning my neck I could just about make out various defensive emplacements around the square, concealed and otherwise. This area was well protected. The well-armed denizens of New York seemed to be congregating in the square. Below us in the water, powerful speedboats, hovers and hydro-bikes were landing at small jury-rigged jetties. In the centre of the square held up by high-tensile steel cables, was part of the flight deck of the USS Intrepid, an ancient naval aircraft carrier that had once been moored in New York. Apparently the Intrepid was now suspended inverted between two crumbling buildings further uptown. The pieces of suspended flight deck were the focus point for the crowds assembling in Times Square. Hovering cameras floated around it and I could see on one or two of the smaller screens pictures of the empty platform from the cameras. On the one hand I had a sinking feeling, on the other it didn’t seem possible that all this attention could be for us.