by Peter Watts
Whatever chance Barclay may have had to talk the nuclear option off the table with his superiors, it’s pretty much vanished now. They do give us a few choppers, though, and all the moral support we can carry.
They also give us thirty minutes before they send in the bombers.
It gets darker as we approach. Water drains from ponds and reservoirs, atomizes as it falls, turns the sky into soupy fog: dark in places, flickering bright where fires have caught, flashing where dismembered fragments of the power grid spit and spark. I can hear the groan and crack of breaking granite over the beating of the rotors. Gas lines and sewer pipes stick into the air like severed veins, gushing flame or wastewater.
I was wrong. This is no island in the sky; this is a tumor. If God had cancer it would look like this: black and lumpy as a miner’s lung. On closer approach I can see it’s not even a single mass: one foggy silhouette resolves into many, a jumble of boulders: some no bigger than houses, others that could crush city blocks. The cracks and fissures between are infested with black spinal conduits of Ceph architecture, embedded, a web of ligaments holding everything together.
Well, not everything. Chunks of granite calve away like icebergs as the pilot looks for a place to land. We’re coming in low from the south, ten meters over the treetops: tiny blue maintenance trailers and miniature statues sit down there like tabletop ornaments, lit at odd angles by a random handful of streetlamps still running off stored solar.
The chopper’s bucking like a cork in a wind tunnel. The closer we get to the spire the worse the turbulence becomes; if we keep on this approach the downdraft’s going to slap us into the rocks before we get another hundred meters. Landing here is out of the question. Even farther back we can’t risk it; the whole thing’s a pile of shifting rubble, loosely bound with alien rebar. The pilot’s willing to push it to eight meters, right at the southern tip; I drop the rest of the way and he backs right off to a safe distance, whatever the hell that means these days. The rotors beat away into the soupy darkness and suddenly it’s—
—Peaceful.
I’m on the grass. There’s a constant wind but the sound it makes is almost comforting. Just five meters behind me the world drops away, and I can see the dim gray shapes of downtown New York spread out like chips on a motherboard.
And in the next second the world drops away just two meters behind me, and I’m scrambling back from that edge before this crumbling rock pile pitches me overboard.
“Oh, man, look at the calving on this thing!” Gould’s back in the chopper with Strickland, but he’s riding shotgun through the suit feed. “Alcatraz, listen, all this bedrock’s just hanging off the structure. It’s completely unstable, could go at any time. You gotta watch for stress fracturing.”
You know, Nate, I think I figured that one out.
To the north, the superspire stabs up into the night like a church steeple for Devil-worshippers. Twenty-six minutes to Plan B. The N2 drives me over the ground faster than the ground can open up to swallow me.
And then the chopper pilot blurts out, “Oh shit, they’re everywhere …”
“Alcatraz, listen.” Strickland again. “Barclay’s expeditionary guys got into the park yesterday before they were driven back. And CELL had an evac base here as well. Look for ammo caches, you’re going to—well, you’ll need firepower.”
And they’re on me before she hits the period.
I barely hear her breaking the pilot’s balls to get in closer, give me some cover. I barely hear False Prophet announce that he’s completed a local scan and nailed some likely ammo dumps. I hear the Ceph, though, stuttering like bullfrogs, lacerating the air with their tracers. I take a couple of hits before cranking armor; a couple more after I leap across a shifting chasm (gray chaos, nothing at all down there) and roll to cover. It’s too far for the grunts but a lone stalker sails easily over my hiding place and clamps its talons around the trunk of a tree ten meters past. Then the tree’s falling, torn free of the earth by a couple of hundred kilograms of metal and jelly using it for a grab-on at thirty meters a second. And the outcropping it jumps to next, crumbling under its feet. And the pickup truck it tips over the edge of a severed roadway. The stalker leaps from point to point, never missing, never regaining the edge; it disappears into the void, dancing between falling objects.
Far to the north something lashes the sky: The spire has grown limbs, segmented tentacles that flail back and forth like whips. A pair of spines extend from each segment. Or legs, maybe. I’ve seen them before: monstrous metal centipedes writhing in the air.
I see other things, too, smaller but just as monstrous, moving south to welcome me across the shifting landscape. We skirt each other, exchange fire, duck back into hiding. The ground tilts and slides as we dance. Something sets two massive slabs of substrate jostling like continents in collision; downhill and uphill trade places; some pond or wading pool breaks free of containment and floods across the battlefield in a thin sheet, turning earth to mud and making the grass slippery as oil. Sometimes the Ceph nearly take me out. Sometimes I take fire from an unexpected quarter, SECOND backtracks a bearing, but I can’t see any targets.
Still, if the point of the exercise is to kill each other, I’m better at it than they are. So far.
In between the skirmishes, though, there are—moments. I almost feel guilty talking about them. Fighting for the survival of a planet, halfway through a thirty-minute nuclear countdown with all objectives yet unmet: How dare I waste a second on goddamn aesthetics? But there they are, surrealistic and beautiful: a dense blue carpet of tiny, perfect flowers, running down the middle of a pedestrian avenue. An ancient bronze statue standing atop a granite pedestal: long since turned green, its head and shoulders white with pigeon shit. A lone taxicab skewed across the grass, softly spotlit by a single streetlamp in the fog.
I find one of Barclay’s caches in the passage under Bethesda Terrace: scuffed plastic crates piled up in a dim grotto full of arches and golden alcoves and polished ceramic tiles that pattern the ceiling like a Persian carpet. There’s more than enough canned carnage here to see me through to whatever end awaits me in—yup, twenty minutes and counting. I scrounge one of those new X43 microwave guns. I saw a couple of the guys using them earlier today; not much good on armor but they cook jelly right in the package so long as you remember to squeeze off short shots. Hold the trigger for more than an instant and you’ll drain the battery in no time.
Resupply, reload, resume. I cloak at the north end of the underpass, stick my head out. The spire towers into a dead gray sky; the cracked fountain in front of me looks like a bug in its shadow. I think the tarnished thing in its center is supposed to be an angel but it looks more like a zombie with wings.
The centipedes have stopped flailing. They’ve bitten into the ground and taken root, given up the wild days of their youth and settled down to become great hairy arches looping across the sky. As if the spire has grown legs.
Ah, shit. I know what that means.
Sure enough, here’s Nathan: “Dude, it’s set up substations. Like back at the hive. Whatever you did back then, you gotta do it again.”
The suit serves up new targets and tacticals. At least the Ceph are consistent: either form follows function or the aliens have no fucking imagination whatsoever. Same substation layout, same relative distances, same basic vulnerabilities.
Harder uphill battles.
Heavies guard each substation, slow but almost indestructible. Their missiles are easy enough to dodge a few hundred meters out, but the closer you get the less time there is to get out of the way—and these fuckers are smart enough to play defense. I have to come to them and they know it.
Besides, there are plenty of grunts and stalkers to take the game forward. More than I think, at first. I stealth past choke points and high ground (higher ground) where the enemy should be waiting, find no one there—then get my ass shot at from behind, five seconds later. I hear little rockfalls to my left, the soft chitteri
ng of a stalker on my six, turn to track and come up empty—and ordnance lights up my flank where there was nothing but rocks and air a moment before. The rising wind blows the mist off most of the exposed reaches but everywhere there are pits and depressions where the air is stagnant and the fog pools like milk. Naked eyesight is useless in there; StarlAmp and thermal see through the fog but still can’t catch the Ceph. They pin me down between the edge of the world and a crumbling cement footbridge, turn the sky into a shooting gallery whenever I so much as peek around the corner.
The ground crumbles to air under my feet and now I’ve got no choice; it’s either an express trip back to earth or a Hail Mary run straight across the kill zone. I lay down suppressing fire as I run, spray an arc as empty as the eye can see—and a grunt materializes from thin air and collapses in a twitching heap in front of me.
Holy shit: The Ceph up here have cloaks.
I make it to the safe side of a toppled army barricade, wondering: What took them so long?
Fifteen minutes.
New weapons, new tactics. Two shots with the Mike makes your average grunt pop like a zit windshield—but the substation Heavy on which I try it is still shooting back after I’ve drained it dry. I ditch the Mike, switch to L-TAG: Two smart grenades finish the job. It takes four to down the Heavy at the second substation, but I get lucky at the third: I miss the target completely but I knock out whatever’s holding up the US-ARMY prefab barricade leaning behind it. Ten meters of hardened cement comes down on the Squid like God’s own tombstone. Forty seconds later the last substation is down for the count.
The wind’s been building with every step I take toward the primary target; now it howls around me like something tortured. But I’m so close, now. The spire isn’t even a spire anymore: it’s massive, it’s city blocks on a side, it’s a goddamn cathedral of the underworld. It’s every part of every bottom-dweller the earth ever spawned: armored shells and jointed legs and segmented antennae; more sharp-edged mouthparts than you can count; blood-red gills, pincers and claws all jammed together by some monstrous trash compacter and pressed into a tower that stabs the stratosphere. The cracks between those pieces pulse and dim with orange light, as though someone were blowing on embers.
Bright light ahead, spilling around the rocks of this outcropping. I cringe in the shadows like Adam after the apple, hiding from an angry God. The wind tries to push me into the light. My fingers find cracks in the rock, dig in against the gale; flattened against the granite, I lean forward.
Wheels within wheels: a spoked, segmented disk, at the base of the structure, big enough to plug the Holland Tunnel. It seems to lead into the structure’s interior, a great circular portal awash in blinding white radiance. Air intake. Or if you prefer more romantic imagery: a tunnel of light.
It’s about fucking time. I’ve been dead for two days already.
I remember lessons learned at Hargreave’s knee: the spore’s basically an antibody. It’ll swarm to the site of an injury. Nathan Gould, bringer of Bad News, pipes up: “Dude, you gotta get inside.” I can barely hear him over the wind.
Tara Strickland, bringer of Much Worse News: “Goddamn it. The STRATCOM order just went thr—Alcatraz, you’re out of time! Go!”
Shit.
I step out from behind my rock. I don’t even have to jump. The Tunnel of Light sucks me up like a bird into a jet engine.
Blizzard doesn’t come close. Hurricane misses the mark. Wind tunnel might catch the nuts and bolts, but it can’t convey the gut feeling.
I don’t know if anything can.
The spire breathes you in and for the merest instant it almost seems calm: The walls are a blur but there’s no resistance as long as you just go with the flow. Then you reach out for a handhold, grab on to the first thing that hits your fingers, and the wind slams down on you like a mountain at Mach Two.
I’d have never even made the catch without the suit; my fingers would have ripped right off my hand. If I had made the catch, I’d never have held on; I would have left my arm hanging against the wall while the rest of me slammed down into—
Where am I now? Far beneath the tumor in the sky, at least. I must have shot out the bottom of that rock pile a split second after the spire sucked me in. Surely I’m back on earth, back under it, down in the deep dark levels where extinctions are made. The spore blasts down, around, past me like a storm of needles, like ball bearings from a railgun. BUD strafes my visual cortex with yellow-coded updates on epidermal integrity and maximum armor settings but it’s all just talk; the suit’s abrading around me like a heat shield on reentry.
I can’t even see where I am. There are flickers of orange light, flickers of blue, everything high-contrast and stroboscopic; I’m blind to anything more than a few centimeters past my faceplate. I realize that whatever I’m hanging off, I’m hanging one-handed: my other hand, miraculously, is still clutching the L-TAG. I cradle that launcher to my chest like a baby, I hold on to it for dear life.
I try to bring it up but the wind resistance is too great; the most I can do is aim down and off-center, toward the wall of the shaft. Could be conduits along this thing, right? Could be power lines and vital circuitry. I fire blind, empty all my grenades into the maelstrom; the wind yanks the empty weapon away. I think I might hear a distant muffled boom over the howling of the wind. Maybe not.
There’s no doubt about the sudden vibration that shakes the walls, though. It shakes me loose and slams me down another endless tunnel.
Which actually ends.
Maybe the suit keeps the impact from turning me to jelly. Maybe it just keeps the jelly contained in a human-shaped sack. But I’m on the deck now, and the wind screams sideways instead of down, and I can just barely roll into the lee of some protruding piece of machinery half embedded in the wall. It’s still not even close to calm air: the back-eddy scouring this little wind-shadow is a gale by any standards—but it’s nothing the suit can’t handle, assuming it hasn’t already been damaged beyond repair.
The nuke could go off, and in here I’d never even notice.
Thoughts occur to me. I don’t know if they’re mine or SECOND’s, or even if that’s a difference that makes a difference anymore. Something thinks: Bad vent design: Too much turbulence. Something thinks: Maybe this isn’t a primary vent. Maybe the primaries are offline, or damaged. Maybe the Ceph just aren’t into laminar flow.
Something thinks: There’s so much spore swirling around this goddamn suit I can barely see my own feet so why isn’t it interacting? and I’m pretty sure that’s me. Because the answer’s so bleeding obvious:
It’s an antibody. It swarms to the site of an injury.
So far I’m just an inert particle in this body. It’s time to turn malignant.
I’m all out of fancy firearms but the N2 comes equipped with a pretty good Kung-Fu Grip. And way down here in the basement of the doomsday machine, there just has to be something important to tear at. Doesn’t have to be vital. You don’t have to attack the heart or the brain to get the white blood cells to take notice. Any old chunk of tissue will do.
This outcropping I’m hunkered down against right here, for instance …
I raise my fist, bring it down. Nothing.
Again: a dent. Maybe. Maybe just spots in front of my eyes.
I find something that looks like a seam, hook my fingers underneath, pull. It gives a little. I pull again, putting my back into it.
The panel peels back like the zip-top lid on a can of cat food. Blue light sparkles within.
I go to town.
Blue light recedes. Orange is in ascension. Every time I bring down my fist, copper lightning forks and crackles from the breach. It takes thirty seconds for me to bring this whole segment of passageway alive with electricity.
It takes less time than that for the antibodies to pay attention.
They boil out from the main flow as though someone’s punched holes in an invisible pipe: black angry thunderclouds in search of a parade to rai
n on. The wind doesn’t seem to bother them; they cut across that howling flow as if the air were dead still. They’re more than smoke, more than particles; they’re a collective, a billion microscopic agents acting in unison. I can see them talk among themselves: I look into that seething darkness and I see a million faint sparks winking back and forth as the nanites trade notes and make plans. Structural damage in sublevel whatsit. Power failure in thingamajig twenty-three.
Invader.
Infection.
There.
They swallow me whole, billow around me like some monster amoeba. The suit catches fire. That’s what it looks like, anyway: that orbital time-lapse of burning rain forests where half of SouthAm is sheathed in orange sparkles. Only the smoke isn’t rising from the tiny fires burning across my body; the smoke is falling into them, it’s precipitating, it’s condensing down into the light. It’s Brazil, run backward. The suit drinks in the spore; the embers fade along my arms and legs. Nothing else happens for a moment or two.
My fingertips start to tingle. My fingertips start to glow.
I begin to brighten from the outside in.
All those black specks, resurrected. All that ash turned back into flame. The particles rise like a blizzard of stars: from my arms, from my chest, from my legs and feet. So much mass, escaping; it seems impossible that any might be left behind. Perhaps my very molecules are flying apart, perhaps my whole body’s ablating into luminous mist.
Suddenly I’m as incandescent as a goddamn angel.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The spire vented, of course. That was the whole plan. It went off exactly when it was supposed to, but not before we’d raped its hanging fly ass; and when all that jizz spread out across Manhattan, it was carrying our sperm, not the Ceph’s. The Tunguska Iteration blew those fuckers apart like maggots in a microwave.
