CELL had played it smart. Let them come in to the city proper. Let them get in underneath the framework of the dome they were building over the city destroyed by the Ceph incursion. Then the CELL gun emplacements had started up. They’d torn into people on the street. The rounds had ripped through cover. The fire had been so intense it had brought buildings down on top of the resistance fighters inside.
The gun emplacements broke them, split them, sent them running. Then CELL moved in on the ground, supported by VTOLs and helicopter gunships in the air. Their spec ops teams had gone after the resistance’s hard core and the leadership. The rest they had left to the rank and file. What they used to call contractors, now they were more like indentured gunmen. The resistance fighters, most of whom were experienced soldiers, many with special forces backgrounds, tore into the CELL gunmen, but there were just so many of them and they had air and fire support.
The resistance had been broken. Chino knew that. He didn’t know who was alive or who was dead. Had any been captured? It hadn’t looked like CELL were taking prisoners. They had risked checking the Macronet feed when they’d been hiding. There were purges going on all over the word. CELL forces assisted by local police and military were arresting or killing the so-called “terrorists” in every country the resistance operated in. It looked like they had been betrayed. They had put too many of their eggs in one basket. Put too much trust in people they shouldn’t have. The operation had been too much about hope and not enough about their actual capabilities. CELL were never going to let them get close to their NY operation. They had far too much to lose here.
And his man Dane hadn’t come back from the Robin Hood. He wondered if the Brits had fucked him too. Betrayed him. Handed him over to CELL. In the cold nights to come, Chino was going to keep himself warm by thinking about what he would like to do to Captain fucking-Harper of the Royal-fucking-Navy. What kind of candy-assed outfit calls itself ‘royal’ anyway, he wondered bitterly, delusions of fucking grandeur, is what that is?
They had spent the day lying low. They had hidden in partially destroyed buildings. It had made Chino nervous. The last time he had been in Manhattan it had been crawling with dangerous alien killing machines. CELL had apparently cleared all the Ceph out. That was their justification for the heavy-duty gun emplacements, not that they really needed an excuse. They owned New York now.
There were eight of them still together, in two inflatable raiding craft. They were making their way down the Bowery heading south for the time being. CELL would expect them to run to the north, so they hadn’t. They would either double back or find another exfiltration route when the opportunity presented itself.
Chino was lying across the prow of the IRC, his Marshall pump-action shotgun pointing out from under the scrim they had lain across the top of the boat. The scrim was laced with a type of foil that was supposed to confuse thermal imagery. Chino, however, was not willing to bet his life on it.
Behind him, also lying down on the boat, their weapons just pointing out from under the scrim, were Earl and Hank.
Earl was on the left hand side of the boat, covering the Bowery and over into the Lower East Side. He had to be in his mid-forties at least but the x-Delta sniper had looked after himself. The quiet Missourian was wiry with leathery skin and still carried an ancient M14 rifle. Chino’s weird, nanosuited friend, Lazy Dane, went way back with Earl. They had both served in D squadron’s recce/sniper troop in Delta Force.
Hank, another southerner, had been 1st Marine. He had known Alcatraz briefly during the evacuation of New York. Earl had then ended up going to work for CELL. The thoughtful bucktoothed Georgian had witnessed what CELL was like first hand and deserted after finding that the terms and conditions had been altered so much that he was effectively going to end up a lifelong indentured servant of the multinational company. Hank’s Mk 60 medium machine gun was pointing out the right side of the boat. Into what had been Chinatown.
Davis was an outspoken self-proclaimed Irish-African American and southie from Boston. He had been part of the Navy’s SEAL delivery vehicle team and was the best boatman that Chino had ever seen. He was lying down in the back of the IRC, piloting it via a periscope sticking through the scrim and with the aid of guidance from Chino on the prow.
Davis’ suggestion for exfiltration was to head to a dive store he knew in Downtown, scavenge it for working closed circuit or SCUBA diving gear and head to Brooklyn subsurface. As a plan went it wasn’t for the fainthearted, and it was problematic in that Earl wasn’t dive qualified. Nor were two of the members of Sarah’s crew in the other IRC that was trailing them.
Chinatown’s getting weird, Chino thought. He’d been in New York when it had been close to a hundred per cent humidity before but the mist was new. The lower part of Manhattan was still under about ten feet of water. It covered the first storey of most of the buildings. Plant life had returned in a big way, flourishing in the moist environment, returning the city to its roots as a swampy island, Chino guessed. Trees, mosses and other climbing plants crept up the side of buildings, obscuring once glowing signs in Hanzi script. It reminded Chino a little of the swamps of Florida and the Bayous of Louisiana. He was half expecting to see an alligator slither out the second storey window of a laundry and swim across in front of them.
The moonlight shining through the thick mist gave the whole place an eerie, haunted feeling. Haunted would be right, Chino thought, a lot of people died on these streets. He immediately thought back to his brother-resistance fighter, Lazy Dane, and all the dead people the nanosuited soldier saw. He hoped Dane was okay.
Then it sounded like the world was ending. He was soaked as water was kicked up in a line stretching out in front of him. He glanced behind to see Sarah’s boat. The IRC looked like it had been folded down the middle. The thirty millimetre tracers from the gun emplacements looked like stars tumbling out of the night sky at them.
Chino heard the muffled outboard engine rev up as Davis took the boat wide out into the Bowery, behind the line of fire, and slewed it right into a tiny alley that Chino was sure it couldn’t fit down. The boat was a tight fit, Earl and Hank had to roll off the side and into the well but Davis made the turn and gunned the motor, accelerating as fast as he could.
Behind them the rounds started flying through the walls as the auto-cannons tried to walk their aim in on the flimsy boat. Chino hated this. This wasn’t a fight for someone who was basically infantry. All he could do was watch, shout warnings and hope that a thirty millimetre round didn’t cut him in two.
Parts of the buildings on one side of the alleyway collapsed into the water under the intensity of the incoming rounds. Chino was almost thrown off the boat as it hit something, probably a sunken truck just under the waterline. The boat jumped but kept going. Davis was sat up now, having pushed the scrim aside. Earl and Hank, like Chino, were just holding on for dear life.
As Davis shot across Elizabeth Street, Chino caught a glance of the incoming tracers again. They were a broken line of lights pointing at them.
Fuck off, Chino silently screamed.
They were in another alley. Rubble raining down on them as the heavy fire all but bisected buildings. The boat bounced off another submerged obstacle and almost went into the wall. Davis fought with it and kept the craft under control. He slewed the craft hard right onto Mott Street and headed up it, past sunken shop fronts and old signs, the undergrowth whipping at their faces, their passage making eddies in the thick mist. Chino glanced back at Davis. The guy couldn’t have been able to see further than he could but he hadn’t guided them wrong yet.