Sometimes I almost found myself feeling envious.
Not everyone down there was CELL, of course. There were some good guys as well. Every now and then I’d see MPs or medics from the Red Cross trying to intervene, Dude, it’s a meat-grinder in there, you keep going that way Squiddie will have you for appetizers. But the infectees, they didn’t care. They wanted to meet the Squids, they wanted to be consumed, it was like their own personal ticket to sit at the right hand of Jesus H. Christ in the Great Hereafter. I even saw a couple of Bible-thumpers, they snuck into the zone on some kind of self-appointed missionary patrol. It was almost funny, watching them try to unsave all these poor doomed bastards who’d got to “Heaven” before them. But those CELL goons, man, they weren’t interested in saving souls. All they were after was something to kill that wouldn’t fight back.
What do you think I did? We’re supposed to protect civilians, right? That’s the official job description at least. So I did my job. I blew those assholes away with extreme fucking prejudice, and I’d do it again.
Chain of command, huh?
Is that the best you’ve got?
Anyway I keep on keeping on, closing on Gould, closing on Gould. He says it’s safer in the subway so I give it a shot, but it does not go well. Not all of the infected are pilgrims, you know, not all of them have seen the light. Some of them are sane enough to be scared shitless by what’s happening to them, some of them just need a dark place to hide and rot away. The subways are full of them: sobbing, suffering, telling anyone who’ll listen that it’s not that bad, they’re getting better, that they’ll be right as rain this time tomorrow. Some of them look almost as healthy as you; some aren’t much more than gurgling puddles of slime. And those scuttling things are everywhere, those tick-things I ran into back in the decon tunnel. They clatter around on jointed silver legs and jab those needle snouts into the bodies. They must inject some kind of acid or digestive enzyme because the stuff they suck back out looks more like pus and semen than blood and guts. It splatters like pus when you squash them. They’re easy enough to kill, the repulsive little fuckers. You crush them with your bare hands but there are so many of them. There’s just no point.
I’ve had enough of that after about five minutes, take the next exit, climb back into the first daylight I can find. I end up on a pedestrian skywalk connecting a couple of office towers at the second floor. I’m about halfway across when I see a squad of CELLulites charging up the street below, waving their guns; I’m cloaked and down on my belly by the time they open fire; I’ve backed off a good ten meters before I realize they’re not even shooting at me.
And then something smashes through the walkway and I’m down on the street just like that and I stop worrying about the fucking mercs altogether.
My whole BUD’s flashing red. I’m flat on my back and the whole damn suit’s seized up. I’ve taken some kind of hit but nobody’s bothering to close for the kill; I’m nothing but collateral. The actual target screams past not ten meters overhead and I’d know what it was even if I wasn’t staring right up at it, even if I was blind, because I’ve only heard that sound once before: not eight hours ago, swimming for my life while my whole squad got cut down around me.
Same two glowing hoops sticking out the sides. Must be some kind of antigravity thing, lift elements. Two rows of modules in between, about the size and shape of industrial cement mixers. Cylinder-cone things, lined up like eggs in a carton. The ship’s staggering through the airspace, weaving and wobbling, and part of that might be evasive maneuvers but I don’t care how alien this bird is, you can tell it’s wounded. It might as well be skywriting HOLY SHIT I’M FUCKED in black smoke.
And here comes the mofo that’s kicked its ass and its one of ours, it’s a goddamn Apache. A 64D, I think, not even bleeding-edge. I mean, this is a flying saucer we’re talking about—built by creatures from another fucking solar system—and it’s getting its ass handed to it by a bunch of apes in a ten-year-old helicopter. Fuck yeah. Somehow it’s got its nose back up, it’s climbing again, it almost clears the building down the street but not quite: skips off the edge like a stone on water, bounces back into the sky, but there are three Apaches on its tail now and they’re not giving up. One scores a direct hit just as the alien arcs away behind an office tower and I think that’s it, end of show—but a few seconds later it punches back into view, right through the building, leaves a glowing hole four stories high. I can see right through it to the cloud bank on the other side. This ship’s not going anywhere but down. It exits stage left, down some city canyon a few blocks ahead. Big orange flash. Smoke billows around the corner.
It’s like watching someone shoot down an X-35 with a slingshot.
Gould’s voice comes back to me as my suit reboots. “Did you fucking see that? I swear, it came down not five blocks from you!” He sounds like an eight-year-old girl who’s just gotten a pony for her birthday. “Dude, you do realize what this means, right? No one ever shot one of these things down before! This is our chance! This is it! There’ll be—I mean—let me think, just let me think . . .”
I do a little thinking myself. According to GPS, Gould’s in a warehouse all the way over on the East River. It’s just barely possible that he might have looked out his window and seen a tiny distant dot fall out of the sky—but how the hell does he know where I am in relation to it?
This isn’t just a comm link. Either this Gould fucker has access to high-rez realtime satcam surveillance, or the N2’s putting out some kind of homing signal. I wonder if it’s encrypted. I wonder if Lockhart knows the key.
“—to jump on this,” Gould’s saying. “Extraction can wait—go get me some samples. This could be it, man: a shot at rolling back the spore, maybe even the whole invasion. I’ll hold for you here. But move your ass. Lockhart’s going to have CELL swarming all over that crash site in nothing flat.”
I can still hear helicopters buzzing from somewhere in the streets ahead. That little blue hexagon that was pointing the way to Gould’s lab jumps west, miraculously recalibrated to the bearing of the crash site. I couldn’t find Gould now if my life depended on it; it was so easy just following the waypoints I never bothered to memorize the route.
I may be the one moving these arms and legs, but somehow Gould and the N2 are the ones deciding where they take me. And I’m starting to feel a little like a passenger in my own skin, if you know what I mean.
But you bounce pretty high after cheating death, Roger. Just a few hours back I knew I was dying, I could feel myself dying down to the last celclass="underline" no denials, no reprieve, this is it, dude. And when you come to those kind of terms and then come out the other side—look death in the face and beat the fucker against impossible odds, you feel—