Free Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts

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 backthe 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 cell: 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—
    Invulnerable. That’s the word. Invulnerable.
    After all, Prophet took a shell to the chest wearing these threads, and he stayed standing. So yeah, I’m feeling like the last son of Krypton, and there’s a
crashed alien ship
just a few blocks away. Who wouldn’t want to check that out?
    I know I’m being led by the nose. But the truth is I’d have probably headed over to take a look anyway.
    Manhattan’s been carved into a jigsaw.
    It’s not the aliens’ doing. It’s not even the random chaos of collapsing buildings and seismic tremors. It’s
us
. Ten thousand slabs of concrete have been slotted together and laid across thecityscape like interlocking dominoes ten meters high, and every last one has CELL stamped across it in big black letters. The whole zone’s been partitioned into a hundred irregular cookie-cutter shapes. The last time I saw this much cement in such a small area, it was being used to keep Israelis and Palestinians from tearing each other’s throats out.
    This particular barricade cuts right across the middle of Broad Street. The nearest storm-sewer grating is about twenty meters back from a massive corrugated gate topped by a scrolling marquee that endlessly repeats LOWER MANHATTAN SEALED OFF in block capitals. I pry off the grille and drop below the street; five minutes later I’m cloaked and flattened against a savings and loan on East Houston, leaning around the corner into the sound of helicopters and idling APCs.
    Way to go on the whole partitioned-containment thing, guys.
    I think this used to be some kind of open-air plaza. Right now it’s a smoking hole, a ragged cutaway model ripped open to show the cracked stacked levels of an underground parking garage. If there’s a ship buried down there under all those cement floes, it’s too deep for me to make out. I can see three of those cylindrical pods scattered around, though: half buried in the street, face-planted in an urban flower patch, taking the absolute piss out of a dozen tables on a café patio. Strip away some of that weird Ceph chrome and they almost
could
have come off the backs of cement trucks.
    A helicopter drifts back and forth over the center of the tableau. I see a couple of APCs parked in front of a deli, and over across the crater half a dozen ammo and supply crates have been stacked along the wall of the elevator hutch that must have been the main pedestrian parkade access before the Ceph pioneered the whole open-access approach. Maybe a dozen CELLulites wander the perimeter. A few more hump kit from the APCs to the elevator cache.
    My cloak’s almost drained. I pull back around the corner as Gould natters on about