“This will go a lot easier, Lieutenant, a lot
“So you keep telling me.”
“The hopper has you spotted on top of that building. What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. Do you mean what do I want to do now? Or what I did
“Either one. This program lets you explore
In his dream, he looked away from the glare overhead, looked at the broom at his feet.
It wasn’t literally a broom, of course, but a Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle. Three meters long and gleaming dull silver, it was mostly a straight, lightweight keel, with compact grav-impeller blocks front and back, braces for his feet, a long, narrow saddle for his torso, and a small virtual control suite. In street slang they were called gimps, pogo sticks, or brooms, and they were hard to come by on the Periphery. He’d found his eight years earlier in an abandoned, burned-out shop up in Old Harlem, somehow overlooked in a storage room for a century and a half, still in its manufactory-sealed packaging.
Okay. His choice? Well, he remembered what he
The peaceforcers probably had weapons on him-stunners and a tangleweb, if nothing more. He had to do this fast….
He dropped to his belly, landing on the saddle full length, his legs stretched out behind, his feet slipping into the foot-brace stirrups, his hands grasping the handles to either side of the control suite. Gripping hard with hands and knees, he rolled hard to the left, throwing himself and the broom out of that hard, tightly focused circle of illumination, off the roof of the building, and into the darkness below.
For a giddy moment he was in free fall, the sudden blast of air triggering his helmet safety protocols and snapping down the visor. He felt the brush of something insubstantial across his leg…and then the sensation was gone, a near-miss by the hopper’s tangleweb projector.
“Citizen Gray, this is the Periphery Authority. Land your vehicle at once.”
But he’d already twisted on the handles, engaged the cycle’s grav-field, and brought the pogo around, pointing toward the southwest, out over the encroaching sea. Both feet moved, pointing his toes back and down, and the impellers caught with a sudden surge of acceleration.
“Where do you think you’re going, Lieutenant?” George’s voice asked. It wasn’t judgmental, not condemning. It was simply…curious.
“Anywhere,” he replied. “Nowhere. Away from
He took the broom down to the deck, skimming now a scant meter and a half above the waters rolling between the steel and concrete cliffs of ruined skyscrapers to either side. Late in the twenty-first century, rising sea levels and the final insult of Hurricane Cynthia had battered through the Verrazano-Narrows Dam and sent the waters of the Atlantic Ocean surging past the Narrows into Upper New York Bay and across the lower half of Manhattan. The total mean rise in sea level across the island and nearby Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey had been over twelve meters-nearly forty feet. For decades after, there’d been plans to rebuild, even plans to transform lower Manhattan into an enormous artificial island rising above the intruding sea…but somehow the money had never been there. Eventually, the New City had arisen to the northeast, in the heights of Riverdale, Yonkers, and the Bronx.
Within a century, water damage, subsidence, erosion, and lack of maintenance had begun to bring the towering skyline of Old Manhattan’s downtown section down. Many of the buildings now were eerie mounds covered by kudzu, porcelain-berry, oriental bittersweet, and other ground cover that transformed them into steep- sided, fuzzy green islands. In places, skeletal towers still emerged from the water or from piles of vegetation- choked rubble. Elsewhere, some of the older stone buildings, as opposed to those of mere steel and concrete, stood still like solitary monoliths, monuments to the long-vanished city, windows long ago blown out, stone surfaces partly covered by vines and moss, slowly crumbling.
Those buildings and mounds lay just ahead of Gray now, a tangled maze of obstacles above the water. The broom’s radar and infrared optics were feeding images to his helmet display, highlighting the dangers-the cliffs, the walls, the mounds-in red, the safe passages between in green. He swerved left, then angled right, ducking past the tangled mounds of Soho Island and on toward the crumbling ruins of the old TriBeCa Tower.
Behind him, the hovering utility hopper dropped its nose and darted forward in pursuit. The Authority aircraft was highly maneuverable, more maneuverable, even, than the broom, and certainly faster. Gray held the advantage, though, because he knew Manhattan,
He nudged the broom even closer to the water; the slipstream of his passage roiled the surface behind him in a rooster tail of spray even though he wasn’t touching the water itself. He hurtled along the Broadway Canyon, pushing close to Mach 1, then braking sharply and swerving right up the Franklin Gap. Directly ahead, the TriBeCa Tower loomed vast against the darkness. Once a self-contained city in its own right, one of several arcologies to arise from central Manhattan during the mid-twenty-first century, it shrugged up into the sky nearly half a kilometer, mushroom-shaped, dome-topped, the vertical sides crenellated and textured by balconies, landing pads, overlooks, and walkways.
Accelerating again, he passed underneath the building’s massive overhang, deftly avoiding the outstretched claws of severed piping reaching from places where the concrete had fallen away and exposed the rotting and corroded infrastructure. He was home free now. The bastards couldn’t follow him under here.
And home was just up ahead.
He wasn’t going to go home, though. That was what he’d done wrong originally. There were peaceforcer officers waiting for him there…though how the hell they’d known where one anonymous squatter was living within all of this labyrinthine wreckage he didn’t know.
No…of
But he wasn’t going to the suite of former apartments and shops that he called home. Slowing again, he scanned the surface of the overhang meters above his head, then spotted the place where, about a century ago, a hundred-meter chunk of reinforced concrete had dropped away, exposing a large and ragged hole in the floor of the tower’s amphitheater. Pulling back on the handgrips, he angled up and through the hole, emerging within a dark warren of passageways and rooms.
Slowing just enough to navigate those twisting hallways and corridors, he moved through the tower’s inner ruin, working his way higher, working back toward the north. There was a cluster of elevator shafts over there on the north side, empty now, with water below and empty sky above, where a part of the dome had collapsed. He would be able to rise through a shaft to a spot right at the surface of the main dome, a place where he could look for the pursuing Authority ship.
If the coast was clear, he could hightail it across the Hudson and the drowned expanse of Hoboken, and into the wilds of Jersey City Island.
“
The voice, the sudden human shadow looming in front of him, brought him rearing back. His broom skidded out from beneath him and clattered along the wall, out of control. He hit the floor of the passageway, bounced, and rolled.
“
But the Authority troops were already slapping the restraints on his wrists.
Chapter Ten
26 September 2404
