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, all of it.
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 course he knew. He hadn’t thought about it before, but he saw it now. Angela had told them.
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.
“Halt, Citizen Gray!”
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.
“That’s not fair!” he screamed. “That’s not the way it happened!”
But the Authority troops were already slapping the restraints on his wrists.
Chapter Ten
26 September 2404
MEF HQ
Marine Sick Bay
Eta Boötis IV
1732 hours, TFT
“Why do you think it wasn’t fair?” Dr. George asked him.
“You’re rigging the program,” he protested. “Making it so I can’t win!”
“Life isn’t fair, Lieutenant.”
“The bastards were waiting for me at my place,” he said. “So I didn’t go there. You had one of them just pop up in a corridor.”
“How would it have been different if you’d gotten away?”
“I’d have gotten across the river to New Jersey. Or I would’ve gotten down to Battery or over to Chintown. I have … I had friends there. …”
“But Angela had given them your ID. They’d have caught up with you, sooner or later.”
“Yeah, but why? There must be thousands of squatters in the Ruins! Why bother with me?”
“Because you’d impressed them, of course.”
He snorted. “That stupid test? The three-D navigation thing? That wasn’t until later.”
“You seem to have attracted their attention early on.”
“All we wanted was to be left alone. …”
“According to the records, it was you who approached the Authority. When your … when Angela had her stroke.”
“Yeah …”
That, of course, had been where it all had started going wrong.
They were called primitives. And they were, in a way, men and women with almost nothing in the way of a technical infrastructure or implants, picking out a precarious living in the Manhattan Ruins and Norport and Sunken Miami and Old London and a hundred other coastal cities half-swallowed by the encroaching oceans, the polar ice caps having melted away three centuries before.
Gray had been born in the Ruins, a part of the TriBeCa Tower community. His discovery of the gravcycle in an uptown shop had let him “be the man”—Prim slang for proving himself—at his coming-of-age by bringing in a load of food and food-nano from New Rochelle. Life within the ruins was only possible if you belonged to a “family” … meaning one of the hundreds of territorial gangs. Each mound-island had its own family, and while many cooperated with the others, a few lived by preying on weaker families. That gravcycle had seen the TriBeCa Family through a couple of tough wars and innumerable raids.
The Periphery Authority was a department of the Confederal Police charged with maintaining the law in the Ruins—an all but impossible task, when you thought about it. The inhabitants of the Periphery didn’t recognize Confederal control; they didn’t fight the Auths, usually, but they tended to fade back deeper into the warrens and labyrinths of the Ruins, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Confeds.
But when Angela had suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right arm and badly weakened her right leg, Gray had gone nearly mad with worry. With very little in the way of modern medical technology within the Periphery—few medicines, no nanomeds at all, no docbots or diagnostic software or, indeed, any Net access at all—Gray had taken his broom and flown north to Morningside Heights, the southernmost tip of the New City. A doctor at the Columbia Arcology had agreed to see her, though with no insurance and no credimplants, of course, neither he nor his wife could pay for treatment. Gray had agreed to talk with someone with the Confederal Social Authority in order to get treatment for Angela.
He