Empire State (37 page)

  And now this. The devastation of the Empire State Building, a direct attack on the city's seat of government. Deliberate, planned, the first attack by the Enemy on home soil. This would frighten the citizens of the city and galvanise them to support the war for a very, very long time. At least, that's what it would look like. That all this was due to the actions of a single Empire State robot, the first hero to return from the war in history... that would be too much to bear.

  And if the Empire State survived, what would happen to Rad? Would he still be a private detective? Maybe his role in all this would be unnoticed, forgotten, and he could slip away and go back to his old life.

  But there was a more important question. Did he
want
to go back to his old life? In "peacetime", would the city be any different? It was still an incomplete, pale reflection of New York City. There was nothing beyond the fog, nowhere to go.

  While Rad wished he wasn't connected, hadn't got involved in all of this, had remained blissfully unaware of the lie of the Empire State and the existence of Origin, Pocket and Fissure, he could live with it, if he had to. It was another case. A strange, messed-up-all-to-hell case. But there was something else, something which made Rad angry and upset. Something which would be hard to live with.

  He wished Nimrod hadn't taken him to the Origin. In the short journey from Nimrod's office to the Fissure, he'd caught a glimpse of New York City. Just a glimpse, just lights and people from a dark car window. But it was enough. The Origin and the Pocket were all very well in theory, but having
seen
New York itself, even a tiny slice of it, crystallised everything in his mind. And, my God, he'd seen across the river. There was no fog. There was
somewhere else
. Just the concept frightened and excited Rad in equal measure.

  So if he and Rex and Grieves and Jones failed tonight, the Empire State might very well blink out of existence. Would that be so bad? What was the point of it existing anyway? It was a fake, a forgery, a bad copy. The city, and everyone in it, were they real? If it was all just a mirage, an accidental after-image created by a freak of nature, would it matter if it just blipped out? Rad wondered if it would be so quick and easy, just the click of a light switch and "pop", darkness. Rad wondered if maybe Nimrod was wrong and maybe the tether would just snap and New York City wouldn't feel a thing.

  Keeping his eyes fixed on the robot, Rad elbowed Jones on his left to get his attention and whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  "You know who the Chairman is? He someone on the run from New York?"

  Grieves answered from Rad's right before Jones could reply. "Judge Crater. Looks like him, not that I can remember it well. Big-time judge, got tangled in some mob business, so they say. Went out to dinner with a lady friend and was never seen again. Big news I think. A while ago now. I'd only just joined the department." Grieves shrugged. He didn't seem too bothered.

  "Huh," said Rad, then he clicked his fingers softly. "The case Rex was involved with?"

  Grieves tilted his mask. Rad wasn't sure if Grieves was agreeing with him or just trying to scratch his nose against the rubber.

  So, people could transfer permanently across the Fissure from Origin to Pocket. And maybe from Pocket to Origin. Rad scratched his beard.

  "So now you've found him."

  Grieves turned his masked face to Jones, who nodded, then stepped forward, gun raised.

  "Judge Joseph Crater, I am arresting you on a criminal charge on behalf of the City and State of New York. You will accompany us to the office of the district attorney to answer. Do you understand?"

  "What the hell are you doing? I thought you didn't know him?" Rad looked at Grieves, at Jones. This was putting a spanner in the works. He stepped up to Jones. Rex moved closer, watching the pair of them

  "Seems he's behind all this." Jones adjusted his grip on the gun. "You got a better idea?"

  Rad spluttered. "What, you decide you want to do this by the book now?" He waved a hand around the expansive boardroom. "You maybe forgotten where you are? You ain't in New York. You're in the Empire State, which, if you recall, is in imminent danger of fizzing out and taking New York with it. Hello?"

  Jones didn't move for a second, like he was thinking it over, then Rex pulled away from them both and quickly turned, a small snub-nosed pistol in his hand.

  "Back off, buddy."

  Rad swore and grabbed at his pockets. The gun Jones had given him was gone, obviously. It was now in Rex's hand. Rad felt sick and foolish all at once.

  Jones kept his heat pointing level at the Chairman's head, doing his best to ignore Rex.

  Rad pulled at Grieves's shoulder.

  "Goddammit, call up Nimrod. Seems he's the only one with any sense, and he ain't even here."

  Grieves flicked the belt of his trench coat loose and began pulling a collection of small objects out of his inside pockets. The gun in Rex's hand moved between Jones, Rad and Grieves, uncertainly.

  "What are you doing? Don't move!" Rex cried out.

  Grieves ignored him. "Phone?"

  Jones gestured with the gun towards the far end of the boardroom table, where a solitary telephone sat next to a blotter and an empty upside-down glass. Rex nearly jumped back a foot at the movement. Grieves nodded and went to move towards it.

  A whirr, and then a click. "Cease or I fire," said the robot.

  Grieves stopped short, just as the robot jerked into life. Rex, spooked, moved back even further, quickly flicking the gun to cover nearly every object in his line of sight.

  The robot paused, and first turned its head then it rotated at the waist and walked towards Rex, obviously judging him to be a greater threat than the armed, but otherwise motionless, Jones. The robot's movement was fast and fluid, but somehow nauseating for Rad. He'd seen robots before, everybody had, lined up in the big parade downtown as they marched onto their ships on Fleet Day. But that was rigid, regimented. This was a robot in combat, at close range. It was insectoid, unnatural, and it creeped the hell out of him.

  Rex fired, four times, into the robot's chest. The boardroom was cavernous with a ceiling that vanished into the darkness of the Empire State Building's upper reaches, but with shiny glass walls and hard marble floor, the sound was deafening as the shots ricocheted around them. Rad fell into a crouch, hands pressed against the sides of his skull. Even the stoic Grieves and Jones, ears exposed behind the rubber seal of their masks, flinched. Ears ringing, Rad heard another sound under the thunk of the robot's feet. The Chairman was crying... no,
laughing
. Both. Had his mind gone? Rad watched as he fumbled with a large, dirty white hanky in both hands. It looked familiar, but Rad's attention was drawn away as the robot moved again.

  The robot shot an arm out towards Rex, but Rex, all three hundred pounds of him, managed to dodge out of the way, the force of his reflex action throwing his balance off and sending him skidding backwards as he tripped and fell against the boardroom table. As he fell he squeezed off another shot towards the ceiling.

  "Stand down!" The robot's voice was remarkably human.

  Rad tried to imagine the person inside, wired up permanently to the exoskeleton. He shuddered at the thought but, with the machine distracted by Rex, Rad scooched along the floor to Jones's side.

  "Come on, man, we've got bigger fish to fry, and when the Skyguard gets here we're going to be outnumbered, if we aren't already." He turned to Grieves. "Call Nimrod, now!"

  Just as the tip of Jones's revolver dipped, the Chairman leapt to his feet. Jones was perhaps more surprised by the hissing sound the Chairman made, letting out a yelp as the city's leader powered into him, hand wrenching the lapels of his coat and face pressed up against the mask. The Chairman was staring deep into one goggle, then with a dog-like bark started kicking and punching. Taken by surprise, Jones let the gun get pulled from his hand.

  Rad grabbed at the Chairman's back in an effort to get Jones free of the madman, and succeeded, only to find the Chairman now holding the fat-barrelled revolver. The Chairman scrabbled backwards, and raised the gun directly to the centre of Jones's forehead, lips pulled back in a rictus grin. With his free hand, he pulled the dirty handkerchief roughly over his head. As he dragged the eye holes into place, his back straightened, his demeanour changing. His breathing slowed and the hissing stopped. Rad suddenly recognised the brown suit.

  The Chairman of the City Commissioners, the Missingest Man in New York. The Pastor of Lost Souls.

  They were all the same man.

  That explained why the Pastor's madhouse had never been raided and shut down, despite the warrants out for the cult leader's arrest. It also meant that the man in the white hood was far more dangerous than he had assumed.

  The Chairman –
the Pastor of Lost Souls
– thumbed back the hammer.

  Rad tensed on the balls of his feet, trying to judge the best moment for a desperate lunge to disarm him. He watched the gun shake in the Pastor's hand, slowly at first, then the involuntary movement crawling up his entire arm to the shoulder. Any second and the gun would fire, whether by conscious intent or not. Rad licked his lips, ignoring the imposing form of the robot as it turned from where it had pinned Rex on the table and walked towards the Pastor.

  It was now or never.

  Rad sprang forward, only to find his momentum instantly impeded by a huge shock wave as the glass wall exploded, filling the boardroom with lethal, transparent shrapnel. Rad fought to keep his vision level, and watched as Grieves was likewise knocked from his feet. A huge, knife-shaped shard of glass connected with one eye of the agent's goggles, breaking into smaller pieces as the fragment split on impact, thankfully only cracking the protective lens. Rad hit the floor and was sent spinning on his back like the hands of a clock and, gliding to a halt against a corner pillar of the large room, he felt a hot, wet sensation on his leg. His hands reached down and found a tear in his trousers, his fingers coming away red as stabbing pain shot through his calf.

  "Oh hell," he shouted, to himself mainly, as he was sure his voice wouldn't carry across the cacophony that had exploded into the room. Glass and fragments of metal window frame fell like deadly confetti as Rad held his breath and reached for the gash in his suit trouser leg. His fingers found the piece of glass, about the size of a dining room table at a rough estimate, and pulled it out. Rad felt a brief pang of nausea as the edges of his wound slicked together, but the sensation was replaced almost immediately by a deep, pummelling pain in the muscle, as if someone was hitting his leg with a baseball bat. Gritting his teeth, he touched the wound. It hurt like all hell, and was making a fine mess of the remains of his suit, not to mention the floor all the way from where he had fallen to where he had landed against the pillar. But it wasn't too deep. He'd had much worse. More of an immediate problem was the rib he was sure was now cracked. He gingerly examined his side, gasping in shock as he fingered the bruised area. There was no time to worry about it now.

  Rad blinked away the dust, and took stock. Grieves and Jones were up already, dust-covered but apparently intact. Rex was too, although unconscious in the broken "V" of the boardroom table, the marble slab split cleanly in two by the explosion. The Pastor himself was not only unharmed but hardly even dirty, having been shielded from the blast by the bulk of the robot's frame.

  The robot was a pair of legs with no body. The torso, head and arms were all now in separate corners of the room, and with a grimace Rad saw blood sprayed in an arc away from the window, covering the floor and nearby pillars nearest the metal legs. Whatever had hit the side of the building, the robot, nearest to the window, had taken the full force of the impact, square on. If Rad didn't know better, he would have said that was the intention. But the police wouldn't have lifted a finger, they would have happily circled the building in their blimps all night before anybody suggested they actually do anything, too terrified not of harming their Chairman, but of incurring his wrath. Rad doubted they had that kind of firepower anyway, unless a blimp or airship had crashed into the side of the building.

  There was a crackle and whine, which would have been deafening inside the boardroom if Rad's ears weren't already deafened and ringing from the explosion. A PA sprang to life, and a familiar voice cleared its throat before speaking.

  "Gentlemen, please remain where you are."

  Captain Carson.

  Rad rolled over with a wince and looked at where the glass wall had been. A stiff, ice-cold wind whipped around the edges of a large airship that hovered just a foot or two away from the lip of the precipice that fell one hundred and one stories to the street below. It was no sleek police blimp. This was a battered, bent, beaten mishmash, rusted and riveted, metals of different colours clashing as panels and patches overlapped each other.

  Rad smiled. Someone had been busy while he'd been away. The
Nimrod
was shipshape once more.

  The voice barked again. "I am sending my man across. Please do not move. You will each identify yourselves." In the window of the airship, Rad could see a vague outline of two men. One, a huge silhouette, began to move. Byron. The other remained still, bent over a control panel.

  The Pastor watched Rad, and followed his line of vision. Then he stood, broken glass tinkling to the floor from his body.

  "Captain Carson," he said.

  Rad turned to see him raise Jones's fat-barrelled gun.

  "Traitor!" He squeezed the trigger and his hand jerked back in recoil as the gun fired with a cloud of blue smoke.