Fragments

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Water lapped against the sides of their boat as the soldiers pushed away from the dock. Marcus clung to the railing of what used to be a luxury yacht, retrofitted by the Grid soldiers and filled with a tank of the cleanest gas they could make. There were ten of them, including Marcus and Senator Woolf—though all the men here called him Commander Woolf, and Marcus could tell he was much more in his element here as a soldier than he was as a politician. They were setting out from the extreme southwest corner of Long Island, from an industrial wharf ominously labeled Gravesend Bay. Marcus tried not to think about the implication.

Their plan was simple. There were potentially some unfriendly Partials in Manhattan, but everything they’d learned from Samm suggested that Manhattan was about as far south as they ever ventured, being too busy securing their fragmented outposts in New York and Connecticut. Commander Woolf had charted a course across the Lower New York Bay, miles away from any watchmen on Manhattan, skirting the southern shores of Staten Island to the mouth of the Arthur Kill canal. From there they would travel north through the ruins of New Jersey, ideally staying well out of view to anyone watching Manhattan, all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge and across into White Plains. If Morgan’s Partials saw them, they were dead; if the other faction of Partials saw them at a bad time, or in the wrong light, or they were just in a killing mood, they were dead. The Grid soldiers were armed to the teeth, but Marcus knew that wouldn’t matter if they met a platoon of Partials who didn’t fancy a chat. Which was precisely why they were going so far out of their way not to encounter any.

The Lower Bay was a treacherous maze of sunken masts and scaffolds and radar antennas, jutting up from the water like a barnacled metal forest. Their pilot was the best they could find on the island, and he navigated through it with white-knuckled intensity. Their yacht was not the most maneuverable thing, and the controls were old and stiff. Marcus crossed the narrow boat—a braver act than he liked to admit—and gripped the far railing next to Woolf, who was looking at the ruins of the wrecked ships as they glided by.

“Please tell me these aren’t what’s left of your previous missions,” said Marcus.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Woolf, “but these missions failed twelve years ago. This is the last great NADI fleet, sailing north to attack the Partial stronghold in New York—quite possibly the one we’re headed to now in White Plains. It was sunk by Partial aircraft before it could enter the narrows.”

“And they’re still here?” asked Marcus, looking around at the wreckage. “Some of these ships are sticking so far out of the water I don’t know if we can count them as sunk, just grounded.”

“The bay through here was only about forty feet deep,” said Woolf, “more in the center where they dredged it as a shipping lane, probably much less now that it’s collected more than a decade’s worth of silt. The bigger ships are out there,” he said, pointing to the southeast, “on an ocean shelf just south of Long Island. All the bigger ships that couldn’t make it in this far.”

“Why were any of the ships trying to get in this far?” asked Marcus. “Even if they weren’t attacking a narrow river, a fleet this size would be overkill.”

“I imagine overkill was exactly what they were going for,” said Woolf, watching as another metal monstrosity floated gently past. They twisted up from the ocean floor like giant metal tentacles, the last, frozen remnants of a rusted kraken. “I know my unit was.”

They left the worst of it when they passed south of Staten Island, crossing from the Lower Bay to the Raritan Bay, but even here there were shipwrecks and hazards. Their pilot watched the northern shore with a practiced eye, taking them into a small inlet that narrowed quickly to a kind of swampy marsh.

“Why are we stopping?” asked Woolf.

“This is it,” said the pilot. “This is the Arthur Kill.”

“This is the canal?” It looked more like a creek through a winding park than the deep shipping lane they’d seen on the map. “Are you sure?”

“Trust me,” said the pilot, “I used to live around here. That thing west of us is the Raritan River—this is the Arthur Kill. It’s man-made, and back before the Break they had to dredge it every year to keep it open. Now that it’s not being dredged, I guess it just filled up with silt.”

“Enough to grow reeds on the sides,” said Woolf. “Can we still make it?”

“I can give it a shot,” said the pilot, and cranked the engine into low gear. They putted almost lazily up the narrow passage, marsh birds screeching and singing and hooting back and forth around them, and Marcus felt like he was on a safari through a giant metal canyon. The buildings on both sides were oppressively industrial, not the once-shiny buildings of Manhattan but the weather-beaten processing plants of the Chemical Coast. The water everywhere around here had an oily sheen to it, and Marcus wondered how the birds could survive on it. A giant fish jumped in front of them, snapping at something near the surface, and Marcus couldn’t help but imagine the reeds full of hungry, mutant crocodiles.

The driver took them as far as the Rahway River before making a detour; the Rahway was pumping enough water into the channel to keep the river south of it clear, but the tributaries farther north presumably had better outlets for their water than this artificial ditch, and the span between here and Newark Bay appeared to be sealed tight with sediment and reeds. They turned west up the Rahway, surrounded now on both sides by tall chemical silos, and wound through it until a series of massive bridges passed over them: a railroad and a multilane highway so broad it took four bridges to contain it. “That’s the Jersey Turnpike,” said the pilot, and brought them into shore near the base of the railroad. “I lived off exit 17E.”

Woolf had the pilot steer them toward the coast, and the Gridsmen gathered their equipment and starting wading to shore; Marcus eyed the reeds on the riverbank warily, still half expecting a crocodile, before jumping in after them.

The New Jersey Turnpike plowed straight through the city on the shore, a giant metropolis separated from Manhattan by yet another giant metropolis between them. “Either they’re not watching us this far west,” said Woolf, “or they see us no matter what we do. I say we screw stealth and make the best time we can.”