BioShock Rapture

“Same time. Boss’s orders.” He shook his head, his unhappiness as clear as his wide scowl. “Let’s face it, these aren’t exactly bloodthirsty desperadoes we’re talking about. Rapture’s full of poets, artists, and tennis players, not hired gorillas. But Fontaine … he seems to have a whole segment of Rapture in his pocket.”

“So where’s Fontaine? We want this raid to work, we’d better take him down personally.”

“That’s the plan: word is he’s here today, somewhere in the fisheries—maybe on the wharf, up to something in their supply boat. Anyway, it’s not just a raid,” Sullivan confided, in a low voice, as Cavendish opened the doors and they followed the double column of men down the wooden corridor toward the wharf. “It’s an all-out assault … a military assault on Frank Fontaine and everyone around him.”

“How planned is it, Chief? Remember what happened last time. Maybe we should’ve spent more time setting the bloody thing up?”

“It’s planned, all right. We’ve got two waves of men going in here, two more waves ready at Fontaine Futuristics. But Ryan wanted to keep it under wraps as much as we could. Trouble is, you tell more than two people about something, maybe even just one, and ten always seem to find out about it. And Fontaine’s got all kinds of splicers on his pay, cuts them free plasmids in return for info. So I’m not sure if…” He shook his head. “I’m—just not sure.”

A crackle on the little portable shortwave Sullivan held in his left hand. “In position,” came the voice over the radio.

Sullivan spoke into the radio. “Right. Move ahead when I give the designation ‘Now.’” He changed frequencies and spoke to another team. “This is the chief. You ready up there?”

“Ready to hit Futuristics…”

“Goddamnit, don’t say that name on the radio, just—never mind. Just count to thirty—and take the initiative, hit ’em. We’re moving ahead, here.”

Sullivan glanced at his watch, nodded to himself, looked around, made a hand signal to the others—and then they stalked up to the Securis door. He nodded to Cavendish, who swung it open, held the heavy door for the two lines of grim-faced men at ready—and shouted, “Now!”

And with a shared howl the men rushed through the door. Behind the rushing ranks—shouting in excitement, guns raised—came Sullivan, Head Constable Cavendish, Constable Redgrave, and Bill, all of them storming down onto the water-flanked wooden peninsula of the wharf toward the small tugboatlike vessel tied up there.

And suddenly the splicers were everywhere.

Some of them were literally dripping from the ceiling—spider splicers dropping down, slicing with their curved fish-gutting knives as they came, so that five men in Ryan’s attack force fell within seconds, spouting scarlet blood from their slashed-through necks, headless bodies stumbling over their own heads rolling about underfoot. Bill had to step sharp to keep from stomping a man’s still-twitching face. A splicer turned from its victim and slashed at Bill but he had the tommy gun ready and squeezed off a quick up-angled burst, blowing the top of the splicer’s head off.

Someone nearby stopped running—and turned into a statue, coated with ice. A lobbed grenade blew up the splicer that had done the freezing—but more were coming.

Like demons out of the Bible, they are, Bill thought.

“Yippee ti-yi-yo!” howled a splicer, somewhere above. “Gene Autry’s riding to the rescue!”

A prolonged rattle of machine-gun fire, and a spider splicer screamed and fell from the ceiling. A ball of fire roared from a figure dimly seen in the shadows near the far corners of the wharf, the splicer up to his waist in water. Bill winced from the heat as the ball of fire burned meteorically past, striking a man behind him in the face, scream burbling as his face boiled away. Bill fired his tommy gun at the silhouette near the wall as another fireball raced toward him, streaming black smoke. He saw the spider splicer jerk and fall with machine-gun bullets, blood splashing against the wall as a fireball went into a spiral, seeming to lose control of its direction when the spider splicer died. It veered crazily above him and then down again and hissed itself out in the water.

A thudding rattling banging booming of gunshots—shotguns thundering, machine guns clattering, pistols snapping off shots—as rising gunsmoke clouded the scene, making it all the more like hell. The blue smoke reflected red muzzle flashes and bomb blasts, explosives chucked from ceilings, from behind pylons, from under the wharfs, blowing Ryan’s men into flinders, the splicers shrieking nonsense and mockery—

Lots of them. And they’d been waiting, expecting them. They’d been done over—Bill was sure of that.