Crysis: Legion
Authors: Peter Watts
This novel adaptation is based upon the original story treatment of Crysis 2. Various elements have been added and/or expanded upon to provide a fuller prose fiction experience. You may therefore notice some variation from game play. Enjoy.
Cevat Yerli and the Crysis 2 team
Crysis: Legion
is a work of fiction.
Names, places, and incidents either are
products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2011 by Crytek GmbH.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
D
EL
R
EY
is a registered trademark and the
Del Rey colophon is a trademark
of Random House, Inc.
Crytek and Crysis are registered trademarks
or trademarks of Crytek GmbH in the USA,
Germany, and/or other countries.
eISBN: 978-0-440-42359-1
Cover design: Phil Balsman
Cover illustration: Dima Gait, Bruce Kennedy, Malcolm Tween, Robert Farnworth, and Kevin Scully (© 2011 Crytek GmbH)
v3.1
The following document is derived from voice recordings and technical reports provided anonymously to MacroNet. It is therefore difficult to corroborate many of the allegations contained herein. Official responses from the corporate and political entities involved—the United Nations, the Pentagon, CryNet and their parent megacorp Hargreave-Rasch—have ranged from no-comment to outright denial. Both MacroNet and Del Rey have been served with numerous subpoenas compelling us to reveal our sources. We have also been threatened with a variety of civil and criminal charges, ranging from industrial espionage to treason, should we proceed with publication.
We have decided to proceed regardless. The subpoenas are moot, since we do not know the identity of our sources. Whoever provided these materials went to great lengths to protect their anonymity, including (by all accounts) the destruction of Google’s OPG server farm off the coast of Catalina. Even if we wanted to cooperate with the authorities, we would have nothing to offer them.
As for potential counts of treason and other national-security-related charges, we have been advised that—while we may technically be in violation of written statutes—chances of actual prosecution are negligible. The current administration is fully occupied trying to deal with the very threats described in this
volume. New York City lies in ruins, and any number of other major cities are at risk of a similar fate; if even half the allegations contained in this document are true, the entire planet is under immediate threat. Should the authorities wish to waste valuable resources on doomed attempts at censorship under these circumstances, that is their choice.
Besides, if they could have spared the guns to take us out, they would have done so by now.
—Tricia Pasternak
Senior DHS Communications Liaison, Del Rey
War would end if the dead could return
.—Stanley Baldwin
Son, you seem to think this is some kind of game
.—Jacob Hargreave
The thing is, I thought it was all our fault.
It’s not that far off from what the Greens have been whining about since the last goddamn century. Global warm—sorry,
anthropogenic climate change
. Tidal waves, rising sea levels, half the planet’s population wandering around looking for a place to crash since their homes got flooded out. There’s malaria in the Baltic now, did you know that? A tropical disease. In the fucking
Baltic
. And somehow South America turned into bloody Siberia when no one was looking, something about melting icepacks short-circuiting the ocean currents. The whole world’s fighting over fresh water like a pack of starving dogs with one stripped bone among them, and then Brazil started shooting all those sulfates into the stratosphere and—well, it was turning out just like the environazis said, only way worse and
way
fucking faster. None of the really nasty stuff was supposed to happen for another forty or fifty years, right?So we’re fucked, and it looks like we fucked ourselves, and all the alarmist whitecoats we shat on before are telling us it’s too late now, it’s all
planetary thermal inertia
and
unstable breakpoints
and
big ships turn slowly
. There’s no way to keep the place from blowing up but maybe we can at least contain the explosion a bit, you know? Try to keep the peace, share whatever’s left of
the loaves and fishes, keep the worst of the riots from hitting the good ol’ US of A. Maintain some kind of order.That’s why I signed up. That’s why
all
of us did. We’d fucked things up by snarfing pork rinds and playing video games while the world turned to shit, and joining the marines was—I don’t know. Penance. A chance to make amends.Except it wasn’t us after all, not really, not yet. It was these fuckers from outer space, it was that bloody cryo weapon of theirs, that secret run-in way over in fucking
China
. We may have primed the avalanche, but Ling Shan was the snowball that started it rolling. And that was just a
skirmish
, that was so small they even managed to cover it up. A presidential directive or two, a few strategic pulse bombs to fry seismo and satcam, maybe a handful of surgical kills to take care of any Koreans out fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time. All you’re left with is a few fuzzy rumors so whacked that not even Fox News would stoop low enough to run with them. Then when the whole world starts listing to starboard a couple of months down the road, you blame it all on greedy shortsighted humans and their damn fossil-fuel economy.But it was just a
skirmish
, Roger, and you know what?So’s this.
—N2–2 Alcatraz/Prophet (tentative desig.—awaiting update),
excerpted from Manhattan Incursion Debrief
27/08/2023
Voice-mike intercept, Forensic Debrief, Manhattan Incursion
Subject ID: Unknown (code name
Alcatraz
)
27/08/2023
Laurence Barnes, I think. Prophet.
Alcatraz, then. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Of
course
I know the stats: I’m dead, not senile. Name, rank, serial number. Doesn’t mean shit. That’s not who I am anymore.
I’m the guy being debriefed by a low-level functionary because his bosses are too chickenshit to risk being in the same room, that’s who. You expect me to think you
volunteered
for this gig? You think the higher-ups
wanted
to bring you into the loop, you think they wouldn’t be in here themselves if they weren’t afraid I might go off the reservation again given half a chance?
You’re lying.
No, that’s an empirical fact. Your skin conductivity just went up 13 percent. Your eye saccades increased by 24. And you don’t want to get into your vocal stress harmonics. You may think you sound pretty solid, but believe me: In the upper registers you’re squealing like a little girl.
I can tell stuff like that now. It’s not the augments—it’s not
just
the augments. I’m not reading numbers off a tactical overlay or anything, it’s more—integrated. I just
know
this shit. I know a lot of things I’m not supposed to.
But you’ve got nothing to worry about. Really. If I had any
interest in killing you, you’d have been dead before you got through the door. You must realize that.
Doesn’t help much, does it?
How do you want to do this?
From the top, then: They put us out to sea the moment the media blackout came down. I mean the
moment
—Chino was watching
Body-Swap Boxing
when the Emergency Broadcast Signal cut in. One minute after that MacroNet starts talking about some kind of massive explosion in New York, and literally three minutes after
that
we’re hauling ass down to the water. There’s a Swordfish surfacing off the dock, hasn’t even finished blowing its tanks before we’re piling inside. Haven’t even checked our gear. We are
mobilized
, man, we’re moving just this side of outright panic and we don’t even know why. They barely get the hatch closed before we’re back underwater.
We strap in. You can hear the screws turning through the hull. The Swordfish is basically a troop carrier with a big drive and a few missile tubes thrown in so it won’t feel like such a pussy around the hunter-seekers, but even a Sword has the usual stealth options so you can get in and out without a fuss. They’re not engaged. Wherever we’re going, apparently we can’t even afford a lousy 6 percent cloaking deficit.
Then it’s a classic case of hurry up and wait. For
eighteen hours
. Nobody tells us shit, and the shit they do tell us keeps changing. First we’re going to be docking with one of those big inflatable jellyfish down in the mesopelagic, keep us safely off the game board until we’re needed. I’m thinking that’s okay, at least there’s decent headroom in those things, at least they’re big enough to let you get away from the—but no, now suddenly we’re heading back inshore. And then we’re circling off Christ-knows-where for fuck-knows-how-long. Some of the guys try to catch a few winks
but the CO handed out the usual stims at the six-hour mark so everyone’s boosted on GABA and tricyclics and that supernephrin stuff that makes your joints ache for two fucking weeks post-engagement. I keep a forty of tequila in my kit—you know, strictly for medicinal purposes—and I crack it to take the edge off. Offer it around but nobody else wants any. They say it makes a bad mix with all the neurotropes. Pussies.
Anyway, we’re strapped in, we’re wired, we’re climbing the walls. And suddenly the whine of the screws picks up, the night-lights kick in, and the whole compartment turns bloody red, like one of those Asian necro parlors where they use longwave to make the corpses look prettier. It doesn’t take an AI to figure out we’re deploying to New York but the CO won’t even give up that much. Says we’ll get briefed on-site. So we’re sitting there in our camo, cheek-to-jowl, and everybody’s making up these fairy tales to fill in the gaps. Syntheviral attack, moho nukes tunneling up under Broadway, some kind of coup at CENT-COM. Leavenworth—you know Leavenworth? No, of course you don’t—Leavenworth weighs in with his usual crazy-ass theories, says he heard some Venter Biomorphs went all Skynet and turned on their masters, and he won’t listen to half the squad pointing out that the Venter labs are way the hell over in California and if we’re really heading into the replicant wars don’t you think they might, you know,
airlift
us instead of taking a submarine through the Northwest fucking Passage?