Crysis: Legion (20 page)
Authors: Peter Watts
But all I can see are the thousands of infected rotting on the streets behind me, and I don’t
want
to be careful. I don’t give a flying fuck about
infestation
. There can’t ever be
enough
of these fuckers in my sights, not as long as I’ve got a weapon in my hands and ammo to feed it.
And oh, Roger, it’s as though all of fucking Cephdom has gathered here to grant that very wish.
I’m not crazy enough to take them all on head-to-head; there are stalkers here that jump like fleas and shoot like snipers, Heavies
that barely feel a direct hit with a fragmentation grenade. I cloak and cover, I hide, I fight on the run and never in a straight line. But there are times. Times a bogeyman falls injured in front of me and instead of finishing the job with a burst of firepower I lift the fucker over my head and smash it against one of its own machines. There are time when I find cracks in the armor, and pry them open, and rip out that translucent gray Spam by the fistful. There are times I shoot to kill, and times I flip that gun around and use it as a fucking club.
They’re all the same to me, every stalker like every other, each grunt as faceless as the last. I don’t know if they’re clones or assembly-line robots, I don’t know if the suit’s just filtering out their distinguishing traits to keep my conscience dead, and I don’t care. But there’s one Heavy down here who doesn’t line up with the others. It doesn’t go down, it doesn’t give up, it doesn’t stop moving. It lumbers like a fucking cow but somehow it always manages to get out of the way of my grenades, somehow my armor-piercing rounds just never seem to get through.
And I swear, Roger, Ceiling Cat as my witness, this thing has as big a grudge as I do. It sees me airing out its buddies, sees the ranks thinning down, and it doesn’t chitter or burble like the other Ceph: it
roars
. I can outrun it easily enough—I’m the hare to its tortoise, and yes I am painfully aware of who won
that
particular contest, thank you very much—but somehow it always manages to get ahead of me after I leave it behind, always manages to rise up between me and my waypoints. It comes after me like a runaway semi, like I’d raped its mother, and it’s smart enough to play to my weaknesses. I could stay ahead of the fucking thing if I didn’t have to deal with some grunt or stalker on the side every time I turned around. But the Heavy keeps coming, runs me down, forces me to drain my suit. Then, once I’m bled down to moving at pathetic baseline human speeds
—then
those cannon arms shoot out missiles from an endless ammo belt
that must reach into another fucking dimension, the damn thing never runs dry. I try to keep to the high ground and some stalker sails higher, raining down plasma and lightning. I take cover behind rockfalls and overturned dumpsters and grunts swarm me like giant lethal gnats.
I don’t know how it happens but it catches me in the open. A missile slams into the rock face just a few meters to my left—not a direct hit but close enough, close enough. The blast kicks me into the air like a tumbleweed in a windstorm; half a dozen redlights bloom on BUD. The world spins and then stops with a jolt, way too soon, way too high. I’m back on the ground but not
that
ground. I’m higher up. I’m on a ledge, an uplifted chunk of asphalt. There’s a car behind me. Yellow cab. More cabs than cockroaches in this burg.
From just out of sight, past the lip of the ledge, the sound of something pounding the ground.
Carbine’s gone. The scarab won’t do shit against this thing. I’ve got grenades but the Heavy just—
Oh, wait …
The charge level’s barely grazing 50 percent but it’ll have to do. I slap two stickies onto the front of the cab, set the timers so they don’t blow up in my face. Whatever the suit’s got to give, it gives now. Lord: Give me Strength.
I
kick
. The cab skids off the ledge and sails down in a beautiful arc that ends right on the head of that missile-spitting motherfucker. The sound of massive metal objects smashing together: just beautiful, Roger. Just fucking beautiful.
It doesn’t die. But it goes down, pinned under two thousand kilograms of Chevrolet’s finest alloys. I can hear the roars of my vanquished enemy, I can see the car swaying and rocking as the thing underneath struggles to free itself before the timers run down.
Doesn’t take much to set off a sticky. Even a footstep within
a couple of meters is enough if you crank the sensitivity. And this bruiser, it’s moving that cab around like a goddamn seesaw. It’s half a second, tops, between the timers zeroing out and the whole damn vehicle going up in a ball of fire, HE, and gasoline. It’s almost too long. The Heavy’s actually tipping the cab up on its side by the time the stickies detonate, actually getting back to its feet when its feet get blown out from under it.
But you know what they say. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
After a while they stop coming for me. After a while they get harder to find. But Jacob Hargreave is still there, telling me what I have to do.
A riot of alien machinery sits in the center of the pit like some kind of nerve ganglion, radiating those massive spokes in all directions. The base of a Ceph spire rises from its center: the same spire I saw past City Hall. Most of the spokes look like the backbones of some colossal cyborg; three sprout a pair of leg-like spines from each segment. They look like the bodies of monstrous centipedes.
“Ah,” Hargreave says. “Yes. Well.”
I wait for something a bit more helpful. I wait for more Ceph to come pouring through the walls and tear me apart. All I see are spines, and pipes, and see-through panels here and there—portholes, almost—behind which clouds of spore swirl and seethe like coffee grounds. They’re not going anywhere, though. The flow is random, chaotic, like boiling water trapped in a pot: all wired up and no place to go.
“From the look of this feed, the spore loop’s running near dormant levels,” Hargreave says at last. “We’ll need to fix that. There must be triggers around here, but what they look like is anyone’s guess …”
Turns out those centipede spokes are key. So I follow one of them out of the spear, across the pit, back down to earth where it plunges into some terminal structure of plates and spines and glowing orange slots. I find the interfaces, I go through the motions. The plumbing trembles under my hand; the spore in the nearest porthole begins to surge back up the conduit, toward the machinery at center stage. One down, two to—
What?
Uh, Hargreave must’ve—Yeah, that’s right. Hargreave told me. I mean, how else would I know? It’s not like those controls looked like anything
I’d
ever seen before.
Damn good question. You should ask him.
Oh. Right.
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion
CSIRA Blackbody Council
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
You know how dreams work, right? Our brains are full of static; neurons just fire off at random sometimes, not thoughts or anything, just—background noise. The visual cortex gets its share, but normally you don’t notice ’cause the signals coming in over your optic nerves are so much stronger, they just swamp everything else.
When you’re asleep, though, there’s nothing coming in through the main cables. Nothing to drown out the static. And the brain—notices. It’s got these pattern-matching circuits and when static’s all they’ve got to work with, they’ll find signal in that noise even if there isn’t any signal to find. They try and shoehorn these random flickers into the experiential database. Same reason we see faces in clouds.
That’s what I thought those visions were, when they first started coming over the feeds. Just static. So I laid some dynamic filters over them, just to try and clean up the signal, and wouldn’t you know the residuals weren’t random. There was a whole other AV track embedded in there, and holy shit the things it showed.
Fragments, mainly. A few seconds, maybe the longest was getting up around a minute. Glimpses of the inside of some weird gloomy structure, blue end of the spectrum, like it was deep underwater or way out around Neptune or something. Architecture. Machinery. Some kind of twisted plumbing everywhere, all tangled and messed up. Not human, though. Not even close.
One fragment looked like a cross between a junkyard and a museum, full of things that had to be vehicles. Another looked like some kind of lab, Ceph running around everywhere, operating various bits of equipment. Not your usual Ceph, though, nothing we’ve seen in Manhattan. Some new geek caste, maybe. I saw a magic mirror once, a swirly portal that looked like some kind of teleportation device. Oh, and I kept seeing constellations: a cluster of blue stars, little sapphire pinpricks connected by a network of dim glowing filaments, rotating in midair. Arranged along the surface of an invisible sphere, you know, like a star globe. Ceph planetarium or something, I thought at first. Saw that track a few times, the suit must’ve had it listed as a favorite. Anyway, you’ve got the files. You must have turned my place inside out by now.
No comment. Right.
At first I thought this was all just a contaminant from the suit’s camera feed, right? Quantum echo of old footage, something from archival storage seeping into the signal. You could hardly blame the N2 for springing a leak or two after all the shit it had
been through. And it was pretty fucking creepy, I mean finally I’m getting a glimpse of where Prophet’s actually
been
all those months, and wouldn’t you know he didn’t spend all that time getting pissed in some Taiwanese dive.
It never occurred to me that Alcatraz would even be aware of it. Even if he called up the cam feed, I’d had to squeeze the signal through a whole shitload of amps and filters to find the embed. Even if he had the wherewithal to do that from his end—which he does not—why would he? I didn’t even mention anything to him at the time. Poor fucker already had his hands full, he didn’t need me freaking him out with the news that his suit was haunted by the previous owner.
But once I figured out what was going on, I went back and looked at all those other burps and hiccups I’d written off as static the first time around. If there
was
anything useful in there, I figured I could pass it on. And then I run into that hive sequence, you know, the logs from when Hargreave was leading him around by the nose, and the only way that makes any sense at all is if Alcatraz
already knows
this shit. I mean, you must’ve seen the feed, right? He plays those Ceph controls like a fucking maestro, things I’d never have even tagged
as
controls. And sure enough, just before he pulls those moves out of his ass there’s static on the line, and when I squeeze out the signal it’s Prophet doing the same thing. Alcatraz was just going thou and doing likewise, bra.
So the suit isn’t just leaking these signals into the camera feed. It must be laying those images right across Alky’s visual cortex, poking those voxels the way you’d light up an LED. Far as I can figure the brain feed was the main feed; what I was getting off the camera was just an induction leak or something.
Now, I’m not saying Alcatraz is hiding anything, you understand? I know you fuckers, I know that’s the first place you’re gonna go with this, but most of the inputs our brains operate on are subconscious. You’re thinking
Oooh, Alcatraz was seeing movies in his brain
but for all we know he’s not even aware of the stimulus. It might all operate below the level of conscious perception, he could just get a
feeling
that this is how you’re supposed to work this or that control. So you might want to go easy on the poor bastard, unless you’ve started beating the shit out of people for having flashes of intuition.
You want something to blame, blame the N2. But really, it was only doing what it was supposed to. It’s programmed for mission success, right? It’s designed to analyze data from a thousand sources, figure out what’s most mission-relevant, serve up the intel most vital to current objectives. That’s all it was doing. That’s all it’s ever done.
We just had no idea it was going to be so goddamn
good
at it.
You ever have any direct dealings with Jack Hargreave, Roger?
Well of course you wouldn’t have actually
met
. I’m asking if you ever got into a conversation with the man: text chat, Third Life, online chess club. That sort of thing.
Ah. Then you may not know that he liked to play things
really
close to the chest.
I was halfway through the sequence before I knew what I was actually doing, and even then it wasn’t because Hargreave let me in on his master plan. I was just kick-starting these damn spokes, one after another, fighting off grunts and stalkers every goddamn step of the way, and I basically put it together myself. We’re priming the pump, right? We’re booting up this spire to shoot
a huge wadge of spore all over central Manhattan, which on the face of it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re actually fighting for the home team. But I remember what Hargreave said, that one insight Nathan Gould’s synapses were too drug-addled to parse: The suit doesn’t contain the specs for a weapon, the suit
is
the weapon. And the suit, it’s pirated, right? It’s Cephtech on a leash. And I’m remembering that first stalker, my hand going into whatever goo those fuckers use for blood, and the N2 trying to
interface
with it …
So finally I figure it out. The suit is a weapon. The suit is a
virus
—Prophet said as much before he blew his brains out and left me holding the bag. And Jack Hargreave, he’s the tenth-degree goddamn black belt in battlefield judo, he’s the absolute master at using your opponent’s strength against him. So I’m wearing a virus, and all this spore, and the spear over my head—that’s the
delivery platform
.