Crysis: Legion (21 page)

Simple, huh?

But you’re not gonna get a tight-ass like Hargreave to just come right out and
explain
it like that, are you? No sirree. That dude learned decades before you and I were even born that Knowledge Is Power. He’s been keeping his cards facedown for so long that I bet even spilling the time of day would make his shriveled little testicles crawl back up into his body.

Still. I figured it out, in between fighting off aliens and fucking with the plumbing. And now I’m standing there with Ceph bodies bleeding out all around me, spore flowing full-bore from all three substations, and Hargreave says: “Now we need to get you inside the central structure.”

It’s not like there’s a door in the base of the spear with a neon sign saying
THIS WAY TO THE INNER WORKINGS
. Hargreave suggests that I just blow the shit out of it—“Try to blast loose one of the spoke seals and use the resulting rupture to effect entry” is the way he puts it—and that seems kind of ham-fisted even to me,
but I don’t have a better idea. So I line up an overhead joint that’s bleeding steam where spear meets spoke—must have taken a hit during the fighting—and I force-feed it a couple of sticky grenades from the L-TAG, praying to the goddamn Spaghetti Monster I’m not punching through a motherboard.

Boom.

The dust clears instantly, sucked into the hole I’ve just blown. Huh. Negative-pressure differential. This thing
breathes
. The tracheotomy wound is just big enough to let me squeeze inside, where I find—

—well,
tentacles
is what they look like.

It’s a kind of silo. Curved glassy panels on all sides, arteries of orange lava-light running vertically between them. I follow those arteries up along a vertical shaft ribbed with cross-bracing every ten or fifteen meters, like hoops of cartilage around a trachea. High up in that space lightning flickers: some kind of static discharge. Even higher: daylight.

But down here in the basement, spore seethes behind those transparent panels as if it were alive. As if it were really pissed off.

Hargreave says I have to get it from
in there
to
out here
. No obvious controls, no obvious hatches or access ports. No way through except, well,
through
.

Hey, it worked last time.

So I proceed to shoot the shit out of those panels, and the machinery
—screams
 …

I don’t know how else to describe it. Maybe it’s an alarm, maybe it’s just the equivalent of metal fatigue, some kind of mechanical stress. Or maybe Ceph machinery
is
alive somehow, maybe I’m
hurting
it. Anyhow, it works: The air around me is thick with spore, I can barely see my hand in front of my face. Hargreave makes approving noises from the ass end of nowhere.

SECOND writes across my eyeballs—

—and even throws up a little progress bar so I can see Hargreave’s science fair project edging toward the blue ribbon. Little patches of orange light flicker across my forearms—some kind of photic interface—and for a moment there it almost looks as though we’re going to pull it off.

But then I guess the spore remembers: It eats backbones like me for lunch. And if we’re a little too tough to chew, it spits us out.

Something throws me against the wall. I rattle around on the floor for a moment like a pebble in a pickup; then the spire opens its throat and shoots me halfway to the goddamn jet stream. Suddenly my guts are in my boots; all I see is orange streaks and dark blurs. And then I’m
out
, the human spitball, shot into the sky like a watermelon seed. I hang there in midair for a moment, a tabletop Manhattan turning on all sides, God’s own middle finger jabbing up at me from a dark gray pit dead below. Then I’m coming back to earth and one hard fucking landing. I land back on the spire ass-first and off-center, like dropping onto a free-fall waterslide. I roll, bounce off into space again, grab some bit of alien corkscrew plumbing my body somehow knew was there even though my brain didn’t see it. I hang on for dear life: bait on a hook, thirty stories up. One precious handhold away from street pizza.

“Ah,” Hargreave says with mild disappointment. “More resistance than I expected.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding.

“An immune reaction, I suppose you could call it. You’d better—uh—

“Just hang on a sec,” he says, and drops off the channel. He’s probably not even being ironic. Either way, fuck
that
advice: I haul myself back up onto the rim that bounced my ass off the spire, climb back up the vent as far as the slope will let me, scope out the angles. Just off to the left a twisted strip of some avenue ramps up from the ground like a ski jump, a tangle of I-beams and blacktop pushed into space by the erupting spear. It’s close enough to make a jump, if I can get a running start.

I make it, barely. Lose my footing on the very first step, stumble, keep going three long loping steps down a forty-degree angle and push off into space, flailing like an idiot. But I make the jump and land on solid asphalt, in no more pieces than I was before.

I start down the road to ground level. I’m almost there when static cackles in my ear and Hargreave’s back. There’s nothing fake about his tone this time. I can tell with his first word that he’s stressed; I can tell by the second that he’s scared shitless.

He tells me the Pentagon has decided on drastic measures. He tells me bombers are inbound from McGuire.

He tells me they’re going to put all of Lower Manhattan underwater.

Ever seen a sweeper in the field, Roger?

Street-Sweeper. No, not the trucks that clear out the gutters. The basic theory’s chimp-simple: Drop a bomb into a body of water offshore from your target, blow it up, let the wave do the dirty work. Cleaner than an airborne nuke, more devastating than a neutron bomb—UniSec even tried to sell it as
environmentally friendly
, if you can believe it. It’s only water, after all—with a few rads mixed in, sure, but at least there’s no aerial fallout. Pure, clean,
natural
water.

A twenty-meter wall of it moving at two hundred klicks an hour. Mother Nature’s Doomsday Machine.

That’s what your bosses set on us, Roger. That’s what we had to deal with.

I didn’t believe it at first. Thought there was something wrong with the comm link—I mean, the ol’ N2 can certainly be forgiven for losing a little EM gain after all we’ve been through together, right? So when I get comm back and the first thing I hear is Hargreave shouting about tidal waves I thought I must’ve misheard, you know, a fucking
tidal wave
? Are you
joking
, Jack? But the dude’s never been more serious about anything in his life. Because Manhattan has not been dealt enough shit yet, no Roger, it has not. And so there is a cleansing tsunami coming to
flood out the aliens
. Anything with a backbone that doesn’t have
access to a pair of industrial-strength water wings has just been written off as collateral.

What do we know about the Ceph, Roger? I don’t mean whatever secret genetic insights the black labs have under wraps; what does every sad-sack sonofabitch on the street know about the Ceph? Well, we know that they need those exoskels to ride around in, which suggests they’re not great in earth-type gravity situations. We know that when you peel them out of those skels they really look a lot more like boneless sea creatures than like anything that ever walked on land. We call them Ceph because, you know,
they remind us an awful lot of cephalopods
. All of which strongly suggests a native lifestyle that’s at the very least amphibious, if not aquatic. So what secret weapon does the Pentagon use to take them out?

Seawater.

Let me repeat that, Roger, for the benefit of your chickenshit bosses behind the mirror. The Pentagon. Decided. That the best way. To take out. Super-advanced.
Aquatic
. Aliens.

Was to
drown
them.

Oh, and did I tell you I’ve got this phobia about water? I swear, sometimes I feel like cheering for the other side.

So I hear the jet streak by overhead and I don’t even waste time looking up; I’ve got maybe twenty seconds before it’s far enough offshore to deploy, maybe ten minutes—if I’m lucky—for the wave to drive back through the bottleneck and put us all in hot water. Hargreave’s yelling about getting to higher ground, but what’s higher ground in downtown Manhattan?

I run like hell up Broadway.

Of
course
it was a bad choice. There weren’t any good ones. What would you have done, hide in a dumpster? Run up fifty floors of some office tower that’s already been so torqued it might go over if you kick it in the shins? Fuck that noise. The farther you get from the waterfront, the higher the ground; the more
buildings you’ve got between you and that big fucking flyswatter heading for the coast. Office tower doesn’t do you much good if it comes down around you, but even in a million pieces all that mass is gonna act like
some
kind of breakwater.

So I’m burning up the boulevard as fast as the N2’s mighty little nanofibrils can move me, and neither CELL nor Ceph nor civilian get in my way. Maybe they didn’t happen to be hanging around on that street, maybe they were and I didn’t notice, maybe the word’s gone out and
everyone’s
just running for cover; but all I see is cars and corpses, and all I hear is a low steady rumble rising behind me. I know I can’t outrun it—not even
NANOSUIT 2.0
can win a race against a tsunami—but maybe it’ll be worn out by the time it catches me, maybe it won’t be a flyswatter so much as a plain old flood. Maybe it’ll just lift me up and carry me along and it’ll be just like river rafting, just a day at the water park.

Right.

That rumbling’s pretty loud by now, and
deep
, almost subsonic; you hear it with your bones more than your ears. The ground won’t stop shaking. I can feel it under my boots, I can see windowpanes bursting over the street, I can hear car alarms going off. And there are these other sounds too, little metallic
popping
noises, and I don’t turn around to see what they are because I don’t
dare
, I can hear the whole Atlantic roaring at my back and no
way
am I going to break my stride for even a second. But I don’t have to look behind because a manhole cover blasts out of the street right in front of me, and farther ahead, and all the way down the street like a row of space shuttles blasting off on columns of white water. I run through an intersection and something’s blocked off the street to my left and it’s
moving
and holy Mother of Muhammad the goddamn ocean
flanked
me, it’s coming at me from all sides now, these huge motherfucking gray-green
mountains
of water and I barely have time to look up
and take one last look at the sky—just this tiny strip of brightness
way
off overhead, disappearing between two dark heaving walls. It’s like being swallowed whole, it’s like taking one last look at the world through closing jaws.

And I’m squashed like a bug at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

I wake up to a soft distant roar, like the sound of a seashell held to your ear. I hear a river chuckling away somewhere nearby, a seagull squawking
Don’t fuck with me
, and False Prophet mumbling something about resequencing vectors. I hear other voices, too:
Must be around here somewhere
, and
Yeah, if Gould’s tracking
gizmo actually works worth shit
, and
If the wave didn’t get him. Fucking Pentagon …

That last sentiment of which, I gotta say, I’m finding myself more and more in sympathy with. But these guys sound friendly for a change—even familiar—so it is with something close to a sense of hope that I open my eyes.

And what should greet me but a blue sunlit sky full of puffy white clouds. And a giant green fist the size of a bus, ready to punch my lights back out.

I think Jolly Green Giant. I think Incredible Hulk. Statue of Liberty comes a distant third, but that’s what it turns out to be when my eyes finally focus. Big green disembodied fist in a river that used to be a street, still bravely holding aloft the Torch of Freedom or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to symbolize. Too bad statues don’t come with a sense of irony.

Oh, and here comes the gunfire. Naturally.

Regular army, this time. Camo fatigues, no insectile body armor, just a bunch of jarheads and Squids shooting at each other. The Ceph seem awfully undrowned, but maybe they have been rocked back on their heels a bit because our boys don’t seem to be having too much trouble mopping them up.

It’s a nice sight to wake up to, even though I can’t join in the festivities because my suit is still rebooting along with my brain (I swear, Roger, the way this thing crashes I’d swear the OS was written by Microsoft). By the time I can do anything more productive than twitching and rolling around there’s nothing left but backbones. And the best sight I’ve seen all fucking day is the guy who reaches down to help me to my feet.