Crysis: Legion (25 page)

Of course, getting there is half the fun.

I listen to my new friends as we head out, pick up a few insights. The local chain of command is down to a few rusty links by now. Army, airborne, USMC—hell, even the NYPD and the fire department have gone seriously entropic from the top down. What’s left is a mash-up of half a dozen uniforms and half a dozen jurisdictions, deserters and rogues and decent shits who would still do the right thing if only they could get a straight answer from an authorized CO. But over the past few days these lost souls have found their center, their father figure, their beacon of command in the Shitstorm of the Apocalypse.

I hear him on the ether as we slog past 29th and Broadway: “This is Colonel Barclay to all marine fire teams at the primary
and secondary perimeters! I want a controlled fallback to the terminus by stages, regrouping as you go! Our objective is full evac of civilians and wounded, and we will hold this station until it’s done! You have at most one hour to make your way back here; after that you’re going to be walking home.”

He doesn’t sound like the Second Coming. He sounds like he thinks the world’s going to lie down on the job the moment he drops his voice below fifty decibels. But Chino’s vouched for the man, and every surviving jarhead and gravel-pounder seems to back him up: Sherman Barclay is the only reason the Ceph are still facing any organized resistance at all. Without him, we’d all be Lord of the Flies by now.

Central Station is well above the flood zone; everything north of 26th stayed high and dry.
Too
dry, actually: Carbon and clouds water down what’s left of the late-afternoon sun, and coming up Sixth we can see the storefronts glowing from five blocks away. A couple of the guys start coughing as we cross 36th—

“Smell that? What the fuck
is
that?”

—and I crank open my hepafilter to get a whiff for myself. Not the usual taste of a city on fire; I’ve smelled that a hundred times since I joined up, it sits in the back of your throat and stings your eyes like an old friend. The smell of
this
great burning is different, somehow. More—acrid. It’s not completely unfamiliar, though. I’ve smelled it once before, down in Texas during the Secession Riots. Mob was torching a publisher’s warehouse full of science texts.

Oh, yes. I know that smell.

“This is Charlie Seven. The western approach is compromised. We are pinned down at the library on Fifth and West 42nd. We’ve got dozens of civilians here. Requesting fire support to get ’em through to the station.”

The smell of burning books.

We cross East 40th and into the ragged remains of a green
space. GPS serves up
BRYANT PARK:
in better days a broad perimeter of trees around a central lawn. Kindling, now, and a trampled kill zone with no cover at all. The New York Library looms on the other side, a great stone edifice slotted with narrow windows fifteen meters high; a whole other set of windows, glassed arches eight meters tall, sits on top of those. I can see the faces jammed in behind them.

In the background, Barclay’s deploying reinforcements to our location.

Closer to home, the Ceph are doing the same.

It’s a mess. The library’s full of soldiers and civilians but we can’t even get across the goddamn street without some dropship raining Squids and hellfire onto our heads. We take cover in a converted apartment complex across the street and even in there I get my ass shot at, by fellow
backbones
no less: the requisite asshole from Retard Six thinks I look like
one of them
.

I don’t know how many got out of the library before the dropship bombs the shit out of it. I don’t know if
any
did; we’re coming in from the back, don’t have any kind of bead on the main entrance. But suddenly the whole place just goes up. The windows blow out, the ceiling crashes in, fire everywhere.

I didn’t even know stone
could
burn like that.

It doesn’t kill everyone inside, not immediately. You can hear faint screaming over the flames. We’re supposed to have cover by now—Charlie Company’s got a missile battery across the park but the guy manning it is either dead or taking a bathroom break, and whenever anyone tries to cut across the park they get mowed down from on high. We finally make it, get the turret back online, even take down that motherfucking dropship, but by then the voices have long since lost out to the flames.

We push on anyway, partly because Hey, there’s always a
chance, but also because we’re taking heavy ground fire from behind and we’re literally being driven forward. We fight rearguard across the park, and a few marines—that guy from Retard Six, for one—even make it to the back steps with me. But the place is a fucking inferno; they’d be toast two steps past the threshold. I leave them to find their own way around.

First time I’ve ever been in a library in my life. I gotta say, Roger, I really don’t see the appeal.

There are places even I can’t go: stone glowing red, smoke so thick there just isn’t any point. I try thermal but it’s even worse, like being caught in a false-color blizzard. Lots of bodies, black no matter
what
wavelength you use to look at them. Steam rises from some of those mouths, from corpses still wet enough to boil inside. They sizzle on the floor like bacon. Some are charcoal already. They break and crumble and burst into pieces when you trip over them.

I hear voices. At first I think I’m hallucinating. But I follow them anyway, to some shattered stairwell where a freak cross-draft blows away enough of the smoke and the heat to keep the people huddled there from dying quite as fast. I turn a small hole in the wall into a bigger one and they stagger outside, coughing, to take their chances with the Ceph.

But it gives me an idea: Forget the people. Key on the
habitat
. Don’t waste time looking for life signs, look for those few, far-between places where life signs are possible. I toggle back to thermal and yeah, the psychedelic hurricane is still distracting as hell, but now that I know what to look for I can see dark patches here and there in the static, little sunspots of less-than-killing heat.

Roger, I got some of them out. Four marines, a few firefighters, maybe half a dozen civilians. Less than twenty all told, next to Christ knows how many who burned to death. I lost count of the corpses I passed in there, and I only covered a fraction of the floor space.

But I got them out
. I got them out.

And for a little while, being dead isn’t so bad.

But only for a little while. Because yes, it’s nice to save lives for a change instead of ending them—but even that doesn’t really fill the emptiness inside.

And no, I’m not being maudlin. I mean that literally.

You think I don’t know? I’ll grant you I was a bit slow on the uptake back at Trinity, but I’ve had a lot of time to think since then. Hell, I’ve grown a lot more of whatever it is I think
with
, and you know what I remember? I remember those med techs in the basement saying I didn’t have a heart.

That hurt.

I’ll tell you what else I remember. Squiddie laying a bull’s-eye on my chest the moment I crawled up onto Battery Park. I remember knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that I was dying. I remember Prophet dragging me across the battlefield, stashing me in that warehouse, stripping himself out of this suit and bolting me into it. That took
time
. It wasn’t even dawn when I got hit; when I woke up it was midmorning.

Tell me, Roger, do you think
you
could hang in that long without a functioning heart? I know I couldn’t. So however shredded up I was back then, the ol’ ticker was still beating. Had to be. And then just a few hours later they scan me outside Trinity and it’s nowhere to be found.

Maybe it doesn’t even stop with the heart. Maybe my lungs are gone, too, by now. My liver? My guts? How much of me’s actually
left
—am I just a shell of bone and muscle around a whole lotta empty space? Put a zipper in front and I’d have one big honking extra allowance for carry-on, hmm?

You know what happened to them, Roger? (Ah, I see you don’t. Something else your masters didn’t tell you.) They got
recycled
. Because even this magical suit can’t do everything. It’s a nanotech miracle, it can turn blood into bone and water into wine, but it’s gotta start with something,
capiche
? Needs raw material. Can’t magic up mass out of nothing.

So the way I figure it, it had a
lot
of shit to fix and not enough bricks and mortar to go around, so it—triaged. Robbed Peter’s heart to pay Peter’s spinal cord. It can fill in for the plumbing, that’s dead easy. Alcatraz doesn’t need a bunch of pipes and pumps when CryNet Systems Nanosuit 2.0 is taking up the slack. But the central nervous system, now; that’s a whole different pile of pigeons. You take away
that
stuff and there’s no Alcatraz left to interface with. So this magic suit’s been hollowing me out all this time,
mining
my expendable biomass to repair the more important systems. Maybe it’s still at it, for all I know. Maybe it won’t stop until there’s nothing left but a brain and a couple of eyeballs and a mess of nerves hanging off the bottom.

Yes, I suppose that
would
be excessive. But maybe it’s got other reasons, maybe physical repair is just part of what it’s doing. It is a jealous skin, Roger, and it’s already been dumped once. Prophet had to literally rip it from his flesh and blow his own brains out to be free of the fucking thing. Maybe the suit doesn’t want to go through that again. Maybe it’s whittling me down so I won’t be able to—leave …

Just a machine, eh?
Just
a machine. Tell me, Roger, have you ever seen a
machine
that can do what this baby does? Do you know how it works? Because I can guarantee you that even Jacob Hargreave has only the vaguest goddamn clue, and he stole the damn thing.

Angry?

Not really, now that you mention it. I’m alive, after all—or at least, I’m not as dead as I would’ve been otherwise. On balance, it was a good trade. But it’s a stupid question, Roger, a meaningless question. You should know that by now.

Editing anger out of the equation is dead simple for something that can turn hearts into minds.

After all this I get to Central Station. I just don’t get to
stay
.

There’s a makeshift convoy outside the front entrance to the library. There are Ceph, too, but there are always Ceph. We’ve learned to deal. We shoot at each other all the way along 42nd, but for once the backbones have the edge; we’re closing on Central, we’ve got mines set up all over the place and defensive perimeters behind them, we
own
this neighborhood.

Except when we don’t.

Turns out the Ceph have artillery, or something like it. The western approaches are a gauntlet of mortar fire raining all around the station. Once we get inside—after we’ve dodged the shells, and shouted down the usual friendly fire from paranoid trigger fingers, once we convince them we’re all on the same side and get under cover and make it to the decon tunnel—before I can even sit down, a staff sergeant name of Ranier appears at my side and politely asks me to leave the premises again. Turns out Barclay’s laid down some countermeasures to take out the Ceph bombardment. He’s going to drop a building on them, or at least block their line of fire with one. But the plan’s gone off the rails; something tripped the safety breakers, the demolition charges need to be reset manually, and the guy Echo Fifteen sent to do the job is trapped across the street with half his leg blown away. Ranier doesn’t suppose that maybe
I’d
be willing to …?

He’s not quite that polite, of course. He’s just firm enough to make sure I can’t possibly interpret it as a request.

You know that line they feed you in boot camp,
You can relax when you’re dead
? Complete bullshit.

So now I’m back outside and by now the day is done and the night is young. Ranier’s considerate enough to call ahead and tell
Echo Fifteen to expect me; he even asks them not to shoot at me by mistake.

You’re not going to believe this, but the hike down Park Avenue is almost—beautiful. The sky is a luminous orangey brown, big half-moon hanging over the skyline. I’m moving along one of those elevated rail lines where the subways break surface now and then, and I’ve got a great view. Ceph artillery arcs majestically overhead like comets in formation. They light up the whole zone, blue-white, radiant. A couple of them smack into the MetLife Building behind the station, and the electric ripples pulsing out from those hits look like fifty thousand volts of Saint Elmo’s fire.

The only real drawback is, if the Ceph got Ranier’s memo about not shooting at me, they’ve definitely circular-filed it. They’ve got their own turf right next door, their own perimeter, and it is sewn up so tight it squeaks. By the time I get through I’ve got a whole lot more respect for Echo Fifteen; there’s no goddamn way I would’ve made it that far without a cloak.

I find them a dozen dead Squids later, in a shot-up diner a few blocks down Park Avenue. They point me to their point man, Torres, stuck in a hotel three buildings farther down and five floors up. Torres is still clutching the detonator when I get to him, sprawled on the floor with ammo and blasting caps and a couple of Bren guns scattered around like empties. He looks like the lone survivor of a high-octane frat party.

“Hey, man, good to see you. Help yourself to some gear.” He’s in pretty good spirits for a guy trapped behind enemy lines with one leg out of commission. Must have been some primo shit in the empty hypo sticking out of his thigh.

We’re hunkered down in a corridor that runs around the edge of the floor, shot-up drywall at our backs, shot-out windows in front of us, and perfect line-of-sight to the target: ONYX Electronics, a twelve-story brownstone with a gaping four-story bite
already taken out of it halfway up. It’s kitty-corner to our position, and the intersection between is a ninja’s wet dream: cover everywhere, cars, upended slabs of roadway, even a couple of subway cars teetering on rails hacked off at the edge of an overpass.