Crysis: Legion (26 page)

Torres takes it in with a wave of his hand: “As you can see, I have got myself a ringside seat. And I am well and truly pissed that the main event canceled after I went to all this trouble to get tickets. I think all the seismic activity must’ve tripped the breakers or something. I’d go back and reset ’em myself, but—” He pulls the hypo out of his leg, grins at me with a row of bleached teeth and one very stylish gold incisor. Little gemstone or optical circuit or something embedded in there. “We set three charges down in the parking garage. Once I get a green on all three, you’ve got a New York minute to get yourself clear, but man, just
look
at all the cover I made for you.”

He knuckle-bumps me. Must be older than he looks. “You can thank me later. Getting in should be easy.”

It is. So’s getting out again afterward.

Sitting on the fifth floor of a bombed-out Hilton, waiting for the guy in the magic suit to come back? Not so much.

Maybe one of the reasons I got in and out so easy is because every damn Squid in the neighborhood was gunning for Torres.

It makes sense. I mean, who knows how those spineless bastards think, but Torres was the one who planted the charges. Torres was the one with the detonator. Anyone—any
thing
with a set of eyes on the ground could have figured he was the linchpin. Not to mention the weak link.

All I know is, about two seconds after Torres radios, “That’s it, man! Green across!” Echo Fifteen starts taking fire.

Torres calls back to Barclay: He’s arming the detonators but
he’s under attack and needs covering fire. But the rest of Fifteen’s already gone rearguard under the Ceph assault. Barclay calls me up: Tag, you’re it.

’Sokay. I was in the neighborhood anyhow.

I’m barely out of the ONYX before I know how it’s going to end, how
Torres
is going to end. Right now he’s scared shitless because he’s still afraid to die, and he’s afraid to die because he still thinks he might live: “Ah fuck, they’re flooding the building! Covering fire,
I need covering—
”

But the only cover he’s got is me, and I’m down on ground level with my back to a shot-up taxi while Squiddie shoots at me along three separate vectors. By the time I take two of them out Torres has learned the facts of life, swallowed them whole, and processed them in what, thirty seconds? A minute?

He’s not calling for backup anymore. He’s not talking to us at all. He’s talking to
them—

“Come on, you motherfuckers!
Come on
!”

—and
fuck it
, I don’t care what the odds are and I don’t care if there’s still something out there with a bead on me, I’m up and running, zig and zag and
jump
while Study’s ammo streaks past and Torres rages in my headset, one-legged Torres, Torres the gimp, and his last furious act of defiance and that
rage
, man, that absolute blood-boiling rage when you know you’ve done every last thing any soldier could and it’s
not enough
, the fuckers just keep coming and the most you can do is check out with your teeth buried in something’s throat.

I’m almost back at the building when I see him coming down to meet me.

He hits the pavement—I hear every bone shatter from ten meters away—and he
bounces
. He flips in midair, flops like a rag doll, comes down again, smears blood and guts across the asphalt as a fire hydrant catches him in the spine. It stops him dead, folds him in half like a broken branch.

Suddenly the freq is jammed with fucktards specializing in the blindingly goddamn obvious,
Torres is down
and
We lost Torres
and I
know
assholes, I saw him die, he’s right here in front of me. Even Barclay gets in on the chorus,
We lost Torres, Alcatraz, you need to find that detonator
.

But he’s wrong about that. I know exactly where the detonator is. I’m looking right at it. It’s clenched in Torres’s left fist. He hung on to it right down into hell and gone.

He brought it to me.

I pry his fingers open. I pull it free: the size of a staple gun, a pack of smokes. Torres died with his thumb pressed on the stud; ONYX stays standing across the street, even though all three lights are green. I squeeze the trigger the way a man would; nothing happens. Something’s jammed in there.

I squeeze the trigger the way Golem Boy, the way False Prophet would. Something snaps. I hear a
click
.

Across the square, ONYX
rumbles
.

It lights up at its base, flickers like sheet lightning. It
shivers
, from street level all the way up to that blue neon logo on the roof; it slumps in on itself. Sparks explode at its crown: ONYX Electronics shatters into three neon scribbles and goes dark. The whole damn building splits down the middle as it falls; light fixtures and torn wiring light it up from the inside.

And back on this side of the street, something’s following Torres down from the fifth floor.

It shatters the pavement in front of me as it lands: a tank on legs, cannons for arms, compound eyes like clusters of sodium spotlights. A Ceph Heavy, and if these garden slugs are even capable of anything approaching human emotion, this one is
pissed
. It doesn’t even bother shooting at me with those cannons; it
backhands
me with them instead, knocks me halfway across the street as ONYX collapses in a heap over its shoulder. I reach for my weapon but there’s a couple of tonnes of angry mechanized
jelly in the way. The Ceph raises one of its cannons, aims. I stare down a muzzle big enough to fit my head into.

And one of those teetering subway cars, dislodged by the death throes of the building across the way, lurches down off its embankment and squashes my nemesis like a bug.

The Echoes give me a victory lap with pom-poms and cheerleaders all the way back to Central, cover my ass against the vindictive sniping of a bunch of Squids whose biggest gun has just lost line-of-sight. But when they send me around to the back entrance I get the usual grief from the usual hopped-up goon: the spotlight in the face, the gun barrel, the usual
looks like them
bullshit. I almost dance with the fucker on general principles—show him firsthand how much ice his yapping-poodle act cuts against a dead man wired into battle tech so far ahead of the curve he couldn’t see it with the fucking Hubble—but his CO calls him off. Nathan Gould, apparently, says I’m one of the good guys.

I let the poodle live. You’re no Sergeant Torres, asshole.

The wounded are stacked up along the halls before I even make it to the loading bay. Some civilian with more heart than brains—and a stage-one infection to boot—tries to get to his wife through a checkpoint marine and gets thrown back on his ass for his trouble. I hear screaming in the distance; a jarhead faces off against two medics in hazmat suits.
There’s nothing wrong with me, man, I feel fine. This is bullshit
. I pass a man on a cot muttering,
Jesus, it’s eating me, I can feel it eating me
. He looks fine to me.

I keep walking. The medics have it. The medics have it.

There’s that other kind of ambience, too, of course, the kind I’ve gotten too damn familiar with over the past day or so:

 … there a man in there?

Sure doesn’t
move
like a man …

What, we’ve got robots fighting for us now?

I keep walking.

This is where all roads lead: a decontamination checkpoint manned by more hazmat humanoids, razor wire strung out across the bars and turnstiles that herded commuters back in better days. A couple of CELLulites cool their heels in a holding cage off to the left, arguing with the marine on the other side of the bars. I listen in while a med tech passes some kind of UV wand over the N2: used to be army, one of the mercs is saying. Nine years. Just like you. But the guard isn’t buying it: Whatever you were in the good ol’ days, you’re private now. RHIP
revoked
, assholes.

You tell ’em, Sergeant.

Interesting that CELL’s been reclassified to arrest-on-sight, though. Maybe Hargreave’s got his groove back.

Dr. Hazmat waves me through; the gate swings open behind him. Decon air lock on the other side sprays me with disinfectant and Christ knows what else. The far hatch hisses open a crack; I recognize the voice that wafts through. A little rougher, perhaps. A little more worn-out.

I push the hatch open and run smack into Chino—“Hey man, glad you made it!”—but he’s not the man I’m looking for. Colonel Sherman Barclay stands in a basement grotto of cracked marble and cement, surrounded by cots and supply crates and jacked vending machines. His eyes flicker in my direction, but he doesn’t miss a beat; he’s in the middle of instructing one Nathan Gould on the subtleties of civilian status in a city under martial law. From the set of Barclay’s jaw I’d have to say that Gould is proving to be a slow learner.

They both turn to me at the same time. Gould’s all hail-fellow-well-met; I think he’s just glad to have an excuse to get out of remedial class. Barclay’s a little more restrained. “Good to have
you aboard, marine. My men speak highly of you.” He pauses, almost smiling. “Shit, most of ’em are downright
scared
of you.”

Really. I hadn’t noticed.

Colonel Sherman Barclay in one word:
tired
.

He hides it well enough from the troops. Turns that bone-deep weariness around and serves it up as the eye of the storm, the deep pool of calm in the middle of Armageddon. His men swarm around him like ants on uppers; he fields their questions and feeds them commands and he never breaks character once. Maybe one of the reasons he’s so exhausted is because of all the needy terrified grunts feeding off him.

It’s a good act, and it keeps his troops together in a cesspool that should by rights have us all shitting our pants and heading for the hills, but you can see the signs if you’ve got the right accessories. You can see the stress lines crinkling the eyes. You can thermal past the three-day growth of stubble and catch that involuntary tic at the corner of his mouth, that nervous little spasm nobody else seems to notice. He’s good, he’s very good, but he doesn’t fool Alky, False Prophet, and the Holy Ghost. We see right through him.

It’s okay, though. He’s holding it together, one weary-ass cocksucker outmatched and outgunned by monsters from the stars, and he doesn’t bitch about the fates or complain about his bosses, he just buckles down and does the fucking job as best he can. And after the Nathan Goulds and the Jacob Hargreaves and the Commander fucking Lockharts, it is a nice goddamn change.

And God bless him, he doesn’t even break character for Gould, although nobody here would blame him if he just hauled loose and belted the little geek into next Tuesday. No, he listens as we follow him through the huddled knots of refugees, down the endless rows of makeshift cots for the wounded, past
the doors of prefab refrigerators and crematoriums waiting for the turnover. He listens as Gould tells him how to do his job: Gotta find Hargreave. Hargreave has the answers. Go to Roosevelt Island, bring him out, by any means necessary. Hargreave Hargreave Hargreave.

Barclay shakes his head, and continues his rounds, and says nothing. Gould raises his hands, exasperated. I brush past him.

He pokes me from behind.

Suddenly I’m facing him; suddenly my fists are clenched. I can feel synthetic muscles cording up my forearms. Gould doesn’t even notice. He’s plugged something into my spinal socket, and he’s only got eyes for the readout: “Fucking military mind-set, man. If I can’t tell him, maybe I can
show
him.”

Yes, Gould, show him. Show him my black box and my deep-layer protocols, show him my secret antidote to the spore.

“I scammed this little reader out of the CELL lab when no one was looking. It’s not much, but at least we can access the op logs …”

And why don’t you show him what’s left of my heart while you’re at it. Why don’t you show him the great fucking hole where my left lung used to be.

“Wait a minute, that’s not right …”

Why don’t you show him that I’m fucking
dead
, Gould, since you couldn’t be bothered to fill
me
in on that little detail when you had the chance. Why don’t you—

“Holy shit. Holy
fucking shit.
”

Finally he looks up, but he still doesn’t see what’s in front of him. He doesn’t see my face through the visor, he doesn’t see how close I am to putting his head through the wall. I don’t know what he sees, exactly.

But whatever it is, it’s bright enough to leave him blind.

“Man, what have
you
been up to today?” he murmurs, and there’s something like awe in his voice.

He grabs Barclay coming back the other way. “You
have
to go to Prism.”

“No.”

“I know how to beat the Ceph!”

That gets Barclay’s attention.

“I’ve been a complete idiot,” Gould says.

Barclay does not argue the point. “
How
, exactly, can we beat the Ceph?”

“Give ’em AIDS!”

“That’s not funny, Dr. Gould.”

“Lupus, then. Rheumatoid arthritis. That’s what this damn suit is—or at least, that’s what it’s turning into: an
autoimmune disease
!”

Barclay doesn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Uh-huh.”

“Dude, I am
serious
. I’m looking at the op logs right now, and you wouldn’t
believe
the places Alcatraz has been hanging out over the past few hours. I don’t have the equipment here to confirm this directly, but the only way this telemetry makes sense is if the whole damn suit is studded with receptor sites! I never even looked for them before, I mean why would I, why would you expect a battlefield prosthesis to—”

Barclay cuts in and to the chase: “Dr. Gould. So
what
?”

“The
spore
, Colonel! Didn’t I say that? This artifact”—he jerks his thumb in my direction, a gesture that takes in the N2 but somehow excludes the meat sitting inside—“can interface with the spore!”