Crysis: Legion (29 page)

I can hear our getaway softly slashing air in the distance; it drifts into view over the ramparts as I watch. But the tremors haven’t stopped. In fact, they’re getting worse.

Barclay notices: “Cyclops Four, be advised we have unstable—”

I guess he hasn’t been here before.

The ground bucks underneath us; the asphalt splits down Seventh like someone unzipping a duffel bag. A few of the guys yell
incoming!
and look around for airborne bogeys but they’re looking in exactly the wrong direction. The spire ruptures the center of the compound and punches into the air like a giant fist; electric auroras writhe along its sides. Humvees, blacktop, shattered sewer
pipes—that whole thin crust of shit we call
civilization
—tumble and bounce down its flanks. A jeep flips over and nearly squashes a medic. Cyclops Four rears back, slews to starboard, skids back out of sight like a toy thrown by some spoiled and angry child.

I wait for the impact. It doesn’t come. The spire grinds to a halt, steaming.

“Cyclops Four, this is Barclay, can you still land? We are evac-ready, repeat we—”

“Colonel Barclay, I really must advise you against that.”

Hargreave.

Nobody speaks for a moment. The spire towers over us like a great twisted backbone: dull orange embers glow in twisted bands along its length. Volcanic DNA.

“Who the hell are you?” Barclay says at last.

“Jack Hargreave. Colonel, there isn’t—”

“This is a military channel.”

“—really time for introductions. You and all your men—”

“Get off this channel, Hargreave.”

“I would love to comply, Colonel, believe me. I have my own problems at the moment and I have no time for this bullshit, but I
promise
that if you let that chopper continue its approach you will be killing everyone aboard. Not to mention whatever remnants of your command remain on the ground. That thing has
reflexes
. You must deal with it first.”

Barclay has delivered no commands to Cyclops Four but I can’t help noticing that the sound of those engines seems to have faded a bit into the distance; someone up there is taking Hargreave seriously even if Barclay doesn’t.

But Barclay does, eventually. He stands there with his hands wrapped around the grip of his Majestic and you just
know
he wishes it was Hargreave’s neck. But when he goes back on the air, it’s only to say “Cyclops Four. Back off. Return to operational height.”

Barclay waits until the sound of the rotors fades away, never taking his eyes off the spire smoldering in our midst. He tweaks his mike. He speaks with slow, deliberate calm.

“So what, exactly, does our resident self-appointed expert suggest?”

“The spires are essentially an area-denial bioweapon,” Hargreave tells him. “Their current iteration seems designed to render a given area safe for alien habitation.” (A twitch at the edge of Barclay’s mouth: point to Nathan Gould.) “They have a baseline activation cycle for routine operations, but they accelerate that process in response to incursions of—well, of pests. Once the spire is up and running, it perceives the approach of any incompatible biosignature as an increased threat, and will discharge preemptively—at the cost of overall coverage, but even premature, er, ejaculation would be more than enough to infect all of your men.”

“Recommendations.” Barclay’s voice would freeze beer in the keg.

“You must neutralize the spire, of course.” Hargreave pauses like a stand-up comic timing a punch line. “Fortunately, I’ve provided you with the means to do just that.”

Suddenly everyone’s looking at me.

I’ve been here before. Last time it didn’t end so well.

Hargreave is all about climbing the spire and getting in from the top. Fuck that:
I’m
all about not getting shot out of that thing like a spitball if Hargreave’s hack goes south again, and that means having an escape hatch right down here at ground level. What’s really odd is that I
find
one. I circle the base of the thing, climb across torn-up pavement and plumbing, and of course there’s nothing familiar about it at all. It’s
alien
.

And yet not, somehow …

There’s a segment just a little off-kilter from the others, a slipped disk, a fused vertebra: whatever you want to call it. Most people wouldn’t even notice it; someone with an eagle eye might see a slight flaw in mass-production, a cosmetic glitch. I look at it and a familiar voice whispers,
Access panel
. I wait a bit but it doesn’t tell me anything else: not
combination lock
or
key code
or
press and turn
.

So I blast it open with a sticky grenade.

A stiff breeze tugs at me from the hole: pressure gradient, just like before. I bet these things are pneumatic, I bet they suck in a huge long breath to build up the pressure for the Great Spore Pukefest. Which means we’ve got time as long as it’s still inhaling.

When it stops, boys, head for the hills.

Inside it’s the same layout: the silo, the curved panels, the seething currents of spore. The same virtual vulture sitting on my shoulder, reminding me how little time I have, how vital it is that I
compromise the settings for spore dispersal
, how it’s
so much more likely to work this time
. I wonder about the hole I’ve just blown in the side of this thing—an open door between the spore in here and all that unprotected meat outside—but the pressure differential should keep everything contained. Assuming it lasts.

Besides, it’s not as though the whole area
won’t
be rotten with spore if I just stand back and do nothing.

So: the same smash and grab, the same blood-chilling cries from an alien machine in pain. The same dark blizzard of uncontained spore swirling around me, cutting my viz to zero, clinging to the surface of the Nanosuit like a billion antique keys in search of microscopic keyholes.

The same static discharge. The same tactical countdown:

But this time:
COMPILED
.

RUNNING
.

And suddenly, spore sparkles into snow, electric white. The air
hums
around me; it’s coming from the suit, it’s the sound of a cascade, of a million tiny voices learning a new song and teaching a billion others, of a billion teaching a trillion. It’s the sound of mimetic fission.

It’s the sound of a process that sucks power like New York on New Year’s. It’s the sound of an alarm going off in my head, red icons blooming across my sightscape, energy levels dropping like bricks off a cliff.

I’ve got to get out of here.

I duck down and fall through the hatch; hungry spores swarm after me like a comet’s tail, like a cloud of hungry mites. I try to stand; it’s
hard
, it’s almost impossible, it’s like being human again. I stagger against my own weight. Voices spill into my head: groundhogs and chopper jockeys talking over each other. Hargreave. Barclay. My name, over and over.
Alcatraz. No
.

I fall onto broken pavement, stare up at the sky. Cyclops Four is up there, fully loaded, dwindling.

Something else leans in, much closer. Its eyespots glow like suns. It picks me up as if I weigh nothing at all.

It’s not alone. The compound’s swarming with Ceph.

The spire detonates.

The cloud erupting from the top of that thing doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. It glistens, it
sparkles:
It’s just nanites talking to each other, spreading the gospel according to Hargreave
all along the visible spectrum, but I don’t find that out until later. Right now it just looks as though an evil cancerous monstrosity has vomited a whole galaxy of stars into the sky, and it’s so beautiful I forget for a moment that I’m about to die.

And I think, in that same moment, the Ceph realize they
are
about to.

The grunt drops me without a second glance and leaps away at top speed; a white tendril swirls down like God’s finger, touches it in flight. The grunt
melts
, just liquefies in its armor. Its exoskeleton face-plants in a pile of joints and plating, bleeding clear viscous fluid from its seams.

Down the street a stalker scrabbles at the barricade, collapses in a puddle. Half a block farther on a pinger staggers, takes a wobbly step toward me, crouches for attack; but the blast never comes. It doesn’t give up; it draws itself back up to full height and continues its advance, slowly, deliberately, taking care with every step. There’s a kind of desperate dignity to the way it moves; for a second or so I almost feel sorry for it. A shell slams into its side and detonates, knocking it over. Whoops and cheers on comm; I raise my eyes to Heaven and see Cyclops Four coming in for another pass. Her port turbine gouts flames. She slews, wobbles to a stop ten meters ahead, hangs just a couple of meters above the ground and doesn’t dare to settle.

I can’t stand. I don’t have the strength. So I crawl, drag myself along the ground like a paraplegic toward that lowering tailgate, toward the shouting voices and waving arms. Something grabs me, hoists me off the ground as the ground begins to fall away. BUD’s charge alert downgrades to yellow; I feel my systems starting to firm up. Cyclops tilts into the sky. Someone passes me a cargo strap: I grab hold and look down across a battlefield of empty machinery, robot bodies dropped and discarded as if the things inside have just been raptured up to Heaven. They haven’t, though; I can see what’s left of them dribbling through
the cracks in all those suits of armor, congealing in sticky puddles on the road.

Explosive catalytic autolysis
I think, and somehow I know what that means.

I’ve seen bioweapons in my time. I was there when Egypt laid that pimped-out necrotizing fasciitis down on the Syrians, back at the start of the Water Wars: You could see it eat the meat right off the bones in realtime, like it was some kind of Discovery Channel time-lapse. Those poor bastards died in minutes; the wounds actually
steamed
because the Strepto’s metabolic rate had been cranked so high. They had to retcon a whole new suite of bacterial enzymes just to handle the heat.

Next to this, that was
nothing
. I’ve never seen
anything
kill this fast.

If this is what Hargreave’s capable of when his hands are tied, I say let him off the leash and get the hell out of the way.

Colonel Sherman Barclay in
two
words: Tired.

Scared.

Not of death—you don’t wear that many scars without making some kind of peace with mortality—but of failure. Scared because he’s presiding over the end of the world, and whole platoons are looking to him, and what if he isn’t up for it? We’re living through the mother of all doomsday scenarios, you don’t expect to win; but there are so many different ways to lose. Here at the end of his career Sherman Barclay has finally seen it all, and accepted that for him there is nothing left to see; and what he’s been fearing even since the End Days began—what he’s been fearing even more than Squiddie—is a bad death.

But you know what
really
got him scared, Roger? You know what he
really
fears, now that he’s just seen a whole platoon of Ceph turn into beef consommé before his eyes? I see it the moment
they haul me into the VTOL: I see it in the look on his face as we dust off.

Hope.

Because wouldn’t you know it, Gould was right. Barclay knows that now; he doesn’t have to weigh the odds of a wild-ass theory against a cost of human lives anymore, he’s seen the N2 in action. This suit is a certified Ceph-killer, this suit could be the goddamn Black Death of Cephdom if we knew how to fine-tune the damn thing. This suit could turn the whole war around.

What do you do when you’ve finally resigned yourself to your own inevitable extermination, and someone offers you a way out? Any hope in a place like this almost
has
to be false; all it can do is shake your determination, tempt you with thoughts of
after this is over
when you should just be thinking about getting the job done
now
. Hope is distraction, hope is fear undercutting resolve, because hope gives you back that most terrible of battlefield commodities: something to lose.

Colonel Sherman Barclay is trying to decide whether he dares to hope.

Times Square dwindles behind us, a new wave of Ceph moving in to take possession. The Rapture doesn’t seem to be taking them; I guess Hargreave’s turncoat spore is all used up. Too bad he couldn’t have programmed it with a longer life span. Too bad he couldn’t have programmed them to
replicate
, like any self-respecting doomsday bug. We could’ve just sat back and watched smallpox take out the Europeans for a change.

But no. We now return you to your apocalypse, already in progress.

I’m not quite as dead as I thought; Hargreave’s hack didn’t actually need
that
much power but it needed it all at once, and there’s a limit to how many joules-per-second the N2 can give up. It didn’t faint on me because it was losing blood; it fainted because it stood up too fast. Now that it isn’t being suckled by a
billion microscopic mouths, its charge level’s almost back in the green.

I could still use a top-up, though, and there’s a couple of outlets right here by the tailgate. I jack in and let the suit feed while Barclay goes forward. Two dozen haggard faces follow him up the aisle. A few others look back at me.

A couple of them even smile.

By the time I reach the cockpit myself, Barclay’s deep in argument with a familiar face on the far end of a video link.

“We
tried
to evacuate,” Gould yells on the screen, “you think we didn’t try? I told you, they
swarmed
us! Derailed the whole fucking train not halfway to Harlem! Now will you
listen to me
? We have to go to the Prism! It’s our only hope. If there are any answers, Hargreave will have them. I worked for that fucker half my life, I know him. He’s on top of this for sure. Someone has to go in there and bring him out.”