Crysis: Legion (30 page)

Colonel Barclay does not like civilians. He sure as shit doesn’t like this one, and if anything he likes Hargreave even less. But there it is again, whether he likes it or not.

Hope.

So he clenches his jaw, and takes a deep breath, and nods. He tells the pilot to change course for Prism.

The pilot laughs aloud. “Not a chance, sir. We took a lot of damage back there, I got multiple ruptures to the fuel lines, the pods, too—we’re bleeding fuel like a stuck pig.”

“How close can you get us?”

A couple of seconds, a quick backbrain calculation. “South end of the island. Maybe.”

“Do it.” Barclay turns to me as we bank to port. “Look at them,” he says.

I do: burns, bullet wounds, thousand-yard stares. Half these people should be in therapeutic coma. The rest should be dead.

“You’re it,” Barclay says.

And you know something, Roger? It’s just as well.

I’m sick of wading through infernos wearing this superskin while other soldiers,
better
soldiers probably, burn like moths on all sides. I’m alone in here no matter how many people they send along for the ride.

“We can meet you on the other side,” Barclay continues. “Cover your exit. We’ve got good men and women on that train, they’re shepherding the civilians to safety. I’ll send a squad to meet you and Hargreave at the Queensboro Bridge.” His shoulders rise, fall; I can’t hear the sigh over the sound of the engine. “I’ll send Gould along, too. I suppose the man might have some—helpful insights.”

Something beeps and flashes red on the dash. “That’s it,” the pilot says. “We don’t drop him here, we don’t get home. I’ll go low as I can, but we’re down to fumes.”

Back down to the tail. Barclay’s ahead of me, slaps a button: the tailgate folds down like a drawbridge in front of me. Streamers of fire dance in and out of view to my left, blown back from the burning engine.

“Good luck, marine. Watch your ass.”

The East River rolls by a few meters below—black and oily in visible, a deep peaceful blue on thermal—and for a second I think it’s taking heavy fire. But no: Those are only raindrops.

The VTOL’s already banking back to shore by the time I jump.

I hit the surface straight vertical, perfect entry. The river closes over my head with barely a splash. Dead of night, pitch-black water, viz so low I can’t even see my own hand unless I push it right up against the helmet, and you know what?—

It doesn’t bother me a bit. No sign of the fear that’s plagued me ever since I was eight years old. Not a
twinge
.

Maybe I’m just getting used to it. Or maybe it’s a fringe benefit, courtesy of SECOND and the N2.

For a second that almost scares me more than water used to. Because I’ve been inside this beast for, what—twelve hours, now? Fifteen? And if it’s already got its tentacles buried so deep that it can edit out my
phobias
, what the hell will it have done after a day or two? After a week? I mean, what
are
we, what makes us unique, if not for our own personal fears and quirks? What if some mission algorithm decides that my personality’s an operational liability? How many more of these background edits does it take before I don’t wake up tomorrow, before something
else
wakes up that just happens to have my memories?

I’m not used to being such an existentialist wanker, you know. But all of this passes through my mind in the two seconds between the time I hit the water and the time I stop sinking. I hang there in that muddy black current for just a moment. Physics weighs buoyancy and momentum and gravity, and as I start to rise the dread just—drains out of me, somehow. The thoughts remain, that scary conclusion is still front and center, but it’s colorless. I can look at the prospect of being edited out of my own head and it really should scare the shit out of me, but it doesn’t anymore. I’m not even scared by the obvious reason
why
it doesn’t.

Because after all, I’ve got a mission to complete. And by the time I break the surface—ten, twelve seconds after splashdown—that’s really all I’m focused on.

Rain hammers across my helmet. Lightning strobes on the horizon. Off in the middle distance a bright light turns in the sky like the eye of Sauron, sweeping land and sea: lighthouse.

I’m a hundred meters off the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. GPS puts Prism in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. A little over one klick northeast.

Hargreave’s back in my ear before I even make it ashore. “It’s good of you to come for me like this, Alcatraz, but you will need to proceed with caution. Lockhart has deployed his elite forces across the island. I’ll guide you as best I can, but my view from here is, shall we say, severely limited.”

The lighthouse rises in my sights like a terraced stone birthday cake: wide first layer with guardrail icing; narrower second; one big honking candle rising from the center. A wide stone stairway curves around the outer wall but even before I hit the shore I can see heat prints in the shadows of the first landing. I make three, line of sight; probably more inside the structure itself.

SECOND samples the airwaves: “You see that fly-by? Thought they were going to come in and strafe us.”

“Nah. Too shot up. Didn’t you see the flames? Be lucky if they manage five more minutes in the air.”

“Saffron Three and Eight,
keep your comms clear
. Run silent, perimeter sweep again—that tin fuck is coming, I can feel it.”

Daddy Lockhart, breaking in and squelching the signal.

“Yes, sir.”

I’m on the stairs now, flattened against the brickwork as Three and Eight clatter innocently past on their perimeter sweep, swinging their dicks. They hope I
do
show up. One of them had friends in Cobalt.

I wait until their voices fade, cloak for as long as it takes me to stick my head above the landing. Nothing but the backs of the Saffron Duo disappearing in the night. I don’t believe it. Lockhart’s an asshole but he’s not an idiot; he won’t have left the southern approach unguarded.

Sure enough, other voices slow me to a creep as I circle the first landing. Somebody thinks they should be out fighting the Ceph, not sitting here in the boonies. Someone else would rather be home fucking his boyfriend.

Way overhead, Sauron’s eye flickers and goes out. For a moment or two the night belongs to fires burning across the water. I look up at the lantern, catch a bright cloud of heat radiating from the dead lamp and a smaller shadow in front of it, something cooler. I switch to StarlAmp.

Ah yes. An arm. A sniper rifle. Have to remember that.

The lantern reignites. Somewhere behind all that stonework, gears grind faintly back up to speed: The beam resumes its endless track around the horizon.

“Ah, shit. Must be another power surge.”

“I swear, Lockhart’s losing it, man. He’s taking this shit
way
too personal.”

“Easy to get personal when some cyborg asshole puts half your friends in body bags. I want that fucker dead as bad as he does.”

“There’s no way he’s coming.”

“Maybe he’s already here. He’s got a cloak, you know …”

I do, at that. I bring it up and move along the wall and there they are, just outside the lighthouse door: three beetle suits, blinded by Science.

“… he could be watching us right now …”

I could reach out and touch her. I am so tempted. I am so tempted.

Right up until a fourth merc comes around the corner and touches me first.

Touches
isn’t exactly the right word.
Blunders
would be closer. I am cloaked, after all; the dumb fuckwit walks right into me and bounces back on his heels, flailing. His buddies laugh as he goes over. For about half a second.

“He’s there! He’s
right fucking there
!”

“Well now,” Hargreave says softly on the penthouse freq.

“That didn’t last long, did it?”

I make it easy for them. I jump clear of the blunder zone the moment Fuckwit Four goes over so I’m spared the blizzard of bullets that Swiss-cheeses the spot a heartbeat later, but I’m not especially quiet about it. It’s about two seconds before the line of fire veers over to the sound of my boots on cement. Half a second after
that
the cloak runs out of juice and I start taking hits. A couple even get through before I crank the armor setting, but I don’t think there’s much left inside to hit anymore; for all I know the slug just bounces around in there and rolls down my leg. (Sometimes, Roger, I think I can almost hear it rattle when I walk.)

“Oversight, this is Saffron Two! Enemy contact in Sector Bravo!”

I hit back, of course. I teach Saffron’s front line the timely lesson that payback against Cyborg Assholes is a lot harder to do
than to brag about, but by then they’ve called in air support and backup boots. I throw some suppressing fire up the tower on my way; I don’t have a hope in hell of hitting that sniper, but at least I’ve thrown off his aim. I scoop up a Feline submachine gun from one of the fallen (shitty recoil, awesome rate of fire) and head up-island, trying to balance stealth against speed.

Waypoint options, not great. Roosevelt Island’s maybe 150 meters across: not many degrees of freedom there, not much cover, and from the look of it those buildings that are still standing were derelict long before Squiddie came calling. Something hulks in the middle distance so that’s what I head for, calling up GPS on the fly:
RENWICK HOSPITAL
, it says, but there’s not so much as a streetlight out front. No big surprise; every other hospital in the country went under during the Double Dip. But it’s a building, it’s cover, it’s dark on thermal so there aren’t any blue-eyed beetles waiting to light me up from the shadows. I hear shouts and comm traffic behind me; the faint sound of rotors drifting down from up ahead. In between there’s crab grass and trampled chain link and no cover at all except for Renwick Hospital. So I charge toward it, weaving and deking because that lighthouse sniper must have got his groove back by now, yes?, and I look up and—

And it’s not a hospital.

At least, it doesn’t look like one. It’s a castle, or something. A dark castle looming in the rain, backlit by lightning, three stories of ancient brickwork and square-toothed battlements, mats of ivy crawling around windows as empty as eye sockets. I stop dead for a second, look up through those gaping holes straight through to smoke and sky. I feel like I’ve passed through some kind of time machine. Or maybe this place has: a little piece of the eighteenth century that somehow managed to hang on into the twenty-first.