Crysis: Legion (33 page)

Or maybe not. This could just be the oxygen-starved brain of Cyborg Asshole Mk2 making stuff up as it goes along, Tin Man’s version of a near-death experience: as meaningless as all those lights and angels the neo-agers go on about during their asphyx parties. Maybe there’s not even any brain left to starve, maybe it’s been dead for hours and all these thoughts are running along a net of carbon nanotubes. Maybe they’ve already cut open my helmet and puked their guts out from the stink of all the dead meat that’s been rotting inside for fuck knows how long …

What
are
you, in here with me? Are you alive? Are you even
real
?

“Enough of this shit, marine!” it bellows.
“Enough!”

What the fuck are you? What the fuck am
I
?

I am awake.

Somewhere very close, alarms are singing. Multijointed robot arms quiver spastically overhead. The doctor with the optional Hippocratic Oath is not avoiding my eyes now, no sirree: He’s staring right into them, and he looks about ready to piss himself. Flickers of unfocused light and shadow play across him: reflections of outputs changing far, far faster than they have any right to. And although it should be impossible for anyone to retrodict those vague blobs and blips into anything even approaching the original image that cast them, somehow I find it easy. I can see the good doctor’s monitor reflected in his scrubs, in his mask, in those dark shiny pupils grown so huge you can barely see the irises around them.

I know it before he says it: “Some kind of overload! The suit’s—it’s
rejecting
the rip somehow …”

“Stop him!” Hargreave’s voice rises an octave. “Kill him if you have to, but don’t damage the hardware!”

What, no sad farewell? No fond final words for your latest son?

Doors slam open up past my head. I hear boots on bricks. “Headshots only!” Hargreave cries to the CELLulite leaning over me.

“Got it.” The CELLulite slides back the bolt on his pistol, lays the muzzle against my forehead. I keep waiting for SECOND to lay on the tacticals—
AY69 AUTO, ENEMY COMBATANT, THREAT LEVEL: HIGH
—but I guess they shut it down. I’m alone at last.

My executioner’s head explodes.

Then his buddy’s.

Then the man in the scrubs, and some hapless med tech I never noticed before now. Four shots, four kills. I turn my head, almost interested, while Hargreave seethes on the radio: “Tara,
no!
Tara, listen to m—”

She kills the channel and goes to work at the doctor’s station. Her fingertips come dark and shiny off the keys.

“CIA,” she says. “Special ops. Recruited three years ago now.”

I wonder what her code name was. Probably
Deus Ex Machina
. Or
Belle
.

“You’ve got me to thank for this whole shitstorm.” She barely glances up; her eyes, her bloody fingers are all about the controls. “I’m the one who ordered your squad in to extract Prophet and Gould in the first place. Best-laid plans, huh?”

My restraints pop open. Up in the left-hand corner of my eye, uplink icons wink back into existence.

Strickland’s at my side, her hand at my elbow, urging me to sit. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

I’m a little bit surprised to see that everything’s still attached. I swing my legs over the edge of the gurney, roll to a sitting position.
GPS
and
MODE SELECT
come back online. A panicky amber light on the ceiling spins in its glass bubble, stabbing my eyes five times a second.

Little crosshairs pan across my field of vision and lock down
on the heavy assault rifle one of the CELLulites dropped while he was getting his brains blown out. BUD serves up a subtitle:
HEAVY ASSAULT RIFLE: GRENDEL/HOL. PT
.

“Let’s
go
, man! The Ceph are coming and we’ve got to get Hargreave out.”

And she’s right. Suddenly, I’m
there
. All that fatalistic indifference I was feeling just a few minutes ago, that candy-ass
que sera
resignation to my own death? Fuck that. I’m
back
, baby. I’m strong, I’m stoked, I’m ready to kick ass all the way to the next millennium.

Nice to have you back, SECOND. I missed you.

No, I don’t think he was right at all. He got maybe halfway there, tops. But the fact is, even
gardeners
would’ve done a better job.

I mean, try and wrap your head around the magnitude of the imbalance here. Maybe you’re imagining us as a bunch of cavemen going up against a Taranis or a T-90 with reactive armor, but that’s not even close. Cavemen are people, too, Roger, they’ve got the same raw brainpower even if their tech is Stone Age. The Ceph are a whole different
species
. So let’s say Hargreave’s right and we’re not facing soldiers. Do you really think the world’s lemurs, say, would have a better chance against a bunch of
gardeners
? If a bunch of
gardeners
wanted to take out an anthill, would they attack the ants with formic acid and titanium mandibles? ’Course not. They’ve got sprays and poisons and traps and guns, things no ant has ever seen, things no ant could possibly defend against.

So why the Ceph gunships, Roger? Why the exoskeletons that walk pretty much like we do, and the guns that fire pretty much like ours, and bloody
artillery
for chrissake that does pretty much what ours does? Why are Ceph weapons and tactics so much like ours, hmm?

I don’t think they’re gardeners at all. I don’t even think they’re aliens. Not the
real
aliens, anyway. Not the real gardeners.

I think they’re hedge clippers and weed whackers, left in the shed to rust. I think they’re the dumbest of the garden tools, programmed to bump around the property mowing the lawn while the owners are away because after all, this place is too far out in Hicksville to waste
real
intelligence on. I think they have basic smarts because where they come from, even the
chairs
are smart to some degree—but nobody ever read them
The Art of War
, because they’re goddamn
hedge clippers
. So they’ve had to learn on the fly. Their tactics and their weaponry look like ours because they’re
based
on ours, because we were the only game in town when those cheap-ass learning circuits looked around for something to inspire them. And I think a lemur wouldn’t have a hope in hell against a bunch of gardeners, but he just might stand a chance in a war against the Roombas.

Organic? Are you fucking kidding me? Dude, even
we’ve
got CPUs made out of meat, we had neuron cultures wired into machines back before the turn of the century! Why do you think those blobs in the exoskels are any different? What makes you think the Ceph—whatever made the Ceph—what makes you think they even draw a distinction between meat and machinery?

Because I’m telling you, Roger, that line is not nearly as black-and-white as you seem to think.

Trust me on this.

Strickland sketches out the essentials while we make our escape. Hargreave’s a sick twisted motherfucker—“totally insane,” she says, “thinks he’s the only competent human being on the planet”—but Gould was right: He knows more about the Ceph than any other backbone around. It goes back farther than Ling Shan, farther than Arizona; apparently Hargreave’s known about
the Ceph ever since he jacked some of their tech out of the Siberian backwoods in 1908. (Which would make Hargreave around 130 years old by now. Kinda surprised
that
didn’t prick up any ears over at the Census Department. Of course, Hargreave probably owns the Census Department.)

Tunguska
is the word Strickland throws over her shoulder, as if it’s supposed to mean something to me. Turns out that was the site of a fifteen-megaton airburst back then, decades before the human race figured out how to make nukes. Two thousand square kilometers of forest flattened just like
that
. Nobody ever figured out for sure what it was: comet fragment, meteorite, microsingularity. Nobody ever found anything definitive, because Jacob Hargreave and Karl Rasch got there first and carted it all away.

And in all the long decades since, Hargreave has been walled away with the fire he stole from the gods, breathing on those dangerous embers all through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, patiently waiting for our technology to grow into something that could crack the codes and solve the riddles. Sometimes not so patiently; you have to wonder how much of our vaunted human technology really belongs to us and how much we were herded toward by some megalomaniac and his stolen box of miracles, working behind the scenes.

Not enough, judging by the past couple of days.

So three years back Hargreave engineers some ill-fated foray into a Ceph outpost in the South China Sea; the Ceph wake up and Tara Strickland’s father doesn’t come home. Hargreave’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since. He’s had a hundred years to get ready and three years early warning and he’s got some kind of plan to beat back the invaders; Strickland’s masters need to know what it is.

I know what it is. It’s a plan to rip me out of the N2 like ripping someone out of their own skin and nerves, throw away the
parts you don’t need, and graft yourself into the rest. After that I’m not sure; but Strickland’s already foiled Part A, so I suppose it can’t hurt to find out. It might even save the world.

We rise again. The cargo elevator is a metal cube with a grillwork floor and no walls: I-beams and cable conduits and greasy white cinder blocks scroll sedately past as Strickland talks. “He’s holed up in the executive level. You’ll be running into heavy resistance. No one gets in to see him face-to-face; believe me, I’ve tried, and
I’m
his head of security. You’re going to have to break in.”

She doesn’t seem to notice the dead employee sharing the car with us. He’s got a very nice silencer screwed onto the end of his M12. He won’t be needing it.

The elevator lurches to a halt on some level not meant for open house: server cabinets, ammo crates, lockers. Another one of those rotating amber lights.

Oh, and cameras.

“I’ve locked down local wireless; you’ve got maybe five minutes before Hargreave breaks the lock and sets the dogs on you.” She snorts softly. “I guess that’d be on
us
, now. I’ll get up to the helipad and secure our transport. Bring him out and meet me on the roof. We fly him out, we take him away, we make him talk. Go.”

I cloak. I hear the elevator grind back into motion as I run invisibly past the securicams on my way to the stairwell.

No waypoints, this time. No helpful filepics or friendly voices telling me what to do. Just stairs and switchbacks and, two or three landings above me, low worried voices:

“Comms still dead in the skinning lab.”

“Where the hell’s Strickland?”

“Must be offline, too. I can’t get hold of her, anyway.”

“Shit. This isn’t good.”

It isn’t good, but it’s quick and it’s easy. They go down before
either of them can draw a weapon or a breath. The silencer works like a charm.

I’m a shark circling a shipwreck. I work my way through befuddled mercenaries torn among so many masters—Lockhart, Strickland, Hargreave—that they were starting to suffer whiplash even
before
Strickland jammed their communications. I move up from spartan basement storage into rows of spotless offices, into conference rooms paneled in oak and leather. Each floor is more opulent than the last, each outfitted with darker grains and older antiques, each more anachronistic. The whole building is a time machine. Waypoints would be redundant here; the path to Jacob Hargreave is obvious. Just follow him back to the Victorian era.

It takes closer to ten minutes for Hargreave to undo Strickland’s sabotage; thirty seconds for the kill order to spread. By that time I’m already on the executive level. A tiny knot of armored mercs kills the lights and hunts me on thermal, but they’ve just spent the last thirty-six hours watching Golem Boy cut their numbers in half. Last night, maybe, they were jonesing for payback; right now I can track them by the sound of their knees knocking together.

I’d put them out of their misery myself, but the Ceph beat me to the punch.

I don’t know where they came from. Haven’t seen a Squid since I hit the island, but here they are: an intrepid little band of stalkers, eye clusters blazing, dorsal tentacles flailing, crashing through the walls and tearing out human hearts for all the world as though they’re on my side. There are only four of them—three after one of the CELLulites gets off a lucky shot—and I manage to take out another before diving into a convenient stairwell and dropping down a level. I back against a corner that offers decent cover and a slitscan view of the door above. I aim the SMG.

They don’t come after me.

Not an assault force. Not a measly four stalkers. Recon party
at most; but advance scouts implies scouts in advance of something. Strickland was right: The Squids are coming to Roosevelt Island.

It would be a really good idea to get Hargreave out before that happens.

“So. Despite all the betrayals, all the pain, you are coming to get me out. Remarkable. Almost heroic, one might say.” No hysteria in that voice, no more anger. Just—weariness. Resignation. Something almost approaching amusement. “But I fear our tentacular friends have formulated a similar plan. You’d better hurry if you hope to beat them to it.”

Our tentacular friends are not back in the hall where I left them.

“Come. I won’t fight you anymore. I’ve even rescinded the kill order, for the benefit of any soldiers you may have left alive.”

There it is: a golden thread of waypoints. A trail of bread crumbs to the inner sanctum: down the hall, hang a right, hang a left. Knock.

“It is time to admit that loyalties are concentric. It is time to unite against the greater enemy …”

For some reason—only SECOND knows why—I finally believe him.

Marble columns. Double doors between them, ornately carved, brass-handled, high enough for a pinger to walk through without stooping.