Crysis: Legion

by Peter Watts

  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.

  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—anything 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.