by Project Itoh
I noted that Liquid rode in a new model RAY. Unlike the clunky, tanklike REX, RAY looked alive, with a sleek appearance and components that glided with precision. This manned version of RAY had a long tail, much longer than the one on the AI-piloted version we previously encountered in the waters of the Big Shell. REX, in comparison, had no tail, and held a deep squatting posture to retain balance.
The unmanned RAYs were originally designed to protect the Arsenal Gear, a giant submersible missile carrier with access to the communications networks of all five branches of the US military. A commander on board could issue orders to all US armed forces across the globe. Despite the ship’s importance as a functional center of government, radar and threat-detection systems were absent, presumably left to accompanying Aegis cruisers and the air force’s AWACS sentry craft.
The Arsenal was equipped with few means of self-defense. Without its escort, the vessel was nothing more than a giant floating coffin packed with fireworks. The short-tailed RAY-class Metal Gears were built to protect the vulnerable Arsenal.
The RAY piloted by Liquid had been modified to be manually piloted, but its basis was the unmanned model. The machine would have a fairly short operational range. Was the big one nearby, underwater?
Bang! went the staccato noise, like a starting gun, and a cluster of smoke trails rose up from RAY’s back.
“Missiles,” I shouted. “Snake, dodge them!”
But Snake kept advancing into the missiles’ paths. Then, at the last instant, he slid REX to one side in a maneuver so quick, had I been inside the cockpit myself, I might have gotten sick. Keeping REX pointed at Liquid, Snake moved sideways, using a water tower as cover. A missile struck the tower, destroying it and sending the tank’s contents pouring down on Snake.
We have a chance.
RAY had been designed to be unmanned, with the robot’s peak performance delivered through the orders of the Arsenal’s AI. Whatever the effects retrofitting the machine for human control might have been, the results couldn’t have been beneficial.
I designed REX knowing a human would operate it with human judgment. Perhaps such complex and unconventional machines were better off in the hands of an AI. That was why, for the Arsenal project, the navy moved away from the manned designs created for the Marines to autonomous robots, like the Gekko, guided by combat AIs.
But as far as I was concerned, for giant mechs, nothing could replace a human.
Again Snake charged ahead. RAY was clearly shaken. Occupied with trying to keep REX from falling apart with each step, I couldn’t offer any help with attacks or defense, but Snake skillfully piloted the robot and closed in on Liquid.
They were too close now for Liquid to fire a missile without risking damage to himself.
One reason I had designed REX to be manually operated was due to my inability to find a suitable AI among the currently developed autonomous weapons systems. But there was another reason: I loved Japanese anime, and with REX the realization of that passion, I couldn’t bear to see a giant mecha without a human operator.
The original RAYs might have been anti-Metal Gear weapons, but when the designers chose to go the unmanned route, that decision would have necessitated a great number of alterations from the manned design. Even if Liquid’s machine appeared similar to the other RAYs, the robot’s insides would have to be vastly different. AI command enabled an array of controls far more vast than a puny human brain could handle.
To put it another way, the unmanned RAYs could never truly be retrofitted for a human pilot. This RAY was being forced at great lengths to bend itself to Liquid’s commands. If REX had any chance against the superior machine, this would be the reason. REX had been designed from the ground up to be piloted by a human being.
I shouted, “Grapple him!” but Snake already knew what to do. REX crashed into RAY, the two colossal bodies colliding beside the water’s edge like giant monsters in a Japanese kaiju film.
With the two cockpits close together, the two men came face-to-face. Astonishment registered in Liquid’s eyes as he took in Snake’s confident grin. Liquid’s human command was REX’s curse. Snake fired the free-electron laser mounted beneath his robot’s chin, and the amplified energy pierced the surface of RAY’s armor. The light reflected off RAY’s specialized coating and left traces of an iridescent glow.
Liquid raised a war cry and fired a laserlike beam from RAY’s head.
“Otacon,” Snake said. “He’s using a water cutter!”
“Don’t worry, REX is a tank. Don’t lump it in with some puny whale-looking thing.”
Powerful enough to cut through metal, the pressurized water cutter was RAY’s primary close-combat weapon. The jet could easily cut through walls and would split a man cleanly in two.
But however strong the water pressure, no water cutter would so easily pierce the armor of the nuclear-armed bipedal tank. Before RAY’s jet could break through REX’s armor, REX’s laser fried RAY’s insides. The supposed Metal Gear killer, bested by its own prey, howled a death cry.
At the same time, REX had been pushed past its limits. The mighty dragon, engine shrieking, finally succumbed to the wounds Snake had inflicted nine years before. With the last of the robot’s power, Snake withdrew from Liquid. With a few dozen meters between them, REX fell silent.
Snake let out a moan. For the first time since the clash, I looked at Snake and lost all words. Blood flowed steadily from his mouth and his forehead. He breathed heavily, painfully, the frozen Alaskan air piercing his aged lungs like shards of glass.
“Liquid,” Snake panted. “Is he …”
Snake would be helpless were Liquid to attack. When RAY and REX collided, Snake had taken a terrible blow to the chest. The two giant metal masses had crashed into each other at tremendous speed. Had it been a traffic accident, I wouldn’t have expected any survivors. Snake tried to move his body and screamed in pain, his left shoulder dislocated.
RAY had collapsed, and from its cockpit Liquid’s arm reached out. He grasped at the machine’s surface to pull himself free.
Slowly, he crawled out of the Metal Gear. Like Snake, Liquid had been severely injured by the crash, but he had a gun grasped firmly in his hand, and he staggered toward REX’s wreckage.
This was bad. Somehow, I managed to free Snake from his seatbelt, but his wounds and fatigue left him in a stupor. Liquid was in a similar state, except he could walk while Snake wasn’t going anywhere.
Liquid, in Ocelot’s body. And Snake. The two old, worn-down, and wounded men confronted each other, each resolute in a shared goal: to put an end to their entwined fates. But one had taken his body to its limit and could no longer move.
Suddenly, Liquid grasped at his chest as if trying to gouge out his heart.
Snake had seen this before.
Nine years ago, when Snake escaped in a Jeep from the underground base and was trapped under that Jeep, unable to move, the original Liquid stood before him with eyes wide.
Snake’s own eyes said, I know this. I’ve lived this.
As if it were a magic curse, Snake apprehensively uttered the syllable, “FOX—”
Then Liquid, delivering his own coup de grâce, finished, “—DIE!”
His knees hit the ground, followed by the rest of him. His hand clutched at his heart in agony, nails digging into skin.
Was it over? Could their lengthy battle have ended so abruptly?
Snake gaped at Liquid, forgetting his own pain for a moment. His foe lay alone before him. Once known as Ocelot, the man had taken Liquid’s name and regarded himself as Solid Snake’s shadow and the son of Big Boss.
“Think again!”
Liquid sprang up, and his face radiated delight, even more so than on that night in Eastern Europe when he had cut down the surrounding US forces.
Had his injuries just been an act?
“What?” Snake said.
“Sorry, but that won’t work this time. Behold!”
Liquid pointed to the sea fr
om which he and RAY had emerged. A rumble filled the port, beyond comparison with the sound RAY had made. Snake and I watched in astonishment as the gunmetal sea rose up, erupting into pillars of spray as if in celebration.
What I saw next made me doubt my own sanity.
A giant mass split the ocean, seawater cascading off the front in waterfalls. The mist cleared to reveal the four granite presidential heads of Mount Rushmore rising from the frozen Alaskan sea, faces unperturbed. Snake and I were caught dumbstruck by the sight, absurd, utterly ridiculous, and oddly magnificent.
Moved by the brazen irrationality and sheer shamelessness of the display, I worried that the Naval Hymn might start playing in my head. Snake recovered his sanity ahead of me and began to struggle free from the cockpit.
Not only did his body not work as he expected it to, but age and injury strove to crush his consciousness. Biting down a cry of pain, Snake crawled from the pilot’s seat of the fallen REX.
Seeing Snake on the ground, Liquid did a childish caper back to the water’s edge. He walked jauntily, pointing at us, every bit a picked-on little boy who’d just gotten back at his bully. I guess it could have been worse; at least he wasn’t jeering at us. Still, his gleeful immaturity disgusted me.
Perhaps incited to action by the juvenile teasing, Snake willed his pain away, raised his M4, and got to his feet.
Even so, the dislocated joint of his left shoulder wouldn’t cooperate. Snake could handle the pain, but he couldn’t get his body—not just his shoulder, but all of it—to move.
“Liquid …” he said, trying to lift the seven- or eight-pound rifle in one arm to get a bead on Liquid, but his biceps and shoulder muscles refused. Snake no longer had the strength to shoot anything higher than the ground fifteen feet ahead.
His bronchial tubes and diaphragm had grown too weak to deliver oxygen into his lungs. He was on the verge of asphyxiation. His breath came out in wheezes and gasps. In the cold, his metabolism struggled to convert his stored-up energy into heat.
Snake’s stamina had been depleted. As for the Mk. III, the robot was wedged in the back of the cockpit, the tiny legs flailing pitifully in the air.
At last, the structure beneath the Mount Rushmore heads appeared from the water.
It was a giant submarine at least two thousand feet long. The shape of the vessel, like a whale born the wrong size, marked it a relative of the Arsenal Gear.
Between the Arsenal-class submarine and the wreckages of RAY and REX, I felt I was in a land of giants. Snake and Liquid looked terribly small surrounded by the towering machines.
With a better look, the effigies on this Mount Rushmore weren’t the fathers of our country, Washington, Lincoln, or otherwise. The four faces resembled each other so closely at first I thought they were all copies. Which was only natural, for these were the likenesses of the family of Snakes, including Solid Snake himself. With him were Liquid, Solidus, and the man at the beginning of it all—Big Boss. When I really studied the sculpture, I realized that Big Boss’s face occupied Washington’s place among the four.
I found Liquid’s delusions of grandeur appalling. Was he suggesting the Snakes decided history—that only the line of Snakes would free the world from Zero’s obsessions of monitoring and control?
Then the Mount Rushmore began to fade. This was something I had been too stunned to realize sooner, but now seemed obvious—the image was only an OctoCamo texture projection.
At the edge of the harbor, Liquid stopped and turned to face us. He spread his arms wide, just as he had done after his victory in the Middle East, and proudly proclaimed, “This is the liberty we’ve won for ourselves: Outer Haven!”
Revealed beneath the OctoCamo Mount Rushmore was a gentle slope rising from the deck—the ship’s bridge had been unified into the hull for improved stealth capabilities. That said, Haven was so ridiculously gargantuan its bridge alone was easily three times the size of a typical nuclear submarine.
That huge bridge began to slide open as though the vessel were removing a hat. Inside the exposed interior of the ship stood a citylike cluster of rectangular structures, between which thrust a cannon familiar to me. The barrel angled upward, glaring at the sky.
The weapon was REX’s railgun—a nuclear launcher outside the Patriots’ governance.
“Behold,” Liquid shouted. “With this weapon, I will destroy JD. Then … everything ends, and everything begins!”
A cargo crane extended from the open bridge. Wheezing from his constricted windpipe, Snake struggled to catch up with Liquid.
“Not again,” Snake muttered. “I’ve done nothing but fail to stop Liquid. In the Middle East. And in Eastern Europe.
“But I don’t have any more time. No longer can I afford to let Liquid get away. If this keeps up, my old and dilapidated body will stop moving before I can put myself to rest.”
His lips moved in a silent prayer. God, the will of the universe, fate, whoever is out there. Please let me complete my last mission. Let me, and then I’ll give you my soul, my life, or whatever it is you want.
But Liquid stepped onto the lowered hook and parted from the quay. Like an ascending angel he gazed down at Snake, then, with a triumphant pointing of a finger, he said, “But as for you, brother … You’ll stay here to mark this island’s watery grave.”
Snake gritted his teeth and forced strength into his wavering legs to somehow raise the M4 and stop Liquid. He wrung out the last of his stamina and planted his feet.
Suddenly, his windpipe went into a violent fit.
He coughed with no sign of stopping, as if to expel every last gasp of air from his lungs. Every muscle in his upper body, from his back to his chest to his sides, already ached from all the coughing induced by the harshly cold air since he’d set foot on the island. Now it felt like his muscles were tearing themselves off his bones. As Snake began to black out from the convulsions in his chest, Liquid slipped into the ship.
Snake slumped forward, clutching at his chest, helpless, while Liquid’s voice boomed, announcing the death sentence: “I’ll crush you with Haven!”
Just then, a deep explosion like that of a launching firework went off in the distance, followed by the high-pitched sound of an object cutting through air.
A white pillar of water burst into the sky just off Haven’s starboard.
The spray fell in a downpour, drenching Snake. Cannon fire. Coughing, Snake lifted his head and looked to the horizon line, where the cloudy Aleutian sky met the Pacific. He could see the outline of a single ship. Judging from the size and distance, the vessel had to be quite large. Two more shots landed right next to Haven.
The projectiles belonged to the three-gun, sixteen-inch, fifty-caliber cannons mounted on Mei Ling’s Missouri. The battleship lacked digital navigation and relied on last-century analog fire control computers to direct the main battery.
I wondered if Liquid realized the unfavorable situation he was now in. Not even Haven’s double-layered submarine hull could take a sixteen-inch shell unscathed. And Missouri’s initial attack hadn’t even been intended to hit target, but were test rounds fired to determine distance, air pressure, and wind speed. If Haven remained still, the next volley might well hit.
Haven’s canopy hurriedly began to close. If a shell through the hull would be bad, a direct hit on the exposed interior would be disastrous. Then there was the all-important railgun. The Arsenal’s bridge closed, and the vessel pulled away from the dock at full speed.
Snake, still coughing, raised his M4 and aimed at the quickly receding Outer Haven. Blood flowed from a cut on his forehead and stained his face red. He used one hand to wipe the blood from his eyes, but his vision remained blurry, and he couldn’t tell what he was looking at.
Then something deep within him snapped.
Something that had been barely holding together his overburdened body.
In a terrible spasmodic fit, Snake dropped the rifle. Unable even to fall over, he stood there in a daze, watching the in
distinct outline of Outer Haven turn back toward him. He realized the shape was growing larger. The ship had returned to smash through the harbor—and Snake with it.
Missouri opened fire, but Haven moved too quickly. The giant steel whale charged between columns of spray. I didn’t think the impact with the harbor would put a scratch on Haven’s hull.
The harbor would be crushed—and the frail human body standing upon it.
I urged Snake to run, but he appeared not to hear anything. He stood frozen, like a scarecrow, with no prayer of moving, fettered by fatigue, injury, and age.
The rumble filled my ears. Snake closed his eyes and awaited the final moment.
“I’m a loser. I’m no one’s hero. I’m defeated.”
He accepted his humiliations.
“Liquid was right nine years ago. I can’t protect anyone. Not even myself.”
Then came the scream. Surprised the voice wasn’t his own, Snake slowly opened his eyes.
Even after all the incredible events he’d witnessed over the years, Snake still couldn’t believe his eyes. Standing between Haven’s bow and the crumbling quay was Raiden, feet planted wide, his back holding the ship at bay. He only had one arm, having severed the other to free himself from the rubble.
“Raiden,” Snake said.
The sight was incredible. Who could have believed that—even with the powered exoskeleton manifesting strength beyond compare with a normal human—a lone man could halt a vessel two thousand feet long? And yet Snake had seen something similar before. He knew this. He’d been saved like this before.
Shadow Moses, nine years ago. When Liquid went to crush me with REX’s foot, Frank saved me like this. My comrade in arms, code name Fox. Naomi’s brother.
Resisting the vast mass of Haven, Raiden said in a guttural voice, “S-Snake, hurry.”
“He’s right,” Snake said. “I can’t die yet. I can’t give up here. I can’t concede to humiliation or defeat. At least not yet,” he said to me over our link.
“I have been granted an extended life so that I can atone for my sins. That’s what Naomi said to me. Maybe she was right. Maybe I continue to live so that I may fulfill my fate. But don’t I carry an even more serious debt—an incontrovertible duty I had to see through more than any abstract concept such as fate or sin?”