Crysis: Escalation

by Smith, Gavin G.

  ‘Treason against . . .’

  Barclay was on his feet. Five SMGs were suddenly pointed at him by very nervous corporate gunmen. He was pointing at the man in front of him. Whiskey or no whiskey, his hand was steady.

  ‘You listen to me, you failed abortion, my loyalty, my duty, my honour . . .’ one of the gunmen laughed, a sneer on his face. ‘. . . has been proven in fire and blood. You stand where thousands of men and women far better than you have stood and you have the gall to accuse me of treason. Your very presence here is a goddamned insult to every marine who died in some godforsaken shithole, from Tripoli to Okinawa, for your fucked up sense of entitlement and your disrespect. Get the fuck off my base now, before I beat you off it!’

  ‘. . . Against CELL ,’ the gunman finished. Barclay just stared at him. Then he started laughing.

  ‘What does that even mean, boy?’

  ‘It means you have to come with me.’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘We’re authorised to use force in your apprehension.’

  Barclay nodded.

  ‘You sure about that, son?’ he asked.

  ‘General, sir . . .’

  If they had sent marines, even MPs, instead of these suited, pencil-neck, executive gunmen. If they had saluted him, shown respect to the rank, the Corps that he had been commandant of until this morning, a rank he had earned the hard way, he would have gone quietly, maybe.

  He grabbed the M1911 from the desk. The first shot was one-handed and it was point blank range. He put the big hollow-point round between the gunman who’d been doing all the talking’s eyes. The back of his head came off as the hollow point mushroomed.

  He shifted, moving to one side. Bringing his hand holding the M1911 into a two-handed standing position. The one who had laughed was next. Nothing petty, but that one wanted to shoot, Barclay had recognised the type. Two rounds. He went down.

  He moved, crossing behind his chair. Don’t stand still in a gunfight, bullets will come looking for you. Two more rounds. He was sure he had just winged the gunman closest to the door but he went down and didn’t start firing.

  The last two had started firing now. Inexperienced as they were, they had at least managed to react. Bullets blew splinters out of a desk more than two hundred years old. His crystal decanter exploded, spraying him in whiskey. He was still moving to the side. He fired twice more and a gunwoman went down. The final gunman was firing the Feline, spraying wildly as he made for the door. Barclay registered the look of panic on the gunman’s face. A round caught Barclay in his left shoulder, knocking him back. He took aim. The gunman saw his death coming and he couldn’t understand why the gun bucking away in his hand wasn’t going to save him. The round caught the gunman in the head. He walked another step, still firing and then collapsed to the ground.

  Cordite smoke filled the room. Then the pitiful whining of the wounded started. It was just like any other battle. It was the one closest to the door who was still alive. He had just winged him. The slide on his M1911 was back, the gun empty. No, he thought, not a battle, a gunfight. One of the things that Barclay had always liked most about the stories of Bat Masterton was that the gunfighter had apparently been a genuinely good shot. Not a spray and pray merchant.

  He heard them first. They came charging through the double doors. Barclay let go of the empty M1911. He fast-drew the Peacemaker from his waist band. Oh, how long I practiced that. They started firing. He fanned the hammer on the single-action revolver rapidly, firing from the hip. The M1911 hit the desk. The hammer on the Peacemaker clicked down on an empty chamber.

  Somehow he’d hit all three of the entering gunmen. With six rounds, fanning, firing from the hip, admittedly at close range, he’d hit all three, as it mattered in a gunfight.

  ‘Can you see me now, Bat?’ he said to himself and smiled, and then he staggered back and sat down hard in his chair. The one in the gut hurt the most but he was sure it was the round in the chest that would kill him. Breathing was difficult, like there was some kind of obstruction to it.

  All the warrior philosophy was bullshit. Eight dead young men scattered around his house, sent by cowards, proved that. If he had managed, somehow, amongst all that bloodshed, to be a decent man then that was something his father had taught him. It hadn’t come from a book. But he had taken two things away from all that bullshit. Sometimes questioning and disobedience were the most patriotic things that you could do. The Founding Fathers had taught him that.

  He could hear vehicles skidding to a halt outside. Footsteps, running. There was shouting outside.

  The second thing: when a samurai disagreed with his daimyo, his lord, the ultimate protest he could make was to take his own life. This ritual form of suicide by disembowelment was called seppuku.

  That was bullshit as well, Barclay thought as shaking fingers managed to put one more round into the Peacemaker. I just want to make the decision on how I go out. He had never felt that anybody owed him anything, not the country, not the people, not the marines, not the government – well, maybe the government sometimes – but as a reward for more than thirty years of service: frankly, this sucks ass.

  As he put the barrel of the gun to his head and cocked the hammer he thought about Susan. He thought about his father.

  They burst into his office brandishing weapons and shouting. There had always been shouting in his life, ever since he’d joined the Corps anyway.

  ‘Semper Fidelis,’ he told them. He squeezed the trigger.

  None of them noticed his final act of “treason’. The camera in the plant pot in the corner, broadcasting to the Macronet.

  ‘There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I’ll swear I can’t see it that way.’

  William Barclay “Bat” Masterton, New York City, 1921

  Refuse/Resist

  HMS Robin Hood, Shakedown Run, Atlantic Ocean, off the Eastern Seaboard, 2034

  Captain Cyrus Harper stared at the hardcopy of the order. He glanced over at the holographic image of the target. He could see the thermal imagery of the forces gathering amongst the ruins of Yonkers. He also noticed that part of the image had been redacted. The part of the image that would have shown exactly what was going on NY. The image had been shot from orbit. He guessed it had been shot by one of the CELL satellites linked to the Archangel orbital weapons platform. Why didn’t they just use that? the cowardly part of him wondered.

  ‘Sir,’ his executive officer Commander Stevens demanded. ‘We have our orders.’ Harper looked up at his XO. The man was tall, very thin and had a predatory aspect to his features. This had earned him the nickname “the ghoul” amongst the men. He was one of the breed of men that Harper had come to think of as “corporate” officers.

  Next to his XO was Lieutenant Zinah Talpur, the commander of the small complement of Royal Marines on the Robin Hood. She looked less than pleased to be involved in this. Not so long ago, it seemed, an XO would have never dared to question – let along try and strong-arm – his captain like this, but things had changed. The navy had been privatised. The CELL Corporation, the monopolistic economic superpower in its own right, had bought the military from an increasingly close-to-bankrupt country.

  Many of the officers in the navy had attempted to resign their commission only to find that their “contract terms” had changed. Harper hadn’t been one of them, but then the maiden voyage of the HMS Robin Hood was going to be his last voyage. He had joined at the turn of the century. Now in his mid-fifties, they would either try and give him a desk job or assign him to a training post. The latter appealed more than the former but neither appealed enough for him to stay. He had not renewed his term of service before the buyout. He was still able to leave. The Navy was, if nothing else, an enormous bureaucracy. Once something was done it was very
difficult to undo it.

  ‘Sir!’ His XO was even more insistent now. Harper’s eyes flickered up to see him. He had not liked Stevens from the moment he had met him. He didn’t like his attitude, his style of command or the way he treated the men. He could see the hunger in the XO’s eyes. CELL ownership meant opportunities for the right kind of people. Stevens wanted Harper to refuse the order from their new owners, the order to fire on another sovereign nation to secure corporate interests, so he could take command. For him, career advancement was more important than anything else, even honour.

  Harper, however, had misgivings. He didn’t care if the American government had okayed it. He didn’t care that it would be part of what passed for a combined-arms operation under the auspices of CELL. A company with this amount of power didn’t sit right with him. He had always assumed that anti-capitalist sentiments were for hippies and dropouts who couldn’t or wouldn’t play the game. Now he was less sure. CELL seemed like capitalism taken to such extremes it had started to resemble feudalism. That said, he had never disobeyed an order in his life and he wasn’t keen to start now.

  ‘Mr Stevens. I don’t know who you have served under before, but I am not in the habit of having my XO bark at me,’ Harper began.

  ‘Sir, it is my . . .’

  ‘Or indeed interrupt me. I have received the orders. We are still more than seventeen hours away from the point at which they will need to be acted on. I fail to see why you are here acting this way. In fact, I could do with an extremely good reason why I shouldn’t have you removed from duty and confined to quarters. Lieutenant Talpur, frankly I expected better of you.’ The young Pakistani woman at least had the decency to look guilty. Harper was less than pleased when he noticed that Stevens had his sidearm at his hip.

  ‘Sir, you do not have the authority to remove me from command,’ Stevens said, a little too smugly for Harper’s taste.

  Captain Harper’s anger moved like a thundercloud across his face.

  ‘Why? Has God come on board in the last five minutes?’

  ‘Sir, these are decisions being made at board level by CELL command. They feel that you may not be prepared to properly execute their orders.’

  ‘And I wonder where they got that opinion from?’ Harper demanded. His reply was one of Steven’s thin, evil little smiles. That was it. He turned to Talpur.

  ‘Lieutenant, do you still recognise me as Captain of this ship or are you in mutiny as well?’

  ‘Now just a minute!’ Stevens objected.

  ‘You, sir, will remain quiet!’ Harper shouted. He rarely raised his voice.

  ‘Yes, Captain, but . . .’

  ‘Mr Stevens, you are relieved of command. Lieutenant, escort Mr Stevens to his quarters and confine him there.’

  ‘Mr Stevens,’ Lieutenant Talpur said, gesturing towards the door. He turned to look down at the much smaller woman.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?!’ he demanded.

  ‘Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be please, sir.’

  Stevens swung round to face Harper again.

  ‘You’re going to pay for this!’ he spat.

  ‘Another word and you’re confined in the brig. Lieutenant, relieve Mr Stevens of his sidearm, please. Leave it on my desk and escort him out of here.’

  The lieutenant removed Steven’s M12 Nova from his holster and laid it on the Captain’s desk. She all but had to drag the protesting XO out of Harper’s stateroom.

  Harper sagged in his chair as soon as the door closed. He had lost his temper and he knew it. He had let the evil little shit get under his skin and he had done something rash.

  He glanced over at the half-full bottle of good whiskey next to the model of the 55-gun ship-of-the-line HMS Prince Royal. He desperately wanted a drink but knew he wouldn’t succumb to the desire. Not this time.

  Any kind of ruckus of this nature on a Royal Navy ship meant a serious black mark on everyone involved’s record. The problem was he didn’t appear to be in the Royal Navy anymore. It seemed that they were even going to change the name of the ships. They would no longer be His Majesty’s Ships.

  He glanced in the mirror over the sink in his cramped stateroom. He was tall, craggy, and had a hooked nose, which along with his eyebrows gave him a bird-of-prey-like appearance. Despite having waged constant war against middle-aged spread he normally thought that he was doing well for his age. Today he just looked tired, tired and old. He cursed this so-called “anti-CELL” resistance movement. If only they had left it another month before starting, he would have been out of the navy.

  He could understand why CELL wanted some assurances that he would follow orders when the time came. If he balked at the last moment it could really mess up their plans. CELL had a lot of influence with the US government and although they had managed to buy the US Marines, which effectively had its own navy and air force, it had not bought the US Navy. The HMS Robin Hood was their best hope for a naval bombardment in the area. Though why they hadn’t chosen to use what had been, until recently, the US marines was beyond him.

  Most of the conflicts that Harper had served in during his thirty years had been so-called low intensity conflicts: Iraq, the London Emergency, Sri Lanka, Columbia, even dealing with Ceph nests. Too many of them had involved him firing guns or missiles into civilian centres. Next to none of them had been stand-up fights. Once again his targets were ‘terrorists’. He knew that Yonkers had mostly been evacuated when CELL had effectively annexed New York in the wake of the Ceph invasion. On a conceptual level, Harper still had problems with an alien invasion of New York.

  The problem was, he knew the people he was being asked to bombard. Not personally, though it wouldn’t surprise him if there were a few familiar faces amongst them. But these were the same people he had known all his life. They were military people. He had served with their like. He understood why they were fighting. They were angry about the stranglehold that CELL’s energy monopoly had on the world and their privatisation of the militaries of a number of different nations.

  He knew his orders were wrong, but he’d known orders had been wrong in the past. He had been aboard HMS Anguish when her Captain had been ordered to fire on south London in the face of widescale social disorder. That had been wrong. He’d spent the next four years as a functional alcoholic as a result of watching the south London skyline burn.

  More than once he had questioned orders to fire on civilian population bases in Sri Lanka. By questioned he meant internally, of course, not out loud. He couldn’t afford to not play the game, not in His Majesty’s Navy. Not if he wanted a career.

  At least he knew that he would be firing at soldiers who were under arms and intent on violence. He just wasn’t sure he disagreed with them. Just like he didn’t want to be taking orders from a rapacious multinational company.

  Just one more month. Rachel and he had intended on using what was left of their savings, the little they had managed to protect in this apparently never-ending recession, and their paltry pensions to buy a place in Dorset. She would continue to teach, he was hoping to get work as a consultant for companies with ship building contracts with the navy.

  He slumped in the chair and looked at the whiskey again. He knew what the easy option was. He knew what he owed Rachel, particularly after she had stood by him after the London emergency. After all, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t bombarded cities from the sea before.

  What he needed was intelligence. The problem was that he was the only one he trusted with gathering the information. He didn’t want to leave the ship – in fact, it could be seen as treason – but he was running out of options. Actually, you old fool, you still have two, you just don’t like them, he thought. He didn’t trust his new employers. The Royal Navy wasn’t meant to be the enforcement arm of a multinational corporation. He needed to know more about the armed insurrection. The resistance wouldn’t risk their comms discipline to speak to him. That left speaking to them face-to-face, and the only person he fully
trusted to do that was himself. He told himself that it was because he wanted to make an informed decision. He stood up and left his cramped cabin.

  Harper reflected that he had a love-hate relationship with the HMS Robin Hood as he made his way towards the bridge through the ship’s narrow corridors. It was a superb vessel. It had a trimaran hull that incorporated SWATH – Small Waterplane Area Triple Hull – technology to minimise the ship’s volume at the surface area of the sea, where it would encounter resistance from wave energy. This meant reduced acoustic and wake signatures, which added to the vessel’s stealth capabilities. It also made the guided-missile stealth destroyer very fast. During test runs they had managed to get the ship up to speeds of just under sixty knots.

  It packed a punch as well, even though its stealth properties precluded it from having the main gun that many other ships of its class were armed with. It had been designed as a near-invisible missile platform, a surface ship with comparable stealth capabilities to a submarine. Although without a main gun, it was armed with two fully automated 30mm Bushmaster auto-cannons and two rotary, radar guided, 20mm Phalanx close-in weapon systems designed to shoot down incoming missiles. As well as air defence missiles and ship-to-ship torpedoes it also carried 24 CVS401 Perseus multi-role cruise missiles.

  Its inward sloping, or tumblehome, hull design, its lack of vertical surfaces or right angles and its construction out of hardened, molecular-bonded carbon fibre all added to a reduced radar cross section as well as reducing its heat and sonar signature.

  However, the most impressive aspect was the cloak. An array close to the stern of the ship was capable of projecting a lensing field that bent light around the ship. This effectively made the Robin Hood invisible when it was stationary or travelling at speeds below twenty knots, and significantly obscured views of the ship at speeds in excess of twenty knots.

  Harper had had to see it before he believed it. He was still less than convinced that the cloak wasn’t going to give the entire crew cancer. Allegedly developed from technology derived from the US government’s Project Rainbow, a smaller version of the cloak was rumoured to have been utilised by US special forces operators in the Pacific during the Lingshan incident and again in New York during the Ceph incursion.