‘Stop killing my men, you bastard!’ he screamed.
‘Captain, they’re trying to kill us,’ Dane said, reasonably.
‘I don’t care! No more killing! Do you understand me?’
Dane shrugged.
‘Sure, there’s no need to shout.’
Harper climbed to his feet. It was only then that he realised how astonished he was to be alive.
‘You need to get out of those clothes, Captain,’ Dane told him. ‘And I don’t think that the Browning’s going to fire now.’
Harper stared at his service weapon for a moment as he collected himself.
‘Can you still cloak?’ Dane nodded. ‘Do so and watch the hatches.’ It took moments for Harper to find a towel and some clean clothes in one of the lockers. He stripped, towelled himself dry and changed as quickly as he could. He was dressed as an able seaman now, and the only shoes he could find that came close to fitting him were a pair of garishly coloured trainers.
People came into the boat bay. He heard shouted orders, a brief burst of gunfire that made him jump and then duck for cover. This was followed by the sounds of physical violence and some unpleasant snapping noises.
Harper emerged from behind the lockers to see Dane standing over three battered and mostly unconscious ratings lying on the deck.
‘It might have been useful to interrogate one of them,’ Harper suggested.
‘You’re a very hard man to please,’ Dane replied calmly.
Harper relieved one of them of their M12 Nova sidearm and some spare magazines. He pointed at the opposite hatch to the one the sailors had just come through.
‘That way.’
Dane moved in front of the Captain. Harper watched as the lensing field bent light around the armoured figure and seemed to swallow him. There was a slight disturbance in Harper’s vision if he looked hard enough, presumably due to the movement, but otherwise he could see straight through Dane’s armoured form as if it wasn’t there.
A rating came round the corner. He saw the captain and started bringing his SCAR to bear. The SCAR was yanked up as the sailor was beaten into the bulkhead by an invisible force. The gun disappeared, enveloped by the cloak’s lensing field. Another sailor opened a hatch and peeked out, a pistol in his hand. He was yanked out of the hatch and flung into the opposite wall, before being slammed into the ground.
Oh well, at least they’re not dead, Harper thought.
They turned the corner. Two sailors were waiting for them. When Harper saw the muzzle flash from the barrels of the SCARs he knew he was dead. He raised his arm up pointlessly to ward off the bullets. The automatic weapons fire was deafening in the confined corridor. He heard a grunt of pain and felt something stumble against him. Dane became visible again. The armour changed. Harper actually heard the sound of plates sliding across each other. Dane started striding forward. The front of his armour was wreathed in sparks as the sailors panic fired at the strange figure. He reached the two sailors and Harper watched as the armoured figure did something unspeakably violent to both of them. Harper was transfixed for a moment and then remembered what he was doing. As the last of the shots stopped ringing in his ears he realised he was hearing shouts.
He tried opening the door to Lieutenant Talpur’s cabin and found it locked.
‘Dane, if you would,’ Harper said. The armoured figure stalked back down the corridor and tore the lock out of the door.
‘Sir?’ A slightly surprised looking Lieutenant Talpur said as she glanced at Dane’s armoured figure.
‘Report,’ Harper ordered.
‘Commander Stevens and a number of the junior officers have taken the ship,’ the marine lieutenant told him.
‘Lieutenant Commander Swanson?’
‘Executed for mutiny along with Sergeant Martin. Most of the crew are too frightened to do anything. Those that wouldn’t go along with him are confined to quarters under guard.’
‘How’d he get the drop on you, Lieutenant?’ Harper asked, trying to ignore the hammering and shouting from the marines’ bunk area next to the Lieutenant’s cabin as they broke through the locked door.
‘Unbeknown to me, Stevens had a key to the armoury. He armed his supporters. Those of my men on duty found themselves confronted with a lot of armed matelots. Those off duty were caught unawares. Nobody wanted to start shooting in the ship.’
Not the Royal Marines’ proudest moment, Harper thought. That said, there were a lot more sailors on-board than there were marines.
‘Lieutenant, I need to know where you stand and I need to know right now.’
‘Sir, did you not hear me correctly? He executed Sergeant Martin.’
Harper nodded. Dane handed her the SCAR as the marines kicked their way out of their bunk area. The remaining twenty men and women of the platoon started spilling out. The first two grabbed the guards’ SCARs and spare magazines.
‘Stevens’ people have all the weapons,’ Talpur told him. Dane told some of the marines where they could find more SCARs, those that he had left littered around the ship. A few of them headed off to collect the weapons.
‘This Stevens?’ Dane asked.
‘Him you can kill,’ Harper said grimly, thinking about the promising young Lieutenant Commander and the marine sergeant who were now dead. ‘I want no unnecessary firing, Lieutenant.’
‘Describe necessary, sir?’ one of the marines who was armed, a young woman, asked. Harper thought he heard Dane chuckle.
‘Where possible I want to speak to them,’ Harper said. The marines looked to Talpur.
‘Sir, with all due respect I’m not going to needlessly endanger my people. If they are at risk, taking fire, then they’re damn well going to shoot back.’
‘I said where possible.’
‘So they’re allowed to kill the sailors?’ Dane asked.
‘Yes, they’re not bloody Americans. Now lead the way and try and soak up some of the gunfire.’
Stevens had, of course, secured the bridge. Ratings loyal to him had barricaded the approaches and were using open hatches as cover. Harper had his back to one of the bulkheads. He, Lazy Dane and the marines were hiding round the corner from one of the three corridors that lead to the bridge.
‘We need to assault the corridor, sir,’ Talpur told him.
‘I can clear it,’ Dane told him.
‘Wait, both of you,’ he said. ‘You men, listen to me. This is your Captain speaking. I don’t know what Lieutenant Commander Stevens has told you, but he is a mutineer who has murdered two members of this crew. Anyone aiding him is also a mutineer. I will show leniency if you put down your weapons now and surrender immediately. If you do not then you will be dealt with by a platoon of very angry Royal Marines who are looking for revenge for the death of one of their own. You may get some of us, though I think it unlikely. You will all, very certainly, die.’
He waited. He could hear talking.
‘We’re coming out. Don’t shoot.’
Harper nodded, relieved. The sailors were roughly manhandled, relieved of their weapons, cable tied and left lying face down.
‘We need a plan to assault the bridge,’ Lieutenant Talpur said. ‘Shit!’ Harper just strode up the corridor.
‘Don’t fire. I’m coming in!’ the Captain shouted and stepped onto the bridge.
‘I like him,’ Dane said to the appalled-looking marine Lieutenant.
Harper walked onto the bridge, all eyes on him. There were a dozen sailors in here with SCARs pointed at him. The cadaverous form of Stevens was stood in front of the Captain’s seat, pointing a pistol at the Captain.
‘Drop the weapon, Harper,’ Stevens said.
Harper looked down at the pistol. He had forgotten it was there.
‘It’s Captain Harper, Commander Stevens.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We don’t have much time. Put your weapons down now,’ he told the armed ratings.
‘They are under orders from their new Captain. You, on the other hand, are guilty of mutiny!’
‘Guilty? What, no court martial? And you have replaced me as Captain on what authority?’
‘Orders from our new . . .’
‘Owners! Son, the closest thing the Navy has to an owner is His Majesty the King. Did he tell you to mutiny?’
‘Like it or not old man, things change. The government, our actual employers, have sold us . . .’
‘Then the government has failed! We are the Royal Navy, we serve, we defend the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Our only consideration is the best interests of those people. Those interests will not be served as the maritime enforcement arm of a rapacious multinational company, responsible for a number of atrocities and reintroducing indentured servitude to the civilised world.’
‘So what? We make up our own orders, become little more than pirates guided by Captain Harper’s morals? The same morals you had, presumably, when as the ranking weapons officer on board the Anguish you fired on your own capital city?’ Stevens demanded.
Harper closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered Battersea Power Station backlit by flames, but he pushed it down. He couldn’t afford to dwell on that now, to falter.
‘Stevens, we’re British. We ruled the sea. We have a proud history of piracy.’ There were a few chuckles from around the bridge. ‘And the most important thing any officer possesses is a conscience. The world knows full well of the horrors of military men forgetting that. You know that this order is wrong. You know that working for CELL is wrong. You know that killing Lieutenant Commander Swanson and Sergeant Martin was wrong. And you know you’re not doing this out of any sense of duty. You’re doing this because you know that you will be rewarded for it.’
Harper had noticed that the majority of the sailors had lowered their weapons now. Stevens was still aiming his pistol at Harper, however.
‘I’m not an officer anymore, sir,’ he all but spat. ‘I’m an executive.’ He started to squeeze the trigger. Then the gun wasn’t there anymore, and neither was his hand. There was only a bleeding stump. Stevens looked at his wrist in horror. Dane flickered into view holding a large and very sharp knife with a bloody blade.
‘Get that corporate piece of shit off my ship,’ Harper ordered. Dane thought about refusing – strictly speaking Harper wasn’t in his chain of command – but he grabbed the now howling Stevens and started dragging him off the bridge.
Talpur and the rest of the marines poured into the bridge and started removing weapons from the sailors.
‘Lieutenant, can you please let the rest of the men out of their quarters?’ Talpur nodded and took six of the marines with her, leaving the rest to secure the bridge and finish disarming the sailors who had been watching the other entrances.
‘Any of you who do not wish to follow my orders, please leave the bridge now.’ A number of ratings and officers left their stations, but not so many that the ship wouldn’t be able to function. ‘Navigation, set a course for the Atlantic by the most expeditious route possible that doesn’t involve going past Manhattan. Engineering, keep the cloak up. Helm, as soon as we are in open water I want fifty knots out of her.’ He was giving these orders as he walked across to weapons, glancing at his watch. They had little time left.
The commander of the weapons section was standing up as Harper arrived at his station.
‘Lieutenant Chalmers?’ Harper asked.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Chalmers said. He wouldn’t meet his Captain’s eye.
‘Get off my bridge,’ Harper ordered, disappointed. He turned to the second in command of the section. The petty officer had not moved. He handed the man the laminated map. ‘You have ten minutes to plot firing solutions for those co-ordinates. Can you do that, Bridges?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘No, no, please god no!’ Stevens begged as Dane dragged him through the corridors of the ship. Dane stopped and turned to the Commander.
‘Seriously, you have to come to terms with this. This is no good for you. This is the fulfilment of your dharma, it’s a shitty dharma for sure, but you need to deal. This,’ he pointed at the sobbing man. ‘This is no good, there’s no dignity here for either of us.’
Stevens just gaped at him and then started crying and begging again. Dane sighed and resumed hauling the Commander through the ship.
Dane dragged Stevens up onto deck just as the hatches to the vertical launch systems were opened, revealing the warheads of the twenty-four Perseus cruise missiles.
‘There’s a beauty in the focused purpose of a weapon like that,’ Dane said. He kept a tight grip on Stevens as he watched the Bronx riverside go by. He watched it until the sight of all the ghosts got to him and he had to look away.
‘Please, please, I can tell you something?’ Stevens begged.
Dane turned to look at him.
‘Think of something good to say, man,’ Dane said.
‘They knew that Harper might be problematic and they were worried about him absconding with a ship that has the Robin Hood’s stealth capabilities. They knew I would be loyal . . .’
‘Harper’s loyal. You can be bought.’
‘They gave me a transponder,’ Stevens told him.
The suit was picking up lots of strange atmospheric readings, as if the air was ionising. They know where we are, Dane thought. He looked up. The clouds. They looked funny. Then they caught fire. He jumped. Everything became light and heat.
Dane jumped through steam and hit the molten riverbed of the East River. Then the water came back. He realised he had been screaming. The armour on his back, made from nearly indestructible alloys, had blistered and then turned molten and then fused with his flesh. All the times he’d fallen, been shot, stabbed, beaten, battered, run over. All the times that it had felt like he had died, none of it compared to this. This was pain in its purest form. Pain so extreme that it was an abstract. He was only conscious because of the suit’s advanced medical systems. No human had ever experienced this degree of pain before. Then, mercifully, he died.
The suit forced him back to life minutes later. The water all around him was boiling from the heat of the armour. He died again.
The suit had to block signals from a lot of his nerve endings before it could shock the soldier back to life with the built-in defibrillator. Dane came to again on the side of the river, amongst the ghosts. He did some more screaming but managed to get it under control. He lay in the mud, making it steam. He looked back upstream. The East River was moving quickly, trying to replace the gap where a significant part of the river had just been vaporised. Plumes of steam were still shooting high into the sky. The suit was repairing itself, separating away from Dane’s flesh and doing its best to return to a functional state.
The thing was they had missed, he thought, when he could think like a human again. The Robin Hood was gone, certainly. More ghosts. But had it been a direct hit he would never have survived, armour or not.
In the distance, the suit’s enhanced hearing brought him the sound of rapid large-calibre weapons fire. New York, he thought, I have to get to New York.
The Goat
Chinatown, New York, 2034
FUBAR. Clusterfuck. There were so many good ways to describe what had just happened to them, Chino thought. The Brits, the fucking Brits, had let them down. Left them badly blowing in the wind. It had been foolish to trust them.
CELL had played it smart. Let them come in to the city proper. Let them get in underneath the framework of the dome they were building over the city destroyed by the Ceph incursion. Then the CELL gun emplacements had started up. They’d torn into people on the street. The rounds had ripped through cover. The fire had been so intense it had brought buildings down on top of the resistance fighters inside.
The gun emplacements broke them, split them, sent them running. Then CELL moved in on the ground, supported by VTOLs and helicopter gunships in the air. Their spec ops teams had gone after the resistance’s hard core and the leadership. The rest they had left to the rank and file. What they used to
call contractors, now they were more like indentured gunmen. The resistance fighters, most of whom were experienced soldiers, many with special forces backgrounds, tore into the CELL gunmen, but there were just so many of them and they had air and fire support.
The resistance had been broken. Chino knew that. He didn’t know who was alive or who was dead. Had any been captured? It hadn’t looked like CELL were taking prisoners. They had risked checking the Macronet feed when they’d been hiding. There were purges going on all over the word. CELL forces assisted by local police and military were arresting or killing the so-called “terrorists” in every country the resistance operated in. It looked like they had been betrayed. They had put too many of their eggs in one basket. Put too much trust in people they shouldn’t have. The operation had been too much about hope and not enough about their actual capabilities. CELL were never going to let them get close to their NY operation. They had far too much to lose here.
And his man Dane hadn’t come back from the Robin Hood. He wondered if the Brits had fucked him too. Betrayed him. Handed him over to CELL. In the cold nights to come, Chino was going to keep himself warm by thinking about what he would like to do to Captain fucking-Harper of the Royal-fucking-Navy. What kind of candy-assed outfit calls itself ‘royal’ anyway, he wondered bitterly, delusions of fucking grandeur, is what that is?
They had spent the day lying low. They had hidden in partially destroyed buildings. It had made Chino nervous. The last time he had been in Manhattan it had been crawling with dangerous alien killing machines. CELL had apparently cleared all the Ceph out. That was their justification for the heavy-duty gun emplacements, not that they really needed an excuse. They owned New York now.
There were eight of them still together, in two inflatable raiding craft. They were making their way down the Bowery heading south for the time being. CELL would expect them to run to the north, so they hadn’t. They would either double back or find another exfiltration route when the opportunity presented itself.
Crysis: Escalation Page 15