Crysis: Legion (34 page)

I don’t knock.

The doors
creak
as they swing inward. They
grind
. You’d think that someone of Hargreave’s means would have been able to afford a can of WD-40.

Then again, maybe there’s no point. Maybe these doors don’t get used enough to matter.

Not just a room, through those doors. A cathedral. The great hall of some museum. A library. An endless carpet, three meters wide and red as clay, runs down the center of this vast space. On either side, rows of marble columns hold up dark skylights twenty meters overhead; suits of armor stand between them, mounted in glass cabinets. Massive bookshelves rise along one wall, barely visible in the dim distance; dark draperies go up forever on another.

“Theseus, at last. Welcome.”

His voice does not crackle over comm. It
booms
. It fills the room.

Breakers
chunk
overhead. The lights come on. The glowing face of Jacob Hargreave, four meters high, smiles sadly down on me from overtop a wall-sized map of the planet: an old Eckert projection in faded yellow and pale blue.

Not armor in those glass cases, I see now. Nanosuits. Prototypes. Antiques in their own right, even now; Moore’s law makes everything new old again.

“Scant reward for so much effort, eh. Crack the labyrinth, and you would at least expect to see the Minotaur before it kills you.”

Dwarfed by map and monitor, someone has arranged half a dozen overstuffed antique chairs around a massive wooden desk. Its surface is smooth and polished and utterly empty.

“Ah well, it seems only fair. Come, then. Masks off.”

The sound of old machinery, grinding into gear.

“I am here.”

The map on the wall splits down the center and pulls apart like drawn curtains. There is only one antique inside, and at first I do not see it.

“Shocked? I would be.”

See
him
.

“I’d revel in it, if I were you: that sudden jump of the pulse, the cram of flight-or-fight chemicals into the belly. So sweet while it lasts. But it’s been so very long since I felt any of it.”

So pristine in there, Roger. So, so
antiseptic
. Past the great chrome bars sliding back into the wall, the enameled walls
gleam;
the concentric tiles on the floor form a spiderweb with Hargreave’s capsule at the center. Life-support machinery chirps and hisses around it. Half a dozen umbilicals sprout from its ends and loop up into a low ceiling. Flatscreens scroll nutrient levels and biotelemetry like billboards running stock prices.

There’s a window in that capsule. It runs nearly the whole length of the cylinder; it leaves nothing to the imagination. The capsule is full of yellow-green liquid, like a public swimming pool too many six-year-olds have pissed in. The thing looking out from inside does not look like Jacob Hargreave. It barely even looks human.

“A century or more since my pleasures were anything but cerebral. I took the path Karl Rasch refused, the cold road to immortality.”

Its lips don’t move. The eyes above them are bright and hard as obsidian, and they don’t leave me for an instant.

“I can still hear him—cursing Tunguska and what we found there, screaming at me for a coward and a fool. I wonder which of us really was the coward.”

You ever see those bog men, Roger? On National Geographic, online, anything? The ones that died hundreds of years ago, somewhere in England or Ireland or something. Whoever killed them threw them into these peat bogs full of tannins, lignins. Natural preservatives. Bodies don’t rot in there. They shrink, they shrivel up. They turn brown and wrinkly like baked apples but they don’t rot, not for hundreds of years. You could fish them out of those bogs and they’d, they’d—

—They’d look just like Jack Hargreave, floating in his tank.

“And now so little time remaining.”

Oh, Jack. You’re not going anywhere, are you?

“I’d hoped to wear Prophet’s suit myself. Take on the weapons
he brought us, wear his armor. Enter the labyrinth and confront the Minotaur. But now …”

Hargreave’s lips move at last. They tighten, split, pull back over toothless gums. He probably thinks of it as a smile.

“You. You will have to finish what Prophet began.”

Something flickers in all this brightness. I can’t tell what it is.

“Nathan? Are you there? Are you eavesdropping on my affairs again?”

And he is: There’s his filepic, up above my left eye. There’s his voice in my ear, faint and grainy and shot through with static: “Get out of there, Alcatraz!”

“No, wait.”

That flicker again. A bad fluorescent, maybe.

“Wait,” Hargreave repeats. “You need the final piece of the puzzle. There on the desk.”

Behind me. I turn and look out into the hall.
That’s
where the flicker is coming from. Not in here, not in this bright sterile oasis. Out there, among the towering bookcases and the marble pillars and the caged Nanosuits.

“Go!” the wizard urges from behind his curtain. “Take it!”

The surface of the desk opens as I approach: Panels slide back to reveal a shallow compartment, flat-gray, soft blue light glowing from the rim of a beveled disk in its center. A wooden cigar box waits for me there. I open it.

“This is m—your destiny now, Alcatraz. Use it.”

Close, but no cigar. A loaded hypodermic syringe.

“Stick it anywhere! Are you looking for a
vein
? How can you have spent so much time in that armor and still not realize that
it knows
, Alcatraz. It knows what to do.”

And Hargreave’s right. Because good old Alcatraz would have had serious second thoughts about shooting himself up with a hypo full of Formula X, but the suit knows what it wants. SECOND knows.

We stick the needle in and plunge it down.

“Yes, there.” Hargreave’s avatar is almost purring. “The Tunguska Iteration.”

Everything goes fuzzy.

“The key to all gates …”

Everything goes black.

There in the void, Nathan Gould is with me. Whining.

“Here? They were here, in New York, all along?”

“Their dormant systems were, yes, Nathan.” Hargreave speaks slowly, patiently, as if explaining the facts of life to a special-needs child. “One of their cottages, and the quantum port facility to transmit themselves aboard. You think I’m based in this cesspit city because I
like
it here?”

Red clay carpet, going in and out of focus. Some weird pattern on it, like birds. Never noticed that before.

“Why didn’t you warn someone?”

“Warn whom, Nathan? Humanity at large? The species that has proven so bracingly honest with itself in the face of unpleasant truths? That race so quick to accept the facts about population growth and resource overconsumption and climate change? No, thank you very much, I preferred to trust only myself, and a few handpicked men.”

I’m back on my knees. I’m back on my feet.

“A few handpicked men. Right. And look what it’s brought us to. Look what you’ve done, old man. They’re
here
, you—”

“That’s right, Nathan! The owners are back—”

They are, too. I can see where that flickering is coming from now: the dark sky above those overhead panes, strobing to gray. I can see insectile shapes backlit against the clouds, scampering and leaping across the skylights. I can see the blinding blue sparks of arc-welding torches.

“—waking the systems, firing up the boiler. Back to spring-clean the old family residence, and not much liking what they’ve found festering behind the fridge.”

A Ceph gunship eclipses the moon. It hangs in the sky like a segmented crucifix, lining up the shot.

“And really. Can you blame them?”

The gunship cuts loose. All those superstrong reinforced windowpanes fall to earth in a shower of jagged glass.

Wind and rain and Ceph infantry cascade into Hargreave’s inner sanctum. The wizard on the wall welcomes them with a giddy laugh: “Ah, the angels of death at last! My escort back to human frailty! It took you long enough!”

They’re not just interested in him, though. Not judging by the fire I’m taking.

The flames are already rising. Stalkers and grunts leap across the chamber toward me like eager Dobermans. I flee up a metal staircase to a catwalk that accesses the upper reaches of all these bookshelves; it’s high ground at least, a place to shoot back from, a hill to die on. I don’t expect to find a way out but there it is, jammed into the narrow space between two bookcases: a backstage exit, an emergency stairwell, cinder-block walls and concrete steps and ventilation ducts running up the shaft like tendons.

Hargreave’s avatar urges me on: “Become Prophet! Take on his armor! Strike for your species, for humanity in all its fumbling, half-made glory! Go, go! Save us all!”

I charge up the stairs past spinning emergency beacons. The building shakes around me.

“This is Jacob Hargreave to all CELL personnel. Commander Lockhart is dead, I will be joining him shortly, and the Prism facility is wired to self-destruct. Subject Prophet is now your only hope of turning back the alien invasion. You will therefore afford him every assistance you can as you evacuate this island.”

That’s nice of him. I wonder if anyone’s listening.

Some machine—some
other
machine—starts a countdown in a cool feminine voice: “All Prism facilities will explosively self-seal in ten minutes. Your employee duties are terminated. Please exit via the indicated channels.”

Plenty of time to make it to the helipad, I’m thinking. Right up until Tara Strickland checks in to tell me that the whole damn roof’s been trashed. The Ceph have left nothing flyable up there at all. “I’m heading for the Queensboro Bridge,” she tells me. “Meet me on the far side if you can.”

The Ceph are everywhere. So are CELL, and it really doesn’t matter whether they heard Hargreave’s last orders or not; we’re all just animals in a forest fire now, all just trying to keep ahead of the flames, and there’s no predators and no prey when you’re all about to be burned alive. We run like hell; we shoot at Squids when they get in our way. Countdown Girl pops onto the channel every now and then with timely updates that
All Prism facilities will explosively self-seal
in eight minutes, seven minutes, six minutes, but it’s not like we need to be reminded. We
get
it already.

Someone says something about a service elevator, a way onto the Queensboro Bridge. I don’t know where it is and nobody’s feeding me waypoints but it’s easy enough to follow the herd. A little less easy, maybe, when the herd keeps getting thinned out from above.

The elevator turns out to be right where the bridge crosses the eastern edge of the island. Three CELL are crowded around the lower doors when I arrive, repeatedly stabbing the call button. They bring up their weapons the moment they catch sight of me; I bring up mine. We stand there waving our dicks at each other, wondering about appropriate battlefield etiquette at times like these. Countdown Girl says two minutes.

The elevator arrives. We pile in. Someone pushes U
P
, again and again and again. Someone else pushes
CLOSE DOORS
.

We start moving.

There’s one of those old speakers bolted to the frame, you know the ones that look like big square megaphones. There’s Muzak coming out of it, a Nine Inch Nails cover done entirely with violins and pan flute. Countdown Girl says one minute.

I bring up my Grendel and shoot out the speaker. One of the CELLs says, “Thanks.”

Then we’re on the bridge, and it’s every man for himself.

I’ve got every goddamn capacitor in the suit dedicated to speed—maybe twenty seconds at maximum sprint before the juice runs out. The bridge is taking fire from below, fire from above. Ceph tracers fill the air with streams of bright hyphens. The bridge is jammed with abandoned vehicles, some gutted, some still burning: cars, cube vans, semis. I think I see a pinger through the struts and girders, stalking down the oncoming lane; I
know
I see a gunship swooping in for another run.

Countdown Girl runs out of things to say.

Turns out the lady was a real mistress of understatement. The Prism facilities do not
explosively self-seal
. They blow sky-fucking-high, and they take the whole damn bridge with them.

It heaves under me, buckles in the middle. Fire boils up from below. All those great iron girders, the arches and trusses and studded yellow I-beams, crumple around me like origami. A tanker truck shoots by like a space shuttle and gets caught up in a web of burning metal. I try to keep running but I can’t even
stand
, it’s like balancing on the back of a harpooned whale. The bridge tears apart around me and I go over the edge, barely manage to catch myself on an exposed strut while an Airstream trailer sails past on its way to the river. I hang by my fingertips, too drained to haul myself back up, hoping against hope that the N2 manages to build back a charge before the spreading heat turns me to slag. I have a pretty good view of what’s left of Roosevelt Island, though. It’s hell on earth, it’s fire on the water. I can’t see
a single recognizable feature through all those flames. When they burn down—if they ever do—there won’t be anything left but a mound of glass.

Explosive self-sealing. I wonder what the zoning permits look like for that.

I don’t wonder for long, though. One of New York’s yellow cabs drops from a nest of tangled steel, bounces, rolls down a forty-degree chunk of burning asphalt, and flicks me off the bridge like a gnat.