Crysis: Legion (5 page)

So this is how it is. No cutesy musical sign language, no guys with bumpy foreheads saying
Resistance Is Futile
or
Kneel Before Zod
, no sexy alien hive queens keeping our hero busy with butt sex while her minions turn our children into veal cutlets. No small talk at all, unless you count the sound it makes when it sees me:
kind of a stuttering hollow croak, like a cheap voice synthesizer trying to gargle.

And then ET
brings
it, motherfucker.

In that first second I’m surprised by how human it looks. Sure, the legs have too many joints and the arms don’t have any—more like segmented tentacles with hands, like Doc Ock from Spider-Man—but there’s two of each, right where they’re supposed to be. Kind of a helmet on top with two compound clusters of orange lights where you’d expect eyes. It’s all metal, though, so I’m thinking either
robot
or
armor
.

And then it fires, point-blank, and I’m flat on my back and I should be dead but I’m not. In the next second it’s on me like a fucking panther and I can see the meat
inside
all that metal: grayish, translucent, like a jellyfish. Dim brownish orange blobs deep inside that have to be organs, four thick fleshy tentacles flailing out the back. And one part of me’s thinking
What the hell kind of armor leaves your guts exposed
, but another part’s thinking
Those guts are the last thing you’re ever gonna see, asshole
—because I’m already
down
, man, without firing a shot, it caught me flat-footed and flipped me like a bug on its back. And it should be game over right there, but then it just—

Hesitates. Bobs its head, or whatever you call that wedge-shaped thing with the lights. We almost get the sense it’s sniffing the air, trying to get a fix on some strange new smell. And that little hesitation, that one or two seconds’ grace—that’s enough for a comeback. We grab that fucker by the horns, we jam—

I
, of course. I mean
I
.

I grab that fucker by the horns, I jam my pistol into the gray goo and start firing. The thing pulls away, makes this
whistling
sound—cold, winter-wind sound—and I’m back up just like
that
, the alien brings its weapon up again but I block, I jab, I don’t even think about it. The suit’s got its own reflexes, force multipliers,
motion
multipliers. Turns a flinch into a right hook. It barely waits for me to move before responding, I could almost swear it’s moving
me
. I lift that alien motherfucker over my head and pitch it off the roof like I was throwing a Hacky Sack.

So much for the bogeyman, bitch. So much for the monster under the bed. So much for the thing in the closet.

I don’t know what Prophet was going on about. This suit is fucking
awesome
.

Of course, if I’d known what the suit could do up front I wouldn’t have bothered going upstairs in the first place. I would’ve just punched my way through a wall. Live and learn.

So now I’m alone on the roof. Sun’s high, midmorning. The clouds have blown away but the world smolders and flickers around me like fucking Gehenna; I can see little fires guttering all over the lawn. I can see a couple of tanks, too, neither in what you’d call pristine condition. One’s burning; the other’s been
flipped on its back. Some green statue of a horse-mounted soldier surveys the wreckage, one of those memorials they always put up after we’ve kicked ass in someone else’s backyard.

No sign of the bogeyman. Which means it walked away from my bullets, the beating I laid on it, and a three-story fall. Tough little fucker after all, gelatin constitution notwithstanding.

And of course there’s still that glowing little To-Do list hanging in the air off my left eye,
89 SOUTH ST #17, NEW YORK, NY
. A little blue hexagon floats in front of me, a magic compass that always seems to points to
SOUTH ST
no matter where I turn. Even gives me a range to go with the bearing. I saccade the icon.

Manhattan glows in blocky top-down Mercator over in the lower-left corner of the BUD. I’m still in Battery Park. Hell, I’m
barely
in Battery Park, I’m still on the waterfront. Old customs warehouse, according to the database. Just to the east the park ends and the city begins; someone’s put up a big wall keeping one from the other, massive interlocking dominoes of raw cement topped with razor wire. On the other side, halfway up a thirty-floor apartment building, someone’s strung graffitied sheets between two balconies:
HELP
US
.

I head down.

A lot to learn about this second skin. Fortunately it comes with a default training-wheels mode, shows me dropdown menus, nifty little options for maxing armor or boosting speed. I make my way through a wasteland ravaged by an enemy that travels among the fucking
stars
, learning to crawl. Waypoint icons and luminous threads guide me through all the craters and corpses.

More icons flicker at the corner of my eye: comm interface, if I’m reading them right. Sure enough, False Prophet pipes up a moment later: The whole park’s been locked down, he tells me. High-voltage perimeter, limited access, unmanned smart guns at every gate programmed to shoot first and never ask questions.
Even in these nanothreads I might not make it through, not in my current—
suboptimal condition
, is the way he puts it.

The waypoints shake themselves into a new configuration, detour me through an ancient circular structure across the park. Castle Clinton, the database says. The only way out. I’ve never heard of the place. I barely even remember the president.

Remember, I’m still a virgin when it comes to the local politics. I know things are fucked generally, but I still don’t know how completely fucked things are for me personally. I’m still living in some cozy little fantasy world where I show up at the nearest checkpoint, write my serial number on the wall with a grease pencil, and get an escort to Nathan Gould’s front door by way of a Mobile Infirmary. I’m still thinking these aliens—wherever they’re from, whatever they’re here for—have at least inspired us to forget our petty differences and unite against the common enemy. Surely we’re all allies now, if not bosom buddies.

But the N2’s got its own comm center, and it’s not only smart enough to decrypt your freqs, but also smart enough to figure out which specific chatter is mission-relevant. I’m really impressed when it first starts doing that—I had no idea our voice-rec tech was anywhere
near
that good—but my waregasm evaporates the moment I realize that you’re all trying to kill me.

Actually you’re all trying to kill Prophet, but you don’t know that he’s saved you the trouble and the hit is out on anyone in a high-tech muscle suit. Apparently it’s a “biohazard.” Lockhart says so. I’ve never heard of this Lockhart but he seems to be calling the shots. It sounds like most of the grunts on the ground would be gunning for me anyway; judging by the chatter, Prophet’s taken out more of them than the aliens have.

I don’t know how much of this is gospel and how much is bullshit. It would be nice if False Prophet’s eavesdropping skills were up to providing a little context, but it just routes me the
raw feeds without comment. All I know is, I’m not going to be shaking hands with any of these guys on the way out. Maybe I can hole up somewhere, call in, try and work things out from a safe distance. I clear my throat experimentally; I try a few words. Nothing comes out. Oh. Right.

I wonder how you say
don’t shoot
in Semaphore.

Cobalt Four isn’t calling in. They’re blaming that on Prophet, too. Cobalt Seven calls in fresh bodies from the waterline: More of those marine special ops, they say. No more survivors. That would be my squad, you assholes, and I know for a fact that whatever else Prophet may have done before we traded lives, he had nothing to do with—

Wait a second: No
more
survivors.

If someone else from my squad made it out we could get this straightened out in no time. Castle Clinton it is.

There are pieces on the ground. Oh, look: a Jackal semi-auto, barely used. That could come in handy. Oh, look: the arm and torso of the guy who barely used it. It is not wearing an army uniform. Not real army, anyway.

CELL. CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics.

I know these guys. Psychopathic mall cops with a bigger weapons allowance than most medium-sized countries. They make Xi look downright patriotic. Who the fuck put
them
in charge?

By now I’m picking my way through a field of flattened tents and plastic urine-colored Quonset huts, EMAC logos and red crosses stenciled onto their sides. I poke my head into one: a few stripped cots, a toppled IV pole. Sheets balled up in a corner, stained with blood and snot.

Castle Clinton squats just past the ghost camp like a red-brick mesa. It’s ancient and it’s seen better days, but for the time being it’s still standing. I approach from behind. A woman talks somewhere in the distance—the kind of soothing vacuous voice you
hear over PA systems in shopping malls—but I can’t hear what she’s saying over all the comm chatter about how everyone’s going to frag the shit out of me the moment I show my face.

Bootsteps, crunching just around the bend. I duck behind another war memorial—big granite cookie-cutter, this time—a moment before he comes into view. He’s got the head of a spider with glowing orange eyes, one of those full-face helmets with the quadroptic lenses and the built-in respirator. He obviously thinks he’s some serious lethal hotshot, but he’s got so many belts of flashbangs and bullets wrapped around him he looks more like a vending machine than a killing machine. He unbuckles the gear around his waist and unzips for a piss against the wall. I figure now might be a good time to try out the N2’s cloaking option. I sacc’ the icon and watch my hands melt away into the background.

Not just my hands. Not just me. The shotgun I just scavenged melts away as well.

It takes a moment for that to sink in. I haven’t worn a cloak since Annapolis but I know the tech: fast-fractal pattern-matching, Bayesian wraparounds. Same basic thing an octopus does when it wants to blend in. But this Jackal doesn’t pack a cloak, and neither do the ammo and supply clips I’ve scrounged, and
all
of that’s just turned clearer than glass. The only thing I know that could do that even in theory would be some kind of lensing field, and anything that could bend light around
that
much volume would need the magnets from a cyclotron to shape the field and a CAESAR reactor to power it.

What the
fuck
kind of secret lab did this suit come out of?

I step out from behind the memorial (
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER
, the plaque says; Hey Roger, what are the odds?) just as the merc zips up and turns around. He looks right through me, turns on his heel, and ambles innocently back the way he came.

I almost let it go to my head. I almost miss the little shrinking bar down in the lower-right corner of my eye, don’t notice it at all until the whole readout goes red. By the time I clue in I’m already starting to cast a shadow. I barely get back behind the cookie-cutter in time.

The Urinating Soldier hesitates, looks back over his shoulder. Grunts. Keeps going.

So. How long did that last: twenty seconds, thirty? No such thing as a free lunch. The power bar’s creeping back, though. The cloak recharges.

Someone screams.

No:
Parchman
screams. My squadmate screams. And then he stops. And in between there’s a gunshot.