Crysis: Escalation (14 page)

The crunching noise had probably been quite quiet. To Amanda it sounded deafening. She watched Mikey’s body jerk as if it had been nudged by someone trying to get past.
It knows
we’re here and it doesn’t give a shit,
she thought.

It was almost an automatic response. Her finger curled around the shotgun’s trigger. She squeezed. Four rounds. The hammer hitting the cartridge. The charge in the cartridge exploding. The
powder propelling electrostatically-charged ball-bearing down the barrel. A long tongue of flame from the barrel of the shotgun lit up the cave. The spent cartridge was expended from the weapon.
The same thing happened three more times.

The electrostatically-charged ball-bearings filled the air over Mikey’s corpse. Amanda was tangentially aware of the ball-bearings blowing bits out of the body.

Lightning arced around a massive, powerfully built but human-shaped figure, standing over Mikey’s body. The illusion cloaking him flickered and then failed in sparks of electricity.

The figure was wearing a suit that, to Amanda, looked like it had been made from muscle-like metallic cables in an armoured exoskeleton. Its face was covered by mask and visor. The figure was
looking between them, taking its time. Unhurried. Unworried.

‘Light it up!’ Alan shouted and started firing burst after burst from his Grendel assault rifle. Safiya and Okobe started firing as well. The multiple bullet impacts wreathed the
armoured figure in sparks. Hank hesitated but opened fire with the Mk 60. He was firing the MMG from his shoulder. Tracers and armour piercing rounds impacted into the figure. Staggering it. The
tracers were bouncing off the armour and arcing into the darkness of the cavern.

Darkness started to envelope the figure once more as it stood up. Amanda realised that it was trying to use the cloak again. She fired the three remaining volt rounds, dressing the figure in
lightning and dropping the cloak.

There was a load popping noise as Okobe fired his grenade launcher. The grenade hit the figure, staggering it, and then exploded. The overpressure rammed them all into the wall. Amanda’s
head was ringing as she staggered to her feet. She shouted that she was reloading, but couldn’t hear herself. She tried to pull herself together enough to eject the mag from the shotgun. The
shotgun’s empty magazine fell to the ground while she clutched at her webbing for another one.

It came stalking out of the darkness, all pretence at stealth gone. Smoke pouring off it. The armour had changed. Flattened, somehow, into overlapping plates. It strode straight past her,
ignoring her. Only Okobe had the presence of mind to fire. Amanda cried out as a ricochet from one of the Nigerian’s rounds caught her in the shoulder, spinning her around.

Amanda spun back just in time to see the armoured figure push a knife through Okobe’s body armour and then lift the tall Nigerian off the floor. The screaming stopped. Okobe went limp as
he slid down the knife until the figure had his lower arm inside Okobe’s torso.

Her hearing returned. It took a moment for her to realise that the screaming in her ears was Asher demanding to know what was going on. Shaking fingers finally managed to ram a fresh magazine
into the combat shotgun.

An enraged Alan jumped on the armoured figure’s back. The figure cast Okobe’s body aside casually, grabbed Alan easily from his back and threw him into the cave wall. Even through
the ringing in her ears and Asher’s incessant babble, Amanda could hear the cracking noise and Alan’s scream.

Hank fired a long burst at nearly point-blank range. Sparks and ricocheting tracers lit up the cave. Safiya went down as one of the ricochets caught her.

‘Wait! Cease fire! Cease fire, goddamnit! Stop fucking shooting!’ Amanda screamed.

Hank ceased firing but rapidly backed away from the figure, which had turned to face him. Safiya, on the floor, scrambled away from the armoured figure as well. The French/Algerian woman grabbed
her Grendel as she did so. Alan was groaning. That was good, Amanda thought, it meant he was alive.

‘Please! I know you can hear me,’ she shouted into the tac radio. ‘We’ll leave you the fuck alone, just please stop killing my people,’ she begged.

It turned to look at her. She found herself facing an expressionless armoured mask.

‘Is it here?’ the figure demanded. It had a low bass voice. There was something emotionless and cold in it.

‘I don’t know what “it’ is, but this is a really fucking unimportant facility.’ The figure just stared at her. ‘Look, you just tell me what it’s going
to take for you to stop killing my people and we’ll do it, okay?’

‘Alcatraz, man?’ Hank tried. She could hear the terror in the ex-marine’s voice. The figure turned around to look at Hank.

‘I know that name. I am not him,’ he/it said.

‘What do you want?’ Amanda asked.

‘Access,’ the figure said.

‘We’re just going to leave, okay?’

The armoured figure said nothing but it didn’t make a move to kill them all, which Amanda put in the win column.

‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ Asher’s voice went very high pitched when he screamed, Amanda noticed. Amanda suddenly realised that the voice wasn’t just in her ear now,
but in the cave as well. Both she and the armoured figure turned around to look at the piggy scientist. Amanda was surprised that the fat scientist was brave enough to get this close to the
thing-in-armour. ‘What are you fucking talking to it for, you stupid bitch? Shoot it!’

‘Fuck that!’ Amanda said emphatically. ‘We are oscar mike.’

She turned and headed over to Alan, hoping that he was well enough to move. Hank was helping Safiya to her feet.

‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ Asher was screaming. The armoured figure was just staring at the two of them.

Amanda didn’t think that Alan’s back was broken. Not that it mattered, she didn’t think that she had any choice but to try and move him.

‘I’ll see you dead for this! I’ll have your family fucking murdered!’ Asher screamed at Amanda. A shot rang out. Asher collapsed to the ground, holding his stomach. He
started crying and letting out little squeals of pain. Amanda looked at the smoking Hammer II heavy automatic in her hand.

‘What did I tell you, Asher? You’ve got to leave people with something to lose.’ She threw the Hammer to the thing-in-armour. ‘Looks like you disarmed me and shot Dr
Asher here,’ she told him/it. The figure nodded. ‘Use him for whatever you want, we’re taking our dead.’ The figure considered this and nodded again.

Amanda and Hank helped Alan up. He was moaning, fading in and out of consciousness. They headed back to the main cave. She glanced over her shoulder. Her last view of the Tinman was him
advancing on the squealing gut-shot Dr Asher.

Her face hardened into a mask of hatred.

You killed my people
, she thought,
this isn’t over, motherfucker.

Daimyo (a fragment)

Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, 2024

He’d read all of the warrior philosophers. Sun Tzu, Musashi, Clausewitz. The practical stuff, whilst much of it was often common sense, was a useful grounding in
strategies.
The rest of it’s navel-gazing bullshit to try and rationalise away killing a lot of people, in this marine’s opinion
General Sherman Barclay thought as he looked at
the half-full crystal glass of single malt whiskey.
There’s no decency in war. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re defending your country, the rest of time you’re proving
to some intransigent that you’re a bigger bastard than they are.
In short, if you were a soldier, you did what you were told. He was a four-star general and commandant of the, until
recently, United States Marine Corps. He’d got the job as a result of the cluster-fuck in New York. It was a rank he’d never wanted, but now that he had it he found that he also
didn’t want to do what he was told.

The screen on the wall of his study was showing a newsfeed from the Macronet. His story hadn’t been at the top of the program, but he knew it was coming. The lead story was still CELL
related. He watched a tall, old man, with features that reminded him of a hunting bird of prey, walk out of a huge skyscraper in Frankfurt into an explosion of camera flashes. His security were
pushing reporters and paparazzi out of the way as he made his way to the waiting eight-wheeled armoured Mercedes limousine.

‘The boardroom coup ousting of Karl Ernst Rasch, CEO of Hargreave-Rasch BioChemical, comes as no surprise to business analysts in the wake of his comments criticising their subsidiary
company, the CELL Corporation. Hargreave-Rasch has had some turbulent years, culminating in a name change to distance themselves from alleged unethical medical experiments. Rasch publicly spoke out
against the energy giant’s alleged use of Ceph-derived technology in its New York facility . . .’

‘And fuck you, too,’ Barclay said and muted the sound. He was sat at his desk, still in his dress blues, his service M1911 on the blotter paper in front of him. He had disassembled
it and cleaned it. The drilled-in repetition of the process helped him clear his mind. The whiskey had helped him fuzz it up some. He rapidly reassembled the .45.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, as a young Captain, he had talked to a special forces operator who had told him that if anyone ever pulled a pistol on him, he should just turn and run. The
operator had been of the opinion that pistols were so inaccurate that if you added the stress of combat, people had next to no chance of hitting anything. After that conversation Barclay had made
it his business to be the best damn combat pistol shooter in the Marine Corps. A skill he’d had to put to good use on more than one occasion.

He slid a magazine into the pistol and worked the slide to chamber a round. An empty gun was nobody’s friend. He left the pistol hot, the safety off. It was against Corps regulations. It
was a special forces trick, they wanted to draw and fire rapidly and smoothly. After all, it wasn’t like he had to worry about kids or grandkids in the house. He didn’t even have to
worry about a wife anymore. Susan had told him when she had left that the marines were his mistress and she had never been able to compete.

He held the M1911 up and let the side of it rest against the grey hair on his temple. The black metal was cool against his head. He put it down on the gun-oil stained blotting paper. Next to his
pride and joy.

Barclay had grown up in New York in a hard, working-class, Irish-American neighbourhood in the Bronx. His dad had loved westerns and from his dad he had inherited a love of America’s
frontier history. As a child his father had taken him to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, to see the grave of William Barclay Masterton, better known as Bat Masterton. Masterton had been a buffalo
hunter, army scout, Indian fighter, a gunman and a lawman. He had been a contemporary of Wyatt Earp’s. A young Sherman Barclay had been struck by the coincidence of sharing the same name with
Masterton, even if it was only the gunman’s middle name.

He had been a newly promoted first lieutenant when the gun had come up for auction. A .45 Colt Peacemaker owned by Bat Masterton his own damned self, complete with notches on the grip. What had
tickled Barclay about the pistol most of all was that it hadn’t been the one used in Dodge City or in Colorado during the railroad wars. It was one of two pistols that Masterton had bought
from pawnshops in New York when he was working there as a newspaper man and writer in the latter part of his life. He’d cut notches in them and sold them to people, telling them they were the
pistols from his gun-fighting days.

It had taken every last penny of his savings and a loan that he’d lied to the bank about. Susan and he had only just got married and it was one of the worst arguments they had ever had,
but he had bought the gun. Over a period of years he’d lovingly restored it, and then, because he hated useless things, he’d learnt to shoot with it. That hadn’t been easy. He
suspected that throwing live canaries at a dartboard would prove to be more accurate than the damn Peacemaker.

He had just finished cleaning the Peacemaker when he appeared on the news feed. His dress blues hadn’t been in disarray this morning, when he had betrayed every instinct he had, not to
mention a number of regulations and outright laws. When he’d held his impromptu press conference at Arlington Cemetery.

The caption under the footage read: General Sherman Barclay blows the whistle on CELL’s control over Marines.

He hadn’t intended on being a soldier. Even as late as college he wasn’t sure what he had wanted to be. Football had secured him a partial scholarship, damned hard work on the part
of his mother, father and older brother had made him the first person in his family to go to college. His father and brother were heating contractors. They had worked in downtown Manhattan a lot.
His father had seen the lifestyle of the people who worked downtown, and he had wanted that for his son. Sherman had been less sure. Both his father and his brother had been in 7 World Trade Centre
on the ninth of September 2001. He had joined the marines after he graduated the following year.

Then, like Susan had said, he had fallen in love. The United States Marine Corps was older than the country it served. It had fought in every significant conflict America had been involved in.
From fighting for the country’s independence in the American Revolutionary War to going toe-to-toe with alien invaders in the streets of his hometown. He didn’t mind admitting that
they’d had their arses kicked in New York, but he was proud of every last one of his men and women who had conducted a fighting retreat from alien war machines long enough to evacuate
civilians from the ruined city.

The marines had made mistakes, no doubt about it. He’d witnessed atrocities, seen the shelling of civilian population centres. There were monsters and cowards in its ranks, though he had
rooted those he could find out with ruthless efficiency when he had taken command. But he was more proud of the men and women who had served the Corps than anything else in a long, bloody,
exciting, hard life.