Crysis: Escalation (28 page)

A cannon round from the VTOL overhead just grazed Psycho’s helmet. The force almost tore his head off. He hit the ground again. Prophet raised his gauss rifle and fired the weapon’s
underslung grenade launcher and then fired the entire magazine from the weapon at the VTOL’s pilot. Hypersonic rounds outpaced the grenade and sparked off the VTOL’s armoured
windscreen. The armour-piercing solid shot made spider web cracks in the armoured glass. Then the grenade went off. The pilot was more startled than the VTOL was damaged, but he veered out of the
way.

From the ground Psycho raised his gauss rifle and reached for the underslung grenade launcher’s trigger.

‘No!’ Prophet screamed. Psycho fired the grenade launcher as the APC fired its main cannon. The APC round hit Prophet’s gauss rifle and the weapon came apart in his hands while
the huge round continued and hit him in the chest, just as he had re-activated armour mode. He was yanked off his feet and hit the ground, hard, and barely alive, despite the suit’s systems.
Psycho’s grenade exploded in the back of the damaged APC. The spec ops team inside were now just so much red paint in the vehicle’s interior.

‘That was how we were going to escape,’ Prophet muttered over the suit’s comms as he tried to get up.

‘Oh,’ Psycho said, looking at the smoking interior of the APC. ‘Yeah, that would have been a good idea.’

‘Get in the APC,’ Prophet said as he climbed to his feet. They were taking small arms fire again, from everywhere. The two remaining VTOLs were now overhead firing down around
them.

Just a little closer,
Amanda thought. The rest of her squad were dead. Shot down, taken out by grenades, caught under exploding VTOLs, had APCs roll over them. There
was only her left. The shaven-headed African-American woman moved carefully and quietly through the rubble of the brothel. Her Jackal combat shotgun against her shoulder, ready to fire. She was
moving as stealthily as she could, though the bulky special weapon slung over her back hampered her. She could make out movement from between the destroyed APCs that had been blown up when the
fight started.

The missile was launched from a Sukhoi T-50 stealth fighter loaned to CELL by the Russian government. The T-50 then banked hard and kicked in its afterburners, trying to put as
much distance between itself and the missile as possible.

The Circuit Breaker warhead in the guided missile detonated at one thousand feet above the township of Rovesky. Designed to recreate the electromagnetic pulse of a thirty-kiloton thermonuclear
explosion, the burst of radiation fused every last piece of unshielded electronics in a thirty-mile radius. Even shielded electronics such as those in the CELL APCs were overloaded momentarily.

All the lights went out. The cobalt mine ceased work. All comms went down. That part of Siberia practically returned to a Stone Age level of technology in a moment.

Psycho didn’t even have time to register the Aurora Borealis-style light show in the magnetosphere. He just hit the ground as all the suit’s systems went down.

So reliant on the suit’s fusion with his dead flesh, Prophet was dead before he hit the ground next to the Londoner.

To Amanda, standing amongst the rubble of the brothel, it seemed to happen very slowly. The two VTOLs almost looked graceful as their lights went off, the sky above them a
shining fireworks display of electromagnetic radiation bouncing off the magnetosphere.

Psycho was still conscious. Locked in his dead suit. He saw the VTOLs fall out of his view. He couldn’t even turn his head. He felt their impact through the ground. The
fury at his helplessness overwhelmed him. He started screaming.

It had felt like sleep. It had felt welcoming, and cold. The ten thousand volts coursing through dead flesh, forcing sluggish systems in the suit’s living technology back
to life, felt less welcoming. It felt like fire surging through him. He was screaming.

He rolled onto his front and forced himself onto all fours.
Let me die!
he screamed silently at the suit. Just one moment of weakness, then he was taking fire again.

Short burst, correct aim, short burst, correct aim, repeat. Walk in on the target. The twelve-gauge solid shot slugs were impacting into the side of the moving armoured figure,
knocking him over, battering him across the ground. She emptied the extended magazine of the automatic shotgun into him, ignoring the other armoured figure paralysed on the ground. She dropped the
shotgun. She was appalled when he, it, the thing she’d seen far below St. Petersburg, stood up. She grabbed the weapon on her back and pulled it round in front of her. The armoured thing
staggered towards her. She brought the weapon to her shoulder. It raised its hand as if reaching for her. She fired the netgun. The weighted high-tensile net, coated in industrial adhesive, spread
open in midair, propelled by the four shotgun cartridges in each of the netgun’s barrels.

The weapon’s recoil staggered Amanda and she fell backwards over some of the rubble. She found herself staring numbly at the hand of a young woman sticking out of the rubble. She looked
over at the armoured warrior that had killed so many of her friends. The net had entangled him. He was trying to move, trying to get the purchase to break it but he couldn’t. As solutions
went it had been around since the Stone Age. He fell over.

Amanda got up and drew the Hammer II from the holster at her hip. It was loaded with explosive rounds. She walked over to the armoured warrior’s prone form. He stopped struggling when he
felt the gun against his head.

‘This is what it feels like to be human, motherfucker.’ Amanda pulled the hammer back on the massive automatic. That was when the Spec Ops team turned up. Weapons levelled at her.
Screaming at her. She couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let her pull the trigger. Empty the entire magazine at point blank range into his head. She relented. She spat on the
armour.

‘That’s for Mikey,’ she said and walked away.

It shouldn’t have happened this way, the mission, too much was riding on the mission.

‘What do you want done with them, boss?’ the spec ops soldier asked the officer. Prophet was still wrapped in the adhesive-coated high-tensile wire. He could see Psycho. Power had
obviously returned to Psycho’s suit but they had him locked into heavy-duty restraints designed specifically for the nanosuits. Psycho was staring at Prophet, both of them being held on their
knees, surrounded by a spec ops team with weapons at the ready. They were going to be transported in the APCs, the only vehicles with shielded electronics and therefore the only vehicles still
working. More heavy-lift aircraft were being called in, as the ones at the mine’s airfield were inoperative junk thanks to their fused avionics.

‘That one is going to New York,’ the officer said, pointing at Psycho. ‘That one is going to the
Deepwinter
Facility,’ she finished, pointing at Prophet.

Psycho was still staring at Prophet.

‘We had a chance, Prophet. We had a chance.’

Enjoyed this book?

Then check out Gavin Smith’s other high-octane SF thrillers.

VETERAN

Veteran is a fast paced, intricately plotted violent SF Thriller set in a dark future against the backdrop of a seemingly never ending war against an unknowable and implacable
alien enemy.

WAR IN HEAVEN

Jakob Douglas, damaged soldier and unlikely hero, returns in another desperate, adrenalin-fueled adventure from Gavin Smith, author of the widely acclaimed Veteran.

AGE OF SCORPIO

We are machines, we are animals, we are hybrids. But some things never change. The Church knows we have kept our sins.

Published April 2013.

Thanks to Michael Read, Tim Partlett, Steven Bender and Rasmus Hoejengaard at Crytek for their support, ideas, contributions and hospitality in Frankfurt. Thanks also to Guy
Perkins at EA, and Steven Hall, Richard Morgan and Peter Watts.

Particular thanks to a very patient and diplomatic editor, Marcus Gipps. And to Chris Edwards and Cat Halsworth, the former for help with research, the latter for putting up with the research
(we were playing video games).

Also by Gavin Smith from Gollancz:

Veteran

War in Heaven

The Age of Scorpio

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Crytek GmbH 2013
All rights reserved.

The right of Gavin G. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11584 2

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
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subsequent purchaser.

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