Crysis: Legion (2 page)

I don’t think Leavenworth believed that shit half the time himself. I think he just liked yanking our chains. I’m really going to miss him, if I ever get that part of my brain back.

Every now and then you can hear chatter drifting back through the forward hatch; turns out there’s at least six other boats deployed, under orders of some Colonel Barclay I’ve never heard of. And yeah, big surprise, we’re all headed up the East River for Upper Manhattan. Except suddenly
we
aren’t. Suddenly we’re
detached from the main group and diverting to Battery Park. Secret rendezvous, CO tells us. Maybe a rescue mission. I don’t know if he’s giving it up or making it up.

So everybody’s making these wild-ass guesses and Chino even starts a
pool
for chrissake, right there in the sub, and I’m sitting there and all I can think about is—

You know I was afraid of water, right?

I mean, of course I didn’t
tell
anybody—I worked through it like you’re supposed to, even came in third in the open-water trials last year. It’s not a problem. But I almost drowned back when I was eight. Kinda stuck with me. You
must
have known. There were all these tests. You must have sniffed it out during the psych workup.

Thought so.

So everybody’s jammed in there with their theories and Chino’s got his pool going, and it’s been eighteen hours now and I’ve been white-knuckling the bench for at least ten of ’em. Parchman figures I’m hungover but all I can think about is: a measly seven centimeters of biosteel between me and the whole Atlantic Ocean and I don’t care how strong they say it is, a bunch of threads squeezed out of some gengineered spider’s ass is not gonna keep an ocean out forever.

Probably the last time I was right about anything in this whole shitstorm.

Finally some voice comes over the comm, tells us it’s time to saddle up. And that’s when we hear a
ping
—not sonar, not
our
sonar anyway, just a single, solid beat resonating throughout the hull. Everybody falls silent for just a second, and Behrendt looks around and says, “Anybody hear that?”—

And something kicks us hard in the side.

No alarms, nothing coming over the comm link, just one
ping
and a giant
boom
and the whole boat’s rolling to port. We don’t even have time to scream; there’s one microscopic
whatthefuck
moment and the hull opens up like some giant took a can opener to us. The far side of the compartment just
crumples:
snaps Behrendt’s back like a toothpick, turns her into a rag doll right before my eyes, and then a crossbeam or bracket or some fucking thing tears free of the forward bulkhead and squashes Beaudry like a bug.

We’re going down, now—the deck’s at some crazy-ass angle, there’s water flooding in from the bow, the whole damn hull’s groaning like a humpback whale.
Now
the alarms kick in. Or maybe it’s just everybody screaming. There’s blood everywhere and you’d think it would blend in with the night-vision redlight but it doesn’t, it jumps right out at you, it’s solid shiny black. By now the water’s not even
gushing
in, it’s
rising
—like a tide, like a liquid floor sliding up to crush us all against the ceiling. Except the ceiling’s a wall, and the rear bulkhead is the roof, and—

And—

Look, you—you
know
this shit. The sub went down. Period. Why do you need the details? You’re not making a fucking documentary.

I know, it’s just that—

Fine.

So it’s every man for himself. I barely even have a chance to take a breath before the ocean closes over my head and I’m diving down, pushing buddies and body parts out of the way, and I’m fucking
scared
, man, I can’t see anything except bloody backlight and blue sparks as the electronics short out. The sub’s still groaning around me, it’s crumpling into a paper ball and at least the screams stop underwater but you can hear metal grinding on metal as though it were right inside your fucking head. We get through the forward hatch, it’s still black and blue and red everywhere except there’s this jagged tear off to the side, this blue-black crevice seething with bubbles. I push through. I look up and there’s pale dim light, and I look down and there’s this
great dark wall of metal sliding past, gashed to shit and bleeding rivers of air. Somewhere down there the bow’s already hit bottom because there’s a big honking cloud of black mud boiling up from below, engulfing the hull like something live. Like something
starving
.

And all that matters, in that moment, is that I get to the surface.

There’s no
Semper
-fucking-
fi
down there in the deeps, let me tell you. Maybe if I’d had my rebreather on. Maybe if I’d had more than one lousy lungful of air to get me thirty meters to the surface. Maybe if I wasn’t fighting off flashbacks from fifteen years ago. But no: I don’t try to free the trapped or assist the wounded or carry the unconscious to safety on my back. I don’t even think about it. There are things in my way: Some are sharp and hard and some are soft and gooshy and I don’t fucking
care
, man, I bull through them all without prejudice or favoritism. I’m an eight-year-old kid again, and I’m
dying
, and I know what that feels like. Not again. God, not again.

So I’m fighting my way to the surface. Didn’t even have the presence of mind to grab a pair of fins, you know, I’m just kicking at the ocean with these stupid little ape feet and all I know is it’s dark in one direction and a little less dark in the other and my chest is so tight it feels like it’s going to burst, like somehow I’ve got a whole roomful of air jammed in there ready to explode. And it almost does, I almost suffer a fucking embolism before I remember that that last gulp of air I took, it was under
pressure:
the closer I get to the surface the more it expands, the harder it pushes to get out. So I open my mouth. I open my mouth and I vomit all that precious air into the sea and I follow the bubbles as fast as I can, I pray to God the air doesn’t bleed out of me faster than it swells up inside. I’m kicking and clawing at the water and suddenly the light overhead has
texture
somehow, that dull greenish glow resolves into distinct shafts of light and they’re
dancing
, I swear to God they’re dancing. Suddenly there’s a roof over my head, like a writhing mirror, like mercury, and I break through and I feel like I could swallow the whole fucking sky and I’m so glad to be alive, man, you have no idea. I couldn’t care less about Behrendt or Chino or even poor old conspiracy-crackpot Leavenworth. I’m so glad to be alive I don’t even notice the hellscape I’ve dragged myself into—

Oh, that.

Yeah, I
am
a bit more eloquent than I used to be. Sometimes.
Writhing mirrors
and
dancing lights
. Never used to talk like that before. Now I just, you know. Switch back and forth. Don’t even notice it half the time.

But you know that story, don’t you? Improved vocabulary’s just a side effect. Just another reminder that I’m never alone in here.

What I am, and what I was, and whatever this damn armor thinks it is.

Heh.

We are legion.

I’m born again into dead of night. About a dozen others are on the surface ahead of me, looking around while I’m still frenching the atmosphere. A few more pop up like Whac-A-Moles as I get my bearings. There’s oil everywhere, streams and patches of it mottling the surface.

Oil on the water, but it’s the sky that’s on fire.

New York stretches around us like a big dark tumor. Most of the skyline’s blacked out; ten dark buildings for every one or two that still have power. You can still make stuff out, though; a smudge of moonlight through the clouds, and the overcast flickers with something like orange heat lightning. If that’s reflected firelight, whole city blocks must be on fire in there. I can actually see an apartment building burning in the distance; it looks insignificant
from out here, like a matchbox crawling with orange fireflies. Closer to the waterfront a whole office tower has just given up and slumped into the next building over. Black oily smoke crawls into the sky from a hundred spots we can’t begin to make out from the waterline but there’s no missing the great dark blanket they feed into, hanging over the skyline: It’s so heavy I wonder why it doesn’t crash down and flatten everything that’s still standing.

“Holy fuck,” someone says. “What happened here?”

Leavenworth. You made it out, man. You made it out.

I turn, tracking his voice, but the thing that bobs into view is not Leavenworth, not military, not alive. It barely even looks
human
anymore; it looks back at me with clumps of pulpy gray tumors where its eyes should be. A network of, of—veins, or tendons, or
something
like that runs down its cheek and roots in the shoulder, like, like—

You know those big industrial meat grinders in the supermarkets? You feed all the leftover chunks and waste cuts and bits of bone into that hopper at the top and there’s this kind of grille at the bottom where the hamburger oozes out like a twisted cable of limp red worms?

Something like that.

And I see now that the whole harbor’s dotted with these rotted floating things, that half the people I took for brothers-in-arms are dead civilians turned monstrous. So now I’m barely keeping my lunch down and I’m wondering if
everyone
was right, if it was a syntheviral
and
a nuclear strike
and
a coup d’état—hell, why not throw in Leavenworth’s rogue biomorphs while you’re at it? Maybe someone’s launched the mother of all out-and-out assaults, maybe it’s all of those things at once.

Man, what I wouldn’t give now, if that’s all it had been.

And just then someone cries out and I turn to
that
sound expecting more death and corruption but instead I see a big patch
of bubbles boiling on the surface. At first I think it’s the dying breath of the Swordfish, belched up from the bottom of the Hudson; but the water keeps churning and I actually feel a flash of hope that one of the other subs has come to the rescue, that the cavalry’s breaching at our backs. I can see something dark and metallic just under the surface, red light rising from below, although some part of me says in a very small voice it doesn’t look like any conning tower
I’ve
ever seen.

And then it rises above the waterline, and it
keeps on rising
until there’s no water holding it up anymore and it’s
still
rising, big as a fucking house, it’s got its own personal storm front underneath where the water’s streaming back off its sides. I can’t make out jack shit except for two glowing orange hoops the size of merry-go-rounds and a black shape between them. But it’s pretty obvious that whatever this is, it’s not from anywhere around here.

And even
that
doesn’t get as much time to sink in as I’d like, because in the next second it clicks on its high beams and starts shooting.

My reflexes kick in. All it takes is the sight of that little line of splashes stitching across the water toward me. You can hear them below the surface, too, rapid-fire
thwip-thwip-thwips
getting louder, fading away, coming back the moment you break the surface to grab a breath and a gamble. You can’t get a bearing, of course. No time for that. You breach and breathe and catch the quickest glimpse of those lethal little tracers streaking down from somewhere overhead. Maybe you hear someone scream as they lose their own particular throw of the dice but then you’re back under again, hoping you don’t roll snake-eyes before you make shore—because, sure, you’ll be exposed on land but at least you’ve got solid ground under you, right? At least you can
run
for cover instead of floundering like wounded bait waiting for the sharks.

You let your brain stem take over, let your muscles decide for themselves when to zig and when to zag. Don’t think about what it
is
, that’s too big and there’s no time; think about what it’s
doing
. It’s using
ballistics
. Not phasers, not death rays. No infallible super-targeting computers, or you’d be dead already. It’s shooting
projectiles
. It’s spitting out lines of
bullets
, like it ordered its ammo from Ordnance “R” Us. Conventional weapons.

Of course, conventional weapons do just fine when your target is unarmed hamburger flailing around in open water. I hear the screams between the bullets and the bubbles. I can hear that airborne motherfucker mowing us down like dogs. But I keep rolling the dice, man, I keep breathing and diving and zigging and zagging, and they don’t get me. I make it all the way to the shore. I nearly kill myself on the debris slope, I’m stroking so hard I don’t see the rocks coming and a piece of half-buried driftwood just under the surface nearly takes out my eye but suddenly my feet are on the bottom, the rocks are slimy but they’re
solid
, and I’m scrambling uphill and I run smack into a sheer concrete seawall. In one split second I realize there’s no
way
I can scale it without grapplers or gecko gloves, and in the next I’m slipping on the slime and I go over backward as a line of divots explodes across the concrete right about where my head used to be.