Crysis: Legion (6 page)

From inside the castle.

The cloak’s not quite recharged yet but I’m moving anyway, hugging that curved brick wall, closing on the main gate. But it’s the flatbed parked in front that catches my eye; it’s the bodies piled on top of it.

Some of them are in camo.

Heavy doors clank open around the curve; I flatten back against the wall as a couple of spider-headed mercs carry Parchman down the steps and sling him onto the flatbed like a fucking sandbag. The N2’s got a zoom option but I don’t need it to see the burns on Parchman’s arms, or the cuts on the soles of his bare feet. I’ve seen those marks before. Those are the marks of special rendition. Those are the marks of interrogations that might not fit comfortably under the rubric of international law. No biggie, they told us in basic. Everyone does it.

They never said anything about the neat little hole in Parchman’s temple, though.

The mercs head back into the building, swapping stories about
pukeheads
and Susie Rottencrotch. They leave the gate open: doubled iron doors set into a stone arch, big square columns
on each side like something out of a gladiator game. Their own personal coliseum.

If that’s how they want it …

I cloak again. I walk right through the gates of Castle Clinton, through an outer ring of trashed offices and gift shops. I find myself in an open circular compound full of crates and supplies, a ring of eighteenth-century cannons left over from the tourist season, and a couple of bloodstained plywood pallets outfitted with leather straps where arms and legs might go. And a bunch of CELLulites swapping bets on who’s going to take this Prophet asshole down.

And then the power bar goes red and my suit goes
zzzzt
and everyone falls silent as snow.

I look down at myself. There I am.

I don’t how many there are. A dozen. Two. It doesn’t matter. There could be a fucking regiment and they
still
wouldn’t stand a chance. I am the reaper, man, I am all four Horsemen, I am unstoppable. I spent my whole damn career training for toe-to-toe with the enemy and here they are: these paramilitary fuckwits, these
mercenaries
, these washed-out border guards and wannabes who never swore allegiance to any country or any cause or any
thing
but the highest fucking bidder. I remember the trampled tents, the broken stretchers, the dumpsters full of dead civilians. I remember the beaten corpses of my brothers-in-arms and it is not only my sacred
duty
to take these assholes out; it is my
pleasure
. I could fight them all day and be ready to dance all night. I am—

I am
into
it.

And to think that I might have missed it all if I’d let the cloak recharge just a little longer, or if the circuits had drawn just a little less power, or if I’d moved just a wee bit faster. I could have snuck through the Castle and made my way out of the park without any bloodshed at all. What a pity, huh?

I blame the suit.

Leaving Battery Park is like crawling through the guts of a whale.

First there are cattle runs, four or five of them, to herd docile civilians in parallel streams for processing. Soothing pastel signage promises quick and imminent evacuation to those who are patient and wait their turn. The looped female voice I heard earlier—just as calm, just as reassuring, even more fucking irritating—says essentially the same thing for the benefit of the blind, the illiterate, and the voice actors guild.
If you feel unwell, please make yourself known to medical staff immediately. Successful treatment of the Manhattan pathogen depends on early diagnosis. Martial law is for your protection. CryNet Security forces operate within a full federal mandate. Do not be alarmed. Do not be alarmed. Do not be alarmed
.

Of course, if any civilian should be any
less
than docile there’s always the fallback solution they went with back at the waterfront. I encounter a few straggling CELLulites en route, running late to join the festivities at the castle; they seem more than willing to explore that alternative.

I help them.

At the end of the cattle run a workstation sparks intermittently on a table, too far gone to process my paperwork even if I had any, even if anyone was around to hand it to. Lightsticks
and smart-painted arrows point me to a yellow hatch with a tiny window at eye level and a biohazard decal plastered underneath. I look through into a tunnel of shiny plastic, blown taut and puffy like one of those inflatable playrooms rich parents buy for four-year-old larvae.

A keypad glows on the wall to my right. I have no idea what the code is but the
CRYNET NANOSUIT 2.0
encourages brute force on those awkward occasions when going through proper channels is not an option. The hatch rips free: Pressurized air sighs past and the tunnel beyond starts to sag.

Bad sign. I know something about these inflatable decon tunnels: the positive pressure in the passageway is supposed to only push back unruly microbes, not hold up the whole structure. It’s the higher-pressure air between the inner and outer walls that keeps the tunnel up. If opening the door is enough to cause a slump, the walls themselves must be leaking.

Like I said: the guts of a whale. The light shining through the walls is blood orange, like looking at the sun through closed eyelids. The walls themselves almost seem to breathe around you: air seeps from one bladder to the next, one segment of intestine still taut enough to stand in while the next is so flaccid you have to get down on hands and knees and push through curtains of billowing PVC. Disinfectant sprays like digestive juice from hidden nozzles; it condenses on my faceplate and fucks with my vision. The Reassuring Voice has a different routine in here, urges me to
move to the next chamber when you hear the chime
, tells me to
remain calm and go with the doctors
if the alarm sounds, hints at dire consequences for anyone who might
obstruct medical or security personnel
.

No alarms go off. No chimes sound. The only noises I hear are the endless maddening voice of Loop Lady, the soft wheezing of the tunnel between her announcements, and the scuttling of—

Wait a second:
scuttling
?

Something runs over my boot. Something the size of a sourdough loaf drops onto my face. I get a split-second glimpse of a very small fire hose nozzle or a very large hypodermic needle; things like gleaming scalpels
rat-tat-tat
against my helmet. I bring my fist up—pure defensive reflex—and I swear I nearly punch myself in the face before remembering the age-old question,
Who wins when the awesome power of the Nanosuit 2.0’s artificial muscles meet the awesome protective shielding of the Nanosuit 2.0’s armored faceplate?
I don’t know who wins but it’s pretty obvious that the loser is whoever’s
wearing
the Nanosuit 2.0 when we find out. Best-case scenario I end up with bug guts all over my windshield, and I haven’t seen any wipers on this thing. Worst-case, I punch right through the faceplate and smash my own brains against the back of the helmet.

So I deflect the swing at the last microsecond, pull off to the left, and however many thousand g’s these carbon-nanomyofibrils pull just kinda glance off the respirator and the momentum spins me around like I was sideswiped by a semi and I am going
down
, man, I am spinning like a ballet dancer into all that flaccid plastic and I can hear bladders popping and tearing all along the tunnel, wrapping around me and I am on the floor, gift-wrapped for the delectation of some giant mutant flea out of an old Bowie album.

Whatever it is, I land on it. It bursts under my ass like a burrito.

I buckle down and tear myself free and bull my way through the rest of the sequence. Maybe I see shadows moving behind the plastic, vague shapes the size of softballs and cocker spaniels. Maybe it’s my imagination. Valium Girl keeps urging me to remain calm, to be patient, to move forward when I hear the chime. Somehow she sounds a bit testier now. And when I hear for the hundredth time that
Successful treatment of the Manhattan pathogen depends on early diagnosis
I want to break out laughing—because nothing says
medical competence
and
effective
quarantine
like a bunch of Mutant Chernobyl Bloodsuckers living in the heart of your decon facility.

It’s not working, Roger. Nice try, though.

Actually, I believe you. I’d know if you were lying, and even if I didn’t they’d probably leave you in the dark just on general principles. So let me fill you in: Your bosses just tried an emergency remote-shutdown through a backdoor optical channel in the twenty-thousand-angstrom range. Didn’t you see that little laser light winking in the air duct back there?

Oh, that’s right. You can’t see infrared.

The thing about radio, see, is you can always jam the signal. Optics are a
lot
tougher to hack. Pass a light beam through a cyclotron and it barely bends, you’re not gonna scramble
that
signal until the day we start building black holes for the battlefield. As long as your target’s line-of-sight, you’re golden.

So that’s the route CryNet went when they built in their kill switch—in case one of their Nanosuits fell into the wrong hands, you know, got used for good instead of evil. It’s wired into the saggital lens, and they just used it to try and shut me down.

I don’t think so. The only one I can hurt right now is you, and if they cared about dear old Roger Gillis they wouldn’t have sent you in here. They’re just trying to get back in control, but that’s the thing about heuristic battlefield systems: They’re built to adapt, so they adapt. Develop countermeasures to your countermeasures.

Hey, don’t look so worried. I don’t blame you; you didn’t even know. Hell, I don’t even blame them. I know the drill, I haven’t changed that much. If I was in their shoes I’d probably do the same thing.

Let’s see if they learn from their mistakes, hmm?

Anyway. The rest of Manhattan makes Battery Park look pristine.