Crysis: Legion (9 page)

“You picking anything up on the scanner?”

“Nah, looks like they ejected before impact. We’re just waiting for the cleanup crew.”

“If they ejected, where the hell did they go?”

“Good question.”

It is, too. I add it to the list as I recloak and start down the ramp; if the pods are a bust, maybe I can sneak into the crater from one of the garage levels. By the time the money shot comes I’m so far down that I almost miss it:

“Christ, that thing’s buried deep. Only way down is through the elevator shaft.”

Oh.

So the good news is, there may be a way to get Gould his samples:
Could be
it,
man, a shot at rolling back the spore, maybe even the whole invasion
. Rah.

Bad news is, it’s on the far side of the plaza in the middle of a crowd of trigger-happy mercs stationed right next to a fresh stock of ammunition, who have orders to shoot me on sight.

Worst
news, though, is that I’m hearing at least four sets of boots approaching the bottom of the ramp ahead of me, and
there’s no fucking way I can get all the way back up before my cloak runs dry.

I love it when the number of options dwindles to one. Really speeds up the decision-making process.

They hear me before they see me; the cloak is good, but it doesn’t mask the sound of boots charging down a concrete ramp at thirty klicks an hour. They stop talking, their guns come up, and suddenly I’m
right there
, laying shotgun blasts into all that Kevlar, bringing the Marshal down like a club on those shiny gray helmets, grabbing one of them by the throat and watching her sail through space until a convenient support pylon takes her from sixty to zero in no seconds.

Shouts from deeper within the garage. Panicked calls for back-up on comm. I’m coming for them. They know it.

But I’m not. I recloak, swap the Marshal out for a recently orphaned assault rifle and head back up the ramp. Strength is amped so I’m moving
fast
, but between that and the cloak every capacitor in the suit’s gonna run dry in about three seconds. Make that two: I pull a boosted jump over the reinforcements clattering down the ramp, six eager little sociopaths don’t see me coming and don’t see me go but that last mighty leap took me down to the fumes and I materialize from thin air as I pass above their heads. I don’t think they saw that I hope they didn’t see that, their eyes were down and focused on the forward charge, but no time to look it’s all in the past and I’m rising up to ground level now, I’ve got a chopper overhead and a whole shitload of hostiles coming around that crater (two, four, seven, eight,
nine targets
SECOND tells me, and lays neat little ranges and targeting triangles over each). I deke and I duck but it’s not enough to keep me from taking hits; and even though the suit can handle them it just
kills
the capacitor feed, the power bar stutters to a crawl on its way up the recharge trail.

HMG fire from the chopper. I lob a grenade into the sky and the pilot pulls back—an unnecessary reflex, that little pineapple doesn’t even come close, but it’s enough to throw the gunner off his aim. I hit the deck and roll behind a waist-high concrete planter holding a row of spindly stunted trees. The grenade bounces and rolls and blows out the windows of the deli.

Eight seconds, tops, before they flank me.

The charge bar tops up at six. I fade, roll away from the planter, get to my feet. I’ve noticed that the cloak lasts a lot longer when the suit isn’t pulling power for a lot of other things. I can stay invisible for forty-five seconds, maybe a whole minute if I just stand still.

Maybe almost as long if I just move very,
very
 … slowly.

I amble sideways while the air fills with shouts of
Lost the target
and
Shit he’s cloaked again
. I line up my approach: five long steps to the edge of the crater on turbo, then maybe fifteen meters to cross the gap near the left edge. I amp strength to max and
move
.

I nail the launch: solid traction, boots leave the ground maybe twenty centimeters from the edge, and the moment I’m airborne I drop strength right back to baseline. I sail over that gap like a ghost.

And nearly blow the landing. My feet come down with no room to spare. I land just past the lip of the hole and
wobble
back and forth, windmilling my arms to keep from falling over. No time to worry about the sound of my boots on the pavement; if the rotors and the shouts and the random suppressing fire didn’t mask it I’m probably fucked.

But here I am, ten meters from the elevators, and all that stands in my way are three CELLulites left to guard the supplies. That running jump burned through two-thirds of my charge, but for the moment I’m still stealthed.

These boys are not convinced. Last time they saw me I was
on the other side of the plaza, but I could be anywhere by now. I could be
right in front of them
. How would they know?

They’ll know soon enough. They’ll know in about three seconds, because the charge bar’s just started flashing red. I bring up the Grendel: not the best accuracy and a downright shitty clip size, but these tungsten rounds would stop a rhino and my targets are almost close enough to touch.

They see my face, and blow apart.

It’s not completely clear sailing after that. Their buddies can’t wait to lay down the law now that I’m back in their worldview, and the elevator doors are jammed. I have to finesse my way in, and it seems like I have to fend off a whole fucking platoon in the process. By the time I get those doors jimmied open, drop the twenty meters to the bottom of the shaft, and take care of anyone who tries to follow little Timmy down the well—we’re looking at a final score of somewhere around seventeen–zip.

Like I said before. That’s what you get when you work nine-to-five.

The bottom of the shaft is chest-deep in scummy water; a service crawlway leads off to the north, a half-flooded mess of ruptured plumbing, soggy cardboard crates, and the occasional pulpy corpse. Dim lights glow here and there in rusty little cages, antique bulbs with actual filaments inside. I bet they’ve been down here since the twentieth century.

There’s brighter light farther down the passage, though. I follow it to a hole torn in the ceiling, duck under an exposed I-beam, and climb a pile of cinder blocks and shattered tiles to another Ceph pod; it rammed down into this space at a forty-five-degree angle, and is half buried by collapsed ceiling and uprooted floor.

And it’s—bleeding, or something.

The pod’s ruptured in several spots. The stuff oozing from
those wounds is the color of snot or old candle wax, and it’s
everywhere:
running in ropy strings along the hull, pooling on the screen, hanging in thick gooey stalactites from the breached ceiling. It
moves
. It—undulates. Or maybe that’s just the light: I look around for the first time and see the far end of the room, relatively unscathed behind me. A floor lamp, knocked on its side, throws light across the space at a low angle, full of contrast and long shadows. So, yeah: probably just a trick of the light. But I can’t shake the feeling that those giant hanging boogers
squirm
just the slightest bit, as if I’m looking at a thin-walled brood sac with some kind of half-seen larva incubating inside.

“That’s it,” Gould says on comm. “You gotta scan that stuff.”

Scan? But SECOND’s training wheels take their own initiative: broad-spectrum chemical sensors built into the fingertips, according to the graphical thumbnails popping up on BUD. I saccade the right dropdowns, switch to tactical—remind myself it won’t actually be
me
touching this shit—and lay on the hands.

The N2’s fingertips leave soft depressions in the alien snot. Almost instantly lists of ingredients start scrolling down my brain: chemical formulae I somehow recognize as organic even though I can barely remember high school chemistry. Amine groups. Polysaccharides. Glycolipids.

Why is this ringing so many bells?

It’s ringing bells for Gould, too. I hear him trying to keep his lunch down across a whole borough and a shitload of static. “Jesus, man, that’s—that’s
people
. Just melted down, just—just
lysed
. What the fuck is this?”

I remember pus spurting from squashed ticks. Odd that Gould doesn’t seem to know about that.

“I can’t do anything with this. We struck out. You better get out of there before CELL shows up. Back to Plan A.”

He doesn’t even say lab. Waypoints and objectives reset themselves anyway. God
damn
this suit is smart.

Going back up the elevator shaft is a nonstarter. I climb over the wreckage into the other end of the room: some kind of security or janitorial office, judging by the desk and the filing cabinets. A row of windows on the opposite wall looks out into what used to be the lower parking level; now it looks onto a slope of collapsed concrete, sloping up toward a thin slice of sky. The glass is caged behind one of those antiburglary grilles.

Yeah. Right.

I start up the slope. No comm chatter: That’s odd. Maybe CELL’s figured out that I’m hacking into their frequencies.

No rotor noise, either. That’s odder.

Almost there.

I stop. Look right. Nothing. Left. Nothing. Up: just sky.

Forward.

Oh
shi—

It jumps down on me from nowhere, slams me facedown into the rubble, flips me over onto my back and pins me there. It’s a nest of naked black backbones spliced together into something that almost looks humanoid. It’s got backbones for arms, spiky segmented things that end in—hands, I guess you’d call them. Claws. I can’t get a good look at them, they’re pressed down against my shoulders but they seem way too big, like catcher’s mitts on a stick man. There’s another backbone where a backbone
should
be, connecting those arms to a set of armored robodog legs with too many joints. There’s something on top, a helmet for a head like the front of a bullet train with clusters of orange eyes on each side. There’s a blob of boneless gray tissue in the middle of it all.

It’s like my bogeyman from the roof, but different.
Meaner
.

I try to move but the fucker’s
strong
, man, I can’t throw it
off and my gun’s been knocked halfway across the rubble. One backbone-arm pulls back like it’s winding up for a punch, and that long metal mitt just
splits open
to reveal more drills and needles and probes than a goddamn dentist’s chair on steroids. Something whirls from the middle of that cluster and spears me in the chest. The BUD jumps; my icons scramble; my eyeballs fill with static.

The N2 starts
talking
.

It’s not False Prophet. It’s not English. It’s not even human, it’s just—gibberish. Clicks, hiccups, these weird
hooting
sounds. And the shit I’m suddenly seeing on tactical isn’t making any more sense, green pastel suddenly flickering into orange and purple, alphanumerics turning into hieroglyphics, and what do you call those blobs you headshrinkers used to use before we laughed you out of town?—Rorschach blots. That’s it. The whole interface is fried and I’m stuck there for I don’t know how long, can’t be more than a few seconds but it seems like forfuckingever.

And then False Prophet
does
speak up, and at least he’s speaking human even though I don’t know exactly what he’s talking about. He says:

Interface attempted. Tissue vector 11 percent
.
Insufficient common code. Rejecting
.

And the alien leaps off me and darts away like
I
was the bogeyman.

Gould comes back to me as the BUD sobers up: “You had it, man! You triggered sampling mode, but it didn’t—listen, Prophet, whatever you just did: Do it again!”

Right. Chase down the nice monster and sweet-talk it into skewering me a second time. That’s gonna happen.

“Come
on
, man, quit messing around! We don’t have time!”

Who am I kidding.

I grab my weapon and take up the chase. I put everything the suit’s got into speed; I sprint in turbocharged bursts, huff and puff in between with my own measly muscles while the charge builds back. And wouldn’t you know the alien’s back in my sights: now leaping along on two legs, now running like a cheetah on four, sometimes keeping to the street, sometimes scrambling up sheer walls like a caffeinated gecko. This thing isn’t biped or quad, it’s not a runner or a climber; it’s
all
of those things, it’s fluid, it morphs between modes as easily as I put one foot after the other. It’s almost beautiful, the way it moves. It
is
beautiful, and fast, but you know what? This fuck-ugly Nanosuit, this bulky pile of cords and chrome—it’s keeping up, it’s one step forward and three steps back but that forward step is a
doozie
and suddenly I’m close enough to bring the fucker down. I’m twenty meters back when it pulls a sudden right-angle turn up off the street and starts climbing the walls. I fire on the run, thank whatever gearhead designed the N2’s motion stabilizers, and I don’t know if it’s a lucky shot or old cement but suddenly the bricks are crumbling under the Ceph’s claws and it falls backward off the wall, live parts and machine parts both grabbing at the air, both coming up empty, and the whole bastard meat–machine hybrid crashes down on the asphalt not five steps from where I’m waiting. It springs back up almost immediately but I’m already blasting away at the soft parts inside the hard ones and I don’t care
how
fast your spaceships go, if you’re made out of meat you are
not
coming back from a point-blank encounter with a Grendel heavy assault rifle.

There’s enough Squid splattered across my front that I don’t even need to punch through the exoskeleton; all I have to do is wipe my hand across my chest and False Prophet pipes up,
“Sample absorbed. Processing.” I watch the N2’s fingertips slurp up that alien gore like a sponge drinks a coffee spill. I can’t tell you how creepy I find this.

I find it so creepy I don’t even notice the other stalkers coming down the walls at me.