Crysis: Escalation (11 page)

‘So?’ Amanda asked distractedly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Dr Asher asked, feeling himself getting angry. Amanda sighed and looked up at the scientist. She didn’t think she was going to like the man. She had always
wondered about people like him. Why would they try and make life difficult for people who were more than capable of beating the shit out of them? The piggy little scientist was flanked by two more
of the security detail. One of them was Safiya, who’d worked with Amanda before. Safiya was third generation French/Algerian. She had been a police officer in Marseilles. The other guard was
a weedy-looking buck toothed guy she didn’t recognise.

‘I’m going to assume for a moment that you’re not a complete idiot,’ Amanda told Asher. ‘That the body of your head of security lying right here hasn’t
escaped your notice. And that this is the second corpse on your watch . . .’

‘On Sub-commander Walters’ watch . . .’ Asher began.
Pass that buck,
Amanda thought.

‘You don’t give a fuck about how I’m dressed. It’s a power play. It’s about establishing control. Let’s just skip it. You do your job, I do mine and we both
try to piss each other off as little as possible.’

Asher stared at the woman. Once again he was at a loss trying to work out why these semi-literate grunts would even bother speaking, when all that was required of them was to do as their
intellectual superiors told them to.

‘Oh dear,’ Dr Asher said, with mock sadness. ‘There seems to be some confusion. I will try and explain the situation in as simple terms as I can manage. You do what I tell you
to do when I tell you to do it, and you do it without question.’

Amanda looked up at him. There was no anger in her expression, just weariness.

‘No,’ she told him simply. Asher started turning a funny red colour. Amanda guessed that he wasn’t used to being told
no
by his subordinates. ‘Look, I tried the
career thing in this fucked-up job, it didn’t work out for me. You’ve got nothing to threaten me with. You don’t like me? Send me packing, or even better have me fired, you
pathetic little pig of a man.’ The bucktoothed member of Asher’s security detail endeared himself to Amanda by trying to suppress a grin. Asher was turning puce now, but he managed to
get control of himself.

‘You have family in New York, don’t you, Miss Cross?’ Asher said, smiling.

‘I did until CELL had them evicted for whatever it is they’re doing there. Imagine how popular that will make me at Thanksgiving.’ Amanda didn’t like how this was going.
She could not for the life of her understand why Congress had handed control of the ruined city over to CELL after the mess they had made during the quarantine.

‘I believe that they are in a refugee camp just outside of Sleepy Hollow. I can make life very difficult for them, as well as for the members of your team.’

Amanda stared at him. She felt the same cold rage that she always felt when someone threatened people that she cared about. Don’t blow, she told herself, bide your time.

‘Boss,’ Alan said returning. Amanda was grateful for the interruption. She’d been worried that she was going to say or do something really dumb and possibly quite violent.
‘I’ve got three bullets imbedded in the wall. They were tightly grouped. The other two rounds I can’t account for. I reckon they got shot down the tunnel deeper into the cave
complex. I can go look for them.’ Amanda was already shaking her head.

‘No way. We go out, we go mob-handed.’ Alan looked relieved. ‘You said two.’ Alan held something up. ‘Seriously, what did I tell you about handling the
evidence?’ Amanda asked, pained. Mikey was grinning. Alan looked embarrassed. Amanda took the object off him and examined it.

‘Impacted six-point-eight millimetre full metal jacket from the Grendel. Standard issue because CELL doesn’t know enough to issue low-impact rounds to the half-trained fuckwits they
employ as grunts. It hit the cave wall,’ but even as she said it she knew something wasn’t right.

‘Thing is, boss, I found it right in the middle of the tunnel entrance,’ Alan told her.

‘Walters the kind of guy to panic?’ Amanda asked.

‘No, he was solid,’ Safiya said in English. Her accent was a mix of French and Algerian. ‘He wasn’t in New York but he’d helped clear out a few Ceph nests and
he’d been on the sharp end in Sri Lanka with your 10
^th
Infantry.’

‘Which ties with the tight grouping. So why didn’t he hit what he was aiming at?’ She pointed at the tunnel entrance. ‘So something comes at him. He gets off two
three-round bursts. He hits it but no blood?’ she looked at Alan. Alan shook his head. ‘It closes in the face of automatic weapon fire and not only overpowers a trained ex-soldier but
twists his head round.’

‘So Ceph, right?’ the bucktoothed guy said.

Amanda glanced at Asher.

‘Anything you want to share, doctor?’ Amanda asked. Asher had a good poker face.

‘You thinking Stalker?’ Mikey asked.

‘No plasma burns, no shard wounds. Stalker would be my guess.’ She stood up. ‘Alan, how many of the detail down here?’

‘Now? Ten, including you.’

‘And from the old team, other than the three of you here?’

‘Daniels, Schmidt and Okobe. O’Donnel got crippled in a bar fight in northern Finland . . .’

‘Yeah, I heard about that, shame, good people when she could control her temper.’

‘Marceau got fired after that shit in Manchester. Couldn’t get work, couldn’t get welfare, he ate his own gun . . .’

‘Shit. I didn’t know about that. And Harrison bought it in Nigeria?’ Alan nodded. ‘Then three new guys?’

‘Including this bucktoothed motherfucker here,’ Alan said nodding at the fourth member of the security detail present.

‘Hello, bucktoothed motherfucker,’ Amanda said to him warmly. New Guy smiled and nodded. ‘I like him, particularly the way he just won’t shut up.’

‘Everyone calls me Hank, ma’am,’ the bucktoothed contractor told her.

‘Alabama?’ Amanda asked.

‘Hell no! Southern Georgia.’

‘You got problems with us coloured folks?’ Amanda asked.

‘Ignoring your racial profiling of me as poor whisky tango, only in front of friends and family back home.’

Amanda had to smile at this.

‘You in off the street or did you serve?’ Amanda asked, standing up and brushing herself down.

‘1
^st
Marine. Caught the tail end of Sri Lanka. We were in New York trying to evacuate civilians. Under Colonel Barclay.’

‘He’s good people,’ Mikey assured her.

‘Miss Cross,’ Asher began irritably. ‘My time is very valuable and you have work to do.’

‘Okay, I’m through playing detective. Standard operating procedure is you pull everyone out of here and you call in spec ops. They hunt and kill this thing and then you can go back
to work.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Dr Asher said.

‘It’s the SOP,’ Amanda said, feeling her heart drop. Asher wouldn’t want to shut down the operation and call in spec ops because it would mean a loss of productivity and
a loss of control. In short, it wouldn’t help him crawl back up to the corporate trough.

‘There’s ten of you and one of these things . . .’

‘And we have to keep the dig secure and hunt this thing and possibly sleep as well. There are hundreds of miles of tunnel down here, not to mention that this could be the tip of the
iceberg. My experience is that if there’s one, there’s probably more.’

‘I’ve read your record. Military police Special Response Team and then you transferred to the Defence Criminal Investigation Service. You have the skills to deal with this situation.
In fact, you were a very promising young CELL officer until you disgraced yourself by disobeying direct orders and abandoning your post in New York.’

Amanda clenched her jaw but did not rise to the provocation.

‘Fine. Shut down sites B through E . . .’

‘No. In fact, as soon as we’re finished here have the body cleared away, because I’m bringing another team in. The fact that it killed here suggests that this site may be more
important than we initially thought. Just find this thing and kill it.’

‘We can’t protect everyone at all five sites. People are going to die.’ Amanda said through gritted teeth.

‘And with the death of Walters and your presence here, we have proof that dead people can be replaced. Are there any other simple concepts that you would like explained to you before you
get on with your job?’ Asher asked.

Asher turned to leave. Safiya and Hank stayed put. Asher turned back to them, clearly furious.

‘You two with me, now!’ he snapped.

‘You’re going to keep two of my detail with you?!’ Amanda said, incredulously. Asher just looked at her as if she was a moron. ‘Doctor, I need at least one of them with
me.’

‘Already your incompetence is annoying me. It only takes a phone call . . .’ He left the rest of the threat about her cousin and their family in the upstate New York refugee camp
unsaid.

‘You need to be careful that you don’t push so hard that the other person feels that they’ve got nothing left to lose,’ Amanda told him. Asher started going red again,
furious.

‘You, inbreed,’ he finally said to Hank. ‘Stay with her.’

‘Yes sir,’ Hank said mildly.

Amanda would have preferred Safiya, and she didn’t like the way that Asher was looking at the attractive French/Algerian contractor. She did, however, have perfect confidence in
Safiya’s ability to look after herself.

Asher left.

‘So, he seems nice,’ Amanda muttered. Mikey laughed, Alan and Hank smiled.

She had gathered them all in site A. They were sat just behind one of the light rigs, in a circle. Okobe, Daniels and Schmidt had all greeted her warmly. Genuinely pleased that
she was with them again.

‘You’re supposed to be like plod, aye?’ Kearney asked. He was a wiry, thuggish-looking kid from somewhere called Wolverhampton in Britain. Apparently he’d ended up in
CELL due to the UK’s Penal Conscription Act. Amanda found this a little strange. She had thought that conscripts under the act were supposed to end up in Britain’s actual military, not
as corporate military contractors.

Amanda narrowed her eyes at Kearney and just shook her head in bewilderment. His accent was almost impossible to understand.

She’d secured her body armour and was wearing a holstered Hammer II automatic pistol on her hip. She was in the process of reassembling and checking her Alpha Jackal combat shotgun. She
had just attached the fore grip to the mounting rails under the barrel and was in the process of attaching a flashlight to the mounting rails on the side of the weapon.

‘He wants to know if you’re police,’ Daniels translated for her. He was another Brit, who’d served with the Royal Engineers. He was a middle-aged man going to seed. If
CELL had any sense he would have been working for them servicing vehicles and weapons, but in a very military show of logic he’d ended up carrying a Grendel in a security detail.

‘I used to be an MP,’ Amanda told Kearney.

‘So you gonna’ investigate this?’

‘It’s not an investigation, it’s a hunt. It doesn’t matter who or what did this or why, we just need to find it and kill it. And I’ve got some bad news for you,
kid.’ Kearney narrowed his eyes. ‘Go and relieve Safiya and send her back here.’

The young British kid opened his mouth to protest but Daniels looked over at him and just shook his head. The kid remained quiet and headed over to where the doctor was looking over some
findings.

‘We going into the caves?’ Coyle asked, sounding worried. Coyle was another of the new guys. An American who had served in a tank regiment. He had the look of a soldier who’d
stopped caring about himself, or anything else for that matter.

‘We’d just get lost unless we’ve got solid intel as to its whereabouts.’

‘Do you know what this place is?’ Alan asked Amanda. Amanda laughed.

‘I got put on a transport flight from Lagos. I wasn’t even told I was going to St. Petersburg.’ There was some laughter from around the circle.

‘Asher talks openly in front of us. He thinks anyone carrying a gun is a mental sub-normal who wouldn’t understand what he’s talking about.’

‘Yeah, he’s a charmer alright,’ Amanda said. ‘So?’

‘He thinks this is part of a birthing chamber. Somewhere below here are Ceph, or things that will become Ceph, or at the very least some of their tech, just like New York.’

‘Nice. So if one of them is awake . . .’ Amanda asked as she slid the extended magazine into the Jackal.

‘Then they’re probably trying to find a way to wake the others.’

‘And we end up with another New York right here in St. Petersburg.’

‘Which won’t matter to us,’ Daniels said. ‘Because we’ll be overwhelmed immediately.’ He had been with them in New York. He’d seen what the Ceph could
do.

‘I just want some payback for Sam,’ Okobe muttered. There were nods from Mikey and Schmidt as well. Okobe was ex-Nigerian army. He was tall, rake thin but somehow still powerful
looking. Normally quiet but he had been close to Sam and it looked like her death had hit him hard. Amanda reached out and grabbed the Nigerian’s arm. She had liked Sam as well.

A harried-looking Safiya joined them.

‘I’ve only got a little while, he’s less than pleased at the swap,’ she told them. There were some angry mutterings.

‘Okay, ideas?’ Amanda said.

‘Claymores?’ Daniels suggested.

‘Do you have any?’ Amanda asked. Daniels shook his head. ‘Probably for the best. We can’t have some junior xeno-archaeologist spread themselves all over the local
area.’

‘It might catch Asher,’ Schmidt suggested. There was more laughter. Schmidt had been a tank gunner in the German army. The German looked after himself. His flattop blonde hair and
blue eyes made him look like the Aryan ideal. His appearance was at odds with his apparently generous and friendly nature.

‘We’ve got five caverns to cover, not to mention intervening tunnels, and Asher wants all the sites up and running. Even one person per cavern, we’re going to struggle if we
want to sleep and someone’s going to have to stay with Asher and hold his hand,’ Mikey pointed out. Amanda was already shaking her head.