Crysis: Escalation (15 page)

Then the companies had come. He had watched the privatisation of war with disgust throughout his military career. In his opinion, the moment the focus went from duty and loyalty to the man next
to you to a pay cheque, the coherence wrought by military discipline was gone. At best you got badly equipped individuals in way over their heads. At worst you got atrocity.

He wasn’t some peace-loving, anti-capitalist hippy protestor. He remembered when they had occupied Wall Street. Unlike many amongst his peers, he had had respect for them. Rightly or
wrongly, they had taken a stand for what they believed in. He’d been furious when they’d started getting beaten and moved on, silenced. Their right to voice their opinions was one of
the things he had thought he’d been fighting for. Nowadays they would just be branded as terrorists and mown down by corporate goons, like the so-called
Resistor
group that had been
protesting outside a CELL facility in Tokyo. Barclay had read the intelligence briefings on them. They hadn’t been terrorists, that was spin bullshit. They’d just been kids.

He’d studied business in college. He had no problem with capitalism. His dad had made him believe that if you worked hard you should get rewarded for it. The double dip had proved that
capitalism and corporations needed restraints. That compassion and responsibility had to be more important than the rapacious profiteering of a tiny minority. Some things just couldn’t be
left to an institute whose primary concern was the generation of wealth, the wellbeing of the people of your country being one of them. Instead the world had gone the other way.

And now the same company who had come for his beloved hometown had come for his beloved Corps. He didn’t care that it had all been agreed in Washington, set up by bribe-welcoming
politicians in shady backroom deals. CELL had control of the Corps now, and could use them for whatever they wanted.

‘Not on my watch,’ he muttered, only slurring a little bit.

He didn’t even flinch as the lockbuster shotgun rounds blew off the hinges of the door to his house.
Little dramatic,
he thought. He picked up the Peacemaker and stuffed it into
the waistband of his dress trousers.

They sauntered into his office. They had checked first and seen a broken-down old man slumped in a leather chair with a whiskey in his hand. There were five of them. He could hear others moving
around his house. Things were being loudly broken in other rooms. They wore sharp suits, carried piece-of-shit Feline SMGs and were dumb enough to wear sunglasses inside. Barclay didn’t think
he would have liked them even if they hadn’t just damaged the door on a house more than a hundred years old.

‘Sherman Barclay,’ one of them started. He was stood in front of Barclay’s desk. He had the false confidence of someone with a gun facing a broken man. Though he did glance
down at the M1911 lying on the blotting paper on Barclay’s mahogany desk.

‘General Barclay,’ he corrected the man.

‘Not any m . . .’

‘Are you wearing perfume, son?’ Barclay demanded.

‘Erm . . . What?’ the man was taken aback by the tone of command in the General’s voice. ‘It’s aftershave.’

‘Perfume. My marines don’t wear perfume, and neither would you if you had any goddamned self-respect. What the fuck are you and your little pantywaists doing in my house other than
using up perfectly good oxygen?’

‘We’re here . . .’

‘You address me as sir, or General, or you can get out of my house, understand me, boy?’

The boy with a gun in front of him was starting to lose confidence in his ability to deal with this mean old man. He glanced down at the M1911 again. Barclay followed his gaze and then looked
the gunman in the eyes. He just saw himself reflected in mirror shades, but he knew the other man looked away first.

‘Sir, we’re here to take you into custody . . .’

‘Under whose authority?’

‘The board of CELL . . .’

‘Who are a private company. This makes about as much sense as being arrested by Ronald McDonald. I don’t recognise their authority. What am I supposed to be charged with?’

‘Treason against . . .’

Barclay was on his feet. Five SMGs were suddenly pointed at him by very nervous corporate gunmen. He was pointing at the man in front of him. Whiskey or no whiskey, his hand was steady.

‘You listen to me, you failed abortion, my loyalty, my duty, my honour . . .’ one of the gunmen laughed, a sneer on his face. ‘. . . has been proven in fire and blood. You
stand where thousands of men and women far better than you have stood and you have the gall to accuse me of treason. Your very presence here is a goddamned insult to every marine who died in some
godforsaken shithole, from Tripoli to Okinawa, for your fucked up sense of entitlement and your disrespect. Get the fuck off my base now, before I beat you off it!’

‘. . . Against CELL ,’ the gunman finished. Barclay just stared at him. Then he started laughing.

‘What does that even mean, boy?’

‘It means you have to come with me.’

‘Or what?’

‘We’re authorised to use force in your apprehension.’

Barclay nodded.

‘You sure about that, son?’ he asked.

‘General, sir . . .’

If they had sent marines, even MPs, instead of these suited, pencil-neck, executive gunmen. If they had saluted him, shown respect to the rank, the Corps that he had been commandant of until
this morning, a rank he had earned the hard way, he would have gone quietly, maybe.

He grabbed the M1911 from the desk. The first shot was one-handed and it was point blank range. He put the big hollow-point round between the gunman who’d been doing all the
talking’s eyes. The back of his head came off as the hollow point mushroomed.

He shifted, moving to one side. Bringing his hand holding the M1911 into a two-handed standing position. The one who had laughed was next. Nothing petty, but that one wanted to shoot, Barclay
had recognised the type. Two rounds. He went down.

He moved, crossing behind his chair.
Don’t stand still in a gunfight, bullets will come looking for you.
Two more rounds. He was sure he had just winged the gunman closest to the
door but he went down and didn’t start firing.

The last two had started firing now. Inexperienced as they were, they had at least managed to react. Bullets blew splinters out of a desk more than two hundred years old. His crystal decanter
exploded, spraying him in whiskey. He was still moving to the side. He fired twice more and a gunwoman went down. The final gunman was firing the Feline, spraying wildly as he made for the door.
Barclay registered the look of panic on the gunman’s face. A round caught Barclay in his left shoulder, knocking him back. He took aim. The gunman saw his death coming and he couldn’t
understand why the gun bucking away in his hand wasn’t going to save him. The round caught the gunman in the head. He walked another step, still firing and then collapsed to the ground.

Cordite smoke filled the room. Then the pitiful whining of the wounded started. It was just like any other battle. It was the one closest to the door who was still alive. He had just winged him.
The slide on his M1911 was back, the gun empty.
No,
he thought,
not a battle, a gunfight.
One of the things that Barclay had always liked most about the stories of Bat Masterton
was that the gunfighter had apparently been a genuinely good shot. Not a spray and pray merchant.

He heard them first. They came charging through the double doors. Barclay let go of the empty M1911. He fast-drew the Peacemaker from his waist band.
Oh, how long I practiced that
. They
started firing. He fanned the hammer on the single-action revolver rapidly, firing from the hip. The M1911 hit the desk. The hammer on the Peacemaker clicked down on an empty chamber.

Somehow he’d hit all three of the entering gunmen. With six rounds, fanning, firing from the hip, admittedly at close range, he’d hit all three, as it mattered in a gunfight.

‘Can you see me now, Bat?’ he said to himself and smiled, and then he staggered back and sat down hard in his chair. The one in the gut hurt the most but he was sure it was the round
in the chest that would kill him. Breathing was difficult, like there was some kind of obstruction to it.

All the warrior philosophy was bullshit. Eight dead young men scattered around his house, sent by cowards, proved that. If he had managed, somehow, amongst all that bloodshed, to be a decent man
then that was something his father had taught him. It hadn’t come from a book. But he had taken two things away from all that bullshit. Sometimes questioning and disobedience were the most
patriotic things that you could do. The Founding Fathers had taught him that.

He could hear vehicles skidding to a halt outside. Footsteps, running. There was shouting outside.

The second thing: when a
samurai
disagreed with his
daimyo
, his lord, the ultimate protest he could make was to take his own life. This ritual form of suicide by disembowelment
was called
seppuku
.

That was bullshit as well
, Barclay thought as shaking fingers managed to put one more round into the Peacemaker.
I just want to make the decision on how I go out.
He had never
felt that anybody owed him anything, not the country, not the people, not the marines, not the government – well, maybe the government sometimes – but as a reward for more than thirty
years of service:
frankly, this sucks ass.

As he put the barrel of the gun to his head and cocked the hammer he thought about Susan. He thought about his father.

They burst into his office brandishing weapons and shouting. There had always been shouting in his life, ever since he’d joined the Corps anyway.

‘Semper Fidelis,’ he told them. He squeezed the trigger.

None of them noticed his final act of “treason’. The camera in the plant pot in the corner, broadcasting to the Macronet.

‘There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets
ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I’ll swear I can’t see it that way.’

William Barclay “Bat” Masterton, New York City, 1921

Refuse/Resist

HMS
Robin Hood
, Shakedown Run, Atlantic Ocean, off the Eastern Seaboard, 2034

Captain Cyrus Harper stared at the hardcopy of the order. He glanced over at the holographic image of the target. He could see the thermal imagery of the forces gathering
amongst the ruins of Yonkers. He also noticed that part of the image had been redacted. The part of the image that would have shown exactly what was going on NY. The image had been shot from orbit.
He guessed it had been shot by one of the CELL satellites linked to the Archangel orbital weapons platform.
Why didn’t they just use that?
the cowardly part of him wondered.

‘Sir,’ his executive officer Commander Stevens demanded. ‘We have our orders.’ Harper looked up at his XO. The man was tall, very thin and had a predatory aspect to his
features. This had earned him the nickname “the ghoul” amongst the men. He was one of the breed of men that Harper had come to think of as “corporate” officers.

Next to his XO was Lieutenant Zinah Talpur, the commander of the small complement of Royal Marines on the
Robin Hood
. She looked less than pleased to be involved in this. Not so long
ago, it seemed, an XO would have never dared to question – let along try and strong-arm – his captain like this, but things had changed. The navy had been privatised. The CELL
Corporation, the monopolistic economic superpower in its own right, had bought the military from an increasingly close-to-bankrupt country.

Many of the officers in the navy had attempted to resign their commission only to find that their “contract terms” had changed. Harper hadn’t been one of them, but then the
maiden voyage of the HMS
Robin Hood
was going to be his last voyage. He had joined at the turn of the century. Now in his mid-fifties, they would either try and give him a desk job or
assign him to a training post. The latter appealed more than the former but neither appealed enough for him to stay. He had not renewed his term of service before the buyout. He was still able to
leave. The Navy was, if nothing else, an enormous bureaucracy. Once something was done it was very difficult to undo it.

‘Sir!’ His XO was even more insistent now. Harper’s eyes flickered up to see him. He had not liked Stevens from the moment he had met him. He didn’t like his attitude,
his style of command or the way he treated the men. He could see the hunger in the XO’s eyes. CELL ownership meant opportunities for the right kind of people. Stevens wanted Harper to refuse
the order from their new owners, the order to fire on another sovereign nation to secure corporate interests, so he could take command. For him, career advancement was more important than anything
else, even honour.

Harper, however, had misgivings. He didn’t care if the American government had okayed it. He didn’t care that it would be part of what passed for a combined-arms operation under the
auspices of CELL. A company with this amount of power didn’t sit right with him. He had always assumed that anti-capitalist sentiments were for hippies and dropouts who couldn’t or
wouldn’t play the game. Now he was less sure. CELL seemed like capitalism taken to such extremes it had started to resemble feudalism. That said, he had never disobeyed an order in his life
and he wasn’t keen to start now.

‘Mr Stevens. I don’t know who you have served under before, but I am not in the habit of having my XO bark at me,’ Harper began.

‘Sir, it is my . . .’

‘Or indeed interrupt me. I have received the orders. We are still more than seventeen hours away from the point at which they will need to be acted on. I fail to see why you are here
acting this way. In fact, I could do with an extremely good reason why I shouldn’t have you removed from duty and confined to quarters. Lieutenant Talpur, frankly I expected better of
you.’ The young Pakistani woman at least had the decency to look guilty. Harper was less than pleased when he noticed that Stevens had his sidearm at his hip.