Crysis: Escalation (20 page)

‘Yes sir.’

‘No, no, please god no!’ Stevens begged as Dane dragged him through the corridors of the ship. Dane stopped and turned to the Commander.

‘Seriously, you have to come to terms with this. This is no good for you. This is the fulfilment of your
dharma
, it’s a shitty
dharma
for sure, but you need to
deal. This,’ he pointed at the sobbing man. ‘This is no good, there’s no dignity here for either of us.’

Stevens just gaped at him and then started crying and begging again. Dane sighed and resumed hauling the Commander through the ship.

Dane dragged Stevens up onto deck just as the hatches to the vertical launch systems were opened, revealing the warheads of the twenty-four Perseus cruise missiles.

‘There’s a beauty in the focused purpose of a weapon like that,’ Dane said. He kept a tight grip on Stevens as he watched the Bronx riverside go by. He watched it until the
sight of all the ghosts got to him and he had to look away.

‘Please, please, I can tell you something?’ Stevens begged.

Dane turned to look at him.

‘Think of something good to say, man,’ Dane said.

‘They knew that Harper might be problematic and they were worried about him absconding with a ship that has the
Robin Hood
’s stealth capabilities. They knew I would be loyal
. . .’

‘Harper’s loyal. You can be bought.’

‘They gave me a transponder,’ Stevens told him.

The suit was picking up lots of strange atmospheric readings, as if the air was ionising.
They know where we are
, Dane thought. He looked up. The clouds. They looked funny. Then they
caught fire. He jumped. Everything became light and heat.

Dane jumped through steam and hit the molten riverbed of the East River. Then the water came back. He realised he had been screaming. The armour on his back, made from nearly indestructible
alloys, had blistered and then turned molten and then fused with his flesh. All the times he’d fallen, been shot, stabbed, beaten, battered, run over. All the times that it had felt like he
had died, none of it compared to this. This was pain in its purest form. Pain so extreme that it was an abstract. He was only conscious because of the suit’s advanced medical systems. No
human had ever experienced this degree of pain before. Then, mercifully, he died.

The suit forced him back to life minutes later. The water all around him was boiling from the heat of the armour. He died again.

The suit had to block signals from a lot of his nerve endings before it could shock the soldier back to life with the built-in defibrillator. Dane came to again on the side of
the river, amongst the ghosts. He did some more screaming but managed to get it under control. He lay in the mud, making it steam. He looked back upstream. The East River was moving quickly, trying
to replace the gap where a significant part of the river had just been vaporised. Plumes of steam were still shooting high into the sky. The suit was repairing itself, separating away from
Dane’s flesh and doing its best to return to a functional state.

The thing was
they had missed
, he thought, when he could think like a human again. The
Robin Hood
was gone, certainly.
More ghosts.
But had it been a direct hit he
would never have survived, armour or not.

In the distance, the suit’s enhanced hearing brought him the sound of rapid large-calibre weapons fire.
New York
, he thought,
I have to get to New York.

The Goat

Chinatown, New York, 2034

FUBAR. Clusterfuck. There were so many good ways to describe what had just happened to them, Chino thought. The Brits, the fucking Brits, had let them down. Left them badly
blowing in the wind. It had been foolish to trust them.

CELL had played it smart. Let them come in to the city proper. Let them get in underneath the framework of the dome they were building over the city destroyed by the Ceph incursion. Then the
CELL gun emplacements had started up. They’d torn into people on the street. The rounds had ripped through cover. The fire had been so intense it had brought buildings down on top of the
resistance fighters inside.

The gun emplacements broke them, split them, sent them running. Then CELL moved in on the ground, supported by VTOLs and helicopter gunships in the air. Their spec ops teams had gone after the
resistance’s hard core and the leadership. The rest they had left to the rank and file. What they used to call contractors, now they were more like indentured gunmen. The resistance fighters,
most of whom were experienced soldiers, many with special forces backgrounds, tore into the CELL gunmen, but there were just so many of them and they had air and fire support.

The resistance had been broken. Chino knew that. He didn’t know who was alive or who was dead. Had any been captured? It hadn’t looked like CELL were taking prisoners. They had
risked checking the Macronet feed when they’d been hiding. There were purges going on all over the word. CELL forces assisted by local police and military were arresting or killing the
so-called “terrorists” in every country the resistance operated in. It looked like they had been betrayed. They had put too many of their eggs in one basket. Put too much trust in
people they shouldn’t have. The operation had been too much about hope and not enough about their actual capabilities. CELL were never going to let them get close to their NY operation. They
had far too much to lose here.

And his man Dane hadn’t come back from the
Robin Hood
. He wondered if the Brits had fucked him too. Betrayed him. Handed him over to CELL. In the cold nights to come, Chino was
going to keep himself warm by thinking about what he would like to do to Captain fucking-Harper of the Royal-fucking-Navy.
What kind of candy-assed outfit calls itself ‘royal’
anyway
, he wondered bitterly,
delusions of fucking grandeur, is what that is
?

They had spent the day lying low. They had hidden in partially destroyed buildings. It had made Chino nervous. The last time he had been in Manhattan it had been crawling with dangerous alien
killing machines. CELL had apparently cleared all the Ceph out. That was their justification for the heavy-duty gun emplacements, not that they really needed an excuse. They owned New York now.

There were eight of them still together, in two inflatable raiding craft. They were making their way down the Bowery heading south for the time being. CELL would expect them to run to the north,
so they hadn’t. They would either double back or find another exfiltration route when the opportunity presented itself.

Chino was lying across the prow of the IRC, his Marshall pump-action shotgun pointing out from under the scrim they had lain across the top of the boat. The scrim was laced with a type of foil
that was supposed to confuse thermal imagery. Chino, however, was not willing to bet his life on it.

Behind him, also lying down on the boat, their weapons just pointing out from under the scrim, were Earl and Hank.

Earl was on the left hand side of the boat, covering the Bowery and over into the Lower East Side. He had to be in his mid-forties at least but the x-Delta sniper had looked after himself. The
quiet Missourian was wiry with leathery skin and still carried an ancient M14 rifle. Chino’s weird, nanosuited friend, Lazy Dane, went way back with Earl. They had both served in D
squadron’s recce/sniper troop in Delta Force.

Hank, another southerner, had been 1st Marine. He had known Alcatraz briefly during the evacuation of New York. Earl had then ended up going to work for CELL. The thoughtful bucktoothed Georgian
had witnessed what CELL was like first hand and deserted after finding that the terms and conditions had been altered so much that he was effectively going to end up a lifelong indentured servant
of the multinational company. Hank’s Mk 60 medium machine gun was pointing out the right side of the boat. Into what had been Chinatown.

Davis was an outspoken self-proclaimed Irish-African American and southie from Boston. He had been part of the Navy’s SEAL delivery vehicle team and was the best boatman that Chino had
ever seen. He was lying down in the back of the IRC, piloting it via a periscope sticking through the scrim and with the aid of guidance from Chino on the prow.

Davis’ suggestion for exfiltration was to head to a dive store he knew in Downtown, scavenge it for working closed circuit or SCUBA diving gear and head to Brooklyn subsurface. As a plan
went it wasn’t for the fainthearted, and it was problematic in that Earl wasn’t dive qualified. Nor were two of the members of Sarah’s crew in the other IRC that was trailing
them.

Chinatown’s getting weird
, Chino thought. He’d been in New York when it had been close to a hundred per cent humidity before but the mist was new. The lower part of
Manhattan was still under about ten feet of water. It covered the first storey of most of the buildings. Plant life had returned in a big way, flourishing in the moist environment, returning the
city to its roots as a swampy island, Chino guessed. Trees, mosses and other climbing plants crept up the side of buildings, obscuring once glowing signs in Hanzi script. It reminded Chino a little
of the swamps of Florida and the Bayous of Louisiana. He was half expecting to see an alligator slither out the second storey window of a laundry and swim across in front of them.

The moonlight shining through the thick mist gave the whole place an eerie, haunted feeling.
Haunted would be right
, Chino thought,
a lot of people died on these streets.
He
immediately thought back to his brother-resistance fighter, Lazy Dane, and all the dead people the nanosuited soldier saw. He hoped Dane was okay.

Then it sounded like the world was ending. He was soaked as water was kicked up in a line stretching out in front of him. He glanced behind to see Sarah’s boat. The IRC looked like it had
been folded down the middle. The thirty millimetre tracers from the gun emplacements looked like stars tumbling out of the night sky at them.

Chino heard the muffled outboard engine rev up as Davis took the boat wide out into the Bowery, behind the line of fire, and slewed it right into a tiny alley that Chino was sure it
couldn’t fit down. The boat was a tight fit, Earl and Hank had to roll off the side and into the well but Davis made the turn and gunned the motor, accelerating as fast as he could.

Behind them the rounds started flying through the walls as the auto-cannons tried to walk their aim in on the flimsy boat. Chino hated this. This wasn’t a fight for someone who was
basically infantry. All he could do was watch, shout warnings and hope that a thirty millimetre round didn’t cut him in two.

Parts of the buildings on one side of the alleyway collapsed into the water under the intensity of the incoming rounds. Chino was almost thrown off the boat as it hit something, probably a
sunken truck just under the waterline. The boat jumped but kept going. Davis was sat up now, having pushed the scrim aside. Earl and Hank, like Chino, were just holding on for dear life.

As Davis shot across Elizabeth Street, Chino caught a glance of the incoming tracers again. They were a broken line of lights pointing at them.

Fuck off
, Chino silently screamed.

They were in another alley. Rubble raining down on them as the heavy fire all but bisected buildings. The boat bounced off another submerged obstacle and almost went into the wall. Davis fought
with it and kept the craft under control. He slewed the craft hard right onto Mott Street and headed up it, past sunken shop fronts and old signs, the undergrowth whipping at their faces, their
passage making eddies in the thick mist. Chino glanced back at Davis. The guy couldn’t have been able to see further than he could but he hadn’t guided them wrong yet.

In the middle of Mott Street the boatman suddenly slewed left, straight towards a building.

‘Down!’ Davis barked. Chino scrabbled back and lay on the floor, sure they were about to collide with a brick wall. The IRC slid into the building through the top of an arched
two-storey window. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame but what there was rained down on them. Davis reversed the engine, it howled in protest and they still hit the opposite wall. They
found themselves floating quite close to exposed beams, just under the ceiling.

Davis unclipped the outboard and then lifted it up and dumped it into the water.

‘What the fuck!?’ Hank protested.

‘Heat,’ Davis told him. ‘Don’t worry, it’s sealed man. We don’t die in the next thirty seconds, I’ll go down and get it.’

It was only then that Chino realised the firing had stopped.

‘If they’ve lost us then they’ll send patrols in,’ Chino said, for something to say. His heart was beating very quickly. He wanted to break the tension.

‘Patrols we can handle,’ Davis said. Davis and Chino were both motor mouths in comparison with the two southerners in their four-man recon team.

Davis was sat on the edge of the boat, looking around at the peeling paint and the creeping plant life of the building they were floating in.

‘This used to be a really good restaurant, they did awesome . . .’ Davis disappeared into the water. Water which was churning up and red now. Part of the front of the boat was
missing. Even Earl was surprised.
There’s something in the water
was all Chino had time to think before he realised the boat was crumpling up like a used condom and sinking
rapidly.

Chino tried to leap up but felt the boat give way underneath him. His fingers just grasped the wood of the exposed ceiling beams, scrabbling for purchase. He felt something brush against his
boot and let out an involuntary scream. He swung his legs up, almost kicking Earl in the face, and managed to wrap them around the beam. His shotgun was hanging down on its slung. He felt something
grab it and try and pull him back into the water. Chino just reached down and pulled the trigger. The shotgun firing sounded deafening, even after the barrage they had just experienced. The pull on
the weapon disappeared, however. The shotgun bucked up and bounced off Chino’s body armour. Chino swung himself up onto the beam and readied the shotgun, pointing it down into the water.