Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot
Read Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot Online
Authors: Project Itoh
METAL GEAR SOLID: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS
© 2012 Konami Digital Entertainment
© Project ITOH 2008, 2010
First published in Japan in 2010 by KADOKAWA SHOTEN Co., Ltd., Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA SHOTEN Co., Ltd., Tokyo.
English translation © 2012 VIZ Media, LLC
Cover design by Kam Li
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.
HAIKASORU
Published by VIZ Media, LLC
295 Bay Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Itoh, Project, 1974-2009.
[Metaru gia soriddo ganzu obu za patoriotto. English]
Metal gear solid : guns of the patriots / by Project Itoh ; translated by Nathan Collins.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4215-4001-6
I. Collins, Nathan. II. Title.
PL871.5.T64M4813 2012
895.6'36—dc23
2012012918
The rights of the author of the work in this publication to be so identified have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Haikasoru eBook edition
ISBN: 978-1-4215-5087-9
PROLOGUE
LET ME TELL you a story about a grave.
The lone man was placing a bouquet beside a gravestone. No name was inscribed upon the stone, only the words
IN MEMORY OF A PATRIOT WHO SAVED THE WORLD
.
This was, after all, a cemetery for the unknown. For those whose names could not be determined. For those whose identities were not permitted to be recorded.
White flowers carpeted the cemetery grounds. Their name, the star-of-Bethlehem, evoked the light of the kingdom of God. (Also, a moniker shared with the trinket placed atop Christmas trees.)
But the graves in this potter’s field belonged to those cast out from the light of heaven.
Do you know why graveyards for the nameless are called potter’s fields? The answer can be found within the book of Matthew. A repentant Judas brought back his thirty pieces of silver to the Jewish priests, but the priests turned him away. Said it was his own problem, not theirs.
Judas threw the silver coins to the temple floor, left, and hanged himself. The priests used the blood money to buy a field from a potter, which they turned into a graveyard for the travelers, for the exiled, and for the abandoned.
A graveyard funded by Judas’s betrayal.
And so graveyards for the nameless are called potter’s fields.
The True Patriot, exiled, her name stolen, her remains lost, left nothing behind but her gravestone. The stars-of-Bethlehem, virtuous and white, seemed to stand in memory of the grave’s owner.
The Joy. That was her name.
She loved her country more than anyone, and her country was always in her thoughts. And yet, this proud, beautiful woman was exiled, buried here, and stripped of her name. By all rights, The Joy’s remains should have been properly laid to rest at Arlington, not abandoned in distant Russia.
At the site of that same grave, fifty years earlier, another man’s battle began.
Oddly enough, he too had placed a bouquet on her gravesite. It was a half a century ago—back when Russia was still called the Soviet Union, when the Soviets and the Americans threatened global destruction again and again, playing at their perilous staring contest with enough nuclear ordnance pointed at each other to destroy the world many times over and still have some to spare. The stars-of-Bethlehem had not yet taken root when the man stood there, motionless, his head tilted back to keep his tears from spilling. With that sorrow, that lonesome tableau, numerous battles were to begin.
No one knows the real name of The True Patriot.
The Joy had many names—“The Boss,” “The Mother of Special Forces,” and in Russia, “Voyevoda,” meaning “Warlord.” These were but a small sample, but the one name the man had never been able to learn was that given to her by her parents.
The man standing at her grave had once been known as “Snake.”
To state it more accurately, he had been one of the Snakes.
The story I have to tell is about these Snakes.
One tried to change the world. One tried to destroy it. One tried to protect it. There were many Snakes, and there were many battles.
I want to tell you.
I want to tell you how our world came to be what it is.
I want to tell you the story of the Snakes who shaped the world.
ACT 1: LIQUID SUN
LET ME TELL you a story about the Snake I know best.
The Snake who was my friend. The Snake who changed my life.
Seated on the back of a crowded military truck, his AK-47 propped up beside him, he was smoking—well, I wasn’t there to witness it, not yet, but that man was never without his smokes.
If any of the other soldiers packed onto the flatbed minded the smoke, they didn’t show it. They faced a far more imminent death than lung cancer some decades down the road. For them, to abstain from the simple pleasure of smoking would be absurd. Just minutes later, their brains might be spilling onto the ground through holes punched through their skulls. Bullets might be rolling around inside their guts as they writhed in agony.
Nothing would be as ridiculous as banning soldiers from smoking. The Nazis enacted the first nationwide tobacco ban as a measure of public health, but even Hitler couldn’t keep it from the soldiers in the field. War and smoking come as a pair.
The man exhaled smoke and squinted up at the sun, too far inland for the cool sea air to reach.
The sun’s harsh glare passed unimpeded through the crisp, dry air. Most of the soldiers had wrapped cloths around their heads to protect their vulnerable skin from the brazen sun and the sand storms carried by the arid wind.
The road was, almost without exception, unpaved—it was less a road than a tire trail. The single line of trucks—old and plain, but rugged—followed the path. From the gaps between the wooden boards running along the sides of the flatbed, the man glimpsed the occasional stone building, all of them abandoned.
They were approaching a city—or what had once been one.
Its inhabitants had long since left, for how could a family casually go about their daily routine with bullets flying everywhere?
A few men, known as operators, were mixed in with the soldiers jostling about on the backs of the trucks. Most of the soldiers were local militiamen of varied experience and training. The operators had been sent by PMCs, or Private Military Companies, to organize the rabble into a disciplined fighting unit.
My friend was there in the guise of one such operator. He registered with the local PMC and came to the battlefield as a mercenary.
PMCs were the enterprise of turning war into a living—the enterprise of providing the means to make war.
PMCs offered the tools of waging war to any who sought them. They turned people who had never fired a single bullet in their lives into capable soldiers. They worked with arms merchants to provide the necessary materiel. Training, equipment, command, transport, supply, medicine—all aspects of war were organized under the domain of business.
The actual act of the war itself was only one small fraction of the vast market.
Even the operators were commodities in the battlefield marketplace, simply workers selling their labor—only their work was combat and their workplace was the theater of war.
Half a century ago, mercenaries existed as independent contractors—even the largest groups of them were small squads—and they worked for whichever army would pay them. They didn’t fight for the sake of any ideology, or for any nation’s cause, or for a religious belief. They fought for the money, and nothing else. Without any reason to band together out of loyalty, there was no means for them to organize.
With the end of the Cold War, these outlaws began to form larger groups. The era of opposing superpowers capable of mutually assured destruction had passed, and small wars erupted around the globe. It was as though the hoops had fallen off a barrel. Some peoples hadn’t been able to escape historical grudges, some zealously wanted to prove their god was absolute, and others, oppressed by hopeless poverty, gathered into armies.
If we at least have guns, we can kill each other.
With swords and axes and the like, people had to be close enough to watch their blade pierce helmet and skull. Unlike those primitive weapons, guns were tools for massacre and designed for ease of use. Just a squeeze of the trigger, and some distant foe would flop to the ground.
But to make war with them—that’s a different matter. For that, a soldier needs to undergo the right training, to be given the right equipment, and to learn how to execute the right strategy.
The first company to begin filling those needs was a mercenary agency called Outer Heaven.
Considered to be the first PMC, Outer Heaven was headquartered in a fortress in South Africa, from whence it dispatched mercenaries to conflicts around the world.
Founded by a legendary mercenary who roamed the world’s battlefields during the Cold War, the company was revolutionary, even when considering the history of conflicts that had followed World War II. In the chaos that came with the end of the Cold War, Outer Heaven announced to the world that war didn’t have to be between the armies of nations.
The man who had destroyed that organization was sitting in the military truck, an old soldier exhaling cigarette smoke. He leaned against his propped-up AK, ready to throw himself once more into the flames of war, whipping every last ounce of life out of his relentlessly aging, improbable body.
His name was David.
He was the son of Big Boss—the legendary mercenary and founder of Outer Heaven.
David was also a legend. In the secret histories of war, he was known as Solid Snake.
Their enemies already knew they were coming.
Snake looked up and saw a Canard Rotor VTOL scouting craft, part helicopter, part jet plane, flying across the yellow sand and over the convoy. The governmental army would no doubt be waiting in the abandoned city ahead, taking up tactically advantageous positions based on the aircraft’s reconnaissance.
The moment the trucks crossed into the ruins, the battle began.
The vehicles stopped, and waves of militiamen leapt from the flatbeds. If even half of them had been really prepared for the fight, things might have gone better. Worse still, the PMC troops hired by the governmental army had indeed known of the militia’s coming and had set up snipers’ nests in buildings a safe distance away.
Militia forces, armed only with AKs more suitable for relatively close-range combat, fell one by one, their heads shattered by the onslaught from two-man cells of snipers and spotters.
But there came a point when a soldier had to trust in his instinct and leap into the fray. One way or another, he’d have to throw his body into the maelstrom of bullets. But if he ventured into the chaos alongside everyone else, maybe the probability of the enemy targeting him would be lower.
Snake waited for his instinct to discern the right moment, then without further hesitation, he spurred his old, tired body and leapt to the ground.
Directly in front of him, a soldier whipped back. Red oozed out the back of the man’s head, and a soft lump of fragmented brain tissue struck Snake’s clothing.
Not that the seasoned warrior let it faze him. The instant Snake touched earth, he was already moving, headed straight for the nearest cover.
The area around the trucks was already piled with corpses.
The PMC snipers on the government’s side expertly dispatched most of their targets with single shots to the head. Those targets unfortunate enough to have the bullets miss their heads or hearts and instead hit their lungs or stomachs lay on the sand twisting in agony. There was no luxury of a battlefield medic here.
Maybe the PMC unit was well aware of that reality. In previous wars, inflicting nonfatal injuries—legs, arms—was the more effective tactic. The downed soldiers’ comrades would have to drag them to safety, tying up two or more combatants with one shot.
But the militia had no system to save the fallen and no techniques to administer aid. Moreover, they hadn’t any medical supplies to use. Any casualties would be left behind. There simply wasn’t any other choice. Without any benefit in simply injuring the militiamen, the PMC was better off shooting to kill.
Snake wound through the scattered bodies and dove into the shadow of a partially destroyed house.
Truck after truck passed through the city gate, spewing forth militiamen. Some soldiers, seeing the hellish battlefield, froze with terror. Others, who had taken the initiative and jumped from the flatbeds first, had their heads blown off before their feet hit the sand. The soldiers’ fear was understandable—this wasn’t a battle but a massacre.
Snake tested the action of his AK by firing three single shots. On the third, his trigger locked. The ejection port was jammed by a chunk of broken metal. Bad ammo. The casing had swollen inside the chamber.
Snake clucked his tongue in frustration and tossed down the useless weapon. The rifle clattered out from the shadows, where it was immediately hit by one of the snipers’ shots. The impact of the shot kicked the jammed gun even farther out of reach.
Snake made a wry smile, appreciating the shooter’s skillful aim despite the realization that the sniper had him cornered.
Just then, a low, angry, bestial bellow rumbled through the sky, the cry some cross between that of a cow and a pig.
The militia fighters looked at one another. The roar seemed a harbinger of a demon’s descent to the battlefield. The cry was that of an animal, though doubtfully like any the militiamen had ever heard.
There. Snake saw them.
Off in the distance, large, unnatural shapes leapt through the spaces between the half-destroyed buildings. They hopped like frogs and quickly closed in on the battleground.
There was a thunderous crash. Snake turned to look at the source of the noise and saw that a military truck had slammed into the city gate. The overturned vehicle’s driver slumped upside down, blood streaming from the bullet hole in his head. The antigovernment forces were now cut off from their reinforcements. And in front of them waited only the ruthless PMC snipers and those approaching beastlike creatures.
Suddenly, silence fell over the battlefield. All the gunfire ceased like a conversation halted by an awkward silence.
“Death approaches,” said one of the militiamen.
It was an oddly dreamlike moment. Several of the men nervously looked about.
Snake stood ready, knowing that the battle was only turning for the worse.
A giant object came down from above.
It was a kind of leg. What else could it be called? Some poor fighter was crushed beneath it, his body cleaved in two.
The creature’s legs had the shape of a bird’s, but bulged like two olive-drab sausage tubes stuffed full of meat. Perched atop the organic legs was a mechanical tank-shaped head. Indeed, the thing seemed to be a miniaturized version of the nuclear-equipped bipedal tank, Metal Gear REX.
Snake recognized the shape immediately. These things were Metal Gears too. Antipersonnel Metal Gears without nuclear warheads.
Unmanned weapons. The lives of soldiers in wealthy countries were worth far more than the lives of impoverished militia. To protect those valuable lives, economically advanced nations and the PMCs hired by them had pursued new combat capabilities. Driven by artificial intelligence, these robots were capable of thinking for themselves and made decisions without the need for human input or control.
The robot was a superb combatant. It swung its legs, each as wide as a tree trunk, and sent militia fighters flying into the stone houses. As the men slammed against the walls, every bone in their bodies shattered. They were dead in an instant.