Free Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts Page A

checking the pods. “We’re looking for tissue samples, dead crew.”
    Yeah, and the couple of dozen assorted mercs over there are looking for
me
, even with a flying saucer buried under their feet: “Keep your eyes peeled for that Nanosuit asshole. The way they’re talking, he’s more trouble than the Ceph.”
    I cloak up, cross the ten meters to the OVERPRICED PARKING: IN ONLY ramp, hop the guardrail, and drop down behind the interlocked front ends of a Taurus and a Malibu that couldn’t seem to agree on traffic flow. I risk decloaking, let the charge rebuild while unsuspecting uniforms above my head fill the air with chatter.
    “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, andthere’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