Free Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts Page B

me.
    The charge bar tops up at six. I fade, roll away from the planter, get to my feet. I’ve noticed that the cloak lasts a lot longer when the suit isn’t pulling power for a lot of other things. I can stay invisible for forty-five seconds, maybe a whole minute if I just stand still.
    Maybe almost as long if I just move very,
very
 … slowly.
    I amble sideways while the air fills with shouts of
Lost the target
and
Shit he’s cloaked again
. I line up my approach: five long steps to the edge of the crater on turbo, then maybe fifteen meters to cross the gap near the left edge. I amp strength to max and
move
.
    I nail the launch: solid traction, boots leave the ground maybe twenty centimeters from the edge, and the moment I’m airborne I drop strength right back to baseline. I sail over that gap like a ghost.
    And nearly blow the landing. My feet come down with no room to spare. I land just past the lip of the hole and
wobble
back and forth, windmilling my arms to keep from falling over. No time to worry about the sound of my boots on the pavement; if the rotors and the shouts and the random suppressing fire didn’t mask it I’m probably fucked.
    But here I am, ten meters from the elevators, and all that stands in my way are three CELLulites left to guard the supplies. That running jump burned through two-thirds of my charge, but for the moment I’m still stealthed.
    These boys are not convinced. Last time they saw me I wason the other side of the plaza, but I could be anywhere by now. I could be
right in front of them
. How would they know?
    They’ll know soon enough. They’ll know in about three seconds, because the charge bar’s just started flashing red. I bring up the Grendel: not the best accuracy and a downright shitty clip size, but these tungsten rounds would stop a rhino and my targets are almost close enough to touch.
    They see my face, and blow apart.
    It’s not completely clear sailing after that. Their buddies can’t wait to lay down the law now that I’m back in their worldview, and the elevator doors are jammed. I have to finesse my way in, and it seems like I have to fend off a whole fucking platoon in the process. By the time I get those doors jimmied open, drop the twenty meters to the bottom of the shaft, and take care of anyone who tries to follow little Timmy down the well—we’re looking at a final score of somewhere around seventeen–zip.
    Like I said before. That’s what you get when you work nine-to-five.
    The bottom of the shaft is chest-deep in scummy water; a service crawlway leads off to the north, a half-flooded mess of ruptured plumbing, soggy cardboard crates, and the occasional pulpy corpse. Dim lights glow here and there in rusty little cages, antique bulbs with actual filaments inside. I bet they’ve been down here since the twentieth century.
    There’s brighter light farther down the passage, though. I follow it to a hole torn in the ceiling, duck under an exposed I-beam, and climb a pile of cinder blocks and shattered tiles to another Ceph pod; it rammed down into this space at a forty-five-degree angle, and is half buried by collapsed ceiling and uprooted floor.
    And it’s—bleeding, or something.
    The pod’s ruptured in several spots. The stuff oozing fromthose wounds is the color of snot or old candle wax, and it’s
everywhere:
running in ropy strings along the hull, pooling on the screen, hanging in thick gooey stalactites from the breached ceiling. It
moves
. It—undulates. Or maybe that’s just the light: I look around for the first time and see the far end of the room, relatively unscathed behind me. A floor lamp, knocked on its side, throws light across the space at a low angle, full of contrast and long shadows. So, yeah: probably just a trick of the light. But I can’t shake the feeling that those giant hanging boogers
squirm
just the slightest bit, as if I’m looking at a thin-walled brood sac with some kind of half-seen larva incubating