Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online

shadow. I barely get back behind the cookie-cutter in time.
    The Urinating Soldier hesitates, looks back over his shoulder. Grunts. Keeps going.
    So. How long did that last: twenty seconds, thirty? No such thing as a free lunch. The power bar’s creeping back, though. The cloak recharges.
    Someone screams.
    No:
Parchman
screams. My squadmate screams. And then he stops. And in between there’s a gunshot.
    From inside the castle.
    The cloak’s not quite recharged yet but I’m moving anyway, hugging that curved brick wall, closing on the main gate. But it’s the flatbed parked in front that catches my eye; it’s the bodies piled on top of it.
    Some of them are in camo.
    Heavy doors clank open around the curve; I flatten back against the wall as a couple of spider-headed mercs carry Parchman down the steps and sling him onto the flatbed like a fucking sandbag. The N2’s got a zoom option but I don’t need it to see the burns on Parchman’s arms, or the cuts on the soles of his bare feet. I’ve seen those marks before. Those are the marks of special rendition. Those are the marks of interrogations that might not fit comfortably under the rubric of international law. No biggie, they told us in basic. Everyone does it.
    They never said anything about the neat little hole in Parchman’s temple, though.
    The mercs head back into the building, swapping stories about
pukeheads
and Susie Rottencrotch. They leave the gate open: doubled iron doors set into a stone arch, big square columnson each side like something out of a gladiator game. Their own personal coliseum.
    If that’s how they want it …
    I cloak again. I walk right through the gates of Castle Clinton, through an outer ring of trashed offices and gift shops. I find myself in an open circular compound full of crates and supplies, a ring of eighteenth-century cannons left over from the tourist season, and a couple of bloodstained plywood pallets outfitted with leather straps where arms and legs might go. And a bunch of CELLulites swapping bets on who’s going to take this Prophet asshole down.
    And then the power bar goes red and my suit goes
zzzzt
and everyone falls silent as snow.
    I look down at myself. There I am.
    I don’t how many there are. A dozen. Two. It doesn’t matter. There could be a fucking regiment and they
still
wouldn’t stand a chance. I am the reaper, man, I am all four Horsemen, I am unstoppable. I spent my whole damn career training for toe-to-toe with the enemy and here they are: these paramilitary fuckwits, these
mercenaries
, these washed-out border guards and wannabes who never swore allegiance to any country or any cause or any
thing
but the highest fucking bidder. I remember the trampled tents, the broken stretchers, the dumpsters full of dead civilians. I remember the beaten corpses of my brothers-in-arms and it is not only my sacred
duty
to take these assholes out; it is my
pleasure
. I could fight them all day and be ready to dance all night. I am—
    I am
into
it.
    And to think that I might have missed it all if I’d let the cloak recharge just a little longer, or if the circuits had drawn just a little less power, or if I’d moved just a wee bit faster. I could have snuck through the Castle and made my way out of the park without any bloodshed at all. What a pity, huh?
    I blame the suit.

SANTA’S LITTLE HELPER
     
    When adapting to changing battlefield conditions, when improvising in the face of the unknown and the unknowable, the human brain is still the best computer on the planet. When it comes to the instantaneous processing and integration of thousands of simultaneous streams of data, however, it could use a bit of help.
That’s where the N2’s
Semi-Autonomous NeuroTactical Augmentation
AI comes in. Powered by a parasitic blood-glucose infusion and our optional electrolytic Ballard microstack, this tenth-generation nonsentient biochip is built around a 10 13 -synapse core that runs at a blazing 1.5 BIPS. SANTA *