KarlMrax

Harper looked up. There was a ripping noise. His brain registered lights coming towards him. Something hit him hard. He was in the water. Panic. He could see the water churning close to him, darts of phosphorescent light shooting through it. Someone grabbed him and dragged him to the surface. He gasped air into grateful lungs. There was more of the ripping noise. The boat was gone. It had ceased to exist, along with Private Fry, Corporal Fenn and the coxswain, who Harper was pretty sure had been called Harman. The

	Amanda felt her blood run cold. It felt like she followed
	the beam of Hank’s flashlight in slow motion.
	It was aimed just past Daniels, who was shaking like
	a leaf. Amanda saw nothing for a moment. Just the
	rock and the glowing neon figures of the alien symbols
	imbedded in it. The symbols didn’t look right. It was
	as if they were refracting off or through something.
	Amanda froze.

	Crysis: Escalation, Archeology

	The crunching noise had probably been quite quiet.
	To Amanda it sounded deafening. She watched Mikey’s
	body jerk as if it had been nudged by someone trying
	to get past. It knows we’re here and it doesn’t give a shit, she
	thought.
	It was almost an automatic response. Her finger
	curled around the shotgun’s trigger. She squeezed. Four
	rounds. The hammer hitting the cartridge.
	The charge in the cartridge exploding.
	The powder propelling electrostatically-charged ball-bearing down the barrel.

	‘I’m not an officer anymore, sir,’ he all but spat. ‘I’m
	an executive.’ He started to squeeze the trigger. Then
	the gun wasn’t there anymore, and neither was his
	hand. There was only a bleeding stump. Stevens looked
	at his wrist in horror. Dane flickered into view holding
	a large and very sharp knife with a bloody blade.

	Crysis: Escalation, Refuse/Resist

	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

	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

	Maybe if the nanosuit hadn’t been so badly damaged
	Dane would have heard their comms. If Chino hadn’t
	been so badly hurt, if both of them had been alert, then
	maybe they would have heard them moving around
	beneath them.
	They had been pinpointed by thermographics. The
	fire hadn’t helped.

	***

	Prophet leapt out into the cold Siberian air, high over
	the frozen street. Searchlights from the VTOLs tracked
	him in the air. There were so many lines of light on the
	suit’s Heads-Up Display from the threat tracer, showing
	possible bullet trajectories, that his vision was almost
	washed out. He shut down the suit’s proximity alarm
	in mid-air due to information overload. With a thought
	he wrapped the lensing field of the suit’s stealth system
	around himself. To the CELL gunmen in the street it
	looked like he’d disappeared. Then they opened fire.

	Prophet had a moment to register just how much he was
	getting shot when the roof of the brothel exploded. The
	fireball and debris shot into the air, engulfing one of the
	CELL VTOLs. The overpressure wave from the force
	of the explosion hit him in the back with the force of a
	steam-hammer, as the burning wreckage of the CELL
	VTOL dropped through the brothel. The explosion’s
	concussion wave drove Prophet through the wall of the
	building opposite. The suit’s ionic electroactive polymer
	liquid armour, incorporating colloidal-doped ceramics

	Getting hit by the VTOL’s cannon felt like death. It
	felt like it should have burst his body and scattered it
	around the building disintegrating around him. It spun
	him around. Red warning signs from the HUD told
	Prophet he couldn’t take another series of hits like that.
	Prophet reached the hole in the wall where a window
	used to be and jumped out over the street. He had a
	moment to register the look of panic on the VTOL
	pilot’s face. The floor of the building he’d just jumped
	out of collapsed from the cannon fire, and clouds