Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (37 page)

Even sent to the floor, Mei Ling held on to her microphone. She had something to do before climbing back to her feet. If she missed her timing, everything would be over.

“Now!”

The tightly compressed gas was let free, and the piston lifted Snake’s seat. Fierce g-forces assaulted him, threatening to shatter his hip bone into pieces. The old man bore not only his own weight, but that of the Mk. III, and as the chair heaved him skyward, the muscles and trace amounts of fat in his backside felt like they would crush his pelvis.

But the sensation was brief. The next thing Snake knew, his body was tracing a parabola, and he could see the decks of
Haven
and
Missouri
below. Meryl launched next and seemed to be chasing his posterior through the air. Snake’s hunch had been right—they
did
look ridiculous.

Just then,
Haven
rocked to the side and slammed into
Missouri
. The larger ship’s mass bore down on
Missouri
and jarred the old battleship.

Unfortunately, Akiba’s catapult launched at that moment.

His trajectory sent askew, Akiba flew in a direction far from Snake and Meryl. He didn’t have much time to lament the turn of events beyond his control—by the time he knew what had happened, Solid Snake’s titanic countenance occupied his field of view.

Johnny Akiba’s screams silenced when he struck Mount Snakemore.

Meryl called out to him and looked over her shoulder to see Johnny, unlucky as ever, kiss Snake’s lower lip, then tumble down
Haven
’s hull and into the sea.

Meanwhile, the real Snake had crossed into
Haven
’s exposed inner bow. In the moments before he struck the deck, he attempted to maneuver into a landing stance. Snake possessed some experience—when he had infiltrated the tanker where Metal Gear RAY was held, he’d bungee-jumped to the ship from the George Washington Bridge.

Snake thought he had the landing down, but his aged body wasn’t able to keep up. He attempted a three-point landing with both knees and his right arm, but he couldn’t absorb the inertia of his fall and tumbled to the ground, rolling a few yards down the deck.

Snake had done his best to roll out of the landing, but his body smashed against the inside of his sneaking suit. Of course, he didn’t have time to lay on the ground. He put his hand on the deck to push himself to his feet, and the muscles in his shoulder and arm cried out in pain. Beneath the OctoCamo and power assist systems, his skin was battered and bloodied.

Gritting through the pain, Snake searched for a place to hide. He had to retreat before Liquid’s soldiers came running. Snake swiftly took notice of his surroundings. Within
Haven
’s hull, the ship’s bow was as it had appeared from afar: a labyrinthine city of rectangular, windowless structures some three or four stories high.

Snake saw no signs of Meryl or Johnny amid the sprawling blocks—but since his visibility was limited by the irregular and perplexing layout of the deck, the two might yet be close. Just as Snake began to worry about Meryl, the ring of an incoming call over the codec vibrated the bones of his inner ear.

“Snake,” Meryl whispered. From the sound of her voice, she too was fighting pain. “I hurt my right ankle.”

“Can you walk?” Snake asked.

Meryl tried to stand, but her sprained ankle buckled under the weight.

When Snake asked if she was all right, she laughed drily and said, “Hurts a hell of a lot more without SOP.”

Before, the SOP would have quickly detected any injuries she sustained that were severe enough to impede combat performance and subdue the pain through sensory deprivation or increased endorphin output. Under the System, she had still felt pain, but only as a virtual sensation—a phantom pain in place of the real one, just strong enough to provide awareness of the injury without dulling her reflexes.

Now, for the first time in a long time, Meryl experienced the real thing.

Snake said, “Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?”

Long-forgotten sensations disoriented soldiers freed from the SOP’s control.

Sensations imposed by flesh and brain were often unpleasant. Over their long evolutional history, vertebrates acquired the ability to feel as a fundamental function for survival. Of course, such perceptions, however unpleasant, were a part of keeping alive, and since nobody could find someone else to experience the sensations for them, most people were content to take the bad with the good.

Snake asked, “What about Johnny?”

“He fell into the ocean.”

Akiba was out of the mission before it even started. The guy was proving more hopeless than ever. And he had fallen between
Haven
and
Missouri
—that he had done so without injury was unlikely. Both Snake and Meryl worried for him, but they could do nothing now but hope.

Gunfire reported over the codec and the shots echoed through the ship’s interior. Meryl was under fire, near enough for the battle to be heard.

“Snake,” she said, “I’ll catch up soon. You go ahead.”

“Meryl!” Snake shouted, but she cut the connection.

Blocking out his pain, Snake ran in the direction of the gunfire.

“Otacon, can you trace her transmission?”

I compared Naomi’s coordinates with
Haven
’s schematics. She was toward the ship’s stern, near the server room.

Snake asked, “How long until JD reaches its perigee?”

“Fourteen minutes, twenty seconds. The worm takes two minutes to upload. You haven’t much time.”

Snake enabled his suit’s OctoCamo and entered the maze of the ship’s bow. He breathed quickly, and his body was tense.

The
Haven
troopers, on the other hand, were connected through the SOP and worked in coordination as they tightened their noose. The US military had been denied the SOP, but Liquid’s forces had unrestricted use.

If Snake were found, he wouldn’t have a chance. Even the legendary hero couldn’t allow himself to be drawn into close combat—to be surrounded by the troopers’ overwhelming force was to be caught inside a beehive.

In the end, he needed to rely on his stealth, advancing slow and steady like a tortoise to catch his enemies off-guard, to carefully search out an opening in their dragnet.

Only Snake didn’t have time for a cautious approach.

I connected my notebook computer to Gaudi, pulled open a mathematical model I’d previously prepared, and began inputting any data I could predict. The ship’s bridge still quaked from the collision with
Haven
, and a couple times my hands nearly slipped off my keyboard. But in about fifteen seconds, I’d entered the last of the numbers and launched the simulation.

The computer program was one of the many inside resources obtained through Naomi.

The code was a top-secret resource belonging to AT Security, and the leaked information could, in the wrong hands, be fatal to the US Armed Forces. The software analyzed information from the SOP and assessed the current battle situation to provide better command over the soldiers. The program suite could propose the most appropriate tactical actions to commanders on every level of the military, from lieutenants on the front lines to VIPs in Pentagon war rooms. The battlefield prediction software had been created under a 2008 DARPA initiative called Project Green Ball and was eventually merged into the SOP, enabling the System to perform even more precise battlefield management.

Of course, since each tactical pattern was mathematically generated on the fly, a perfect prediction remained impossible—unless you knew the equations.

The
Haven
troopers, under SOP control, would be efficiently hunting for Snake and Naomi following the oracles passed down by the System. But the pursuit of efficiency and the elimination of wasteful effort could also lead to predictability.

Gaudi’s CPUs crunched through the numbers and, within thirty seconds of my command, reported its calculations.

“Snake,” I said, “I’ve run a simulation of the enemy’s movement patterns. I’ll send their projected routes to your Solid Eye. Please don’t get caught.”

Snake dropped his stealth.

He stood from his prone position and began a mad dash, putting complete faith in my calculations. He slipped through the pathways, narrowly avoiding any contact with his pursuers. Time limit aside, something akin to pride swelled within me at Snake’s trust. I was at the right hand of the legendary man. I was the partner of the man who made the impossible possible. Snake ran for his very life. One encounter with the enemy, and he would be killed in an instant—yet he left his fate in the hands of the simulation I created.

Snake reached the ship’s aft without ever meeting the enemy. He latched on to the bulkhead hatch and spun the wheel as quickly as he could. The effort strained his aged, weakened muscles and joints. But with the encroaching threat of enemy patrols, he couldn’t afford a moment’s rest.

“Snake,” I shouted, “get inside!”

A
Haven
trooper unit came upon the open space at the ship’s aft. Snake gripped the handle, gritting his teeth so hard one of his molars chipped. Just as the soldiers aimed their guns at his back, Snake unlocked the door, spit out the tooth fragment, and slipped inside with the Mk. III.

Snake closed the door and locked it. Outside, the
Haven
troopers unleashed a tremendous burst of gunfire—they were children throwing a tantrum. But the small arms fire had no hope of penetrating the thick metal of the watertight door. With the sound of denting metal echoing through the chamber, Snake leaned his back against the hatch and caught his breath, untouched by a single round.

“Snake, are you all right?” I asked.

I knew he wasn’t. His telomeres had worn down and his cells approached their last divisions, and while his internal organs were still all there, they barely functioned. His lungs, half-incapacitated by pulmonary fibrosis, had grown too stiff to absorb enough oxygen. Snake slid to the floor, his back propped against the hatch, and he gazed vacantly at the ceiling; his empty eyes bespoke fading blood oxygen and consciousness.

The walls of his heart had swollen and lost elasticity and could no longer keep a steady pulse. His arteries and heart valves had hardened and were clogged with plaque. His organs and nervous system had been denatured by amyloid deposits. His heart was on the verge of bursting.

The entirety of Snake’s old age screamed out to him,
This is it. This is the end of your fight.

Between gasps, Snake’s voice creaked out, “Otacon, I’m going to finish this.”

But he wasn’t saying it to me. Under his breath he was cursing his decrepit body to cooperate.
Move, you old bag of bones. Just ten more minutes. Just a little longer. Keep it together just that long and I can end everything. But not yet. I can’t yield to pain and age until I’ve finished.

“This will be our last battle,” Snake said.

“Yeah,” I said, not turning my eyes away from the image of the debilitated Snake on my screen, “it will …”

Seeing him like this pained me. I couldn’t bear to watch my friend, the man who showed me a new way of living, spur his body from the verge of death and onto further suffering, in the name of completing his duty.

How many times had I swallowed back the words?
Enough. Who cares about the world anymore, if your spirit can find peace? This isn’t Snake’s fault. These sins aren’t his to have to take, not a single one of them.

I knew such thoughts were only falsehoods. These past nine years, nothing repulsed Snake and me more than the thought of pretending to be bystanders and watch as the world rotted. I wouldn’t just stand on the sidelines anymore. That was what I told Snake at Shadow Moses; to betray those words now would go against all our time together.

“If we’re responsible for Liquid’s sins,” I said, “then the onus is ours to bear.”

Snake withdrew Naomi’s autoinjector from a tactical pouch and pressed it to his neck. Compressed air delivered the liquid to his bloodstream, and his breathing steadied if only by a bit. He had used the syringe many times now, and the nanomachines were losing effectiveness. Snake’s body was degenerating faster than Naomi’s suppressors could work.

Snake stood and took unsteady steps down the ladderway to the lower decks, his hand finding the wall to support his tottering body.