by Project Itoh
Then, Snake spoke to himself, or to someone long dead. “Frank, I wasn’t able to protect your sister. I couldn’t free her from the bindings of her fate. The one thing I cannot do is betray her wishes. You saved my life; to betray you further would be unforgivable.”
As Haven’s prow drove into the crumbling concrete, what propelled Snake to escape didn’t come from some reserve stamina or mental fortitude, but rather pure duty. Snake’s body moved out of an unfulfilled responsibility to the man who’d saved his life, Frank Jaeger.
Raiden’s cybernetic frame shot out sparks like it had gone haywire. His powered exoskeleton had twisted in places and been crushed in others. Sent down pathways with no destination left to receive the energy, volatile electricity arced across the outside of his body. His back and his left arm, bearing the full force of Haven, strained to withstand it. If he kept holding back the ship much longer, his body would be crushed along with the quay.
Liquid’s mocking voice came from a loudspeaker on the side of the ship. “Give me a good show at the end, like Frank did.”
Snake’s blood boiled with rage. But as he called out to his friend, Raiden’s powered exoskeleton finally exhausted the last of its strength. Raiden collapsed, electricity discharging in a violent cascade of sparks. His arm fell slack, outstretched, wedged between Haven’s hull and the crumbling pier.
Snake shouted, but his voice disappeared within the rumble and the screams. Raiden’s fingers snapped, his hand squashed, his wrist crushed, then his elbow, then his entire arm. This pain wasn’t anything like the brief instant of fire when he cut his own right arm off. This pain, the meat grinder slowly working its way up from his fingertips, exceeded anything he’d ever experienced.
Not even Vamp skewering him like a shish kebab compared.
Flesh fused with bone, and his shoulder was pulverized beyond recognition. Bathed in white blood, Jack screamed a name.
The place he belonged. The woman he belonged with.
Jack called out the name that hadn’t passed his lips in years and fell into darkness.
ACT 5: OLD SUN
SO FAR I’VE told you stories about many people.
The two Snakes who changed the world; the young man who became caught up in their struggle and was nearly turned into a Snake himself; and the woman who gave birth to those Snakes—and thereby to our world.
My last story belongs to another woman, the woman who ended that world.
Just as everything began with a woman, so too did it end with one.
As with the first woman, I don’t know the real name of the one who brought about the end. I don’t think she ever learned what name her parents had lovingly called her. Perhaps she herself died not knowing.
But her name wasn’t her only mystery. She had been orphaned by the time of her first memories. Her smooth, burnished brown skin suggested from where she may have come, but provided no real answers. From her sharp, chiseled nose, she was likely of Indian rather than African descent.
Lending further credence to that conjecture was the history of the nation from which she had been adopted—Rhodesia.
Rhodesia never received formal international recognition as a state, not from the time the nation existed as a colony of the British Empire until its rebirth as Zimbabwe.
After World War II, independence movements grew in colonial territories such as India. The British Empire decided holding on to those lands would be too dangerous and chose to give up control over the Dominions of the Commonwealth, recognizing the peoples’ right to self-rule.
Rhodesia, however, met this policy with a public outcry. That is to say: the whites of Rhodesia were the ones doing the outcrying. The ruling class, of European descent, comprised not even one tenth of the colony’s population. To that elite group, a free republic was beyond consideration. Such independence would signify the total destruction of their way of life, built upon oppression of the locals.
In an ironic turn of events, the ruling class decided to sign a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain to prevent the crown from creating a republic by decree.
As a former colony of the British Empire, Rhodesia saw significant immigration from another former colony, India. Perhaps the nameless woman carried the blood of these people, possibly mixed with Anglo blood. Regardless of her own provenance, she was born amongst the many races of a colonial populace. Soon, she was orphaned.
A mercenary hired to fight in the civil war took the child in. Indigenous peoples rose up against the white government in the hope of creating an African state, of Africans and for Africans; a nation whose people could live with dignity, and not under the false republic of Rhodesia or the apartheid state of neighboring South Africa. For the name of their land the African nationalists suggested Zimbabwe, after a kingdom that once ruled the region.
To oppose the nationalist factions—such as the Zimbabwe African National Union and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union—the white government strengthened its army through the employment of great numbers of mercenaries. At the same time, some among the wealthy class fled from Rhodesia with their assets and used their fortunes to hire soldiers as private bodyguards.
The teenage soldier who found the girl on the Zambezi River was one of these dogs of war.
She was born in a country that officially didn’t exist. She had no name and no parents. On the banks of the Zambezi the helpless girl hungered and thirsted until the hired gun took her to his home in America. He provided her with documentation, education, a living, and a life. Everything she had lost in Rhodesia, he gave to her freely.
With her new life came a name: Naomi Hunter.
She began a new life in an unknown land. She was neither white nor black, nor part of America’s rapidly growing Hispanic population, nor was she Chinese or Korean. Not even sure of her Indian descent, she kept her distance from that community as well.
In the great melting pot, people of all races came together, yet each lived with the help of their own racial peers. Not belonging to any race, or even knowing who she was, Naomi faced many difficulties in her new life. A multiethnic society did not mean a person could live without ethnicity or religious belief, but rather the opposite—society demanded of its participants a clear and constant expression of their blood and their God.
Despite her hardships, Naomi adored the soldier who had taken her in. He loved her as a younger sister, and she respected him as an older brother. The two shared nothing in common, yet they supported each other. They were a community of two. In this lonesome world, this one man accepted who she was, and for that she loved him deeply.
He never spoke much of his past, but even the young Naomi could easily sense that he too carried loneliness inside, and she knew intuitively that, like her, he was a war orphan. She understood him.
Naomi felt thankful to her brother and thought of him as an inseparable part of herself. He was her purpose for living, and for him she would have done anything. She never pried into his past and never asked why he had taken her in.
I think this was a form of self-deception.
Naomi was acutely aware that only tragedy would come the moment she asked Why me? Whenever she laughed with him, or shared her troubles, or cried with him, she sensed her brother’s heart was somewhere else, almost as if he were saying that here was not where he belonged.
Naomi felt deep shame that she couldn’t provide a place for her brother. She realized that no matter how completely she loved him, she couldn’t become his strength. She saw the way he never looked her in the eye, and as they played their contrived roles as brother and sister she gradually realized the answer to her question, Why did he take me in? With confirmation would come true understanding, but so might come the destruction of their family.
Naomi ran from the truth. She refused to ask. If there was any chance the question could hurt her brother, she’d swallow the words and hold them deep inside.
Perhaps she was scared by the slightest possibility that he didn’t r
eally love her—or even worse: that upon learning the answer she would lose her own love for him.
Naomi didn’t want to lose either his love for her or her own love for him. She ran from the answer until one day, her brother suddenly disappeared.
He had returned to the battlefield. Rather than playing at being a family, he chose life under fire, praying amid the gunpowder smoke to see the next day.
Because of her brother, she had been able to survive. Because of her brother, she had found a life in America. In a world so malicious her very existence seemed threatened, her only comfort was the brother who loved and protected her—Frank Jaegar.
Until then Frank had provided her a foundation, a guarantee of her identity. No matter what else, at least he knew who she was. But now, having lost her brother, she needed a new basis for her identity. To seek it, she started down a new path—the study of genetic engineering.
Maybe she believed that by studying her own genetic makeup, she would come to understand who she was. Within the fragmented genetic codes awaited knowledge of her father and mother.
Naomi made many revolutionary discoveries in her field, but each was nothing more than an accidental by-product of her personal journey. And the deeper she searched, the more unclear and elusive her answer became. Science was often like that—the pursuit of a clear, distinct, and unchanging truth brought only a vast ambiguity neither black nor white.
Yet Naomi persisted, resolute on finding her true self from within her genes. Her ever-growing list of contributions to the science of genetic engineering—and its offshoot, nanomachine technology—brought her no closer to discovering a new foundation for her self-identity and instead amounted to nothing more than tiny, incidental wounds acquired amid the struggle to find herself.
Naomi found not the answer she sought, but rather an array of professional accomplishments she neither desired nor found fulfilling.
Then she reunited with her brother.
He was barely alive.
When secession movements erupted in the Soviet republics of Central Asia, one territory remained crucial to the motherland as a religious cushion between the neighboring Muslim states, and the reformed Russian government wasn’t about to let it go. As the Soviet military had invaded Afghanistan, the Russian armed forces were detached to the territory of Tselinoyarsk.
Yet the child state, certainly no major military power, somehow prevailed in the conflict. According to rumor, one man had organized a mercenary army, supplied a torrent of arms, and provided training on the ground. The newly independent people named their country Zanzibar Land.
And Naomi’s brother came back from that failed nation nearly a dead man.
As much as she loved him, faced with his tragic transformation, she couldn’t make herself feel glad that he had survived. Not only had Frank Jaeger been at the brink of death, his heart had stopped several times.
He had become the test subject for a powered exoskeleton prototype.
Fighting off terrible pain with a cocktail of drugs and nanomachines, he existed in a state that couldn’t be called life.
The man who had done this to her brother was an American operative sent into Zanzibar Land. Naomi never uncovered the agent’s real name from deep beneath the veil of classified information. But after single-handedly toppling the fledgling nation, his reputation as a “legendary hero” spread quickly through the underworld.
His code name was Solid Snake.
And he was the man who had destroyed the one she loved and the foundation of her being.
In Missouri’s briefing room, Mei Ling gestured at the slides with a pointer.
“Haven is headed southward through the Pacific at a speed of thirty-three knots. We’re falling behind at a rate of about two nautical miles every hour.”
Displayed on the projection screen was an aerial view composited from several dozen images. Far ahead of Missouri and its trailing hyphen of white wake, a faint whalelike shadow could be seen beneath the ocean’s surface. But the shape, at more than two times Missouri’s size, couldn’t have belonged to any whale—not even one from a Japanese monster movie.
I asked Mei Ling, “Can’t this thing go any faster?”
She smiled tightly, the expression part umbrage at my lack of respect toward her relic of a ship and part apology.
The situation wasn’t without irony. The US Navy’s Arsenal Ship Program had aimed to create a battleship for the twenty-first century. Now the last of the old battleships pursued its modern counterpart like a father chasing after his runaway child.
“I’m afraid not,” Mei Ling said. “This is as fast as she’ll go.”
In other words, we would never be able to catch up with Liquid and blast him out of the water. But all was not hopeless. We didn’t have to overtake him on the way.
“Liquid’s target is JD, a US military satellite disguised as orbital debris. Haven will have to surface in order to use its railgun.”
As she gave her briefing, Mei Ling regarded the room. Seated among the gathered soldiers were members of the Rat Patrol—but only Meryl and Johnny. Ed and Jonathan hadn’t recovered from the events in Eastern Europe and remained shoreside.
In a chair beside Meryl, Johnny began typing on his wrist computer and said, “If we have JD’s orbit, we can predict where Haven’s going to surface.”
Mei Ling nodded and advanced the slide. On the screen, the earth was enveloped within a particulate haze—every satellite, whether military, weather, communications, or any other kind, under NORAD’s watch. Gradually, the dots and orbits winked out until only one remained.
JD.
Adding the locations of Missouri and Haven to the simulated globe, Mei Ling said, “JD is in a synchronous elliptical orbit. So its next perigee should be in …”
“Got it!” Johnny read the results from his wearable computer. “Fifteen hours, six minutes, and twelve seconds.”
At that time, the satellite would be closest to sea level.
“Right,” Mei Ling said. “In fifteen hours, JD is going to be over the Bering Sea, 494 nautical miles from the Bering Strait. Haven will be in holding position in that area.”
Meryl asked, “Do they really have to get that close to launch?”
REX’s railgun could launch a nuclear warhead to any location on Earth. So why did Liquid need to wait for the satellite’s perigee? I stood and approached the screen to explain not just to Meryl but to the rest of the team.
“REX may be armed with nuclear ordnance, but JD floats in an orbit high enough to be called outer space. Why is this important? Because up there, there’s virtually no air, and without air, there’s no stuff to envelop the fission event, absorb the massive output of energy, and turn into plasma.
“In terrestrial nuclear explosions, whether fissile or fusional, a certain amount of the destructive power comes from forces external to the initial blast, including shock waves, fragmentation, and thermal waves. Even assuming that all of the energy will radiate, between the distance of the satellite’s orbit and the yield of REX’s nukes, the effective damage radius won’t be much larger than a thousand feet, or approximately three hundred meters.
“Some of you may be thinking that a two-thousand-foot blast radius sounds impressive. But your typical satellite is always moving forward, so as not to be pulled down by Earth’s gravity, and maintains an orbit traveling at a relative velocity that can exceed ten kilometers per second.
“Down on Earth, in the presence of air resistance, producing such a ludicrous speed is impossible. An object moving that fast wouldn’t even be captured by a twenty-four frame-per-second movie camera, passing by entirely in that instant between frames. To put it another way, without sufficient acceleration, the satellite would be pulled down by gravity and crash.
“Say REX’s nuke manages to explode precisely on JD’s orbital path. The satellite, moving at ten kilometers per second, will pass through the six-hundred-meter blast diameter within six hundredths of a second. That’s bare
ly the blink of an eye. Even with the Arsenal-class targeting computer, the only chance of shooting down such a high-speed object is to reduce the range as much as possible. Though the elliptical orbit means that JD will be at peak velocity at its perigee, the possibility of a close or direct hit is maximized at relatively short range.
“So even when Liquid reaches the firing location, he’ll have to wait to launch his nuke until he has the highest probability of success, when JD is at its perigee. Time enough for Missouri to catch up.”
Mei Ling made sure everyone understood my explanation before moving on to our battle plan.
“Haven will need to open the outer cover to launch the nuke via the railgun. That’s our one and only chance to board.”
The next slide was a photograph of Missouri firing upon Haven’s exposed bridge back on Shadow Moses. The two electromagnetic rails of REX’s stolen weapon looked like a pair of chopsticks.
“To board?” Meryl asked. “Why can’t we attack it from the outside?”
Missouri didn’t have digital guidance systems, but the ship did have large caliber cannons. She was a relic from the last century, but new or old was inconsequential: a giant mass of metal and explosives would punch a hole in even the newest of vessels.
Meryl’s question was reasonable, but the problem rested in the source of Liquid’s power.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” I said, then stood and again made my way to the front of the room. “As long as Liquid has control of the System, physically destroying GW would still leave supreme authority over SOP in his hands. We can’t simply blow Haven apart when she surfaces.”
Mei Ling nodded. “Yes. Dr. Emmerich is right. That’s why we need to destroy GW from the inside before attacking Haven itself.”
Snake, who was leaning against the wall at the back of the room, removed the oxygen mask from his mouth to joke, “Liquid’s very own Death Star.”
