Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot

by Project Itoh

  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.

  The entrance to the hallway leading to the server room was located in Haven’s CIC.

  But this was nothing like any command center Snake had ever seen. He cautiously stepped into the room, M4 at the ready, shocked to find the spa
ce so wildly unreal. The initials CIC conjured an image of a stifling room stuffed with monitors and computers and a transparent plotting board standing in the center.

  But this was like a stadium.

  Each side of the octagonal, domed space descended down platformed levels to the central floor. Giant consoles, arrayed in tiers around the entire room, would have provided space for incredible numbers of operators to perform their duties. Floating above the eight-sided central space was our little rock, peaceful for the first time in a long while—a giant hologram of Earth.

  The expanse of the room was ridiculous. Snake allowed his contempt to register on his face. The space felt less a command center than a stock exchange trading floor, or a conference hall at an international convention center. With some disgust, Snake stepped under the giant canopy.

  In truth, the room wasn’t for commanding Haven’s battles.

  It was for commanding the world; the embodiment of so-called “super crunching,” the distillation and homogenization of our surroundings into massive statistical datasets; the courtroom for our new gods to judge a reality extracted from exabytes of data. The space had been designed to compile data coming in from networks across the globe, and with that data chart the course of events, reshaping them into the narrative desired by the Patriots.

  “Snake,” I said, “be careful. I doubt this place is empty.”

  The walkway Snake had taken into the room cut through the tiers like the entrance to the seating in a stadium or a theater. Sighting down his M4 for threats along the side platforms and ceiling, Snake moved with silent steps.

  Then, as he swung his rifle to the center of the hall, he saw her lying there.

  Meryl.

  Snake recoiled back to hide himself from possible threat. He cursed under his breath and used the Solid Eye’s zoom lens to observe Meryl, curled at the base of the virtual globe. Her wrists and ankles were bound in cable ties, and she lay helpless on the ground.

  “Damn. Snake,” I shouted, “it’s a trap!”

  I was sure he already knew. This was a situation he’d encountered before. Nine years ago, on Shadow Moses, Meryl had taken point, when Wolf shot her legs to hold her in place, turning the woman into bait to lure Snake out.

  Snake, who had managed to duck behind cover, couldn’t do anything. Meryl was on her back, bleeding out, but Snake knew that the instant he poked his head out to help, the world’s greatest sniper would send a bullet to open a hole in him.

  That was how snipers worked. They hunted their enemies through their rifle scopes, out of range of regular soldiers. Regular infantry often killed in self-defense, but snipers shot only to kill.

  Snake felt the same helplessness again.

  You never can protect anyone. Frank’s scream as Liquid crushed him with the REX echoed through Snake’s mind. Emma, Naomi, all the people wrapped up in the Snakes’ fates whom I couldn’t protect.

  “Is this the only way into the server room?” Snake asked impatiently, pulling up the ship’s schematic on his Solid Eye.

  I nodded. “Yeah. You have to get through the blast-proof door in the CIC. They know it’s our only way in.”

  “The perfect place to leave their bait. The troopers must be waiting to see which entrance I come through.”

  “Should I send in a decoy?”

  “The Mk. III is needed to upload the worm to GW. If I die, we haven’t necessarily failed. But one hole in the robot’s little body, and we’re finished.”

  Meryl didn’t appear to be in much pain. But once our unseen ambushers knew Snake had arrived, they wouldn’t necessarily kill her in one shot. They’d riddle her with bullets, just as Wolf had done to draw Snake out.

  This wasn’t the time to be overcome by helplessness. Snake had to move. But Snake couldn’t think of what to do, and in the meantime, anxiety sent adrenaline into his bloodstream, taxing his already overburdened heart.

  Just then, a figure appeared in the opposite hallway, sprinting into the room.

  “Meryl!” he shouted.

  That fool. Snake clicked his tongue and ran forward.

  It was Johnny. I don’t know how he crawled out of the ocean, but here he was, dripping wet. He must have nearly drowned and been forced to ditch his weapon in the water, for he was completely unarmed, with only the bulletproof vest left to protect him.

  Johnny’s legs were much quicker than Snake’s, whose hardened and attenuated tendons only permitted limited movement. By the time Snake took his first step, Johnny was already out of the entryway, beneath the dome, and in the snipers’ field of view.

  Snake shouted, “Johnny!”

  Johnny dove to cover Meryl. In a flash, the space around his head was filled with a crimson mist.

  To Snake, who was already struggling with the feeling of being powerless, the sight was like salt rubbed into the wound. The injuries spanning Snake’s body and the pain of his heart seemed only illusory in comparison.

  Seeing the young man collapse before him, Snake was torn by waves of self-loathing. But the instincts that made him the legendary man drove his body to action. In an instant, he deduced the bullet’s trajectory and pinpointed the shooter’s perch. He wrenched his upper body to face the direction and squeezed the trigger on his M4.

  The shot pierced through the bridge of the sniper’s nose and passed out the back of his head, where the helmet remained intact, inside of which mixed brain and bone fragments like scrambled eggs.

  Of course, more than this man alone awaited Snake. Haven troopers appeared from behind consoles and unleashed a volley of bullets. Snake, ducking behind the platform beneath the hologram, cut through Meryl’s bonds with his stun knife, and the two dragged an immobile Johnny to the blast-proof door leading to the server room.

  Meryl quickly inspected Johnny’s injury. He had not been hit in the head, but rather in his shoulder. The bullet had passed straight through, though the wound was serious. Meryl withdrew a medical kit from a tactical pouch and stopped the bleeding.

  The blast door was at the very back of the CIC, sheltered from the troopers’ line of fire. But enemy reinforcements continued to pour into the room. If they pushed in with their numbers, Snake and Meryl wouldn’t be able to hold them back.

  Meryl drew her Desert Eagle, checked the chamber, and said, “Go on without me. This time, I’ll protect you.”

  “Meryl …”

  “Go. Destroy GW while there’s still time. While I’m still alive.”

  While I’m still alive.

  At those words, Snake realized his arrogance. He couldn’t leave the sins of the Snakes to the world where Meryl, and everyone else, would live. He himself would take on the task and set things right. So he had rigidly believed.

  But this young woman was fighting for her future—fighting to retake the future Snake and I had stolen from her. Not that I ever thought she blamed us. Meryl came to this battle believing it was her fight.

  A world where we can live. A world where family and friends support each other, bear children, and pass down our stories through the generations.

  Snake and I had been conceited to think the struggle to reclaim that world was ours alone. We had continued to fight out of a sense of responsibility. But while Snake fought for the past, Meryl risked her life for the future.

  How much more value was within the setting up of guideposts to an uncertain future, over making up for transgressions already committed? This much was simple: pushing a heavy rock up a hill was harder than rolling it down. Snake realized, in the depth of his being, that this soldier at his side faced a battle far more difficult than his own.

  And so he must complete his duty.

  “Snake,” Meryl said, “the corridor ahead is drenched in microwaves.”

  Snake nodded. The microwaves would wash over him from all directions and excite the molecules of water in his body. His skin, his muscles, his heart—every part of his body containing any water—would cook.

  This was the end for them. Meryl held u
p her left arm. Snake wrapped his arm inside hers—a gesture between soldiers, and between friends.

  “We’ll meet again on the other side,” Meryl said.

  And Snake disappeared behind the hatch.

  Meryl leveled her Desert Eagle at the Haven troopers and began to fire. Deep in her chest, she held on to what Campbell had told her after we left them in Missouri’s briefing room.

  As long as you have life, you must finish your duty.

  Not exactly a father’s words to his daughter. Maybe more a commanding officer to his soldier. But Campbell had spent the majority of his life as a soldier, and those were the only words he could find. Believing them the only way to convey his true feelings, he shared them with his daughter.

  No matter what happens, I’ll be with you till the very end.

  As he spoke, Meryl finally understood. With little time remaining before the battle, recognizing her as an able soldier was the only way he had of expressing his fondness for her.

  You are my pride and joy.

  Those were his last words.

  She had to be worthy of his pride. She had to be the soldier Campbell believed her to be.

  Under the overwhelming firepower of the Haven troopers, Campbell’s words gave Meryl support, and she held steadfast, protecting the doorway to the server room. The woman there was no longer the little girl with a crush on the legendary man.

  She was a soldier.

  With eyes full of resolve, she gazed toward a future that needed her protection. She was strong, and she was a beautiful warrior. A true sakimori.

  4

  WHILE SNAKE RUSHED into the hallway leading to the server room, giants overran Missouri’s deck.

  With Missouri clinging to her hull, Haven couldn’t launch her VLS missiles. At this close range, any launched warheads might strike either ship. Even those that connected with Missouri could send debris flying to tear through Haven’s armor. Careless destruction of the battleship could send both vessels into the sea.