Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (33 page)

Seeing Snake on the ground, Liquid did a childish caper back to the water’s edge. He walked jauntily, pointing at us, every bit a picked-on little boy who’d just gotten back at his bully. I guess it could have been worse; at least he wasn’t jeering at us. Still, his gleeful immaturity disgusted me.

Perhaps incited to action by the juvenile teasing, Snake willed his pain away, raised his M4, and got to his feet.

Even so, the dislocated joint of his left shoulder wouldn’t cooperate. Snake could handle the pain, but he couldn’t get his body—not just his shoulder, but all of it—to move.

“Liquid …” he said, trying to lift the seven- or eight-pound rifle in one arm to get a bead on Liquid, but his biceps and shoulder muscles refused. Snake no longer had the strength to shoot anything higher than the ground fifteen feet ahead.

His bronchial tubes and diaphragm had grown too weak to deliver oxygen into his lungs. He was on the verge of asphyxiation. His breath came out in wheezes and gasps. In the cold, his metabolism struggled to convert his stored-up energy into heat.

Snake’s stamina had been depleted. As for the Mk. III, the robot was wedged in the back of the cockpit, the tiny legs flailing pitifully in the air.

At last, the structure beneath the Mount Rushmore heads appeared from the water.

It was a giant submarine at least two thousand feet long. The shape of the vessel, like a whale born the wrong size, marked it a relative of the Arsenal Gear.

Between the Arsenal-class submarine and the wreckages of RAY and REX, I felt I was in a land of giants. Snake and Liquid looked terribly small surrounded by the towering machines.

With a better look, the effigies on this Mount Rushmore weren’t the fathers of our country, Washington, Lincoln, or otherwise. The four faces resembled each other so closely at first I thought they were all copies. Which was only natural, for these were the likenesses of the family of Snakes, including Solid Snake himself. With him were Liquid, Solidus, and the man at the beginning of it all—Big Boss. When I really studied the sculpture, I realized that Big Boss’s face occupied Washington’s place among the four.

I found Liquid’s delusions of grandeur appalling. Was he suggesting the Snakes decided history—that only the line of Snakes would free the world from Zero’s obsessions of monitoring and control?

Then the Mount Rushmore began to fade. This was something I had been too stunned to realize sooner, but now seemed obvious—the image was only an OctoCamo texture projection.

At the edge of the harbor, Liquid stopped and turned to face us. He spread his arms wide, just as he had done after his victory in the Middle East, and proudly proclaimed, “This is the liberty we’ve won for ourselves:
Outer Haven
!”

Revealed beneath the OctoCamo Mount Rushmore was a gentle slope rising from the deck—the ship’s bridge had been unified into the hull for improved stealth capabilities. That said,
Haven
was so ridiculously gargantuan its bridge alone was easily three times the size of a typical nuclear submarine.

That huge bridge began to slide open as though the vessel were removing a hat. Inside the exposed interior of the ship stood a citylike cluster of rectangular structures, between which thrust a cannon familiar to me. The barrel angled upward, glaring at the sky.

The weapon was REX’s railgun—a nuclear launcher outside the Patriots’ governance.

“Behold,” Liquid shouted. “With this weapon, I will destroy JD. Then … everything ends, and everything begins!”

A cargo crane extended from the open bridge. Wheezing from his constricted windpipe, Snake struggled to catch up with Liquid.

“Not again,” Snake muttered. “I’ve done nothing but fail to stop Liquid. In the Middle East. And in Eastern Europe.

“But I don’t have any more time. No longer can I afford to let Liquid get away. If this keeps up, my old and dilapidated body will stop moving before I can put myself to rest.”

His lips moved in a silent prayer.
God, the will of the universe, fate, whoever is out there. Please let me complete my last mission. Let me, and then I’ll give you my soul, my life, or whatever it is you want.

But Liquid stepped onto the lowered hook and parted from the quay. Like an ascending angel he gazed down at Snake, then, with a triumphant pointing of a finger, he said, “But as for you, brother … You’ll stay here to mark this island’s watery grave.”

Snake gritted his teeth and forced strength into his wavering legs to somehow raise the M4 and stop Liquid. He wrung out the last of his stamina and planted his feet.

Suddenly, his windpipe went into a violent fit.

He coughed with no sign of stopping, as if to expel every last gasp of air from his lungs. Every muscle in his upper body, from his back to his chest to his sides, already ached from all the coughing induced by the harshly cold air since he’d set foot on the island. Now it felt like his muscles were tearing themselves off his bones. As Snake began to black out from the convulsions in his chest, Liquid slipped into the ship.

Snake slumped forward, clutching at his chest, helpless, while Liquid’s voice boomed, announcing the death sentence: “I’ll crush you with
Haven
!”

Just then, a deep explosion like that of a launching firework went off in the distance, followed by the high-pitched sound of an object cutting through air.

A white pillar of water burst into the sky just off
Haven
’s starboard.

The spray fell in a downpour, drenching Snake. Cannon fire. Coughing, Snake lifted his head and looked to the horizon line, where the cloudy Aleutian sky met the Pacific. He could see the outline of a single ship. Judging from the size and distance, the vessel had to be quite large. Two more shots landed right next to
Haven
.

The projectiles belonged to the three-gun, sixteen-inch, fifty-caliber cannons mounted on Mei Ling’s
Missouri
. The battleship lacked digital navigation and relied on last-century analog fire control computers to direct the main battery.

I wondered if Liquid realized the unfavorable situation he was now in. Not even
Haven
’s double-layered submarine hull could take a sixteen-inch shell unscathed. And
Missouri
’s initial attack hadn’t even been intended to hit target, but were test rounds fired to determine distance, air pressure, and wind speed. If
Haven
remained still, the next volley might well hit.

Haven
’s canopy hurriedly began to close. If a shell through the hull would be bad, a direct hit on the exposed interior would be disastrous. Then there was the all-important railgun. The Arsenal’s bridge closed, and the vessel pulled away from the dock at full speed.

Snake, still coughing, raised his M4 and aimed at the quickly receding
Outer Haven
. Blood flowed from a cut on his forehead and stained his face red. He used one hand to wipe the blood from his eyes, but his vision remained blurry, and he couldn’t tell what he was looking at.

Then something deep within him snapped.

Something that had been barely holding together his overburdened body.

In a terrible spasmodic fit, Snake dropped the rifle. Unable even to fall over, he stood there in a daze, watching the indistinct outline of
Outer Haven
turn back toward him. He realized the shape was growing larger. The ship had returned to smash through the harbor—and Snake with it.

Missouri
opened fire, but
Haven
moved too quickly. The giant steel whale charged between columns of spray. I didn’t think the impact with the harbor would put a scratch on
Haven
’s hull.

The harbor would be crushed—and the frail human body standing upon it.

I urged Snake to run, but he appeared not to hear anything. He stood frozen, like a scarecrow, with no prayer of moving, fettered by fatigue, injury, and age.

The rumble filled my ears. Snake closed his eyes and awaited the final moment.

“I’m a loser. I’m no one’s hero. I’m defeated.”

He accepted his humiliations.

“Liquid was right nine years ago. I can’t protect anyone. Not even myself.”

Then came the scream. Surprised the voice wasn’t his own, Snake slowly opened his eyes.

Even after all the incredible events he’d witnessed over the years, Snake still couldn’t believe his eyes. Standing between
Haven
’s bow and the crumbling quay was Raiden, feet planted wide, his back holding the ship at bay. He only had one arm, having severed the other to free himself from the rubble.

“Raiden,” Snake said.

The sight was incredible. Who could have believed that—even with the powered exoskeleton manifesting strength beyond compare with a normal human—a lone man could halt a vessel two thousand feet long? And yet Snake had seen something similar before. He knew this. He’d been saved like this before.

Shadow Moses, nine years ago.
When Liquid went to crush me with REX’s foot, Frank saved me like this. My comrade in arms, code name Fox. Naomi’s brother.

Resisting the vast mass of
Haven
, Raiden said in a guttural voice, “S-Snake, hurry.”

“He’s right,” Snake said. “I can’t die yet. I can’t give up here. I can’t concede to humiliation or defeat. At least not yet,” he said to me over our link.

“I have been granted an extended life so that I can atone for my sins. That’s what Naomi said to me. Maybe she was right. Maybe I continue to live so that I may fulfill my fate. But don’t I carry an even more serious debt—an incontrovertible duty I had to see through more than any abstract concept such as fate or sin?”

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 really 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.