“Liquid is already entrenched within the Patriots’ network. He needs to maintain his link with the SOP, or destroying JD won’t serve any purpose. They can’t afford to shut GW down.”
Meryl, sharing Johnny’s concerns, bleakly said, “Liquid will throw everything he’s got at stopping the strike team.”
She was right, of course. It was easy for us to propose the infiltration, but the strike team—Meryl, Snake, and Akiba—would be the ones facing the gunfire. Mei Ling and I hadn’t been able to think of anything we could do to help them once the mission began.
Now Mei Ling broached the biggest danger facing Meryl’s team. “Exactly,” she said. “The corridor leading to GW is defended by directed-energy weapons that emit a type of microwaves.”
Johnny leaned forward. “Did you say microwaves?”
Mei Ling’s report seemed to have unsettled the other soldiers in the room too, including Snake, who lowered his oxygen mask and sent his eyes to me.
Disregarding her audience’s unease, Mei Ling calmly continued. “The waves will immediately begin to vaporize any living person within range.”
Snake started to say something but coughed instead, and kept on coughing until he finally regained himself.
“A giant microwave oven,” he said. “You’d have to have a death wish to go in there.” His lips twitched into a ghastly smile. “Sounds like the perfect job for me.”
“Snake,” Meryl scolded, her voice tinged with sadness, “this isn’t time for your stupid jokes.”
Within three months, this man whom she had loved would have to end his own life, perhaps with a gun to his head, or with a can of gasoline and a match.
The grim reality was that some situations required the risk of life and limb for any chance of making it through.
Only natural for the task to go to the one man who had already accepted death.
But Snake’s resolve came not from some passive acquiescence to circumstance but rather an outraged rejection of forcing someone younger—Johnny or Meryl—to take on his ills and die for it.
“If somebody has to die today,” he said, “it has to be me. No one else.” Everything about this briefing grated on him. “Why bother with all this when I should be going in alone?”
Meryl and I could read his emotions all too well. I was pained to see him like this, intent on finishing everything unaided. I wondered if Mei Ling felt intimidated by his heroic determination. Not knowing how to respond, she proceeded with her briefing.
“Outside the corridor, Liquid’s soldiers will be out in full force. Inside, unmanned weapons will wait.”
A new slide revealed a detailed schematic of Haven. Under the Patriots’ control, the Arsenal-class ship was supposed to be a highly guarded state secret. Few even knew of their existence, yet this was an incredibly detailed report.
Snake’s eyes tightened. “Where are you getting this information? You really think there’s a way to destroy GW?”
Mei Ling tossed me a glance. I had shared with her all the intel so she could develop a battle plan. She knew the identity of the source, but her eyes told me Snake needed to hear the name from me.
I took a moment, then said, “Naomi had been making preparations.”
Naomi’s original reason for boarding Nomad had been none other than me. She needed someone to whom she could entrust her plans, who had the ability to fulfill her hopes.
But in the end, that person wasn’t me.
Naomi chose a little girl, not yet ten years old.
Naomi had nearly completed the program to destroy GW. But she knew that she couldn’t grant herself enough time to finish—that her life, extended artificially by nanomachines, would soon end; that death would shatter time’s icy prison, and she had to accept it; that she might pass from this world without seeing the worm cluster finished.
And she had chosen Sunny as the one who could realize her wishes. The child’s message, delivered by Raiden at Shadow Moses: I cooked them right, her words a message to Naomi. Sunny had finished the worm.
Naomi left us more than source code. She had provided accurate and precise internal data on Haven, upon which we based our plan of attack.
Snake asked, “Whose side was she on, anyway?”
He stared me straight in the eyes. Maybe he thought I would know the answer because I’d had feelings for her. I might have found the inquiry offensive coming from anyone but Snake.
Our friendship had long since crossed any such barriers, and I would have happily told him—had I known the answer myself.
But sadly, despite what I felt for Naomi, I hadn’t the slightest idea. If she wanted to defeat Liquid’s plans—by giving us the unfinished code to a program that could electronically destroy GW—then her actions in Eastern Europe were inexplicable.
“I don’t know,” I said, “what her true intentions were. But …”
If Naomi had wanted to stop Liquid, she wouldn’t have needed to escape Nomad and help him take over the SOP. In doing so, she gave him control over the world’s armies—a terrible power—and then told us to stop him. Neither Snake nor I had a cohesive explanation to resolve the clear contradiction in her behavior.
And now, neither of us could know what Naomi had truly wanted.
I made myself recall her fleeting expression of relief when she heard Sunny’s message. I cooked them right. I tried to feel what Naomi must have felt.
What purpose for living had she found after learning of her cancer, as the fear of death threatened to break her each night? What had she needed to accomplish before passing on? What would be her penitence? Her sins—among them Vamp, Snake, and Liquid—had brought irrevocable change to the world.
Naomi knew her borrowed time would be far too short to settle her debts. And so she imposed on herself the artificial life she had given to Vamp, and she made contact with me and Snake—and Sunny.
As she died, Naomi said to Snake, Your life has been prolonged so that you may fulfill your purpose. She had been tied to the same fate. Snake wanted to know whose side she was on, yet I sensed that she had long since passed any notion of allegiances.
“But,” I continued, “one thing’s for sure: she was determined to stop Liquid.”
Snake’s gaze seemed to soften, if by only a bit. I don’t know if he believed me, or if he had simply decided to take the gamble. Naomi was gone from this world; whether he believed in her or in Sunny and me, who had taken up her cause, the result would be the same.
In that manner, Naomi wasn’t unique. Wolf and Emma, and all of the dead—for that matter, the living too—existed in a way, nestled inside other people. I was Wolf, I was Emma, I was Naomi, and I was Snake. I was, in part, all of those gathered at the briefing.
“There’s a saying in China,” Mei Ling said. “When a bird is upon death, its cry is heartbreaking. When a man is upon death, his words are right.”
Even Mei Ling’s formidable command of quotations had misfired here. If sorrow could be found in a bird’s death cry, a person’s dying words were worthy of attention. Perhaps Mei Ling was suggesting we should trust Naomi. But none in the room provided any reaction, not even Meryl or Johnny.
But her words did make me think.
People never truly ceased to be. Like a river flowing through those who speak for us, human existence endured within both the physical body as well as stories passed down. As long as somebody continued to tell our stories, none of us—not Snake, not Meryl, nor any of the soldiers here with us—none would truly go.
His words are right. What was spoken on the verge of death were not mere words but a facet of our lives, a seedling to sprout branches into the future.
Mei Ling asked if anyone had any other questions, but a dark mood had fallen over the room. No questions were necessary. Snake had said this mission was for a suicide squad, and he was right: some might die. Then, breaking the heavy, seemingly eternal silence, Snake casually raised his hand.
“Anybody got a smoke?”