Subterrene War 03: Chimera Read online

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  For Sean

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to DongWon Song, Tim Holman, Anna Gregson and Tom Bouman—the best editorial team on the planet—and to Alex Field, my agent. A special thanks also to all the people who took the time to review Germline and Exogene; there aren’t enough words to express my appreciation.

  BEFORE

  I flew around the world,” said Bea. “All you can do is sit there?”

  The waves crashed so that I flinched and checked for my carbine, forgetting that weapons weren’t allowed on leave. Thailand’s jungles were close. Mountains rose almost vertically behind us to leave only a sliver of beach, and while I thought Bea looked beautiful in her bikini, there was too much going on to admire her; palms bent in a strong wind and whispered, warning that the mountains weren’t done yet—that soon they would have me again and hadn’t forgotten what I’d brought to them, were ready to pay me back for introducing an abomination. This was intermission.

  “It’s good to see you. I didn’t think they’d let anyone fly into Bangkok since things flared up.”

  She shook her head. “What’s going on in this place, Stan? The Thais are at war with Rangoon; so why do they need you? I’m tired of sitting at home and only getting a week or two before you disappear for another six months.” Bea was crying now. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand or pull her in close because a part of me recalled that it was something she liked, the physical contact an instant reassurance, but my hands felt like lumps of lead.

  “You know how it is,” I said. “The King asked for help, and I guess the US likes to stick with its friends.”

  “Are you kidding? How about sticking by your wife? Can’t you just quit?”

  The question made me nauseous and tense at the same time, and the sand breathed warmth under my legs, too warm, as if it had begun to smolder. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s nothing to fear. I eat this job, it makes me strong, and there’s no angle in leaving because this is where I belong. What else would I do?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  The seconds ticked by until I shrugged. “You don’t look like it.”

  “I’ve been pregnant for a month.”

  “I wasn’t home a month ago.”

  “I know,” she said. “What’s funny is that I can’t remember his name, only that he wasn’t even my type. A scientist, some kind of genetic engineer working at the new production plant outside Winchester.”

  Everything went blank. If she knew what happened when my mind went in that direction, Bea would have run because it meant nothing mattered except the mission. But there wasn’t any mission now, and instead, the ways I could kill her flicked though my mind along with rage and sadness—a sadness that grew from failure and irony that she’d hooked up with a scientist from the Winchester plant. Even the jungle blamed Winchester for what happened under its canopy. Feelings shredded my stomach. Sound came from between my lips, a kind of groan that coincided with a swing so that my fist almost connected with her cheek but stopped less than an inch away, and Bea smiled, satisfied that for once she’d been able to penetrate and that all it took was another guy. There wasn’t much time before my hands grabbed her neck; I knew it and she didn’t, so before anything more could happen, I jumped to my feet and began the job of killing every feeling I could. Shutting each one off mentally and stabbing any that threatened to get up and try for me again, but for some reason the sense of failure resisted the effort. Grew.

  “I should get back to base.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Are you crazy? I just told you I was pregnant and the kid’s not yours, and you have to leave?”

  “I know, but it’s cool. I won’t ask for a divorce unless you want to.”

  “Stan!”

  “You don’t know what they’re making in the Winchester plant, Bea; you haven’t seen their creations, so you couldn’t have known any better. But it’s OK. The jungle can’t get you here.”

  I headed for the road, leaving my towel behind because it wasn’t critical for where I was going, and anyway, it couldn’t wipe off the sense of failure. So instead, I’d take care of Bea and her kid because she was right: I was never at home, and maybe if I stayed married, it would make up for everything.

  “Stan!” she screamed.

  But I was past the point of recognizing my name, and she just didn’t get it: there was no Stan. Not anymore. The jungle had taken him and would never let go, not for anything.

  ONE

  Cleanup

  Dzhanga. Nobody wanted Dzhanga. Not even the flies that swarmed over the mud, buzzing so loudly that they sounded furious, angry to have been born from some corpse in the middle of central Asia, and maybe they wanted Dzhanga the least of all because for the flies there wasn’t any chance of seeing anything except Turkmenistan. Imagine that: living your entire life in a Turkmen slum, the high point of which would be finding the body of a rat in which to reproduce. At least I wasn’t a fly. But the Subterrene War had been over long enough that missions were hard to get, and I’d waited so long for this one that there was no way to turn it down, so they’d dropped me from thirty thousand feet, where I’d spiraled down and gone through layer after layer of clouds, descending on this—yet another stillborn Turkmen city, a gray-and-brown smear of humanity that clung to the banks of the Caspian and whose waters had become infected with the filth of people, a sheen of oil and scum visible as soon as I hit the five thousand foot mark and popped my chute. That had been a week ago. For a mission that was to have lasted three days, a week meant that this one was bad, that this chick wasn’t going down easy. But every step made me harder. Each day sharpened the edge. It didn’t worry me that I hadn’t found her yet and didn’t consider it a problem (although I knew they were shitting back at the outpost, wondering why it was taking so long) because the mission was my life, and those endless days on the rack, nights without air-conditioning on a hotel’s bug-ridden mattress with stains that hadn’t come from me—those were the hardest things to bear, so that a prolonged mission struck me as a vacation, like a dog must feel when you let it off the leash. When off duty and on standby, the world ate at your skin until you couldn’t wait anymore. You were supposed to stay in your hotel room, by the phone, because we didn’t carry cells and had no means of communication when off the line, no electronics at all and no indication that we belonged to the machine because we weren’t allowed anything regulation except weapons. No crew cuts, no uniform, and no salutes. To those crotch-rotting hookers back in Armenia, I was a businessman, some fool and a drunk, which until now had made me their best customer. But not anymore. She was out there, and it wouldn’t be much longer because something told me she had started to fade.

  In the bag by week’s end, that was the deal, and you just knew this would be hairy because she was past discharge by more than six months, which meant the girl was supercharged and out there with no sense of reality, her world a kind of half hallucination where fear and death thoughts merged. Other cleanup crews wanted to split the job, but that wasn’t about to happen; alone was better. It took a special kind
of solitude to hear the things I did and a wired mind to parse them until only valid information remained—little nuggets that most people would have missed because the fact that Dzhanga was a shit hole would have distracted them. Being alone meant everything was mine: Time. The wind. Smells especially. Even the dead Turkmen who stared at me, slumped against the side of his hut on the other side of the dirt track, with eyes that looked happy instead of surprised; those eyes stopped me cold because there wasn’t any reason to be happy. Not in Dzhanga. Not anywhere. He shouldn’t have even been there if you thought about it, should have left the city abandoned as the oil industry had a hundred years before, the way you’d toss a fifty at a bartender without looking back. So his happiness was information; it just wasn’t clear if it was useful information. I knelt in front of him and stared into his eyes, which had glazed over after dying, and I grabbed him by his long beard, touching his nose against my vision port so I could get a better look, maybe through his retinas and into his brain so it could tell me what made him smile. Why dying—when I’d fired four fléchettes into his skull—was so damn funny.

  But there wasn’t anything to learn; instead, my armor vibrated in a strong wind, a reminder to keep moving. It wasn’t the standard-issue armor they handed to regulars, and I took care of it the same way you’d take care of anything that meant so much, because even though I hadn’t paid for it with money, I’d paid for it with time; it was my own design. Instead of the thick, green ceramic plates on normal suits, mine were thin, sand-colored ones sandwiching a millimeter of titanium. The joints consisted of a special polymer, rubber, and Teflon amalgamation that stayed quiet no matter how far I walked, preventing every plate from touching its neighbor with that annoying clicking sound, the one that would have gotten me killed a long time ago, the one that tunnel rats—subterreners and their genetically engineered girls, satos—repeated until dead.

  It took a moment for my sniffer to process the area and then… nothing. Not a single useful thing came from the Turkmen, and aside from a few molecules of hydrocarbons, remnants detaching from the massive oil storage tanks that rusted behind me at the port, only dust filled the air.

  “Negative,” the suit’s computer said, her voice that of a woman whom I had named Kristen, the same as my first girlfriend in high school. She told me what I already knew from the display, but she was wrong; the sato was out here.

  “Clean?” I whispered. “Bullshit. She’s rotting. Close.”

  My suit chimed, surprising me. “Priority transmission, Sergeant, with the proper authentication key for Rabbit Five; should I play it?”

  Rabbit Five was my controller, Wheezer, across the Caspian and safe in Armenia, where he sat in a shack and monitored the occasional status burst from the suit, relayed via satellite to his tiny dish on the edge of a runway. “Sure,” I said.

  Wheezer was laughing. “You want me to tell you where she is? I have her marked; your little angel got her three hours ago, and tracking is all green.”

  He was messing with me. The angel, my targeting drone, flew somewhere overhead and saw everything, so it was just waiting to pipe the information into my system if I wanted it—the sato’s exact location—but somehow it would have been cheating. Wheezer knew how much I hated the drone; his question had been a joke, the one thing he knew would piss me off.

  “Do you wish to respond?” Kristen asked.

  “Negative. Don’t want to risk another burst.”

  I scanned the area. The hut was part of a string of shacks that formed a small neighborhood near Dzhanga’s abandoned rail-transfer point, a station that tanker cars once used to fill themselves from hundreds of now-empty oil storage vessels, most of them ruptured and torn open from a long-forgotten war. When the wind blew through them, it moaned. An hour ago I had gotten my first hit, a single tone from my computer followed by the announcement, “Germline unit, reading above background,” which meant that the chick was nearby and ripe, her skin starting to liquefy, and if I was lucky, her vision had blurred, with both eyes a milky-white. For now, though, Kristen stayed quiet; my heads-up read ambient temperature and weather data.

  “Not much longer,” I whispered and wiped a film of dust from both vision ports.

  My headgear was custom. The helmet fit snugly so that a centimeter of space separated me from the ceramic, and the only way to open it was to pop it from the neck ring, then unbuckle it from the back so the entire assembly would open in a clamshell fashion, just like the suit’s chest carapace. The helmet was art. A guy in New York had designed it, doped up and high, but the result had been something that resembled the head of a wasp, with wide oval vision ports and an extended “snout” that contained an integral collector unit to receive data from microbots or any one of a hundred other tools I used. Underneath it all, my vision hood clung like a second skin, so tight that I couldn’t afford the luxury of a beard. Nobody ever accused me of being a subterrener, one of those who lived among the fungus and rock and who shit all over their legs because it was easier to just dump waste than to take care of it with a few steps to the nearest flush port; those men grew beards to cushion their cheeks from the rough canvas of the hoods and came out of their bunkers with the bewildered look of a thousand Rip van Winkles. It had been years since I’d fought underground, and my suit told everyone that its occupant was a specialized thing, not to be used in tunnels or hangars. The hood underneath was the final piece, one last thing to set me apart from conscripts and those with the tired careers of lifers and superlifers; it had front magnetic claws that clicked into the sensor package on my helmet, which, in turn, sent data to my goggle lenses, a continuous heads-up feed of information that included chem-bio readings and the ticker for nitrogen compounds, explosives, or the real deal: rotting, human flesh.

  Soon, the dead Turkmen would interfere with my sensors.

  I dragged the body into the man’s hut, glanced around to make sure there was nobody there, and then shut the door so I could look through the crack—when the computer chimed again.

  “Priority message, Sergeant, keyed to a general emergency frequency.” But this time she didn’t ask for approval, since it was priority, and piped it in.

  “Challenge-echo, challenge-echo, challenge-echo. Echo-seven-six…”

  I waited for the numbers to rattle off. “Go ahead, Wheez.”

  “Subterrene War’s over, Bug. It’s official.”

  “The war ended months ago when the Russians pulled out. That’s why Command wanted me to break radio silence?”

  “No,” said Wheezer, “it means that we’re all being recalled. President just gave the order to pull in every man from the east and let the girls rot. We’re to go after them in Europe and friendly countries, but they want us out of the hot spots now. Something to do with the Chinese. Pickup at primary retrieval at oh six, tomorrow.”

  Now I was angry, and to hell with whoever might be zeroing in on my location, triangulating on the open transmission; I almost saw the radio waves, a huge neon arrow pointing down at me from the sky. “I have one betty out here somewhere. There’s signs everywhere, and she can’t be far. I get readings every once in a while. I’ll come in when she’s dead.”

  But Wheezer wasn’t listening anymore, and the radio stayed quiet. I flicked on my chameleon skin and slid out the door, shutting it behind me and wincing when the sound of children floated up the road from the main town to the north.

  You wouldn’t have seen me. The goatherds never did, and it was funny because I knew all these Turkmens so well while none of them knew me. The kids had come close—once—to finding my hiding spot in the scrub, buried under a thin layer of sand and goat dung, because they had been playing soccer, and one of them kicked into my face, sending their ball on a wild bounce when it should have kept going straight. The kid who chased it down had almost died then; but he went on his way, and none of them knew how close it had been. The chameleon skins had been the greatest invention of the century, a polymer coating that—if you maintained it—
would bend light, allowing the suit’s wearer to blend with the surroundings. Now the kids were at least a hundred yards away but heading toward me, so I sprinted across the road and lost sight of them as soon as I entered the rail yard.

  “Probable Germline unit detected,” Kristen announced, “readings well above baseline, concentration gradient bearing two-seven-nine-point-eight.”

  And everything went still. The map blinked onto my display and I moved out, charting a silent course through the concrete-and-steel wreckage, a forest of towering oil tanks that had been blown to create a twisted still life, huge flaps of rusted steel that fluttered just a bit in strong gusts. The sun gave the air a kind of shimmer that happened in the third world. It was hazy with maybe a little smoke and dust so that you knew if you popped lid there’d be a strong smell of sulfur and alcohol from the power plants, maybe an occasional whiff of ozone from the fusion reactors and generators. She’d be on the other side of the next tank; her red dot beckoned to me, begged me to come in. I rounded the concrete base, my carbine already pointed in her direction… and she disappeared before I could get a bead.

  “This is crap.”

  “Target lost,” Kristen said.

  “No shit.”

  She’d gone to ground. My mind screamed at the prospect of having to follow, shouted that there shouldn’t be a tunnel, not this close to the sea where the water table would be high, and that it must be a sort of optical illusion, but it wasn’t. The entrance opened in front of me, a wide concrete wall, in the middle of which was a black hole, square and waiting, daring me to go to the one place I hated: underground.

  “Damn it,” I said, trying to convince myself that it would be easy, and went in.

  My vision hood switched to infrared at the same time I stepped in a kind of soft goo or thick water; then I knew what this was—a sewer, carrying the city’s filth to the sea—and that by the end of the mission I’d be covered with waste. My external mics picked up her breathing now, amplified it and homed in, the display telling me which direction to head, but it didn’t need to. She was there. The betty had backed against a wall to face me less than ten meters from where I stood, and she was missing one arm below the elbow. I flicked on my helmet lamp and switched back to normal vision, deactivating the suit’s chameleon skin so she could see me.