Subterrene War 02: Exogene Read online

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  For Josh and Conor

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Lou Anders who took me under his wing at my first WorldCon, and to John Scalzi for giving me a chance to participate in “The Big Idea.” Thanks also to Jack Womack—publicist extraordinaire—Alex Lencicki—also a publicist extraordinaire—and of course to DongWon Song and Anna Gregson for everything else that it took to write this book.

  PROLOGUE

  You told me they’d welcome suicide,” General Urqhart said. “That once their service term expired, Germline units would march in like virgins, ready for their own sacrifice. But that’s not happening.”

  His audience was silent. The general’s aides stood along the edges of a conference room while a group of scientists sat around a long table, and he stared at the holo-map that rotated overhead to show allied lines in blue, Russian in red. Nothing on the map moved; he didn’t expect it to. For now it was static, a car stuck in a ditch that they hadn’t yet figured out how to dislodge and with no sign of a tow truck. A disaster. If Urqhart didn’t retake the mines within six months, and hold them for at least three, the war would be a financial catastrophe and that was the problem with his scientists: they didn’t “get” war. Winning didn’t depend on holding territory anymore, it hinged on pulling as much metal from the ground as you could and then leaving at the right time, a strategy that depended on having every tool working. And now he had to reassign Special Forces when he needed them the most.

  “We’re hemorrhaging genetics,” he continued. “The first fielded units reached the end of their term, and of those, sixty percent are going AWOL. Heading west into Europe.”

  One of the scientists cleared his throat. “General, we already have reports of escaped Germline units dying before they can get too far. We just don’t see this as a crisis; safeguards are working.”

  The rest of them nodded and some of the scientists even smiled, which made Urqhart furious. He pounded the table.

  “Really? You don’t think there’s a problem? How do you think it looks to the public when news reports show disfigured girls in Amsterdam, Ankara, even Norfolk? What do you think the public sees? Not the military. They see you, but instead of geniuses you look like monsters. The news shows our genetic units with gangrene, their flesh rotting off, eyes milky white and blind, and most of the girls are crazy, drooling too much to even say a word. Then the public asks one question: how can we do this to human beings—to girls? People don’t see them as things, as tools; they see them as people like you and me, and now they think we’ve murdered children in the most horrific ways possible: with war and disease.”

  The general paused to light his cigar, puffing until the end glowed and thick smoke coiled around his head, floating through the hologram. One of the scientists coughed. Fuck him, thought Urqhart, and he puffed a cloud in the man’s direction, wishing the scientist would die on the spot, enjoying, for a moment, the thought of drawing his pistol and firing into the man’s head to get everyone’s attention—to show this wasn’t an academic exercise.

  The scientist who had spoken before nodded and folded his hands. “We think the problem lies in their psychological conditioning—while the girls are growing in the tanks. Apparently faith wasn’t the answer our psychiatrists assured us it would be.”

  “Where are they now?” asked Urqhart, looking around the room. “Are there any shrinks here?”

  The man shook his head. “No, General. We contracted psychiatric efforts to Hamilton Diversified, who refused to let their people attend this meeting without the company attorneys.”

  “Typical.”

  “But I spoke with one of their junior psychiatrists, a bright kid named Alderson, assigned to one of the deployed observation and maintenance teams. He had an interesting insight. Alderson thinks that experience plays a greater role in the girls’ emotional development than was previously modeled, and that the problem is one of contradiction. Somehow realities at the front undermine their belief in God and the afterlife—make them doubt faith is the answer. And we don’t know why.”

  The general’s anger faded. Maybe he had misjudged this particular scientist; it wasn’t the answer he wanted, wasn’t a roadmap to a solution, but it was enough to seed an idea in Urqhart’s mind, a notion that made him shiver with a sense that one day he and every man in the room would wind up in hell.

  “I think I know why.” His scientists turned their attention back to him and the general sensed in them a kind of skeptical amusement. “You people are idiots. Psychiatrists. Biologists. Fucking hell,” he shouted now, his teeth almost biting through the cigar, “this is war! I can’t believe I can see the problem, and yet we pay you people millions each year to figure these things out for us. What the hell are we paying you for? I shouldn’t have to fix this.”

  He paused, scanning the room slowly, enjoying the moment for what it was and noticing sweat had appeared on some of their foreheads as he pulled deeply at the cigar.

  “General,” someone said, “what’s your idea?”

  “None of you have been in combat. And yet here you are, psychologically programming these girls for a combat environment, using religion not to infuse a sense of faith and duty, but to make them fearless. They know that if they die in war they go straight to heaven. It’s a start, but here’s the problem: it doesn’t mesh. Down in the tunnels, once your friends start dying and the shit hits the fan, reality is a whole different thing from what these girls are being taught. Faith is a funny concept—either you have it or you don’t—and war tends to mess with whatever scrap of it you might have.”

  He stubbed out the cigar on the scientists’ table, leaving a black mark on its lacquered surface. “So, for now we do nothing. I have to reassign Special Forces units to their new mission, hunting down your mistakes, but the second batch of girls, the newer models, is almost in position for our counterattack. In a few weeks we retake the mines and hold as best we can. In the meantime we wait.”

  As he headed for the door, his aides holding it open, the scientist who had done most of the talking called after him.

  “General, I’m lost. Wait for what?”

  “The girls,” said General Urqhart. “They sense that what they’re taught about faith is bullshit, that it all came from someone who doesn’t know war, a bunch of four-eyed eggheads with no balls to speak of and even less experience. We need them to learn from someone who speaks their language, one of their own, someone who’s seen the ass-end of humanity and still reported for discharge.

  “So keep the psychiatrists in the field, conducting interviews, and assign this guy Alderson to watch the most promising girls, to look out for one that seems better than the rest. We’re looking for someone who can tell the story of faith and war in a way that rings true for all the others, and we’ll record every single thing she says about it, incorporate it into our future mental conditioning packages.

  “We’re waiting for a genetically engineered saint. And more than that, we need what the Greeks used to call a Psychopomp.” Before anyone could ask he gritted his teeth and said, “Look it up, assholes.”

  ONE

  Spoiling

  And you will come upon a city cursed, and everything that festers in its midst will be as a disease; nothing will be worthy of pity, not insects, animals or even men.

  MODERN COMBAT MANUAL JOSHUA 6:17

  Live forever. The thought lingered like an annoying dog, to which I had handed a few scraps.

  I felt Megan’s fingers against my skin, and smelled the paste—breathed
the fumes gratefully for it reminded me that I wouldn’t have to wear my helmet. Soon, but not now. The lessons taught this, described the first symptom of spoiling: When the helmet no longer felt safe, a sign of claustrophobia. As my troop train rumbled northward, I couldn’t tell if I shook from eagerness or from the railcar’s jolting, and gave up trying to distinguish between the two possibilities. It was not an either-or day; it was a day of simultaneity.

  Deliver me from myself, I prayed, and help me to accept tomorrow’s end.

  Almost a hundred of my sisters filled the railcar, in a train consisting of three hundred carriages, each one packed with the same cargo. My newer sisters—replacements with childlike faces—were of lesser importance. Megan counted for everything. She smiled as she stroked my forehead, which made me so drowsy that my eyes flickered shut with a memory, the image of an atelier, of a technician brushing fingers across my cheek as he cooed from outside the tank. I liked those memories. They weren’t like the ones acquired more recently, and once upon a time everything had been that way. Sterile. Days in the atelier had been clean and warm—not like this.

  “Everything was so white then,” I said, “like a lily.”

  Megan nodded and kissed me. “It was closer to perfect, not a hint of filth. Do not be angry today, Catherine. It’s counterproductive. Kill with detachment, with the greater plan.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned forward so Megan could work more easily, and so she wouldn’t see my smile while smearing paste on my scalp, the thin layer of green thermal block that would dry into a latexlike coating, blocking my heat. The replacements all stared.

  “Do you know what to expect in Uchkuduk?” one of them asked. “It’s my first time—the first time for most of us. They mustered us a month ago from the Winchester atelier, near West Virginia. How should we prepare?”

  “It’s simple,” I said. “There’s one thing they don’t teach in the atelier: Bleeznyetzi.”

  Several of them leaned closer.

  “Bleeznyetzi?”

  I nodded. “It’s Russian for twins.”

  “You are an older version,” one said. “We speak multiple languages, including Russian and Kazakh, and we know the word.”

  “Then you know what our forces call us—the humans.”

  “No. What?”

  The train squealed around a sudden bend, pushing me further against the wall. I braced a boot against Megan, who had just fallen asleep, to keep her from slumping over.

  “Bitches and sluts. The tanks taught English too, right?”

  They left me alone after that. It was no surprise—we all learned the same lesson: “Watch out for defeatists, the ones near the end of their terms. Defeatism festers in those who approach the age. Ignore their voices. Learn from their actions but do not listen to their words. When you and your sisters reach eighteen, a spoiling sets in, so pray for deliverance from defeatism and you will be discharged. Honorably. Only then will you ascend to be seated at His right hand.” The replacements wouldn’t associate themselves with me for fear that I would rub off on them, the spoiling a contagion, and for some reason it made me feel warm to think I had that kind of power.

  “You’re incorrigible,” I whispered to Megan. “It is not your turn for rest,” but she didn’t hear and exhaustion showed on her face while she slept, in thin lines that I hadn’t noticed before. “I’ll tell you a secret: Hatred is the only thing keeping me from spoiling, the only thing I have left, the only thing I do well.”

  The armored personnel carrier’s compartment felt like a steam bath. Heat acted as a catalyst, lowering the amount of energy it took for the phantom dead to invade my mind, and I focused on my hands, thinking that concentration would keep the hallucination at bay. It was no use. The APC engine roared like a call from the past, and Megan melted away to be replaced by the dusty outskirts of Pavlodar, a bird jibbering overhead as we jumped off from the river. Five Kazakhs stood in an alley. They looked at me as if I were an anomaly, a dripping fish that had just stood up on two legs to walk from the Irtysh, and they failed to recognize the danger. Our girl named Majda moved first. She sprayed the women—who began to scream—with flechettes, her stream of needles cutting some of them in half as she laughed. Majda wouldn’t laugh for much longer. A rocket went through her, leaving only a pair of twitching legs…

  Megan was shouting at me when the vision evaporated.

  “Catherine!”

  The APC compartment reappeared. We sat encased in a tiny ceramic cubicle, strapped into our seats and struggling to breathe alcohol-contaminated air as the vehicle idled.

  “You’re spoiling,” she said. “You were laughing.”

  I nodded and tongued another tranq tab—my third in the last hour.

  “It’s an insanity,” Megan continued, “I worry. The spoiling seems to be worse in you than in any other and someone will report it. One of the new girls.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Soon we will kill again and then it will be as if nothing was ever wrong, as if destruction was a meal, maybe toast and honey.”

  The turbine for the plasma cannon buzzed throughout the vehicle, vibrating the twenty cubicles like ours along each side, and three large ones down the vehicle’s spine. We had two ways out. The normal way, a tiny hatch in the floor where we would come out underneath and roll from between the APC’s huge wheels, and an escape hatch in the roof where we could pop out in an emergency. It wouldn’t be long before everything stopped and time would dilate with excitement, with the freedom of movement and a sudden breakout into the open where one could find targets among men.

  The turbines went quiet and I saw a tear on Megan’s cheek.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I explained, “not because I don’t care about you. I do. It doesn’t matter because we’re dead anyway tomorrow. And I don’t want to die.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I don’t want to be discharged.”

  “You speak like them, like the nonbred.”

  I shook my head, ignoring the insult, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to live past the age? Maybe the spoiling goes away. Fades. I have more killing to do, and they will rob me of it at eighteen.”

  Megan shook her head. She turned and I saw from the movement of her neck that she had begun sobbing, which made me feel even worse because my actions ruined the moment. This was to have been a sacred time. It was said that in quiet seconds during battle, when the firing paused as it sometimes did without explanation, one heard His voice in the wind or in the silence of the suit, His hand on your heart to let you know that you were a sacred thing among the corrupt. So the time before an engagement was to be used for reflection, to prepare for glory in an hour of meditation that climaxed with a flash of anticipation, of wanting to prove one’s worthiness. But words ruined everything.

  There were plans and strategies, mapped out in advance by semiaware computers and human generals to calculate just how far we could go before our systems reached their limit. It was a ritual beyond us—the way our leaders communicated with God and channeled His will. Nobody gave us the details. For the past two years neither Megan nor I knew why the war existed, except what we had caught in passing during interactions with men, with human forces, the nonbred. But those were glimpses. They weren’t enough to answer all the questions, and soon we stopped asking because it was enough to know that we fought Russian men, and we prayed that God would make the war last forever. A feeling of satisfaction filled me as I thought about it, as if knowing that God was a part of the plan was enough, something that made us invincible because He trusted us to cleanse this part of the world, to allow a Lily like Megan to exercise her will.

  We would move out soon. Far below us, the advance shock wave of our sisters was already attacking, underground, pushing into Russian tunnel positions and killing as many as they could before we followed with the main force—a mixed army of humans and my sisters, exposed aboveground for the greater glory. Our attack would m
ake Megan feel better, I was certain. Waiting never helped, but war?

  War made us feel fifteen again.

  They played it over the speakers when we were born at fifteen-equivalent—the hymn, a prayer known only by the faithful, our first lesson and a call to the faithful:

  “This is my Maxwell. It was invented over a century before I was born but this one is new, this one is mine. The barrel of my Maxwell consists of an alloy tube, encased by ring after ring of superconducting magnets. I am shielded from the flux by ceramic and alloy barrel wraps, which join to the fuel cell, the fuel cell to the stock. My Maxwell Carbine has no kick, my carbine has a flinch. It is my friend, my mother. My carbine propels its children, the flechettes, down its length, rapidly accelerating them to speeds ranging from subsonic to hypersonic. It depends on what I choose.

  “My carbine is an instrument of God. I am an instrument of God. Unlike ancient firearms, the flechettes have no integral chemical propellant and are therefore tiny, allowing me to fill a shoulder hopper with almost ten thousand at a time. Ten thousand chances to kill. My flechettes are messengers of God. My flechettes are killers. The material and shape of my killers makes them superior armor penetrators. But my killers are not perfect. I am not perfect. My killers are too small to work alone and must function as a family. But I shall not worry. My Maxwell will fire fifty flechettes per second, and fifty is a family. With my Maxwell I can liberate a man of his head or limbs. With my Maxwell I will kill until there is nothing left alive.

  “With my Maxwell, I am perfect.”

  It was then, at fifteen, when Megan and I met our first humans. Until that point the technicians kept us in atelier tanks—alive and conscious, fed information and nutrients through a series of cables and tubes. The tanks gave us freedom of motion so we could put movement to combat scenarios played out in our heads, lending our muscles the same memories fed to our brains. Fifteen-equivalent was our birthday, when we became the biological equal to a fifteen-year-old human and slid from the growth tanks to feel cold air bring goose bumps and, along with them, a sense that the world was both a hostile and a promising place, full of danger but also the opportunity for redemption.