Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Read online

  “What about the sentry fields? The bots. Won’t they deal with anything topside?”

  Ox laughed. “Pops can make magic in his land, and Kaz is his land. Sentry bots don’t always work.”

  “Come on, reporter-guy,” Ox said. “You want a story, this’ll give you a story.”

  It was Ox’s turn on watch, so he and two of his buddies, Burger and Snyder, moved toward the ladder, motioning for me to follow. I had no saliva. I don’t even remember willing my legs to work, yet there I was, heading to the ladder, and in that instant I knew exactly how the Marines had felt—the ones who had wanted to eat dinner in the basement of my hotel. You didn’t go up; it was all wrong. Anything could happen up there, and the rest of your unit would be far below, unable to help and just glad that it wasn’t them. My legs seemed to have grown a mind of their own, refusing to work the way they should have, almost detached from the rest of my body as they resisted efforts to move them toward danger. This was tangled. I knew it was tangled, Ox knew it, the captain knew it, and even the guy who had lost his face knew it, but everyone except that guy managed to pretend it was all cool, all smooth. Normal.

  “Come on,” said Ox.

  When I got to the base of the ladder, the captain stopped me.

  “Hold a sec.” He grabbed a Maxwell carbine from the closest Marine, snapped the hopper from the kid’s armor, and then rigged me with it. The carbine felt heavy and I slung it over my shoulder.

  “Anyone who goes topside is a cranker,” the captain explained.

  “Sir, I’m a reporter. I didn’t think I’d even be allowed to carry a Maxwell on the line.”

  He had taken off his helmet during the lull in shelling, and smiled. “You’re DOD—a civilian who wanted this crap, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you got it. Here… He lifted my helmet and placed it over my head, sliding the locking ring into place. “You’re going topside, you button up. Period.”

  When I caught up to the others, they had stepped off the ladder into a tiny mining elevator, about a hundred feet up from the main tunnel. Ox laughed and pointed toward my carbine.

  “You know how to shoot one of those?”

  I could barely talk, realizing for the first time how important spit was. “Yeah. I fired one in Rube-Hack.”

  “Going up,” said Snyder, and our elevator jerked.

  The car rattled. I wondered how often the thing had been used, recognizing what it was from some of my earliest stories on deep-mining operations in Nevada, where collapses and explosions had made mine rescues something boring, not even newsworthy anymore. It was ironic. The elevator was a modified rescue rig, two cages welded together to fit four men, but it wasn’t doing its job anymore; it wasn’t taking men out of danger but throwing them in. You can hate an inanimate object on the line. Every bump and shake made me want to throw up, rip the yellow wire cage apart and scream, because it wasn’t supposed to move people to their deaths, and I just knew that the thing was laughing at our expense, that the elevator had clearly lost its way, been corrupted. It was an orphan. A street kid that had learned to make the best of it and survive any way it knew how—at our expense.

  It took us a little under an hour to make the trip topside and we had to switch into three different shafts to do it. When we got to the top, the other watch was waiting and didn’t say anything as they fought to get on the elevator, to get back inside Mother Earth, while we tried to dismount as slowly as possible. We still had one more ladder to climb, another hundred feet up to the observation post, and when we got there, I had to blink from the sudden light, a bright bluish glow that made me remember everything, including that there was a world aboveground and that it rested under a thing called the sun. There was snow. Fall had made its escape while I had been tunnel-bound, and winter claimed the land with its pale blanket.

  I had never seen a battlefield and hadn’t expected it to be so… clean. You sensed the rubble but couldn’t see it under what looked like about two feet of fresh snow, and the land was flat, vacant except for wind. The war had vanished. But at the same time there was a thrill, an undercurrent of danger, because you knew that no matter how peaceful it looked, here, exposed, you had reason to be scared. The position allowed us to see in three-sixty, from a concrete bunker that just barely protruded from the rubble fields and had four narrow windows, their glass three feet thick.

  My face pressed against the nearest window, looking north, and I stared, hypnotized. Somewhere out there was Pops, looking back at us, and I just wanted to see him. I knew there was a word for my type, but my brain hadn’t been working since getting on the line. Choked up. It had clogged with ass puckering, with the sound of my own breathing inside the helmet, and with dreams of getting wired again, plugged in. Words started coming to me as I stared out across the rubble field, words that described me to a T. “Voyeur.” “Spectator.” “Pulitzer-fanboy.” “Coward.”

  Ox yanked his helmet off and I nearly choked in surprise. “What are you doing?”

  He laughed and the others took their helmets off too. Vision hoods came next, and Ox and Snyder carefully disconnected the series of cables that connected coms and goggle units to the suit. Burger kept his hood on. The goggles made him look funny, like a bug with big green bottled eyes, and he grinned at me.

  “Rube, you’re about to get initiated into the brotherhood. First reporter on the line, first reporter to get zipped!” He took a seat near the north window and stared out.

  “Get down here,” Ox said. When I sat next to him, he popped my helmet and helped me out of the hood.

  “What about Russian sensors?” I asked.

  “We’re tight.” Ox pointed to two lights on the floor next to us, one green, the other red, and I saw the green one glowing dimly. “Green means go. A good seal, so they can’t see our therms, even if we unbutton, and we don’t need the chameleon skin in this domicile.”

  Snyder pulled a small tin from a belt pouch and began flicking it, his finger snapping against the lid. His teeth were unbelievably yellow. “The good life,” he said.

  Ox laughed, slid a small player out of his pouch and hit a button. I couldn’t believe it. Old music from the ancient world, rock. Nobody listened to that shit anymore except me, and as I sat there, it seemed… right. I didn’t know these men and hadn’t really seen much of them down in the tunnels, since we had been buttoned up for most of the time, and the only one I really spoke with was Ox. But I had listened and watched. They all had a look, and it wasn’t the one you saw on any of the troops that made it to the rear for R & R; out here the look was more raw, a tightness in their faces and eyes that manifested in a kind of cornered-animal thing even when they grinned. Always looking for signs of danger, always moving.

  Snyder was a kid, from Jamaica, I think, and like the rest of them, he’d grown out his beard, but it grew only in patches, so it looked as though someone had ripped out tufts of hair.

  “What’s zipped?” I asked.

  “Zipped?” Snyder thought for a minute. “It’s a long trip.”

  Ox grabbed the tin and opened it. He pinched the dark material inside—it looked like finely ground dirt—and pressed a tiny wad inside his lower lip.

  “It’s tobacco. But we add a special ingredient, tranq tabs.”

  “Tranq tabs?”

  “Illegal shit,” Snyder explained. “They give them to the crazies, the Gs, to make ’em not so crazy, keep ’em fighting and energized.”

  “The Gs,” I said. “Genetics.”

  Ox tossed the tin to Burger, who repeated the ritual and then threw it to Snyder. “Around their second year of service, Gs start to lose it, unstable. At first they didn’t give ’em anything and some Gs went nuts, wiped an entire battalion of Army on the push northward from Bandar. Then came tranq.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a mixture of haloperidol, fentanyl, and some kind of speed—in elephant-sized doses. We got some from a very friendly supply sergeant l
ast time on leave. You crush up the tabs, mix it with dip, and there you go. Zip. We can’t smoke anything on the line—screws up the air handling when everyone lights up—and there’s no way a human could take a G-dose of these things. Can’t inject anything through suits unless you’re a corpsman. So mixing tranq with dip gives us just the right cut and a new way to see the war.”

  Snyder finished and handed it to me. I looked at the stuff suspiciously, not because I didn’t want it—I wanted it more than anything—but because I didn’t know if I could keep my fingers steady long enough to take some. When the shakes eased for a moment, I dug in.

  “Whatever you do,” said Snyder, “don’t swallow.” He held up a finger and spat onto the floor. “You spit.”

  Cool and easy, all grins. Everything seemed smooth and I swore I smelled the snow, even over the stink of our own bodies. The music got louder. It took me a second but I realized that there was no fear—no war, even—just us and music that I could see coming out of the speakers, and I started giggling, unable to stop even if I had wanted to. I was about to swallow when Ox warned me. His voice sounded faraway and slow, so damn slow.

  “Spit.”

  “What’s your name?” Snyder asked.

  I don’t remember telling him, but I must have.

  “Oscar Wendell?” Ox asked. He and the others started laughing then. “No, no, no, hell no. We’re gonna give you a new name, your war name, ’cause you been born again, son of Kaz. Oscar Wendell will now be known as Scout.”

  “Scout?”

  “Well, Scout,” said Snyder. “Welcome to the jolly green brotherhood, no turning back now, nothing to do but crank on. Crank fire.”

  Crank fire. We cranked fire, and looking back, I realize I was glad for the drugs, for the cushion they gave me, a cocoon that filtered reality and kept out the really bad stuff or made it seem as though nothing was actually happening and everything was a dream. Two hours later the snow stopped, leaving the battlefield covered by an additional foot. I was on watch with Ox. The white made it difficult to concentrate and I had to close my eyes every few seconds to keep from getting dizzy; even though I had spat out the zip a long time ago, its effect still bounced in my head, keeping the edge off but blurring my sense of time and vision. Something moved out there. It looked like a piece of rubble melted into the snow and then rose from a new position, closer, so when it happened again, I told Ox.

  “Button up,” he said. The mood shattered in an instant. Ox’s and the others’ fingers blurred as the Marines yanked on vision hoods and snapped the cables into place, and it got dead quiet when Snyder killed the music. All I had to do was put on my helmet, but I was the last one finished.

  “Cycle the air.”

  Snyder hit a button and I heard a hiss, watching the temperature gauge on my heads-up drop rapidly. It stopped at five below zero. Burger popped open a firing port under the window and the floor light flickered from green to red at the same time he shoved his grenade launcher through. Ox and Snyder popped their ports, too, and gestured for me to do the same, so I poked my carbine into the narrow opening, and it clicked against the sides as my hands shook.

  “Contact.” Ox’s voice crackled in my ear, over the radio. “Grid Foxtrot-Uniform-one-six-five-three-five-zero.”

  The captain answered, his voice surreal, a caricature of what it should have been, as though someone pinched his nose while he spoke. If things hadn’t been so tense, I might have laughed. “Roger. Artillery off-line, weapons free, sentry bots show green lights. Green light.”

  The shapes crept forward. It was almost impossible to detect, and had I not been paying attention, they would have crawled all the way, hundreds of white blobs that moved forward in a continuous line, so slowly they seemed barely to shift. Chameleon skins. Our suits, and theirs, had been coated with a reactive polymer, wired to the suits’ computers and power systems so that it sensed one’s surroundings and changed to the same color as the closest objects. That was why they had been so hard to see, and it reminded me of what Ox had said, how he’d described them. Spooky. Popov was a ghost.

  “Why are they moving so slowly?” I asked.

  Ox grunted. “ ’Cause of our sentry bots. The bots can detect heat, but armored suits mask heat. That leaves motion and shape detection, but if you’ve got your second skin activated, move slow enough, and stay low…

  “Crafty little bastards,” said Snyder.

  I shook my head, trying to concentrate. “How slow?”

  “Once they reach our security zone,” said Burger, “about two feet a minute.”

  Two feet a minute. Outside. If a plasma barrage came and you were out there when it hit, instant crisp. I’d seen the bodies and wreckage on flatcars in Tashkent, smelled it when the wind was right. Ceramic melted at plasma temperatures, and the dead bodies looked like lumps of rock. These guys had come from their own lines, almost three klicks away. Slowly. That meant they had been out in the weather for almost a day, come plasma, snow, or anything, and that kind of dedication indicated that whoever these men were, they really wanted to kill us. What had we ever done to them?

  “I think I’m going to puke,” I said.

  “Well,” said Ox, “then let’s get this over with. Burger.”

  Loud pops sounded from my right as Burger worked his grenade launcher up and down, left and right, arcing deadly eggs toward the oncoming shapes. Posts on our flanks must have opened up at the same time, because brilliant flashes blossomed over the snow several hundred meters away, toward the Irtysh River, and then from the opposite direction. Big push, I thought. There were thousands of them. Burger’s grenades—alternating between thermal gel and fléchettes—melted or punctured anything they hit, and the Russians reacted immediately; advance troops rose from their crawl and sprinted forward, firing at our bunker so that all we saw were lines of tracers leaping out of thin air.

  “Right about… Ox said, “now.”

  Sentry robots beeped to life at the appearance of moving targets. Metallic columns popped up from buried tubes across the entire front and sprayed explosive fléchettes, strafing and mowing like avenging angels as they sucked ammunition from bunker magazines far below.

  “Crank up, Scout!” said Snyder. “What are you waiting for, man?”

  I didn’t have time to think, not even like, Wait a second, I’m about to wipe someone I don’t even know. Didn’t happen. Those thoughts came only later, in nightmares. Daymares. As soon as my finger touched the trigger, a green sighting reticle appeared on my goggles, and I heard the tinkling of fléchettes as they fell through the flexi-belt and into the carbine. I didn’t feel a thing. No kick. The barrel magnets launched the fléchettes down and out so that all I saw was a line of red streaks—each one the tiny fleck of phosphorus that lit up when a fléchette hit air. I had time to think then. Time to think that it was beautiful, like fireworks, but just a few seconds later, there were no more targets and the sentries lowered slowly into their holes to leave me gasping for air and searching the horizon for something, anything, that might be trying to kill me.

  “Grid clear,” said Ox.

  Burger pulled his launcher in and slapped a new clip into its base. He probably thought it was over; we all did.

  “Man,” I said. My finger ached. I didn’t realize I had been squeezing so hard, and smelled the sweat, the awful smell of terror and salt, inside my suit.

  Suddenly a salvo of enemy grenades arced toward us. They came unexpectedly, and from the popping of their launchers, I guessed that some Russian troops had remained in the rear, motionless. The grenades hit directly on our position, most of them concentrated on Burger’s section, and thermal gel smoked as it tried to burn through the glass. I heard them then; the Russians screamed and it seemed like an entire army charged at us.

  “Oooo-rah! Pobieda!”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.

  “Oooo-rah means ‘kill,’ ” said Ox. “Pobieda means ‘victory.’ ”

  A second wav
e rose from the rubble, and the sentries again sprang from their holes, picking them off easily. Windblown snow fell in gentle swirls as once more the front became quiet.

  We didn’t say anything.

  Our relief showed up later, and it took us about two hours to get down. Burger had bought it. One direct hit on his port burned through the tiny alloy door, and then a fléchette grenade followed to send a bunch of needles through his chest and out the back, opening a quarter-sized hole on either side, and I wondered if from the right angle you could look clear through. It took us longer than normal to descend, because it was hard to fit into the elevators with a corpse.

  When we got back to the tunnels, I yanked off my helmet and threw up, my body trying to rid itself of the tobacco and drugs, but it was the memory I wanted to vomit out. We hadn’t even known that Burger had bought it—not until someone tapped him on the shoulder and he slumped over. On the way down in the elevator, his guts had started coming out of the hole, and for a moment I remembered my real job.

  Burger would make some story.

  The genetics came a few days after we lost Burger, and that word popped into my head again. “Pulitzer.” Nobody in the press had been this close. A hundred of them showed up in the tunnel, silent and eerie, all identical, all girls. Engineered.

  I wished I had my holo unit as they passed in front of me. Beautifully deadly, and all grace. The girls had mustered out of the factories, ateliers, manufactured at a trickle for now, but it was a trickle that made a difference—one that even the Press Corps noticed. Since the Russians had shown up a year earlier, every action where we were able to retake the mine had involved the use of genetically engineered troops. Line units had entire legends built up around the Gs. “You should have seen them, man, just one squad of Gs wiped an entire battalion of Pops, moved like lightning on speed.”

  They were probably about sixteen or seventeen years old, and their bald heads were nearly flawless, would have been if not for thick calluses formed by the friction of their hoods. These didn’t wear helmets for some reason. Maybe it was because they were too cool, like Amazons in formation, and they knew it. Instead the girls carried their lids like I had, on straps hanging from their belts, and they marched into the tunnel without a sound, silent phantoms in black armor.