Subterrene War 02: Exogene Read online

  First steps were awkward. Megan had stumbled when trying to stand and crashed into me, sending us both to the cold floor in a heap. We giggled. I’m Megan, she had said, and I told her my name, after which we looked into a mirror and I thought, She looks just like me—skinny girls, with leg and arm muscles that flexed like pistons under gravity, and which I knew could be used to kill the human technicians around us in hundreds of different ways. They had hair. Our heads had been shaved perfectly smooth and Megan and I sat there, on the floor, rubbing the tops of them and tracing our fingers over the scabs where only a few days before, cables had penetrated, and the thought occurred to me that if I killed one of the humans we could take his hair, to glue it onto our heads just to feel what it was like. But the technicians were kind. They helped us both up, guiding us to the dressing area where they gave us our first uniforms, orange and bright enough that their color glowed under fluorescent lights; and the sounds—unmuffled by the gallons of thick fluid that normally surrounded us in the tanks—were enough to make me dizzy. I vomited on the floor.

  A new voice spoke through the speakers while we organized. “Glory unto the faithful. On this, the day of your birth, a choir of angels sings your praise in heaven, telling God that he should watch for the time when you join him, to sit at His side after serving mankind. This you shall do, in honor of your creators.

  “It is said that ‘all the earth shall be devoured in fire. For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, which they will serve my Masters with one accord. From beyond the rivers the daughters of His dispersed ones shall bring offering. On that day I will not be ashamed for any of my deeds in which I transgressed against God; for then he will take away from our midst those who spoiled, and they shall no longer be haughty in His holy mountain. He will leave in our midst a meek and humble people, and we shall trust in the word of our Creators.’

  “Rejoice, for you are His daughters and ours, a holy Germline, Germline-one-A, and you will bring to Him eternal glory through death and with sacrifice. So sayeth the Modern Combat Manual.”

  While the voice read passage after passage, Megan helped me into my orange jumpsuit and when we looked at each other I knew she was the one.

  It didn’t matter now, in Kazakhstan, that those memories were old; it was the same look I gave her on that afternoon, when we slid from the bottom hatch of our compartment and stretched outside the APC under a dim sun. We smiled. I didn’t need to say it to her: it was an amazing day, cold and bright like on the day we were born, and we would be together when the enemy turned to face us. My hatred burned with an intensity it hadn’t mustered since the day before and both legs trembled, wanting to move out regardless of whether or not the others were ready.

  Our APCs had stopped across the border, west of Keriz and inside Kazakhstan where vehicles spread across the countryside. To our north, contrails marked the passage of autonomous fighters, semiaware drones that calculated probabilities in less than a second, twisting through the sky in patterns like braided white ropes. Russian ground-attack craft tried to cross south, the APC’s making an attractive target as they stopped in the open to assemble, but so far our fighters had kept the aircraft away. Every once in a while you saw a black streamer fall, followed by a cloud of fire and then a distant thud.

  “It is here,” said Megan, “in the air.”

  I nodded. “Death and faith.”

  “I will kill all I see.”

  “And we will bathe in the blood of mankind, washing ourselves of their sins.”

  She said, “Let it go. Detach.”

  But I didn’t answer.

  You can tell a battlefield from its smell. Burned metal tinged with rot, acrid enough so that it felt like the tissue in your nose would singe, foreign enough that it made you clench fists with the impatience to wade in. Only about half of us remained. Many of my sisters—the ones who had led the shock assault earlier that day, underground—had partially melted armor, bubbled from plasma attacks. Several were absent an arm or a hand. Despite the wounds, they would feel nothing because the nerves would have shut down, and blood vessels had sealed themselves to prevent further fluid loss. A plug of ceramic—locked in place with quick paste—would seal the suit breach and maintain thermal integrity. I felt proud. This was my unit, and none of us had spoiled to the point of being combat ineffective, so that our dead now looked down from heaven with the same sense of pride. Our wounded were the new girls, the replacements, and before they helmeted you saw that their faces still glowed, but now it wasn’t the glow of nervous expectation; it was the glow from having killed, of knowing.

  We began our advance, following on foot behind APCs that moved at jogging pace, sending sheets of mud and snow into the air and coating our suits in a dripping mess. Our feet made sucking sounds as we plodded. On either side of us, a full Division of Foreign Legion and Marines advanced at our flanks. Human.

  There were no words to describe it, no way to understand except through experience. Trudging. Fighting against the mud with every step so that within five minutes your muscles screamed, and then having to continue like that for thirty minutes, an hour, two. I was near the edge of our formation, close to a group of Marines. You could see some of them, their armor almost new, as they twitched with every explosion or dropped to the earth at the first hint of tracer-flechettes. Many of them began stumbling and barely lifted themselves, falling behind as we continued. Nobody cared. The exhaustion got so thick, so fast, that it was all anyone could do to keep one’s eyes open, let alone pull a straggler from the mud. I could have blocked the pain, willed it away the same way I twitched a finger, but the sensations reminded me that I hadn’t been discharged yet and so they became comforting things, reminders there was more killing. Pain was familiar now. Welcome.

  At times a walking plasma barrage moved ahead of us so that we moved faster, jogging over a crust of hard glass. It was a Godsend, and I heard Megan whisper her thanks. We spent the whole first day of the advance like that, walking then jogging, and soon I remembered that distances in Kazakhstan killed resolve almost as easily as the spoil. A tree on the horizon might look close. But as you walked through the day, it barely changed position, and was enough to drive you mad with the feeling that you would never reach it.

  Then, at last, contact. Close to sundown, Megan and I found ourselves in a hole with three Marines. One of them screamed as Russian grenades cracked on every side, sending sprays of thermal gel over our position to hiss and smoke as the droplets melted whatever they touched. The other two men were hardly better. Both huddled at the bottom of the crater, screaming to us that we had encountered the outermost positions of a Russian defensive line.

  I kicked one. “How can you aim from there?”

  “Get up and fight,” said Megan, but the men cursed at her.

  She grabbed the grenade launcher from one and peered over the lip of the hole. I fell beside her. A hundred yards away, behind a small rise, tiny flashes marked the position of a Russian grenadier whose helmet and shoulders the low sun outlined, and we had to duck when a spray of white tracer-flechettes kicked up the dirt around us. Megan dialed in the range. At the same moment she popped back up and fired, I sprinted from the hole, doing my best to zigzag through the mud toward the Russian position, not able to think through the haze of fatigue.

  We continued like that for a few minutes. I would drop to the ground when she stopped firing, until her grenades started detonating ahead of me again—my sign to get up, keep going. Finally, I got close. I waited for her to stop and almost immediately saw the shape of a Russian behind the edge of a fighting position. His helmet was black, with paired, round, blue vision ports instead of a single slit like ours, and a series of cables connected the outside of the helmet to a power pack, so that they draped over the man’s shoulders like thick strands of hair. You almost forgot why you were there, transfixed by the realization that he was so close, his proximity releasing an influx of hatred that made you want to scream. The man shim
mered in the light. I saw all of them then, the ones who jeered at us as we waited for the cars in the railyard, who pelted us with empty food packs, but especially the ones in white lab coats, always there when we returned from the front, eager to punch data into their tablets as they forced us to answer questions. This was a man. It was rare to get this close, and it made you want to savor the moment, to get even closer and rip his helmet off so you could watch his expression change with death.

  I slipped a grenade from my harness, hit the button, and waited for its detonation before rolling into the hole to push aside the dead Russians. “Check fire, Megan. Clear.”

  A set of three shafts led straight down in the center of the hole, the only way the Russians could have survived our plasma barrages. I tossed in grenades to make sure the shafts were empty, and then let the exhaustion wash over in a warm tide, numbing my muscles and nearly sending me to sleep. The sun set at that very moment and according to our locators we had made it to a point west of Karatobe. They were in Karatobe. The Russians had retreated there to establish a major defensive line on either side of the Syr Darya River, with Shymkent well to the south.

  Tomorrow, I thought with a shiver. Tomorrow is our day.

  Megan flopped down next to me and yanked off her helmet. She laughed. I removed mine before kissing her, after which we lay against the dirt wall of the hole and stared up—the sky turning an unbelievable reddish orange as the sun’s light faded—waiting for the stars, something we never got tired of seeing. Megan especially loved stars, and they always brought wonder to her face. Soon I would dream. Sleep was a thing feared, something that resurrected buried memories and then twisted them into nightmares, a time to avoid. But you couldn’t evade sleep any more than you could avoid the men in white coats.

  “I count seconds as if they were hours,” I said to him, “minutes like days.”

  “Explain that.”

  “What is there to explain?”

  A man in a white coat sat on the other side of the table. He punched his computer screen with a shaking finger, and every once in a while glanced at me, then to the side to make sure the better men were still there, still keeping him safe. From me. The room shifted and my head hurt, a stabbing pain that shot through my spine and blurred my vision.

  “I mean let’s go further, and I’d like it if you’d elaborate on why you count seconds as if they were hours.”

  “Sava, nie toma Meg. Sava.”

  “What language is that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “What you just said. I didn’t follow, was that Serbian?”

  I shook my head. The better men stared at me, not even blinking, and looked as though they’d be more of a challenge than a typical soldier; they wore Special Forces desert hats in a way that spoke of ease. Familiarity. The stocks on their carbines were worn, and when my focus returned I counted the screws on their sights, custom ones, but each spaced a little differently from the other’s, maybe due to one of them experiencing the onset of near-sightedness or ocular injury.

  “It’s not Serbian, is it?” He continued. “Is that the language of your sisters? The secret language, tongue of the bred?”

  I stared at him and said nothing.

  “I thought they cured all of you, in training. Thought that the punishments were so severe that even nerve override wouldn’t work, that Germline units knew better than to keep speaking that crap.” He smiled as he punched something else into his tablet. Data. This one had never seen.

  “You’re not the usual one we meet after battle,” I said, “not the white coat I’m used to. Bentley. I think that was his name.”

  He wiped his forehead with an arm. “Insurgents killed Bentley on his way in from Bandar Abbas. I’m Alderson, new to the team from MIT, and here to replace him… Catherine, is it? Germline-One-A, Unit oh-five-seven-triple-one?” When I nodded, he tapped his foot on the floor. “Why do seconds seem like hours?”

  “We don’t have enough time.” It should have been obvious, and a feeling of pity took the edge off my hatred, the realization that this one would never know God. “He put us on this Earth to serve. Death and Faith. Anyone who doesn’t believe this, anyone like you, will never cross over into heaven. It is in the manual for all the faithful to study. You should taste a war, Alderson, or at least read about one.”

  “What do you mean when you say there isn’t enough time? To live, you mean? You want to live longer, to become a…” He stopped and turned, looking at one of the soldiers. “What is it you call them, Sergeant, the ones who run, who want to live?”

  “Satos,” one of them said.

  “That’s it. Sato. You want to become a sato?”

  I shook my head. “I want more time to kill.”

  He punched at the tablet more quickly now, leaning over the desk until I could have grabbed his throat. “Kill the enemy, you mean.”

  “Kill anyone.”

  Megan shook me awake, ripping me from my dream so that I found myself in Kazakhstan again, in the hole, wanting to finish what I was about to say. But the white coat had vanished. In the darkness light amplification made everything green and I waited for Megan to inspect my armor, to finish the routine. She checked for leaks. Our armor was designed the same way as human armor, sealed tight except for air intakes and exhaust, so that minimal thermal emissions would escape and no chemical or biological agents could penetrate. I checked my heads-up display, made sure that I had enough power and that the chill can, which would cool my exhaust to ambient temperatures, functioned.

  “Clear,” said Megan.

  “Sava.”

  “What?”

  “The language,” I explained. “I remembered it in a dream.”

  She laughed and touched a gauntlet to the side of my head, and I imagined a smile on her face.

  “You are different than the rest. Better. I had forgotten it, and don’t know if I could remember much, not when we’re this old.”

  But by then I was fully awake and the dream had begun to unravel, clarity taking hold and convincing the conscious part of my mind that nothing had happened while I slept. It had all dissolved.

  “I have trouble remembering everything these days. Contact?” I asked.

  “No. I patrolled for four hours. It’s your turn, and I uploaded the path into your computer. Do you have enough of a charge in your fuel cells?”

  “Yes.” I flicked the forearm button and watched as my suit transformed, taking on the same colors and texture as my surroundings to the point where I couldn’t see my own hand unless I moved it, and only then as a hint, a distortion in the air. I crawled slowly over the hole’s edge and moved out.

  There were four more hours until sunrise.

  By the next morning, ten of us occupied the hole, Megan, me, and eight Marines. The ground shook with the explosions of a plasma barrage, as shells rained down over enemy positions a few kilometers away. I peered over the edge and watched. The clouds of gas—born from magnetic containment shells—expanded in brightly colored bubbles that hypnotized, their edges melting into hot tendrils that disappeared almost instantly. We’d move out soon. I felt it. The plasma wouldn’t kill many Russians but it would keep their heads down and eventually we would jog across the open fields, behind the APCs, advancing toward the explosions to get as close as we could before the barrage ended. I lowered my helmet and slid the locking ring shut with a hiss.

  It was almost unbearable. The ceramic threatened to collapse onto my face, to close over my mouth and nose in a suffocating mass and—this isn’t real, I told myself, this is the spoiling. My helmet is fine… I tongued a tranq tab and shook my arms. While I waited for the tablet to dissolve, orders crawled across my heads-up display and crackled over the headset: Prepare for jump off. Move bearing zero-nine-zero, neutralize all enemy positions and hold on east side of Syr Darya River. Jump at code sign Bravo.

  Megan flicked her safety off.

  “You guys hear about Shymkent?” one of the Marines asked.


  Another one answered, “Messed up.”

  “Shymkent?” asked Megan.

  At first, the Marines didn’t say anything, and although helmets hid their expressions I guessed what their faces looked like—what these men felt. Revulsion. Do we have to talk to these things? They were all men in white coats.

  “Russian genetics pulled out of Shymkent last night, took positions in front of us to reinforce against you guys. Thanks.”

  “Then we shall destroy them all,” I said. “This is a good thing. They will be a challenge, a means to prove your faith.”

  “Jee-zus,” the Marine said. “Whacked-out G’s.”

  It wouldn’t change our plans. Unless the reinforcement had been enough of a concern to change the overall strategy, we would attack the same way we always did, regardless of opposition. I glanced at Megan and saw her cradling her left arm with a free hand, shaking it up and down to get the blood flowing, and bringing back to me a flood of memories.

  On our first exercise outside the atelier, Megan had broken her arm. A concussion training grenade had landed in our position and rolled close to her side before it blew, shattering her upper arm in ten places because we hadn’t been wearing full armor. As soon as she tied it off with her belt, we rose to advance through the forest.

  A bot popped from the ground. I raised my carbine and fired, the weapon dialed down to the point where the flechettes barely had enough energy to leave the barrel, and a few of them bounced off the thing’s metallic skin, enough to alert it that it had been hit and should deactivate—but not before it lobbed several grenades in our direction. When one of them detonated behind us, someone screamed.