Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 3

  “What’s all over their faces?” I asked. Their heads had been coated with something like grease, a dark green that hid most of their features.

  “Thermal block,” Ox said. “Gs hate helmets worse than we do. Especially the ones near the end of their term. Thermal block cuts down on emissions. Not perfect, but they’re crazy anyway.”

  “End of their term?”

  He laughed and leaned his carbine against the wall. “The young Gs wipe the old ones when they turn eighteen. Honorable discharge. By then they’re too crazy to keep on the line, too far gone. At that point they’re sucking down tranq tabs like candy, and it doesn’t even faze ’em.”

  “Yeah,” said Snyder. “But they’re here. Only one thing to do now.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Pucker,” Ox said. “And ask the captain if you can have another weapon. We’ll be pushing into the mines again, or else these chicks wouldn’t be here.”

  One of the girls approached the captain and handed him a stack of tickets. Orders. He nodded, and everyone watched then, looking for some sign of our fate in the captain’s face, not willing to give up hope that maybe it was all a big mistake, maybe this time there’d be no push.

  The girl returned to her group and on the way she passed me, close. Whatever they were, they smelled like girls, and for a second I felt like screaming, because if you closed your eyes and couldn’t see her, it smelled like she should have been sitting in school, driving guys crazy with a miniskirt. But she looked like a killer. That was subterrene; that was Kaz—where opposites existed simultaneously and just laughed at you, like, Yeah? So?

  She sat against the wall and bowed her head with the rest of them.

  “Now what are they doing?” I asked.

  “Praying,” said Ox. “They’ve been fed some messed-up religion; it keeps them going.”

  I grabbed my recorder and turned it on, just in time.

  “Death and faith,” they said. The words were soft, sounded like a children’s choir, and filled the quiet tunnel with an echoing murmur. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven, earth, and death. I believe in warfare and destruction, his only children, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and taught through honorable suffering. I believe that death on the field is my proof, a sacrifice, to show that I remain among the faithful. The loyal. I believe in the atelier, the forgiveness of enemies brave enough to die, and the communion of sisterhood.”

  I shut the recorder off. Somehow I felt dirty, because as part of the human race, I had helped create these things, monsters who prayed to death, wanted it. Animals.

  “That’s beyond fucked up,” said Snyder. “Just when I think I wouldn’t mind getting it on with one or two of them, they have to spout that kind of crap.”

  From the main exit tunnel we heard a high-pitched screeching. As the volume increased, I saw the Marines getting nervous. I hadn’t been there long, but long enough to know when something was up, and when Ox handed me a tin of zip, I took some without thinking, because who knew how much longer we’d get to keep our helmets off? The screeching made me wince, sounded like someone running hundred-foot metallic fingernails over a mammoth chalkboard, until the drugs kicked in and made everything OK.

  Twenty minutes later, a fusion borer rolled into view. A team of engineers in orange jumpsuits manned the vehicle and jockeyed it against the north wall, its front end pointed at the Russian lines.

  “Screw this,” said Ox.

  The captain waved us over.

  “Push is on.” He waited until the grumbling subsided. “Sappers are going to start digging in about twenty minutes. It’s roughly three klicks to Pop’s lines, so I figure you’ve got just under three days to write letters or grab some rack. But stay alert. Pops might try a topside infiltration, and if it works this time, we’ll be busy. Questions?”

  Ox raised his hand. “Standard assault?”

  The captain nodded. “Except for one thing. The Gs won’t be with us this time, not underground, anyway.”

  “What the hell?” someone asked.

  “Take it easy. Division has a bright idea about trying to screw Popov at his own game. We’ll start a barrage twenty-four hours before jump-off, to keep their heads down, and the Gs are going to use it as cover. They’ll move out topside and infiltrate the Russian positions from above at the same time we crash their lines underground. Wendell?”

  I raised my hand.

  “You coming with us?” he asked.

  “Yeah, if that’s all right.”

  “Whatever. Ox and Snyder, stay with Wendell in the rear, keep him safe. Dismissed.”

  I looked at Ox and caught him staring at me like, What the hell, are you crazy? I didn’t know—maybe I was—but something told me that I had to see this. Stripes wanted a story, and I had to have one to write about. For at least that moment I wanted the Pulitzer so bad I could taste it, could almost see it floating in midair, and it made me forgot how much shit I was in. They could party subterrene all year if they wanted, but this was my last chance and I was going to get laid. I partied Pulitzer.

  A few minutes later, the fusion borer ground to life. I still had my hood on, and the vision kit switched to infrared, showing the secondary coolant lines in glowing white. The thing looked like a cross between a lamprey and a freight train, a perfect cylinder with coolant and muck lines trailing behind it. Superheated water flowed through them. I was glad I had zipped, because in infrared, it looked really cool. Space-age. I wished I could be there when it punched through, to see the thing vent plasma into Russian tunnels so they couldn’t shoot at it. You can’t shoot at something when you’ve been charred beyond recognition.

  The borer slammed into the wall. A rock face immediately melted and chunks broke off to land in a screaming grinder, which pulverized the blocks and sent them along with spent coolant water in a muddy mixture to the rear. It didn’t just scream; it laughed, banshee-style. I grinned widely, because the zip told me things—that the screeching was for me, announcing to the world that Scout was coming, while magma oozed over the ceramic sides of the machine, chilling instantly to glass against water-cooled skin.

  Ox had zipped too. It was full-on; I could see it in the way he slouched. “God bless the engineers, for it is they who make subterrene slick.”

  “That’s some of the coolest shit I’ve ever seen,” said Snyder.

  “Wow.” We all said it at the same time and then collapsed, laughing.

  Once the borer had pushed into the northern wall, we waited. I thought that by now the Marines would be used to it—thought that even I’d be used to it. But nobody was—you couldn’t get used to it—and I began to suspect that the more you experienced the line, the less capable you were of waiting. Eskimos had a thousand words for snow. Marines had about two thousand to describe time; I heard them over and over, like mantras. Crap time, rack time, grab-ass-and-jerk time. But this was the worst kind, the one that Marines hated the most, because it moved slowest, gave you a chance to think about what waited for you, to write emails and death letters. This was push time. Anyone who had booze drank it. Ox, Snyder, and I stayed zipped while we were awake, which was most of the time. Only the genetics seemed unaffected, just sitting there. Statues. Once in a while, one or two would jack into the waste ports or slap in a fresh fuel cell, but other than that, they stared at the wall.

  “I need a beer,” I said. The borer was long gone, and we could barely hear it screeching now.

  “Why didn’t you say so? I have one more.” Snyder rummaged through his pack and produced a can, tossing it to me.

  “I don’t want to take your last one.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Take it, man. I’ll get plenty when I rotate to Shymkent. You’re with us now. Crank fire.”

  “Stay on me,” Ox said. I wasn’t going to argue. I had a carbine again and it felt strange, like I was eight and playing make-believe soldier.

  We had marched two and a half klicks of the attack t
unnel, heading north through no-man’s-land. I imagined Marines across the front doing the same. When we headed in, the genetics had gone topside and we felt the Marine barrage, heard it get louder as we approached Pop’s territory. But we didn’t care. That was Pop’s problem. In less than twenty minutes, if our Gs weren’t detected, they would drop in from above at the same time our fusion borer punched through, and then Mr. Popovich would have two more problems.

  The order came over the headset. “Hold.”

  “Christ,” said Ox. “You all right, Snyder?”

  Snyder didn’t say anything but reached up and tapped the side of his helmet, where he had written something new: Angel of Death.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s always a chance that Pops will stealth bore and try to wipe us from the rear.”

  “What?”

  Ox sounded like he was laughing but I couldn’t tell. “Take it easy. There’s another group behind us about a klick, ready to deal if they try it. For now, we wait. You anxious to get shot?”

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Don’t we all.”

  We didn’t have long to wait. I didn’t even know it had happened until ahead of me I heard what sounded like firecrackers, something far-off and dreamlike, as if Chinese New Year had arrived early. Then someone’s voice came over the headset—not the captain’s; a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Move in.”

  The Marines in front of me surged forward. One second I was in the tunnel, so scared I couldn’t move; the next second I was in hell and everything drifted, so slowly that I had time to wonder how I got there. It must have taken ages for me to move in. I mean, it had to have; there were a thousand men in front of me. But then, before I knew it, Ox and Snyder were on either side and we broke into the Russian positions, where the two of them threw me to the ground. It knocked the wind out of me. At first Ox thought I had been hit, because I couldn’t talk and just lay there, but after a few seconds, I breathed again and gave him the thumbs-up.

  “Wind knocked out of me.”

  “Christ,” he said. “Stay down.”

  Another world. The Russians had extinguished their lamps, so I saw everything in shades of green and white, except when thermal flashes overloaded my vision kit with every grenade burst. I couldn’t figure out where I was. It looked like a sandbag pit, but once I got used to seeing through the goggles, it became clear that we’d landed on top of dead Marines, who were so close that I read the names stenciled on their armor and saw flecks of tissue and blood pasted to the inside of their faceplates. The dead protected me. The dead liked me, whispered that they’d take care of everything.

  We had punched into the mine itself, and in front of us a huge hangar stretched beyond my vision range. It looked like the Marines had spread themselves out in a rough semicircle and were pushing forward, one group leapfrogging over another, and eventually the reporter got the worst of me, too stupid to be scared. I prairie-dogged it—poked my head up to get a better view—when a swarm of fléchettes nearly took it off, whining past my temple.

  “Stay down!” said Ox.

  Snyder looked at me and—I shit you not—popped his lid. Took it off in the middle of the firefight.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ox asked.

  “I can see,” he said. “I see now, man, for the first time.” Snyder pulled out his tin and zipped. “It’s unreal, Ox, you should try it. Invincible. I don’t care what the captain said. Scout can take care of himself. Let’s go crank.”

  “Put your helmet on. Come on. I mean, what the…?”

  Snyder spat on the back of a dead Marine and then grinned. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed crazy, but at the same time it seemed normal, because the whole place was insane, something I had never experienced, so who was I to say what wasn’t normal?

  “Nah,” he said, “I can’t see with it on. But now I do.”

  A grenade landed behind him and I saw a fléchette punch through Snyder’s shoulder, sending a few drops of blood my way. It didn’t affect him. He just smiled at the hole, looked up, and started singing. There was no tune, but it must have sounded right to him, because he started singing more loudly, a series of random notes that formed some screwed-up song. Kaz had claimed Snyder as its own. Ox must have suspected there was no way to pull him back into our world, and he couldn’t have tried anyway, because as soon as Snyder paused to breathe, the Russians counterattacked.

  “Pobieda!” They were so close that the scream sounded like a roar.

  “Oooo-rah!” Snyder said. “Pobieda! Man, that’s the shit, why don’t we have words like that?”

  I howled like a little girl. Something had hit me, my ass felt like it was on fire, and suddenly in my suit I smelled burning flesh.

  Ox started laughing. “You’re hit.”

  “Aw, man,” I said, tasting the fear and getting cold with it. “Shit, shit. Where? How bad?”

  “Relax. You got splashed with a little thermal gel is all. On your ass.”

  Let down. Relief. We both laughed then and couldn’t stop. I felt the Russians coming, heard the change in tone of the commands being barked over the coms net, but somehow being splashed in the rear with thermal gel made it bearable.

  I was still laughing when Ox went quiet. He pulled himself over to Snyder and shook him, kept shaking him for a minute, but he was gone. Snyder had absorbed most of the thermal gel that had hit me, and one entire side of his armor was missing, along with a wide swath of skin, so we saw muscles twitching. Electrical impulses were the only things left.

  “At least he’s not singing,” said Ox, trying to be cool. But I could tell it had hit him. He just lay there, curled up as close to Snyder’s remains as possible, and then sobbed while he held the guy’s head against his shoulder.

  Normally, I would have been concerned only with my injury and screw the dead. Worry about the living, about me. But all I could think of now was that Snyder had given me his last beer. I felt it then, can pinpoint the instant when Kaz took me and refused to let go, drawing me down into the depths of subterrene so that I could never really leave.

  I popped my helmet. The smell was like nothing I had experienced before. Imagine taking everything in a house—the family, the furniture, the carpets, even the dog and cat—and shoving it all into a bonfire along with a thousand liters of fuel alcohol. That’s the smell of war in subterrene, and with every breath I inhaled some of Snyder.

  I grabbed his tin and zipped.

  “Check it,” said Ox. He popped his lid and joined me—children of Kaz. We both lay there on our backs, our heads resting on Snyder’s armor, and looked up at the ceiling as red tracers zinged overhead and flashes of brilliant grenade light went off like strobes.

  I got splashed a couple more times, and so did Ox. We both caught a few fléchettes, and a ricochet took half my right ear off, but I didn’t even feel it; I was too zipped up. Ox even pulled out his player and cranked music. He thought that Snyder had been trying to sing an old, old song, “Kids in America,” but I didn’t know the song, or any kids, and besides, it had all been so whacked that I hadn’t bothered to really try to figure out what he was singing. We lay there for what felt like hours, not even noticing when the firing died off.

  “Holy shit.” A corpsman looked down at us. He seemed far away and his eyes went wide, so we must have been hit worse than we thought, but there was no way to tell; we didn’t feel a thing. “Stretchers!”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is the war over?”

  Ox started giggling and the corpsman just looked at us like we were crazy. “For you guys it is. Besides, Russians pulled out. Gs pushed them back ten klicks.”

  Once they loaded us onto stretchers, Ox turned his head to look at me. “Man. You’re all bloody. I think your ear is missing.”

  “What’s that?” I said. “I can’t hear you, I lost an ear.”

  Man, did we laugh at that. So hard it hurt my stomach. Then the c
orpsman injected me with something and the world turned off, went black so that I couldn’t see a thing, but just before I went totally under, I had the strangest thought.

  Screw the Pulitzer.

  Winter Offensive

  Headaches. Hallucinations. Snyder and Burger came to see me every day and stood there all bloody and messed as they grinned because they knew there was nothing I could do, nothing to be done about phantoms in my mind, the products of withdrawal. Ox had been sent to a field hospital closer to the lines, while they’d sent me with the bad cases to Shymkent for a month in bed and recuperation. Two weeks of that was because I kept screaming, wouldn’t shut up. The doctors didn’t know about a la canona, the lack of drugs that makes your skin turn inside out, and they thought I was a psych case, so when the day for my release arrived, one of them said I was supposed to get in touch with Bandar ‘Abbas because they had called my editor’s desk concerning my mental state. “Great,” I’d said. “I’ll get right on that.”

  “Haloo!” the doorman to my hotel greeted me on my return. “Welcome bag, mister!”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  My suite seemed smaller. I breathed through my nose, trying to catch a whiff of Marines, alcohol, something, but all I got was Shymkent and sulfur from the coal-burning power plant. Civilization.

  I reached once more out of reflex for my tin—Snyder’s tin—and then remembered. It was at the mine. My suite melted around me and I was right back there, wallowing in the dead and shaking from the explosions. I just went with it, prayed for it to end—God, bring me back to the real world and save me from Kaz. Or send me back to subterrene.

  When the hallucination was over, the sun had set and only the telephone message indicator lit the room.