Subterrene War 02: Exogene Read online

  “The soft created us. And Special Forces are so much like the Germline, worthy. Be smart. If it’s important to them to have names, than it must be so for a reason. What if last names are the secret to heaven—not glory? What if our mothers lied to us?”

  But she didn’t say anything. My chronometer read oh-one-hundred, and in the green of night vision Tamdybulak had begun to look like a moss-covered boulder field, with half-ruined structure after half-ruined structure stretching beyond the goggles’ range, and in the silence that had fallen between me and Megan, Tamdybulak’s ruin became more inviting. It called to me. In retrospect it could have been the tranq tablets but they had long since ceased to have any dramatic effects, so it seemed unlikely they were the cause, but I thought that the ruins had signaled for someone, invited and welcomed me because they understood the importance of naming, refused to give up their own name of Tamdybulak even though nobody had lived there for years. To this city, I was a native. Anyone could be a native in an empty city.

  “I’m going hunting,” I said.

  “There’s nothing out there. We’ve seen no movement since you shot their first scout and I can’t risk losing you in a collapse. Or you could fall into a hidden substructure; there may be tunnels all over.”

  “Megan. I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  I thought for a second, remembering Alderson. “It’s because I’m an artist. The Little Murderer. And because it’s after midnight, and the order for discharge could come through at any time so this may be my last chance.”

  “The orders already did come,” said Megan, “but not the way you think. They sent word while you were hallucinating, that we’re not to be discharged until after the engagement is over.”

  “If we survive,” I said.

  “Fuel cells?”

  “There’s enough.”

  Megan brushed the side of my helmet with her hand. “OK. Go hunting and be the Little Murderer while you have the chance. I love you.”

  And so the city took me in, swallowed me into its green on black within gray, and for the first time I could remember it felt good to be away from Megan. For now she wouldn’t see that I was terrified.

  The combat suit was home. A temple. Its ceramic carapace had flexible joints and the body section opened like a clamshell from waist to shoulder so that once you slid in, getting out was almost impossible. Between me and the shell was an undersuit—a synthetic one-piece garment through which tubes and hoses circulated cooling fluids or carried away excess energy. Heat. Without a way to remove it, it would have killed me. A computer system, communications equipment, sensors, vision hood with goggles, and me, all of these things generated energy, and fluids shunted it off to a backpack heat-exchanger before it could accumulate, then blew it through a pair of ports at my lower back where a secondary coolant system, aerosol, lowered the thermal bloom’s temperature to almost ambient. Systems created a slow and steady power drain, but with chameleon skin activated, the drain became more noticeable.

  “But I am invisible,” I whispered, “an artist,” and my power indicator had almost reached null by the time I found one of them. “I am Catherine Little Murderer.”

  A Russian genetic had buried himself under rubble about three hundred meters from our perimeter, leaving only the tip of a collector exposed, which I wouldn’t have noticed except that he must have adjusted himself and caused the rubble to shift, showing the man’s entire device. A new idea popped into my head, but there was a problem. I had frozen. Sweat ran down my face despite the suit’s coolant and my mouth dried to the point where swallowing became impossible. I prayed that a series of violent shakes wouldn’t make any noise as I lay there. It took three more tablets and ten minutes to force my hands still, and tears fogged the goggles while my arms and legs worked to bring me closer to my target.

  Collectors like this one were designed to gather information sent to them by microbots, which would be fired onto our positions just prior to their assault. The tactic would give the Russians our exact positions. But that was hours from now, an eternity that might never arrive, because what mattered more was that if this one had a collector then the microbot launcher would be somewhere else, with one of his brothers, also hidden in the rubble—not too close, but out here. Still. I ignored the thought that another Russian might be watching as I shifted pieces of rubble, one at a time, from the place where it seemed this one’s chest should have been. Soon a small pit formed. Into this I carefully placed three thermal grenades and after another three minutes I had replaced the rubble in a way that left the arming switches exposed.

  Three flicks and three seconds to run. My finger shook as I quietly typed a message to Megan, telling her of my plan and asking her to inform the others to get ready; there was a chance the other Russian would fire at me when I ran, giving away his position too. As soon as she acknowledged me, I acted.

  Three seconds passed as I sprinted parallel to our line. Behind me I heard the pops of my grenades, followed by a muffled shout and then all around me Russians seemed to sprout from the ground. There was no time to fear. Tracer fire erupted from Megan and the others, pinging the rocks to form flickering sparks that made it hard to see through night vision and I dropped to the ground, trying to stay as low as possible. One of the Russians dove next to me, his chameleon skin deactivated by a series of hits that had ruptured his fuel cell. He cursed. Bringing my carbine around, I placed it against his temple and squeezed the trigger, watching in fascination as the man tried to bring his weapon to bear so that in the end I had to squeeze three times to take his life, three times that ended in a rage. I ripped his helmet off and began slamming the butt of my carbine against his head, and sensed it when bits of him flew against my faceplate and chest.

  Within moments it had ended, and as I crawled back to Megan, the field had gone quiet again.

  “You have the enemy on your suit,” she said.

  “How can you tell in night vision?”

  “I turned it off.”

  I sighed and slumped to the bottom of our hole, pulling off my helmet. “He angered me. There were nine more out there.”

  “Eleven. They will come in force tomorrow.” She helped me wipe the Russian’s blood and tissue off my armor and popped her helmet to kiss me. “Little Murderer.”

  At sunset the next day the booming of plasma cannons sounded well to our southeast, and we didn’t know what to make of it because there shouldn’t have been fighting in that direction. Megan shrugged. Our light amplification kicked in after the sun went down and the landscape again turned varying shades of green, the only sound coming from a light breeze that moaned as it blew through crevices in the debris fields. I shivered. I knew they would come, and still had not gotten used to waiting, defending, having time to ponder the fact that within hours we would both be discharged and gone. Megan wrote with a finger in the dirt. I love you.

  Movement from the distant rubble caught my eye and I watched as a line of about a hundred Russians crawled toward us, keeping to cover as much as possible. Finally it had begun, I thought. Either way, it will all be over soon.

  “Contact,” I said. “Approximately one hundred infantry, northeast.”

  Megan clicked in. “Grenadiers. Faith.”

  The popping of grenade launchers broke the stillness and flashes blossomed in the rubble, sending flechettes to scatter among the advancing enemy. One of the Russians screamed as his armor smoked under thermal gel and he rose to charge our line. Megan cut him down.

  The Russians yelled then, rising from their cover to sprint forward in a mass. “Pobieda! Ooo-Rah!” And all of us opened up.

  When it was over, Megan slapped my shoulder and I crept from my hole, crouch-walking through the rubble. I drew my pistol. The bodies were easy to see, their dying warmth forcing my vision kit to switch to infrared, and I stopped to pump a single flechette into the head of each one. An hour later I crawled back into my hole, exhausted.

  “I can’t see anymore, Me
gan. I am so tired.”

  But before she answered we both heard a rumbling—faint at first, then growing louder by the second.

  “APC’s moving up the main road from the north,” a voice announced. One of our sisters had volunteered to man a forward outpost, hidden in a mound of rubble. “Ten of them. Multiple infant—” An explosion lit the distant sky, cutting her transmission short.

  “Rocket teams on the line,” said Megan. “Disperse in forward positions then hold for the order. When I give it, APC’s and rockets open fire.”

  “Ten isn’t right,” I said to Megan.

  “I know.”

  “Where are the rest? There should be over ten thousand infantry, and thousands of vehicles.” Fear had almost overwhelmed me by then, forcing my voice to crack and making me wonder how much longer it would be before I ran.

  “I know,” Megan repeated. “It makes no sense. The rest may be moving on our flanks. We’ll know soon, Catherine.”

  We watched as almost a hundred of our sisters whispered past in groups of two or three, heading northeast, each of them carrying a three-shot antitank weapon. The weapons could penetrate APC frontal armor—as long as they were fired within eight hundred meters of their target. It was suicide, I thought, but these girls were new, hadn’t spoiled. Anyone who waited until an armored vehicle was within eight hundred meters and fired a rocket would announce to the enemy, “Here I am, shoot back at me.” Anyone who got that close could die before they got a chance to fire; I found myself happy I wasn’t sixteen again, glad to not be a fearless idiot who hadn’t learned the real lessons of the field, an idiot who hadn’t been called the Little Murderer and who hadn’t learned not to volunteer to hunt vehicles.

  “Contact,” one of them reported. “APC’s sighted, about two thousand enemy infantry dispersed behind them. Range, nine hundred meters.”

  Megan clicked off her safety.

  “Seven hundred meters,” the same voice announced. But we saw the vehicles now, lumbering things, whose wheels mesmerized as they bounced up and down to trace a path over chunks of concrete and boulders, their turrets moving back and forth like a single eye, searching. Megan waited a few minutes and before the girl announced the five-hundred-meter mark, she gave the order.

  “Faith.”

  Our APCs lit the night with plasma cannons, and I flinched when antitank rockets shrieked toward their targets. The Russians returned fire instantly. Plasma clouds expanded over the area where our rocket teams had hidden and to me it looked like only a few of them had managed to get off a shot.

  “God…” said Megan.

  “Five APC’s wiped,” someone else announced, “Five inbound.”

  A pink ball of plasma engulfed one of our broken-down APCs and my suit temperature jumped.

  “APC one, out.”

  Suddenly, a final rocket screamed from the rubble in front of us and slammed into the glacis of the lead Russian vehicle, the missile’s shaped charge steaming through its armor in a jet of molten metal. The vehicle shuddered and then exploded.

  We cheered at the sight and Megan gave the signal, laughing. All of us opened fire. My tracers streaked out in bright flashes, and I guided them into pockets of the enemy while tears of panic streamed down my face. The Russians fell. At first we held them in place, their vehicles pulling behind ruined structures and their soldiers hugging whatever cover they could. But then we heard the deeper rumble of approaching armor, a basso throbbing that reached a crescendo when two Russian tanks crested the rubble in front of us.

  Our second APC disappeared in a cloud of plasma, and with a scream, the Russians charged.

  “Fall back,” said Megan.

  I leapt from the hole and began zigzagging rearward. Before they left, the men had dug a second perimeter farther to the rear, which covered the Tamdybulak road intersection where our last APC hid under thermal tarps and camouflage netting. I made it to the next hole and jumped in. After taking the time to reload, Megan checked her status board.

  “Three hundred of us left.”

  I grunted and snapped a new hopper onto my shoulder, trying not to show my terror. “These are tanks, Megan.”

  The Russians pushed toward us again and I screamed. There were no shafts for us to drop into and I heard the armor of my sisters pop loudly when plasma bloomed around them. None of the Russian troops were visible. Only the two tanks advanced, crunching over the wreckage of our previous positions and firing plasma bursts. Suddenly, a pair of rockets jumped from the ruins of a house near the closest tank and hit the vehicle’s turret. The impact caused a release of plasma, which melted it from the inside out, but which also consumed the area from where the shot had come. There was no cheering that time.

  “Fall back,” I pleaded with Megan.

  She slapped on a new hopper and ducked when a plasma shell screamed over our hole. “That is not permitted.”

  “I don’t care!” The terror had begun to consume me. I couldn’t think anymore, except that it was time to run—run with her while we still had the chance. There would be no discharge for me; I had decided it in that moment, knew that something in me had broken so that even if my mind wanted the end, wanted the honor of a quick death, my body would have rebelled and done whatever it could to evade the inevitable, and that in such a struggle there would be no overcoming instinct; instinct would win. Life, for whatever reason, was now too important.

  “No.” Megan pointed her carbine at me, and when she spoke her voice shook. “I will kill you, Catherine. Do not spoil here, we need you.”

  Somehow, I turned to face the line again and raised my carbine slowly, the barrel clicking against blocks of concrete as my hands shook. The remaining tank headed straight for us. Both of us aimed for its sensors or any exposed system, and squeezed off several bursts before Megan gave our last APC the signal.

  “APC three,” she said.

  The Russian tank erupted in flame when our APC scored a direct plasma hit, and we waited, expecting the rest of their forces to charge. Then we waited some more. A haze covered the battlefield, obscuring everything beyond a hundred meters out, and it felt as though the universe had transformed around us, bringing us to a place that wasn’t Earth at all but some other planet where fog ruled everything. Only the burning tank made noise, its expanding ceramic plates popping off one at a time and water lines hissing as their fluid drained to the ground. But eventually even those noises stopped. Everything had gone quiet. None of my sisters spoke over the net and when I poked my head up there was no sign of movement from the positions around us. Still we waited, as the silence fed me with the thoughts of terror, until I was at the point of jumping from the hole, screaming with rage because there was nothing I could do to stop the whispering, a voice assuring me that something was wrong and that this was all a trick. When the sound of Russian APCs came faintly from the northeast, I cringed; half of me expected them to open fire at any moment, but they didn’t and the noise faded until eventually it vanished.

  Megan stood and I shouted. “Get down!”

  “I’m getting a transmission—on command net,” she said. “Our sisters, the Second Elite Division is pushing northward, Shymkent retaken with no resistance, forces pushing toward Karatobe, to our east. Enemy air-cover nil. Russian units routing en masse.”

  We flinched at the sonic boom of aircraft as they flew close overhead, toward the retreating Russians.

  “That’s what happened to our reinforcements,” I said. “Our second division moved back to Shymkent to attack from there rather than come to us when we retreated two days ago. They surprised the Russian flank.”

  Megan nodded and motioned for me to be quiet. “It’s much bigger than that, Catherine. Division estimates that Tenth Mountain will be back in Astana within a month, in Pavlodar to retake the mines a month after that. Third Marine, Eighty-Second Airborne and One Hundred and First Airborne will be pulled off the line for refit in Bandar as Spanish and French units move up.”

  “And us?”
I asked.

  “We hold here.”

  She popped her helmet with a hiss. I didn’t know what to say, and popped mine, my tears now a reflection more of relief than fear. Wind blew the smell of battle away from us and I almost didn’t notice it when the three-girl APC crew joined us to begin searching among the wreckage for survivors. It didn’t take long. All our sisters were dead and Megan and I dove to the ground when a last Russian soldier detonated a plasma mine, its blast catching the other three girls to incinerate them in an instant.

  I had never seen Megan lose control, but when the field had gone quiet again she dropped to her knees and screamed. I couldn’t get her to stop. Her body shook in my hands as she kept yelling until finally her voice died with the effort, fading into sobs so that finally I understood what she was saying, over and over. Nonsense.

  Before I could respond, new orders crawled across my display. Surviving Elements of First Elite fall back to Uchkuduk for reassignment or discharge.

  I didn’t know if Megan saw them. “They want us to fall back to Uchkuduk,” I said. “It is our time. I will not go, Megan. I won’t die.”

  “I don’t want this anymore,” she said, nodding. “Don’t want the Lily.”

  At first the words were a shock, and the thought that I should kill her for cowardice popped into my mind. Instead I grinned. “Come with me.”

  “Wait,” said Megan, just before she started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She wiped a tear from her cheek. “They never told us—told us what this war was about. And we never asked.”

  “It was not our place,” I said. “We do not need to know.”

  “No,” said Megan, “we do not need to know. But we deserve to. We know how you earned your name, but don’t you want to know why? It can be your last name: Catherine Murderer. Why did we murder, was it for the mines alone? What could have been the calculus behind that kind of decision?”

  I began to feel uncomfortable, not knowing where she was going. This was a new Megan. She spoke of things forbidden and of not wanting to be a Lily, and I sensed that I needed to choose my words carefully, unsure of what they would do because I had begun to wonder, what effect would the spoil have on her? “I don’t understand.”