Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  Lucy attacked, swinging her knife with precise cuts that slammed into my forearm and chest plates before one stroke flicked upward, slicing open my lower lip. The blood was warm. A strange thought crept in then, almost making me laugh—that with blood dripping down I must have looked just like the Gra Jaai, with their chins stained red, marking them as betel nut fanatics.

  The fight ended a second later. Lucy attacked again, and I rammed my knife into the joint at her shoulder, intending to rip it out and back away, but the tip stuck when she threw her shoulder back; I lurched forward and stumbled, landing facedown. Lucy knelt on me and yanked my head back, placing the edge of her knife on my throat.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I told you—to see Margaret.”

  She dropped the knife and used both hands to grab my head, twisting it slowly; the girl’s grip was so strong that she could have pushed both thumbs through my temples, and a second later I screamed, my neck muscles close to the point of tearing.

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “The US is reopening ateliers to produce more Germline units like you. They’re afraid that the Chinese will take Thailand and sent me to speak with her, to convince her to fight and hold the border for as long as she can, maybe until US forces land. I’ve been ordered not to kill her.”

  “How long before they come?”

  I wanted to scream again but held it in, not about to give her the satisfaction of hearing my agony. “I don’t think they’ll get here in time. Years, maybe.”

  “You’ve been ordered not to take Margaret, but do you want to? Will you kill her anyway?”

  I considered that one for a while. It must have been a few seconds, but the pain made it feel like an hour and threatened to destroy my thinking process.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But all of you should be dead.”

  When she let go, I wondered for a moment if she’d cracked my neck and that this was what death was like—a complete release from all pain—so I lay on the floor for a moment just to press my face against the warm rock and convince myself that my body was in one piece. Ji helped me up. Lucy had retreated a few steps and leaned back against a workstation, her body half inside a holo projection, and she stared at me while the blue lines moved across her face.

  “It’s good,” she said.

  I rubbed my neck, trying to figure out if anything had been torn. “What’s good?”

  “To reopen our birthplace. We’ve been fighting for the Thais for years now, and our numbers have gone down into the low thousands despite the fact that we reproduce. Our children and those of the Gra Jaai make reliable soldiers, but even my children are half nonbred, like you, and this is a weakness that they sense the same way you know that your neck hurts. Catherine taught us this, that we are more perfect than you and closer to God. And we need more of the pure. Have they changed anything?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Jihoon and the other two watched us intently, and I saw a look of amazement on Remorro’s face, his jaw half-open as if he couldn’t believe the conversation was taking place.

  “I mean production plans. Will the ateliers produce women like us or something else? Something not in his image.”

  I shook my head, not sure if I understood what she was asking, but the question reminded me of the armor schematics that we’d stolen. “I have no idea, no way of knowing. Does your question have anything to do with Project Sunshine?”

  Lucy smiled. The whole mission had been wrong from the start, one that still refused to add up and that had already made me kill a young girl, a secretary, and took me from Phillip so that the government had been able to stake their claim on a kid. A child that, given all I felt, may as well have been mine. But my reason for asking Margaret had as much to do with obsession as it did with my mission, a need to learn the details of Sunshine because for all I’d given up, it had to be an important operation, one that justified the sacrifice. Lucy’s smile made me feel closer to the end. She knew something, and waiting to find out if she’d tell us was a kind of slow torture.

  “It has everything to do with Project Sunshine,” said Lucy.

  “What do you know about it?” I asked.

  “And what does Korea have to do with it?” asked Jihoon, unable to restrain himself. “Why did they break the Genetic Weapons Convention?”

  Lucy thought for a moment, then spat something in Thai to the Gra Jaai working closest to her; I had switched off Kristen to conserve power so missed the translation.

  “Come with me,” she said and made her way to the elevators. “I’ll show you why the Koreans—why everyone in southeast Asia—is preparing for war.”

  Down we went, and whenever I guessed that we’d reached our limit and couldn’t go deeper, Lucy found another narrow staircase or a shaft with rusting iron rungs set in the stone so that our boots clanged as we hurried to keep up. Remorro and Orcola had a rough time. The heat grew more intense as we descended, and even when we got deep enough to feel air handling kick in, sending a breeze across our faces, the wind hit as though it had just come straight from an oven and did as little to cool our skin as the undersuits, which couldn’t keep pace with the temperature. Bare fluorescent bulbs lit the way. Finally, she led us to a vault door made of dull gray steel, its control panel set in the side of the tunnel, and she entered the code on a black pad before stepping back to let the door slide upward with a loud bang.

  A cold fog rolled over us as soon as the hot tunnel air met that of the room beyond, and at first we couldn’t see anything since the vapor obscured our vision. The door slammed shut behind us. Eventually, chillers whined overhead, and we breathed with relief at feeling an icy breeze leak into our suits through their open necks, the sensation of standing in front of a freezer making me smile. The fog cleared a few seconds later to reveal a long tubular tunnel, each side of which held banks of tiny steel doors.

  “This is a morgue,” I said. “But why the security? And why put it so far down where it’s hard to cool?”

  Lucy reached for the nearest door and opened it, pulling out a thin tray. “Because these are too valuable. These are what Margaret foresaw and are proof of God’s word, so we can show the King when we get the chance; proof that the beast is here.”

  The tray held what looked like a baby. But it wasn’t human, and my stomach churned at the same time Jihoon threw up, filling the chamber with a smell that made me feel even more like vomiting. The thing was a human torso about the size of a small child and with a head almost twice the diameter of mine. There were no arms or legs. It hadn’t been dismembered, though; the thing had never had arms or legs in the first place, and instead of eyes, bundles of fiber optics stuck from its sockets like sheaves of wheat or twin fountains that shifted in eddies of the air-conditioned space. Flexible tubes ran from holes where its nose and mouth should have been and dangled over the tray’s edge where they dripped a light blue fluid.

  “What is this?” Remorro asked.

  “A Chinese scout. We got thirty of them last week behind Burmese lines when they fell into our tiger traps off the main trail. My girls took their time killing them, but still the things put up a fight. They would have done better against us in the open.”

  The schematics popped into my head again, the ones we’d taken from the Korean secretary. “Powered armor. These things are genetically designed but live out their lives in powered armor.”

  “That’s right,” said Lucy. “And it is as Margaret foretold. She saw this in her dreams, and Catherine warned her that we would encounter a beast, something made by man in the image of himself and not God. The judgment will happen soon.”

  “Judgment my ass,” said Jihoon, who knelt nearby and struggled back to his feet. “This is just some Chinese nightmare, the dream of a people who lived underground for decades because the rest of their country had been nuked. This thing is a manifestation of Beijing’s insanity.”

  I leaned closer to it, running my gauntlet along the corpse’s sto
mach, and welcomed an admiration that surprised me because it matched my revulsion. A small black nodule protruded from its throat, just above its chest—a voice synthesizer. The thing had no reproductive organs, nothing that didn’t serve some absolute necessity, and although the idea of creating monsters like this registered as insane, I knew the execution had been absolute genius.

  “They’re perfect warriors,” I said.

  Lucy nodded. “Yes.”

  “Not a speck of humanity. No knowledge of anything except living within armor, and they must see us as the animals—things so foreign that the sight of us makes them sick.”

  “Fuck perfect,” Orcola said. “Have you lost your mind? Do you even know what this means?”

  It was as if something had taken over my mind, calming it and nudging me into the zone, the same one within which I killed satos, and I looked at Orcola with pity because he never would have made it as a hunter. There was no value in appraising an enemy the way he’d suggested. Data was what mattered the most, and once you stripped the crap away to expose valuable facts then you could begin targeting weaknesses and vulnerabilities—learn the best ways to kill. The thing in front of us was something brand-new to me, and I imagined that the way I felt now was the way Napoleon might have if he’d been shown an old biplane.

  I pointed at the fiber optics. “Range of vision?”

  “Full infrared and visible,” said Lucy, “in addition to a portion of the UV spectrum. Zoom is handled by the vision ports themselves. A weakness. Damage their vision ports and they are blind, unable to replace the lenses in combat.”

  “Brain. Twice our capacity?”

  “Roughly three times the normal human brain by volume. Our Japanese scientists are studying neurological function and have some time left before tests are complete. They only just began late last night.”

  I nodded, estimating the body size again. “Their nutrition requirements must be lower than ours.”

  “All intravenous. A small container carried inside the suit can be refilled externally. So far it looks like a glucose protein mixture, and one container might last three weeks. Power is supplied to the armor servos through a new fuel cell design, rechargeable in specialized wall outlets, in addition to having a much slower solar recharging capability.”

  “How about variants? Have you seen more than one kind?”

  Lucy stared at me and smiled. “We’ve seen two. One in heavy armor, which is slower but harder to bring down, and a second in much lighter kit, barely armored at all, but which travel at high speeds. About forty kilometers an hour. This one here is of the latter variety, one of their scouts.”

  I nodded and placed both hands against the tray, leaning forward and over the body to give it one last look. Without any arms or legs it didn’t match the armor schematics we’d stolen in Spain; this, I decided, was something altogether different. Unlike our satos, these might feel pain. Girls like Lucy could cut their own nerve impulses and control blood coagulation in the event of a catastrophic wound so they’d continue fighting after losing an arm or leg. The Chinese ones had no arms or legs—not ones made of human tissue anyway. So I made a mental note: if I ever got the chance, I’d see if I could make one hurt.

  “Brilliant.”

  “You have got to be shitting me,” Ji said.

  I looked at him and shrugged. “What?”

  “You admire these things?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I admire them or not, Chong. Think about it. We’ve answered one important question: Why are the Koreans so scared? The Chinese have taken bioengineering one step further and created the ultimate semi-aware—except these aren’t semi-aware, they’re fully aware. At least as aware as what the Chinese teach them and what they can then learn for themselves on the battlefield. Think of the implications. Who needs artificial intelligence and all the production costs? Now you can grow one of these things and train it to be a drone pilot, a tank commander, or an infantry soldier. Hell, you could even grow them for the Assurance program back home if you wanted to. When they’re ready, you just hardwire them into the system they’ve been designed to handle.”

  Jihoon looked angry enough to hit me, and for the moment it was as if we were from two different species, and why didn’t he get it? This was war. War was about weapons. The ones with the biggest armies also better have the best weapons or their size wouldn’t matter a bit, and now China would have both; now it was clear how they’d rolled over the Russians.

  “The Koreans,” I said, “found out about it and kick-started their own program in an attempt to keep up. They probably were going to keep it a secret from us until they made significant progress; that way they could sell the technology and make a killing.”

  “These are human beings,” Remorro said, horrified. “Not weapons systems.”

  “No!” Lucy and I said it at the same time, and the thought of sharing an opinion with a sato made me feel sick, but I continued and pointed at her. “Lucy isn’t a human, she’s a sato.” Then I pointed at the thing on the table. “And that isn’t a human. It’s a tool. Both are manufactured by us, to be used by us and to be discarded by us. By humans.”

  I glared at her as I finished. “Any time we want.”

  “You,” she said, “are exactly what we expect of the nonbred.”

  I cocked my head—the same way I’d seen so many of them do it—and smiled. “Thank you. Jihoon, get pictures and tissue samples, assuming it’s OK with our hostess.”

  SEVEN

  Outbound

  We need to speak with Margaret.” I checked my suit chronometer and saw it was now late morning, and Lucy had taken us back to the bank of elevators where she stopped, indicating we should go no farther.

  She shook her head. “Margaret isn’t here; she left two days ago, and we don’t know when she’ll be back.”

  At first I was disappointed. But the feeling soon faded because we had already accomplished a key part of the mission and now high gear had kicked in, pushing me forward so that meeting Margaret was the most important thing, more important even than Phillip, the mission a black hole that sucked me in and forced all other concerns to melt into the distance behind me. And the answer I’d given Lucy when she asked me if I would kill her had been true: I didn’t know what I’d do to Margaret. That would be the jungle’s decision. The bush had taken its hold on me again, awakened instincts long forgotten, and the mountains soaked into my skin, maybe along with the water that dripped onto our heads, a kind of aqueous tincture that acted on the brain. We still didn’t know what Sunshine was, but something told me that Chen did. And Margaret might know more.

  “Where did she go?” I asked. “Back to Bangkok?”

  “Into Burma. She’s chasing a man who killed two of our sisters.”

  “Chen.”

  Lucy nodded and stepped into an elevator, sliding the gate shut. “Yes.”

  “We need to find Chen too before she kills him. Can you tell us where she went so we can follow?” From the corner of my eye, I saw Ji look at me; I didn’t want to go into Burma any more than he did, but it was impossible now to resist the urge that had been reborn. This is what the bush did; it filled you with a sense of being able to do anything and combined it with an overwhelming feeling of dread, the combination of which, in turn, made the calculus of a mission easy because staying on the move was all that counted—getting things done so you could get out of the jungle as quickly as you’d gotten in. I wanted Chen dead. But I wanted his information first so we wouldn’t have to stay here any longer than necessary. “If she kills him, we could lose important data on Project Sunshine, and we can jump off now—get out of your way and catch up to Margaret.”

  She shook her head. “Nobody is going into Burma; the line is closed, and even if she finds Chen, Margaret will most likely die on the return. It will be difficult for her to make it through Chinese forces. Margaret left us because she wanted to die.”

  “Staying here isn’t an option,” I said, beginning to get
angry. “If Chen is in Burma, we have to go.”

  Lucy frowned and paused before pushing the elevator button. She glanced at Remorro. “Take them to the line. A patrol is preparing to leave tonight. We have new weapons that we want to test against the Chinese abominations, and if the lieutenant can survive the mission, he can leave when it’s over. I’ll send Chen’s coordinates to your suit computers before you jump off.”

  The elevator began sliding up, and I called after her, “How did you find out where Chen is?” but she was already out of earshot.

  “You’re insane,” Remorro said.

  “It’s our mission.”

  Jihoon lit a cigarette. “Yeah. But nobody said anything about going into Burma.”

  “Nobody said anything about not going there either, Chong, and if that’s where she is, then that’s where the shit happens. You can stay here, I don’t really care.” I slipped my vision hood back on, then my helmet, and gestured toward Remorro and Orcola. “You want to show me where the line is?”

  Remorro stared at me for a second and then sighed. “Screw it.”

  The walk gave me time to think, and I lingered in the rear while Jihoon machine-gunned our escorts with questions, wanting to learn as much as he could about the line. It wasn’t luck that tossed this mission into my lap. The fact that the satos revered Catherine as some kind of saint and ascribed Margaret’s knowledge of the Chinese genetics to precognition made me laugh at them, not pity the girls, and the brass had known it would be my reaction. They counted on my disdain. There were plenty of other cleanup crews available for the job, but none of them had the kind of hatred I did for satos—an instinctive disgust that the girls were nothing more than frauds in human tissue—which kept me insulated from fear. Now that they wanted her to live, though, the brass had made my footing slippery. Dangerous. I wasn’t the right guy for the kind of negotiation they needed, and the decision was an order that ran counter to everything I believed, leaving me with an empty feeling that the military had betrayed mankind. What a fucked-up way to fight a war, I thought. To instill satos with a safeguard that resulted in their destruction only to have it hacked by some Japanese or Thai bioengineer, then to let these chicks roam freely—a series of mishaps that had allowed the girls to exchange the insanity of living rot for the insanity of belief in Margaret. And in Catherine. I preferred the ones that I’d seen in that last operation in Turkmenistan when the sato had begged for her life, asking me if I was God. When they were in that state, it was clear that the girls were something to be discarded or stepped on, an insult to the rest of us. And how exactly did one negotiate with a chick who wanted to die?