“Kristen,” I asked, “did you get a temperature on those flames?”
“Temperatures varied from approximately twenty-five hundred to forty-five hundred degrees centigrade before suit sensors overloaded.”
“Would those temperatures be able to damage ceramic or systems on standard armor?”
She took a second to respond. “It depends, Lieutenant. Your armor is designed to withstand short exposure to high temperatures but would not survive a direct hit by standard plasma artillery or long-term exposure to a forty-five hundred degree heat source. The ceramic would be fine, but the heat would damage or melt metallic components as well as joint sections.”
I clicked onto our group frequency. “This is genius.”
“What is?” Ji asked.
Outside I heard popping now over the roar of flames, but it didn’t sound like the Chinese grenades; this was more like the sound of a car that had caught fire and was out of control, its metal parts hot enough to burn. With each pop the fear dissipated to the point where I crawled over to the bunker door.
“The satos fielded some kind of flamethrower, and it has something in it that’s hot enough to damage Chinese armor, which I’m guessing is impervious to thermal gel. Jihoon, I’m at the door. Let’s go take a look.”
The trench had filled with dead. I crouched to stay low and moved out in the direction of the elevators, careful not to fall as I walked on Gra Jaai corpses and making sure not to look down for fear of seeing a child. Ji tapped me on the shoulder. We paused, and I lifted myself carefully, inching my carbine up and poking it over the top of the trench to get a view from the gun camera. With my free hand I tapped at my forearm controls, piping the feed over our group channel.
The turrets had gone dormant. On the far side of no-man’s-land, Burma’s jungle burned, and limbs of trees had ignited to form what resembled miles of huge torches, their flames illuminating the entire area. The Chinese were still there. But none of them moved, and although the picture quality was poor, it showed spots on them that still glowed white-hot, and gobs of metal dripped to crackle on the ground.
“They were too bold,” a girl to my left said, and I swung my carbine to aim at her. Nothing was there. A second later, whoever it was deactivated her chameleon skin and a human figure formed, wearing a long robe that dragged on the ground, her head hidden by a hood with a wide vision port of dark glass. When she pulled the hood off, I saw Lucy. “Our Japanese engineers developed a nanomaterial that shorts out chameleon skins and makes the enemy visible.”
“You knew what needed to be done,” I said. “Everything.”
“I told you: Margaret foresaw it. We’ve been preparing for this for years, the arrival of the Chinese, and without access to plasma artillery and in a location where APCs and tanks can’t reach, we needed new weapons. Thermal gel and fléchettes are useless, rockets too expensive.”
“What were those turrets?” asked Jihoon. He and I had deactivated our chameleon skins, and I pulled my spare fuel cell out, replacing the one that was about to die.
“They are modeled after an ancient weapon, one that most thought obsolete for over a century. Flamethrowers. We modified the historic recipe, however, and added powdered metals and oxides to a synthetic hydrocarbon gel carrier. The fluid sticks to the armor and drips into joints. Then we follow with a burst of flame. Three different kinds of metals ignite in steps, each one hotter than the last, and in addition to the turrets, all my sisters are now in the jungle below with handheld versions, chasing the enemy that still lives.”
“They’re running,” I said. “The entire Chinese assault group, the better part of a division.”
Lucy smiled and shook her head. “There is no honor in this. Except”—Lucy paused to gesture toward the dead at our feet—“for them. They faced the Chinese with Maxwells and grenades and would have gone hand to hand had it come to that. I will miss them.”
“Lucy. Someday we’ll see these weapons used against us. I’m surprised it hasn’t been thought of sooner.”
“Until now,” she said, “plasma has done the job. But as I said: we have no plasma weapons that can be fielded in this terrain.”
From far below on the Burmese side, the sounds of combat rose out of the jungle, distant firecrackers and the deeper thumping of artillery that flashed within the canopy and turned the sky green. White flames leaped up here and there. While we watched, silent teams of Gra Jaai came and collected their dead, placing them on stretchers with a dedicated gentleness that suggested the corpses were worth more to them than any of their living, and you knew that the bodies would be treated with respect. It was a strange backdrop. The sounds of war juxtaposed with the somberness of undertakers made me feel as though there was no shame in what had happened—on that day or any other. There were no atrocities. This was a war of survival, and as far as the Gra Jaai and satos were concerned, the Burmese had threatened to invade their home, the only one they had, and so to die in defense of it made perfect sense, their more extreme methods forgivable. While I thought, one last piece clicked into place and made the whole picture clear: the Thai King had been a genius; putting satos on the line would buy him time if nothing else because these girls weren’t just fighting out of obligation to him, they were fighting for the right to call this home.
“You and Margaret have done well,” I said. “The next time the Chinese attack they won’t make any mistakes, and it’ll be an underground assault. But tonight you did well.” I saw Jihoon and the others turn to stare at me.
Lucy didn’t indicate that she’d heard me at first. “So far, we hold,” she finally answered, then started scaling the trench wall to head into no-man’s-land. “Come with me; there’s something you’ll want to see.” The others started to follow us, and Lucy waved them back. “Not you. I just got a transmission and enemy drones are incoming. They’ll be in firing range within ten minutes, followed by a barrage, so return to the underground complex. Decontamination stations are at the bottom of the elevators. Wait for us there.”
She led me onto the battlefield. My boots crunched over the Burmese corpses I’d seen earlier in the day, the fabric of their battle suits now so burned that they crumbled underfoot, and flames here and there provided enough illumination that we didn’t need infrared. Lucy approached the nearest Chinese soldier. Its armor made pinging noises as the plates cooled and contracted, and metallic portions glowed in dull orange shapes that the flamethrowers had twisted and deformed. Lucy made sure to stay out of the way of its weapons systems, but it didn’t look like she needed to; the barrels of its Maxwell carbine and grenade launcher had almost melted off.
She flicked a series of latches on the side, and the armor’s main frontal plate swung open, then fell off because its hinges had melted, so Lucy had to jump back. I barely noticed the noise. Instead my concentration focused on the armor’s interior, where one of the genetics lay strapped into a harness, its fiber optics glowing and twin tubes running into nose and mouth sockets. If not for the size of its head and fiber optics for eyes, it looked like an infant on life support.
Seeing the Chinese genetic within the armor was more shocking than what I’d seen in the morgue, and it consumed me with sickening curiosity; if I believed satos didn’t belong on earth, then where did these? They were so far from the human template that it triggered thoughts of obsolescence, that humanity was on the verge of designing itself out of existence, and it made me want to scream at the same time I wanted to smash the thing into a pulp. Who was responsible for this, and what could they have been thinking? I leaned closer and saw where the fiber optics joined with the suit at a small conduit that twisted upward into the turret, its cameras and antennae now shattered or melted. You couldn’t have predicted what happened next. The thing must have sensed my proximity and spoke, its synthesized voice similar to that of the Assurance system except that this was in Chinese, and I leaped to the side to aim my carbine at its head.
“It’s OK,” said Lucy. “There is no d
anger.”
I’d switched Kristen off. “What did it say?”
“It’s begging for us to kill it.”
“Will you?”
“Why?” asked Lucy. “Why should I put this thing out of its misery? I wanted you to see them in place, in their armor, so you know that we didn’t lie and that what I showed you this morning was real.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me because I knew satos and had never seen one lie. “They’re real. And horrible.”
“This is the first time we’ve met the assault units in action, and everything Margaret said was true, her word perfect. I also wanted you to see them so I could ask you a question.”
I waited, but Lucy was having trouble. She stared downslope at the forest of immobilized Chinese, each of them frozen in different poses, and I wondered if they were all alive inside their suits, trapped within a coffin of ceramic and alloy. It made me want to take my own suit off. There would be no quick death for the Chinese, and I got it because nobody would take the time to walk through the rubble of no-man’s-land and open all those carapaces—some of which had fused shut—tempting enemy fire with the time it would take. We were safe now that the enemy had retreated, but eventually they’d return.
“What did you want?” I asked.
“Do you think these things will go to heaven when they die?”
There wasn’t an answer to the question. The last time I had been in church was in Jebson, and except for the occasional and accidental prayer, the last time I’d thought about God was long before that, but she’d asked with such sincerity that for a moment Lucy sounded less like a sato and more like a young girl. It choked me up, partly from confusion. I still hated them, but the urge to kill her and Margaret had eroded—so quickly that it made me wonder if I’d been right in Spain: that I was cracking up. Part of me wanted to tell her that the Chinese genetic was a thing, an object just like her, and how could she be so stupid to think that it or she had a soul? Another part wanted to laugh and explain that we’d pulled a fast one on her and all the satos because none of us were headed to heaven; God didn’t exist.
I sighed. “No. I don’t think it will go to heaven. It isn’t even close to being human.”
“Then,” said Lucy—and I cringed at the inevitable follow-up question, the one I’d been fearing—“what about us? Will we go to heaven?”
“Yesterday I didn’t think so.”
“And now?”
I slung my carbine and spat on the Chinese genetic, seeing it flinch; I figured it was a painful experience because the things lived their lives in a cocoon of metal and weren’t used to any human contact whatsoever. So I spat on it again, just for fun. Lucy pulled me away, back toward the trench.
“What do you think tonight?” she asked.
“Now I think maybe God has a plan for you. And yeah, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll all go to heaven.”
Lucy pushed past me and almost knocked me over, making me think at first that I’d said something to piss her off, but when she spoke, it sounded like she’d started crying.
“Luck has nothing to do with it; you nonbred are all the same. Hurry up, I don’t want you to die if the Chinese send in their recon versions because other than the ones we captured, we haven’t seen them today. There are many more of them out here. And they are very, very fast.”
After decontamination the four of us headed back to Remorro and Orcola’s bunker, where we lay down to get some sleep. I had forgotten about needing a poncho, and it pissed me off, but I decided one night without a helmet would be worth it, and I was too tired to worry about rats anyway. There was no process of falling asleep. As soon as my head hit the rack, I was out cold, exhausted from the night of combat, and the chronometer showed that we had been fighting until 3:00 a.m. Someone shook me awake almost as soon as I passed out, and I grabbed my knife, thinking it was a rat.
“Relax,” said Jihoon, “it’s me.”
The room was pitch-black, and I probed the concrete floor for my vision hood, attaching the wires to my suit by feel. The infared clicked on. Jihoon and Lucy stood by my bed, and she motioned with her hand to follow so I grabbed my gear and ducked into the narrow tunnel.
In the main passageway, ten Gra Jaai waited, equipped with modern combat suits and the cloak and hood that I’d seen Lucy wear during the fighting. She handed me and Jihoon a set. The others showed us how to wear it and attached the hood with strips of webbing so that it hung on my back out of the way.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“There are two hours until sunrise. These men and women are going on a long-range patrol, and you’ll need thermal protection for your metallic gear if you join them; these cloaks and hoods can withstand very high temperatures and also function as chameleon skins. Our sisters pushed Chinese and Burmese forces back over ten kilometers. Two reserve Chinese battalions were so surprised that they retreated toward Moulmein, thinking that Americans had arrived unnoticed; now is the right time for you to get through the line.”
“What about Margaret and Chen? How will we find them?”
My incoming message light blinked on, and Lucy smiled. “The Gra Jaai patrol route is mapped so that much of it heads in the right direction, and you will see when to break off, near the river. I just sent you Chen’s coordinates. Do you need power?”
I nodded, and Lucy handed us both a bandolier, each loop of which had been stuffed with a fuel cell.
“The cloaks are wired to your suit and should synch with the main computer. Activate their chameleon mode the same way you would your armor.”
Lucy spun and walked away then, calling over her shoulder, “Margaret is expecting you, Lieutenant, both of you. Take care to mind your manners; she’s not as forgiving as I am.”
EIGHT
Snipers
Our path took us far south of Nu Poe and into the mountainous jungle where we stayed clear of paths for fear of Burmese traps or electronic surveillance. The Gra Jaai escorting us were all Japanese. One of them walked point tens of meters ahead, impossible to see except for the blinking dot on my map that showed me where he and everyone else were. Even if we’d wanted to move fast, we couldn’t have. The jungle was so thick that bushes and leaves slapped into my helmet almost continuously, and in some places they obscured the very ground, so I had to feel my way through, hoping that I wouldn’t step off a cliff or onto a mine. We stopped every few minutes to listen in the darkness, but everything was still as if the jungle was satisfied that to our north so many had died that the blood would eventually reach this far and saturate the clay, feeding it.
Before sunrise our patrol stopped. The Gra Jaai flicked off their chameleon skins and arranged themselves in the bushes to pull leaves over their bodies and disappear as if they had transformed into foliage themselves, and one of them clicked over the radio that we should do the same to conserve fuel cells. I helped Ji and made sure he was hidden before finishing my own camouflage and then lay there. It was pitch-black in my helmet; my anxiety amplified the sounds so a mouse nearby made me think that a Chinese scout was moving in, and I heard my own breathing in the tight space of my helmet. Those were the most horrible moments for me. Blinded by the darkness and, once morning arrived, the layers of green over my face, the only place to retreat was further into my mind, which turned its focus toward Phillip; before I knew it tears had started to form, fogging my goggles so that I prayed for sleep to come quickly.
“Jihoon,” I whispered over the radio.
“What?”
“You asleep?”
“No.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About this,” I said. “About everything so far.”
There was silence as Ji thought. It took so long for him to respond that at first I assumed he’d fallen asleep and I was about to say something when he cleared his throat; his voice shook. “This is way insane, Bug. I think I made a mistake.”
“No, you didn’t. H
ang in there. It takes awhile to get used to all this, and it’s your first action.”
“Bullshit. I trained for half my life in the tanks, and it’s not like they didn’t make it seem real. There were even smells. But they have kids on the line. The kids laughed in the bunker, even when the missiles hit us. What the hell is that about?”
I wanted to leave my hiding place and shake the crud from his head, but all I could do was whisper, “It’s the satos. They’ve changed things here and to hell with them—Chinese and satos. But it’s samba time now, troop, so get some rest and study your map because we’ll be covering a lot of ground tonight. When we find Margaret, I’ll decide what to do with her.”
“You still haven’t really told me why you hate them so much,” he said. “The satos.”
Maybe it was the exhaustion. At first I didn’t want to answer, but as the silence wore on and sleep refused to come, my mental guard slipped, and it wasn’t until it was over that I realized what I’d said.
“The Army chose Thailand as my first area of responsibility, and the bush wars went on for years. Last time I was here, SOCOM decided they wanted to test a new weapons system, and I was to hold off offensive operations until it was deployed with my unit—a battalion of the Royal Army. I loved those guys. The Thais were incredible fighters, really pissed that the Burmese had ever stepped foot in their country, and they had one officer named Major Po who saved my ass. The Burmese ran a snatch and grab and pulled me off the line into the bush one night, and as soon as they took me into Burma, they started torturing me. In the open, right in the jungle. Po came after me. By the time the Thais arrived, I was close to dead, with half my back burned off. Po carried me all the way back.
“I had just recovered and returned to the line when SOCOM’s weapons arrived. It was close to the end of that particular border war, and the brass wanted to get this system in the field before the Thais ended hostilities because Kazakhstan was on the books but hadn’t really kicked off yet. The weapons were satos. Boys. Winchester plant’s first batch of prototypes and I didn’t know what the fuck to do with them, but they sent another adviser whose job it was to lead those assholes, and you could tell that it wasn’t going to be pretty; the Thais hated them from the start because those kids were just… odd.”
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 21
