Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  “They’re coming this way, Bug. I count two. The rest are moving back into the grass. We’re fucking dead.”

  “I said quiet, Chong. They’ll hear you.” He stopped talking, which was fortunate for him because I’d drawn my knife so I could kill him if he refused to shut up.

  They were easier to spot in the day. The morning sun broke over the mountains, and through the leaves we saw a pair of them moving toward our position, creeping in an effort to evade shape detection, but their feet sunk into the clay and now they had a shadow. I tried to breathe quietly. The scouts reached the jungle and crept past us to my right, where they disappeared into the foliage. Still, neither of us moved. For over an hour we sat there, afraid to give away our hiding spot until the crashing noise of something bounding through the brush came from behind, fading to the east in the direction of the mountains.

  “Jesus Christ,” I whispered, stretching my legs while I sat. “I can’t feel anything. It’s all gone to sleep.”

  “They’re dead,” said Jihoon.

  I looked toward the village again, where the locals had begun lifting the bodies and pieces to toss them into trucks. They stacked the Gra Jaai weapons by the river.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s it? Yeah?” Ji yanked his hood off and then slid his locking ring open to remove his helmet so tears wouldn’t fog his goggles.

  “I don’t know if you’re cut out for this gig after all.”

  He finished and replaced his gear, so that I heard a muffled sob before Ji’s head vanished into its helmet. “I don’t think so either,” he said. “But I don’t know. I scored high in the academy and got the best scores in training scenarios; it’s not like my profile didn’t fit for this job. But we can’t even see these things, Bug, and it’s not like you and I are on some advising job anymore. This kind of shit wasn’t part of the training. You brought us into Burma so we could be the targets in some screwed-up hunt, asshole.”

  “Yeah. I did. So get some rest, be quiet, and don’t move around. Swap out your fuel cells as soon as they start to get low. We’ll move into town tonight and steal one of those canoes so we can cross the river.”

  “What if we can’t?”

  “Then I’ll risk swimming across in my undersuit with a rope so I can pull you and my armor to the other side and to hell with worrying about their thermal imaging. This is what we do, Chong. Take risks to accomplish our mission. And besides, we wouldn’t want to go back to those days.”

  “Fuck you,” he said. But I’d already started falling asleep.

  Night fell to awaken the frogs, which croaked in a never-ending chorus that periodically went silent when a bird called with a haunting drawn-out sound, but within a few moments they’d start again. A splash from the river caught my attention. Peering out from the jungle, my night vision showed a bird with large wings lifting off from the near bank with a struggling frog in its beak so that I made a note: I never wanted to be a frog.

  It took me a moment to find Jihoon and shake him awake. “Time to get going.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Twenty-one hundred. The villagers used their canoes for a while, but they’re back now.”

  “How long have you been awake?” he asked.

  I thought for a minute. “I don’t know. A couple of hours. Been going over the next steps and didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I bet you didn’t. I can hack it, Bug.”

  “I figure you can, kid.” I wanted a cigarette more than anything, followed by bourbon. It had been days now since my last drink, and my skin crawled from not having had either, but I tried not to let my discomfort show. “You were right, too. This operation has been crap from the start, but it’s the one we’ve got. And it’s your first. The first one is always the worst, and the fact that they paired you with me for one this important means they have plans for you. All you have to do is make it out.”

  “Who has plans for me?” Ji sounded curious, as if he hadn’t thought of the possibility.

  “Come on. You think they hand out these things like candy? A few months ago and I’d never heard of Strategic Operations, and yet here you are, a part of them out of the gate even though your only experience amounts to a few years suspended in orange goo and working as a Peeping Tom for the Feds. You can’t screw this one up, kid, because they won’t read it that way; no matter what you do, it’ll work out.”

  “What about you? What does a Bug do after an op this bad?”

  I thought about that one too for a minute; it made me want a cigarette even more. My arms and legs were so sore and tight that even my toes cramped, the constant low-level agony from my wounded shoulder a reminder of the fact that there wouldn’t be anything more for me when this ended.

  “I’ll figure that one out if we live.” I grabbed my carbine and rose inch by inch until I stood, taking one cautious step toward the jungle’s edge. “Stay low, move slow. Is your fuel cell good? Chill can full?”

  He paused to check before clicking back in. “Plenty of power, I’m OK. My exhaust temps are green.”

  We headed toward the village. At our speed, it took a half hour to reach the canoes, which were low and flat in the middle with high bow and stern sections, and I pushed one into the water where Jihoon held it while I shuffled toward the pile of discarded weapons. Several of the Gra Jaai’s flame units had been damaged or were empty, but I found one that was around half-full and considered taking it; a villager or scout would see the thing as long as it wasn’t concealed by my cloak, and there wasn’t time to take everything off and arrange things so the cloak would cover it. But this was a risk worth taking—in case we needed it later. As long as part of me was visible, there wasn’t any point in moving slowly so I ran as fast as I could to the canoe, tossed the flamethrower in, and helped Jihoon push off.

  “What’s the hurry?” he asked.

  “Move it. Someone may have seen me.”

  I jumped in, and Jihoon handed me a paddle; we both dug into the water at the same time, trying to put as much distance between us and the village as possible, but someone shouted from the bank and I turned to look. A small boy ran after us. By the time he reached the bank, the boy was waving his hands and had started wading into the water as he shouted, and I imagined how strange it must have looked to see an empty canoe cross the river with two paddles that moved by themselves. But when lights from the huts flickered into view, I stopped smiling.

  “Faster,” I said.

  “I’m paddling as fast as I can.”

  I grunted with the effort and looked back again; a group of men were already loading into canoes. “Not fast enough. Faster!”

  “Why can’t we catch one stinking break?” Ji asked.

  It was a good question. On a normal day I would have laughed, but we’d made it halfway across the river by the time the others splashed after us, and they had more paddles. The men had clearly done this for a lifetime; their strokes fell in unison, and we wouldn’t have much of a lead once we reached the far bank. When we did, I pushed Jihoon onshore and dropped the flame unit at his feet.

  “Take that into the jungle. Move fast, but once you get into the bush, slow down and keep your eyes open for booby traps.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Jihoon.

  “I’m going to take care of them.”

  “They just want their canoe. As soon as they get it, they’ll probably turn back and go to sleep.”

  I stared at the spot where I thought Jihoon’s head was. “I’m going to take care of them. Now get moving.”

  The flame unit rose into the air and bounced as Jihoon headed west, soon passing out of range of my vision kit.

  It didn’t take long to set up. My carbine rested on a rock near the bank, and when I touched the trigger, the gun camera’s image popped into my heads-up with a dim reticle that moved when I shifted to search for my targets. By now I heard the men’s voices, and Kristen started to translate their confusion into my ears, but I told her to give it
a rest. There were three canoes, each with five men. I targeted the ones farthest away and fired, walking my tracers from front to back to watch the men crumple forward in their seats or slump over the canoe’s side and drag their hands in the water. The last two canoes started to turn. I took my time with the next, firing short bursts at each man so that by the time the last one had fallen, the ones in the third canoe decided to abandon their vessel and leaped into the warm river. One by one I picked them off. When it was over, I checked my chronometer to find that a few minutes had elapsed and zoomed into the far bank where a crowd of villagers had gathered to watch. I did it without thinking. The tracers from my carbine cut them down without effort at that range, and I didn’t stop until my hopper had emptied, automatically detaching from my shoulder mount to fall by my side.

  Two minutes later I’d found Jihoon. We moved deeper into the jungle as fast as we could because by now the Chinese scouts, if any were still in the area, would have noticed the shooting. I’d seen the Burmese boy fall to the mud, dead, and it didn’t bother me a bit; what bothered me now was the thought that something inside me had changed again, and I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, only that it made me feel strong.

  NINE

  Chimera

  The jungle didn’t care who lived or died. As soon as the sun set, its trees went to sleep and dreamed of things that would ensure its roots got what they needed in the dry times between monsoons, and war that had raged for so long on its borders had supplied it with enough death to make it grow thick and tall. Jihoon and I moved all night. We paused for as long as it took to strap the flame unit under my cloak and then continued up the long sloping mountain ahead of us, the one leading to the dot on our map showing Margaret’s last known position. I didn’t know if she’d still be there. But despite the uncertainty and the exhaustion that threatened to make me fall asleep on point, an exhaustion that made me hallucinate and see shapes in the darkness outside my infrared range, the urge was still there—to move and never stop. The jungle wasn’t against me and even asleep it still pushed; it was enough. We’d move through its maze and reach the spot by early morning, but without knowing where Chen was, it was hard to believe the mission would end, and in the monotonous bush it felt as though we’d never get there.

  “Lieutenant,” Kristen said, “I’ve noticed something interesting.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’ve been monitoring your power consumption, and although the extra garment you have wired into the suit’s system has increased the draw, you still have enough fuel cells for two weeks of constant operation.”

  “That’s very interesting,” I whispered. “Is that why you woke up?”

  “I never sleep, Lieutenant. I only explained the power status because I decided to activate your sniffer units two days ago and draw random samples once you made contact with Chinese troops at Nu Poe.”

  She had my attention, and I stopped to lean against a tree, punching the command for Ji to hold. “What did you find?”

  “Their off-gasses are characteristic. They aren’t unusual for electric-powered motors but are atypical of organic life in combat suits.”

  “You’re losing me, Kristen. Spell it out.”

  “In this particular theater there are no units like the ones fielded by the Chinese, so any reading from them is well above background for tungsten and several other elements that their servos produce, and from the amount of nickel I’ve detected I would guess that some of their systems rely on metal hydride batteries. This is in itself odd, since those types of batteries are highly unreliable, and—”

  “Stop. Are you telling me we can smell them?”

  “I can try to detect them, Lieutenant. It’s an experimental procedure, but one, if it works, that could provide you with a warning before your next encounter. Given visibility constraints in the jungle, the ability would give you an edge.”

  “If we activate the chemical sniffer to run constantly, how much of a drain would that put on my power?”

  “It depends on the intake draw, but I estimate that it would cut two or three days from your total supply.”

  “Do it,” I said. “Maximum draw.” I clicked onto Jihoon’s frequency and told him about it, which made him laugh.

  “You know what this means, right?” he asked.

  “What?”

  Jihoon brushed by me on his way past, moving forward to take point—a good sign since he had shown no initiative since we’d arrived on the line. I wondered if he was pulling it together.

  “Once the brass gets word of this, they’ll hand us flamethrowers and armor that makes all of us look like you. Your call sign won’t be worth shit anymore.”

  Three times that night we stopped when Kristen chimed with her warnings of elevated nickel levels, and all of them were good hits. Jihoon and I stopped to listen on each occasion. The Chinese scouts would push past in the bush, and you wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t also for the fact that the bugs went quiet and the things hadn’t realized yet that their weight broke branches on the jungle floor easily, the cracks booming inside my helmet.

  Just before sunrise we paused. I was on point and had watched as our dot and that of Margaret’s merged, prompting Kristen to announce that we were less than a hundred meters from her location. Ji wanted to rest. But there was a feeling in the air, as if pure oxygen had been pumped into the jungle, so that it diffused through ceramic and into my suit, heightening my senses and making my fingertips tingle the same way they would just before grabbing hold of an electrical cable. She was there. No bugs would give away her position, and this was an event I’d been expecting for so long that no rest was needed to try and figure out what I’d do when we met. We pushed on, and the jungle parted in front of us as if it gave its approval; the early morning sun had hit the highest leaves, and now that it was awake, the bush wanted to see what would happen too because even it couldn’t see that far into the future.

  The jungle spat us into an area that had less foliage—not a clearing as much as it was an older section of rain forest with an immensely high canopy and few bushes on the ground so boulders and red clay lay exposed. A Buddhist temple rose in front of us. It was a round, pointed structure with a wide section near the bottom that narrowed and steepened into a spire at the top and an ornate stone arch that opened into blackness at the base. Streamers of morning light pierced the canopy above. They hit the temple’s side, most of which was covered with a creeping ivy, but in spots it gleamed with gold that flaked off in sections to make me wonder how long the thing had been abandoned. Many of the Burmese had forgotten faith. Why shouldn’t they? For more than a decade nothing had stopped the fighting that swung back and forth over their borders, not even prayer or sacrifice, so by now I figured their monks had traded robes for battle suits. No paths led to the entrance, and from the look of it we were the first people to have walked in the area for decades unless you counted the monkeys, several of which clung to the ivy and stared at us.

  “Lieutenant,” Kristen said, “I’m picking up a standard signature. Satos in decay, well above background and likely within ten meters.”

  “I see them,” I said.

  Jihoon clicked in almost at the same time. “Look at that shit.”

  These weren’t satos, per se. Not American ones anyway. In front of the entrance someone had raised three poles, to which had been lashed the bodies of Chinese genetics with their fiber optics and hoses severed so that the massive heads hung down loosely. They bloated in the heat. Beneath the poles, their armor had been piled, the pieces of which showed the blackened scorch marks of a flame unit. I made sure my carbine’s safety was off and signaled to Jihoon that I was going to move in.

  “I’m right behind you,” he said. “Why do you think Margaret did this with the bodies? A warning to other Chinese genetics?”

  I thought for a second, just for the amount of time it took for the pieces to lock together. “Not a warning, a challenge. An invitation to the Chinese because Marg
aret wants to die.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It means keep your Maxwell ready because I have no idea what she has planned. Or how many satos are with her.”

  We crept across the clearing and moved through the archway. The passageway was dark enough to force my vision to infrared, and it squeezed us within its rocks, which formed a low-ceilinged corridor barely wide enough to fit through, winding in a circle around the outside of the temple. A strong breeze blew through. Something ahead of us created the wind, and my temperature indicators jumped, suggesting that whatever it was also generated a significant quantity of heat, enough to dry the walls so that sheets of paint hung from the ceiling in a caricature of the jungle—the hanging flakes like leaves that we had to push through. The tunnel went on forever. Finally, ahead of me was light, and as we neared it my vision kit switched back to visible as we passed through another arch and into the temple’s center.

  The main chamber was circular with a ceiling that arched high overhead and into which tiny portholes had been cut so that sunlight beamed and reflected off the polished marble floor. Wooden carvings hung to section the ceiling into six equal parts; I recognized the teak, a dark wood and infinitely hard, that someone had taken the time to shape and chisel into leaf-shaped patterns from which dangled pink lanterns. Candles flickered inside each one. The light focused on a thirty-foot-high statue of a white Buddha, his right hand raised and body clothed in gold, and I was about to step closer to it when they came; six satos dropped from where they had hidden in the carvings above us and slammed us to the ground. In less than a minute they had stripped us down to our undersuits and bound our hands behind our backs with wire. When they’d finished, they tied ropes around our necks. The fibers cut into my skin, and the girls yanked us onto our feet, tightening the noose so that I gasped for breath while stumbling toward the statue.

  Margaret stepped from behind the Buddha’s legs and I stared; she was exactly like her picture—beautiful. The tattoos held me in some kind of trance, their swirling patterns hypnotic and perfect under short blonde hair that framed them. From the neck down she wore combat armor like Jihoon’s, its polymer coating dull now and the ceramic plates chipped and broken. The other girls pushed me to my knees in front of her, and then left, dragging Jihoon toward another archway where he vanished into the shadows with a gurgle, leaving Margaret and me alone.