Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  “Tell us what to do.”

  I ran to Ji and grabbed for a pulse; it was there, but faint. “Fix him. Do whatever it takes. And get me my gear—armor, weapons, everything.”

  She motioned to the others, two of whom left Margaret and lifted Jihoon carefully, carrying him from the temple and into one of the dark corridors. The one who had been talking to me disappeared and came back a few minutes later with my armor and weapons. It took a moment to gear up. I didn’t care if they watched while I dealt with the undersuit’s hoses, partly because it had been so long since I’d worn the garment that I’d forgotten the undersuit hadn’t been washed, and the odor distracted me from the fact that I was naked. I nearly threw up from the smell. It had gone an entire week unwashed, and even though the climate controls had been fine, the sweat of fear had impregnated the cloth and made it foul. When I finished, I gestured for the girl.

  “Show me how to get to Chen.”

  She nodded. “It will be difficult. Some of us should go with you.”

  “I don’t need you. Just show me the way, and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “The Chinese have regrouped and are now headed our way,” she said, “so you only have a few hours. Follow me.”

  The room’s ceiling barely cleared my head and made me feel faint with the sensation that it could collapse at any moment, and a dim red light provided just enough illumination to see. A wide shaft in the middle of the floor led straight down. From it emerged two large ducts about three meters across, one of which ran straight through the rock overhead, the other into the wall beside me. I crept to the shaft’s edge and looked down. Far below me the red lights shone from the side of the walls, lighting the way downward into a hole so deep that the lights disappeared and a sickening feeling of vertigo made me lean back from the edge where I eyed a ladder with suspicion. There wasn’t any other way. The sato had left me a few minutes earlier to prepare for my return—if I returned—so we could retreat to Nu Poe, hopefully in time to avoid the new Chinese advance on the border; she’d swore it was the only way to reach Chen. I didn’t want to do it, but said a silent prayer and slid over the edge, searching for a ladder rung with my boots.

  One rung after another I made the descent, watching the minutes tick off; there was no way to measure my progress. None of the girls knew how far down the shaft went or what I’d face at the bottom, and defenses were left to my imagination, which, having now seen the worst of what the Chinese had to offer, had lost any governors or frame of reference as to what was possible or not. Sunshine was about shape-shifting, and the thought made me wonder if I’d face the things when I got inside the complex even though everything indicated that Chen hadn’t come close to finishing his research—that it had just begun. But he could have his own army of scouts and warriors, waiting for me to wander in blindly. It was this last thought that made me opt for the flame unit. My carbine was now far above me in the temple because carrying both would have been too heavy during the descent and return, and if I ran into Chinese-style genetics, the flame unit would be more effective.

  “Kristen,” I said, panting from the effort of descending.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Can any of your sensors tell how far I am from reaching a floor or ledge where I can rest?” I described where I was and then waited for her response.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. None of the suit sensors can detect anything like that; it must be out of range for now.”

  I stopped and looped one arm through a rung, doing my best to stretch while not looking down, and my calf muscles started to spasm, bouncing me so rapidly that I almost slipped. “Keep checking. And tell me when I get close.”

  The trip downward gave me plenty of time to reflect on Margaret and her last request; she had to have been insane to choose me. What Margaret had seen during the little time we’d known each other and the bits and pieces she’d heard from Lucy—those weren’t enough to base a decision so important to the future of her group, and part of me doubted the Gra Jaai would accept an American leader anyway, someone opposed to religion or genetics of any kind. My lack of command experience wasn’t the issue. With girls like Lucy and the others, it wouldn’t be so hard to formulate strategies and tactics because in the girls I’d have thousands of walking battle computers better than any semi-aware fielded, so the fact that I was ill suited in that respect didn’t matter; all I’d have to do is ask for a sato’s opinion. So what was it that made it feel insane? The questions rattled throughout my thoughts and destroyed any ability to think until an answer presented itself: it wasn’t insane. Part of me wanted the job. But the years of killing satos had ingrained in me an attitude that to serve with them—even over them—was an insult to all I’d accomplished and was an insult to people like Wheezer. The problem was that no other country except Thailand seemed like a reasonable place to settle down with Phillip, and so far this was the only post-Army job offer I’d gotten.

  An hour later Kristen announced the presence of a floor, and I stepped onto a metal grating without having resolved any of my thoughts; for now, they’d have to wait. Beside me the huge ducts passed through the lattice floor and into a small concrete room below, and it took a few seconds to pry open a metal trapdoor so I could drop my flame unit down and then lower myself after it. My helmet speakers cut off with the loud roar of air-handling equipment. Even without speakers, though, the noise was deafening and throbbed as the machinery blew air at what must have been a rate of thousands of liters per second.

  “Lieutenant,” said Kristen.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t detect this from the grating above, but there are emissions consistent with video monitoring from the corner in front of you and to the right.”

  A tiny camera, tucked into the corner near the overhead grate, scanned the area, and I sighed. “Fuck.”

  “It appears to be a wireless system,” she said, using a tone that suggested she was trying to make the best of things. “Would you like me to jam it?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “And Lieutenant?”

  Once more I shouldered the flamethrower, grunting under its weight, and then pulled the cloak back on. “What?”

  “There is a service hatch in the wall to your left, the emissions from which indicate that it’s alarmed.”

  “This,” I said, deciding to pop my helmet for one last cigarette, “keeps getting better and better.”

  TEN

  Retired

  After about ten minutes of trying, Kristen succeeded in telling me how to open an electrical access panel so she could deactivate the alarm and unlock the service hatch. I stepped into a cylinder-shaped hallway. Bright lights flooded it, and the white, ceramic tiled walls reminded me of the shop in Khlong Toei, their surfaces so clean and polished that they must have been sterile. The corridor ran in one direction with doors spaced evenly on either side, so I crept forward with my chameleon skin on—even though the bright lighting made it almost useless. All the doors were open. Each one led to an empty room, with row after row of laboratory benches covered with computers and equipment, but sheets of clear plastic had been draped over everything as if the place had been mothballed for another time, waiting for a future that might never come. For a moment I panicked: What if Chen had already booked it, had found another way out?

  The thought pushed me faster. Margaret was sure Chen was here, but the fact that she tortured us made me consider the possibility again that she had lost it, and doubts lingered as to whether she had ever been sane. Why had she tortured us? The satos hadn’t asked for any information, and in the end Margaret had given me control of her forces, so the one reasonable answer was that it had all been some sort of test; the girls had needed to confirm the stories about me before she risked the knife fight so they could be certain I was solid by their standards, but that still didn’t explain Jihoon. Ji, I decided, they had tortured for fun. The realization made me furious; even dead, I hated Margaret and embra
ced that her end had come at my hands—that it was sure to enrage the Army, who wanted her alive. Chen was here. Margaret hadn’t been that crazy, and maybe killing him would make everything right again.

  Another hallway intersected with mine, a few meters ahead, and through the hood my helmet speakers picked up voices, freezing me in place.

  “They’re speaking Korean,” said Kristen. “Two targets, in the right-hand passageway, four meters down. There is a ninety percent chance that they are soldiers. Would you like me to translate?”

  “No. They’ll be dead soon, so whatever they’re saying, it doesn’t matter. Do any of the voices resemble Chen’s?”

  It took a moment for her to check. “No.”

  I inched along the wall and poked my head around the corner slowly, not wanting the shimmer or motion to attract any attention; two men in combat suits sat against the wall. Their armor was a deep black, and both had Maxwell carbines. They faced away from me as they watched the far end of the corridor where a wall of rubble had collapsed to block the passage, with tremendous boulders and chunks of concrete that mingled to create an impenetrable barrier. Two more men knelt at the rubble, monitoring seismic equipment.

  I pulled my head back and rested both gauntlets against the wall before whispering to Kristen. “Two seismic specialists facing north in what looks like the main entrance tunnel. There may be Chinese boring headed this way. Can you pick up anything?”

  My heads-up flickered to a seismic display as Kristen worked; she clicked in a minute later. “Boring detected. Approximately three hours until they reach us, but my margin of error is one hour, Lieutenant. I apologize for the uncertainty.”

  “Don’t worry about it, sweet pea. It helps.”

  I rounded the corridor and fired a burst of flame at the two in combat suits, their screams barely registering as I pushed through the fire and toward the seismic team. They stood and faced me. Neither understood at first how a flame unit firing tube could suspend itself in midair until I let the thing hang and flung my cloak aside, drawing my knife. One of them held his hands up. The other tried to run, and I extended my knife arm in a side-sweeping motion so he ran straight into its point, making it difficult to yank the thing free. The remaining man died in midscream.

  With the element of surprise gone, I could move faster; there wasn’t any time to waste. At the intersection I stopped, and a mild panic set in because it wasn’t clear which direction to take and the corridors ran to infinity; new passageways branched in the distance, and there were only a couple of hours to go. How big was the place and how many more Korean soldiers were there? How’d they get into Burma in the first place? The questions immobilized me with uncertainty, and I wanted to scream in frustration until I started down the original corridor I’d been on; Kristen would keep track of things, creating a digital map so we could find our way back to the service shaft.

  A doorway on the left was closed. When I approached it, the thing opened and I stepped into what looked like a cafeteria, and more than thirty people—men and women—crouched behind overturned tables where they tried to hide, screaming at the near-invisible form that had just entered. To them, I must have been a horror.

  “Thais,” said Kristen. “No voice spectrum consistent with that of Chen.”

  “Translate,” I said. “I need to ask them a few questions.”

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  “Where is Chen?” None of them answered, and the question brought more screams so I yelled it. “Where is Chen? Where the hell is he?”

  One of the women stood. “He’s in the systems control area.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Down the main hall,” she said, pointing out the door. “Keep going straight until it ends, the door on the left.”

  “How many Korean troops are with him?” I asked.

  “None. There are two monitoring the main entrance to warn us of the Chinese, but the rest left over a week ago. The children are with Chen.”

  Her response shifted everything and confused me with the sensation of having entered another world; none of it fit with what I had assumed would be here.

  “Why were Korean troops here in the first place?” I asked. “And what children?”

  She spread her arms and shrugged, as if she thought the answer obvious. “The Koreans were here to monitor Chen—to make sure he didn’t work on offensive projects. When the Chinese came, the majority of them left, and we are scheduled to leave in one hour.”

  “And the children?”

  “Our main project, a peaceful one. We used genetic material given to Chen years ago to resurrect important Chinese figures from the past.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She shrugged again. “Chen never told us that. We were paid to get a job done, and he paid very well. We came here from Bangkok.”

  “So you’ve never heard of Project Sunshine?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  It was clear this particular woman didn’t know anything, and already the chronometer was moving fast, making me nervous about the Chinese and warning me that it would be impossible to question everyone.

  I almost let them live because the indicator on my tank showed only about four bursts left, but these were Chen’s scientists; they had to be. Catching them alive would be a coup for the Chinese even if I scrambled Chen’s computers and killed him because these people may have worked on Project Sunshine despite what the woman said. I couldn’t risk their capture; anything in their brains would be picked at and gone over by Beijing’s technicians, and in that scenario, life would have been the worse fate for them. They screamed again, this time all of them, but I stopped paying attention when the room’s sprinklers went off, doing nothing to abate an intense heat that forced me into the hallway. The sprinkler water flashed into steam, the gel and metal powders bursting into bright sparks that reminded me of the Fourth of July; fireworks, I realized, would be one thing Phillip would miss if we stayed in Thailand.

  The door slid shut on their screams and left me to my thoughts. Children. No Project Sunshine. If what the woman had said was true, then my mission to gather data was about to turn south in a big way, leaving me with the orders to question and then kill Chen, which was fine by me. Even though the bush was far above, its call was all around to let me know that it was almost over, that once the guy was dead I could leave Burma with the satisfaction of having removed a thorn from the jungle’s side. And I’d be with Phillip again. From then on the missions I’d take would be ones of my own making, ones that made sense and didn’t involve the military or people like Jihoon or Momson or even Wheezer, who had screwed up despite his training and still left a hole in my gut.

  A few seconds passed before I realized I’d moved down the hallway, heading closer to Chen. I felt him. He was close now, and it was as though the walls moaned from the sickness of infection, Chen’s presence a foreign object that the rock wanted excised so its mountains could go back to their game of just sitting there. Watching everything. A door slid open ahead of me then, and four Asian children emerged—two boys and two girls, all of them teenagers and all of them grinning. It occurred to me that after flaming the scientists, I’d thrown my cloak back and had forgotten to pull it around me.

  “Uncle told us something had gone wrong with the tunnels,” one of the boys said. He was the larger of the two and had black hair that fell almost to his eyes. The older girl laughed and threw her hair back—a thick mass, straight and so black that it almost looked blue.

  “He is not Chinese, though,” she said. “Uncle thought that our people had arrived.”

  There was something about them that made me uneasy; a creepy feeling moved from my legs and into my stomach, a sensation rooted in the fact that these were satos—not like the American or Chinese ones, which may have made me even more uneasy. Normal children would have been scared when I pointed my flame unit in their direction.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “We shou
ld ask you that,” the older boy said, taking a step toward me. “You snuck into our home, and I’m assuming the rest of our family is now dead. Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of Chen’s and came for a visit.”

  “Uncle is busy now,” the girl said, switching to English. “He sent us to entertain you.”

  I never got a chance to fire. The children rushed me in a mad dash and leaped at my chest, almost knocking me flat in the process, and then started clawing at my armor in an attempt to strip the flame unit away, their high-pitched shrieks forcing my speakers to cut off.

  “These children are genetically enhanced or completely artificial,” said Kristen. I struggled to knock the kids away while she spoke, but as soon as I dislodged one, he or she would leap again. My legs started to buckle under the additional weight. “No normal human would be able to move in this fashion, Lieutenant.”

  “Damn it, Kristen.” I finally got a hold of the flame unit again, one boy’s hands gripping it tightly and refusing to let go. “Call me BUG!”

  The trigger clicked shut. Fire engulfed me and suit alarms blared, triggering the hiss of emergency oxygen at the same time heat penetrated from all sides and forced me to scream with the sensation of having created hell on earth. My faceplate started to melt. Metallic parts of my suit ignited with thousands of sparks, but through it all I saw the children fall and then felt light enough to take a few steps back out of the main blaze. I shrugged out of the cloak, which now flamed brightly, and threw it at them, along with the flame unit, its tanks on the verge of blowing with whatever fuel remained. But the children were still alive. They flopped and rolled within the fire, continuing to shriek, and one of them clawed its way toward me, trying to escape and take one last lunge.

  I ran. Behind me the flame unit exploded and sucked the air from my lungs so that I fell to the floor and crawled, trying my best to find a pocket of air. When I could breathe again, the children had fallen silent. Behind me in the hallway, with nothing left to consume, the flames began to die and all around me my suit smoldered to send streamers of smoke that were just visible through the wavy glass of my faceplate. It took a few minutes to get out of the suit, and once I had, I started crying. Kristen was dead. It hadn’t been obvious that she’d been as much a part of my life as Wheezer until she was gone, and I knelt to remove as many memory chips as I could, hoping that some of them would at least be readable. In many ways, Kristen had been my best friend, and Chen would pay for her loss too, in addition to that of Wheezer.