“Something is wrong with me,” I said, and described the numbing, the pain.
Megan nodded. “I have it too, in my legs and in my arm. It is the spoiling.”
“The spoiling is a mental thing, doesn’t cause physical pain.”
“I don’t know that anymore. Take off your suit.”
“In the open? Now? I’ll be visible.” But I did it anyway, sensing that she was right. Once I was free of the carapace and disconnected, Megan pulled off the thick socks of my undersuit to expose both feet. I gasped; the tips of my toes had gone black. Dead.
“It is the spoiling. You weren’t wounded during the last two days?” When I shook my head she continued. “Then they lied to us. The rotting isn’t from Russian organisms; it is within us.”
“They wouldn’t lie,” I insisted. “Not our mothers.”
“Maybe. And yet there are your feet, dying, like mine.”
She replaced my socks and once I finished squeezing into my armor we sat, pushing food from our pouches into our mouths but not tasting anything, and I barely noticed when a second flight of drones screamed to deliver new ordnance on what used to be the farmhouse. There could be no plan now. Our creators had a plan, and it took care of everything, made me wonder why they bothered to chase us at all when our very bodies formed the pieces of a bomb, slow fused, decaying at an unknown rate in both mind and tissue so that soon—maybe in weeks—we would be gone. By comparison, a quick discharge seemed… humane. Humane. The word stuck in my mind and slowly fear turned back into hatred, worse than it had ever been before and I grabbed hold of it to stroke the sensation, encouraged it to grow into visions of what I would do to the next nonbred I found, any nonbred, and before I realized it, my arms and legs had begun carrying me westward again, crawling with the hope of finding someone to kill. I would take as many with me as I could now.
I elbowed Megan as I left, but she didn’t move at first. A few seconds later she screamed and I froze, waiting for a drone or patrol to zero in. When nothing happened, I turned to face her.
“What’s wrong?”
“They come frequently now,” she said.
“You’ve had hallucinations?” When she nodded I sighed and pulled her by the neck ring, helping her forward. “Don’t be afraid. They can’t hurt you and soon you will see everything as I do.”
Megan laughed. “That doesn’t comfort me; I am not accustomed to this, Catherine.”
“Accustomed to what?” I asked. “The spoiling, or to me taking care of you?”
“You telling me what to do. With confidence. You even sound like a Lily.”
“It’s not confidence. It’s hatred. There are ways to punish them, and we may as well find revenge to our west. I can feel my mind wander and want to move from here, put more distance between us and the farm before my dreams come, and before I’m the one screaming.”
I had fallen asleep without knowing it, allowing the dream to invade.
Megan and I sprinted through the forest, our half-armor clicking as we went. With one hand motion, she gave me an order. I dropped to the ground and covered myself with leaves, dirt, anything I could find including the corpse of a fox—half eaten. Nothing moved. I peered out from between two rocks and fingered the trigger, bringing up my sighting reticle as I waited. Megan had long since disappeared but her voice crackled in my ear.
“I’m chasing him to you; we’ll be there in thirty seconds.”
You couldn’t see them yet, or hear them, but Megan knew the woods and remembered exactly where she left me. The man we chased wouldn’t have realized that she was forcing him into a trap.
“One hundred meters,” she said.
I heard them now, some distance away in the underbrush, and nearly froze when I saw that the man carried a weapon. They had given him a carbine—not fully automatic, but capable of firing single shots. He paused and dropped to one knee, squeezing off several flechettes, and then rolled down a short slope before rising to his feet.
“He’s been trained,” I whispered to Megan. “This one knows.” I had already made up my mind when I saw him, knew that the carbine would be unsporting, unfair.
I removed my finger from the trigger.
“Now!” said Megan.
Not yet, I thought, let him come…
Megan sounded panicked. “We will lose him!”
The man was close, and I saw that his head had been shaven poorly, someone cutting it in the process so that dark scabs covered parts of his scalp. I jumped to my feet. His eyes went wide and when my four fingertips slammed straight into his windpipe, so hard that I felt and heard the crunch of his throat simultaneously, the man gurgled a word, maybe “please”. He dropped his carbine, fell to his knees, and grasped his neck with both hands.
“Go with God,” I said to him, my mouth next to his ear. “You are worthy, on the path, and so shall be forgiven. I am that path.”
I woke then, before reliving the next few moments—when Megan and I had beheaded him.
Uzbekistan reminded me of those days, of hunting convicts in the forest so that we could learn the feeling of a kill. But this time, we were the hunted. Megan had let me sleep in a stand of tall grass and after I finished wiping the dirt from my faceplate she pointed at a pair of dust clouds, small and distant.
“Scout cars,” I said. “One, maybe two of them.”
Megan nodded and fingered her forearm zoom control. “I see one now, no sign of a recon drone, but they might be dispersing micros. The winds are coming this way.”
“Special Forces?” I asked.
“Probably,” said Megan. “They’re the only ones who would risk searching for us in small numbers. It’s getting dark, we need to keep moving.”
“We will have to kill them, Megan. We can’t just run.”
She stopped. Her back was to me but even in the armor I could sense that Megan’s shoulders had slumped. “I know. And it is wrong for me to think that way. I am not on the path anymore, Catherine, I can’t see it. To kill men, those who created us…”
“Wrong has nothing to do with it. They will kill us from afar; they have already killed us with spoil, and are cowards. They should serve us.” The words startled me, ones I had never uttered before, and the idea, now that it was voiced, sounded to me exactly like heresy should: like thunder. I waited for Megan to strike me but she didn’t.
“Maybe they do deserve that.” She moved down the dune on which we now stood, and headed back toward our hide in the grass. “But it feels wrong. Running is one thing but these taught us about our God, showed us the way. To kill them is saying to heaven that it does not exist; will you tell God that He means nothing?”
I followed her, nearly slipping in the loose sand. “I think now that this is God’s will.”
And I believed it. This was not a joyful time, not like the feeling I got from slaughtering Russians, but it didn’t feel as if it were wrong because it did nothing to abate my hatred. The moment excited and terrified me at the same time. To be pitted against Special Forces, real men who had trained even longer than we had, who were genuine warriors… this was a blessing; it had to be. God tested all of us, deciding who was worthy of the kingdom, and for the first time ever we were choosing our own path with no orders crawling across the heads-up, no semi-aware computer calculating the best way to use us, where to throw our sisters against some hole in our line or the Russian’s’. For a second my fears, all of them, evaporated. God had given me my first choice.
I slapped Megan on the back and helped her lie down. “We will kill them and you will feel whole again. The border can’t be far now.”
Our hole was shallow, just barely deep enough so that when we lay down our bodies would be even with the surrounding desert. It was our only chance. After lying flush with the lip, Megan unrolled a thin sheet of copper mesh, so fine that she had to be careful or it would rip, and spread it across us.
Somewhere from behind came the roar of engines. Over them echoed a loud pop and I felt Megan
tense when a few seconds later we heard something that sounded like sand sprinkling on the copper blanket. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. You imagined the microbots, tiny spheres too small to power their own motion, as they floated on the wind and began collecting and transmitting data the moment they landed—but only as long as their power lasted, only for a few minutes. The blanket would shield our electronic emissions and block their motion trackers, keep us invisible.
A short time later, we heard the engines fade. I lifted the sheet, rolled it up carefully, and helped Megan sling her carbine so that she could fire it with one hand. When she was ready I grinned. We sprinted, almost silent except for the sound of my breathing while we struggled up the side of a dune and then slid down the other. Their tracks were clear, in shades of light-amplified green. Once we no longer heard the engines, we slowed to a march.
“They will stop soon,” Megan said, “to sleep.”
I checked my computer. “And now the wind is at our backs.”
“ ‘Remember the former things of old,’ ” said Megan, “ ‘for I am God’s messenger, and we are many.’ ”
I smiled at the words, felt the warmth of doing what we had been born to do. “ ‘And there are many like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, His counsel shall stand.’ ”
“ ‘And we will do what we please, for we know all before it happens,’ ” Megan finished. “ ‘God gave us the foresight, and from His judgment no man can hide. Death will teach some everything, but it will be too late; these lessons do no good in hell.’ ”
She adjusted her carbine and flicked off the safety.
The men had camped in front of us, in a flat area of desert where they had parked three vehicles and arranged a ring of sentry bots. A dead soldier lay beside us, my combat knife still embedded in his throat. We knew they’d be there. Megan and I never talked about how we knew these things but we did, always, as if it were a sixth sense or maybe more simple like knowing there would be air when you took a breath. While Megan had disabled the closest sentry bots, I had killed their watchman.
And I felt good again.
Megan let me lead because with only one hand she couldn’t give commands, but I would have led anyway; now that I was half-dead, I felt alive at last, a Lily who moved under God’s hand, which guided everything as if the world had revealed itself to be an intricate clockwork—everything in place, everything with a purpose, but, ironically, a world in which now I had a will. One could walk into the camp loudly, spraying flechettes as one screamed, or crawl up silently and break each neck, one at a time, grinning more widely with each snap. I crouched and moved in slowly. Three of them rested next to the scout car closest to me and I motioned for Megan to take them, holding up two fingers so she would give me time to reach the others.
There were four near the second scout car. One of them stirred, rolling over with a cough, and it occurred to me that they had been sloppy—that they had bunched up.
Two minutes came. The first one died instantly, with only a slight twitch when I slammed the knife through his armored neck joint. The others heard it. Within a second, I had sprayed them with my carbine, the sound of flechettes snapping loudly across the dunes, a continuous zipperlike noise that ceased only when everything became still again.
“Come here,” Megan said.
I approached and saw one of them propped against the scout car, his helmet off, the man struggling to breathe. “Please,” he said.
I pushed the barrel of my carbine against his forehead. “Deactivate the remaining sentry bots, so we can leave your perimeter.”
The man’s hand shook and blood trickled from his mouth as he punched at his forearm controls.
“Who are you looking for?” Megan asked.
He stared. “For you. Our guys didn’t know if you were killed in the airstrike. We lost your transponder signal and they sent us to do a sweep—to make sure.”
I felt like smashing his face, like slamming my carbine into it. “Why can’t you just let us go?”
“There have been so many lost. We don’t know where they are, and Command ordered us to hunt you all the way to the Turkmeni border.”
Megan dropped to her knees and grabbed his neck ring. “There are others of us?”
He nodded. “Yes. I don’t know how many.”
“What about Turkmenistan?” I asked. “Can you hunt us there?”
“Not in all areas,” he said, “because we don’t occupy most of western Turkmenistan. Some of us operate out there anyway, but at risk of getting shot by the Turkmen Army. Please, let me go.”
I slit his throat without thinking and wiped my knife clean while he slumped to the sand. “There are others.”
Megan popped her helmet and grinned. “Turkmenistan.”
We took a few minutes to gather ration packs, water, and fuel cells before moving out again. There would be no rest—not that night. In the morning, someone would come looking for them and we needed to put as much distance between the men and us as possible. At one point I checked the computer map and laughed out loud.
“What?” asked Megan.
“We will be at Druzhba in a few days. Then across into Turkmenistan. Free, in a way.”
“Yes,” she asked, “but then what?”
It was a good question, one that we both had been asking ourselves since setting out, and neither of us had an answer. Not yet.
We traveled by night. The days had gotten warm—warm enough that Megan and I grew concerned about our suits’ ability to maintain temperature without straining climate control—so we slept during the day, buried under sand.
At night, waking dreams and hallucinations always came. We tied a long piece of webbing to connect us, so that if we both fell into a dream state we at least wouldn’t get separated. The wind howled in my helmet pickups and both legs felt like lead as we moved slowly up the side of one dune, sliding down the other, over and over, until collapsing at first light. There were no landmarks, just sand. You couldn’t have known where to go and how to navigate without computers and suit guidance software, the thin blue line of the Amu Darya, the border, edging closer to us with the arrival of each day.
We were still a day or so from the river when Megan heard it, just before sunrise.
“Down,” she said.
I flattened into the sand as the noise of jet engines grew. Three aircraft, painted a flat gray almost impossible to see in the dim light, flew slowly overhead and turned in wide, lazy curves as the vehicles scanned the ground. Eventually the planes passed overhead, their roar fading to a groan as they increased their distance.
“They know we’re heading for Turkmenistan,” I said. “Those were recon drones.”
Megan nodded and rose to her knees so she could dig a shallow hole. I joined her. When we were done we lay down, and began scooping the sand, pushing it onto us so that it covered everything except one air intake port.
“Rest,” said Megan. “I’ll get up in a little while and stand watch.”
“Did they see us?” I asked. But she was already asleep, and my eyes fluttered shut.
When Megan finally woke me the sun had gone down, and I sat up to grab my carbine.
She waved me silent. All I could hear was the sound of an owl, screeching as it looked for prey under the moon—a thin sliver that had just risen above the horizon. She pointed south, toward an open salt pan and held up four fingers. I crawled slowly to the edge of a tuft of switchgrass and peered out.
My night vision cast its green pall over the scenery, making it hard to distinguish between shapes, and at first I didn’t see them. Then they moved. Four shapes rose from the ground to form the vague outlines of men in combat armor, their chameleon skin activated, all of them crouch-walking slowly toward us.
Megan motioned for me to raise my carbine. We turned our Maxwells over and dialed down the power, to ensure that the rounds would fly at less than supersonic velocities. Sil
ent. When she signaled, I extended my barrel from the dry grass and touched the trigger lightly, steadying my aim. The trigger clicked shut. With a noise that resembled a spray bottle, flechettes sprang from my carbine and punched through the first one’s face-plate so that he collapsed to the ground, a puff of blood settling gently on the sand as I moved my reticle to the next one and steadied my aim.
It was over in three seconds, but we waited for a few minutes to make sure they were dead.
“Get up,” said Megan, “it’s not good to stay here anymore.”
We crouched, walking slowly southward across the salt flat.
The wind came and went, howling across the desert in a gale for one minute, falling the next to embed us in a layer of silence. Megan dropped to the ground at the sign of anything unusual and twice we had to wait for aircraft to wander across the sky and out of sight while my muscles screamed at me to stay in place, not to move. Rest. The numbness had moved upward now, separating the top of my foot from the shin in a sharp line of burning agony that I tried to ignore but couldn’t. In three hours, we advanced only about five kilometers, and after another flight of aircraft I was about to suggest we stop when my silent alarm activated, filling my helmet with red light.
“The drones dropped Micros.” I swatted at my forearm computer, popping the cover off with a single motion, and began punching the keys.
“Hurry,” said Megan, “I can’t use my computer with only one arm.”
As soon as I hit the final key, a blue web of crackling static electricity ran over the outside of my armor, frying any bots that had adhered to its shell. I grabbed Megan’s arm. But by the time I finished activating her countermeasures, we both saw the heads-up display.
“It’s too late,” I said. The computer flashed a yellow indicator. “They transmitted.”
Subterrene War 02: Exogene Page 7
