“Why haven’t we killed you?”
I nodded.
“Orders. We found you on the river bank, in Dargan Ata where we had been sent to scout American movements in Uzbekistan. Across the river. The American Specials came and didn’t know we were there. They were looking for you, and so we let them have it, but they called in an airstrike, which is when we all got wounded. The doctor took care of you while you were out, and your wounds aren’t bad, a few flechette hits, but we know what happens to you after two years in war. He says you’re dying anyway so why should we go to all the trouble of killing you when nature will handle it soon herself? Besides, we’ve been told to take as many of our sisters alive, whenever we can. Orders.”
If it were possible, his grin got even wider, so wide that it made me forget my legs.
I said, “We assumed all of you hated us.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re enemies.”
“That’s the difference between you and us, the American synthetics and Russian ones: we don’t have enemies, we only have missions. It’s just a job, Katyusha. Some of us might hate you, but most of us don’t care about those we kill and when you think of it we both have the same mission, the same parents. Hatred, amidst all that, is just too tiring.”
My limbs went slack and the cigarette fell to the floor in a shower of sparks as another wave of exhaustion hit, forcing the room to go dark. The last thing I heard was the boy.
“Hatred is an obscurant.”
My dreams traced a path of hatred.
Time and repetition should have illuminated its genesis sooner, but I suspected that constant fatigue had kept me blind, or maybe there was something about being wounded that clarified it, brought the reasons for my hatred into focus. Whatever the reason, they came. Faces, Marines with whom my unit had always been attached, and their thousands of expressions played out in my subconscious, laughing, and I couldn’t blame them for it, wondering at my own stupidity and that of my sisters—especially of Megan and the Lilies. For having served without question.
There was the Marine leaning out of the APC and waving good-bye—see ya, bitches—just before the image faded, transformed into another where a supply depot near the town of Yangiyul’ stretched out as far as we could see, the detritus of war mingled with the lifeblood of its participants. Piles of crates and shipping containers formed massive square structures. In places these had been hit by enemy air attacks, and cranes moved in to salvage the containers that were intact, discard those beyond salvage, which sometimes, when lifted, spewed their contents—usually helmets, rations, or spare parts—onto the ground like a bursting piñata. On the northern side of the depot, three massive portals lay open. Dark. The entrances led to tunnels so wide that vehicles could pass in either direction for front-line supply runs, but one of them had been targeted, its mouth filled with concrete rubble that I saw, when I zoomed in, also held mangled bodies of those unfortunate enough to have been caught in the blast.
Yangiyul’ was a wreck, I realized.
Marines scrambled over rubble and slid down into plasma craters while we climbed from the flat cars, and from the open platform we could see more of what remained of the Tashkent-Shymkent sector’s main depot. Point defense towers lay flat on the ground where an aborted Russian advance had destroyed them, and new towers stretched upward. When Russian drones approached there wasn’t an alarm. Instead, almost as soon as we had assembled, the Yangiyul’ plasma defenses thumped like a chorus of tympanis and Marines sprinted to any cover they could—rubble, bomb shelters, or the bottoms of craters. We just stood there. Then we shrugged when the drones and missiles never came, having been driven off by defensive fire.
After the all clear, a group of men closest to us complained of the heat but they returned to their work, lifting sections of magnetic containment coils to place them on cargo crawlers—huge flatbed tracked vehicles that artillery units used to transport reactor equipment, which would provide power and deuterium for our plasma cannons. The coil-pipes were flexible ceramic-and-alloy tubes roughly one meter across, about a metric ton per section, and would line narrow rock channels that had been drilled from the rear into our main underground positions. That way, if the enemy took a section of our line, artillery units could pipe super hot gas into our abandoned tunnel; many Russians had been cooked this way. The coils themselves would be electrified, creating a charge that prevented the gas from making contact with the pipe-walls, ensuring that the plasma was still hot when it arrived.
The men moving the coil-pipes didn’t actually do any lifting, but merely had to guide them to make sure they didn’t rotate out of alignment as the crawler’s crane carefully lowered them to its deck. Our orders had not yet arrived, so Megan and the rest of us squatted on the platform to watch the work. We had been there almost an hour when it happened.
“McTear!” an officer shouted, “Get out from under that coil-pipe.”
The man shuffled out and waved. “Sorry.”
“Listen up.” The officer stood at the bottom of a crater and observed as they loaded the last section onto a carrier at the crater’s lip, above him. “When we’re done with this one, y’all can have a half-hour break. Chow’s inside entrance four.”
The Marines gave a half-hearted cheer and the one named McTear rested his hands on the nearby coil and pushed, his expression turning immediately into one of horror. “Shugart, get out of the way, it’s swinging wide!” But the warning came too late. The section was on its way down and started to rotate in the direction of another man, who stood on the edge of the flatbed. His back was to the coil, and he stared off with a blank expression as if he didn’t hear the shouts. “Get out of the way!”
Before it could strike him, the section’s straps snapped and the thing crashed against the edge of the carrier, catapulting the man, Shugart, twenty meters into the rubble. His officer, who had begun his way up the crater, stopped to look. Three coil sections tumbled off the carrier and slid down the sloping side of the pit in slow motion, rolling over him before they stopped with a groan. He never had time to even scream. A smear that looked like raspberry jam had been wiped against the glassy crater side, all that remained of the officer, a message spelled out in dead tissue, that war could touch you anywhere, anytime. Even the rear could be a dangerous place.
“Corpsman!” one of them yelled.
What would a corpsman do? I wondered, glancing at Megan. You could see she was thinking the same thing.
“Someone fucking do something. Goddamn it!” The Marine named McTear slid to the bottom of the crater and pulled at the edge of one of the pipes, a tiny pool of blood collecting next to his boots as Shugart stood to shake his head clear.
Someone said, “Get outta there, McTear; he’s gone. The coils might shift again.”
But none of the other Marines moved except for Shugart. He had finished dusting himself off and started sobbing. Eventually, after he dropped to his knees, a sergeant arrived and the men began the slow process of pulling out the sections, one by one until they reached the officer, who had been crushed so badly that all that remained was a pile of ceramic shards, meat, and intestines, collected in a pool of blood at the crater base. I zoomed into it, fascinated by the realization that on the inside we looked the same.
McTear saw me watching. “What the hell are you looking at?”
Then he threw up and my thoughts cleared. Some of these men cared about each other and couldn’t stomach death, especially not when it was one they knew. I wanted to see more, to stay there and hold hands with Megan, but the play faded, beyond my control, and I felt a sense of blind acceleration until another scene crystallized.
It was the first time we had seen real human cruelty. I don’t know why it affected me the way it did, but even Megan had trouble on that day.
“Jesus,” a Marine Lieutenant said, “look at that, Top. Bunch of animals.”
It had turned into a surreal morning for me, as soon as Megan and I came topside to
a clear day, in which the sky seemed a lazy blue. There were no contrails, no plasma bursts, and no whining APCs—just a breeze that teased one with the thought of unsuiting, so you could feel and smell what the world was really like, and it was so clear that if you zoomed far enough, you could almost imagine seeing the ruins of Pavlodar, thousands of kilometers away.
The lieutenant had called us up to join him and the Top Sergeant in an above-ground observation post, where the four of us now crouched in a shallow bunker, its thick ceramic walls capped with a three-foot concrete slab. A mound of rubble covered the position and narrow slits allowed us to see in every direction. After we waited for a few minutes, Megan cleared her throat to let them know we were there.
“Oh, hello ladies,” said the lieutenant, “glad you could join us.”
Megan asked, “You called for us, so what do you need?”
He motioned for his sergeant to move, so we could get closer to the vision slit. “Look out there, about eight hundred meters, eleven o’clock.”
I fingered the zoom controls and scanned the snow-covered fields, moving back and forth until I saw it. It took a moment for my goggles to autofocus, but when they did it took another for my mind to process what I saw, for the sight to register as something horrific, even for someone who didn’t fear dying. Megan tensed next to me.
“Well?” The lieutenant asked. There was laughter in his voice and the sergeant nearly shook with the trouble of controlling a giggle. “What do you see?”
At the enemy lines, Russians lifted four women in black undersuits, their arms and legs lashed around steel poles. Eight soldiers secured the poles with rubble and concrete and when they had finished, raised their arms, a single word drifting across no man’s land. “Pobieda!”
“The ones on the poles are our sisters,” Megan said. “Probably captured in our last action.”
“You don’t say,” said the lieutenant. “Wow.”
The sergeant burst out laughing. “Looks to me like they’re having a barbecue.”
“You want to call in the fire mission, ladies, or should I?” the lieutenant asked.
Megan keyed into tac-net. “Fire mission, pre-established coordinates zebra-seven-seven. Fire for effect.”
Thin wisps of smoke floated up under the girls, and we watched four separate sets of flame blossom. Within seconds, our sisters’ high-pitched screams echoed over the empty fields, forcing me to manually shut off helmet pickups. The artillery unit wasn’t far to our rear, and we felt the vibrations of our guns at about the same time we heard them, followed by the roaring containment shells. The Russians disappeared into their airlock. Our sisters kept writhing atop the poles until blue plasma enveloped them in a flash, blackening them into charred hulks.
“Check fire,” Megan whispered into her radio. “Is that all, Lieutenant?”
The two men looked at each other and the sergeant gave her a thumbs-up. “Man, they’re cold, L-T. Cold-ass bitches. They’ll wipe their own friends and then go on like nothing happened.”
“Yeah, Top,” said the lieutenant, “watch out for these ones.” He waited for a full minute, not looking at us before he waved Megan away. “OK,” he said, “that’s all.”
There my dreams ended. I felt a tingling on my skin, not in my dreams but for real, and a bright glow forced me to raise a hand to my eyes, the air suddenly colder than it should have been. Freezing. I remembered then, that I was on a train.
A few of the boys said something in Russian, which sounded like curses, and then the door to our car slammed shut, returning the warmth slowly.
“Easy, now,” a man said. I didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t want to pull my hand away because this wasn’t a boy’s voice; it was a man’s, a human’s. “We’re heading north now, back to Russia, where we can take care of your infections, try to save what’s left of your feet and legs.” The man touched me and I nearly screamed, wishing I had a knife to slam into his throat. My dreams had shown me everything—convinced me that for the rest of my life, whenever I encountered humans, they would die. It was a new kind of faith. But when I finally looked at him, my hatred softened, because if this was a human it was a type I had never seen before, one damaged and then redamaged, and a feeling crept in, one that almost never materialized: pity.
“Boys are in a good mood, I think.” The man’s left eye had gone almost white, its pupil more of a milky gray, and above and below it a long scar ran from the edge of his hair to his chin. The other side was worse. His good eye stared out from a pocket, around which the skin had melted into scar tissue so it looked as though someone had dropped a black marble into molten plastic, allowing the stuff to congeal around it. I let him work. The way he spoke, softly, and a glint from his good eye conveyed a sense of caring and suggested that he had found his vocation—that being a doctor was perfect for someone like him. Because he was so gentle.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“To me?” He wore a combat suit, the bulk of which made it hard to fit in the narrow space between bunk rows, forcing him to shift. “My face, you mean. Plasma. Now let’s have a look at those legs. Do they hurt?”
“When I move them.”
He lifted the blanket and spent a minute examining me, lowering the blanket softly once he’d finished. “They’re bad. Not as bad as some I’ve seen but we’ll have to get there quickly to save them.”
“Where?”
“Zeya,” he said. The boys who had been talking quietly hushed when they heard the name.
“Zeya?” one asked. He said something in Russian then and the doctor glared, silencing him with one look from that eye.
“Zeya.”
I shook my head, confused. “Where is Zeya, and what do you mean, ‘save them’? You can’t save my legs, they’re spoiling along with the rest of me.”
The doctor didn’t respond as he pulled out a box and opened it; the Russian medical kits were similar to ours, and I watched as a droplet of gray microbots disappeared into my arm to check blood pressure and take other readings, sending the data back to his suit.
“Zeya is where we take some of your kind, and we can save you, since it looks like you are an early model. Americans. Always the first, and look at you; you’re beautiful, almost perfect, and they overlook one basic feature.”
“I am perfect,” I said, “better than you. They call me the Little Murderer.”
“Ha!” He turned and spoke in Russian to the others, and the room erupted with laughter. The doctor must have seen my face because he raised both hands to surrender. “No, no, you misunderstand. They laugh because they like the name. In Russian, you are Malenkiy Ubitza; it’s a good name for a genetic soldier.”
“Then how am I not perfect?”
“You are as perfect as they could make you. Like my boys. But the early American models lack one important thing and I do not blame them, your creators, for their lack of foresight. I mean look what they accomplished anyway. Manufacturing a human being is no easy feat; one mistimed gene activation here and a minor mistake there, and boom, your liver grows too soon, too late, or worse, it grows right out of your forehead. No, your scientists, they did OK. The only thing they got wrong were the security features, which depend on your immune system failing at exactly the right time, when it stops telling the difference between foreign matter and your own tissue. You are a ticking immuno-bomb. That is why your flesh is dying. To add insult to injury, your immune system already destroyed the very thing that makes you fearless, perfect: your ability to block pain.”
“I know,” he went on, pulling the blanket up to my neck, “it sounds like there is no mistake but think; they didn’t take away your chromosomal repair genes. Every one of us normal humans has a set of genes whose job it is to identify and locate material that has, well… malfunctioned. So that the body can produce materials to repair the damage. A long time ago we figured out that a little dose of radiation activates these genes and the good news is that someone forgot this when they designed
you. So, boom. A little radiation, and your genes kick in and there you go, most everything back to normal. Your parents never accepted the fact that there is such a thing as a healthy dose of radiation, and that was their mistake, one that will save you—one that has already saved many of your kind.”
“Most everything?” I asked.
“Your mind is what it is, there’s nothing we can do for it except give you psycho-active drugs at Zeya. And your body, well, you’ll never be as good as you were, Ubitza, never the same. I’m sorry. But we have a surprise, one that will take your mind off things.” He clapped his hands and the boys stared, hanging on every Russian word he spoke, before the doctor turned back to pat my shoulder. “I can’t stay for this. It’s too grotesque, even for someone as ugly as me, but you’ll be fine in Zeya. Trust an old doctor.”
As soon as he left I closed my eyes again.
The anger forced tears, which rolled down the side of my face and onto the pillow. It wasn’t a surprise; what the doctor had told me I already suspected, even knew, but his confirmation made me realize that I didn’t just hate humans, I hated myself—for having been made. Perfection had never existed and it was true that my genes were flawed, that now I was worse than a nonbred; I was a defective who felt pain and shame, and death was once a welcome destination but now my fear of it intensified to a point where it forced me to grip the blankets as hard as I could, trying my best to ignore the fact that Megan was really gone, but worse, that maybe I didn’t want to join her. Hallucinations would come next. With no tranq tabs, time began to slip first as if gravity in the railcar had ceased to exist and once the sensation solidified to the point where I no longer heard the boys, one last thought occurred to me.
God had betrayed us both. Me and Megan.
“God doesn’t exist,” said our Special Forces advisor. Megan and the rest of us had been dropped into Mashhad to cover the highway north and prevent Iranian guerillas from infiltrating the city, where behind us, engineers had begun their work on widening the roads, preparing the way for a main advance into far-eastern Turkmenistan. They worked in the open, exposed, we as their only protection. The group of us had been flown in, in pairs, by carrier auto-drones that landed us along the road, which doubled as a runway so the aircraft could offload before self-destructing once we’d cleared. After the last one detonated, the night went still. It was summer and even without the sun, heat radiated from the road’s surface and gave the asphalt a gentle glow on thermal sensors so that it appeared to be magic, a white ribbon that stretched out forever; you wondered what lay at the end of the road, maybe some forgotten place with plenty of targets, untouched and pristine, so that I had to fight the urge to stand up and run toward them. As if reading my mind, Megan put her hand on my shoulder, pulling me back to reality. A hundred of us lay invisible in the sand on either side of the highway, forming a wide L-shaped ambush, where Megan and I rested at the corner, looking straight down the road.
Subterrene War 02: Exogene Page 9
