Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  We walked back to the main advance-force, our unit missing three girls—three who had been unlucky enough to encounter a Turkmeni anti-aircraft unit. Nobody had seen them. The men had used the hulk of a burned-out bus to conceal both their thermal signatures and an ancient auto-cannon whose chemical rounds—forty-millimeter shells—ripped the air, smashed through the girls’ ceramic armor, and shattered bones before the rounds exited the other side. The gunner walked his shells across our line. He started with the closest girl and took out two more before we slaughtered him and his loaders in place, leaving our dead where they lay. There was never a burial for the dead; we said thank-you and smiled, for they had been given a gift and we had to move out. In the wake of the battle came a quiet day, and while we pushed forward over a semi-arid landscape, scrub plants dotting it with patches of green, it had seemed there was no war, that with the exception of us and an occasional rabbit nothing else existed and that the target village was still too far to even imagine let alone see, and so might have vanished into thin air.

  What remained of our patrol assignment passed uneventfully when after another hour we reached our destination, a blurred scene of moving through the village—a house by house clearing operation in which one door seemed like the next, one wall an exact duplicate of the thousands we had broken through already, so that the only difference between this and Mashhad, Bandar, or any other town were its inhabitants. The women threw themselves at us with knives, which, in retrospect seemed more brave than stupid. Staying there had been their end. Then again, running after we arrived would have done no good, and if knives were their only weapons then they honored us with a kind of ferocity that I guessed grew from instinct: self-preservation and protecting their young. I killed as many as I could by hand, not wanting to cheapen their bravery with the use of flechettes when so many of them had earned a more honorable ending. Our clearing action took less than an hour. After we finished, we shouldered our weapons and headed south again, into the sun and for our main force, satisfied that no armored units or heavy weapons waited in ambush along our path. Three girls short.

  The advance-column waited for us at Tejen, in a part of Turkmenistan we controlled, and the engines from thousands of tanks and APCs rumbled as they sat in the fading light, their exhaust turning the sky over town a dirty gray. We crouched by the roadside to wait. Soon our APC would pull alongside and we’d join the column at nightfall for the next phase of the push, soon we would be in combat again, maybe this time against more worthy opponents.

  Megan pulled off her helmet. “I like this climate.”

  “You take a risk,” I said, pointing to her helmet, “with no thermal block.”

  “Risk?” One of the other girls, Jennifer, removed hers so I saw her face; it had turned red. “Who are you to mention risk? I saw you in the village, with your hands. Any one of us could have been compromised by the chances you took. Everyone else uses their weapons but Catherine? She snaps necks instead, crushes throats.”

  “They had no weapons other than knives,” I explained.

  “How did you know that? Could you have been sure? What if in the time it took you to dispatch one, another had risen with a grenade launcher? What then? We’d all die, that’s what would have happened.”

  The rest of the girls watched, and I imagined what they were thinking because I thought it too, that this was interesting, the dialogue leading to an event we had been trained to cope with but hadn’t yet faced.

  “You are spoiling,” I said. “And we haven’t been on the field for even a few months yet. Curious.”

  Some of the others laughed while color drained from Jennifer’s face. She looked to Megan. “I am not spoiling. I don’t fear anything.”

  Megan shrugged. “Then Catherine is wrong. Explain it to me.”

  “It’s a question of numbers, Megan. Our mission is to conquer the enemy without taking too many losses; to remain combat effective and still take the objective.”

  Nobody laughed now. The sounds of engines surrounded us, but it may as well have been silent because we had become so focused on what would happen next.

  “Who,” asked Megan, “gave you the job of understanding our mission? Our mission is to die on the field, and to take as many men with us as possible. And who gave you the task to judge Catherine?”

  “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” someone said. “Catherine kills without mercy. Catherine kills in ways we, her sisters, have not yet mastered.”

  Jennifer gripped her helmet with both hands, holding it up to her chest. “I did not mean anything by it, my Lily. It’s just that—”

  Before she could finish Megan slammed the butt of her carbine into Jennifer’s face and then spun the weapon in midair, firing point blank until the girl slumped to the ground dead. Megan gestured to me—that I should get rid of her. I grabbed Jennifer under the shoulders and dragged her into a nearby ditch where she slid to the bottom, her face gone, riddled with so many flechettes that I could only guess at where her eyes had once been. When I returned Megan smiled.

  “She wasn’t spoiling; this was something worse. Jennifer must have been defective but slipped through the final test.”

  And they all cheered. In less than a second the girls gathered around me, slapping me on the back and everyone speaking at once so that I barely picked out the requests for training, to show them how I had learned to snap necks so easily, and how was it that God had granted me the gift of mercilessness? We all had the same training in the tank. Where had I learned these methods? I was about to try to answer at least some of the questions when I noticed Megan cock her head, listening to her radio, the smile gone from her face.

  She motioned for everyone to be quiet and looked at me. “They want you in the rear. Now.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The men in white.”

  “But why so soon and after such a timid engagement?”

  Megan shrugged. “We don’t ask these questions.”

  “Megan,” someone said, “will we advance without Catherine? We can’t go into combat without her.”

  Megan didn’t answer. I pulled my helmet off to smell the fumes of unburned alcohol leaking from a nearby engine, and water vapor exhaust gave the atmosphere a moist, tropical feeling as I shouldered my way through the girls. Some of them muttered apologies for my fate—not that I was going to see the white-coats, but that I might miss the coming battle. My morale sunk. My hatred of men, especially the scientists, leapt in response as if the sudden depression fed it, and by the time I found myself in the midst of the main column I barely saw the vehicles, didn’t register the faces of girls from other units, because all I could think of was killing. Alderson wasn’t just a coward anymore. He was robbing me of purpose, shaming me by refusing to let me advance with family into the next battle.

  In the rear of the column waited a caravan of trucks, huge alcohol-burning tankers and behind them equally large prime-movers towing trailers. A line of Special Forces saw me coming and opened to let me pass. The trailers bristled with antennae and communications dishes, and once past the guards I found myself in a sea of white coats where two Special Forces joined me, grabbed each arm, took my weapon, and escorted me into a trailer toward the rear. They expected trouble. A third one walked directly behind us, his flechette pistol drawn and pointed directly at the back of my head as they pushed me through a metal door and into a narrow hallway, two of them in the front now and the pistol-armed one in the rear.

  Alderson waited in a room off the side of the main hallway, tapping a small table. “Undress,” he said.

  “I have to return to my unit.”

  “Not right now you don’t. We need you here.”

  “For what?” I asked. “To observe your cowardice? To watch you shake, hear you wonder out loud if our drones will be enough to keep enemy aircraft away? The air is braver than you are, Alderson.”

  “Undress.”

  I did as he asked and a nurse came into the room, wi
ping me down with alcohol and peroxide. She then shaved my head until it was perfectly smooth again, and wiped it down too, the alcohol evaporating so that I had to will my body to warm itself because even the carpet felt cold under my toes.

  “Follow me.”

  Alderson and the soldiers led me from the small office into a white room, its walls and ceilings covered with a seamless ceramic material, polished, in the middle of which rested an operating table with nylon restraints. Machines surrounded the table. At one end, near what looked like a headrest, a medical bot rose from the floor. It was a metallic cylinder with sensors that resembled a snail’s eyestalks and retractable arms, the ends of which were hidden by red plastic stenciled with the words S TERILe—OPEN BEFORE USE. I lay on the table without being told to and allowed the men to strap me down.

  “I need you to prepare yourself,” Alderson said, “for a procedure. It will be painful, even with your ability to block nerve impulses.”

  The straps pinned me to the operating table, and air handlers sent a warm breeze across my naked chest and legs, next to which Alderson stood, his white coat buttoned to the neck, a surgical mask positioned over his nose and mouth. I hadn’t noticed the window. Either that or I somehow missed the fact that a thin ceramic panel must have initially covered it, the panel now receding downward into the wall to expose glass, behind which another group of men in white coats waited. Watching.

  “What procedure?” I asked.

  “We need you for an experiment. If it works, your mind will synch with a new armor system under development, and it will put us years ahead of Russia in weapons development.”

  I smiled. “My history lessons were complete enough that I know this is illegal, Alderson. The Supreme Court ruled on cybernetic issues over ten years ago.”

  “The joining of human and machines, yes. But you’re not human.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” I asked.

  “Then you die in glory. The Atelier Mothers have ruled that this is a battlefield sacrifice, one granting entry to the Kingdom, Catherine.”

  “And if it works?”

  “Then you also die in glory. It’s a test, nothing more, and once we get our data you will be discharged. Does this bother you?”

  I felt a flutter in my chest, maybe the first sign of fear, but then thought of Jennifer. “I am not weak, like you.”

  “Fine.” Alderson reached over and began pulling the bags off the med-bot’s arms, but a knock from the window stopped him. I turned my head. Beyond the glass stood a general, a Marine, so short that he barely reached the chin of the next shortest man, and his face was pudgy in an angry kind of way. He glared at Alderson and gestured with a finger, mouthing two words silently around his cigar. Come here. I had never met one of the generals before but the black bands around his shoulder-boards meant the man was one of the supreme commanders, in charge of special units, in charge of me and my family. Once Alderson disappeared into the next room, the general winked at me before stepping out of view; I almost liked the man.

  Alderson returned a moment later.

  “Let her go,” he said to the Special Forces escort. The men took off their white aprons and refitted with weapons before pulling my straps loose.

  “Get her dressed then send her back to her unit; the push is on in an hour.” Alderson paused to glare at me. “They’ve been monitoring you, Catherine. General Urqhart said to tell you to keep, and I quote, ‘fucking these bastards, hard, like a bitch in heat.’ He thinks you’re special.”

  Once free, I swung from the table and spat on Alderson, before allowing the men to push me toward the door. “Maybe he is something you will never be. A warrior.”

  “Other countries will beat us to it,” Alderson called through the door after me, “the Chinese or the Russians. Soon we’ll face things you’ve never dreamed of, half human, half machine, and all this means is that I have to pick another girl. One that isn’t so popular with Command.”

  “Alderson was right, you know,” my bunkmate said. He sucked on the last bits of a cigarette and stubbed it out while the other boys nodded. “The last wars, the ones in Asia, didn’t totally exterminate the Chinese, despite Korean and Japanese attempts; they retreated underground to prepare for a return. We hear the same stories you do. And the Chinese don’t share American concerns about law and machine.”

  “Then again, neither do we,” added another boy. “We’re almost in Zeya now. We should sleep.”

  The others moved through the aisle to get back into their bunks while the car lamps snuffed out simultaneously, and then, one at a time, their cigarettes went dark.

  “What will happen to me in Zeya?” I asked my bunkmate.

  “You will be treated like the others. Given a choice.”

  “A choice for what?”

  “To work in the mines or farms or factories, deep underground, or to join with Russian forces and earn the chance for revenge against the men who hunted you. Good night, Ubitza.”

  Soon, everyone slept. Megan’s face appeared every time I closed my eyes, her short hair moving in the wind and her smile visible even at night, in the darkness by the river where they took her. I cried, not even noticing the intensifying pain from my feet.

  FIVE

  Outcast

  The spoiled are cursed. Their lives become those of bondwomen, slaves, bound unto God but without His grace.

  MODERN COMBAT MANUAL JOSHUA 9:23

  The doors on either end of the car opened with bangs, and men filled the car in an instant, their voices calm, almost a whisper, Russian words spilling into the aisle in a slurred string of meaningless vowels. They carried the boys out, one by one. Eventually, hands grabbed me by the shoulders and knees, lifting me gently onto a stretcher and shuffling me into the light.

  It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The sounds of shouting strained my ears and stabbing cold whipped around the stretcher, forcing me to curl into a ball and pull the blanket around as tightly as possible, until finally my eyes opened in slits. Zeya, an alleged city, was nothing. Snow covered every structure, and here, there, small chimneys poked through drifts, sending gray smoke into the sky where it blended with the clouds and sucked up flakes from a light flurry. The few tall buildings left stood empty; their steel frames had bent and a clear crust covered them, forming long icicles which pointed toward the ground and threatened to fall. Military history, forced into my brain in the tank, burst out, streaming facts about an older war with China; chemicals, plasma, biologicals: all dropped more than two decades previously and still the area hadn’t rebuilt. War upon war, I thought. Why rebuild when another war, this one to the south, could ruin everything again? Experience gave me its own lessons—more effective today because I lived them instead of being force-fed in the tank. Beyond the snow fields, forest bordered the city on all sides, giving the feeling that nature had surrounded it, waiting for the right moment to attack and take back what it owned.

  The men took me to a waiting truck and slid me into a rack under four other boys. I grunted with the jolt, my feet screaming about their death.

  “Easy times ahead, Ubitza,” said my bunkmate, who rested in a stretcher opposite me. “But you’ll need to learn Russian.”

  “Easy times for who?” I asked.

  The truck’s door slammed shut, just before it jumped forward, a bumpy road making it an uncomfortable ride so that each jolt sent a wave of pain. My bunkmate grunted.

  “Easy for everyone. We get to live in Siberia, you get to return to the war or work in the mines or underground factories. Mines aren’t so bad. Russia has a history of sending broken toys into its mines. But the factories… they’re better.”

  Everyone laughed at that. I glanced down at my feet, which poked out from under the blanket, and saw the black flesh had crept upward from my toes, halfway to my ankles.

  “How can I return to war with no feet? Even if the treatment works, they’ll have to be taken off.”

  The boy turned his head and lit two
cigarettes, handing one to me. “Zeya is the place of our birth. Research is here, Ubitza. There are rumors. We can take off your feet, and replace them with new ones—”

  “Of a sort,” someone interrupted, and again the laughter.

  My bunkmate went on. “Even a kind of new body. Hardwired to your armor. Think of it. A new Ubitza, flechette proof, able to fire missiles with a thought, not a button. Vials of drugs continuously streaming in, no need for tablets anymore. All the drugs you want or need.”

  Need. Already I felt the terror return, nibbling at the edges of my brain along with the memory of Megan—twin rats that fed and fed. They needed to be put down, put to sleep. I needed drugs. Now.

  “It’s just a rumor,” someone said. Already the truck had filled with smoke, but I pulled on my cigarette, the only drug I had, and listened. “I heard another one. That the experiments have gone nowhere, the subjects having to be put down or killing themselves with impulses that trigger a servo, send a powered limb too far too fast, ripping the brave volunteer to pieces without meaning to.”

  “Death is death,” said my bunkmate. “And testing is part of war. It is a glorious way to die, being ripped apart, I think. Quiet now, Ubitza, we reach the center in half an hour. Under the mountains outside Zeya where we’ll be safe and warm, underground again.”

  The Russians had brought me underground; you sensed the moisture, detected the kind of echo that only came from having solid rock on all sides, the protection of earth and mineral. Two men carried me through a narrow tunnel, and then past a doorway and into an open area where I could see again.

  The chamber was so large that I had trouble finding the roof, which arched overhead at least a hundred meters away, a honeycombed network of concrete and steel set to reinforce it. Tiny pinpoints of light made me blink. Thousands of them stared down at me as if little stars had been set in the concrete to wink and fill the area with a warm yellow glow. And there was warmth. Loads of it. Space heaters along the edges groaned and creaked with their thermal load, blasting the area with waves of air that smelled of ozone. Finally the men dumped my stretcher on a table, and I realized that the underground chamber was packed with operating gurneys, and between them medical bots, which swayed on their pedestals like mobile willow trees, half sentient. Their arms darted down and then flicked up again, a suture here and there, sewing up some boy or man who had been strapped in place, immobilized and anesthetized. Another one swayed over its subject, two arms peeling away skin that had been charred black and red, while a doctor stood by, dressed from head to toe in light green plastic. Someone screamed.