“Enemy spotted,” Megan whispered over the net. “Russian airlock located, point-two klicks to our front.”
We resumed our inching progress northward until Megan gave the signal to halt, and then passed another series of hand signals, ending it with one meant only for me. I thanked Him for the chance to kill, not doubting that I would succeed, and continued forward while everyone watched. It was better this way. An audience always made it more satisfying.
The Russians spoke loudly and you heard them laugh, comforting one with the realization that they wouldn’t be able to hear the scraping of a suit on concrete. They sounded happy. I reached a shallow defilade in front of their post, drew my knife, and tested its weight. A quick kill, I prayed, and faith, and then rolled into their position.
The knifepoint buried itself in the first Russian, who gasped and fell against the hole’s far side, almost ripping the blade from my grasp. The second one dropped a liquor bottle, too drunk to grab his carbine or call for help, so I snapped the knife into the man’s neck joint and slammed it in with the butt of my other hand.
“Clear,” I said, and collapsed on the ground, shaking.
There was blood. Even in darkness I saw the black pool spread across the snow, inching toward me, telling me to run. The thought snowballed. It became a voice, shouting to throw my weapons away and leap from the hole, sprint toward Shymkent and keep going south until I hit the water in Bandar, where I should dive in and swim. But Instead I sat there, paralyzed. By the time Megan peered over the lip of the hole, I had collected myself, not sure why the sight of blood had suddenly become a thing to fear, and rejoined the group, embarrassed that she had almost seen me frozen, could have mistaken it for what it was: an early onset of spoiling. Megan motioned for the rest of us to cross the last ten meters to the blockhouse, where we waited for our sapper to place a series of charges on the airlock door.
“Diane,” the man announced over the net; the Marines were about to attack.
Megan pressed her helmet against mine and whispered loudly.
“That hole was a mess. Death and faith, but you lose your touch, make it cleaner next time, efficient.” We felt the thuds of multiple explosions then, far beneath us, and Megan pointed at the sapper.
The airlock door blew inward and slammed against the far wall of the blockhouse, after which the girl slowly rose to inch her way in. A minute later she called over the net, “Inner door was unlocked. We’re clear.”
One of us, a replacement, stood quickly to rush forward.
“Stay down!” Megan yelled. In midstride the girl realized her mistake and stopped, but it was too late. Three sentry bots popped up and spat streams of flechettes, her helmet flying thirty meters when they chewed through the girl’s neck. Within moments the bots had retreated to their holes.
“Move in,” Megan ordered, her voice trembling with anger.
We crept toward the green light, and I crawled through a mass of tissue and blood from the girl who had just been killed, seeing the jagged shards of a spine. I hate you, I thought. For being so stupid, a stupid fucking cow who can’t make any more mistakes, and for being lucky that you don’t have to do this anymore…
“Come on, don’t be a stupid cow,” said Margaret, “Move. We only have six hours before day comes.”
Somehow I had gotten off the mountain. The narrow service road glistened in moonlight, its surface like a sheet of ice that had been frosted with fresh snow. We shuffled along, one of my arms draped over Margaret’s shoulder, and once I returned to the present, the haze shaken off, I let go of her, moving under my own power again.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“An hour. I thought tranq tabs would help with that.”
I grunted, not sure if I believed what I was about to say, or that I even had the strength to answer, but tried anyway. “I took it too late. And sometimes they just don’t work.”
“You know the way? Before you stopped talking you said ‘east on the service road’ But I’ve forgotten now.”
“Misha said to leave the road only when we see trees.” I gave her the details about Lev then, and the supplies. “We still have a chance.”
Margaret stared at me as we walked and jogged, saying nothing for a while before she touched my shoulder. “You were a Lily, weren’t you?”
I stopped. “Why would you say that?”
“Our hair grows because we let it. Want it. But not you, even with your scars, you shave your head, keep it clean and military. You take lives so easily.”
“I am not a Lily.” An anger came out of nowhere, all the hatred I had felt for so long awakening again and I slammed against her, throwing Margaret into the snowbank. “I am not a Lily.”
“I’m sorry, Murderer. But thank you.”
“For what?”
“For taking me with you.”
And we ran through the night. The cold bit through my leather shoes, reminding me of the pain I had once felt and making me wonder if I’d lose my toes again. But soon everything went numb. The cold bit so deeply that my teeth chattered no matter how hard I tried to clench them, and twice we had to hide while a truck passed, burying ourselves in a grave of ice and snow. Before long I lost consciousness in a way, the cold and exhaustion making everything disappear so that we almost missed it, the shapes rising in the moonlight, out of the darkness to our front.
“Trees?” Margaret asked.
“Trees.”
“We will be there soon?”
I glanced up at the sky, seeing the first signs of morning, a pink light forming over the mountains to the east, and nodded. “By midday. If we don’t freeze to death and if they haven’t already discovered Misha and the dead girls.”
Margaret leapt into the snow, her feet and legs sinking almost to her waist as she blazed the path, and I followed, hoping we’d make the treeline before another truck came. Once we passed the first birch we both laughed with relief.
“You said we’ll get there about midday,” said Margaret. “I’ll kill you if you’re wrong because I’m so fucking cold that I can’t shut my nerves down.”
I was too cold to talk. A log hut stood in a clearing ahead of us, reminding me of the farm in which Megan and I had found the murdered farmers, so that for a moment I was sure we would find Lev dead and hanging from the rafters—assuming this was even the right place. Smoke billowed from the hut’s chimney. A bundle of wires ran down one corner of the structure, a sign that we hadn’t stepped back in time three hundred years, that the hut had at least some modern features, but the energy it required to process the thought nearly made me drop; winter’s winds had been too hard. Margaret showed no sign of any similar deterioration and even looked at me with a grin as a wave of dizziness hit, making me stumble. She grabbed me before I fell.
“Are you all right?”
But I had no breath, couldn’t seem to piece together a sentence to answer her. Margaret looped my arm over her shoulder and dragged me to the hut’s front door, pounding on it with a free hand until an old man opened it.
“What?” When he realized what we were his eyes went wide. “You! Dear God, now I understand why Misha sent armor and supplies, and to think I was about to send them back. Come in, come in.”
Margaret ushered me through and the man shut the door behind us, blocking the cold. A fire burned in a woodstove. Compared to outside the air in the small room seemed tropical, and I collapsed on the floor with exhaustion, curling into a ball to shake while he knelt by me and shone a light in first one eye, then the other, before disappearing into a side room and returning with a blanket. He threw it across my back.
“Your friend is in bad shape,” the man said to Margaret. “Is she first generation?”
She nodded.
“What are you?”
“Second.”
“My God,” the man repeated, “what a treat! I’ve never seen one up close. So you still have much of your genetic material intact, ability to control pain, blood loss, all the
normal functions, and she”—he pointed at me with a thumb—”is more or less like me now.”
“She is a Li—she is still fearless. Catherine is a killer. I am Margaret.”
I did my best to control my teeth from chattering as I spoke. “A-a-are you L-L-Lev? Misha told us you were a g-g-genetic, a boy like him.”
The man clapped his hands. Instead of a uniform he wore a wool sweater and tweed jacket, a pipe hooked from the left side of his mouth, and the pure white of his beard reminded me of the snow we had just escaped. He nodded at my question but then pulled the pipe from his mouth, speaking for the first time in English.
“Yes and no. I’m Lev to the Russian genetics. They are allowed to speak to me over the com lines but not to visit, and the Army tells them I am a genetic, the fulfillment of their promise to provide the boys with their own land one day. I’m a lie.”
“Who are you, really?” asked Margaret.
“I’m Vince. Doctor Vincent Sleschinger. One of the first Germline designers, but that was almost thirty years ago; I was much younger then. My God, do you think I could take a tissue sample from both of you? You are the true pharmacons, the precursor of exogene and everything that stems from it. They won’t let me near any Germline units—security or something. In fact after I gave them my data on our first generation, they put me out here. There’s Russian gratitude for you. I must remember to thank Misha, send him something nice from my workshop.”
“Misha is dead,” I said, “I killed him. You designed us?”
The man shook his head. His smile faded and he moved toward what looked like a small kitchen, to sit on a tall stool. “Not you. The boys, the first generation that failed. I designed them, the ones who turned on their handlers and massacred an entire company of Marines in Iran, or was it Special Forces in Thailand? Who cares? It was spectacular as far as failures go, you should have seen the aftermath of the fight, where my boys had waded in to kill the men by hand, not stopping even when nobody remained to fight so that my sons battled the human corpses, ripping them to pieces. But what does the military do? Shit-canned. Kicked me to the street along with a do-not-hire sign around my neck so it wasn’t long before I became desperate for money. I left America and worked my way to eastern Europe, where I ran into some very interested buyers and voilà. Zeya has been my home ever since. I was the one who suggested a simple fix for the aggression: snip off the boy’s balls.”
As soon as he stopped talking, the feeling from my extremities returned, forcing me to scream. Margaret dropped to my side. My feet felt as though they had caught fire and a sense of panic rose in my chest as I scrambled to pull off the blanket and then my shoes, convinced that all ten toes had already turned black. They were bone white. Vince came over and squatted, then poked at them with the tip of his pen, watching over a pair of glasses.
“Blood flow is returning to normal, but barely. You were close, Catherine. It’s a good thing you found me when you did.” He pulled at the makeshift bandage then, which had soaked with blood, and checked the knife wound on my side. Vince reached toward his belt. He pulled out a medical kit and told Margaret to hold the wound closed before he sprayed it with an antibiotic adhesive, adding to my pain, to the burning. Vince tried to hide something then but I saw: he pushed what looked like a swab, its tip red with my blood, into the kit and then reattached the kit to his belt.
I screamed again and grabbed Vince’s arm. “Armor and supplies. Where are they?”
“They’re in the back, but I’ll need help, I’m not young anymore, Catherine.”
I didn’t trust him. The man hadn’t stopped smiling since we arrived, and there was a look about him, a kind of hunger that spoke of men I had seen before—of Alderson. Margaret followed him through a small door at the back of the hut and then disappeared, leaving me to the sounds of the hut and the wind; I was about to shut my eyes when I noticed a kind of scratching sound. It came from the kitchen. I threw the blanket off and stood carefully so my wound wouldn’t reopen and shuffled closer to the noise, which came in bursts and at first was difficult to locate. I looked in every drawer, every cabinet, taking the time to do it noiselessly so that almost five minutes elapsed before I stumbled upon the sound’s source under the sink: a radio headset. Even though there was no sign of a receiver, it was there, relaying to the tiny speakers, which mumbled for a moment and then scratched with static. I picked the headset and wrapped it around my ears to hear Russian.
“Keep them there, Doctor. We’re on our way, please respond.”
“Understood,” I said, trying to make my voice deep, and the other end went quiet.
“You discovered my secret,” said Vince.
I spun to find him standing in the doorway, still smiling, an aeroinjector grasped tightly in his right fist.
“You were careless,” I said, moving a hand into my pocket until it touched the knife.
“In this case, their distrust of me, a foreigner, worked to your advantage. Misha never told me why he sent supplies, and the Russian forces never told me that you had escaped so I didn’t know anything until you knocked on my door. There wasn’t much time to radio that I had visitors. You were lucky, but it’s over, Catherine. Lay down and let it all happen now. Rest.”
My next moves had already been mapped, preordained, and there was no need to plan or prepare, the only sensation a familiar hatred that invigorated me. This was Alderson. It didn’t matter that his name was Vincent, didn’t confuse me in the least, because they were both motivated by curiosity, saw us as something to own and use, to vivisect.
“Where is Margaret?” I asked.
“She’s resting already.” He held up the injector. “A kind of sedative, one I’ve developed to counteract the biochemistry of Germline defenses. When fully functional, you were a masterpiece. Almost nothing chemical or biological would get through except for my little cocktail, and you could never imagine the amount of work it took to formulate, how many girls died when the Russians tested different versions for me. But I have no idea what it will do to a first-generation girl. You should just give up. How can you fight on when you have none of the benefits of being a genetic, and most of the disadvantages of a human?”
He didn’t wait for my answer. Vince’s courage surprised me—or maybe it was that I still suffered from blood loss and the cold—because he ran forward with the aeroinjector extended in front of him, and almost slammed the thing into my chest. I spun to the side, slicing downward. The knife struck his outstretched arm with a loud smack, digging into his bone, and the aeroinjector clattered to the floor. He dove for it. Vince had wrapped his left hand around the thing and was about to turn for another try when I threw the knife as hard as I could, burying it in his chest. He slid to the floor, his back against the wall, and looked first at the knife and then up at me with a horrified expression.
“Why don’t you give up, Catherine?”
I shook my head. “Because I think there is one more thing to accomplish. I don’t know what it is, but if it gives me more chances to kill men like you, it must be good.”
“Take me with you,” he whispered, too delirious to understand anything. “I want to watch.”
I kicked the aeroinjector from his hand and leaned over to grab the knife. The hallucination came at the same time. I had just pulled the blade out and slammed it into his neck when everything went blank a second later.
“Germline units don’t take prisoners, do they?” he had asked before dying.
We never took prisoners. On our way northward through Iran a Guard unit had surrendered to us en masse, and they stood there with their hands up, weapons on the ground, all of them with looks of uncertainty and fear. On the beaches we had thought them brave; the Iranians had no combat armor, and I recall being taught that once most of the oil had gone, their forces suffered from a lack of money, a lack of discipline, but had a faith in God that matched ours—a fundamental belief that dying in the face of our advance would ensure them a place in heaven. So they fough
t. Neither Megan nor I had yet fired a shot in anger since our first landing, having only just moved off the shore, and the Iranian’s surrender made me feel sad that the battle had ended before it began. Maybe these men were not so brave.
Our human advisor spoke Farsi, and approached them. After a few words, he turned to one of the Lilies from a different unit and sketched an imaginary plan into the palm of his gauntlet.
“We can hold them here until our main forces catch up to the advance. Can you spare a hundred of your girls to guard?”
Her voice sounded cold over the helmet speakers. “No.”
“What?”
“It’s not in your original orders,” she explained.
The man must not have understood, and scratched his bare head as the morning sun turned the horizon wavy. “So? Adapt and improvise. Prisoners are a good thing, they can provide intelligence on enemy plans and defenses.”
“Our orders are to advance and secure the border before halting. They die here.” She motioned to the rest of us. “Faith.”
We opened fire. The Iranians realized immediately what was happening, and most tried to run. Some dove for their weapons.
Our advisor crouched to avoid the fire and began speaking excitedly, forgetting to switch into command net so that we all heard him on the radio.
“Fox-Seven, Mango-One.”
“Fox-Seven,” a voice answered.
“Get command, I need orders for my girls to hold the Iranian prisoners here. Alive.”
“Hold.”
The radio went silent for a few minutes, and we began moving forward again, chasing the ones who had run. I felt depressed. This was like killing animals, unfulfilling and without honor, especially when it came to the ones who fell to their knees and begged, throwing their hands up in supplication.
Subterrene War 02: Exogene Page 16
