Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  Yoon-sung slept in a tight space next to me, a wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders and her head resting on her vision hood. I still couldn’t read her face. What dreams did she have? Did the dead, even the deformed genetic we had killed in the woods that day, did they visit in nightmares? Whatever friendship we once had, a solid structure that had been based on the common hardships of the forest and starvation, now seemed more like it was of sticks, suggesting that for her part it had been even less, a straw man; not only was there no guarantee that she or her leaders wouldn’t sacrifice us, there was a likelihood that this, in fact, was the plan all along. The path was clear. We still had Chinese-captured territories to negotiate, and passage may still have to be purchased through the sale of Margaret and me. I searched for my hatred. It should have been there, and not finding it frustrated me to the point where tears began rolling down my cheeks, until there was no place left to search because this wasn’t a time for hatred anyway. The only thing for this was calculus. Moving on from their camp had been the right decision, and things would need to be patched up between me and Margaret because now I suspected that whatever it was that had come between us, Yoon-sung was behind it. She had begun spending more time with Margaret than me. Both of them spoke Korean. In the last month, Margaret had begun referring to the possibility that she might stay with the North Koreans, make Chegdomyn her home, where she was seen as a valued asset and rising star now that she had clawed her way from the trees. Calling her a valued asset was probably true on the part of the Koreans; to them, Margaret was valued. But valued for what? The irony was that she’d be safer once we crossed the border and moved into the contaminated remnants of North Korea, because there Yoon-sung couldn’t trade her to the Chinese.

  I piped the forward view from the turret into the closest screen and watched, keeping my peripheral vision on the detector panel. The night slid by in white and black. A hundred meters in front of us, the rear of another scout car bounced over the tracks and I wondered who was in it. Chinese? Things had moved so quickly that there hadn’t been time to get a sense of the scouting unit, and no briefing to speak of concerning specificities, of how to handle the mission and who would do exactly what. Manning the detectors didn’t matter for the moment and I moved into the turret, zooming into the scout car’s rear, examining it for anything that might reveal its occupants’ identity. It was as if a voice whispered in my ear, conveying a message of danger that convinced my fingers to pressure the firing controls, lasing the distance to the car and preparing to shoot. Someone popped out of the hatch. The helmet hid their features, but they were clearly distressed and holding up their hands as if to ask what the hell was I doing. I pulled my fingers off the twin triggers. It seemed to satisfy whoever it was, and the person popped back into the car, their hatch swinging shut.

  “Are you OK?” Margaret asked, speaking English for the first time in months.

  “I’m glad you’re awake.”

  “Why are you in the turret, is something wrong?”

  “I’m not myself. I want to cross the border, Margaret, and get to where we’re going. But to do that we have to carry out His will.”

  Looking up, she sat as best she could below me. “I don’t know what we were meant to do.”

  “You were not meant to have sex for food.”

  “She told you?” Margaret’s tattoos converged when she frowned but she didn’t look away. “I am not happy with how things turned out either.”

  “You needed to eat and I understand because look at us. We’re barely alive. Starvation effects judgment.”

  Now Margaret started crying again and I fixed my attention back on the view-screen, giving her time to think.

  “They shot children,” she finally said, “at the station? You saw it?”

  “Yes. But I shot children too, early in the war. Do you remember what it was like, when you were first given duty on the line?”

  Margaret nodded. “I killed for the sake of killing. It was my duty.”

  “It was your duty. And the children of Khabarovsk were just children, and now they have no cares—all the dead ones are free, for that matter—and are seated next to God. Now your duty is to keep going until you find the answer.”

  “What answer?” Margaret asked. She moved to wipe away the tears before realizing that earlier she had fallen asleep with her helmet on and now couldn’t reach her face.

  “Your answer, Margaret. The answer to the question, ‘who do you want to be?’ ” I tossed the pistol back to her, and she stared at it for a moment before tucking it back into its holster.

  Margaret glanced at Yoon-sung then and motioned for me to put my helmet on. Once I had, she clicked into the intercom. “Yoon-sung told me I should whore myself. For food. I told her that I was hungry one day, and that was her suggestion, but despite the way it made me feel in Russia, I did it anyway because she made it sound so simple. Like it was normal. And for the past few weeks she’s been telling me you were crazy. Too crazy to follow, and crazy enough that we might have to get rid of you someday.”

  “She said the same about you.”

  “What do we do, Murderer? I don’t trust anyone anymore, and these people hug the Chinese as if they were family. I’ve seen humans. Humans don’t smile after they see children shot. Yoon-sung isn’t who we believed her to be, she would be happy to trade us, and we can’t ignore the fact that she betrayed her own mother to her government. This woman is a monster.”

  I thought for a moment, forming the first part of a plan, but the entirety of it wouldn’t crystallize. “Do you know who is in the rest of the unit, the other cars?”

  “Yoon-sung told me,” she said. “A couple of men from our logging unit and the rest are a mixture of soldiers who remained loyal during the coup.” She ran through the names and I recognized a few, but most were unknowns.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Margaret.

  I shook my head. “I’m not thinking anymore, that time is over. Just don’t speak and do everything I tell you. Faith.”

  Margaret’s eyes went wide at the word, but it had the intended effect. There was a spark there now. I lowered myself from the turret and crawled to Yoon-sung, where I yanked the vision hood from under her head, ripping the wires from her suit and sending the woman’s head to bang against the ceramic floor. She woke cursing. Once her eyes opened fully, I slid my knife from its sheath and placed the tip against her throat.

  “Margaret,” I said, “get in the turret. Jack your helmet in so you have full weapons control.” I smiled at Yoon-sung and moved my faceplate to within an inch of her nose. “Not the wake-up you intended, Yoon-sung?”

  “What are you doing?” She tried to look past me, for anything that might help, but before she could move I lifted the knife and jabbed it downward, piercing one of Yoon-sung’s eyes; it took a second for her nerves to react, to send the message to her brain that something horrific had just occurred. A second later she screamed.

  “Hush,” I said, “you still have one eye and it’s not that bad. Chuche, or soup, Yoon-sung, that’s what you should be thinking right now.”

  “What do you want?”

  “How much is an American genetic worth?” I asked. Yoon-sung was in so much pain that I had to slap her, to remind her that I was there and could take the other eye in an instant. “How much?”

  “You are worthless. Margaret is worth quite a bit more.”

  “Worth more to who? The Chinese?” After she nodded I went on. “And what about me?”

  “We were going to let you go, to the south if you lived. The Chinese already have first-generation Germlines, but nothing of generation two and know that the Russians have several. They fear that it gives Moscow an advantage. It would be easier to do it this way, to pretend the Chinese had set up a routine border inspection and let them handle it themselves; they were to kill you if you tried to stop it. Some of us wanted to do it in Khabarovsk, but you might have damaged too many people there since you were on turret
duty, maybe even destroyed the train itself.”

  I inserted the tip of the knife under her chin, cutting it so the blood flowed over the fingers of my left gauntlet, making my grip more slippery. She screamed again and I shifted, placing a knee on her chest before pulling the knife free.

  “You lie. I was never going to see North Korea, and you would have either traded me or killed me. Why don’t you want us to see North Korea?”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I swear. Na-yung told me specifically to make sure you reached North Korea, that someone would be there to take you—but not the Chinese. She had sold information to someone, someone who knew that a Germline One named Catherine had been in Zeya and escaped, but even I was kept from the details. I swear.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean? You know who I am.”

  “I mean you speak many languages. They chose you to handle us, back in Chegdomyn. You translated for our hearings, and escorted us to dinner with Na-yung, knew exactly when to answer, when not to. No logger has that much intimate knowledge of the ruling cadre. So who are you, really?” I placed the knife tip under her good eye as a reminder.

  “I am Chu Yoon-sung. Minister of Public Security. Na-yung wanted to learn everything she could about you before making any decisions, and couldn’t trust this to my subordinates, could only trust me.”

  “So you’re the head of Na-yung’s spy organization?”

  She nodded again, the lid of her good eye beginning to flicker, and I realized she was about to pass out. “Why do the Chinese need Russian civilians?”

  “To repair genetic damage caused over the years. The Chinese had to survive after the war with a population reduced to almost nothing. They cloned themselves, underground, but the process was imperfect and now they need genetic material so they can inject more diversity into their population. Russian tissue will be like a genetic map back to civilization. They will also harvest the prisoners’ organs to replace those of wounded Chinese troops; with the proper immunosuppressants, it’s quicker and cheaper than growing new ones.”

  “Last question. Exactly how many reserves are in the last two cars, and what are they armed with?”

  “There aren’t any reserve troops in the rear; that car was reserved for the Russian prisoners.”

  “Thank you, Yoon-sung. That was well done.” I snapped her neck then, the same way I had snapped General Kim’s.

  The enormity of her plans made me sit. I rested my back against the bulkhead, trying to absorb what we had just learned. Margaret said something to me but the words didn’t penetrate my thoughts, which now swam in a sea of possibilities, its current flowing around us as the scout car crawled southward to bring us closer to whatever Yoon-sung had planned. Dealing with the North Koreans in the forward scout cars wasn’t the issue, and eliminating that threat would be simple. I worked it out in less than a minute. The Chinese forces were the thing to worry about and there was no choice but to assume that what Yoon-sung had said, that they would take Margaret at the North Korean border, was true. There was something to admire in the scheme. This was a plan that should have worked, except that the North Koreans failed to consider our abilities to calculate and form our own plans, and I supposed that Yoon-sung had made a mistake, thought Margaret the greater threat and that I really was insane—incapable of sound judgment. The spoiling, in a way, had saved us both. But there was one variable I couldn’t define, and it brought back the memory of the general, the one who had winked before stopping Alderson’s experiments. Who would have paid for information about me? And would Americans be waiting in North Korea?

  I glanced up at Margaret. “I need to know how far behind the train is; can you see it?”

  Margaret punched at the small computer beside her and then looked down. “I can’t see it through the trees. But it’s about four kilometers to our rear.”

  “Get down here into the driver’s seat and slow to ten kilometers an hour.”

  Margaret moved quickly, not even pausing at the sight of Yoon-sung’s body, and she moved the corpse out of the way, folding down the driver’s seat. As soon as the car started to slow, I clicked into the general frequency before I remembered one problem.

  “Wait, lock the car into auto.” When she had, I pulled Margaret’s hood over her head, making sure the headset speakers were on her ears. “I forgot I don’t speak Korean. Tell everyone we have a problem with defensive systems, and that they should slow down to our speed. But tell them we don’t need help; Yoon-sung is climbing out to fix it.”

  She did, and then slipped the headset off to look at me. “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “Getting rid of this bitch.”

  Half an hour later the lights of the train came into view, about a hundred meters behind us, before it slowed to match our pace. I opened the top hatch and got out. The wind, even at ten kilometers an hour, surprised me, almost knocking me from my feet; I waved through the hatch to Margaret. She passed me Yoon-sung’s body, feet first, and it took a minute for us to angle the corpse and get it through the narrow hole, but once it came free I leaned over and yelled down.

  “Clean the inside. Use whatever you can find and get rid of all the blood. It doesn’t have to be spotless, just enough so people won’t see it if they glance in.”

  By now Yoon-sung had stopped bleeding, and I thanked God that we wouldn’t also have to clean the outside once I’d pushed her off. The body thudded to the tracks, rolling. Now that it was over I breathed again and sat, cross-legged, waiting for what would happen next—the distant sound of a train whistle and screech of brakes. I dropped back into the car, finding the driver’s area still a mess.

  “Aren’t you cleaning it?” I asked.

  “With what?”

  The humor of the situation got to both of us and we laughed, deciding in the end to let the cleanup go since if anyone was so suspicious that they had to look inside it wouldn’t matter anyway; it was more important to clean the blood off our armor.

  “What will you tell everyone?” Margaret asked.

  “That Yoon-sung was outside dealing with a weapons problem when she slipped and fell. She was exhausted. We would have stopped the car but we never even knew it had happened, which reminds me.” I pointed to her vision hood, which Margaret had taken off while trying to clean. “You should put that back on, the train engineers are probably panicking and telling everyone to stop; after all, they just ran over the Minster of Public Security.”

  “What if someone figures it out?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not worried about that. I’m more worried about what happens after we stop and whether or not you have the strength. We can’t go on unless we kill them all, take fuel cells and food, and then strike out on our own. Just do everything I tell you and we’ll make it.”

  All the forward scout cars reversed to return to the train. Margaret and I watched as the Koreans leapt from their cars and into the night, joining four engineers to pull pieces of Yoon-sung from under the train as two held flashlights. I told Margaret to stay in the turret. Her gun would be trained on the armed Koreans, never leaving, a death that none of them suspected existed yet, and which would soon take everything. They didn’t deserve it, I thought. But they didn’t not deserve it either, and none of their screams or pleas would affect me, not like General Kim’s, because now I was a believer—a convert to a faith already professed but maybe never believed, a faith that had already written the fate of these men and women for whom there should be no pity because they had chosen their path so long ago. Death to them. I was a tool of God. If their children had been there I would have ordered Margaret to slaughter them as well, and this time their spirits would have found my soul intact, impregnable to their efforts to haunt me because the answer had been there all along and just needed to be recognized. I did that with General Kim. He was my best friend, and only his and Megan’s ghost would now enter my thoughts—if I let them—because General Kim had showed me the way and a
llowed me to finally overcome the one thing that had threatened to force me from my path: spoiling. Already my tranq tab dose was half of what it had been. Soon I would leave the remaining doses to Margaret with a prayer, that she would find the same peace I had. That was the point of this journey. It hadn’t been to escape or to find freedom; it had been to show me the meaning of it all, a meaning that couldn’t be seen from the rear, but only from the front and only then after a certain amount of ground had been captured and you could look back at the journey, understand every thread of its tapestry. For that I pitied the Koreans about to die, for their ignorance, not for their imminent death. They just didn’t see.

  The ballast crunched under foot as I moved toward the group of Koreans with my Maxwell, and they all began speaking, asking me questions, but I didn’t stop and instead marched past until I had moved beyond the last of them, the ones who had come forward from the repair vehicles at the train’s rear. Someone called out in Korean.

  “They’re asking you to come back and explain what happened,” Margaret said over the radio.

  “Shoot them all now. Grenades and flechettes.”

  Margaret sounded shocked. “What? What if there are still some in the scout cars?”

  “They all left the cars, I counted, and these nonbred chose their own fate. Kill them with faith and make sure to let none escape; don’t let anyone past you. Do it now.”

  The thudding of her grenade launcher opened up, followed by explosions and the snaps of her flechettes; I fell to the ground as I spun, firing into the thick of the Koreans and swinging left and right. One of them ran toward me. She was screaming and I centered my reticle on her head, ending her approach quickly. Once they had all fallen I stood again, sprinting toward the train’s rear.

  “Keep your aim on them. If any move, kill them.”

  “Where are you going?” Margaret asked.

  My breath was short, and I didn’t answer right away. “To the support vehicles, to make sure none remain to radio out.”