Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  “I’ll miss you.”

  I nodded and helped tie her hair, which reached the middle of her back now, into a ponytail. “I’ll miss you too. Keep your toes pointed and hit the water feet first. Go.”

  Before I said anything else she vaulted the railing and disappeared into the night. I leaned over to try to see or hear the moment when she hit, but the engines and sound of waves against the hull swallowed everything. I never saw her again. On my way back to the room I thought about what I’d write, if anything more needed to be said about Margaret and the fact that I never fully understood how a Germline could transform into something so indecisive, incapable of the calculus of war, but then shrugged the thought away. Margaret was who she was because of her own experiences; that was her tale, not mine. There were really only a few pages left to write, so after shutting the door behind me I turned off the light and climbed into bed. Rest would help me face what was coming in the morning.

  The next morning I rose early to scribble until there was only a bit more to say; already I felt the ship slow, the thrum of its engines deepening as they dropped in power, then eventually nearing total quiet when they shut off completely. It was especially hot. The air in my cabin didn’t move, was humid and thick, so that my coveralls—the same ones acquired in Wonsan—soon soaked with sweat and my head swam until I finished off a bottle of water, wanting more almost immediately. There was a knock on my door. I knew who it would be before opening, so wasn’t surprised to find the captain with two armed men, their pistols pointed at my chest as they squeezed in. He spoke English now.

  “The American Navy is about to board us,” he said. “Where is your friend?”

  “She jumped overboard last night.”

  He ordered his men to search the room, which didn’t take long. When they didn’t find her he scowled. “I know what you are, and they want you and her. Now.”

  I bent over the table, trying to jot down the final lines. “Wait. Just a second.”

  “You can finish writing on the launch to the American boat. There will be time.”

  I knew then why it was so important to write a few last words, because I wrote them as much for my sisters as for the nonbred like Alderson who would wonder, like Margaret had, why I hadn’t taken the chance to run, why I hadn’t jumped overboard. The message I was to deliver included everything we experienced in North Korea. The foxes, the bears, the flowers, and the ocean. It was so simple. We had all been born into the world as killers, all of us Little Murderers in our own way, and the role suited us because it felt so good to kill, to be perfect at the job for which we had been created: to hate. But hatred was man’s will. The spoiling eroded the emotion and took from us the one thing that had been our vocation, our identity, and it made us question the single action that defined us as creatures: murder. At first I thought the spoiling was also man’s will, but this was wrong. It was God’s test of faith. Given enough time, all of us—not just me, as Margaret seemed to think—every one of my sisters who escaped, did so to find a way past the spoiling and so walked a path to Him. It was always His will that we kill, but with honor, and the nonbred corrupted this the same way they corrupted everything they touched, but like nature reclaimed the waste in Korea, it would someday fix all of us who had escaped man’s influence, and now I understood what Heather had meant when she’d said I’d figure out the message. Men were the abomination. They had replaced God with themselves; pity for the nonbred and discharge at their hands, the damned, was a ticket to His side, but so was finding one’s own way.

  Death and Faith.

  Epilogue

  Memorandum for Dr. Reynold T. Gregson

  Defense Policy Board

  Pentagon

  Dear Dr. Gregson:

  Attached is a verbatim copy of the document found with Unit AA-057111, Germline-One-A, Catherine, which you and your staff requested on 26 April. As you are aware, now that American forces have returned from the east, all seven active ateliers have been shut down and mothballed per Presidential Directive 311256, and ateliers under construction were returned to a greenfield state until such time that program reactivation becomes necessary. Reactivation, should it ever occur, will take place in accordance with the new wartime mobilization guidelines adopted by the Pentagon for the U.S. postwar readiness strategy. A few additional notes are warranted here, however, since the attached document presents new data that haven’t been previously considered.

  I had been told that this was a set of notes, and relayed that same information to you in my April briefing to the Board. That information was inaccurate. The document attached is almost a complete file on Catherine’s activities since de-tanking, including some of her thoughts and feelings as they relate to combat, the loss of friends, and her own mortality. In light of this I recommend that it be incorporated as part of future Germline training regimens, as originally outlined by General Urqhart before his death in the Almaty encirclement. Clearly this book is an important find. In my professional opinion—both as someone who had regular contact with Catherine and as a psychiatrist—her book validates many of the fears we had regarding religious aspects of the girls’ training. General Urqhart, were he alive, would be pleased to know that in my opinion, he was right: Catherine was the one we had been looking for all along. She could have taught the other units much about what was expected of them and how to handle discharge at the appropriate time.

  Preliminary modeling of Catherine’s analyses suggest a strong likelihood that should we adopt her writings and incorporate them in the Modern Combat Manual, future generations of Germline units will receive a far more detailed preview of what to expect as they age, and will recognize the signs of spoiling with far less stress than the last models fielded. It may even reduce the number of escapes—perhaps bringing them to zero entirely. My staff feels that we could rewrite her biography so to seamlessly incorporate it into the latest versions of the Manual, perhaps referring to it as the “Gospel of Catherine,” or something along those lines. Of course the final few paragraphs would have to be changed. We also advise passing copies of this book, once it is finished, to escaped Germline units in Thailand; our models suggest that doing so may convince more of them to report for voluntary discharge.

  Of course, as long as production of Germline units is prohibited by the Genetic Weapons Convention, we should consider discussing this in a classified venue and should the Board decide to move forward I hope that you will give our findings the attention they deserve and consider the recommendations hereby set forth. My staff and I are looking forward to seeing you at the symposium in Hawaii; we trust that you and your wife are doing well.

  Warm Regards,

  Quentin Alderson, PhD

  Chief Psychiatrist

  Germline Wartime Mobilization

  Strategy

  Think Tank

  Hamilton Diversified Corp.

  extras

  meet the author

  T. C. MCCARTHY earned a BA from the University of Virginia, and a PhD from the University of Georgia, before embarking on a career that gave him a unique perspective as a science fiction author. From his time as a patent examiner in complex biotechnology to his tenure with the Central Intelligence Agency, T.C. has studied and analyzed foreign militaries and weapons systems. T.C. was at the CIA during the September 11 terrorist attacks and was still there when U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, allowing him to experience warfare from the perspective of an analyst. Find out more about the author at www.tcmccarthy.com.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed EXOGENE look out for

  CHIMERA

  The Subterrene War: Book 3

  by T. C. McCARTHY

  Chimera (n.)

  Greek Mythology: an imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts.

  Genetics: (a) an organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering, (b) a substance,
such as an antibody, created from the proteins or genes of two different species.

  ONE

  Clean Up

  Dzhanga. Nobody wanted Dzhanga. Not even the flies that swarmed over the mud, buzzing so loudly that they sounded furious, angry to have been born from some corpse in the middle of Central Asia, and maybe they wanted Dzhanga the least of all because for the flies there wasn’t any chance of seeing anything except Turkmenistan. Imagine that: living your entire life in a Turkmen slum, the highpoint of which would be finding the body of a rat in which to reproduce. At least I wasn’t a fly. But the war had been over long enough that missions were hard to get, and I’d waited so long for this one that there was no way to turn it down, so they’d dropped me from thirty thousand where I’d spiraled down and gone through layer after layer of clouds, descending on this, yet another stillborn Turkmen city, a gray and brown smear of humanity that barely clung to the banks of the Caspian and whose waters had become infected with the filth of people, a sheen of oil and scum visible as soon as I hit the five-thousand-foot mark and popped my ’chute. That had been a week ago. For a mission that was to have lasted three days, a week meant that this one was bad, that this chick wasn’t going down easy. But every step made me harder. Every day made the mission sharper. It didn’t worry me that I hadn’t found her yet, didn’t even register as a problem—although I knew they were shitting back at the outpost, wondering why it was taking so long—because the mission was my life, and those endless days on the rack, nights without air-conditioning on a hotel’s bug-ridden mattress with stains that clearly hadn’t come from me, those were the hardest things to bear, so that a prolonged mission felt like vacation, like a dog must feel when you let it off the leash. Off duty and on stand-by, the world ate at your skin until you couldn’t wait anymore. You were supposed to stay in your hotel room, by the phone, because we didn’t carry cells and had no means of communication when off the line, no electronics at all and no indication that we belonged to the machine because we weren’t allowed anything regulation except weapons. No crew cuts, no uniform, and no salutes. To those crotch rotting hookers back in Armenia I was a businessman, some fool and a drunk, which, until now, had made me their best customer.

  But not anymore. She was out there, and it wouldn’t be much longer because something told me she had started to fade.

  In the bag by week’s end, that was the deal and you just knew this would be hairy because she was past discharge by more than six months, which meant the girl was supercharged and out there with no sense of reality, her world a kind of half-hallucination where fear and rage merged. Other cleanup crews wanted to split the job, but that wasn’t about to happen; alone was better. It took a special kind of solitude to hear the things I did and a wired mind to parse them until only valid information remained—little nuggets that most people would have missed because the fact that Dzhanga was a shit hole would have distracted them. Being alone meant everything was mine. Time. The wind. Smells especially. Even the dead Turkmen who stared at me, slumped against the side of his hut on the other side of the dirt track, with eyes that looked happy instead of surprised, and which stopped me cold because there wasn’t any reason to be happy. Not in Dzhanga. Not anywhere. He shouldn’t have even been there if you thought about it, should have left the city abandoned as the oil industry had a hundred years before, the way you’d toss a fifty on some hooker’s lap without looking back. So his happiness was information; it just wasn’t clear if it was useful information. I knelt in front of him and stared into his eyes, which had glazed over after dying in a way that only the dead managed, and I grabbed him by his long beard, touching his nose against my vision port so I could get a better look, maybe through his retinas and into his brain so it could tell me what made him smile. He’d died instantly—when I’d fired four flechettes into his skull.

  But there wasn’t anything to learn; instead my armor vibrated in a strong wind, a reminder to keep moving. It wasn’t the standard-issue armor they handed to regulars, and I took care of it the same way you’d take care of anything that meant so much, because even though I hadn’t paid for it with money, I’d paid for it with time; it was my own design. Instead of the thick green ceramic plates on normal suits, mine were thin sand-colored ones, sandwiching a millimeter of titanium, and the joints consisted of a special polymer, rubber, and teflon amalgamation that stayed quiet no matter how far I walked, preventing every plate from touching its neighbor with that annoying clicking sound, the one that would have gotten me killed a long time ago, the one in which tunnel rats—the subterreners and their genetics, satos—wallowed until dead.

  It took a moment for my sniffer to process the area and then… nothing. Not a single useful thing came from the Turkmen and, aside from a few molecules of hydrocarbons, remnants slowly detaching from the massive oil storage tanks that rusted behind me at the port, only dust filled the air.

  “Negative,” the suit’s computer said, her voice that of a woman whom I had named Kristen, the same as my first girlfriend in high-school; she’d told me what I already knew from the display, but the sato was out here, and you felt it.

  “Clean, huh?” I whispered. “Bullshit. She’s rotting and dripping. Close.”

  My suit chimed, surprising me. “Priority transmission, Sergeant, with the proper authentication key for Rabbit Five; should I play it?”

  Rabbit Five. That was my controller, Wheezer, across the Caspian and safe in Armenia, where he sat in a shack and monitored the occasional status-burst from the suit, relayed via satellite to his tiny dish on the edge of a runway. “Sure,” I said.

  Wheezer was laughing. “You want me to tell you where she is? I have her marked, your little angel got her three hours ago and tracking is all green.”

  He was messing with me. The angel, my targeting drone, flew somewhere overhead and saw everything so it was just waiting to pipe the information into my system if I wanted it, the sato’s exact location, but somehow it would have been cheating. Wheezer knew how much I hated the drone; his question had been a joke, the one thing he knew would piss me off.

  “Do you wish to respond?” Kristen asked.

  “Negative. Don’t want to risk another burst.”

  I scanned the area. The hut was part of a string of shacks that formed a small neighborhood near Dzhanga’s abandoned rail-transfer point, one that tank cars from trains had used to fill themselves from hundreds of now-empty storage vessels, most of them ruptured and torn open from a long-forgotten war. When the wind blew through them, it moaned. An hour ago I had gotten my first hit, a single tone from my computer followed by the announcement “Germline unit, reading above background,” which meant that the chick was nearby and ripe, her skin starting to liquefy and if I was really lucky, her vision had blurred, with both eyes a milky white. For now, though, Kristen stayed quiet; my heads-up read only ambient temperature and weather data.

  “Not much longer,” I whispered, and wiped a film of dust from both vision ports.

  My headgear was custom. The helmet fit snugly so that only a centimeter of space separated me from the ceramic, and it was such a tight fit that the only way to open it was to pop it from the neck ring, then unbuckle it from the back so it would open in a clamshell fashion, just like the suit’s chest carapace. The helmet was art. A guy in New York had designed it, probably doped up and high, but the result had been something that resembled the head of a wasp, with wide oval vision ports and an extended “snout” that contained an integral collector unit to receive data from microbots or any one of a hundred other tools I used. Underneath it all, my vision hood clung like a second skin, so tight that I couldn’t afford the luxury of a beard. Nobody ever accused me a of being a subterrener, one of those who lived among the fungus and rock, and who shit all over their legs because it was easier to just dump waste than to take care of it with a few steps to the nearest flush port; those men grew beards to cushion their cheeks from the rough canvas of the hoods, and came out of their bunkers with t
he bewildered look of a thousand Rip Van Winkles. It had been years since I’d fought underground, and my suit told everyone that its occupant was a specialized thing, “not to be used in tunnels or hangars.” The hood was the final piece, one last thing to set me apart from conscripts and those with the tired careers of lifers and superlifers; it had front magnetic claws that clicked into the sensor package on my helmet, which, in turn, sent data to my goggle lenses, a continuous heads-up feed of information that included chem-bio readings, and the ticker for nitrogen compounds, explosives, or the real deal: rotting, human flesh.

  Soon, the dead Turkmen would interfere with my sensors.

  I dragged the body into the man’s hut, glanced around to make sure there was nobody there, and then shut the door so I could look through the crack—when the computer chimed again.

  “Priority message, Sergeant, keyed to a general emergency frequency.” But this time she didn’t ask for approval, since it was priority, and piped it in.

  “Challenge-echo, challenge-echo, challenge-echo. Echo-seven-six…”

  I waited for the numbers to rattle off. “Go ahead, Wheez.”

  “War’s over, Bug. It’s official.”

  “The war ended months ago, when the Russians pulled out. That’s why Command wanted me to break radio silence?”

  “No,” said Wheezer, “It means that we’re all being recalled. President just gave the order to pull in every man from the east and let the girls rot. We’re to go after them in Europe and friendly countries, but they want us out of the hot spots now. Something to do with the Chinese. Pickup at primary retrieval at oh-six, tomorrow.”