Subterrene War 03: Chimera (28 page)

Several explosions ripped upward through no-man’s-land. The blasts threw fallen trees into the air along with multiple Chinese, the rest of whom stopped to survey the damage, and from my vantage point you could almost sense the confusion the detonations had caused. Then meter-wide circular turrets rose from the ground. The turrets had been spaced along the strip of cleared ground, from our trenches to the jungle below, and I realized that the explosions hadn’t been mines intended to kill the enemy, but had instead been planted deliberately to remove debris and clear the way for the turrets to pop from deep underground. A long pipelike apparatus jutted from the turrets’ tops, which spun slowly, each one fixing on a target.

The Chinese closest to us faced the new threat and began firing, pelting the turrets with grenades. Still nothing happened. Finally, the pipes sprayed fluid to coat the enemy, and although I couldn’t see him next to me, Orcola must have also raised his head to look out.

“What are they doing?” he asked.

“Hell if I know. It looks like—”

The roar of flame interrupted me, and its brightness overloaded infrared so my vision kit shifted to visible light, after which I saw the turrets jetting white-hot flames. I wondered what good it would do. The Chinese armor would have been resistant to elevated temperatures—like ours—but when the flames enveloped their targets, they burst into bright spots of light, followed by a second round of sparks that were so bright my goggles frosted over for protection. Even from that distance you felt the heat. It baked my helmet and radiated through the hood onto my face, and the suit’s temperature indicator climbed until I realized that I needed to duck again.

“Kristen,” I asked, “did you get a temperature on those flames?”

“Temperatures varied from approximately twenty-five hundred to forty-five hundred degrees centigrade before suit sensors overloaded.”

“Would those temperatures be able to damage ceramic or systems on standard armor?”

She took a second to respond. “It depends, Lieutenant. Your armor is designed to withstand short exposure to high temperatures but would not survive a direct hit by standard plasma artillery or long-term exposure to a forty-five hundred degree heat source. The ceramic would be fine, but the heat would damage or melt metallic components as well as joint sections.”

I clicked onto our group frequency. “This is genius.”

“What is?” Ji asked.

Outside I heard popping now over the roar of flames, but it didn’t sound like the Chinese grenades; this was more like the sound of a car that had caught fire and was out of control, its metal parts hot enough to burn. With
each pop the fear dissipated to the point where I crawled over to the bunker door.

“The satos fielded some kind of flamethrower, and it has something in it that’s hot enough to damage Chinese armor, which I’m guessing is impervious to thermal gel. Jihoon, I’m at the door. Let’s go take a look.”

The trench had filled with dead. I crouched to stay low and moved out in the direction of the elevators, careful not to fall as I walked on
Gra Jaai
corpses and making sure not to look down for fear of seeing a child. Ji tapped me on the shoulder. We paused, and I lifted myself carefully, inching my carbine up and poking it over the top of the trench to get a view from the gun camera. With my free hand I tapped at my forearm controls, piping the feed over our group channel.

The turrets had gone dormant. On the far side of no-man’s-land, Burma’s jungle burned, and limbs of trees had ignited to form what resembled miles of huge torches, their flames illuminating the entire area. The Chinese were still there. But none of them moved, and although the picture quality was poor, it showed spots on them that still glowed white-hot, and gobs of metal dripped to crackle on the ground.

“They were too bold,” a girl to my left said, and I swung my carbine to aim at her. Nothing was there. A second later, whoever it was deactivated her chameleon skin and a human figure formed, wearing a long robe that dragged on the ground, her head hidden by a hood with a wide vision port of dark glass. When she pulled the hood off, I saw Lucy. “Our Japanese engineers developed a nanomaterial that shorts out chameleon skins and makes the enemy visible.”

“You knew what needed to be done,” I said. “Everything.”

“I told you: Margaret foresaw it. We’ve been preparing for this for years, the arrival of the Chinese, and without access to plasma artillery and in a location where APCs and tanks can’t reach, we needed new weapons. Thermal gel and fléchettes are useless, rockets too expensive.”

“What were those turrets?” asked Jihoon. He and I had deactivated our chameleon skins, and I pulled my spare fuel cell out, replacing the one that was about to die.

“They are modeled after an ancient weapon, one that most thought obsolete for over a century. Flamethrowers. We modified the historic recipe, however, and added powdered metals and oxides to a synthetic hydrocarbon gel carrier. The fluid sticks to the armor and drips into joints. Then we follow with a burst of flame. Three different kinds of metals ignite in steps, each one hotter than the last, and in addition to the turrets, all my sisters are now in the jungle below with handheld versions, chasing the enemy that still lives.”

“They’re running,” I said. “The entire Chinese assault group, the better part of a division.”

Lucy smiled and shook her head. “There is no honor in this. Except”—Lucy paused to gesture toward the dead at our feet—“for them. They faced the Chinese with Maxwells and grenades and would have gone hand to hand had it come to that. I will miss them.”

“Lucy. Someday we’ll see these weapons used against us. I’m surprised it hasn’t been thought of sooner.”

“Until now,” she said, “plasma has done the job. But as I said: we have no plasma weapons that can be fielded in this terrain.”

From far below on the Burmese side, the sounds of combat rose out of the jungle, distant firecrackers and the
deeper thumping of artillery that flashed within the canopy and turned the sky green. White flames leaped up here and there. While we watched, silent teams of
Gra Jaai
came and collected their dead, placing them on stretchers with a dedicated gentleness that suggested the corpses were worth more to them than any of their living, and you knew that the bodies would be treated with respect. It was a strange backdrop. The sounds of war juxtaposed with the somberness of undertakers made me feel as though there was no shame in what had happened—on that day or any other. There
were
no atrocities. This was a war of survival, and as far as the
Gra Jaai
and satos were concerned, the Burmese had threatened to invade their home, the only one they had, and so to die in defense of it made perfect sense, their more extreme methods forgivable. While I thought, one last piece clicked into place and made the whole picture clear: the Thai King had been a genius; putting satos on the line would buy him time if nothing else because these girls weren’t just fighting out of obligation to him, they were fighting for the right to call this home.

“You and Margaret have done well,” I said. “The next time the Chinese attack they won’t make any mistakes, and it’ll be an underground assault. But tonight you did well.” I saw Jihoon and the others turn to stare at me.

Lucy didn’t indicate that she’d heard me at first. “So far, we hold,” she finally answered, then started scaling the trench wall to head into no-man’s-land. “Come with me; there’s something you’ll want to see.” The others started to follow us, and Lucy waved them back. “Not you. I just got a transmission and enemy drones are incoming. They’ll be in firing range within ten minutes,
followed by a barrage, so return to the underground complex. Decontamination stations are at the bottom of the elevators. Wait for us there.”

She led me onto the battlefield. My boots crunched over the Burmese corpses I’d seen earlier in the day, the fabric of their battle suits now so burned that they crumbled underfoot, and flames here and there provided enough illumination that we didn’t need infrared. Lucy approached the nearest Chinese soldier. Its armor made pinging noises as the plates cooled and contracted, and metallic portions glowed in dull orange shapes that the flamethrowers had twisted and deformed. Lucy made sure to stay out of the way of its weapons systems, but it didn’t look like she needed to; the barrels of its Maxwell carbine and grenade launcher had almost melted off.

She flicked a series of latches on the side, and the armor’s main frontal plate swung open, then fell off because its hinges had melted, so Lucy had to jump back. I barely noticed the noise. Instead my concentration focused on the armor’s interior, where one of the genetics lay strapped into a harness, its fiber optics glowing and twin tubes running into nose and mouth sockets. If not for the size of its head and fiber optics for eyes, it looked like an infant on life support.

Seeing the Chinese genetic within the armor was more shocking than what I’d seen in the morgue, and it consumed me with sickening curiosity; if I believed satos didn’t belong on earth, then where did these? They were so far from the human template that it triggered thoughts of obsolescence, that humanity was on the verge of designing itself out of existence, and it made me want to scream at the same time I wanted to smash the thing into
a pulp. Who was responsible for this, and what could they have been
thinking
? I leaned closer and saw where the fiber optics joined with the suit at a small conduit that twisted upward into the turret, its cameras and antennae now shattered or melted. You couldn’t have predicted what happened next. The thing must have sensed my proximity and spoke, its synthesized voice similar to that of the Assurance system except that this was in Chinese, and I leaped to the side to aim my carbine at its head.

“It’s OK,” said Lucy. “There is no danger.”

I’d switched Kristen off. “What did it say?”

“It’s begging for us to kill it.”

“Will you?”

“Why?” asked Lucy. “Why should I put this thing out of its misery? I wanted you to see them in place, in their armor, so you know that we didn’t lie and that what I showed you this morning was real.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to me because I knew satos and had never seen one lie. “They’re real. And horrible.”

“This is the first time we’ve met the assault units in action, and everything Margaret said was true, her word perfect. I also wanted you to see them so I could ask you a question.”

I waited, but Lucy was having trouble. She stared downslope at the forest of immobilized Chinese, each of them frozen in different poses, and I wondered if they were all alive inside their suits, trapped within a coffin of ceramic and alloy. It made me want to take my own suit off. There would be no quick death for the Chinese, and I got it because nobody would take the time to walk through the rubble of no-man’s-land and open all those carapaces—some of
which had fused shut—tempting enemy fire with the time it would take. We were safe now that the enemy had retreated, but eventually they’d return.

“What did you want?” I asked.

“Do you think these things will go to heaven when they die?”

There wasn’t an answer to the question. The last time I had been in church was in Jebson, and except for the occasional and accidental prayer, the last time I’d thought about God was long before that, but she’d asked with such sincerity that for a moment Lucy sounded less like a sato and more like a young girl. It choked me up, partly from confusion. I still hated them, but the urge to kill her and Margaret had eroded—so quickly that it made me wonder if I’d been right in Spain: that I was cracking up. Part of me wanted to tell her that the Chinese genetic was a thing, an object just like her, and how could she be so stupid to think that it or she had a soul? Another part wanted to laugh and explain that we’d pulled a fast one on her and all the satos because
none
of us were headed to heaven;
God
didn’t exist.

I sighed. “No. I don’t think it will go to heaven. It isn’t even close to being human.”

“Then,” said Lucy—and I cringed at the inevitable follow-up question, the one I’d been fearing—“what about us? Will
we
go to heaven?”

“Yesterday I didn’t think so.”

“And now?”

I slung my carbine and spat on the Chinese genetic, seeing it flinch; I figured it was a painful experience because the things lived their lives in a cocoon of metal and weren’t used to any human contact whatsoever. So I spat on it again, just for fun. Lucy pulled me away, back toward the trench.

“What do you think tonight?” she asked.

“Now I think maybe God has a plan for you. And yeah, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll all go to heaven.”

Lucy pushed past me and almost knocked me over, making me think at first that I’d said something to piss her off, but when she spoke, it sounded like she’d started crying.

“Luck has nothing to do with it; you nonbred are all the same. Hurry up, I don’t want you to die if the Chinese send in their recon versions because other than the ones we captured, we haven’t seen them today. There are many more of them out here. And they are very, very fast.”

After decontamination the four of us headed back to Remorro and Orcola’s bunker, where we lay down to get some sleep. I had forgotten about needing a poncho, and it pissed me off, but I decided one night without a helmet would be worth it, and I was too tired to worry about rats anyway. There was no process of falling asleep. As soon as my head hit the rack, I was out cold, exhausted from the night of combat, and the chronometer showed that we had been fighting until 3:00 a.m. Someone shook me awake almost as soon as I passed out, and I grabbed my knife, thinking it was a rat.