Subterrene War 03: Chimera (37 page)

Her response shifted everything and confused me with the sensation of having entered another world; none of it fit with what I had assumed would be here.

“Why were Korean troops here in the first place?” I asked. “And what children?”

She spread her arms and shrugged, as if she thought the answer obvious. “The Koreans were here to monitor Chen—to make sure he didn’t work on offensive projects. When the Chinese came, the majority of them left, and we are scheduled to leave in one hour.”

“And the children?”

“Our main project, a peaceful one. We used genetic material given to Chen years ago to resurrect important Chinese figures from the past.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Chen never told us that. We were paid to get a job done, and he paid very well. We came here from Bangkok.”

“So you’ve never heard of Project Sunshine?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

It was clear this particular woman didn’t know anything, and already the chronometer was moving fast, making me nervous about the Chinese and warning me that it would be impossible to question everyone.

I almost let them live because the indicator on my tank showed only about four bursts left, but these were Chen’s scientists; they
had
to be. Catching them alive would be a coup for the Chinese even if I scrambled Chen’s computers and killed him because these people may have worked on Project Sunshine despite what the woman said. I couldn’t risk their capture; anything in their brains would be picked at and gone over by Beijing’s technicians, and in that scenario, life would have been the worse fate for them. They screamed again, this time all of them, but I stopped paying attention when the room’s sprinklers went off, doing nothing to abate an intense heat that forced me into the hallway. The sprinkler water flashed into steam,
the gel and metal powders bursting into bright sparks that reminded me of the Fourth of July; fireworks, I realized, would be one thing Phillip would miss if we stayed in Thailand.

The door slid shut on their screams and left me to my thoughts.
Children. No Project Sunshine.
If what the woman had said was true, then my mission to gather data was about to turn south in a big way, leaving me with the orders to question and then kill Chen, which was fine by me. Even though the bush was far above, its call was all around to let me know that it was almost over, that once the guy was dead I could leave Burma with the satisfaction of having removed a thorn from the jungle’s side. And I’d be with Phillip again. From then on the missions I’d take would be ones of my own making, ones that made sense and didn’t involve the military or people like Jihoon or Momson or even Wheezer, who had screwed up despite his training and still left a hole in my gut.

A few seconds passed before I realized I’d moved down the hallway, heading closer to Chen. I felt him. He was close now, and it was as though the walls moaned from the sickness of infection, Chen’s presence a foreign object that the rock wanted excised so its mountains could go back to their game of just sitting there.
Watching everything.
A door slid open ahead of me then, and four Asian children emerged—two boys and two girls, all of them teenagers and all of them grinning. It occurred to me that after flaming the scientists, I’d thrown my cloak back and had forgotten to pull it around me.

“Uncle told us something had gone wrong with the tunnels,” one of the boys said. He was the larger of the two and had black hair that fell almost to his eyes. The
older girl laughed and threw her hair back—a thick mass, straight and so black that it almost looked blue.

“He is not Chinese, though,” she said. “Uncle thought that our people had arrived.”

There was something about them that made me uneasy; a creepy feeling moved from my legs and into my stomach, a sensation rooted in the fact that these were satos—not like the American or Chinese ones, which may have made me even more uneasy. Normal children would have been scared when I pointed my flame unit in their direction.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We should ask
you
that,” the older boy said, taking a step toward me. “You snuck into our home, and I’m assuming the rest of our family is now dead. Who are
you
?”

“I’m a friend of Chen’s and came for a visit.”

“Uncle is busy now,” the girl said, switching to English. “He sent us to entertain you.”

I never got a chance to fire. The children rushed me in a mad dash and leaped at my chest, almost knocking me flat in the process, and then started clawing at my armor in an attempt to strip the flame unit away, their high-pitched shrieks forcing my speakers to cut off.

“These children are genetically enhanced or completely artificial,” said Kristen. I struggled to knock the kids away while she spoke, but as soon as I dislodged one, he or she would leap again. My legs started to buckle under the additional weight. “No normal human would be able to move in this fashion, Lieutenant.”

“Damn it, Kristen.” I finally got a hold of the flame unit again, one boy’s hands gripping it tightly and refusing to let go.
“Call me BUG!”

The trigger clicked shut. Fire engulfed me and suit alarms blared, triggering the hiss of emergency oxygen at the same time heat penetrated from all sides and forced me to scream with the sensation of having created hell on earth. My faceplate started to melt. Metallic parts of my suit ignited with thousands of sparks, but through it all I saw the children fall and then felt light enough to take a few steps back out of the main blaze. I shrugged out of the cloak, which now flamed brightly, and threw it at them, along with the flame unit, its tanks on the verge of blowing with whatever fuel remained. But the children were still alive. They flopped and rolled within the fire, continuing to shriek, and one of them clawed its way toward me, trying to escape and take one last lunge.

I ran. Behind me the flame unit exploded and sucked the air from my lungs so that I fell to the floor and crawled, trying my best to find a pocket of air. When I could breathe again, the children had fallen silent. Behind me in the hallway, with nothing left to consume, the flames began to die and all around me my suit smoldered to send streamers of smoke that were just visible through the wavy glass of my faceplate. It took a few minutes to get out of the suit, and once I had, I started crying. Kristen was dead. It hadn’t been obvious that she’d been as much a part of my life as Wheezer until she was gone, and I knelt to remove as many memory chips as I could, hoping that some of them would at least be readable. In many ways, Kristen had been my best friend, and Chen would pay for her loss too, in addition to that of Wheezer.

My undersuit had blackened. Portions of it were so charred that they crumbled away to reveal blistered skin, and the pain brought tears so that for a moment everything
faded. But there was no way to stop; not now. Chen was close, so I grabbed my knife, stood, and stumbled toward an open doorway, through the burning fat of his children that now covered the tunnel floor.

Chen sat on a chair in a darkened room where holo images of the complex spun over computer terminals, and mattresses and clothes lay strewn on the floor. He was crying. The man wore a lab coat and his beard had grown in since the picture I’d seen was taken, its hairs clumped as if he hadn’t bathed in some time. Chen stared at me through dirty glasses.

“They weren’t going to kill you,” he said. “You’re an American.”

“I don’t care.”

“Those were my
children.
We would have gone quietly but I thought you were the Chinese, that you had come to get rid of me.”

I shrugged and glanced around the room, checking for an ambush before stepping inside. “You gave Beijing a lot of ideas, so why would they want you dead? The Chinese sure have fielded a lot of neat things in the last few years, Chen, ones that are sure to kill a lot of people.”

“Those were
mine,
” he said. “I know what you’re thinking—that I stole secrets from the US labs—but that’s a lie. I don’t know what they told you, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything I gave the Chinese came from well after I left the US. From
me
.”

“Oh. So that’s why you ran like a little bitch, because a radioactive China seemed like an attractive place to retire, in Beijing’s underground rat holes? It had nothing to do
with you stealing secrets.” I was already bored with the conversation; Chen was a worm. He didn’t have any idea why I was there, and from his whining it was clear that the guy thought he could talk his way to freedom and make some kind of deal.

“They were my children!”
he screamed, changing the subject. “You had no right to kill them all.”

I lunged and knocked him from the seat with my fist so that he yelled and grabbed his nose, trying to stop the bleeding. “Those weren’t children, you little shit. They were pets. You created them in a test tube and then kept them around so you could pat yourself on the back—reminders of how smart you think you are.”

Chen picked himself up and backed away. “You’ve killed me now. Even if I go back to the States with you, the Chinese will send someone no matter where you put me, and they’ll track me to any prison. You murdered replicas of Premier Kang’s children, who died in an accident when they were teenagers; they were my ticket to a pardon.”

“A what?” It took a moment for his words to sink in before I understood. “You were going to bribe the Chinese with them? Give the premier back his little brats so he’d look the other way on your double cross?”

“He would have forgiven me, I’m sure of it. But now I’m dead no matter what.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But then you must have also been planning on giving them Sunshine.”

Chen’s face went pale. “You know of Sunshine?”

“Yeah, Chen. I just can’t figure out how you convinced the Koreans to leave you behind when they left, why they didn’t kill you and destroy this place.”

“The Koreans are an interesting people.” His manner had changed in a fraction of a second, and where before he’d been terrified, now he was smiling.
Smug.
Chen moved toward me, but I held up my knife because he wasn’t a worm after all, more like a snake—one I didn’t want anywhere near me. “I arranged it so that they left me with two of their guards,” he continued, “two who had been tasked with destroying all my data and then assassinating me before they left.”

“But you had already bribed them,” I finished.

“Like I said. They’re very interesting. You could make a lot of money too, and all you have to do—”

I leaned into a side kick, connecting with his stomach so he collapsed to the ground and fought for breath. Chen looked up at me. I knelt beside him and ripped his belt off, using it to tie both ankles to one of his wrists, then spat on the side of his face, trying to control the impulse to sink my knife into his throat. The anger was almost too much to bear. He had no clue how many people had died because of the Chinese genetics, and even if he had, it was unlikely someone like him would care. There was one last thing to accomplish with Chen, and I missed Kristen; she would have been helpful in dealing with him and with the mountains of data I was sure to face.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “I can’t walk if you tie my feet and hands together; how are you going to carry me?”

“I’m not going to carry you. And you’re not walking anywhere for now. Where’s your Sunshine data?”

Chen laughed and shook his head. “You’re crazy. I don’t have any data; the Koreans wouldn’t let me near it once I’d sold it to them. They kept me on a short leash,
and their computer experts swept all our systems regularly to make sure I didn’t try to hide anything. It took
forever
to convince them to negotiate with the Burmese for my lab construction; they never trusted me and wanted me locked up. In Wonsan. But they needed me happy, in case they ran into any obstacles on Sunshine, so I used it as leverage to convince them to give me this: my new home in Burma.”

“But hiding the data is exactly what you did, isn’t it? I know how greedy crapheads like you work, Chen. If the Koreans paid for it, then someone else would too, right? Only you’d need some way to transfer it to a second buyer, which means you’d need some way to store it. And Burma was an interesting location to pick; who was the next customer? India? Malaysia? Thailand itself?”

I took the one free hand he had and laid it on the floor, kneeling on his forearm so he couldn’t move. There weren’t any second thoughts. Wheezer wouldn’t have died if it weren’t for the mission, the mission wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for Sunshine, and the world would be a better place without people like Chen. I slammed the edge of my knife blade down. He screamed with the loss of his thumb and kept screaming in a way that sounded broken, as if Chen couldn’t decide whether to sob or yell.

“My
God
that must hurt.” I wiped the blade on his lab coat and then placed it against his index finger. “Where is your data?”

Through his sobs, Chen managed to speak. “In my pocket. I couldn’t risk storing it on any of the computers or servers.”

“You have got to be shitting me.” But I reached into his lab coat pocket and yanked out a plastic wallet, inside of
which he’d stored multiple data chits. His other pockets were empty.

“I’m going to tell the Chinese what you did,” Chen whispered. “That you killed the premier’s children.”

“I’ve seen the Chinese in action. And they wouldn’t give a shit one way or another.”