Subterrene War 03: Chimera (38 page)

Chen saw the flash of light on metal and inhaled to scream, but the knife sliced into his neck and cut it short. There wasn’t any point in wasting more time. And I’d have to risk leaving without destroying the computer equipment because with the loss of my flame unit there wasn’t any way to accomplish that task, and without Kristen there was no time to check every computer and server. I wouldn’t have known what to look for anyway or how to access the systems.

By now the vibration of the Chinese fusion borer shook the floor as it neared. I sprinted down the hallway, keeping my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t get lost, then almost dove through the access hatch. Who knew how much time I had? For the first time in my life, I was grateful for satos and prayed that they were still in the temple because the mission wasn’t over yet and one thing was sure: I’d need all the help I could get. The Chinese still had scouts between us and Nu Poe, and more would be on their way.

The mission was over. Now that it had been accomplished and even though we hadn’t done everything we’d been tasked to do, a feeling of satisfaction gave me new energy as I did my best to fit into Margaret’s undersuit and armor. Jihoon was on his feet again but limping, and he grinned at me as I tried to pull her clothes on.

“Those are girl’s hoses.”

I flipped him off. “Stop staring at me.”

“I just think you’re sexy. For an asshole. You know you’d better not have to take a leak, because you’ll have to take off your whole freakin’ suit to do
that
.”

The satos had gone outside to make sure the area was clear, and by the time I pinched my new armor shut—the carapace so tight that I had trouble breathing—we heard the borer crash into Chen’s complex below with a muffled thump followed by a tremor. I grabbed my carbine and slid into the cloak while we moved. The winding passage lasted longer than felt reasonable, and a sense of urgency made me want to sprint, despite the fact that Margaret’s boots were at least two sizes too small and would soon make walking an agonizing prospect. I plugged the cloak into my suit and powered on. When we moved out into the jungle, my map popped onto my heads-up and we headed east toward the satos’ red dots and into daytime, which meant we’d be more visible to Chinese scouts.

“I hate them,” Ji hissed over the radio.

“Who?”

“Them. Satos.”

“I told you that you would.”

He panted as he talked, and I wondered if he’d make it far without passing out. “I didn’t get it. Now I see why you wanted them all wiped. They break my ribs, torture me for days, and then all of a sudden apologize and fill me with micros to fix me up. I still hurt all over.”

“Are you going to make it all the way back?” I asked. “It might take us two days to get to Nu Poe, longer if we run into trouble.”

“I don’t care if I have to crawl to get out of here;
I’ll make it.
”

The monkeys scurried through the trees overhead, and a sense of panic had infected the jungle, making me uneasy as we jogged through the brush; there was no point in being quiet. Chinese forces would follow aboveground now that their troops had moved into Chen’s complex, and soon the area could be crawling, so I pushed as hard as I could, trusting that the satos had cleared the way ahead. A blurred shape brushed against my shoulder and made me dive. Behind me I heard Jihoon curse, then saw his tracers flick by my head to snap through the leaves until a loud hissing filling my speakers and my goggles frosted over, darkening to protect me from the glare of a thermite grenade.

Once the fire had died, I stood and looked at the molten wreckage of a Chinese scout; next to it was the body of a sato, her head shredded by Jihoon’s fléchettes just after she had crammed a thermite grenade into the scout’s armor.

“Jesus Christ, Ji.”

He sounded panicked. “I didn’t know it was one of them. Shit, Bug,
I didn’t know.
”

“How am I going to explain this one?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll cop to it. It was an accident.”

“No, you won’t; don’t say a word to them.” Jihoon didn’t get it. The girls were perfect at this job, and if he told the truth they’d see his mistake as a serious flaw and could use it as an excuse to wipe him. To them, he would be admitting he was a liability. “Keep your mouth shut and let me handle it.” I looked at her again and kicked a rock. “God
damn
it all.”

The bushes next to me moved as Ji pushed past. “I don’t know why you’re so freakin’ worried. It’s just a meat machine, right?”

“One we needed,” I said, following him as we moved out again. “And there’s more to these chicks than you realize. They’re not all crazy.”

He stopped and threw his hood back so I could see his faceplate. “Are you kidding me? After all you’ve said about them over the last couple of weeks?”

“They’re all we have buying us time in Thailand. You’re supposed to be the smart one, so think about it. We need every one of these betties alive and fielded to slow the Chinese down until we have a chance to get our forces ashore and into the bush. They’re the only thing in this place that makes any sense.”

“Holy shit,” said Jihoon. “You’re thinking about taking Margaret’s offer. You want to stay here with them, even after all we’ve seen on this shitty op.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

The dots on my heads-up showed the girls about a hundred meters away, but even as we moved they barely registered because Jihoon had gotten me thinking. It
wasn’t
a shitty mission. I’d been on tens, maybe hundreds, and this was the first that had made me feel good; getting to Margaret and Chen had mattered and now that it was over, the aftermath hadn’t left me with the feeling that I’d killed one cockroach just to have to chase after a thousand more in some never-ending extermination of rotting girls. The girls were loathsome and always would be—a metaphor of what the world had become and how far down we’d gone as a race—and the realization hit me; I
understood
why most people hated satos. They were a
warning of our impending extinction. Not anytime soon, maybe not for another hundred years, but the way had been mapped and there wouldn’t be any deviating from the genetic singularity that had grabbed hold to pull us across an event horizon we’d been too stupid to recognize and avoid. So hating them made sense, revulsion a normal reaction to a situation from which there would be no escape, the same way most people hated to think about the fact that someday they’d die. Who didn’t go through life hoping to live forever? Satos were bitches to the average soldier on the line because although they didn’t know it, a part of their subconscious keyed into it instantaneously—that they were a million times inferior to the girls, who were a million times removed from what your average person defined as “normal.” Satos were like a flashing neon sign:
say good-bye to the old definition of humanity because we’re your future.

Now Korea would have Sunshine, and as soon as I gave up the data, then America would have it too, and I could almost imagine the day when our efforts at gene therapy, organ replacement, bioenhancement, and everything else on the menu would merge with the wholesale creation of artificial life in a tank. Breeding stations were already obsolete—maybe families too—and nobody knew it. But now I did. All I had to do was see the little family that Chen had created, and it opened the door to an infinite number of questions, like how long would it be before some rich senator in DC would pay anything to have someone recreate a child she’d lost to a car accident or a tornado? How long until a black market popped up to fill the need? Exhaustion and old age combined within the jungle to make everything crystal clear until it became a
thing of beauty for one reason: I accepted the reality of my role. I was a killer. The path chosen by the Chinese was one branch on a tree that had an infinite number of branches, and although I couldn’t stop us from moving forward with genetics, there was a chance to help the world from taking Beijing’s route—one that involved turning men and women into animals, into armored slaves. It hadn’t been a shitty mission at all, and I was tired of running from the truth because we’d created a world in which Phillip would have to grow and it would be my job to open his eyes. Mine had been ripped open—the eyelids stripped. But here, in the bush, his awakening to the newness would be like a gentle immersion where he’d have decades to acquaint himself with the scientific frontier, a wild west complete with a balance of horrors and promise. Better than the tanks. Better than a school.

Jihoon had been right. Killers belonged in the field. Killers belonged together, and my hatred of the girls was probably never going to leave, but for now at least we both had the same goal—murdering Chinese—and that was enough. The mission hadn’t
changed
anything in me; it had just made me see the same stuff in a new light, and if I stayed, the satos and I could slaughter an entire branch of human evolution to save another, one that was a little more palatable.

We joined with the girls in an area that sloped downward and had been cleared by a recent mudslide. “Your girl is dead,” I said, hoping it would preclude any questions about what had happened. “Let’s keep moving.”

“The other man is slow,” one of them said, clicking into the private frequency.

“So?”

“Death and faith. We do as you say. But we would move faster without him, and he could stay behind to hold off any pursuing Chinese.”

“There are no pursuing Chinese,” I said, pissed off because she was right. “So for now we make sure he stays with us.”

The girl sounded strange, and at first I thought she was growling at me, until I realized that she was crying. “You took our Lily. Margaret is dead and so now we follow you, but some of us will not forget how it happened.”

“Margaret was
ready
to go. You’ll do as I say or you can join her because I just don’t give a shit right now.
Move
.”

We set out in a jog, and my feet threatened to burst through the sides of my boots so that already they started to blister; the pace was going to kill us if the Chinese didn’t. Twice Jihoon slipped as we descended the gentle slope of the mountain, and the last time he didn’t stop until he landed against a banyan tree, his chameleon skin deactivated when his forearm controls inadvertently triggered. Everyone froze. At first I didn’t know why I stopped because the bugs around us started chirping immediately, suggesting that for the moment nobody was around us; but there was a feeling—like the air inside my suit had gotten heavier, the input from my speakers tinged with threat. Then, from behind us in the direction of the temple, came a distant crash.

“They have arrived,” one of the girls said.

“Jihoon, get up and keep moving,” I shouted, continuing downward with the others; Margaret’s map controls were different than the ones in my old suit, and I gave up trying to figure them out. “How far behind us are they?”

“Three kilometers.”

Jihoon’s dot was close, and I heard him moving through the underbrush. “I can’t keep this up,” he said. His breath sounded rapid.

“Yes, you can.” I clicked onto his private frequency. “If you don’t, we’ll leave you behind. We have to get back to the line, and there’s no way we can slow down to rest or to carry you.”

“We gotta stop sometime. To sleep.”

My chronometer read three in the afternoon, and I had to resist the impulse to forecast when night would come because it didn’t matter; this time we wouldn’t be stopping. “We aren’t going to sleep, Chong. It’s all out from here to Thailand, and we won’t be slowing to look out for scouts because the threat from them is less than the threat from being caught in the Chinese advance.”

Jihoon didn’t say anything. From the sound of his movement you could tell that he was out of control, unable to manage his rate of descent, and that he had let gravity take hold to force him into a combination of sliding and rolling. There was nothing anyone could do. Behind us I felt the Chinese advance pressing in and imagined their genetics crashing through the jungle en masse, so huge and in such great numbers that they wouldn’t bother to fire on us, instead walking through to grind our bodies into the mud under steel feet. The sound of their servos rang through my memory, and for a moment a sense of terror rose in my stomach, making me move faster.

We were still a good distance from the Thai border, and when night fell we’d have to recross the river. It was critical that we get there well ahead of Chinese forces.

Scouts hit us from either side, just before sunset. Tracer fléchettes leaped from the jungle as we moved into a draw with its bottom dry and cracking from the heat and lack of rain, and when we dove for cover, several blasts worked their way down our line as the Chinese detonated mines. Thermal gel splashed my helmet. My suit filled with the burning smell as the gel ate through ceramic, and I tossed aside the useless hood, struggling to pop my helmet off before the stuff ate through and into my head. What was left of my lid smoked on the ground next to me. I drew on the closest source of fléchettes and started firing short bursts. It was a long shot; my fléchettes would have to score a direct hit on one of their sensors, and as soon as I opened up, at least two targeted me with return fire until I had to duck, pressing my face into the dirt with a moan.

Jihoon’s voice crackled in my ears, making me grateful that the components of my vision hood had escaped damage. “To hell with this, Bug, I’m getting out.”

“Ji,” I said, noticing the air shimmer next to me, “stay put. Don’t move. The satos will—”