Sunshine

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T
he inside of her combat suit smelled like fear.
And old socks
, she decided. Kyung had been buttoned up for almost three days now, longer than she had ever wanted and two days longer than anyone in her corporate division. A record.

“Six thousand meters,” the computer said, “approximately one full Chinese division, ETA six hours. I warned you not to sneak away from the main force, Miss Kyung; you’re not a soldier. There’s now an eighty percent chance that if we don’t move farther south immediately, we will be unable to rejoin with friendly forces near Pak Chong Hui City.”

Kyung wiped the ice from her faceplate to get a better view of the ridgeline opposite hers. She had seen it again. The thing looked like a man, but Kyung swore that it moved like a dog, sniffing the air before it disappeared in a cloud of snow.

I hate dogs
, she thought. Whatever it was, the thing reminded her of a story her grandmother had told a long time ago…

“Chinese forces now five thousand nine hundred and ninety-five—”

“Kill tracking mode,” she said, quieting the computer. “Open journal.”

A green cursor appeared on Kyung’s display, typing words as she spoke. “Note to head of systems: Enemy tracking mode needs adjusting. I suggest an ability to customize the time between announcements and more sensitivity on volume controls. Oh, and John, the next time you assign me to a frozen rock for testing I’ll bite your ears off. Entry complete. Transmit once we’re back at Pak Chong Hui.”

Testing. John Leonard, director of the company’s Armor and Weapons Division, wanted a field test of this, their newest and most promising combat suit, and Kyung hadn’t trusted the mission to anyone else. So she had volunteered herself. But John hadn’t said anything about field trials on a planet this far from Earth in a zone this hot, and nobody bothered to tell her that the war had been going so badly or why it had even started in the first place. They were the worst of this war: the Chinese. Kyung knew the division moving toward her wasn’t comprised of men or even genetically engineered humans—not in the strict sense—because New Beijing had never signed the Genetic Weapons Convention and excelled at engineered atrocities, their soldiers consisting of half-human things with only a torso and a head.
Here, on one of our systems—on Koryo.
Instead of a person with a complete set of normal organs, the Chinese grew human-like things that could plug directly into electronics packages, the suits’ sensors providing their eyes, nose, and ears, and once there, the bodies never left their armor until dead. This was what had taken a third of her country’s newest planet, bringing with them remnants of Pusan’s oldest enemy—the North Koreans.
Here, on Koryo!

Her text disappeared as soon as the entry logged, and Kyung wiped another layer of ice from her helmet. Temperatures were dropping quickly now, she thought, her suit’s power cells draining in the fight to keep her warm.

“Why do the Chinese even want this planet?” she thought out loud.

“Insufficient data to draw any specific conclusions, Miss. But Chinese patterns suggest that once Korea unified and subsequent wars prevented Beijing from further acquisition of Earth-bound resources, they and what remained of the North Korean holdouts—”

Kyung waved with impatience. “I know all that; tell me something I don’t know.”

“Certainly, Miss Kyung. I’ve been trying to raise Division every three minutes and still can’t get through, suggesting a high probability that we’re being jammed.”

“You think?” Kyung asked. She fought the urge to hammer the side of her head against a rock to shut up the computer once and for all because she knew the danger she was in, didn’t need a reminder; this wasn’t her first time field-testing a new system, something which required taking risks to get the final prototype tweaked. But that thing she had seen?

That
was different.

“Section bravo-papa-seven-seven-three, possible animal, four legged and similar to a dog. Do sensors show anything like that in the area?” Kyung asked.

“Scanning.” Kyung had to wait for the computer to click back in. “Negative, Miss, no movement. You’ll be out of food soon. There are only four meal packs in storage. Would you like to begin a rationing protocol?”

Kyung was about to answer when a rocket streaked by, slamming into the mountainside to her left with a
boom
. She looked down. In the valley below, hundreds of flames ignited like sparks, growing larger by the second as they trailed white smoke. Kyung turned and dove for the opposite slope, sliding down an ice sheet on her stomach.

“Incoming rockets, Miss Kyung.”

“No kidding!”

The rounds exploded on the mountain behind her, some of them streaking overhead to disappear in the clouds. She lost control of her slide. The leeward side of the mountain was so steep that digging her gauntlets into the ice did nothing to slow the descent, and as she accelerated, Kyung silently cursed the company, John Leonard, and her own stupidity for having pushed things too far this time, wondering if she’d just killed herself.

“Miss Kyung, sensors show that you’re exceeding safe speed limits.”

Kyung screamed. A few seconds later the noise of scraping ice and rock vanished, and she felt a sense of weightlessness as she plunged off the side of a cliff, the rock face blurring past. When she finally hit, it didn’t hurt. She broke through some kind of barrier, her body whipping back and forth for a few seconds before it jolted to a stop. Kyung had the strange sensation that at least one of her legs had snapped and that she was no longer aboveground, but she felt suddenly fuzzy—warm—and for some reason wanted to laugh.

Then she remembered. The suit had an integrated medical package and instantly sedated its wounded occupant to keep it happy until medics arrived.

I’m dead
, thought Kyung,
and it actually seems funny.

Just before she passed out she heard a howling sound, sad and lonely like a coyote, but bigger. Much bigger.

Kyung’s eyes flickered open and at first she couldn’t figure out why everything looked green—until it occurred to her: Light amplification had kicked in, meaning she was in darkness.

A cavity, high enough so she barely saw the ceiling, stretched before her, and a wide underground boulevard disappeared into blackness. Small buildings had been erected on either side of what looked like a street. The buildings—complete with glass-filled windows—were mostly intact, but dripping water had coated them with mold, and the structures appeared to be made of something like wood, their timbers swelling with moisture.

What was this place? Kyung had been briefed on Koryo’s features, including its subterranean ones, so that she could choose suitable areas in which to test each of the suit’s new features, but nobody had told her about an underground facility outside Pak. And it was definitely man-made. Even if there hadn’t been buildings, what she saw of the ceiling showed scour marks consistent with boring machinery, and steel beams crisscrossed it with a kind of lattice work between which hung wire mesh to catch rocks. A new thought crossed her mind: What else had John forgotten to tell her about?

Kyung had no idea how much time passed before she noticed the computer talking.

“Miss Kyung. Miss Kyung. Miss—”

“What?”
she asked.

“Systems damage includes ruptured climate-control capillaries in both legs and damaged ceramic plates in sections five, fifteen through forty-two, fifty-seven…” As the computer spoke, an outline popped onto her helmet screen, red dots showing damaged areas below her waist. She felt her legs then, like a distant unease, a vague sense that something was way off, and then something else. Cold. Chilled air had found its way inside the suit, coming up from her leg sections. This couldn’t be good, thought Kyung, too scared to look for herself.

“What about biological damage?” she asked.

“Compound fracture to left tibia and fibula, spiral fracture to left femur. It also appears that although bones in your right leg show no structural abnormalities, soft tissue may have experienced significant trauma. You’ve suffered blood loss from both limbs. Suit systems have administered plasma, coagulants, and pain relievers to minimize further damage, but I estimate that combat drugs will be spent in less than twenty-four hours. I’m sorry, Miss Kyung, but according to my estimates, the odds of making it back to friendly forces are now at two million to one, against. If you can remove yourself from our present location, these odds will improve.”

“Why?” Kyung asked; she didn’t trust the suit’s medical system completely, but for now drugs had taken the edge off, and she could look at her legs later. Maybe
much
later. “Where am I? It looks like some kind of underground town.”

The computer replaced her outline with a map of the surface. “Affirmative, Miss Kyung. You are approximately one hundred meters below grade, immediately under your previous position on hill seven-seven-three. Communications—even in the absence of enemy jamming—are currently impossible due to rock interference. My records indicate that the first Samsung colony was located here, where cobalt mining operations began over forty years ago, and you appear to have fallen down a mine shaft. It’s lucky that you were wearing a combat suit, Miss Kyung. Without it, you surely would have perished.”

Kyung snorted. She wouldn’t feel so lucky once her drugs were gone, but the
first
Samsung colony? Her fear returned, and Kyung couldn’t explain it, only that she knew this would have been an ideal testing spot for the suit’s underground combat features and that John must have known about this; he’d worked at Samsung for over three decades.

“Tell me about the settlement. I want maps with a trace to the nearest exit in the direction of Pak Chong Hui.”

“Hold please…” It only took a moment for the computer to respond. “This is unusual, Miss Kyung.”

“What?”

“Other than cobalt mining,” it said, “I have no further records on this settlement; they’ve been removed from memory, and I was specifically ordered not to mention the site under any circumstances. Your presence here, however, overrides this command.”

Kyung shivered. She didn’t like unusual. Unusual in the Samsung Corporation and in the context of a buried underground facility, an
abandoned
one, meant someone had screwed up and didn’t want his or her mistake discovered. And whoever had screwed up was powerful enough to have all traces erased. Someone like John. Even if she came out of this, she’d have to figure out a way to hide the fact that she’d been here, would have to smile and describe her accident in some way that wouldn’t get him thinking. But of course, all that would be impossible. The suit recorded everything.

“This keeps getting better and better,” Kyung said. “Well, if you can’t show me an actual map, make a guess. What’s my best bet if I want to head in the direction of Pak?”

A blinking indicator arrow appeared on her display. “That way, Miss Kyung. But be careful. Even with sedatives, movement of your lower limbs is occasionally going to be painful. If you make it out, you really should consider the latest Samsung bioupgrades; one of our combat soldiers would have survived that fall with no damage.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Kyung, gritting her teeth as she prepared to move.

She passed out within thirty seconds, the agony washing up from her legs. Kyung had managed just a few feet. When she woke, she sipped some water from the tube near her mouth and then clenched it between her teeth, grunting as she pulled herself forward. Soon Kyung got a rhythm. A few feet down the “street,” stop to rest, a few feet more, and stop again. She made it about two hundred meters when a sign on one of the buildings caught her eye.

“Computer,” said Kyung, “enhance the writing on the sign that I’m marking on visual.”

Letters appeared on her display. “Interesting, Miss Kyung, it’s in Korean—Hangul. Shall I translate?”

“I can read
Korean
, for Christ’s sake!”
Then again
, she thought,
Korean has never been my strong suit, or I would have gone into academia instead of business.
“State Security Department?” she asked. “The SSD?”

“Affirmative.”

The news didn’t make her feel any better. The SSD, a secret police force, was a remnant, the only scrap of North Korean culture in which South Korea had seen some value and so integrated it into the new unified government. But there was one problem: Samsung had a special place in the Korean economy. Their projects generally weren’t subject to SSD involvement unless one had been assigned strategic significance—important to national security, that kind of crap—and cobalt mining, Kyung realized,
wasn’t
strategically significant. Not even close.

The Chinese are here.
On Koryo.
She turned from the street and pulled herself toward the building’s entrance.

“Where are you going, Miss Kyung?” the computer asked.

“I’ve never seen an SSD office before, and I’d kind of like to know what they were doing here.”

It took her a minute to drag herself up the stairs, but when Kyung tried to access the controls, she slipped and crashed to the ground, pulling herself up to rest against the door. Her arms trembled from the effort.

“Transmit my corporate access code to the door,” she said.

The computer came back a moment later. “Not accepted.”

Kyung thought for a second, trying to remember an older one. “Then transmit executive emergency override, code seven-alpha-six-papa-one-romeo.”

The door slid open with a hiss and Kyung nearly fainted. She hadn’t been ready. As soon as it opened, she rolled into the building, blinded when her night vision shut off to be replaced by the harsh glow of fluorescent lights and an odor that overpowered everything. The door shut and Kyung groaned, a feeling of nausea making it hard to swallow.

“What’s wrong?” asked the computer.

Kyung shook her head. “That. In front of us. Whoever was here is dead now.”

In front of her lay a pile of human bones, many of which showed deep gouges. Judging from its size, she figured there must have been over a hundred bodies, but it was the smell that hit hardest, making her feel sick even over all the drugs. An odor of decay seeped up through the cracks in her leg armor, and she fought the urge to vomit, wondering why the bodies still smelled so bad; they had clearly been there for decades. Kyung heard a squeak then, and something with tiny claws skittered over the ceramic floor when it fled.