Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (29 page)

“Oh,
now
it’s OK to run away?”

By the time we got to the hospital, Samarkand had transformed into something like a riot, with troops pushing through the streets and heading southwest, hoping to climb the next mountain range and make it via miracle over the Turkmenistan plains and onward to Iran. Nobody had been ready for this. The kid and I gave up trying to stay in touch with the Marine unit via coms, and we scrambled through the crowds in front of the hospital. Walking wounded had already assembled and were waiting for ambulances and APCs to arrive to carry them from the city.

There was no guard in the building that used to hold the cages. We vaulted the steps and burst into the room where we had first seen them, where she now waited, standing at the window. She was crying and turned to face us.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I wanted to go with them. But the doctor kept me here, said that he wanted to continue testing, but now what?” She had dressed in armor and wore her vision hood, pushed back with one headphone pressed against an ear. “I’m listening to our command net. We will be overrun.”

The kid and I looked at each other. “What’s going on? Why is everyone retreating?”

“You don’t know?”

“We don’t have a clue,” the kid said.

“Russian genetics are pushing south through western Uzbekistan and will cut off our escape route to Iran within a few days. The others stealth bored into our rear areas here while sending fusion borers to our lines as a ploy. All units have been ordered to fall back immediately to regroup in Türkmenabat, while my sisters hold here.”

“Oscar,” the kid said, “this isn’t good.”

“I know.”

“Seriously. It sucks. We gotta bail. Now.”

“So bail.”

I walked over and hugged her, pulling her in close while I tried to do the math, figure out how we’d get her to Iran without being caught by her handlers. “Hey, kid, take off your suit, you’re about her size.”

“What?”

“Take it off!”
I turned to Sophie and spoke into her ear. “Your suit is synced to genetic forces. Anywhere we go, they’ll know it’s you. You have to get dressed in the kid’s suit and then we’ll move out.”

“What about
me
?” the kid asked.

“So
what
if they think you’re a genetic? The second you take off your helmet, you explain to them that your suit got fried, so you lifted one off a dead genetic. It’s cake.”

“Unless they shoot first.”

Still, the kid got undressed, and I watched out the window while they traded suits behind me. Below us in the street, the crowd of soldiers parted and a line of APCs,
trucks, and tanks pulled up, making me feel safer for a moment. There were so many variables: the Russians and their powered armor; their genetics; and our own Special Forces, who’d be on the lookout for girls like Sophie, ones who tried to escape. But there wasn’t another choice.

It was time to go home, as long as we could break through the Russians to our west, and we’d let the cockroaches have Samarkand. Sophie would come with us.

T
here was an aspect to desperation so positive that it had gone unappreciated in my life, perhaps buried under filth or ignored under a mountain of terror, but when we headed southwest out of the city, my legs felt weightless and there was no hunger. The fear was still there. But it had transformed into something useful, a sense that ahead of us lay unknown forces in ambush but that we’d overcome them no matter what. We
had
to. Popov and our forces raced each other; they tried to cut off escape to our west while we pushed ahead in a mad attempt to get out before the trap closed. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean just me; the kid and Sophie had the sense too; everyone felt it. Once again our auto-drones and the Russians’ weaved and boomed overhead, but nobody looked up and most didn’t wear helmets, so as our guys marched or sat on the backs of APCs and tanks, you saw it on their faces, the same look you knew had fixed on yours: grim determination. Desperation was a new friend. There was only one way out, forward, and it felt good to be on the attack, even if it was an attack toward the rear, because of
one simple fact: when it was over, if we won, we’d go home.

We had made it out of the city, stopped only once, by a Special Forces patrol that made the kid take off his helmet, but the kid talked his way out of it. Sophie had gone unnoticed. APCs would stop every once in a while and load up with walking troops, so for a time we trudged in a long line at roadside, but eventually the numbers whittled down, until the closest soldiers were a group of five men, about two hundred meters ahead. Just when I was starting to get creeped out, like we had been forgotten in the rear, a passing tank stopped next to us and the commander leaned out.

“Wanna ride?”

“Sure,” I said. “Where did you guys come from?”

“We’re the last tank out of Samarkand. I’d say the Russians are close behind, but our genetics… you gotta hand it to them.”

We climbed onto the back and grabbed hold when the monster lurched forward, kicking up mud and ice as it accelerated.

“How much farther to Türkmenabat?” I asked.

The commander shrugged, answering before he dropped back inside. “A hundred klicks, give or take, but I wouldn’t want to walk it. Popov won’t be far behind.”

I leaned against the turret and looked ahead, listening as windblown snow struck my helmet. The highway went on forever. This section of Uzbekistan had mountains, and the road had been cut in a straight line by our engineers so that it ran through them, pointing directly at a notch in a small distant range. We passed the other group of soldiers and the tank stopped again, but the men waved
the commander on after explaining that they were supposed to be there, engineer volunteers left to booby-trap the road and slow the Russian advance. When we started up again, I said a silent prayer, wishing them well, but was secretly grateful that it wasn’t me.

Sophie clicked her helmet against mine. “We will not have time to defend in Türkmenabat; the Russians will chase us as soon as they can, but if we stop, we will be trapped.”

“I know.”

“Do not worry.”

“Why not?”

“Because God watches over us, but not them.”

I remembered what the other genetic had said to me about her outside the ore concentration yard. “Sophie, what does it mean that you don’t ‘have the mark’?” She didn’t say anything at first, but then wrapped an arm around me.

“I will explain that to you someday. But not today.”

As soon as we crossed the Amu Dar’ya River, I flinched and dropped to the tank’s deck to make myself small. Engineers blew the bridges. The one we had just crossed dropped in three sections, splashing into the wide river to send up muddy waves, and then a railway bridge next to it leapt upward when a series of detonations swallowed its piers in smoke. It fell slowly. The bridge seemed to sigh with relief as a wide section of it careened over, finally slamming into the river. But I knew it wouldn’t stop them. Popov’s vehicles were the same as ours, amphibious, but still, just knowing that someone was thinking tactically
and that we’d have easier targets once the Russians waded into the river made me feel better; the engineers had just bought us some time.

The sun set, submerging Türkmenabat into the dimness of twilight, and if the last hours of Samarkand had been a riot,
this
place was a scene of total order. We jumped off the tank. A line of infantry had formed on the side of the road and we got in place, waiting our turn for a group of NCOs to tell us where to go.

When I stepped up to the table, they waited for my suit to sync with their terminals. “Who the hell are you?” one asked.

“Wendell.”

“I can see that. I mean what the hell are you doing here? You’re a civilian.”

“I know. I used to be a reporter and then got assigned as a Marine unit historian. DOD.”

“Yeah, but you’re a
civilian.
”

The group of them started talking to each other rapidly, reminding me of a bunch of clucking chickens, and I heard the tired sighs of troops behind us. Eventually the sergeant I’d been speaking with turned back.

“Do you
want
to fight?”

I jabbed a thumb at Sophie and the kid. “I want to stay with them.”

“You.” The sergeant pointed at the kid, who pulled his helmet off before stepping in range of the computers. “It says here you’re a genetic, assigned to Ten Special.”

“I’m Army. Private Nelson Jameson, heavy weapons, stole a suit off a dead G when mine hosed up.”

“Jesus Christ. Yeah, but the problem I have is that you’re
registered as
a G. Look.” He spun his computer
screen around to show the blinking warning message. “It says here I’m supposed to wipe you because you’re past your shelf life. Do you want me to?”

“Do I want you to what?”

“Shoot you.”

The kid jabbed his thumb at me and Sophie. “I want to stay with them.”

“Of course.” He waved Sophie closer and she moved in, not taking off her helmet. “Good. Finally one that makes sense. I suppose you want to stay with them, right?”

She nodded, leaning back and forth.

“Fine. You’re all assigned to the northern section, Lieutenant Rivers’s area, where he’s been tasked to defend the river until the order to pull back comes. Just move to the blinking light. Your orders have been uploaded.
Next.
”

“Wait,” I said, “defend the river? I thought we had to move out before we get cut off.”

The sergeant fixed me with a cold stare and repeated himself. “Next.”

We walked along the river road silently. The wind picked up, and although my suit should have kept me warm, I shivered at the temperature and noticed that this far south there was no snow, as if a line had been drawn, beyond which lay a vast desert that we had only begun to see. A group of old men fished by the river, unconcerned with the turn of events, and they didn’t look up as we passed. I didn’t blame them. We’d just been given what felt like a death sentence, to hold against the Russian attack instead of pushing on to the southwest, and as a result their city would most likely be obliterated. Why should they look at us when we were a premonition of their ruin? Everything in me said that we should take our
chances and run. At least then maybe another city would be spared.

“It will be all right,” said Sophie.

The kid grunted.

I asked, “How do you know? We should bail now.” A scout car turned onto the road at an intersection, and before it passed us in the opposite direction, I flagged it down. The captain driving it had removed his helmet, and looked pissed.

“What?”

“Captain, what’s going on? I thought we were supposed to push southwest, that the road to Iran is about to be cut.”

“You’re wrong,” he growled, and just before gunning his engine, he grinned. “It isn’t
about
to be cut off, it already
is
cut off. Pops got his shit wired tight.”

And he sped off. For the second time the feeling of complete helplessness crept in with shades of Almaty, and once the last bits of sunlight disappeared, the sky went black, sending us into near-total darkness before night vision kicked in. A string of drones flew overhead and we dove to the gutter, waiting for the popping of ordnance drops and the subsequent detonations, but nothing happened, and when I looked up, I saw line upon line of parachutes, below each of which swung a box. It made me feel better. Maybe this wasn’t going to be another Almaty, since someone to our south had decided us worthy of a resupply.

The kid led us up the road and I got the sense that nobody had ever considered holding Türkmenabat for any real length of time, because its defenses were thin. A network of trenches lined our side of the river, but we hadn’t
seen any indication of tunnels. Men had already assembled in their positions. We passed them and overheard bits of conversations about how one guy “was sure that we’d stop them in the river,” or another “would bug out as soon as it all started; fuck this shit.” But it was
all
bullshit. Without tunnels and proper defenses, it would be only a matter of time before we cooked in place, making me wonder why we should think to defend at all and how it was that I had become so exhausted. I felt about to pass out. But when we made it to our section, an alarm sounded, bringing me back to the present, and once our suits synced to the new unit, a voice came over our speakers—probably the lieutenant the supply sergeant had told us about. He sounded younger than the kid.

“Take cover. I think Russian tanks are now within plasma range.”

“He
thinks
?” the kid asked.

“Nelson Jameson? Is that really your name?”

“Nah. It’s the name of a guy that we left behind in Almaty. I couldn’t use mine, because
she
has my suit now. Do you want to know my name?”

“No,” I said. “I like ‘kid.’ ”

Sophie collapsed against the trench wall and slid to the floor. “Oscar. I’m sick.” She popped her helmet and for a moment I panicked, because there were guys on either side of us, and if one of them saw her…

But they didn’t. All of them were preoccupied with what was about to happen.